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2023 Hugo Awards
- mi_lk 3y agoLittle surprised that such a renowned sci-fi award is hosted on a plain WordPress site. A welcome surprise.
- Maken 3y agoThe site is quite good actually, with lots of information and a extensive archive.
- asicsp 3y agoGood to see Travis Baldree winning Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Legends & Lattes was one of my favorites reads last year - looking forward to the prequel next month.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoBarely recognize any of the books or authors there, especially the winners. I've listened to Travis Baldree narrate Cradle, so I'm probably gonna check out his Legends & Lattes book. It didn't win, but I read The Scholomance which is listed in the series section. If you're interested in unconventional magic systems then I'd recommend it. Nettle & Bone was the big winner. Reading the blurb doesn't immediately call out to me. Worth checking out?
- wiredfool 3y agoT Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon is very good, in a weird fantasy/horror/romance/reimagined fairy tale way. (Depending on the book. One of the romances features severed heads.) I haven’t read this one, but I’ve read basically all her other stuff apart from the horror, which I’ve noped out from. I’m not sure if this one is more reimagined fairy tale or horror, which is how I made it past release week without reading it.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoIt's a bit of both, but I'd say leans it has more of a Grimm fairy tale vibe
- selykg 3y agoLegends & Latte's is one of my favorite books of the past year. It falls into that Cozy Fantasy genre. It's very different than the Monk & Robot series but makes me feel a very similar way to those books. Highly recommend. There's a sequel coming out in November called Bookshops & Bonedust. I think it's technically a prequel. Travis Baldree did amazing with Cradle as well. Going to miss getting new books in that series.
- gertrunde 3y agoI've not read "Nettle & Bone" yet - but have read some of T Kingfishers other work, can be quite big on the 'unconventional magic systems' as well (e.g. "A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking").
- progne 3y agoThe Scholomance series by Naomi Novak is quite good, her best and I've liked all her books. Yes it's a Potter derivative, but doesn't feel derivative but inventive and de-disneyfied.
- krzyk 3y agoOh, thanks, I didn't notice here (scanned just the titles and winners). I liked her previous two non-series books (Uprooted and Spinning Silver).
- brookst 3y agoI loved her previous books but just couldn’t do Scholomance. I don’t mind the Harry Potter derivation, but she tripled down in the life is so unfair vibe that annoyed me in Potter. Still, glad to see her recognized, Spun Silver and Uprooted are amazing books.
- progne 3y agoNovik doesn't just copy the teen-angst-life-is-so-unfair vibe, but efficiently includes it in her world building. She justifies it. By the end of the series it's clear that the her universe is indeed impressively unfair ... which is core to her protagonists' motivation to do something about it and drives the plot.
- brookst 3y agoAgreed, but from my perspective as very very far removed from adolescence, I had to give up because I found it whiny and predictable. As a teenager I probably would have related more. God knows I was whiny and predictable enough.
- dkarl 3y agoEven as a teenager, I knew that "it turns out all your emotional angst is vindicated by objective reality!" was a bullshit fantasy, but even knowing that, I needed it to sometimes be the answer. The older I get, the more I'm able to revisit that stuff without cringing and appreciate that it was just an emotional outlet.
- slothtrop 3y agoIs it typical of Hugo Awards for fantasy to be so strongly represented, vs sci-fi?
- tromp 3y ago"The hugo award" sounds eerily similar to the Dutch town of "Heerhugowaard" where I grew up...
- karmakurtisaani 3y agoWell, thanks for sharing I suppose.
- greesil 3y agoIs there a dutch town that sounds like Worldcon or Dragoncon?
- tromp 3y agoYou can look for similarities on https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_Nederlandse_plaatsen https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_Nederlandse_plaatsen Workum seems closest to Worldcon, and Drogeham to Dragoncon.
- Dudester230602 3y ago[flagged]
- slothtrop 3y agoWhat does this even mean, "not written by women"?
- gred 3y agohttps://gizmodo.com/the-hugo-awards-were-always-political-now-theyre-only-1695721604 https://gizmodo.com/the-hugo-awards-were-always-political-no... https://www.npr.org/2015/08/26/434644645/how-the-sad-puppies-won-by-losing https://www.npr.org/2015/08/26/434644645/how-the-sad-puppies...
- slothtrop 3y ago2015 was almost a decade ago, and the word "feminism" doesn't even appear in those articles. Seems the salience was more about race/diversity.
- gred 3y agoI think that's the context, though. Going back as far as a decade ago, the Hugo Awards were leaning "inclusive". There were some reactionary campaigns. Regardless, the trend has continued. Not everybody is happy about it, and not everybody sees a Hugo Award as a reliable indicator of quality these days.
- brookst 3y agoOr like “where women are correctly shown to be subservient and secondary to men” or something? What a strange way to look at books.
- swayvil 3y agoAn absence of preaching X does not necessitate preaching Y. We can also do without any preaching at all. Scifi is large. That other stuff is small.
- lscdlscd 3y agoThe Children of Time series is fantastic! I'm glad that Adrian Tchaikovsky is getting more well deserved recognition.
