Not yet finalised my Hugo nominations, but here are a couple of items I'm likely to include on my list which I haven't yet seen mentioned by others:

Novel: The Children of Húrin, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Indubitably eligible; while some of the material has been published before, it was first published in this form in 2007. So what if the author died a third of a century earlier?

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Along with the obvious Doctor Who episodes (Blink and Human Nature/Family of Blood) I will be nominating Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane, from the Sarah Jane Adventures.

Still haven't read Brasyl, of course.

As resolved, I have just finished writing a piece on Kelly Link's 'The Faery Handbag'. Not my best one in the series, but good to get back into the swing of it.

12) L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future volume XIX, ed. Algis Budrys

I bought this way back when Jay Lake's story "Into the Gardens of Sweet Night" got its well-deserved Hugo nomination a couple of years ago, but have only now got around to reading the rest of the fourteen pieces of short fiction in the book, all of which are given a single illustration by an up-and-coming artist. Lake's is the jewel of the collection, and several others show promise though there was none that quite grabbed me in the same way. There is a rather odd inclusion of a short piece on writing by Hubbard himself, and an even shorter piece on illustrating sf by Will Eisner, as well as a retrospective by Sean Williams on what it meant to be included in an earlier volume.

I was really struck at the time that "Into the Gardens of Sweet Night" came only fourth in the Hugo votes, despite getting the most first preferences (and nominations) by far. In the transfers for determining the winner, Swanwick's "Legions in Time" picked up 217 votes, and Lake's story only 50; in the run for second place, "The Empire of Ice Cream" literally doubled its tally from 163 to 326, and Lake's story gained only 65; "Nightfall" got third place by nearly doubling its first prefs from 167 to 330, while "Into the Gardens of Sweet Night" gained only 38 preferences. It's a really nice story, and there is no reason on its own merits for it to be so transfer-repellent. I wonder if voters had deliberately avoided reading it simply because of its provenance being so closely linked to Hubbard?

Closest result: Dave Langford wins his 21st Hugo for Best Fan Writer, beating John Scalzi by 1 vote - 128 to 127. He was seven behind on the first count, but picked up crucial transfers from shsilver and Chris Garcia. This is also the category where the "No Award" test came closest to coming into force, 50-188 (21%-79%).

Second closest result and closest second result: pnh beat Jim Baen for the new Best Editor award by 2 votes, 156 to 154. Baen was actually 26 votes ahead on the first count, but Patrick picked up more transfers from everyone else.

In the count for second place, David Hartwell beat Baen by 1 vote, 151 to 150, again despite being behind (though not as far behind) on the first count.

Closest fiction result: Neil Gaiman's much tipped story, "How to Talk to Girls at Parties", was ahead of Pratt's "Impossible Dreams" on the first count and only nine votes behind (201-192) at the end.

Most one-sided result: Naomi Novik got a clear majority for the Campbell Award on the first count, beating all four other nominees and No Award, with almost four times as many votes as the runner-up, Sarah Monette.

The Campbell Award is of course Not A Hugo. The most one-sided Hugo result was the win for Julie Phillips' Tiptree biography, comfortably ahead of both the Worldcon Guest of Honor Speeches and the book about Heinlein's Juveniles.

My obsession with age: Tim Pratt is by some way the most recently born person to have won a Hugo; he is seven years younger than Kelly Link.

The Gender Question: Rankings of works by women writers as nominated in the various fiction categories:
Best Novel: His Majesty’s Dragon (Naomi Novik) 4th; Farthing (Jo Walton) joint 6th; The Privilege of the Sword (Ellen Kushner) 14th.
Best Novella: “Where the Golden Apples Grow” (Kage Baker) 12th; “JQ211F and Holding” (Nancy Kress) 15th; “Map of Dreams” (M. Rickert) joint 16th
Best Novelette: “Journey into the Kingdom” (M. Rickert) 8th; “In the House of the Seven Librarians” (Ellen Klages) joint 13th; “A Flight of Numbers Fantastique Strange” (Beth Bernobich) joint 22nd; “Home Movies” (Mary Rosenblum) joint 22nd; “Except the Music” (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) joint 30th
Best Short Story: “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls” (Nancy Kress) 6th; “Under Hell, Over Heaven” (Margo Lanagan) joint 13th; “Mahmoud's Wives” (Janis Ian) 17th; “The Saffron Gatherers” (Elizabeth Hand) joint 19th; “Age of Ice” (Liz Williams) joint 19th; “World of No Return” (Carol Emshwiller) joint 21st.

