Tag: Hugo awards

How I would vote now: 2009 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross

The Actual Results

  1. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
  2. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
  3. Anathem by Neal Stephenson
  4. Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
  5. Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

How I Would Have Voted

  1. No Award
  2. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
  3. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Explanation

I’ve found that Hugo Award winning / nominated books tend to fluctuate in decade-long waves, in terms of how much I enjoy them. Some decades are pretty good, others are just downright terrible. Generally speaking, the books from the 50s and early 60s were good if not great (though Dune is certainly a masterpiece), the late 70s had a couple of years with some hits and misses, and most of the books from the late 80s and early 90s were actually pretty good. But from the mid 60s through most of the 70s (and into the early 80s), the Hugos were generally garbage, mostly because of how they were saturated with radical feminism, Malthusian economics, and global cooling global warming climate change hysteria. Also, there were lots of communist “fellow travelers” writing during that era. After the mid 90s, it seems like the Hugos tried to become “dark and gritty,” just like comic books and epic fantasy. A lot of those old political trends from the 60s and 70s came back with a vengeance, and from the late 90s through the early 2010s, the books are really hit and miss for me.

The year 2009 was a complete and total miss, in my opinion. I didn’t like any of the books or authors that were nominated that year, though I will admit that I skipped all but two of them. I’ve written before about how much I cannot stand Scalzi as either an author or a human being, and after trying to read his Interdependency novels, I’ve just completely sworn him off. Zoe’s War is technically a sequel to Old Man’s War, which I enjoyed at the time, but after all of Scalzi’s shenanigans I have no desire to finish that series. As for Neal Stephenson and Charles Stross, everything I’ve read from them is so loaded with gratiutous sex, graphic violence, and sheer unadulterated nihilism that I’ve sworn them off as well. Dark and gritty is almost always overrated.

Moving on to Little Brother… how can I put this? The book is about a teenage hacker and his high school buddies who fight back against an insidious surveillance state, which seeks to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives. Great concept… except that if you went back in a time machine and brought Cory Doctorow from 2009 into a debate with Cory Doctorow today, one of two things would happen: 1) the debate would turn into a vicious cage match, from which only one of them would leave alive, or 2) the older Doctorow would say “but a police surveillance state isn’t bad if the Democrats are in charge,” to which the younger Doctorow would say “you make a very good point, sir,” and the two would leave as best of friends. Which is to say that Cory Doctorow is a massive hypocrite when it comes to the lucrative merger of Big Tech and the state, and I can’t tell if his hypocrisy goes back all the way to the Bush years, or whether the election of 2016 broke him. Either way, I just could not get into Little Brother because of how thoroughly he’s flip-flopped on his views.

(As a side note, I really would like to see someone train two large language models on Doctorow’s writings, one from everything pre-Trump, and the other from everything post-Trump. It would be fascinating to pit those two models against each other in a simulated debate, because of how thoroughly he’s flip-flopped. Also, it would be entertaining to watch the real Cory Doctorow’s reaction to this simulated debate, because he’s written extensively about how much he hates ChatGPT and generative AI.)

With all of that said, however, I didn’t think Little Brother was terrible, even though I couldn’t finish it. As with Scalzi, it had less to do with the book itself and more to do with my opinion of the author, which is why I’ve decided to rank it above the other books below No Award. But I put it below The Graveyard Book, because there wasn’t really anything political or offensive in that one; it just wasn’t for me. I can’t affirmatively vote for The Graveyard Book, because I didn’t enjoy it enough to finish it, but if it had been a different year, I simply would have abstained instead of putting it below No Award.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2019 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

The Actual Results

  1. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
  2. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  3. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
  4. Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
  5. Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
  6. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  2. No Award
  3. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Explanation

The Calculating Stars actually started out pretty good. Mary Robinette Kowal is a very skilled writer, and her main character in this book was both likeable and interesting—something that seems to be increasing rare in Hugo-nominated books. It also didn’t hurt that in the very first chapter, a giant meteor wiped out Washington DC and most of the eastern seaboard. But then it gradually turned into a story about the little woman who roared and her band of misfit minorities who team up to fight Captain Patriarchy, and the super-woke feminism just ruined it for me.

