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How I Would Vote Now: 1992 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

Bone Dance by Emma Bull

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

The Summer Queen by Joan D. Vinge

The Actual Results

  1. Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
  2. Bone Dance by Emma Bull
  3. All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
  4. The Summer Queen by Joan D. Vinge
  5. Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
  6. Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
  2. Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

Explanation

I have a confession to make. That girl from the XKCD comic who loves Xenocide more than the first two books in the Ender’s Game series? …yeah, that’s totally me. Ender’s Game is a science fiction classic, and one of the best books to ever win a Hugo Award (second only to Dan Simmon’s Hyperion, in my opinion), and Speaker for the Dead is a worthy sequel that is superior in many ways to the first book. But Xenocide totally blew me away when I read it back in college. The superintelligent AI Jane, who lives in the ansible connections between planets, is one of my favorite sci fi characters of all time. Also, the concept of the philotic web is one of the most fascinating and exciting sci fi elements I’ve ever wrapped my head around. I also thought it was really fascinating how the post-Earth humans have developed a heirarchy of alienation, and how that influences the ethical decision of whether to make peace or make war with the aliens they encounter.

In short, there was lots of really high concept stuff in Xenocide that blew my mind in just the right way. Also, the story had me hooked from the first page, and the characters are some of the best I’ve ever read. Orson Scott Card has a lot of strengths, but his greatest strength is in writing characters, and he was definitely on his A game with this book. So yeah, go ahead and slam the door in my face—Xenocide is my favorite book in the Ender’s Game series.

Barrayar is classic Bujold, and one of the best books in her Vorkosigan saga. Even though it doesn’t feature Miles directly, Cordelia is such a badass that she more than makes up for his not-quite absence (after all, she is pregnant with Miles while all the action goes down). The political intrigue is everything you’d expect from a good Vorkosigan book, and there’s no shortage of action or things blowing up. But the thing that makes it most satisfying is how everything ties into the later books—in fact, I would go so far as to say that Barrayar is the best place to start with the Vorkosigan Saga, followed by The Warrior’s Apprentice, and then maybe Shards of Honor just to get a little more background before going on with the rest of the series. I definitely wish I’d started with Barrayar. And if you can, listen to the audiobooks, because Grover Gardner’s narration of them is quite excellent.

So those were the books from this year’s ballot that I enjoyed. As for the others, I DNFed them all, though I didn’t even pick up The Summer Queen because I had already DNFed the first book in the series, for reasons that I’ve since forgotten. I’ll try to refresh my memory when I cover The Snow Queen in How I Would Vote Now: 1981 Hugo Awards (Best Novel). Maybe it’s one I should try to pick up again.

I also didn’t pick up All the Weyrs of Pern, because I DNFed that series with the second book. I read the first Dragonriders of Pern book way back in college, and thought it was okay, but it didn’t really hook me enough to read the rest of the series. Last year, I tried to pick up the second book, and was totally blown away by how overpowered the dragons are. Seriously—they can teleport anywhere instantaneously through space and time? How can anything possibly threaten them? Then the book started turning into a soap opera between the dragonriders, and I mentally checked out.

(As a side note, I would say that the Dragonriders of Pern books are the kind of grim-bright books that tend to do well in a second turning, and not a fourth turning. Even though the characters are literally saving the world as part of their job description, they’re so OP that the world is never really in any danger of falling, so the books are a lot more slice-of-life and cozy escapist fantasies. Check out my blog post on the generational cycles of fantasy and science fiction for a more in-depth discussion of this sort of thing.)

Stations of the Tide never really hooked me, and had some weird sexual content that turned me off pretty fast, if I remember correctly. Overall, it felt like the sort of book that was written primarily for the author, and not for any actual reader—kind of like how a movie studio will sometimes let a director make a pet project that no one but the director really likes, just so they can get them to make the blockbusters that everyone goes to see.

