Tag: Hugo awards

How I Would Vote Now: 1968 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson

Chthon by Piers Anthony

The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany

Thorns by Robert Silverberg

Lord of Light by Robert Silverberg

The Actual Results

  1. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
  2. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany
  3. Chthon by Piers Anthony
  • The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson
  • Thorns by Robert Silverberg

How I Would Have Voted

  1. No Award
  2. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

Explanation

I’m not a huge fan of New Wave science fiction, and by 1968, that was the hot new trend that was sweeping the genre. Of the five books nominated, I DNFed three and screened out the other two using AI. Here’s the breakdown:

I tried to read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, but just didn’t get into it. It was too Eastern and pseudo-mystical for me. With that said, it’s not a bad book, so I could probably be persuaded to go back and try it again. It’s just not for me.

Strangely, I’ve found that to be true of most of Zelazny’s books and stories… except for his Chronicles of Amber, which I love. Granted, the last couple books in the series are turning into a bit of a slog (I’m currently in the middle of book 9), but the first five books following Corwin are absolutely fantastic. I was hooked from the first page of the first book, unlike every other Zelazny title, which usually loses me after 30 or 40 pages.

The Butterfly Kid was really hard to find, because the Orem Public Library AND the BYU Library don’t carry it—and the BYU Library has one of the best science fiction collections west of the Mississippi. So I read the free sample on Amazon, and that was enough to DNF it. Way too psychadelic and trippy for me. The whole book is basically a 200 page drug trip, with an alien invasion thrown in for good measure. No wonder BYU doesn’t carry it.

The Einstein Connection was probably the book that made me decide to blacklist Samuel R. Delany and never read anything else he’s written (that, and the fact that he endorsed NAMBLA). There’s a lot of weird and twisted sexual content, including (if I remember correctly) some sexual content involving children. There’s a reason why Neil Gaiman wrote such a glowing introduction to the book, extolling all the reasons why he loves all things Delany. Bunch of sick perverts if you ask me.

I’ve tried to read some Piers Anthony before, but found it very difficult because of all the sick old man vibes he gives off. Which is a shame, because he’s a pretty decent writer. But everything I’ve tried to read of his has a weird obsession with rape, or of the necessity of women to submit to male sexual needs (including the needs of strangers). So when ChatGPT told me this about Chthon, I decided I didn’t need to read it:

This appears to include rape, incest/Oedipal sexual themes, coercive/abusive sexuality, and a race of women whose narrative function is tied to abuse, desire, and destructive obsession. Several reader reviews specifically warn about rape, incest, misogyny, and violence against women, with one review describing “cold scenes of both rape and incest” and objecting that the story seems to frame the perpetrating character too sympathetically.

The setup itself is grim: Aton Five is condemned to the subterranean prison planet Chthon after falling in love with a dangerous “Minionette,” and the novel is described by SFWA’s Nebula page as dark, grim, and heavily prison-sequence driven. The tone seems psychologically oppressive rather than hopeful or adventurous.

Robert Silverberg has a very similar problem, though he’s not nearly as overt in his sick old man vibes as Piers Anthony. But I don’t think I’ve ever read a Silverberg novel that I didn’t end up DNFing for weird and disturbing sexual content. Here’s what ChatGPT said about Thorns:

High concern. There is definitely sexual content, and it sounds deeply uncomfortable rather than erotic in an ordinary adult-romance sense. Multiple reader descriptions flag a bizarre or disturbing sex scene, and the central relationship involves a seventeen-year-old girl paired with a much older, physically altered man under manipulative circumstances.

I did not find evidence of a conventional rape scene in the sources I checked, but the book’s whole setup involves sexual/reproductive exploitation: Lona is used by scientists for her eggs, becomes the biological mother of one hundred children, and is then denied access to them. That is not “sexual violence” in the ordinary on-page assault sense, but it is very much reproductive exploitation and psychological violation.

This sounds like one of Silverberg’s darker psychological SF novels. The central figure, Duncan Chalk, literally feeds on other people’s suffering and engineers misery as entertainment. The book seems interested in pain, isolation, bodily alienation, emotional manipulation, and the public consumption of private suffering.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that ChatGPT flagged its own description of the novel as potentially violating its content guidelines, which is never a good sign.

