Hugo award winner part 2 (1980-2013

lol JK Rowling

I'm a big fan of the following:

C. J. Cherryh - Downbelow Station (1982)
William Gibson - Neuromancer (1985)
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game (1986)
Orson Scott Card - Speaker For the Dead (1987)
David Brin - The Uplift War (1988)
CJ Cherryh - Cyteen (1989)
Dan Simmons - Hyperion (1990)
Verner vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep (1993)
Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age (1996)
Verner Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky (2000)
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2005)

voted Stephenson, probably should have voted Gibson but oh well

Excellent - Nueromancer, Hyperion, Green Mars, The City & The City
Very good - The Uplift War, A Fire on the Deep, The Diamond Age
Pretty good but probably had no business winning a serious sci-fi award - American Gods, Jonathan Strange
Enjoyable and all, far from the best of its series and certainly had no business winning a serious sci-fi award - Goblet of Fire

Not read the rest.

One of the Connie Willis books. All are great, but Blackout/All Clear is pretty amazing.

I'm halfway through Green Mars now and may well end up voting for it. It's magnificent. I'm in awe of KSR, he has amazing concepts, exciting stories, great characters, elegant prose, plus he knows his science (and social science) hardcore.

Green Mars for me

I wonder how well Neuromancer has aged. I haven't reread it in the 29 years since it came out.

yeah only ksr i've read is 2312 and the plot was perfunctory at best (though entertaining, just felt so beside the point) but the concepts and the science were fantastic, just awe inspiring super imaginative stuff. i read a bunch of scifi the summer of 2012 and it was my second fave book (some distance after martian time slip). ender's game was probably the worst one i read, totally get the fandom and man if i'd read that at 10 or 12 or whatever i would've eaten it up, it plays into young nerd resentment and anger so well, but coming to it for the first time as an adult it was dull and mechanical and just crazy w/ unearned smugness. neuromancer is the only one up there i've read so i'm abstaining.

i think the rowling is there as part of a weird 'we'll acknowledge some fantasy' trend, not sure the logic completely or if it was ever even declared (i'd guess so, surely there was an outcry at harry potter winning) but grr martin's been nominated a couple of times.

I wonder how well Neuromancer has aged. I haven't reread it in the 29 years since it came out.

I initially read it in... 2003? 2004? and it was fantastic

This is all totally after I got off the bus so will not be voting in this one.

are Joan and Verner related?!

they were married

totally get the fandom and man if i'd read that at 10 or 12 or whatever i would've eaten it up, it plays into young nerd resentment and anger so well,

this is how I was exposed to it (vivid memory of fellow nerd excitedly reading the passage where he murders some bullies in the locker room out loud to me) and even then I could tell there was something off/wrong about it. fuck OSC forever tho, for real.

in general - a lot of garbage here, with most of my favorite writers of the era (Sterling, Noon, Armstrong, Yu) totally shut out. They didn't even nominate the right Mars trilogy book (that would be Red Mars).

I guess this is Gibson really, altho I haven't read Neuromancer in forever. The two Verner Vinge novels that won are good. Haven't read a ton of this other stuff and why would I

no M. John Harrison or Michael Moorcock (seems like the British New Wave dudes never really got the Hugos in general) or Steve Aylett or Victor Pelevin either.

Ender's Game is weird and fascinating in how Ender basically is led into being this horrifying human being with all of the consequences of his actions being explicitly hidden from him by the forces around him, which basically is how I felt some of my white peers were treated while growing up so there was this fascinating unintentional anthropological subtext to the story that I appreciated even more when Ender actively rejected the people who spent all of that time coddling and protecting him from realizing what a horrible murderous monster he had become

wouldn't fall on my sword for either of those books but I enjoyed them as a kid

not gonna tell you such a reading is incorrect but willing to bet that of all the "big ideas" Card thought he was bringing to the table with those books, that particular racial allegory is probably not (intentionally anyway) among them

(seems like the British New Wave dudes never really got the Hugos in general)

