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2007 Hugo Award Winners Announced

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sat Sep 08, 2007 08:39 AM
from the come-on-down dept.
Sci-Fi Entertainment
jX writes "This year's Hugo Award Winners have been announced at the recently launched Hugo Award official website. Some winners that should be familiar to any well read/watched geek are Vernor Vinge for Best Novel, Doctor Who for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form), and last years hit movie Pan's Labyrinth for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Of course, a complete list of this year's nominees and winners is also available."
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  • Pan's Labyrinth (Score:5, Informative)

    by lastninja (237588) on Saturday September 08 2007, @08:44AM (#20520253)
    The Pale Man sequence in Pan's Labyrinth, scared the living shit out of me. A must see movie.
    • Pan's Labyrinth, quite simply (for me) the best film since the turn of the millennium. No other film has so much and ties it together so well, both brutal with the viewer and the most wonderful climax (which I wont spoil)

      It's such a shame that so many people wont watch it just because it is subtitled. I have friends who actually say that subtitles are "too much work"

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Briareos (21163)
      Am I the only one to think that every movie that was nominated besides Pan's Labyrinth was a lot better and should've won instead?

      In my book, Pan's Labyrinth was a jumbled, incoherent mess of a story that ultimately went nowhere. Sorry, but WW2 war stories and that kind of fairy tale fantasy just don't mix well, and Pan's Labyrinth was hopping from being one to the other all the time and in the end fell flat on both accounts.

      All the other movies at least told their story well, but when I watched Pan's Labyr

      • Granted, it wasn't "Night Watch" *shudder* bad,
        You had me, then you lost me.

      • Re:Pan's Labyrinth (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Don_dumb (927108) on Saturday September 08 2007, @12:38PM (#20521813)

        Am I the only one to think that every movie that was nominated besides Pan's Labyrinth was a lot better and should've won instead?

        In my book, Pan's Labyrinth was a jumbled, incoherent mess of a story that ultimately went nowhere. Sorry, but WW2 war stories and that kind of fairy tale fantasy just don't mix well, and Pan's Labyrinth was hopping from being one to the other all the time and in the end fell flat on both accounts.
        You're not thinking at all, it was about the Spanish civil war, not WW2. So I would assert that the film was intellectually above you. I am not going to explain why the two stories make sense together because that would spoil the film for those who are just reading this thread. But I suggest you read the imdb.com summaries.

        • Re:Pan's Labyrinth (Score:4, Interesting)

          by SETIGuy (33768) * on Saturday September 08 2007, @01:55PM (#20522399) Homepage

          You're not thinking at all, it was about the Spanish civil war, not WW2.
          I'm not sure what movie you were watching, but it was "about" the trauma women (or at least some of them) go through when losing their virginity. The whole Spanish civil war + mythical beings thing was there to make you think it was about something else.

          Or did you miss the giant representation of the female reproductive system on the movie poster? [panslabyrinth.com]

          Although I can understand how the point might be lost on the slashdot crowd.

  • For those of you (Score:4, Informative)

    by saibot834 (1061528) on Saturday September 08 2007, @08:52AM (#20520297) Homepage
    who did not know what the Hugo Award was (like myself): Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org].
    Basically it is an award for the best science fiction or fantasy work.

  • Rainbows End (Score:5, Insightful)

    by savala (874118) on Saturday September 08 2007, @08:54AM (#20520315)

    I read Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End last year, and wrote the following about it:

    I expected it to be good, but it's gone way far above and beyond any expectations I harboured. Everything it did, it did perfectly right. The people living this story have become gloriously real, the story captivated me more and more with each passing chapter (building up to an awesome conclusion), there were real emotions, chillingly shocking and yet hopeful visions of the future as it could be, and through it all, the sense that everything in this book was written by someone who really knows what he's talking about.

    The technology predictions in this book won't stand the test of time. Two years from now they'll still be valid, but five years from now they'll already be decidedly quaint. Still, as someone very famous once said, science fiction isn't about the future, it's about the present. And I think there's very few people who understand the present as well as Vinge does. And I can pretty much guarantee that even when the technology predictions are considered not just quaint but hilariously outdated, this book will still be read and enjoyed - simply because it's an awesome book with an awesome story.