So there you have it. Another bad year for science fiction—which tends to support my thesis that SFWA ruined the genre by starting it down the long march through the institutions. SFWA was founded in 1965, and Silverberg was the president from ’67 to ’68.

(As an interesting side note, every one of these novels had at least one edition featuring cover art with topless female nudity and visible nipples.)

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I Would Vote: 2026 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The incandescent by Emily Tesh

The Actual Results

TO BE DETERMINED

How I Would Vote

  1. No Award

Explanation

The Hugo nominees for 2026 just came out, and I have to say, deciding how I would vote on this ballot has been the easiest post I’ve done in this series. All of these books fail—all of them. I don’t even have to read them to know how I would vote. Thank you, ChatGPT, for helping me screen these books.

(Fun fact: I have more active subscribers on my email list (meaning their last activity was less than 90 days ago) than people who cast ballots for the Hugo nominees. Almost twice as many active subscribers, in fact. It’s not even close.)

Why do I use ChatGPT to screen my books? Because of a terrible experience I had reading The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. It started as a fun time travel adventure about a kid who gets a fantastic time travel belt, and uses it to do awesome things. But then, a future version of himself shows up and starts grooming him sexually, and before you know it, the whole book is literally about him fucking himself. I was so repulsed and disgusted from that reading experience that I vowed I would not read any more Hugo nominated books until I had screened them with AI first.

I’ve trained ChatGPT to look for five kinds of content that I personally find objectionable. Those are:

  1. Explicit sexual content, especially sexual violence,
  2. Explicit language and profanity,
  3. Violence against children,
  4. “Woke” themes or ideologically leftis messaging, and
  5. Nihilisim

If a book is only borderline on one or two of the categories, I may still read it if the book description interests me. But if it’s hardcore over the line on at least one of those things, I won’t read it. And for the 2026 Hugo Awards, ever single book fails miserably in at least one of those categories.

A Drop of Corruption is a direct sequel to The Tainted Cup, the book that won Best Novel in last year’s Hugo Awards, which also failed my screening criteria (for sexual content, woke messaging, and profanity), so that was enough of a basis not to read the sequel. But ChatGPT also says there’s sex trafficking and pedophilia in this one, which is enough to fail this book on its own.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by Alix Harrow that I didn’t DNF, and I certainly won’t start with The Everlasting. According to ChatGPT:

One content-warning review rates the spice as “severe,” with open-door intimacy in chapters 17 and 22; StoryGraph also flags graphic sexual content.

Child death is flagged by some readers, along with war and repeated death.

One review counts 27 uses of f-word and 3 uses of c-word; profanity rated severe.

[It also features] Queer-inclusive / bisexual themes, gender-norm challenges, feminism, anti-fascist themes.

Not a hard choice there at all. Here’s what it said about The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson:

StoryGraph user warnings include graphic child death among other violent content.

Ever since having children of my own, I do not do any sort of violence against children. I just can’t stand it. I loved Hyperion, but the subplot about the girl who gets the Merlin disease and grows backwards just completely wrecked me. Thank goodness it has a happy ending, because otherwise I probably would have burned my copy of The Fall of Hyperion. So I’m really not kidding when I say I don’t do violence against children.

Surprisingly (or perhaps not), most of the books this year failed on that particular point. Consider what ChatGPT said about The Incandescent by Emily Tesh:

StoryGraph flags child abuse and child death, and the premise involves a magical school where demons prey on children.

Bisexual female protagonist, neurodiversity representation, critique of elite education, class privilege, and capitalism.

I suppose this is a side effect of the ideological purity of the awards, since one of the defining issues of the modern left is abortion. When your political faction literally celebrates the murder of children, should it come as a surprise that it produces so much anti-family and anti-natalist fiction?

Anyways, the last two books failed primarily on the “woke” messaging. They’re the ones I’m most likely to reconsider my decision to skip, though I’d have to hear a recommendation from someone I really trust. I’m particularly reluctant to read Death of the Author, just because I usually can’t stand when writers write about what it’s like to be a writer. Here’s what ChatGPT said:

Feminism, disability autonomy/representation, racism, sexism, transphobia, Nigerian-American cultural conflict, and publishing/representation discourse are prominent.