Maybe the Gaiman and Mieville wins are a weird belated apology for this.

not gonna tell you such a reading is incorrect but willing to bet that of all the "big ideas" Card thought he was bringing to the table with those books, that particular racial allegory is probably not (intentionally anyway) among them

hence "unintentional" in my original post

what connection do those guys have to the New Wave, apart from being British?

xp

xposts
I've read 16 of these. None of them are terrible:
Great
Neuromancer, Ender's Game (despite the fact that OSC is an awful person), A Fire Upon the Deep, The Diamond Age, To Say Nothing of the Dog, A Deepness in the Sky, Spin, The Graveyard Book, The City & The City, Among Others
Good
The Fountains of Paradise, American Gods, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Rainbow's End
Overrated
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Redshirts

I also own but haven't read:
The Snow Queen, Hyperion, Blue Mars (for some reason I own red and blue but not green), Forever Peace, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, The Windup Girl, Blackout/All Clear (I own the audiobook of Blackout - gave up after I got bored many hours in).

The Hugo is for both Science Fiction and Fantasy so you're going to get the occasional Fantasy winner. It's also a popularity contest - both nominated by and voted for by the public (well the people who get memberships for worldcon) so people who have a lot of fans like Gaiman or Rowling will get nominated all the time and win reasonably often.
Where Worldcon is held can also make a huge difference - people reckon Sawyer only won for Hominids because it was in Canada that year.

tbf I haven't read (well, I haven't finished) any of the Gaiman/Mieville winners, couldn't even make it past the first chapter of the one Mieville book someone leant me, and I'll be fucked if I'm wasting any time on Gaiman's prose

xxp

They both exist in a spec-fic landscape massively influenced by the new wave writers, Mieville in particular. The New Weird movement makes its debt to those writers pretty explicit.

Isaac Asimov - Foundation's Edge (1983)

i'm a shameless foundation trilogy stan but this is a really, really terrible book.

Haven't quite made it to the New Weird yet, still working on the Old Weird.

I voted for The Diamond Age, because it developed in a very unusual way, as glib cyberpunk-liberatian elements wrassled with deeper or at least more apt thoughts/observations, and the rise of artistic integrity/talent/skills. (Sort of like Valis, though NS didn't have to deal with his cracked pot, just his skatrboihood.)
The City and The City proved worth staying with, despite my initial irritation with the ineptly broken English (East Euro grits und gravels! You betsky, Boddy!). He gradually forgot about that shit, or anyway I did. Emergence of the thriller arc def helped, although the penultimate bit did remind me of Dave Chappelle's Axl Rose/Hans Brinker skater shimmy, while John Mayer played "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." But before and after that, pretty good! Like Stephenson, he found his way through some self-imposed problems (I identify with).

Voted Hyperion.

I read Neuromancer for the first time last year and I was amazed at how well it worked - only the cover's Max Headroomy graphics seemed atrociously dated.

Only other ones I've read on this were the Yiddish Policemen's Union (completely meh) and American Gods (ditto), so I probably shouldn't vote.

I didn't realize Hugo had decided to give awards to novels marked "literary fiction" which were in some respects SF, like Clarke, Chabon. Was Margaret Atwood ever nominated for this? Ishiguro for Never Let Me Go? Cloud Atlas?

Anyway, voted for the Uplift War, which really got to me in some deep way when I was a kid. A much more interesting take on the child's "what if I'm SPECIAL?" feeling than Orson Scott Card ever did, with the whole human race in the role of the quivering, confused adolescent.

Also, Among Others is really outstanding, and raises interesting questions about genre boundaries -- it sort of is SF but it is definitely ABOUT SF. On some level, I concede that Neuromancer might be the real answer here, but much as I loved it as a kid I'd read Uplift War again before I read that.

Neuromancer is the only real game changer here sure.

Yes but it's really mediocre.

Neuromancer is the only one of these I've read. I'm pretty sure it was actually the first sci-fi novel I've ever read. It thought it was OK.