    You're looking at the clear winner of next year's Hugo and Nebula Awards.

    Ok, so I was wrong about the Nebula. Can't win them all. :)

    I can also highly recommend this book to everyone here at slashdot. It's the kind of book most of us will be able to relate to. A book by a geek who understands not only technology, but also the social implications thereof.

    • Vernor Vinge's best book is Marooned in Realtime, closely followed by A Deepness In The Sky. I have not read the other books that were nominated, so I cannot say how they compare relatively, but Rainbow's End was a rather unorganized, disjointed, and mundane book in comparison to his others. It didn't really have a clear plot line because one plot line about old codgers pissed off about destructive digitization of books just happened upon another plot line by blind chance. The connection was really forced.

  • Blink! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by radarsat1 (786772) on Saturday September 08 2007, @08:59AM (#20520343) Homepage
    I thought "Blink" [tvsquad.com] was by far the best Dr. Who episode this season.. can't believe it wasn't listed there.
    Anyways, are they really canceling this show after next season?? I do hope it continues.
    • "Blink" has the same author, but was probably too new for this award. I don't understand why they don't make more episodes with Stefan Muffat, he is by far the best of all the current Doctor Who script writers.
      • Rumor has it that Moffat will be taking over from RTD after season 5. They're having a 1 year hiatus between season 4 and 5 and RTD is expected to move on to something else. I agree, I've loved each and every episode penned by Moffat and Blink was perhaps the best one.

        • Blink was great. Wonderfully tightly wound little plot, great effects and creepy-lovely. I also like the Utopia - Last of the Timelords sequence because it introduced some nice modern day concerns and well, it's hard to go wrong with such an epic villain. Very true to the character of the Doctor in his non-violent approach to defeating the Master, also. But Blink was definitely one of the best.
      • If you liked the episode, be sure to read "What I Did on My Holidays" by Sally Sparrow [bbc.co.uk], the short story on which the episode was based. It was a favourite in our house before the episode was made - the kids really loved it.
    • Those episodes were from last year. I'm sure either Blink or Family of Blood will make it next time.

      And they aren't canceling it. From what I understand, they're doing the 4th series, then taking a break and producing a handful of extended length specials, and then doing the 5th series.
    • This was the very first Dr. Who that I've ever seen. I was hooked in 10 minutes and ended up watching every single episode. It's amazing how good the whole series is.

      • At one point, mumblety-mumblety years ago when PBS was running Dr Who, I taped each episode and watched them while exercising. I believe I saw every episode that PBS broadcast, ranging from (the available) Hartnell episodes to McCoy. It took rather a while. (And yes, I enjoyed them and no, I'd not even think about doing it again.) I've since seen (but less comprehensively) many of the episodes produced since. (I didn't enjoy the Eccleston series as much as some of the others, but rather I'm look

        • No absolutely not. I definitely know of the "classic" Dr. Who's but I've never had the chance to see them. I should have qualified what I said as every single modern episode. Working from the wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] I mean only Dr.s 9 and 10 so I have obviously only barely scratched the surface.
    • I haven't seen it yet it airs next friday in the USA for the first time.

      So don't spoil it for me the previews looked good and I have to wait as it is or spoil my friday sci-fi night.
    • Anyways, are they really canceling this show after next season?

      No, thank goodness! It's going on semi-hiatus in 2009, with three specials instead of a full season [bbc.co.uk]. No news as to whether David Tennant will return in 2010, though.

      -Stephen

  • The Best Short Story Nominations are . . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by Slithe (894946) on Saturday September 08 2007, @09:07AM (#20520391) Homepage Journal

    Best Short Story

            * "Impossible Dreams" by Tim Pratt [Asimov's July 2006]
            * "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" by Neil Gaiman [Fragile Things, William Morrow 2006]
            * "Eight Episodes" by Robert Reed [Asimov's June 2006]
            * "Kin" by Bruce McAllister [Asimov's Feb 2006]
            * "The House Beyond Your Sky" by Benjamin Rosenbaum [Strange Horizons Sep 2006]

    Best Related Non-Fiction Book
    Funny, I didn't know Slashdotters held that much power at Worldcon

  • Charles Stross (Score:4, Interesting)

    by grassy_knoll (412409) on Saturday September 08 2007, @09:14AM (#20520435) Homepage
    I'm disapointed that he didn't win the best novel category. I'm a huge fan of his Laundry books ( think HP Lovecraft + Dilbert in a spy novel ).