As for Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, that’s probably the one of these books that I’m still the most on the fence, but from what I can tell with ChatGPT’s screening, it seems like he’s gone all-in on the woke messaging in order to appeal to the Hugo voters, and that’s enough for me to give it a pass. Here’s what ChatGPT said:

Strong anti-corporate, anti-colonial, environmental/extraction critique; one review frames it around humanity, colonization, corporate strip-mining, and moral corruption.

So there you have it. Not a hard choice. If I were voting in the Hugos this year, I’d give it a “no award” for the Best Novel category. As it stands, though, there is absolutely no way I’m giving these MFers any of my money, so I won’t be voting. It will be mildly interesting to see which species of perversion and woke leftist pathology will win this increasingly irrelevant award.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I Would Vote Now: 1980 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch

Harpist in the Wind by Patricia A. McKillip

Jem by Frederik Pohl

Titan by John Varley

The Actual Results

  1. The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
  2. Titan by John Varley
  3. Jem by Frederik Pohl
  4. Harpist in the Wind by Patricia A. McKillip
  5. On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch

How I Would Have Voted

(Abstain)

Explanation

I didn’t like any of the books this year, though none of them were particularly objectionable or bad (at least, not of the ones I read). The Fountains of Paradise just didn’t hold my interest, and I got bored and put it down. As for Harpist in the Wind, I never got to it because I ended up DNFing the first book in the trilogy, The Quest of the Riddle-Master. I wanted to like it, but I was just totally lost, especially when some of the characters were dead… maybe? Or maybe it was a dream? McKillip is clearly a beautiful writer, but writing a clear and engaging plot is clearly not her strength.

As for the other three, I screened them for objectionable content with AI, and based on that, I chose not to read them. I’ve found that I have to do this with all the Hugo Award nominees because some of the books are just way beyond the pale. On Wings of Song is apparently about a 14 year old child’s supernatural sexual awakening. Titan is apparently about a bunch of libertine, pansexual astronauts on a starship making first contact (in more ways than one) and spreading free love across the galaxy. Jem is apparently about the evils of colonialism and capitalism in a world where Malthus was right and Thomas Sowell is wrong (and you thought Ayn Rand’s preaching was bad).

1980 was the tail end of the New Wave, when science fiction went totally woke before “woke” was even a thing. But by this point, the movement was already starting to feel tired. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that a lot of these toxic ideologies were in full retreat, making room for some truly great books like Ender’s Game and Hyperion. At the same time, because the movement was already starting to burn itself out, none of these New Wave books is particularly terrible. Just more of the same tired thing.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I Would Vote Now: 2013 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

Blackout by Mira Grant

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Redshirts by John Scalzi

The Actual Results

  1. Redshirts by John Scalzi
  2. Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold
  3. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
  4. Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
  5. Blackout by Mira Grant

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed

Explanation

None of the books this year were super woke or objectionable to me, so I wouldn’t put any of them below No Award. But the only one that I actually finished was Throne of the Crescent Moon, which I found to be an enjoyable debut fantasy novel. It’s got some flaws, but it makes up for that with heart, just like many good debut novels. It’s also got a real Islamic / Middle Eastern flair to it, which made it fun and unique. And while these days, there’s an association between Islamism and the Left (the “red-green alliance”), Throne of the Crescent Moon isn’t woke at all—which I suspect was one of the reasons it didn’t win.

I hope Saladin Ahmed writes a sequel to this book. The world is interesting, the characters are good people, and the first book is clearly setting things up for other books. But I’ve heard rumors that the reason Saladin hasn’t written the next book yet is because the whole Hugo Awards process was such an emotional rollercoaster that it burned him out and killed his desire to go through all that again. Plus, when you experience a surprising degree of success too early in your career, there’s a danger that the pressure to perform will kill your subsequent efforts. Which is too bad, because I definitely want to read the next book!

As for the other books this year, none of them were all that great. I DNFed Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series with the first book, so I didn’t bother reading Blackout. Redshirts is basically a space opera retelling of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which I thoroughly hated (not to mention, I haven’t liked anything Scalzi has written since Old Man’s War, for reasons I’ve explained previously). And 2312 was more of a hard SF slice-of-life novel about all the wonderful things Kim Stanley Robinson would like us to build as we expand humanity’s presence across the Solar System—all with the correct neoliberal politics, of course. A little too heavy on the vision, and a little too weak on the plot.

