Hugo award winners part 1 (53-79)

Probably will go with Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man (1953). The original is still the greatest.

Probably on of the LeGuins for me, magical books.

I've only read four of these, but, of those, it's definitely The Dispossessed.

Only read Stranger in a Strange Land and Man in the High Castle, so I'm not going to vote here. Definitely want to read the Clarke and the LeGuins. Anybody want to recommend any of the more obscure winners here?

Hmmm . . . I think the two that have stuck with me the most over the years are Rama and To Your Scattered Bodies Go. (And I might like Farmer the most out of all these folks generally.)

Canticle For Leibowitz and Stand on Zanzibar are excellent. Forever War has some great ideas but is marred by homophobia and some slightly tedious war sequences. Ringworld is fun.

xpost

Canticle is in the running for me. Liked The Fabulous Riverboat better than the first one, maybe because I read it first.

Never even heard of Roger Zelazny - ...And Call Me Conrad (1966). But never heard of the book or the authors for this one: Mark Clifton and Frank Riley - They'd rather Be Right (1955)

Yeah me neither. Also who is Vonda N McIntyre?

XPOST

James Redd just mentioned the two I've never heard of, either.

Voted The Dispossessed, but that would've been beaten by certain PKDs other than Man in the High Castle.

I only know McIntyre from her licensed Star Wars and Star Trek stuff. Don't know if her original fiction is any good (apparently good enough to win a Hugo, but still).

Jo Walton did a series on all the Hugo awards. Apparently They'd Rather Be Right is terrible: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/10/hugo-nominees-1955

I love Le Guin but the Bester is good too.

In the UK, Dreamsnake was issued as part of Pan's 1970s/80s silver embossed science fiction line, which was generally of a pretty high standard, so it's prob worth reading:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41EX7GzO5WL._AA160_.jpg

Wow at that link. Thread has already justified existence.

They'd Rather Be Right is more famously known as the Forever Machine. It's quite good, but not the best up there which is The Demolished Man by a pretty sizeable margin.

Great:
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man (1953)
Walter M Miller - A Canticle For Leibowitz (1961)
John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar (1969)
Ursula K Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness (1970)
Frederick Pohl - Gateway (1978)

Very Good:
Phillip K Dick - Man in the High Castle (1963)
Ursula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1975)
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War (1976)
Kate Wilhelm - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1977)

Good:
Mark Clifton and Frank Riley - They'd rather Be Right (1955)
James Blish - A Case of Conscience (1959)

Want to read:
Fritz Leiber - The Big Time (1958)
Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer (1965)
Arthur C Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama (1974)
Vonda N. McIntyre - Dreamsnake (1979)

Don't care about:
Robert A Heinlein - Double Star (1956)
Robert A Heinlein - Starship Troopers (1960)
Robert A Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land (1962)
Clifford D Simak -Here Gather the Stars (1964)
Frank Herbert - Dune (1966)
Roger Zelazny - ...And Call Me Conrad (1966)
Robert A Heinlein - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1967)
Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light (1968)
Larry Niven - Ringworld (1971)
Philip Jose Farmer - To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1972)
Isaac Asimov - The Gods Themselves (1973)

Have only read 3 of these and none of them since high school so Dune...which might explain why it gets no love here

I liked Dreamsnake. I remember the setting - a Native-American type post-apocalyptic desert with shamans who heal people with snakes; then there was a hidden city/structure in the desert - but I can't remember much else about it.

I think I've read 13 of these and wish I had read more. I like the Bester, Brunner, and Dick novels a lot, but Dune stands out in this list, overplayed though it may be.

Bester and Dick both wrote better novels than their Hugo winners.

Out of the ones I've read:

Great:
Demolished Man
A Canticle For Leibowitz
Dune
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (by far Heinlein's best non-juvenile)
Left Hand of Darkness
The Dispossessed

Good:
Gateway (I prefer other Pohl books)
Rendezvous with Rama
To Your Scattered Bodies Go (Not read this in 20 years - recently got a copy so I can give it another go)

OK:
Ringworld
Starship Troopers

Bloated mess:
Stranger In A Strange Land

Own, but not read yet:
Lord Of Light
Stand on Zanzibar
The Forever War
Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang

Don't own, want to read:
Man in The High Castle
Dreamsnake

I'm probably going to vote for The Dispossessed but I could happily vote for any of the ones I've ranked great.

a canticle for leibowitz is my favorite of the ones i've read

There is an article somewhere in Harper's or The Atlantic mocking the opening of Canticle saying how badly it was written and then plenty of others rebutted saying, no actually it is really good.

Robert A Heinlein - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1967)

This is one of my favorite books of all time

I don't really like the third section in Canticle it seems lazy and unfeasible how (SPOILERS) after society has been rebuilt America has once again become the champion of democracy, and China an oppressive state. Maybe I'm misremembering slightly, it's been at least ten years since I read it. Other than that it's a masterpiece.