The Asimov's Question: Proportion of short fiction categories won by stories first published in Asimov's: 100%.

...to ianmcdonald and pnh on their Hugo Awards. (And to everyone else, of course, but Ian and Patrick are the two who I know.)

1) Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the year 2660, by Hugo Gernsback

Brian Aldiss blames Gernsback for taking sf away from the literary tradition established by Mary Shelley, and reading this, the Luxembourg-born author's only well-known work of fiction, I can see why Aldiss accuses Gernsback of "a deadening literalism"; and yet I can also understand why the Worldcon hands out Hugos rather than Shelleys.

This fairly short novel was written in 1911, and concerns Ralph 124C 41+, the greatest inventor of his age, who one day meets the beautiful Alice as a result of a crossed videophone conversation, and saves her from an avalanche in distant Switzerland by remote control. He takes her on a tour of 27th century New York and rescues her from abduction and certain death in space at the hands of his rivals for her affections.

Of course the narrative (such as it is) is interrupted frequently by breathless descriptions of the technical advances of the year 2660. Some of these (e.g. radar and solar panels) are now familiar to us in 2007, while in some cases one wonders why he didn't take the idea a step further (you can watch live broadcasts from Europe, and phone calls use video as a matter of course, but no mention of video recording of any kind - and this was written several years after the dawn of cinema).

No robots (still nine years before Čapek invented them in R.U.R.), and perhaps more unexpectedly no rockets - space flight happens via antigravity. (Robert Goddard only began his rocket experiments that same year, 1911; Tsiolkovsky had been writing on the subject for decades, but I don't know how well know his work was in the English-speaking world.)

Yet Gernsback's most spectacular miss is in his failure to understand how technology would revolutionise society. Ralph's sleep is enlivened by a recording of Homer's Odyssey; his manservant puts it on for him. Ralph's dictation machine means that his secretary can devote her time to other things, not that he can dispense with her services. As noted above, we hear a lot about live entertainment, but not much about other forms of literature. The technicalities of how the newspaper of 2660 is produced and read are described in detail; its contents are not.

(And Gernsbach's asteroids have atmospheres.)

Still, I can find a lot more forgiveness for him than Brian Aldiss did: for me, Gernsbach's enthusiasm makes up for his desperately clunky prose. And I love the line, "Martians in New York were not sufficiently rare to excite any particular comment."

(NB: got this as an ebook from Renaissance ebooks.)

Edited to add: At least he tried harder to have an actual plot than Edward Bellamy.

Yes, everyone, livejournal is back!!!!

And so I have three sets of interview questions, which I will answer as follows:

From loveandgarbage

1. Your LJ is always very interesting to read and you exhibit an eclectic range of interests. What has led you to have such a diverse range of interests; and do you feel that this range of interests led you to seek out your work, or your work led you to broaden your interests? ( answer )
   
2. Some years ago Updike wrote a novel entitled "Memories of the Ford Administration". What are yours? ( answer )
   
3. Given your analyses of SF book award winners do you think book awards reward the best novels, or are other factors at play? ( answer )
   
4. Which Wodehouse books would you recommend to someone new to his work? ( answer )
   
5. If you had the power to erase one film, one book, and one TV show from history with the consequence that no-one was aware they had ever existed what would you choose and why? ( answer )

From electricant :

1. What's the best thing about being a father? ( answer )
   
2. I get the impression you have friends dotted all over Europe. Is this the case? How do you go about maintaining long distance friendships with people in other countries? ( answer )
   
3. Why do you book blog? What do you get out of it? ( answer )
   
4. How do you feel about the way geek and sf communities sometimes characterise themselves as being full of people with autistic-spectrum-type tendencies? Do you think it raises genuine awareness of autistic spectrum disorders, or does it only create misunderstandings? ( answer )
   
5. How important is your career to you? If it all fell to pieces tomorrow how would you feel and what would you do? ( answer )

From ninebelow :