I wanted to like Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, and I’ve enjoyed most (if not all) of the other Vorkosigan novels by Bujold… but after the first few chapters, I just started to feel as if the series has run too long for me. One of the biggest obstacles to reading the Vorkosigan Saga has been figuring out a proper reading order, since the chronologically first few books have virtually none of the important recurring characters, and every other book seems to refer to the events of half a dozen other previous books, sometimes including books that haven’t been written yet. And trying to read them in publication order doesn’t help either, since Bujold tends to jump all over the place in her own timeline. But in general, I think all the best books are the ones she wrote earlier, because the later-written books are mostly just about the feelings and relationships of the side characters in the series.

When I was a younger writer, I thought it would be wonderful to have a career like Bujolds, with a popular long-running, open-ended series that I could add new books to as the muse tended to strike me. But now, I tend to think that every good series has a definitive arc, with a beginning and an end. I might end up eating these words, of course, especially if one of my series becomes popular enough that that’s all my readers want to read more of. But I would rather have multiple popular series, each with a distinct arc, than one never-ending series where the later books just don’t quite measure up to the first ones.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I Would Vote Now: 1979 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Faded Sun: Kesrith by C.J. Cherryh

The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey

Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre

Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

The Actual Results

  1. Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
  2. The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey
  3. The Faded Sun: Kesrith by C.J. Cherryh
  • Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

    How I Would Have Voted

    1. No Award
    2. The Faded Sun: Kesrith by C.J. Cherryh
    3. The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey

    Explanation

    Science fiction is so woke, it was woke before “woke” was a thing. It started in the 60s, with the organization of SFWA (which was an ideologically captured institution from its very founding—seriously, go read about the Futurians and their communist sympathies) and it reached a peak in the 70s. Then the Reagan-Thatcher era and the fall of the Soviet Union pushed the genre to moderate for a couple of decades, but after it went dark & gritty with cyberpunk and grimdark, the wokeness rose up and took over all the institutions of the genre. Which is why, today, most of the award winning science fiction is pink haired butch lesbian cat ladies going where no gender identity has gone before, with a few token minorities thrown in for good measure.

    The late 70s was when the pre-woke era really hit its peak, which is probably why 1979 was the year when we got the worst book to ever win a Hugo: Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre. Seriously, it is terrible—not for being woke (it isn’t especially political), but just for being BAD. It’s based on a short story McIntyre wrote that won the Hugo the previous year, and the novel seriously reads like bad fanfic… of her own story… so because it assumes that you already know and love the story, the book never actually tells the story in a meaningful way. And of course, the writing is absolutely terrible—almost as terrible as the original first edition cover art:

    McIntyre went on to write some writing books, with terrible advice like “never say ‘he screwed up his eyes in thought!’ Who even does that?” Later, she even founded the writing workshop Clarion West, which seriously makes me wonder about the quality of instruction. But from what I can tell, the whole Clarion / Clarion West / Odyssey workshop network is less about teaching good writing and more about serving as a feeder system for traditional publishing, making sure that the new authors are sufficiently diverse and woke.

    I used ChatGPT to screen Blind Voices by Tom Reamy, and based on what it told me, I decided not to read it. Apparently, the book is about a bunch of naive, innocent midwestern girls who get corrupted (and one of them gets raped) by a supernatural traveling circus. Lots of nihilism and weird sexual content, so I’m gonna pass.

    I wanted to like Kesrith, and actually got several chapters into it, but the book ultimately bored me too much to finish it—which I’ve found is true of most of C.J. Cherryh’s books. Maybe I’ve just become too impatient as a reader, since I did enjoy Merchanter’s Luck and Voyager in Night back when I read them in college, but I don’t have much tolerance for boredom anymore.

    As for McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, I DNFed the series after the second book. I know it’s super well beloved by the older generation of readers, but the dragons are just so OP that I couldn’t really get into it. Seriously… if your characters can magically teleport through time AND space, is there anything they can’t do? So where is the conflict? Apparently in lots of interpersonal relationship drama, which is why I checked out.

