It's Hugo nomination season again, which means that I need to come up with a list of works to suggest for SF's premier fan-voted award. It also means that there are lots of publications out there putting out lists of recommended works to help potential Hugo voters narrow their ballots.
Last year, there was a bit of a fuss kicked up because the list of nominees was almost all white males. Looking at my potential list of nominees (more detail below the fold), I would say at least my ballot is headed in that direction again. If you are a person who would like to see more books and stories by women and minorities nominated, here's your chance to tell me what I'm missing. What works should I be considering for the Hugo by people from those groups?
I won't promise to nominate anything just for political reasons, but I will give any suggested works all due consideration, in the interest of not having to read a bunch of complaints about the gender breakdown of the ballot. But I need suggestions, because I'm not seeing a whole lot here.
My preliminary ballot thoughts at the moment:
Here's a list of the books that I've read from the Locus, NESFA, and SFRevu lists:
- The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
- Spook Country, William Gibson (Putnam; Viking UK)
- Bad Monkeys, Matt Ruff (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
- Queen of Candesce, Karl Schroeder (Tor)
- Halting State, Charles Stross (Ace)
- Axis, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
- Territory, Emma Bull (Tor)
- Ink, Hal Duncan (Macmillan UK; Del Rey)
- Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada; Roc)
- Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)
- Cauldron, Jack McDevitt
- The Last Colony, John Scalzi (Tor)
To these, I would add:
- Ragamuffin, by Tobias Buckell (Tor)
which is inexplicably missing from all three lists. It was a terrific bit of space opera, with a really cool setting, and great fun to read.
Those are pasted in in the order that they appeared on the other lists, but my top three would be the first three: Chabon, Gibson, and Ruff. People will complain that the Gibson isn't really SF at all, but it has the feel of SF to me, and more importantly, it's a really good book-- not his very best, but very good. Ruff's twisty thriller goes a little wonky at the end, but it's a really good read all the same. Chabon's alternate history Jews-in-Alaska story is head and shoulders above anything else on this list.
After that, I'd probably go with Axis (an excellent book, but not as good as Spin) and The Last Colony, which is the best thing Scalzi's written so far.
Yeah, I know I said I'd add Ragamuffin into the mix, but as good as it is, it doesn't quite catch the others. Halting State is orders of magnitude better than Glasshouse which was awful, but it's still got serious flaws. Queen of Candesce is good, but it goes into a corner of the setting that I don't like as much, and doesn't really make sense unless you've read Sun of Suns. Ink barely makes sense even if you have read Vellum. Territory, Emma Bull's secret history of the Wild West, is a very strange book-- it moves along in a very slow and atmospheric sort of way, and then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of stuff happens all at once. When you look back, the story was clearly building to that point, but it's disorienting the first time through.
Books from those three lists that I haven't read, but have at hand:
- Undertow, Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra)
- Shelter, Susan Palwick (Tor)
- Ha'Penny, Jo Walton (Tor)
- The Secret History of Moscow, Ekaterina Sedia (Prime Books)
- The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
- Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
- The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss (DAW; Gollancz)
- Nova Swing, M. John Harrison (Note: Published by Gollanz, UK 10/2006)
to which I would add
- Acacia, by David Anthony Durham
which isn't on any of the lists, but got some good buzz.
Of these, I am unlikely to read Ha'Penny any time soon-- though I'm thanked in the acknowledgements of Farthing, it's really not my thing. I'm 150 pages or so into Shelter, and as much as I want to like it, there are some bits of the setting that just don't do it for me, and I think I'm going to put it aside in favor of other things. It's the rare case of a book whose cover copy is too accurate, starting off:
The three basic human needs are food, water... and shelter. But in the late twenty-first century, compassion is a crime. You can get your memories wiped just for trying to help.
If that appeals to you, then jump right in, because it's very well written. Personally, it makes me want to put the book down, and reach for something else.
I started Nova Swing a while back, and remember almost nothing of what I read before getting distracted by something else. I enjoyed Light quite a bit, though, so I'll definitely come back to it. The start of Undertow looks promising, but I'm a little wary of Bear. Kate is halfway through the first book of the Valente duology, and raves about it, so that's likely next in the queue, after she finishes it.
Matthew Hughes's The Spiral Labyrinth gets mentioned as well, and while we don't have that, we do have the first book in the series, Majestrum, and the premise of those sounds interesting. Acacia and The Name of the Wind look fairly entertaining as well, though I was on a Big Dumb Fantasy kick a little while ago, and I'm not quite in the mood for them now.
As for the rest of the ballot, I'm not planning to nominate anything in the short fiction categories, just because I read so little short fiction. I'm willing to change that plan-- I asked Kate to grab a copy of The New Space Opera from the library, because it collects a large number of the short works recommended by Locus-- but I need some specific recommendations, because my time and attention are finite resources. If there's a short fiction work out there that you thought was spectacular, point me to it, and I'll give it a read.
And that's the current state of my Hugo nomination ballot. If there's something you'd rather see nominated than the works I listed, now's your chance to tell me about it.
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Wouldn't it be better to blind yourself to the gender and ethnic identity of the authors and simply vote according to your evaluation of the books?
Thought experiment: For the next year, all science fiction and fantasy short stories, novels, scripts, etc. are published under pseudonyms that give no clue to the identity of the author.
