The 2014 Hugo Awards 180
Dave Knott writes: WorldCon 2014 wrapped up in London this last weekend and this year's Hugo Award winners were announced. Notable award winners include:
Best Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Best Novelette: "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal
Best Novella: "Equoid" by Charles Stross
Best Short Story: "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu
Best Graphic Story: "Time" by Randall Munroe
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Gravity written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Game of Thrones: "The Rains of Castamere" written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, directed by David Nutter
The results of this year's awards were awaited with some some trepidation in the SF community, due to well-documented attempts by some controversial authors to game the voting system. These tactics appear to have been largely unsuccessful, as this is the fourth major award for the Leckie novel, which had already won the 2013 BSFA, 2013 Nebula and 2014 Clarke awards.
Best Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Best Novelette: "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal
Best Novella: "Equoid" by Charles Stross
Best Short Story: "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu
Best Graphic Story: "Time" by Randall Munroe
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Gravity written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Game of Thrones: "The Rains of Castamere" written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, directed by David Nutter
The results of this year's awards were awaited with some some trepidation in the SF community, due to well-documented attempts by some controversial authors to game the voting system. These tactics appear to have been largely unsuccessful, as this is the fourth major award for the Leckie novel, which had already won the 2013 BSFA, 2013 Nebula and 2014 Clarke awards.
Re:Informative winners list (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's because opinion is subjective.
Re:Informative winners list (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree about the winners in recent years, although I usually peruse the best novel nominees, quite a few of my favourite books have been "losing" Hugo or Nebula nominees.
Re:Informative winners list (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sad Puppy Slate (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory in both contests the popularity is supposed to be based on the quality of the work. That rule is probably more closely observed for the Nebulas than the Hugos, but in both cases it is impossible to eliminate all personal biases.
I voted in the Hugos and personally found the Vox Day work to be junk, while the other works from the "Sad Puppy Slate" were decent, though not anything i would have considered worth nominating myself. Obviously i agree with the results, but obviously i am also biased like every other human being.
So yes, the Hugos are a popularity contest, as are the Nebulas, the Oscars, the Grammys, and every other reward for artistic achievement that you can think of.
Re:Gravity isn't SF (Score:5, Insightful)
Good science fiction is (almost) ALWAYS about people, and how they react in an environment that is altered by a technology, or an event, or some other external influence that simply wasn't imaginable until our understanding of the universe progressed (the science part of the fiction). While there are some examples that differ from this, if you take a look through your favorite stories, they almost all conform to this pattern.
In this case, it's an exploration of what happens to someone who is in orbit during an event that leads to Kessler Syndrome. I'm not saying the film deserved to win, but I think complaining that "this isn't science fiction" is decidedly unwarranted.
Re:Informative winners list (Score:4, Insightful)
I picked up a collection of Hugo Award winners, as edited by Isaac Asimov - I found the writing incredibly pretentious and the stories almost seemed to take a back seat. They were a massive disappointment to me.
Hugo winners are often incredible stories - I've read a lot of them, and while some of them are crap, a lot of them are very, very good. Really, it depends a lot on the year they were written - if the collection you read was from the 70s, then I can see why you thought they were crap; the popular scifi writing style in in that decade was ... well ... pretentious. It's also possible that you just don't like the same kinds of stories Asimov likes - as editor, the stories were chosen by him.