    How I Would Vote Now: All Years

    How I Would Vote Now: 1966 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

    The Nominees

    The Squares of the City by John Brunner

    The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

    Dune by Frank Herbert

    Skylark DuQuesne by Edward E. Smith

    This Immortal by Roger Zelazny

    The Actual Results

    1. Dune by Frank Herbert and This Immortal by Roger Zelazny (tie)
    • Skylark DuQuesne by Edward E. Smith
    • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
    • The Squares of the City by John Brunner

    How I Would Have Voted

    1. Dune by Frank Herbert

    Explanation

    Dune is the most perfect science fiction novel I have ever read. I wouldn’t call it the best—in fact, I would say that Hyperion and Ender’s Game are marginally better—but it is the most perfect, in terms of genre conventions, tropes and archetypes, story structure, etc. It is a magnificent book, but it’s also the kind of book you need to read three or four (or five or six) times to fully appreciate.

    My first reading of Dune was when I was still in high school. I almost didn’t get through it, just because the writing was so dense. But I was intrigued by Paul’s prescience and his struggle to avoid the timeline where the jihad happens, so I read it all the way through to the end. But most of the book went over my head.

    My second reading was sometime in college. I don’t remember when, exactly—it might have been around the time I read 2001: A Space Odyssey, or when I first discovered Asimov’s Foundation novels. It may have been a year or two after that, when I’d decided to pursue writing as a career and felt like I needed to steep myself more in the science fiction genre. Either way, I enjoyed it much more that time, though still, most of the subtle nuances of the story still went over my head.

    I read Dune the third time shortly after I got married, when my wife and I used to read in bed together (this was before we had a crib in our bedroom, which has been the natural state of affairs for most of our marriage now). This time, I finally got all of the stuff that I’d missed, like the politics of the great houses and the galactic empire, the impact of the Butlerian Jihad, the economics of the spice and the importance of the Spacing Guild, and the ecology of Arrakis and how it played into the story. It was amazing. World building on the level of Tolkien, or perhaps even higher. Truly incredible stuff.

    Since then, I’ve tried to read most of the other Frank Herbert Dune books, but I gave up midway through Heretics of Dune. Dune Messiah was a really great wrap-up to the story of Dune, though it didn’t feel nearly as epic as the first book. Children of Dune was a fun read, and almost as good as the first one. God Emperor of Dune was a more of a slog, though the ending was fantastic. By this point of the series, I was starting to feel again like everything was going over my head, so that’s probably why it was so difficult.

    I do plan to read all of these books eventually, though. And I may even give the Brian Herbert / Kevin J. Anderson books a try, though I’ve heard they’re not nearly as good as the original Frank Herbert books. The next time I attempt the series, I will probably look for some YouTube content to help explain it without giving away too many spoilers. Or maybe I’ll use AI as a reading companion (which would be a super ironic way to use AI, hehe).

    So if the 1966 Hugos were held again today, I would definitely vote Dune as the top book. But to be frankly honest, I don’t think I could vote for any of the others, even though some of them are classics in their own right.

    Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is the other big classic from this year, but I’ve just never been able to get through it. I’ve tried twice, but each time I’ve set it down in disgust, mostly because of all the weird sexual conventions in the future that Heinlein has constructed. There are some things that I really love Heinlein for, and other things about his writing that I simply cannot stand, and I have learned from experience to avoid any of his books where his views on sex are a major part of the story. But maybe I’ll try the audiobook sometime.

    I should probably try to reread This Immortal, too. For some reason, the only Zelazny books I have ever managed to read are the Chronicles of Amber books, and I am currently taking a break midway between books 8 and 9 (or is it 7 and 8?) The first half of that series, following Corwin, were fantastic. Really great stuff. The second half, following Merlin, has been… not as great. I’m still enjoying it, but I constantly feel like I’m lost. But back to This Immortal… to be honest, I don’t remember why I DNFed it, but I think it came down to a combination of feeling lost and not really caring about the characters. But I should definitely pick it up and try it again (though it’s becoming a hard book to find).

    I tried to read the Skylark series from the beginning, but it was super, super campy and I got bored with it. I can appreciate that it was a formative work during the pulp era of science fiction, and that many of the fans in the generation that started Worldcon and the Hugo Awards were first exposed to science fiction when they read those books as children. The equivalent for me would be the original Star Wars trilogy, and all the classic old Star Wars books by Kevin J. Anderson, Dave Wolverton, and Timothy Zahn. But unless you’re writing a dissertation on the history of science fiction, the Skylark books probably aren’t essential reading.