As for Bone Dance, it seemed like an interesting post-apocalyptic novel, but the main character was so androgenous that I just had no desire to read past the second chapter. I know this wasn’t typical of books written in the 90s, but these days it’s become so trite to write women who think, act, and look like men that I really have no desire to read that sort of thing. I’d much rather read about manly men and womanly women. Also, I don’t really want to read about lesbians in Minnesota. There’s a reason why Minnesota is now the California of the midwest.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I Would Vote Now: 1974 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The People of the Wind by Poul Anderson

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold

Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

Protector by Larry Niven

The Actual Results

  1. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
  2. Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
  3. Protector by Larry Niven
  • The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold
  • The People of the Wind by Poul Anderson

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Protector by Larry Niven
  2. No Award
  3. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
  4. The People of the Wind by Poul Anderson

Explanation

I really enjoyed Protector. It was a great sci-fi space opera novel, with interesting characters, fun worldbuilding, an intriguing premise, a deep sense of wonder, lots of suspense, and some really unexpected twists and turns. It was also a very good hard SF novel, where the rigorous scientific accuracy actually drove the story and made it even stronger. That can be a very difficult thing to pull off, since in the hands of an unskilled author, the harder the science fiction elements become, the more dry and cerebral the story tends to become as well, but Larry Niven is a very skilled author and he pulled it off quite well in this one. In particular, the long-distance space battle that covered the last hundred pages or so had me thrilled right through to the end.

In contrast, Rendezvous with Rama was the kind of hard SF that tends to bore me. There was nothing wrong or objectionable about the story, but it was kind of slow, and didn’t build up very much suspense, aside from the central premise, which was basically “ooh, an abandoned alien starship—and we get to go inside!” I should probably try to read it again, though, because Arthur C. Clarke is definitely not an unskilled author, and Rama is one of the classics.

Poul Anderson, though… I don’t know what it is, but reading his books is like trying to walk through a brick wall. The parts that I have the most questions about, he doesn’t explain at all, and the aspects of his stories that I care about the last (particularly the worldbuilding elements) he explains in soporific detail. His characters all feel like wooden marionettes, and whenever they move, they seem off or contorted in some way, doing and saying things in ways that I would least expect.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m beginning to think that Poul Anderson just isn’t a very good writer, and his success was mostly due to the good fortune he had to be writing in a time when any book with a rocketship on the cover was guaranteed to be snapped up by hungry science fiction fans. I’ll try a couple more times to read him, but at this point I’m just about ready to give up on this author.

I did not even try to read Time Enough for Love. I’ve been burned enough by Heinlein to know that anything of his that 1) is longer than his juveniles, or 2) has a half-naked (or in this case, fully naked) woman on the cover is guaranteed to turn me off. Time Enough for Love fails both of those counts, so it got a hard skip.

I know that a lot of people love Heinlein, especially the kind of science fiction reader who otherwise aligns with my own reading tastes. But my own experience with Heinlein is all over the map: some of his books, like Farnham’s Freehold and Citizen of the Galaxy, I absolutely loved, and even count as major influences on my own writing. Others, however, like Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I just couldn’t stand at all. With some, like Double Star, I was glued to the page all the way through, while others, like Have Space Suit, Will Travel, never really hooked me at all (if I weren’t listening to that one on audio, I don’t think I ever would have finished it). So at this point, I’ve more or less decided to limit my reading of Heinlein to his juveniles, unless it comes with a strong recommendation.

Which brings me to The Man Who Folded Himself, which is one of the most disgusting Hugo-nominated books I have ever DNFed, and the main reason why I put No Award on the ballot for this year. A better title would be The Man Who Fucked Himself, since that is both more memorable and more accurate to the story. It starts out as a delightful little time travel novel, but soon turns into a homo- / mono-erotic sexual fantasy. I quit just before the money shot, but I am 100% convinced that Gerrold is a pederast, if not an outright pedophile. Disgusting!

In fact, I had such a horrible experience with The Man Who F***ed Himself that I have started a ChatGPT thread specifically for the purpose of screening these Hugo-nominated books for woke and explicit content. If ChatGPT gives me a synopsis that doesn’t pass my smell test, I’m going to pre-emptively skip it, since I don’t want to expose myself to anything like The Man Who F***ed Himself again. Any book that I skip in this way will get ranked below No Award, and I’ll include ChatGPT’s synopsis in the review.

On the plus side, that probably means I’ll get through this How I Would Vote Now blog series a lot faster.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

Two more fascinating pro-natalist podcast episodes

Ward Radio is a Latter-day Saint podcast that tackles all aspects of Mormonism, from rebutting anti-Mormon arguments and debating various models of Book of Mormon geography to running deep dives on ancient apocryphal texts and fringe scientific theories. They also tackle cultural issues too, and in these two podcasts, they specifically look at the depopulation crisis from a Latter-day Saint point of view. The first one is all the main co-hosts of the podcast, and the second one is the main host’s wife and a bunch of her friends / guests from other LDS podcasts.