- asplake 3y agoI enjoyed it too, but I enjoyed the Rivers of London series even more. Great audiobooks both
- jmartrican 3y agoOMG I didn't know there were two more books in the series. Audible is doing a bad job at recommending books. It does not recommend the next books in series I follow.
- cantaloupe 3y agoI haven’t read The Children of Time, but I would highly recommend Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture trilogy. It’s been my favorite series I’ve read in a few years.
- jnsaff2 3y agoI don't get the hype about Everything Everywhere All at Once .. quite a letdown. Nowhere close to Rick and Morty it had been compared to. Severance however was pretty good. Children of time - amazing.
- Orochikaku 3y agoPlease tell me your first paragraph was satirical, else please elaborate
- jnsaff2 3y agoNot satirical. I guess it was just not for me.
- asplake 3y agoIt was 1) fun, and 2) humane
- swayvil 3y agoRick and Morty was the rare quasar in a mess of warm gas. And I say "was" because it fell off a cliff after season 2. As for "everything everywhere all at once". Quite meh. Turned it off halfway.
- drmpeg 3y ago
- jmartrican 3y agoI didn't know the Hugo Awards has so many award. I naively though it was just best sci-fi book because I would see lists of Hugo award winners by year and see only one book per year and they were all sci-fi.
- pseudo0 3y agoShe-Hulk received a nomination, clear evidence that the Hugo Awards are now an anti-signal.
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoBest Dramatic Presentation categories are borderline meaningless. Hugos are literary awards, not TV or film awards. Voters don't take those categories seriously. 2023 voting details aren't available yet, but for 2022 it only took 26 nominations out of 1368 nominating ballots to make it onto the final ballot for that category.
- gertrunde 3y agoNice to see Nnedi Okorafor get an award, while I've not read the book that won the award, I've enjoyed other books they've written.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoI loved the first two books in the Nsibidi series, Akata Witch and Akata Warrior. I didn't even know this third book was out! Looking forward to reading it.
- KingMob 3y agoOkorafor hates the Harry Potter comparison, but I'll say it: The Akata series is like if HP had 10x wilder magic, was 100x better written, and was set in Nigeria.
- dcminter 3y ago"Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes" by Rob Wilkins really is excellent. If you enjoyed Pratchett's novels and are interested in his life then you will get a lot out of it. It's much better written than I expected of an authorized biography; not a hagiography at all, it showed his feet of clay as well as his halo. Some of it, of course, is very amusing. Be warned, however, that it covers Terry's deterioration with alzheimers' without pulling its punches much. There were a couple of points where I had to put the book down for a bit and take a break because it was too sad.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoThe Hugo Awards have really come to represent the views and tastes of a narrow clique. I don't know to what extent this was always the case -- my impression of the Awards in the 90s and 00s was that they strived for more objectivity -- but it's quite flagrant right now. And it's unfortunate, as they go HARD for very soft science fiction which reads a lot more like fantasy...
- alephxyz 3y agoVoting is open to all attendees of the World Scifi Convention and they usually get thousands of votes now. It's possible that you find the winners too "mainstream" but accusing them of being cliquey doesn't make sense.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoWorldCon is not representative of all readership. Its website even notes: "The Hugo voters are good at finding and nominating good works, and do talk among themselves, so word spreads." [1] They seem to do an awful lot of talking among themselves, I'll give them that. Besides, it doesn't take a whole lot of nominations to get something onto the ballot. An energetic and motivated clique can capture the whole thing. And surely it's apparent that they reward a certain type of work, and disregard others. For e.g., Analog Magazine -- which specializes in hard science fiction -- didn't pick up a single short story or novella nomination. [1] - https://www.thehugoawards.org/submitting-your-work/ https://www.thehugoawards.org/submitting-your-work/
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoTraditional print magazines like Analog are at a huge disadvantage in popularity contest awards like the Hugos because they are only available to subscribers. Hugo winners usually come from magazines that make their stories available for free online.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoA motivated clique attempted a takeover in the mid 2010s and the nominating rules were changed so it couldn’t happen again.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- lacker 3y agoI used to really love the Hugo and Nebula awards but over time they seem to be shifting away from the harder science fiction that I like the best, more in the fantasy direction. I miss the days of Hugo winners like Neuromancer, A Fire Upon the Deep, Green Mars, The Diamond Age, The Windup Girl, The Three-Body Problem. That might be just tracking what gets written nowadays rather than the opinions of the people giving out the awards, though. And I did really like Babel (which won the Nebula this year although I guess was not a finalist for the Hugo) and N K Jemisin's work (three Hugos in the past decade).
- dbsights 3y agoAgreed. When I was a kid, I would look for the award winners as a shortcut to find new books to read, but lately its been disappointment after disappointment. I don't feel like the winners reflect what I consider quality (e.g. I loved A Deepness in the Sky, Cryptonomicon, in addition to the books you've listed (minus Three Body Problem)). With the death of physical stores, I no longer have a way of discovering new science fiction. I wish there was an award or recommendation engine that could find these gems among all of the trash. Interestingly, I did find one book that was quite enjoyable, from a John Carmack tweet of all places, The Powers of the Earth.
- senectus1 3y agoIt didn't win a hugo, but Project Hail Mary was excellent.