<3 Canticle

Harper's blog bagging on Canticle: http://harpers.org/blog/2008/11/girded-loins/ ; http://harpers.org/blog/2008/11/knowingly-and-winkingly/

Readers voted early and often.
Lol at this.

I made a point of reading every single one of these from 1960 on a few years ago, and I'm voting Stand on Zanzibar.

Other standouts:

Man in a High Castle
Rendezvous with Rama
The Forever War

I would love to re-read Rendezvous with Rama; I loved that when I was younger.
I haven't read too many of these really, but Demolished Man and Canticle are truly great and deserve all the props they're getting.

The Forever War does rule pretty hard

Only issue with Stand on Zanzibar is that it's inferior to the Sheep Look Up. If the latter had one a Hugo I would definitely think hard about giving it the edge over the Demolished Man (which is only ever so slightly inferior to the Stars My Destination).

had won

Robert A Heinlein - Double Star (1956)

i know ppl hate heinlein for understandable reasons bcz his later, mostly awful books are the ones that his fans tend to celebrate, but it's important to remember that he didn't get famous because of that stuff, he got famous for his early work, which for the most part has no trace of his creepy right-wing politics. read this for the first time last year and it's really great and fun, doesn't deserve to be dismissed with 'stranger' and the rest of that stuff.

Just realised it would've made a bit more sense to go up to 84 and make it a pre-Nueromancer poll.

xp -- yeah, I remember Double Star being really good. This thread may inspire me to go back and reread some of these. This is a tough choice, might vote Forever War.

the sheep look up is indeed excellent and very depressing.

I just realised that I have an ebook of Double Star that someone gave me. So I'll give that a read too.

I read Rendezvous With Rama around 1975 or so. This is odd, because I've never read much sf at any time of my life. As I recall it, it seemed like an acceptable yarn, workmanlike in its plot and characters, but I don't recall being impressed with it. It filled the time.

It would make a really good Pixar film.

Feel like THE Arthur C. Clarke book to read is The City and the Stars

haven't read enough of these to vote but jeez when I was a young sf dude expecting to only read sf all my days this list was full of "I'm going to save that one for when I want something completely incredible" entries including the Kate Wilhelm one which I remember people talking about like it was just the most amazing thing

rendezvous with rama is the shit. such a simple, creepy little unresolved mystery

lol at aero, remember that feeling.

Dreamsnake made it onto this list http://io9.com/5892742/10-ultra+weird-science-fiction-novels-that-became-required-reading

To be honest that Wilhelm is kinda weird-o libertarian book, but it's still a good read.

I'm trying to remember more about Juniper Time. IIRC that was a better book but it's been years.

tbh that book always made me want to read more by the guy who came up with the title
(xp)

voted for Canticle.

Snap-voted Haldeman without putting too much thought into it.

For anyone whose curious about this period of Sci-Fi I wholeheartedly recommend Engines of the Night by Barry Malzberg, a fantastic collection of essays about everything sci-fi in this period including how depressing it was writing it.

You've recommended that before, maybe now is the time to read it, thanks.

Apparently they've reprinted as Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium with some new essays.

Btw missed voting in this cuz it was over the weekend whats up w that

Hugo award winner part 2 (1980-2013

I am shocked!
Why was I so damn sure Bester would walk this?
Maybe it's just cuz it was my favorite. Or because it's really generally highly lauded in certain quarters. I didn't vote though, since I've only read 11 or 12 (I gave up on _Ringworld_) and tbh most of them so long ago that I don't remember much about them. I'd totally forgotten that I'd read _Double Star_, for instance.

This thread made me pick up _Rendezvous With Rama_ and _Gateway_ from the library, so thanks! Almost done with Rama and it's the most I've enjoyed an SF novel in years I think. I believe rec.arts.sf.written made it clear that it's imperative to remember that it has no sequels. Suspect that's true of _Dune_ too. I meant to read the original Herbert series a couple of years ago, but after struggling through _Dune Messiah_ and just hating the start of _Children of Dune_, I gave up.

Anyways, I think _Dune_ was a worthy winner. I think it would be harder to recommend that to people than Bester or Le Guin though.
Happy to see zero votes for _The Big Time_. The hell with that.

Why was I so damn sure Bester would walk this?
Glad I voted for him. Feel like my taste in sf at this point breaks down to:
1) Stuff that was written in kind of an 50s ad-speak/satirical mode such as Bester or Sheckley
2) Golden Age writers that I had ignored in favor of the Big Three, like for example, Jack Vance, or James Schmitz, although I still haven't read much of either, tbh
3) Weird sui generis stuff like Cordwainer Smith
4) New Wave fellow travelers (as mentioned by Shakey on the other thread) such as M. John Harrison and Christopher Priest
5) Ballard who is the connection between 1 and 4.