I didn’t read Revenant Gun or Record of a Spaceborn Few because I DNFed both series with the first book. With Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, I don’t remember much, except that the first book made absolutely no sense to me, with so much meaningless violence that it bordered on the absurd. With Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series, it started off as an interesting space opera, but the ship quickly turned into a lesbian love boat, with lots of queer and transgender aliens to boot. Wokery ensues.

As for Trail of Lightning, I honestly don’t remember much about that one, other than that it started to give me woke vibes and I didn’t really like any of the characters. I think it also played the Death is Chic and Life is Not Worth Saving trope, which I personally cannot stand. If the main character had struck me as a good and decent person, I probably would have kept reading, but so many books that suffer from wokeness also suffer from having protagonists who are just terrible human beings in general. I don’t think the two are unrelated.

The first chapter of Space Opera was laugh out loud hilarious, and I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. Valente’s gonzo humor is a lot of fun! Then… I don’t know quite how to put this, but the story just started to feel depressing, and I’m not sure why. Also, the gonzo writing style started to grate on me after a while, kind of like Chuck Wendig’s writing does for anything longer than a blog article. It wasn’t a terrible book, but I didn’t end up finishing it.

But I really loved Spinning Silver, much more than I was expecting to. I’m not generally into fairy tell retellings, but this one stirred something primal in my Slavic roots and scratched an itch I didn’t even know that I had. Besides all that, it’s just a damn good story. The villains were genuinely villainous, the peril was genuinely perilous, the good guys all had satisfying growth arcs, and the ending was a crowning moment of awesome that brought everything full circle in the best possible way. Really great book.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2006 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Learning the World by Ken MacLeod

A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

The Actual Results

  1. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  2. Accelerando by Charles Stross
  3. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  4. Learning the World by Ken MacLeod
  5. A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
  2. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  3. No Award
  4. Learning the World by Ken MacLeod

Explanation

This is going to be controversial, but I don’t think any of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books should have been nominated for the Hugo Award. In the first place, those books are pure fantasy, and while the line between fantasy and science fiction can become blurry at times, with everyone drawing it in a slightly different place (Dragonriders of Pern, for example), I do think it’s important to draw that line somewhere, because each of us as readers draws that line somewhere. Some readers read only fantasy, some read only science fiction, and even among readers who read both, they scratch very different itches.

(As a side note, A Dance With Dragons came out right when I was indie publishing my first few books, and I remember being super annoyed that it was monopolizing all of the top spots on the Amazon bestseller charts for subgenres like science fiction > action & adventure, even though it was very clearly not a science fiction book. That annoyed me as both a writer and a reader.)

More than that, though… how do I say this? I know that a lot of people are (or were) huge fans of Game of Thrones, that it had a huge and lasting cultural impact, and that the writing quality of both the books and the miniseries was quite excellent, at least for the first few books/seasons… but to what end? The HBO series itself is blatantly pornographic, and the books are even worse, glorifying the immorality and horrific violence that characterizes the series. Worse, there is no good or evil in this world: only power. This means that there are no heroes, only victims and victimizers.

I’m not sure how much Game of Thrones is responsible for shaping our current cultural decay, and how much it was simply a reflection of the culture in which it was created, but this obsession with power and the victim-victimizer complex lies at the heart of all of the social pathologies currently driving the West to cultural and spiritual suicide. It’s the force driving our own modern Game of Thrones, between the MAGA disciples of orange Jesus and the machinations of our Big Tech and Deep State overlords, with their hordes of hypnotized NPC zombies protesting in behalf of [current thing], all while remaining carefully masked. It turns out that when you embrace Martin’s paradigm, rejecting good and evil for the pure pursuit of power, and define everyone by their victimhood status, it leads to the death of everything in your culture that is good, true, and beautiful.

