Tag Archives: hugos 2013

Companion Piece, eds. L.M. Myles and Liz Barr

Second paragraph of third essay:

I'm going to look at Barbara and Ian not only as televisual companions to the Doctor, but as icons within the wider worlds of Doctor Who. Who were they, why were they key to the success of the series, and why do we still keep returning to them over 50 years after Ian was the first person to say "but it was just a police box"?

This is the sixth of the Geek Girl Chronicles, and the third of them to collect essays by women about Doctor Who (following on from Chicks Dig Time Lords and Chicks Unravel Time). Published earlier this year, it is eligible for next year's Hugo nominations as Best Related Work; the first in the series won that category in 2011, and Mad Norwegian Press has had three more nominations since (Chicks Unravel Time, Chicks Dig Gaming and Queers Dig Time Lords).

Obviously this is mainly going to appeal to Who fans with a decent knowledge of both Old and New Who, but I commend it to the rest of you anyway. I think the weakest essay here is better than the weakest ones in the two previous volumes; I think that there are a couple of really standout pieces (the para I quote above is from "Scheherazade and Galahad in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks", by Mags L. Halliday, which was one of my favourites); and I think that the best of them relate the ongoing story of Doctor Who to wider cultural and literary trends in a way that should be relevant to anyone with an interest in the genre.

It's quite likely to get one of my nomination slots next spring. But this is the one category where my shortlist is already overpopulated, and mostly with Whoviana at that. I'll leave you with the opening para of the final chapter, Amal El-Mohtar on "A Question of Emphasis: The Doctor as Companion":

Predicting the Hugos

As the dust settles from this year’s Hugos, I thought it worth revisiting my two posts from earlier this year assessing how the nominees had been rated in different ways online.

The LibraryThing/Goodreads statistics proved a good guide this time round, with Redshirts, the Best Novel winner, pretty far ahead of the field on both sites. It has to be said that LibraryThing/Goodreads prognostication is not always so successful. LibraryThing called 2312 for the Nebula this year, and Goodreads was not far off; but the process failed completely for the BSFA Award and the Clarke Award – both winners, Jack Glass and Dark Eden respectively, were fourth on the Goodreads ranking and fifth on LibraryThing. Basically this is a good way of identifying books that have built up a wide audience, but won’t take you much further.

My survey of blog posts got two winners in the fiction categories right and failed to spot the other two. The overwhelming consensus from bloggers for “Mono no Aware” for Best Short Story, and the strong consensus for The Emperor’s Soul for Best Novella, were reflected in the voters’ choices. But only one blogger of my original survey went for “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi” for Best Novella, and none at all for Redshirts, though each of them drew support from two (different) commenters to my post.

This is not unusual. In my 2011 survey, the blogging consensus converged correctly on “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” for Best Novella. But the strike rate was unimpressive in other categories, with majority support for ultimately unsuccessful nominees in the other short fiction shortlists, and not a single blogger in my survey voting for the eventual Best Novel winner, Blackout/All Clear. Basically, blog surveys are a pretty blunt tool, covering only the articulate voter who posts in forums which I can see. If there is a strong consensus around a particular nominee, it is often right. If there is no strong consensus, it is certain that most people are wrong. (Using “right” and “wrong” as shorthand for “correct [bzw. incorrect] reflections of the outcome of the actual vote” rather than any judgement of individual choices here.)

Despite the demonstrably limited value of these surveys, I expect I shall continue doing them; it is interesting to identify front-runners, especially when it turns out that they do not win.

Hugos in detail

Headlines:

  • Closest results of the night were for Best Related Work, the final margin for the Writing Excuses podcast being only 3 votes over The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy, after a tie-break on the penultimate count between the Cambridge Companion and Chicks Unravel Time. Second place was also decided by a mere five votes (Chicks Unravel Time this time ahead of the Cambridge Companion.)
  • The Unwritten Vol 6 missed nomination for Best Graphic Story by five votes; 15 people nominated The Unwritten without specifying whether they were nominating Vol 5 or Vol 6.
  • "The Waves" by Ken Liu (Novelette), The Writer and the Critic (Fancast), Abigail Nussbaum (Fan Writer) and Taral Wayne (Fan Artist) all missed nomination by one vote.
  • If the threshold for nominations had been 4% instead of 5%, there would have been eight nominees for Best Short Story rather than three.
  • Tansy Rayner Roberts won Best Fan Writer despite narrowly scraping into the fifth place in nominations. (Well done Tansy!) Mark Oshiro had more nominations for Best Fan Writer than the next two nominees combined, but still came only fourth in the actual award voting.
  • SF Signal crushed all opposition in the Best Fanzine category.
  • “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal got enough votes to qualify for nomination for Best Novelette, but was ruled ineligible due to being an audiobook.