Who are the Big Three? Asimov and Clarke I'm guessing...

Neither of whom I've actually read.

And Heinlein.

(xp to self)
Which is why I don't care much for or about the books on the sequel thread. Depending on whether I am feeling polite or crotchety I will attribute this to
My being old
or
The genre taking a Wrong Turn

was thinking last night about how much Heinlein has fallen from favor generally (which I think has been remarked here). Clarke (thx to 2001) and Asimov (thx to Foundation, robots etc) seem to endure as Grand Old Masters but I dunno anyone who will really stan for Heinlein these days. My wife used to be a big fan of his but her ardor has cooled as she's grown older. Of the three my favorite is probably Clarke, I tried re-opening Foundation awhile ago and man it was just so ponderous and slow.

xxxp If you're Martin Prince from The Simpsons, it's Ben Bova.

fwiw I don't really think the genre took a Wrong Turn as much as the wrong stuff became more popular/visible in the post-Star Wars era. A lot of great, innovative stuff came out from the late 70s on (Wolfe, the cybperunk trifecta of Gibson/Sterling/Stephenson, a bunch of great Brits I already mentioned etc., and then on the American side in recent decades there was Lethem, Armstrong, Yu)

but sci-fi publishing as a whole has seem fixated on rehashing the same overcooked space opera and/or cyberpunk tropes for almost 30 years now and that is pretty sad. There are not a whole lot of great practitioners of the basic "what if...?" approach anymore.

Adam Roberts does that kind of thing in a technically impressive way, but I don't really like his writing.

I like Greg Egan for the big what if thing. I've only read his short stories though. My impression is that his recent novels are really rough going. His stories mostly about weird science (physics, biology) not so much space exploration and aliens.
He's waaay over my head a lot of the time, but does put together some pretty exciting plots.

Just finished _Rendezvous With Rama_ and wish it had received some votes. What a good book! Buncha pros wander around in weirdospacetube going "what is this?" and then something weird happens and the pros go "wait. what is this?" and so on.

starting Canticle for Liebowitz with a fair amount of skepticism (as is usually the case with award-winning authors who never did anything else of note). so far this seems like a second-tier Twilight Zone plot.

Xp I always considered Rama to be in the same sort of vein/spirit as Solaris, if maybe a little more approachable for the casual reader - i.e., "If we ever really encounter alien intelligence, its motives and purpose will be nigh impenetrable to us."

You may be right superficially, Shakey, but last time I checked it succeeded where many failed at evoking a vibe of "Teh future is just like Ye Olde Past except that contemporary stuff has happened in between."

Certainly better written than this here

Lol

(this post might be a bit spoilery re: Rama)
Phil d: that's something I wouldn't have thought of. There's some truth to that, I guess, but for me Rama seemed to be primarily a sort of great thought experiment about an alternative world. A novel about an object, even. Clarke comes up with this cool idea of this space-tube-world then starts exploring that idea through the eyes of a team of professionals and tries to come up with cool shit that would make sense in such a place. What would weather be like, how would it feel for a human to be there physically and psychologically, how would one arrange things on it to suit the various situations that might come up etc.

It's been a long time since I read _Solaris_, but I recall that as much more philosophical in nature. While Rama doesn't entirely bypass questions about who and why &c, and making a point of not coming up with any explanation, that seemed to be a big mystery at the center that isn't really given that much time. It's possible I'm wrong and it was just something I didn't care much about myself.

The book did make me wish I was better at mentally visualizing things — that looping river, the thunderstorm &c sound so curious.

Funny how he kinds rams in a little museum at the end to give us some idea of what the Ramans are like, by showing us a suit of clothes.
I guess I think Clarke's novel is very much an engineer's sort of novel, with a few chapters thrown in to try out what an adventure tale in this world could be like (the flight, the boat ride. Not so much the bomb defusing)

Aliens as truly alien does seem to be a thing talked a lot about in SF, but not that big part of the literature. Hard to write directly about something of inscrutable psychology, which might make a plot like Rama's that only describes their artifacts a pretty good way to go about it.

? There are tons of books that go into the likely inscrutability of alien life. A Fire on the Deep/A Deepness in the Sky, Jem, several PKD books, several Lem books (Solaris included), Starmaker, On a Planet Alien...

I removed a section about that, including mention of Vinge & Weinbaum's 30s story "A Martian Odyssey", but I do think it's a small portion of the genre, though? It's much more common to have stories where humans communicate more or less sensibly with the aliens and their motivations seem clear.

I'm far from well read though, so I realize I shouldn't be making sweeping statements.

Just started reading Rama on the back of this thread. Also, for early LeGuin, do I have to start with Rocannon's World or can I just skip ahead to the ones in that sequence which are everyone's favorites?

