{"id":152,"date":"2006-03-29T12:48:12","date_gmt":"2006-03-29T12:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/29\/hugo-award-nominations\/"},"modified":"2006-03-29T12:48:12","modified_gmt":"2006-03-29T12:48:12","slug":"hugo-award-nominations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/29\/hugo-award-nominations\/","title":{"rendered":"Hugo Award Nominations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, before descending into fluff topics like a serious scholarly treatment of Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science<\/cite><\/a>, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber posted about something really<\/strong> important: The Hugo Awards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Weirdly, I find myself in the position of having read all of the Best Novel nominees, and this months before the awards themselves are announced. This is unprecedented– even the year that I voted for the Hugos, I didn’t read all the nominated works. (I’ve read basically none of the short fiction nominees– of which there are many<\/a>— but this is nothing new.)<\/p>\n

This obviously demands some surprisingly-well-informed comment from me. As this topic is of interest to approximately six of my readers, I will provide it below the fold.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Taking them in the order that I would rank them on the ballot, were I to vote:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Spin<\/cite> by Robert Charles Wilson<\/strong><\/a>. I thought this was far and away the best SF novel I’ve read in the last year, and probably in the last several years. It’s got SF ideas on a grand scale, and characters and relationships that are every bit as good as you find in mainstream literature. It’s a fantastic book, and everybody should read it.<\/li>\n
  2. Learning the World<\/cite> by Ken MacLeod<\/strong>. I finished this just the other night (so there’s no booklog post to link to), and it’s a very strong second. It’s a first contact story of sorts, with a generation ship full of post-humans arriving at their destination planet to find it already inhabited by a race of alien space bats with approximately Victorian technology levels. It’s got lots of good stuff, as the alien scientists detect the presence of the humans, and the humans debate what to do about the space bats. It goes off the rails a little bit at the very end, with a big dramatic showdown that felt kind of forced, and a metaphysical coda that struck me as slightly dippy (in that it’s basically a hard left turn into landscapeology<\/a>). It’s a clear step down from Spin<\/cite>, but an excellent book, and I say this as someone who really disliked some of his earlier books.<\/li>\n
  3. Old Man’s War<\/cite> by John Scalzi<\/strong><\/a>. This was probably the most fun of any of the nominees– Spin<\/cite> is excellent, but it’s the sort of book that you finish, and want to sit quietly and think about for a while. Old Man’s War<\/cite> is more of a “Hey, that was cool, when’s the sequel<\/a> coming out?” kind of book. It’s got snappy dialogue, space battles, boot camp scenes, and a quickly moving, highly entertaining plot. I put it below Spin<\/cite> and Learning the World<\/cite> because it’s just not as weighty as those books– it’s not total fluff, but it’s not quite as substantial as the other two. It’s still a very good book, and a lot of fun to read.<\/li>\n
  4. A Feast for Crows<\/cite> by George R. R. Tolkien<\/s> Martin<\/strong><\/a>. The latest book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, I put this low on the list because it shows some worrying signs of Robert Jordan syndrome. It’s close to a thousand pages long, and nothing much happens, other than a number of characters wandering around in a way that seems to position them for future events. It’s not bad<\/strong>, but it doesn’t really bode well for the series as a whole.<\/li>\n
  5. Accelerando<\/cite> by Charles Stross<\/strong><\/a>. This is probably the book with the most buzz of any of the nominees, but I thought it was an incoherent mess. There are some nifty ideas, but there’s so much stuff<\/strong> thrown into the book that there was bound to be something cool. It’s not just too clever for its own good, it’s too pround of its cleverness to not be annoying. The book is a fix-up of some older stories, and I thought it was significantly inferior to last year’s Iron Sunrise<\/cite><\/a> (which was written later).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So, those are my thoughts, for whatever that’s worth (not much– my voting was almost perfectly anti-correlated with the final results the year that I voted). You are now welcome to hold forth in the comments on how I’m a cretin with no taste in literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Last Friday, before descending into fluff topics like a serious scholarly treatment of Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber posted about something really important: The Hugo Awards. Weirdly, I find myself in the position of having read all of the Best Novel nominees, and this months before the awards… Continue reading Hugo Award Nominations<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}