If current demographic trends continue, then a hundred years from now, the world population will be under 1 billion, and about 200-250 million of them will be members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another 50-100 million will be Amish, and maybe another 50-100 million will be Jewish. The Latter-day Saints will absolutely love the Jews and the Amish, to the point of annoying everyone else around them, and the Jews and the Amish will grudgingly tolerate the Latter-day Saints.

How I Would Vote Now: 1989 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold

Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card

Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

The Actual Results

  1. Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh
  2. Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card
  3. Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
  4. Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling
  5. Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

How I Would Have Voted

(Abstain)

Explanation

Another year where the books were fine, but not to my personal liking (or else they were, but… we’ll get to that). I found no reason why I should give “no award” a vote over any of these books, but I DNFed most of them, though I could be persuaded to try some of them again. But overall, there was nothing in this year’s ballot that really blew me away (except… we’ll get to that shortly).

First, I didn’t read Mona Lisa Overdrive because it was the third book in a trilogy, and I DNFed the series with the second book. The first book, Neuromancer, I read back in college, and while I enjoyed it at the time, even back then I felt that it was right on the edge of being too explicit. Today, I would certainly find it too explicit—in fact, that’s why I DNFed the second book. These days, I just really don’t want to read a book with lots of sex, drugs, and pointless violence. Just not interested in any of that.

Islands in the Net is another gritty cyberpunk novel, but I actually didn’t find it too explicit at all. Perhaps that’s because the two main characters were married and had a family. In fact, compared to Neuromancer, or even The Matrix, it didn’t feel all that gritty at all to me. But reading it in the 2020s, all of the future predictions just made me laugh, especially the idea that internet piracy would allow the quasi-failed states of South and Latin America to get super, super rich, by hacking into the banking networks and siphoning off everyone’s money. Also, while I can understand (and even, to a degree, agree with) the idea that corporations would exercise more power over people’s lives than their own governments, I don’t think Sterling portrayed it in a realistic way. He should have studied East Asian history and society, particularly the Yakuza, to see what that would really look like.

Ultimately, though, the story just slowed down so much that I decided to skip to the end, and I’m glad I did, because the married couple broke up for the stupidest reason in the world, and the big bad turned out to be a bunch of terrorists stealing a nuclear submarine and threatening to launch their nukes and end the world… which is honestly such a boomer trope that it made me role my eyes. Don’t get me wrong—I’m very sanguine about the threat of nuclear war, especially with what’s going on in Ukraine right now (hopefully things haven’t gone nuclear by the time this post goes live), but it’s a uniquely boomer trope to think that history will end when the first nuke of the war goes off, and that all stories have to have clear good guys and bad guys (or at least clear bad guys) and that the whole story can be reduced to “stop that nuke!”

Anyways, I don’t know if that mini-rant makes any sense, but the point is that Islands in the Net didn’t impress me. It wasn’t terrible, but it didn’t hold my interest or blow me away.

I DNFed Cyteen because I got bored around the second or third chapter, though I probably could be persuaded to try it again. I’ve enjoyed many of Cherryh’s other Alliance-Union books, especially Merchanter’s Luck and Voyager in Night, but it’s been years since I read any of them. Just couldn’t get into this one.

Of all the books from this year, Falling Free is the one that I should probably try again. I forget why I DNFed it, which probably means that I just lost interest, or didn’t connect with any of the characters. Also, this was around the time that I was becoming disillusioned with Lois McMaster Bujold, after my wife DNFed Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen and told me all about that one. I used to really love all of Bujold’s novels, and still do enjoy the early Vorkosigan books. But this one, while technically in the same universe, isn’t really a Vorkosigan novel, which is probably a big reason why I just lost interest. But I could be persuaded to try it again.

Which brings us to Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card…

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s definitely a worthy sequel to Seventh Son, and while it had some minor issues, especially toward the end, it definitely ranks up there with Card’s best.

However… this is book two of a seven book series, where the first book came out in 1987, nearly forty years ago… and the seventh book hasn’t even been written yet! In fact, it’s been twenty-one years since book six came out—in fact, more time has passed since the sixth book came out than between the publication of the first book and the publication of the sixth!

What the heck, Card? It’s bad enough that you probably won’t ever finish your Women of Genesis series—will you never finish your flagship fantasy series either? At this point, you’re worse than George R.R. Martin, since at least Martin has only dropped the ball on one fantasy series, not two.

