{"id":5832,"date":"2011-08-21T09:29:39","date_gmt":"2011-08-21T09:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/08\/21\/2011-hugo-awards-predictably-m\/"},"modified":"2011-08-21T09:29:39","modified_gmt":"2011-08-21T09:29:39","slug":"2011-hugo-awards-predictably-m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/08\/21\/2011-hugo-awards-predictably-m\/","title":{"rendered":"2011 Hugo Awards: Predictably Meh"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/04\/hugo_humiliation.php\">noted a while back<\/a>, the Hugo Award nominations for this year were pretty uninspiring. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/blogs\/2011\/08\/announcing-the-2011-hugo-award-winners\">actual awards were handed out last night<\/a> and, well, yeah. I wasn&#8217;t all that wild about <cite>The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms<\/cite>, but it at least would&#8217;ve been an interesting choice. But giving it to <cite>Blackout\/ All Clear<\/cite>, a pair of books that almost nobody had anything good to say about? The only possible outcome that would&#8217;ve been less inspiring would&#8217;ve been a tie with <cite>Cryoburn<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<p>Lower down the ballot, things are a little better. I don&#8217;t read much short fiction, but lots of people who do said before the voting that Sheila Williams was way overdue to win the short form editor Hugo. I&#8217;ve enjoyed Shaun Tan&#8217;s work, <cite>Clarkeswordl<\/cite> seems like a good magazine, Lou Anders has done a good job building up Pyr, I liked <cite>Inception<\/cite>, the Ted Chiang story was perfectly good,  and most importantly, the short story Hugo <em>didn&#8217;t<\/em> go to that <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/05\/short_story_club_ponies_by_kij.php\">terrible Kij Johnson story<\/a>, or the <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/08\/short_story_club_the_things_by.php\">Peter Watts one<\/a>, either.<\/p>\n<p>The Campbell not-a-Hugo went to Lev Grossman, whose books and blogging I enjoy quite a bit, so I&#8217;m happy with that. He&#8217;s not <em>really<\/em> a new writer, in that he had at least one novel published before <cite>The Magicians<\/cite>, but not in the genre, so it&#8217;s no sillier than David Anthony Durham winning a few years ago.<\/p>\n<p>So, you know, it could&#8217;ve been worse. Still&#8230; it&#8217;s hard not to be disappointed, given the Novel result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As noted a while back, the Hugo Award nominations for this year were pretty uninspiring. The actual awards were handed out last night and, well, yeah. I wasn&#8217;t all that wild about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but it at least would&#8217;ve been an interesting choice. But giving it to Blackout\/ All Clear, a pair of&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/08\/21\/2011-hugo-awards-predictably-m\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">2011 Hugo Awards: Predictably Meh<\/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-5832","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\/5832","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=5832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}