Full results here.

lots of details

2013 Hugo Awards

Best Novel: Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi (Tor)

Best Novella: The Emperor’s Soul, Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)

Best Novelette: “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”, Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)

Best Short Story: “Mono no Aware”, Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)

Best Related Work: Writing Excuses Season Seven, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler and Jordan Sanderson

Best Graphic Story: Saga, Volume One, written by Brian K. Vaughn, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: The Avengers, Screenplay & Directed by Joss Whedon (Marvel Studios, Disney, Paramount)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Game of Thrones: Blackwater, Written by George R.R. Martin, Directed by Neil Marshall. Created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (HBO)

Best Editor, Short Form: Stanley Schmidt

Best Editor, Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Best Professional Artist: John Picacio

Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Jason Heller, Sean Wallace and Kate Baker

Best Fanzine: SF Signal, edited by John DeNardo, JP Frantz, and Patrick Hester

Best Fancast: SF Squeecast, Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Lynne M. Thomas, Catherynne M. Valente (Presenters) and David McHone-Chase (Technical Producer)

Best Fan Writer: Tansy Rayner Roberts

Best Fan Artist: Galen Dara

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Mur Lafferty

Special Committee Award: Stanley Schmidt

Forrest J. Ackerman Big Heart Award: Tom Veal

More later.

Other people’s Hugo votes

It’s much more difficult to find online discussion of the Hugo nominees now than it was ten years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening – I’m sure it is. But I suspect that the gardens of the internet are regaining their walls, which is a bit sad. Even two years ago (admittedly two days before the voting deadline, rather than ten) I found a lot more to work on.

Anyway, there are a few brave souls who have posted their likely votes on the fiction categories in places where I was able to find them. There were a number of others who had listed the nominees but didn’t give me a clear enough idea of their rankings to include below; please shout if you feel unjustly excluded. If I am able, I may post an update as the voting deadline nears.

In two categories there is a pretty clear front-runner, and in the other two the votes seem more dispersed. This, of course, doesn’t represent anything even approximating to an opinion poll: it is very far from a random sample, and I can entirely believe that there are fans of particular authors who will vote for their works but don’t feel the need to blog about it, or even necessarily to read the competition. But it’s interesting to read the analysis of people who have read the same stories and taken very different things from them.

Best Novel: 2312 weak favourite, Redshirts least preferred

2012 Hugos: Best Professional Artist

The deadline is drawing nearer, and it’s time to quickly look through the Hugo nominees in a couple of the other categories. I was struck by how many of the Best Professional Artist pictures were sketches just of sultry individuals looking sultry; then the question is, how much circumstantial detail can be fitted in to make this image more memorable than that? It is very much a matter of individual taste and mood. I feel pretty sure of my first and fifth rankings, but the middle three placings are much more difficult because I found them so similar to each other.

my vote

June Books 11) Saga, vol. 1, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Last of the Hugo nominees for Best Graphic Story (well, the last that I will read; I will skip Schlock Mercenary as I did last year).

The only other Vaughan I have read was the last volume of Y: The Last Man, similarly nominated four years ago, and I was underwhelmed by it. I like this a little more. Fiona Staples' art is fantastic – she has a great way of bringing our the characters (memorable characters here include a spiderwoman who is clearly related to the Queen of the Racnoss, and a giant lynx which only speaks when others lie) and also does superb set-piece big picture scenes – this is her only listed work on LibraryThing, hopefully the first of many.

I'm much more dubious about Vaughan's story; there is a very dodgy episode set in a space brothel; and various bits of the setup don't make much sense. I wonder whose choice it was for our heroine to have wee fairy wings, and our hero manly horns? Edited to add: Ian points out in comments that she is obviously an angel, and he a demon, which means we needn’t waste much time worrying about originality.

Not one I'll be adding to my regular purchase list, but glad to have read it this year.