1. How on Earth do you find the time to read so many books? ( answer )
   
2. You got very angry about George Osbourne's off the cuff remarks about autism early in the year. What is the balance to be struck between holding people accountable for their remarks and avoiding public figures sticking entirely to vetted talking points? ( answer )
3. What is your favourite language? ( answer )
4. Can you ever imagine yourself going into politics (ie as an elected representative)? ( answer )
5. What is the worst book ever to win a Hugo or Nebula? ( answer )

As usual, if you would like questions, ask.

powered by performancing firefox

1) Thanks, everyone, for your earlier recommendations. Nero is indeed by far the most user-friendly software for this purpose that I've seen. Unfortunately it hasn't solved my problem. I went out and bought some of TDK's CD-R's, but they don't seem to cut it - though the burner is able to write to CD-RW's OK, so I guess I will just have to trade up in terms of my CD-R purchases. (The TDK-made recordable DVDs don't seem to work either.)

2) In case anyone interested hasn't already seen it, the Robert Anton Wilson appeal has been a success. The man himself responds:

To steal from Jack Benny, "I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don't deserve them either." ...You have all reminded me that despite George W. Bush and all his cohorts, there is still a lot of beautiful kindness in the world.

3) If you're wondering why I haven't posted any book reviews yet this month, given that it's already the 7th, the reason is that in the spirit of this post I'm reading Neal Stephenson's The System of the World and it is taking me, er, a long time.

4) I did read Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and came away somewhat unconvinced. It seems to me almost axiomatic that real artificial intelligence, whatever it turns out to be, will be very different from the way humans experience intelligence and consciousness; the Turing test is basically a parlour game. But I really hate "cute robot" sf stories, and perhaps I was biased against Turing's argument because I feel he bears some responsibility for that particular genre.

5) del_c  posted a response to my various crazed rantings about how authors born between 1942 and 1951 have won twice as many Hugos and Nebulas as would have been expected. I think his argument fails even a simple visual inspection of the data he presents, but look for yourself. fjm  offers an interesting theory in a comment to my last post on the subject; I should like to be able to quantify it a bit better.

6) The Belgian municipal elections are tomorrow, and voting is compulsory for those foreigners who (like me) bothered to sign up to the electoral register. Our mayor has been in power since the 1976 reorganisation of local government and is running for a sixth term. There's very little to choose between the parties; the Mayor's list of candidates is officially independent but unofficially Liberal (the Liberals in Belgian are to the right of centre); he is in coalition with the Christian Democrats, led here by our local MEP; the Socialist Party leaflet had no identifiable policies in it at all; one of our neighbours is standing for the Greens so I will probably vote for her. (The far-right "Vlaams Belang", formerly the "Vlaams Blok", have no candidates here.)

7) Thanks to everyone who has posted good wishes on certain entries recently. You know who you are.

8) Good night.

Last week's post about the fact that authors born between 1942 and 1951 was picked up pretty widely (John DeNardo, Andy Wheeler, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Niall Harrison) but the only place it really drew comment was james_nicoll's post on "The Secret of the Over-Achieving Cohort". Most of the comments on that post (which number well over a hundred in total) are dedicated to disproving Doug Muir's over-hasty statement that "there are very few SF writers under 35 today, and basically none under 30". There were, however, several directed to my argument, as follows:

( why it's real )

...some of you may be aware of my thesis that authors born between 1942 and 1951 (inclusive) have won a surprisingly large number of Hugo and Nebula awards. I have done a bit more number-crunching on this question.

( Here it is )

In summary: authors born between 1942 and 1951 have won almost twice as many Hugos and Nebulas as might be expected, comparing them with all Hugo and Nebula winners.