    The Squares of the City is a surprisingly difficult book to find. It’s not at my local library, the library network’s audiobook app, or the BYU Library—which is unusual, because the BYU Library has one of the best science fiction collections in the country (they have all 300 or so of the Hugo nominated books in their collection, except maybe half a dozen). I think the paperback is currently selling for something like $200 on Amazon. But the ebook is available, and relatively cheap, though to be honest I only downloaded the sample. And after reading the first two chapters, that was enough for me to decide to DNF.

    There’s nothing terrible about the book, but it just isn’t all that good. It’s about a European (or maybe American?) tourist visiting a fictional South American dictatorship, which is on the verge of a communist revolution. The thing that’s supposed to make the book unique is that Brunner played a game of chess while writing the book, and all of the major plot points are tied to specific chess moves from that game. In that way, it’s a little like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, where he used some kind of Chinese divination system to come up with the actual plot.

    But we don’t remember The Man in the High Castle for the plot, and apprently, we don’t remember The Squares of the City for anything. My guess is that Brunner got nominated because of his politics, which made him a favorite among the Futurians and all the others in the fandom that were trying to turn science fiction into a vehicle for world communism. So basically, the spiritual predecessors of today’s blue-haired crazies who have completely taken over the Hugo and Nebula awards.

    How I Would Vote Now: All Years

    How I Would Vote Now: 1983 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

    The Nominees

    Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov

    The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh

    2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke

    Friday by Robert A. Heinlein

    Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury

    The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

    The Actual Results

    1. Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov
    2. The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh
    3. 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke
    4. Friday by Robert A. Heinlein
    5. Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury
    6. The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

    How I Would Have Voted

    1. Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov

    Explanation

    I haven’t read all of Asimov’s Foundation novels yet, but I’ve loved all of the ones that I’ve read, including Foundation’s Edge. Really fun. Lots of interesting ideas. Classic sci-fi. A must-read for sure.

    I’ve written before about my love-hate relationship with Heinlein. The long and short of it is that I’ve learned to avoid any of his books where he explores his free love ideas about sex and women. I’ve really enjoyed his juveniles, and books like Farnham’s Freehold and Starship Troopers. But if it’s got a partially (or fully) unclothed woman on the cover, it’s probably not for me.

    Courtship Rite was an easy skip, based on ChatGPT’s preview of the book. Here is what it said:

    Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury is one of the most morally challenging and controversial works in classic science fiction. The most immediate concern is the sexual content: Kingsbury depicts a harsh, survival-driven society on the planet Geta where sexual practices are ritualized, non-monogamous, and culturally compulsory. Several scenes contain explicit adult sexual behavior—never pornographic in tone, but described in enough detail to be unmistakably explicit. These sexual rites are integral to the worldbuilding and cannot be skipped without losing the thread of the story.

    Violence is also central to the novel, particularly the culture’s reliance on cannibalism as both a sacrament and a pragmatic necessity in a resource-scarce ecosystem. Cannibalism is discussed repeatedly and explicitly, sometimes in unsettling biological detail, and ritual combat, ordeal, poisoning, and execution also appear. Although the novel does not dwell on scenes of graphic torture or sadistic harm, the society it portrays practices ritual child sacrifice and cannibalism, and this is presented as a normalized element of Getan culture.

    From the book description: Jo Walton remarked that Courtship Rite “is about a distant generation of colonists on a planet with no usable animals. This is the book with everything, where everything includes cannibalism, polyamory, evolution and getting tattoos so your skin will make more interesting leather when you’re dead.”

    There are too many good books in the world for me to waste any of my life reading that.

    I know a lot of people love Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series, but I tried the first book and just couldn’t get into it. The fantasy world was just too macabre for me, and the story never hooked me. I’ve also heard that his writing is an acquired taste, so maybe I should give it another chance. But if I were to cast my ballot now, I wouldn’t vote for it.

    As for 2010: Odyssey Two and The Pride of Chanur, I DNFed both of those for basically the same reason: I got bored. The story and characters didn’t really hook me, the world building was interesting but not enough to keep me reading, and over time I just lost interest and gave up. They weren’t terrible books, just not particularly interesting or compelling. I might enjoy them in audio, though, so maybe I’ll give that a try.