What would it imply if, after the 'best' works were identified, there were significantly more female and ethnic minority authors represented? What would it imply if nothing changed?
You should nominate Shaun Tan's The Arrival for Best Related Book (it is a wordless graphic novel and so isn't eligible in the fiction categories which require, you know, *words*).
Other than that I don't have a ballot yet either. Just to cross-reference, here's my post asking for suggestions.
In the context of Identity Politics, logrolling, editor sharing, magazine preference, he/she already won once so give somebody else a chance, agents, backscratching, and other distortions, the most accurate description of awards nomination and voting that I know was said in a snarky/realist interview in (I think) the Arts section of the New York Times (or was it The New Yorker?) circa a decade ago:
voting for the Tony Awards for best Broadway plays and actors of various subgenres:
First, if you're nominated, vote for yourself;
Second, vote against your enemies;
Third, vote for your friends;
Fourth, if you have votes left, vote your conscience.
For short fiction lists: I have just posted our Year's Best SF and Year's Best Fantasy lists. The way I use them when composing a Hugo ballot is in combination with the LOCUS recommended list so as to get the award categories right.
(There are, of course, other very fine works of short fiction not in our TOCs for reasons of length.)
Wouldn't it be better to blind yourself to the gender and ethnic identity of the authors and simply vote according to your evaluation of the books?
Sure.
You know what else would be great? A pony.
The packaging of books is a big part of how they get sold and bought, and the author's name and (apparent) identity are a big part of that package, all the way through. Anybody who claims otherwise is either stupid or trolling.
It is conceivable to me that books I might otherwise like are packaged in a way that makes them look like books I would not like. Lord knows, the reverse happens often enough. It is also conceivable that this happens systematically with books by women or minorities-- that books by women are, consciously or not, given a "chick-lit" sort of gloss in the process of design and marketing, regardless of the contents.
This might cause me to systematically miss good books written by women, for no good reason. In which case, I could correct that gap in my reading by asking people who have read those books for recommendations.
I don't personally feel that the gender distribution of the awards ballot is terribly important-- I was not particularly bothered by that aspect of last year's ballot, for example (the fact that most of the short story nominees were pretty bad, on the other hand...). I know that a large number of other people, many of whom I like and respect, feel that it is important, though, so in deference to their opinions, I am willing to make an additional effort to make sure that I'm not overlooking books by authors from under-represented groups.
I'm not going to nominate anything I haven't read or don't enjoy, but I am willing to do some extra reading to make sure that I haven't overlooked some book that I might enjoy enough to nominate.
You've got to read "The Electric Church" by Jeff Somers.
Great, sci-fi read. Touches on religion, politics, and economics in a classic dystopia where a commoner's life expectancy has dropped to thirty years or so. And then there's the Electric Church, which recruits new members by creating cyborgs, removing their recruit's brain and implanting it in a robot.
If that doesn't sway you, it's got a really freaky website.
http://www.the-electric-church.com/
I liked Ysabel and Bad Monkeys quite a bit.
I haven't read Ha'Penny, but if I were voting, I'd probably go out and read that so I could vote for it in good conscience.
Well, put me in the 'stupid' category, because I've loved too many books with absolutely horrible covers to pay much attention to the packaging wrapped around my stories.
Never been a 'special effects' person, I suppose.
David Hartwell supplied the quotations here, Your Humble Webmaster did the rest...
[on my web page, the ALL CAPS are internal hotlinks to enecylopedic description and listing of those subgenres]
[click on htlink to me web domain, then click on "Science Fiction"; or google "Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide", click to it, click on "IF YOU LIKE THIS, THEN YOU'LL LIKE THAT"
then scroll down slightly to
START HERE IF YOU ONLY REMEMBER WHAT THE BOOK COVER LOOKED LIKE
1. "Futuristic Mechanical Devices?" Try HARD SCIENCE FICTION, but it might be a trick to get you to read any kind of science fiction.
2. "Humans Against a Futuristic Setting, With or Without Machines?" Try SPACE OPERA, but it might be some related Adventure science fiction.
3. "Humans Carrying Swords or Other Anachronistic Weapons?" Try THERE AND BACK AGAIN or UNICORNS IN THE GARDEN, but it might be any kind of "fantasy or fantastic adventure against a cardboard or cliched SF background."
4. "Hypermuscled Males Carrying Big Swords and Adorned with Hyperzaftig Females, Both Scant-Clad Against a Threatening Monstrous background?" Almost certainly HEROIC FANTASY, also known as "Swords & Sorcery".
5. Skulls, Discolored Flesh, Sharp Teeth? Try HORROR: that old black magic, the really scary stuff.
6. Flying Saucers, Ray Guns, Tentacles, or Bug Eyed Monsters? Try ALIENS ON EARTH
7. Historical Figures in Strange Combinations, Such as Elvis With Hitler, or Civil War Soldiers Carrying Machine Guns? Try ALTERNATE WORLDS.
8. Cute Furry Animals, No Humans? Try BAMBI'S CHILDREN.
9. Exotic Flowery Landscape, Perhaps with Castles? Try BEYOND THE FIELDS WE KNOW.
10. Futuristic Buildings, Weirdly Dressed People Looking Scared or Furtive? Try CYBER PUNK, DYSTOPIA, or CITIES OF THE FUTURE.
11. Several Identical People, or Emphasis on Glowing Eyes? Try CLONES or EXTRA-SENSORY PERCEPTION.