Prodded by an observation from chilperic, I make the following provisional and contentious list of Hugo winning fiction which is clearly fantasy rather than sf:

1959: "That Hell-Bound Train", Robert Bloch (short story)
1964: "The Dragon Masters", Jack Vance (short story)
1967: "The Last Castle" by Jack Vance (novelette)
1971: "Ill Met in Lankhmar" by Fritz Leiber (novella)
1974: "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", Ursula K. Le Guin (short story)
1978: "Jeffty Is Five", Harlan Ellison (short story)
1981: "Grotto of the Dancing Deer", Clifford D Simak (short story)
1982: "Unicorn Variations" by Roger Zelazny (novelette)
1987: "Gilgamesh in the Outback" by Robert Silverberg (novella)
1990: "Boobs" by Suzy McKee Charnas (short story)
1991: "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (short story)
1994: "Death on the Nile" by Connie Willis (short story)
1997: "Blood of the Dragon" by George R. R. Martin (novella)
2001: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (novel)
2002: "Hell Is the Absence of God" by Ted Chiang (novelette)
2002: American Gods by Neil Gaiman (novel)
2003: Coraline by Neil Gaiman (novella)
2004: "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman (short story)
2004: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (novel)
2005: "The Faery Handbag" by Kelly Link (novelette)
2005: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (novel)

So chilperic is right to say that four of the last five Hugos for Best Novel - and none previously - have gone to fantasy novels; and taking all the categories into account, more Hugo awards have gone to works of fantasy rather than sf in the last six years than in the previous twenty.

Does it matter?

5) Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Having read Asimov a few days back, I thought I would continue picking through the chronology of Hugo winners that a) I haven't yet written about on-line and b) are on my shelves. It is therefore entirely by coincidence that I read this just after George Soros' book, which has extraordinary resonances with Bradbury's chilling vision of a future America addicted to interactive yet completely brainless television shows, fighting pointless yet very violent and highy visible wars, and rejecting intellectualism as a crime against the state; where firemen are the burners of books, not the savers of lives.

"Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?"
"No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it."
"Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames."

Bradbury's brilliance is that once you swallow the (rather huge) premise, the plot works very well as a thriller. Montag is the classical sfnal hero rebelling against all he has been taught (and what a great role model - to rebel in favour of reading great literature!), and at every turn the bad guys, his own former comrades, seem about to catch up with him. The character of Clarisse, at the very beginning, is interesting too - partly that it is rather neat to put a teenage girl as the person who opens the central character's eyes, partly also because her ambigous demise sets the tone for much of what is to follow. (I take it that we are meant to understand that her uncle is the protagonist of Bradbury's short story, "The Pedestrian".) But Beatty, the fire captain, is also a more interesting character than I had remembered as well - Montag's flash of revelation (after murdering him of course) is that his boss "actually wanted to die", that his own belief in the burning of books was in the end not strong enough to sustain him.

Anyway, a great book, well worth the re-read.

14) Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
15) Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov
16) Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

Picked these up off the shelves after doing that Hugo meme the other day, perhaps also in an effort to recapture my early teens when I must have read them for the first time. The basic concept, as if you needed reminding, is that the scientist Hari Seldon, inventing a new discpline called psychohistory, foresees the fall of the (humans only) Galactic Empire and sets up two foundations, one at each end of the galaxy, to preserve knowledge and reduce the forecast age of barbarism from thirty thousand years to a single millennium. We follow the story of the Foundation for the first few centuries of its existence on the distant planet of Terminus, which withstands several challenges to the Seldon Plan and then unexpectedly falls to a mutant who has the power to change people's emotions, called the Mule. The mysterious Second Foundation intervenes and neutralises the Mule; it then has to also deal with a threat from the first Foundation which seeks to discover and destroy it.

There are two basic concepts here which are completely wrong. First of all, the idea that future history can be modelled to such mathematical accuracy is surely ludicrous. As a very close observer of international politics at the highest level, it seems to me that the two fundamentals are a) the resources available to decision-makers and b) those decision-makers' own capacity for making decisions. The second of these cannot be easliy modelled. My own view has always been, for instance, that a different leader than Milošević could have pacified the Kosovo Albanians in 1988, when their demands were basically to be left as they were rather than for independence; could have struck a deal between Serbia and Slovenia in 1990 to keep the Yugoslav Federation together; and then would have suppressed any Croat rebellion with the full support of al international actors. In fact, even the first factor, the availability of resources, cannot always be predicted: who would have expected that the meltdown in Albania in 1997, caused entirely by a fairly predictable economic event (the collapse of various pyramid schemes), would result in the looting of Albania's well-stocked military armouries and the consequent arming of the Kosovo Liberation Army?