For that reason, I refuse to read any more Alvin Maker books until the last book has finally come out. Also, if the 1989 Hugo Awards were held today and I got to vote on them, I would not vote for Red Prophet, even though it’s a fantastic book. I just can’t justify voting for an author who lets multiple decades go by without doing the damn work to finish what he’s started.

(And yes, I know I have a couple of unfinished trilogies of my own. I’m working on it. Captive of the Falconstar and Lord of the Falconstar should come out next year, and I will probably start work on The Sword Bearer and Return of the Starborn Son in just a few months. In my defense, though, I haven’t let more than a decade pass since I published the last book in any of those series.)

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I Would Vote Now: 2003 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Kiln People by David Brin

The Scar by China Mieville

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer

Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

The Actual Results

  1. Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
  2. Kiln People by David Brin
  3. Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
  4. The Scar by China Mieville
  5. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

How I Would Have Voted

(Abstain)

Explanation

None of these books were so bad/woke that I felt No Award merited a vote for this year. In fact, if my memory serves me, few of these books were woke at all (or else they were just a lot better at hiding it. Whatever.) But at the same time, I didn’t enjoy any of them enough to feel that I could affirmatively vote for any of them. In fact, I ended up DNFing all of them, for various reasons (that’s right, China Mike—I didn’t feel it was necessary to finish any of these books to know how I would have voted).

Kiln People and The Years of Rice and Salt were both books that I didn’t bother to pick up, because I’ve read enough from each author to know that I don’t care to read anything they write. Way back in high school, I read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, but I never felt compelled to finish the rest of the series, and DNFed the second book when I picked it up years later, as well as every other Hugo-winning book he’s written. With David Brin, I started his first Uplift Trilogy book but DNFed it about a hundred pages in, and decided to DNF him as an author after throwing The Postman across the room.

For both of these authors, my reason for DNFing them has less to do with their politics (though I’m sure we have irreconcilable differences there) as it does with their dogmatic, almost fanatical adherence to materialism: the view that everything in the universe is reducible to physical, material phenomena, and that if something cannot be measured it might as well not exist. You can see this in the dismissive way that they treat religion in all of their books, especially Christianity—as if faith, in any form, is a delusion that ought to be beneath all clear-thinking and enlightened people. From long experience, I’ve learned that authors with this particular worldview almost never write anything that I feel is worth reading. Hence, I didn’t feel it was necessary to read either of their books.

The Scar is book two of China Mieville’s New Crobuzon series, and since I DNFed the first book, I didn’t read the rest of the series. I’ll explain my reasons more when I write up my post for how I would vote now in the 2002 Hugo Awards, but it basically comes down to the sex scene in the first chapter, which was too graphic for my tastes. Call me a prude, but I prefer to avoid graphic sex scenes. I suppose I could be persuaded to try the series again, though, on a strong enough recommendation.

I forget why I DNFed Hominids. I read it back in 2002, when I made—and kept—my resolution to read (or DNF) all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels. I think it came down to getting bored with the story, or not really liking any of the characters. I could probably be persuaded to try it again, though I doubt the results would be different a second time around.

Lastly, Bones of the Earth was my biggest disappointment from the books on the ballot this year. I had previously DNFed Swanwick’s Station of the Tide, which struck me as the sort of thing an author writes when they don’t really care what readers think of it and they just want to wallow in their own self-indulgent fantasies. Also, there was a lot of weird sex stuff that I found off-putting.

But Bones of the Earth started out really well. It’s basically about a bunch of time traveling paleontologists, and the bureaucracy built around the time travel machinery to keep all the timelines from falling into contradiction and paradox. Think Jurassic Park meets The Adjustment Bureau. The first half of the book was really well done, to the point where I started wondering why I’d never heard of this book before, or why it hadn’t gotten more commercial traction.

Then I found out why.

The inciting incident happens when a creationist terrorist sends a bomb out to a group of paleontoligists somewhen in the Cretaceous period, killing one of them, destroying their time beacon, and stranding them in time. I wasn’t actually bothered at all by the creationists being the bad guys, since 1) several of the paleontologists were various stripes of Christian, and 2) I can totally believe that radical fundamentalist creationists would resort to sabotage, or even terrorism, to derail the whole project. But about midway through the book, after the band of marooned time travelers go through some pretty hefty forming and storming, as they just start to enter the norming phase, they all decide, at the same time and on a total whim, to throw off their clothes and have a group orgy together.