    If that seems a little harsh, I’d like to point out that No Award doesn’t appear anywhere on this ballot. For the Hugo Awards, that’s saying something. In general, the 80s was a pretty good decade for the Hugo Awards, so even though this particular year wasn’t a bullseye for me, I’d still rather read any of these books (even Courtship Rite) over most of the woke crap that gets nominated these days.

    How I Would Vote Now: All Years

    How I Would Vote Now: 1994 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

    The Nominees

    Moving Mars by Greg Bear

    Glory Season by David Brin

    Virtual Light by William Gibson

    Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

    Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    The Actual Results

    1. Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
    2. Moving Mars by Greg Bear
    3. Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
    4. Glory Season by David Brin
    5. Virtual Light by William Gibson

    How I Would Have Voted

    (Abstain)

    Explanation

    None of these books/authors are so terrible (or so woke) (except maybe for Kim Stanley Robinson) that I would have ranked them below “no award.” With that said, I just didn’t think any of these books were good enough for me to vote for.

    Greg Bear’s Moving Mars is basically a sci-fi retelling of the 60s student protest movement on Mars. That’s the big draw. The more I learn about what was actually happening in the 60s, though, the more insufferable I find the hippies and their ideological descendants to be. Needless to say, I DNFed this one.

    I skipped the book by David Brin, because he’s just such a dogmatic atheist. I tried his Uplift books and DNFed them for much the same reason. If you’re going to be so dogmatic in your religious views that you cannot build a fictional world where the opposite views might plausibly be true, I have no time for you. That’s equally true for theists as for atheists (unless, of course, the book falls into the religious fiction genre).

    I tried Virtual Light, but DNFed it only a couple of pages in, due to some explicit violence against children. Now that I’m a father, I have a really low tolerance for that kind of stuff. I’ve also found Gibson to be a bit too dark and gritty for my taste. He seems to occupy the same literary niche as Neal Stephenson, and rub me wrong in much the same way.

    It’s been so long since I DNFed Beggars in Spain that I’ve forgotten what my issue with it was. I found the basic premise to be quite interesting, and got about halfway through the book. Ultimately, though, I think I just got bored with it. But I might come back to this one. Of all the books on the Hugo ballot this year, this is the one I’m most willing to try again.

    As for Green Mars, I just couldn’t get into it. Part of that is how insufferable I find KSR’s self-righteous liberal politics to be, but another part was the sexual content in the first few pages. I read Red Mars back in college, when my threshold for those kind of content issues was much lower, but I did come very close to DNFing it after the farm orgy scene. Also, Red Mars was a bit of a slog for my younger self, since I never really latched on to any of the characters. Same with Green Mars. Just a lot of people doing a lot of things, when it was clear that all the (crunchy liberal) author really cared about was the capital “I” Idea. Pass.

    How I Would Vote Now: All Years

    How I Would Vote Now: 2014 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

    The Nominees

    Warbound by Larry Correia

    Parasite by Mira Grant

    Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

    Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross

    The Actual Results

    1. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
    2. Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
    3. Parasite by Mira Grant
    4. Warbound by Larry Correia

    How I Would Vote Now

    1. Warbound by Larry Correia
    2. No Award

    Explanation

    Technically, the entire Wheel of Time series was also on the ballot this year, but there is no other year in which a complete series (as opposed to the latest book in the series) was ever on the ballot. It seems really weird that they would do that just for Wheel of Time, so I’m going to act as if it never happened. Otherwise, The Wheel of Time would probably get my #2 slot, just above No Award.

    I haven’t read Warbound, but I have read enough of Hard Magic, the first book in Larry Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles, to know that I’m going to read the rest. The magic system is a lot more explicitly rules-based than much of his other stuff, but the characters are great, the story is great, the world is fascinating… it’s definitely up there with the rest of his work. Good stuff. Great writer.

    Ann Leckie holds the record for the author I’ve DNFed the fastest. Ancillary Justice is the book that put her on the map. The main character is a sentient spaceship, which sounds like a pretty cool starting concept… until you realize that the most exciting thing about this spaceship is that it’s transgender, and views every other human as a “she.” Derp. The whole book is obsessed with leftist gender politics, which is why I believe that No Award is more deserving than this garbage. I predict it will not age well.

