The Nominees
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
Frameshift by Robert J. Sawyer
The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick
City on Fire by Walter Jon Williams
The Actual Results
- Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
- City on Fire by Walter Jon Williams
- The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
- Frameshift by Robert J. Sawyer
- Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick
How I Would Have Voted
- The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
Explanation
I loved all the books of the Hyperion Cantos, and felt that the last book ended as strong as the first book started. One of the best science fiction series of all time. For that reason, The Rise of Endymion heartily earns my vote. It was a magnificent 700 pages and I thoroughly loved it.
I didn’t enjoy The Forever Peace nearly as much, and DNFed it after the first couple of chapters. It’s been several years, so I don’t remember exactly what pushed it over the line, but I do remember a weird scene where the main character’s consciousness was sexually merged with the other twenty people in his team, as in he was aware of having ten penises and ten vaginas, or something weird like that, and it really turned me off. Also, Haldeman writes with a very nihilistic edge, and that also must have put me off.
I started Metropolitan, the book for which City on Fire is the sequel, but I also DNFed it after the first couple of chapters. Lots of grim cyberpunk nihilism, and skimming ahead, the main character has an adulterous affair that’s played up as if it’s a reason for the reader to give her sympathy. I don’t really do that. So DNF that series.
The other two books I screened with ChatGPT and decided to skip. For Frameshift, the problem was explicit violence against young children. Now that I have young children of my own, I have zero tolerance for that sort of thing and will not read it. And with Jack Faust, there are also apparently several explicit sex scenes involving graphic depictions of lust and infedelity. Also, I’ve read enough Michael Swanwick to know that he has a tendency to inject his books with weird and creepy sex stuff. No thanks.
I’ve got another 49 books to read before I can finish this blog series and evaluate every year of the Hugo Award, sufficient to know how I would vote if every year of the awards was held today. Obviously, I’m not reading all of the books: ChatGPT is helping me a lot to screen out the worst of them, and I’m also very quick (perhaps a little too quick) to DNF a book when I don’t think it’s worthwhile. But I have found a few unexpected gems, and I hope to find a few more as I read the last 49 books.
Is there another ward that I should do instead? I kind of want to use Writers of the Future to find some new authors, though it can be tricky since many of the contest writers never write anything else—or else they go for years (sometimes decades) before producing their first novel. But the contest has produced a handful of avid career novelists like Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Dean Wesley Smith, so it’s worth checking those ones out.