I can believe that there are people in this world who would do that sort of thing. I can even believe that a group of randomly selected people might consist entirely of this sort of person. I just don’t want anything to do with them. I’ve been in a fair amount of group situations, and the worst ones I’ve ever had to endure were the ones where everyone either wanted to all get drunk together, or all get sexy together (thankfully, none of them turned into an actual orgy like the one in this book).

But frankly, the impression I got while reading it was that the author was a little too sex-deprived (if not an outright pervert) and indulged in that scene purely as an act of wish fulfilment. Any editor worth her salt would have told Swanwick to remove or totally rework that scene, so the fact that it’s still in the book probably means that he’s too bull-headed for his own good—which is a shame, because the book probably would have sold better if he’d cut that scene out. The orgy scene added very little and certainly alienated more readers than it brought in.

One of the things I’m trying to be more careful about, as a writer, is writing books for other people, not just myself. I was a lot more self-indulgent in my early career, which is probably a major factor in why many of my older books haven’t gained much traction outside of a small readership. While it’s important not to try to write for everybody, authors who write only for themselves are too often inaccessible to anybody.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

Interesting interview about the depopulation crisis

I listen to a lot of long-form podcasts these days, usually while I’m doing work that doesn’t require my full attention. So I figure it would be good to start posting links to the more interesting ones.

Chris Williamson is a great interviewer, and he has a knack for finding really interesting guests. He particularly likes to talk about modern dating and the “man-o-sphere,” which I find only somewhat interesting, and the depopulation crisis, which I find extremely interesting.

The ongoing collapse of birth rates (some places in the world have been under replacement for multiple generations now, and in just a couple of decades, almost every country in the world—including most African countries—will be under replacement if current trends continue) is, in my opinion, the greatest global crisis of our time—much, much larger than climate change, the threat of which has been greatly exaggerated by the global elites in order to push us into a techno-feudal society with them as the royalty and the rest of us as debt-serfs. But the depopulation crisis is a true existential crisis for humanity, and it’s also the exact inverse of the Malthusian population-bomb disaster that popular culture has taught us to fear.

(Also, as a side note, I find it fascinating to think that if current demographic trends continue, a hundred years from now the global population will be under 1 billion, and somewhere around 200 million of those people will be members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another 50 million will likely be Jews, since they are one of the other few demographic groups with an over-replacement fertility rate. The latter-day saints will absolutely love the Jews, and the Jews will tolerate the latter-day saints.)

Anyway, this is the latest interview that Chris Williamson did on the topic, with a Scandinavian researcher that shares some interesting data from his most recent studies. Worth giving a listen, if you’re as interested in this topic as I am.

Well, this car ad is a breath of fresh air

Especially after that crappy Jaguar ad/rebrand:

My family drove an old 80s Volvo station wagon for years, growing up. My Dad said he chose Volvo because it’s a safer car. Maybe it’s worth looking into that brand for our next vehicle.

Swamped but Still Here

I’m pretty swamped with stuff right now, especially all the publishing tasks that I need to catch up on (with the way we’ve set up our new routine, it really only makes sense to spend one day out of the week working on publishing tasks, rather than an hour or half-hour each day. So if I miss a day, or don’t finish all of the week’s work on that day, things tend to spiral pretty quickly). But things are going pretty well overall: I’m making slow but steady progress on writing, and the wife and kids are doing pretty well. Everyone’s warm, fed, (mostly) happy, and still alive.

For Thanksgiving, we’re going up to Bear Lake with my wife’s family, since my brother-in-law has a timeshare there, and it’s closer to Couer D’Alene so it’ll be easier for the family up there to come down. But Bear Lake gets pretty cold this time of year, so we’ll have to pack warm. Also, with the recent developments in Russia and Ukraine, it occurs to me that Bear Lake might be one of the best places in the lower 48 to ride out an initial nuclear strike (though definitely not the best place to ride out a nuclear winter). Hopefully we don’t have to test that theory.

In any case, it should be fun to spend some time with the family, and to watch our kids spend some quality time playing with their cousins. Since my mother-in-law doesn’t want to do any cooking at the timeshare, she’s farmed out most of the work to everyone else, and had us bake a turkey so that she could collect the drippings for turkey gravey. Looks like white bean chili with leftover turkey is on the menu for the next couple of weeks!

My job is to make the cranberry sauce. I’ll be using my Mom’s recipe, which is super simple, and also super tasty: combine one pound of raw cranberries, one whole unpeeled orange, one whole apple, one cup of sugar, and one cup of pecans and blend until smooth. Chill before serving.