The second is, of course, the shadowy Higher Power guiding human affairs, at first apparently Seldon's Plan, but later revealed to be the Second Foundation's continuation of his work. I suspect that Asimov must have been attracted by Plato's notion of a Republic guided by enlightened philosopher-kings; the Second Foundation certainly describes its own mission in similar terms in internal discourse. It is a popular literary trope - see the Da Vinci Code, or indeed the various websites denouncing the annual Bilderberg conferences. But there is a nasty undercurrent too to such concepts, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the more recent nonsense about Eurabia. Asimov does manage to put us in sympathy with the Second Foundation by the end, which is quite an achievement.

The three books are basically fix-ups of stories published individually in the 1940s, and in fact the volumes have little individual internal unity - the story arc of the Foundation's encounter with the remnants of the Empire is split between volumes 1 and 2, and the arc of the Mule between volumes 2 and 3. The first few stories (after the set-up) are pretty repetitive: Asimov's heroes defeat their enemies by brain rather than brawn, with much dialogue and little action. The introduction of the Mule - indeed, perhaps more the introduction of the first female character of any note, Bayta Darell - livens things up considerably, and we get a chase around the Galaxy on the Mule's quest for the Second Foundation, which won the Retro-Hugo for the earliest year yet awarded, 1946. The final story, starring Arcadia Darell, Byta's fourteen-year-old granddaughter, actually turns on the same plot twist, an unexpected revelation of the real identity of another character, but is perhaps the best written segment of all - it includes a brilliant passage about a spaceport, which makes it sound rather like Penn Station in New York - also remarkable because such descriptive passages are generally few in number.

Anyway, it's a good re-read, but Asimov would have difficulty getting it published today. (I seem to remember in the first edition I read, many years ago, the young student in the very first story segment had the same surname as the imperial envoy in the second segment; in the new edition the latter seems to have been renamed from Dornik to Dorwin, I suppose to avoid confusion.)

There's a meme going round at the moment to list all the Hugo-winning novels you have read. I have, in fact, read all of them, so won't do it that way. But I will list the ones I have written on-line reviews of below - most are short notes, but in several cases I have posted longer analyses on my website (marked with an asterisk):

( list )

My favourites off that list are the novels by Le Guin, Clarke, Zelazny, Bujold, and Leiber, and also Gateway, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Big Time and Fahrenheit 451.

My least favourites: Hominids, Neuromancer, C.J. Cherryh, The Gods Themselves, They'd Rather Be Right.

In 2005, 2004 and 2003 I listed my preferences among the stories nominated for the Hugo Award, also including as many links as I could conveniently include to other people's thoughts on the nominees. It seems to have been a popular move, so I have repeated it this year and the results are below. (I also listed just my own preferences among the nominees in all categories in 2002, and for the novels in 2000. My website also has various other statistics on Hugo and Nebula awards.)

I'd thought of doing it a little differently this year, by starting with the short stories and working up to novels, as indeed the Hugo ceremony itself does. However, I then realised that it meant the incoming reader would hit my acerbic remarks about Michaels Resnick and Burstein first, and might therefore be put off science fiction for life. The novels are a far better starting point, so it is business as usual after all.

Last year, pressed for time, I wasn't able to add review links for the novels. This year there has been so much to choose from that I was only able to add the first few dozen that caught my eye from Google and Icerocket. My apologies if you feel you have been unfairly omitted, but there is an element of chance in all this.

I've also made one other significant format change. In previous years I have striven to supply the real names of reviewers, and the name of the website where the review first appeared, wherever possible. This year I have given up; for blogs in general I've used the nom de net if the blogger's real name isn't obvious, and for LiveJournal users, who are by far the biggest group of bloggers writing about sf books, I have adopted the LiveJournal format for their identities, and given real names in only a very few cases. Indeed I drafted this web-page using a LiveJournal client. In contrast, I have only linked to one myspace blog entry (there were very few of relevance anyway, and too many of them play annoying music at you). If you are one of those I have quoted or linked to, and would prefer me to identify you in a different way than I have done below, please do let me know.

The version of this mega-meta-review on my website should be considered the primary source (though feel free to contribute to discussion threads here or on the usenet partial version).

Having said all that, on with the show...
( Read more... )

Continued here.

Continued from this post.