      • ( think HP Lovecraft + Dilbert in a spy novel )
        That description made my brain hurt.
        I think that's the point. :-)

        ("The Atrocity Archives", and "The Jennifer Morgue")

  • no online short story winners? (Score:4, Informative)

    by sdedeo (683762) on Saturday September 08 2007, @09:15AM (#20520437) Homepage Journal
    Curious to see that the print journals (and Asimov's in particular) still rule. I don't read SF as much as I used to, but I would assume that there is a lot of work online and probably a lot of good online magazines for it to appear in. At least, that's how it is in my own niche, poetry, where online journals these days publish a non-negligible fraction of the work that wins contemporary awards in the "industry."

    Are the Hugo readers still a little too snobby for the web?

      • My eyes! That has to be the most horribly laid-out webzine I've seen in awhile! The fontsize seems chosen for the massively aged, e.g., and the leading is awful. (Well, OK, the internet is a race to the bottom when it comes to layout, of course, although I thought things were changing.) Also, what is up with megalomaniac SF names? Who is Jim Baen? He ain't Asimov, that's for sure! (And I believe Asimov had to be cajoled into letting his name be used as the magazine's title.)

        Interesting to see that they c
        • Doesn't seem so terrible to me, except for the very cluttered image in the front.
          They seem to be going for a retro look, which is interesting.
          Font size doesn't seem any different to anywhere else...

          Perhaps you're just reacting to a website that dares to use serif fonts?
          • Funnily enough, I have just been advocating forserif fonts for body text on the web (check my blog.) The font size thing may be a browser dependent thing -- on the latest version of Safari, the lowercase (!) in the stories is taller than the standard mouse pointer. That's way too large for me. I am way way sympathetic to browser-dependent bugs, we just finished laying out absent [absentmag.org], a poetry journal, and it took far longer than expected because Safari's treatment of word breaks in <pre> tags is broken w/

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Jardine (398197)
          Who is Jim Baen? He ain't Asimov, that's for sure! (And I believe Asimov had to be cajoled into letting his name be used as the magazine's title.)

          Jim Baen is the publisher (or was, since he recently passed away). Baen Books is huge in their niche market of military science fiction and space opera. Many of the books they publish are also available as DRM-free ebooks. Quite a few are at the Baen Free Library for free and a lot of the newer hardcover books come with CDs containing other works by the author. Th

  • Is it too much to ask... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2007, @09:18AM (#20520457)
    Is it too much to ask that articles on a geek site have proper parenthesization? I going to have nightmares about the article not compiling for the rest of the day.
  • Not to take anything away from Vinge and Rainbows End, but Blindsight was just simply amazing. From the characters to the technology to the plotting style, it took everything good about a first contact story, and then added to it. If you haven't read it, you owe it to yourself to (and the associated Vampire Domestication presentation.) Best of all, Peter Watts has made it, and his previous Rifters trilogy, available online under a Creative Commons license at his website [rifters.com], and it's well worth just download
    • Vampires? Fantasy and vampire books do not belong in the Hugos. Yes, I know Harry Potter won a Hugo and the Hugos nearly jumped the shark then, but it seems like they have gone back to real science fiction. If the vampires can be explained as simply a predatory species without all the gothic overhead, I could suffer that (though there better be a damn good evolutionary explanation for how such a species could evolve in such a way to consume the blood of other alien species), but if they come from hell or an

      • Fantasy most certainly does belong in the Hugos. From the FAQ:

        Aren't Hugos just for Science Fiction?