June Books 9) Blackbirds, by Chuck Wendig

“The first rule,” Miriam says, “is that I only see what I see when skin touches skin. If I touch your elbow and you’re wearing a shirt, then nothing. If I wear gloves – and I used to, because I didn’t want to bear witness to all this craziness – then it prevents the vision from happening.”

Another from this year’s Hugo Voter Pack – and the last of the novels by Campbell nominees – this is actually fairly far into dark fantasy, a novel about Miriam Black who can see when people she touches are going to die. It has a strong start, grim and very violent; I felt it didn’t quite deliver on the premise at the end, but it is a very good ride.

(Now to read the short stories submitted by Cho and Lafferty.)

June Books 6) Clockworks (Locke & Key Vol 4), by Joe Hill

I enjoyed this volume of Joe Hill’s series about a group of teenagers exploring the mysterious Keyhouse in Lovecraft, Massachusetts, more than I had the previous one. In particular, the first of the six issues collected here, a flashback to the revolutionary era from the present day, I found very effective. But it is rather difficult to appreciate the full scope of the story starting more than halfway through, and I’m not sufficiently swept away by it to want to get the earlier volumes to catch up.

June Books 4) The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn

Fantasy is not so much a mansion as a row of terraced houses, such as the one that entranced us in C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew with its connecting attics, each with a door that leads into another world.

One of this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Related Work, this is an excellent set of essays on various aspects of the fantasy literature, with a very strong historical introduction (apart from a bizarre chapter on children’s fantasy), a middle section on various literary approaches to the genre, and a concluding section on various subgenres or “clusters”, with a much better chapter on children’s fantasy. When I read books like this I want i) a better understanding of books I have already read and ii) suggestions of books I might read in the future which may appeal to me, and I was fully satisfied on both points. In particular I note that many chapters referenced Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, which I must now look out for. (Other individuals with more than ten references in the index: King Arthur, Jorge Luis Borges, John Clute, Sigmund Freud, Neil Gaiman, Alan Garner, Elizabeth Hand, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ursula K. Le Guin, C.S. Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, George MacDonald, Farah Mendlesohn, China Miéville, Edgar Allan Poe, Philip Pullman, and – way in the lead – J.R.R. Tolkien.) Strongly recommended.

May Books 21) Three Parts Dead, by Max Gladstone

When the Hidden Schools threw Tara Abernathy out, she fell a thousand feet through wisps of cloud and woke to find herself alive, broken, and bleeding, beside the Crack in the World.

One of the novels included in the Hugo Voter Pack to represent the author’s œuvre (so far) for the Campbell Award. It’s a decent enough fantasy novel with some vivid steampunk moments; I felt it comparable to Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, which is a Hugo nominee in its own right, in that the setting is more imaginative but the writing not quite as passionate.

2013 Hugos: Best Novelette

Now that the Hugo Voter Pack is out, I’m working through the various folders and files; in response to one query, all the fiction (as far as I’ve checked) is available in .mobi and .epub formats as well as PDF. I’ve been reading them on iPhone/iPad in Kindle format (ie .mobi).

I liked this list more than the novels but less than the novellas. There was one that I felt definitely should not win, and my top vote is not very far ahead of my fourth.

and my votes are:

May Books 16) Grandville: Bête Noire, by Bryan Talbot

Short listed for this year’s Hugos, this is another in Talbot’s alternate history of Grandville, where most people are anthropomorphised animals and England is only now recovering from two hundred years of French rule after defeat at Waterloo. As well as taking us to the dark heart of political conspiracy, with overtones of Tintin (and also, frankly, Dangermouse), Talbot reflects art history too in his distorted gaze; the character here illustrated is one Jackson Pollo, and he refers in an afterword to the CIA’s funding of Abstract Expressionism. It’s a witty, absurd and also rather bleak story. I will find it tough to choose between this and Saucer Country for the Hugo.

May Books 12) “I have an Idea for a Book …”: The Bibliography of Martin H. Greenberg

The Hugo Voter Pack is out! So I have merrily downloaded all the nominees I hadn’t already read (and a few that I had), and started with this from the Best Related Work category.

Unfortunately it’s not very interesting.

Dr. Martin H. Greenberg (1941-2011) was the most prolific anthologist and book packager in the world. During his nearly 40-year career in publishing, he created 1,310 anthologies (including 199 single author collections) and more than 950 novels, along with 228 nonfiction books, for a total of almost 2,500 published works. During this time, he commissioned more than 8,350 original short stories and reprinted more than 13,300 short stories (including 807 novels).