    I forget why I DNFed Neptune’s Brood. I think it had to do with sex, violence, and drug use that was just too explicit for me. When I was in my 20s, I was willing to do dark and gritty, but these days I have little patience for it. I think this may have been the book that made me decide to skip Charles Stross as an author, so there must have been a lot of it.

    As for Parasite, I think the main thing for that one was that I just felt no interest or connection with any of the characters. Glancing over the book, it doesn’t appear that it had any explicitly terrible content, and I vaguely remember getting bored with the story and deciding that it wasn’t worth continuing. But having read and DNFed several other works by this author, I know she has a tendency to veer into crossing my lines (such as building sexual tension between a brother and sister, or throwing in weird occult stuff, or making her main character a transgender child). And running the book through ChatGPT, it appears that the book has an undercurrent of nihilism, which I absolutely cannot stand in any fiction. Perhaps I picked up on that soon enough to DNF it early.

    Of the three books from this year that I DNFed, I’d be most willing to give Parasite another try, then maybe Neptune’s Brood. But I wouldn’t be willing to read Ancillary Justice (or anything else by Ann Leckie, for that matter) unless you paid me damn well for it. And even then…

    How I Would Vote Now: All Years

    How I Would Vote Now: 1993 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

    The Nominees

    China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

    Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

    Steel Beach by John Varley

    A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

    Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

    The Actual Results

    1. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
    2. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
    3. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
    4. China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
    5. Steel Beach by John Varley

    How I Would Vote Now

    (abstain)

    Explanation

    I didn’t hate any of these books, but I didn’t love any of them either—which is fairly typical for me of 90s era Hugo Awards. Let’s go down the list.

    Doomsday Book is often held up as Connie Willis’s best, but I thought it lost the plot a bit when the time travelers had to simultaneously face a pandemic in their own future time while also having to rescue the lost apprentice time traveler from the black death in medieval England. If you’re reeling from a pandemic, what the heck are you doing sending time travelers back as if it’s a normal day on the job? Also, Connie Willis really has no love for the medieval era, and it shows. Blackout and All Clear were much better, partially because of how much Connie Willis clearly loves WWII-era Britain.

    If there’s one book in this list that I should try again, and probably will, it’s A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. It’s the kind of science fiction that’s right up my wheelhouse, and I’ve enjoyed Vernor Vinge before (Rainbows End is the best so far). But this book is so freaking huge, and I never latched on to any of the characters… oh, and the central conceit of the aliens, that the small collective packs form a hive mind that thinks and acts like an individual—that didn’t really work for me either time I attempted to read this book.

    I screened Steel Beach and China Mountain Zhang through ChatGPT for objectionable content and decided to skip both of them. Here is what ChatGPT said about China Mountain Zhang that made me decide to skip it:

    The story engages deeply with themes of intersectional identity, including race, sexual orientation, and societal roles. Zhang’s struggles as a gay man in a conformist society are a significant part of the narrative. The book also critiques authoritarianism and explores social dynamics through a progressive lens. While these themes are integral to the story and handled with subtlety, they align with a modern “woke” perspective.

    And here’s what it said about Steel Beach that made me decide to skip it:

    Language: Strong language is used throughout, reflecting the irreverent tone of the protagonist and the society depicted.

    Gender and Identity: Steel Beach explores themes of gender fluidity and personal identity in a society where individuals can easily change their biological sex. This aspect of the world is presented as normalized rather than contentious.

    As for Red Mars, I read this one way back (way way back) when I was a freshman in college. At the time, I was still working out what I believed politically, so most of KSR’s leftism went right over my head. However, there were a few sexually explicit scenes that weirded me out, especially the one where the colony team’s depressed psychiatrist discovers—and joins—the bizarre sex cult and their group orgies in the farm module. I still finished the book, but I declined to read the rest of the series.

    What is it with crunchy leftist authors and bizarre, explicit sexual content? Why do they always seem to feel a need to fill their books with weird and pointless sex? There are so many books I’ve read for this series that started out strong, but ultimately devolved into sexual degeneracy that added nothing to the story. It’s almost like they felt a compelling need to add the degeneracy for its own sake. Maybe it’s a boomer thing? A “spirit of the age” possession of some sort? I honestly don’t know.

    How I Would Vote Now: All Years