I think in general when the books are just using aliens as lazy analogs for types of people yeah you won't have any serious consideration of what alien life might actually be like. But I wouldn't go so far as saying that's the most common treatment of aliens in sf.

xp

Also, for early LeGuin, do I have to start with Rocannon's World or can I just skip ahead to the ones in that sequence which are everyone's favorites?

Start wherever. It's only a loose series.

would have voted Moon Is A Harsh Mistress if I'd seen this, probably the most successful blend of world-building / politics / thriller in Heinlein's oeuvre

I thought Clarke's "Meeting With Medusa" (novella) was pretty rich stuff: the interplanetary problem-solving bit, but also the social context, incl. govt.-industrial complex, with the hero as tool (of complex), changing self-image, incl. body-image, even surreal-satirical steampunk element (in 1971, no less), though seems plausible the way he tells it; also beautiful description of Jovian atmosphere etc. (and I'm usually not that into elaborate descriptions). I was getting pretty jaded re wry dystopian etc. in some collection of same, 'til I found this.

gateway definitely had that sense of mystery and alienness for me. disappointed to go on wikipedia now and see that he actually eventually provided some resolution to the plot

Don't sleep on Solaris--novel (Polish, Iron Curtain deadpan) or movie (Russian as hell, not that it stops there)(Tarkovsky's, that is; haven't seen Soderbergh's)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YpxqXZw1ie0/US2E03GXAlI/AAAAAAAABbE/JHhg4AaLEvA/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-02-26+at+5.09.30+PM.png

Certainly better written than this here

about 2/3rds of the way through, Miller has won me over. It's not mindblowing or anything but it's a solid tale creatively told, and does not feature any sentences as odious as this:

"He mapped the folds that fell, wetly out, with his tongue; and the grisly nut in the folded vortex, and the soft granular trough behind it."

god I hate Delany.

Don't sleep on Solaris--novel (Polish, Iron Curtain deadpan) or movie

the film is def sleep-inducing

novel is great because Lem

I'd be willing to bet that "grisly" should be "gristly" in that quote (the book went to print with hundreds of uncorrected typos), but yeah, that line is pretty lol.

is that a description of cunnilingus?

yeah, would take a thousand clunky golden-age sentences over that thing.

xp - yep

Delany is that dude who sounds fascinating on paper - a gay, black experimental sf fiction writer from the golden age of the genre - and yet when I actually read him on paper I want to throw the book(s) out the window

Yeah, I could only get about 20 pages into The Einstein Intersection.

Gotta admit he looked boss though
http://gapersblock.com/bookclub/1456552_10151788600847047_2052672162_n.jpg

Present tense, please! He's still around rockin' that beard.

Shit, I just blithely assumed he was dead. Please forgive me!

is there a good book hidden in the beard somewhere

Shakes maybe you should try the Neveryon stuff. Bronze Age Delany. No tech trappings. Also The Mad Man, compulsively readable gay porn. And Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, awesome reportage/analysis of the old and new 42nd streets.

I've read Dhalgren, Nova, Empire Star, and Babel-17. at this point I think it's safe to say I just don't dig him.

not into fantasy in general

Been a long time since I read him, but this is a good description of Nova, from Science Fiction Encyclopedia's site:
Nova is the Prometheus story and the Grail story combined in an ebulliently inventive space opera/quest; the fire from the heavens, the glowing heart of the Grail, is found only at the heart of an exploding nova...Passages of high rhetoric are mingled (as they often are, too, in the work of Delany's contemporary Roger Zelazny) with relaxed slang and thieves' argot. The book features a characteristic Delany protagonist, the criminal/outcast/musician/artist whose literary genealogy goes back through Jean Genet all the way to François Villon...
The variety of cultures in these and other novels by Delany has the effect of making morality and ethics seem relative, pluralistic. Divers forms of bizarre human behaviour, many of which would have been seen as antisocial in US society of the time, emerge as natural in the circumstances created.

Grab a coffee next time Tarkovsky's Solaris shows up on TCM (prob late Sunday night): it starts slow and broody, yeah, but gets wild.

Significant excerpt from Malzberg's aforementioned Engines of the Night here: http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/why_malzberg.jsp

Recently read and enjoyed the first ever Hugo Award winning short story, "Allamagoosa," by Eric Frank Russell. Then looked at list of all the short story winners and was struck by the weird mix of very well-known stories with not so well-known, not often anthologized stories by very famous authors.

was hugely moved by delaney's autobio of his early years -- the motion of light on water. also like his early more genre short stories and novels. Nova, Empire Star, the Towers trilogy. The Driftglass anthology is also really good.

delany i mean, only one 'e', whoops

This list looks interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell_Memorial_Award_for_Best_Science_Fiction_Novel