This is a list of all of the books he edited, including ebooks, and it will be useful to people who find this sort of thing useful. The authorship attribution is a bit puzzling; there is a short introduction by John Helfers, but no indication that he assembled the rest of the material (indeed he is explicitly given copyright only for the introduction); the very short biographical sketch from which I quote above is listed in the contents page as “Commentary by Martin H. Greenberg” but clearly isn’t, as it refers to him in the past tense and is cast in the first person plural, without ever saying who “we” are. I read the three pages of introductory material, but it would be an exaggeration to say that I even skimmed the rest.

2013 Hugos: Best Novel

This year’s Hugo nominations seem to have produced more than the usual grumbling (I am away from base, so won’t link to any of it, and if you are interested you have probably seen it). I admit that I too found the Best Novel shortlist a bit uninspiring. I don’t want to overstate this; I am used to there being a couple of entries on it that leave me cold, and this year I found points of redemption even in my least favourite nominee. Conversely, however, I do normally find that there is at least one nominee that does catch my enthusiasm and which I can then cheer for. That did not really happen this year. As ever, I found the BSFA list more to my taste, which I guess is not so very surprising, in that I have more in common with more of the selectorate.

Anyway, my ranking in this category is:

5) Redshirts, by John Scalzi – a two-joke book, executed in Scalzi’s usual style, which a lot of people clearly like more than I do.

4) Blackout, by “Mira Grant” – more running around to avoid zombies, with characters unsuccessfully seeking closure.

3) 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson – surprisingly tedious romp round the Solar System, wise people from off-Earth kindly decide to fix the planet.

2) Throne Of The Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed – sword and sorcery in richly imagined Arabian-style culture, not very surprising plot and characters.

1) Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold – fun, and nearly as good as some of the stuff she wrote twenty years ago.

See also: Best Novella | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

May Books 2) Redshirts: a novel with three codas, by John Scalzi

“…the most rational explanation for what does go on in this ship is that a television show intrudes on our reality and warps it. But that’s not the worst thing about it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Finn said. “If that’s not the worst thing, what is?”
“That as far as I can tell,” Jenkins said, “it’s not actually a very good show.”

This is by some way the most widely owned of this year’s Hugo nominees, and it ticks a lot of fannish boxes so will probably win. I myself will put it last. This is basically a two-joke book, and the punch line to the second joke (above) is delivered less than a third of the way through; all the characters sound the same; and we don’t ever get an Explanation for what is going on. Having said that, the third of the three codas, a time-travel parallel worlds love story, is far superior to the rest and I would have given it a much higher ranking if it were nominated on its own in some other category.

2013 Hugos: Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

5) Fringe: Letters of Transit

As with last year, I had actually seen four of the five nominees on (or very shortly after) first broadcast, which left me with only Fringe to catch up with. It’s not my show, and there were obviously lots of payoffs for narrative lines of which I was utterly unaware, but there was plenty of interesting stuff going on and one or two good lines, certainly enough to justify putting it above “No Award”.

4) Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks

It gets really difficult after that. I loved all four of the other nominees and one gets into really spurious grounds for ranking one below another. My spurious reason for putting Asylum of the Daleks below the other three is that I didn’t think it handled the Rory/Amy relationship well.

3) Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan

Now it gets even more difficult. I loved The Angels Take Manhattan too, but my spurious reason for putting it below the other two is that the payoff for Amy and Rory’s departure was a bit disappointing; they could easily enough travel away from New York to see the Doctor again.

2) Game of Thrones: Blackwater

Only one episode from the second series of GoT got nominated this year, but this was clearly the best set piece: an excellent chapter from the book, steered to the screen by GRRM himself. I felt the ending was fumbled, but otherwise really enjoyed it. I would not be at all surprised to see this win in San Antonio.

1) Doctor Who: The Snowmen

But my vote will go to The Snowmen, which ticked many of my fannish boxes, and has set up the mystery of Clara which we are still waiting to see resolved. I don’t think one should be rude even to Sontarans, but otherwise I fully approved. In any case, I will cheer if any of my top four wins, and shrug in bemusement if the voters opt for Fringe.

See also: Best Novella
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