( Novellas, Novelettes and Short Stories )

...I discover that Joe Haldeman has been looking at my website, to check how many Nebulas he has won.

I see that Interaction has put the opening and closing remarks from last year's Hugo ceremony on-line (49 MB WMV file). To be honest I'm not sure that this was all that smart. It is, after all, in competition in the same category as "Dalek", "Father's Day" and "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances". While those who were there will remember it fondly as an entertaining and witty frame for a jolly good evening, it doesn't really improve on re-watching. Though Kim Newman's line about "the then-secret Grand Bombe Atomique, the weapon which allowed France to prevail in the Great War of August 1914 to later that afternoon in August 1914" still raises a laugh.

(I see the Nebulas are being announced tonight.)

( Doctor Who )

But next week there will be Cybermen!

Afterwards liberaliser and I went outside - and I brought Fergal downstairs - to see if we could catch the International Space Station, supposedly visible from 2154 to 2159 at our location according to the wondrous Sky and Telescope site. I'm pretty sure we were looking in the right direction but the sky was still too bright. Oh well, there's always tomorrow evening from 2219 to 2222.

Official shortlist. I know I am several days behind the curve here. Anyway, congratulations to autopope, ianmcdonald, shsilver, Ken, Paul and Cheryl all of whom I think do read me here from time to time (and apologies as well as congratulations to anyone else seeing this who I missed).

I don't think he reads this, but in case he does, an extra shouted "Congrats" to Dominic Green, who I haven't seen since student days in Cambridge, though we were in touch a few years ago, er, in 2000 now that I look at it.

Novels: Am stunned and surprised that Anansi Boys didn't make it to the short list. Perhaps it came out too late in the year? Perhaps the reason I particularly liked it - that it marked a move onto slightly different territory for Gaiman - worked against it for most fans? Will obviously have to get hold of Old Man's War and Spin; I have already read the other three.

Novellas: The only two I have read were the Link (which must surely win) and the Sawyer (which rather to my surprise I nominated).

Novelettes: Have read none of them. This will change.

Short Story: Despite my congrats to Dominic, nobody stands a chance against Margo Lanagan.

Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form: Serenity, obviously.

Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form: Good Lord, I have actually seen four of these - the three Doctor Who nominations (for four episodes) and Kim Newman/Paul McAuley's Hugo presentation last year. Despite pickwick's surprise, it's not so very surprising that the two Worldcon live events both made it to the shortlist. I have a vague feeling this has happened once or twice before but have not yet found supporting evidence.

pnh comments, "It’s one of our subcultural myths that we’re “neophilic,” that we routinely acclaim strong new work, and in fact since the first Hugo Awards in 1953, fully 22 debut novels have been among the finalists." He is entirely right to be sceptical of that myth. In fact, the Nebula voters are much more neophilic than the Hugo voters. It is some time since I last crunched the numbers; but in 2002, the 178 Hugos for fiction had been won by 82 different authors while the 148 Nebulas had been won by 89 different authors. If I have counted right, five of the 16 Hugos awarded since then have gone to first time winners (including three last year) - six out of 20 if you count Ray Bradbury's Retro-Hugo; compared with eight out of twelve Nebulas. Having said that, there will be at least one first-time Hugo winner this year as (hat-tip Locus Online) none of the Novelette nominees has ever won it before. And I think we can add Margo Lanagan as well.

Almost two months ago, truepenny came up with a meme - to list all the novels which have won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, Tiptree, Dick, Stoker and  World Fantasy Awards and, as so often, bold the ones you have read. It was a pretty short-lived meme; in the next couple of days 34 people did it (all but one on livejournal) and then it died a death as these things do.