        While the organization sponsoring the Hugos is named the World Science Fiction Society, our charter explicitly makes fantasy as well as SF eligible for our awards. Works of fantasy have often won Hugos, and, in fact, Hugos have been won by works that some people consider horror or even mainstream. There will never be universal agreement about the precise distinctions between genres and sub-genres, so WSFS

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by QuantumET (54936)
        It was explained with plenty of hard science fiction - a human subspecies missing the ability to produce a key biological compound, leading to a host of other adaptations to allow the vampires to successfully hunt regular humans, including different brain wiring, hibernation ability, and an unfortunate mental glitch having to do with right angles, which lead to them going extinct way before modern times. They were then brought back through some genetic archeology work.
  • I am normally a big Vinge fan, but I wasn't too impressed by Rainbow's End. I thought that the schooling part of the story was mostly silly. Success isn't really about schooling, it's about intelligence. (Although big impressive credentials are important and its hard to get those without schooling.) Unlike Vinge's imagining, high school computer class in the future will be just as silly as it was 10 years ago, just as silly as it is now. Even if the technology improves, the teachers and students will not. I
    • Agreed. I couldn't stand Rainbow's End, though I read it through to the end because it was written by Vinge, and I loved his other work. This frankly makes me lose faith in the Hugo as a guidepost to what to read.

  • They need some new categories. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by foniksonik (573572) on Saturday September 08 2007, @09:36AM (#20520563) Homepage Journal
    There should be:

    Best Video Game - Console/PC

    Best Video Game - Web

    Best Machina - Short

    Best Machina - Long

    Best Interactive - Website

    Best Interactive - Microsite

    Essentially there are a lot more formats available for Sci-Fi/Fantasy creative works than there used to be. Let's give those people awards for their contributions.

  • I'm not going to argue that Doctor Who is somehow insignificant or unworthy of attention, but last year was a wonderful year for science fiction on television. I cannot begin to understand how Doctor Who took the award for best episode even when its fanbase was split between two nominated episodes. It seems remarkably hard to fathom that the 4,000 year old series, infinitely rehashed, is still considered original enough to warrant the award. Give lifetime achievement awards for those that stuck with the pro
    • Did you actually watch the episode in question? I kinda lost interest in the new series after Eccleston left, but I have to admit that "Girl In The Fireplace" is by far the best Doctor Who episode ever, and roundly trounces anything in Battlestar's second season.
    • As a watcher of Heroes, Jericho, and Battlestar Galactica, I must say that the "Girl in the Fireplace" was one of the best Doctor Who episodes they've ever done. The quality of an individual episode is what's evaluated here, not that it's a part of a 40-year old framework.

      Heroes struck me as candy on the level of Prison Break, with a lot of comic-book sensibility thrown in.
      Jericho is more (good) drama than Sci Fi.

      Having said this:
      - The Hugos were for shows that aired through Summer 2006. Heroes and Jer
  • Is the best Doctor Who episode ever. It's been a while since you could say that a Doctor Who episode is so original, and its story so poignant, and elegantly written. I especially love how the final shot ties the whole episode together and resolves what looked like a plot inconsistency up to that moment.
    • It was good - I thought it had a disticnt Douglas Adams-y feel to it.

      On reflection, that was probably the inexplicable Horse, plus a bit of inspiration from the Grebulons in "Mostly Harmless"... Still, what goes around comes around :-)

      (FYI the late lamented Adams once worked as script editor/author on the original Doctor Who - elements of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Life, The Universe and Everything" actually started life as Doctor Who scripts)

      Great thing about Stephen Moffat is that - un
      • OK I just watched "Blink" and I almost crapped my pants, from a combination of it being the best episode EVAR and the statues creeping me out. Pretty much best writing so far in Doctor Who, and by far the best episode of any sci fi show this year.
  • Here. [nippon2007.us]

    Most of them anyway - the Stross is a link to buy the ebook for a silly price, so why not try Accelerando [accelerando.org] instead, which is free, or any of a bunch of stories on his site [antipope.org].

    • Re:You mean... (Score:4, Informative)

      by savala (874118) on Saturday September 08 2007, @09:02AM (#20520363)
      No. The 2007 Hugo is for a book published in 2006. (Although there's some leeway for which date to pick for books which were first published outside the USA.)

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