I thought it would be intertesting (well, interesting for me, anyway) to crunch through the numbers and see how many people of this self-selected group have actually read each of the award-winners. Excluding the Stoker winners, which seemed to have far less take-up, and the Sidewise Awards, which only one person listed, the results for the other 169 books are as follows (top twenty-ish above the cut tag, and the three which nobody had read below it):

32 (1st): Frank Herbert, Dune

29 (2nd): Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

28 (joint 3rd): Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

27 (5th): J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

26 (joint 6th): Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
William Gibson, Neuromancer

25 (joint 8th): Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Larry Niven, Ringworld
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

24 (joint 12th): Connie Willis, Doomsday Book
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

23 (joint 14th): David Brin, Startide Rising
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

22 (joint 16th): David Brin, The Uplift War
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

21 (19th): Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

20 (joint 20th): Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

( others, all the way down to... )

0 (joint 166th): Carol Emshwiller, The Mount
Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife
Stepan Chapman, The Troika

I confess that I have never heard of either Louise Erdrich or Stepan Chapman, let alone their respective award-winning novels. Howver, I have read the top forty or so. The first I haven't yet read is China Mountain Zhang, followed by Little, Big and Mythago Wood, and then Thomas the Rhymer and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

That Dune came out on top overall is not so very surprising. I'm pleased by Le Guin's performance. Slightly surprised that Flowers for Algernon did not do even better - I thought it was a standard high-school assignment (certainly the most-visited page of my own website) but perhaps if you strictly count the novel rather than the original short story the count goes down. Other interesting data there as well, but I have been working on this for long enough.

(Thanks very much to agrumer, apotropaism, badgerbag, blue_condition, http://browriter.blogspot.com, burger_eater, communicator, ellen_fremedon, feyandstrange, firecat, gummitch, hollowpoint, jodawi, jry, kangeiko, katlinel, kerravonsen, ladyoflight2004, lenora_rose, linda_joyce, marykaykare, nhw, nickeyb, pariyal, peake, pigeonhed, sbisson, shsilver, sooguy, spacedoutlooney, tensegrity, tinaconnolly, vierran45 and especially truepenny for putting it into its standard form - user names link to the relevant entry in each case.)

Of course, I've been tracking the Hugos and Nebulas separately; but this was interesting. (Usual - bold if you've read.)

Thanks to truepenny here, burger_eater here, gummitch here, peake here, sbisson here and ajshepherd here.

( Read more... )

Bah, just realised that I've been reading Dhalgren for the last few days in the mistaken belief that it was also a Nebula winner. Oh well.

Finally, after eight months, I have done the next in my series of reviews of those works of written sf which have won both Hugo and Nebula.

Clifford D. Simak's "Grotto of the Dancing Deer".

Surprisingly little to be written about it, in the end, probably partly why it took me so long. Right, now about those other reviews I owe Keith Brooke...

I see Cheryl Morgan's roundup from Worldcon includes this comment:

I’ve also heard a few complaints about Chris Priest. I’m not exactly happy about what happened at the Hugo ceremony myself, seeing as it was on my watch, so to speak. But having talked to a number of people who know Chris better than I do I’ve been reassured that he was trying to make jokes. Unfortunately it seems that his particularly dry British sense of humor doesn’t translate very well, and he came over to many people as being deliberately rude.

I completely missed whatever this refers to. Can someone refresh my memory? (Unless it was his joke at the closing ceremony about autopope?)

A homunculus, automaton or other artificial being:

1. shall not serve a human red wine with fish,
2. must always alert a human to shortfallings in the quality of his cuisine with a mechanical cry of 'sacré bleu', and
3. shall not (through inaction) allow a human to be seen in public with mismatching gaiters and cravat.

Full text here (hat-tip pnh)

Since this is the episode currently rated best on the dynamic rankings site - even ahead of The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Genesis of the Daleks, and everyone was telling me at Worldcon how great it was (but sadly it was broadcast when I was at the wedding), I was very much looking forward to it. ( well... )

So, operationally, what episode should those of us who care about these things collectively throw our weight behind in the nominations for next year's Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)? I still haven't seen The Doctor Dances, but I don't think it will change my view that the one to back is Dalek; as a stand-alone episode it is more accessible, it certainly got me more excited than any other (I actually referred to it in five separate posts around the time of the first broadcast). Of course, youse can all nominate what you like; but I think a little discussion ahead of time does no harm at all!

Well, I don't think I can really complain. Of the stories I put top of my own list, River of Gods appears to have come second to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell; "The Clapping Hands of God" came second to "The Faery Handbag"; and "The Concrete jungle" and "Travels With My Cats" both won. As did the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which is excellent. (With Peter Weston's book second.)

Longer post tomorrow; now I have to go and join the long long queues for a) getting my stuff back from the cloakroom and b) getting a bus to the Hilton.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susannah Clarke