And even laying all of that aside, the fact that Martin hasn’t finished the damned series yet has done more to destroy the epic fantasy genre than all the other things that his career has otherwise accomplished. If you’re a new fantasy writer and you have a great idea for an epic fantasy series, you’d better have a good day job or a sugar daddy/momma, because most readers won’t give your series a chance until after you’ve finished the last book. But can we honestly blame the readers for this, when Martin ran off with their money and left them all burned?

Back when Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire was still ascendant, fans and readers were all mesmerized by how skillfully George R.R. Martin could subvert their expectations and pull off twists that no one had foreseen. It turns out that the biggest expectation that Martin ever subverted was the expectation that he would finish the damned series.

Anyways, that’s enough ranting about George R.R. Martin and the pathological effect that I believe he’s had on the culture. I read A Game of Thrones back in 2010 and decided to skip the rest of the series. The writing was fantastic, but I hated all of the characters and could tell that things were going to get way too dark and way too graphic in the later books. And now, I wish I lived in a world where George R.R. Martin was still a mostly unknown midlist author, with a small cult following but not a lot of influence on the culture overall. It would be a much better world.

I skipped Accelerando, because I’ve read enough Charles Stross to know that his particular brand of grungy cyberpunk nihilism rubs me the wrong way. Learning the World wasn’t terrible, but I DNFed it because I got bored, though I could be persuaded to try it again. It was just too much of an idea book, without enough story to really hook me.

Old Man’s War… my thoughts on that one are complicated. I cannot stand Scalzi as either an author or a human being. He’s basically an obnoxious internet influencer who made it big back in the days of the blogosphere, before “influencer” was a job title. Of course, to be an influencer, you have to either 1) be an extremely attractive woman, or 2) be off your rocker somehow, and that definitely describes Scalzi. He is an obnoxious blowhard who likes to argue with people on the internet for fun and profit, except he’s apparently not as good at social media as he was at blogging, so he’s pivoted to writing science fiction and playing the SFWA mean girls game instead.

But most of that happened after Old Man’s War, so it’s not exactly fair to judge the book on all of that. And I have to admit, I enjoyed it back in 2008 when I read it. It’s basically a retelling of Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but without all of the nihilism and politics—and since the nihilism and the politics are the things that got me hung up on both books (though I actually enjoyed the politics of Starship Troopers; the part that slightly annoyed me was getting a lengthy treatise on human sociology instead of an adventure novel), Old Man’s War was basically a retelling with all of the good parts and less of the bad parts. So I’ll grudgingly give Scalzi his due and admit that his first book is good enough to deserve an affirmative vote.

But Robert Charle’s Wilson’s Spin is easily the best book on the ballot from this year, and possibly the best Hugo-nominated book that I’ve read from this whole decade. It’s fantastic. One of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read. The rest of the trilogy is just as good, too. In fact, Spin and its sequel Axis were a huge influence on my own Genesis Earth, though it may not be obvious at first glance. I read Spin when I was studying overseas in Amman, Jordan, while I was still working on the first draft of Genesis Earth. The next year, I read a whole bunch of Robert Charles Wilson’s other books, and I have to say that I have yet to read a book he wrote that I didn’t enjoy. His books have had as much influence on me as Ursula K. Le Guin, and largely scratch the same itch.

So that’s how the 2006 Hugos shape up for me: three books that I didn’t like, and two that I did—and one of those books is one of my all-time favorites.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2023 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

Alright, let’s tackle the most controversial Hugo awards since Sad Puppies 3—and possibly the most controversial Hugos ever!

The Nominees

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

The Actual Results

  1. Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher
  2. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
  3. The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
  4. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  5. The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal
  6. Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

How I Would Have Voted

  1. No Award
  2. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
  3. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Explanation

The 2023 Hugo Awards were an epic clusterfuck, from which the Hugos might never recover (and honestly, I kind of hope they don’t). Not only did the organizers exclude a bunch of titles like Babel by R.F. Kuang that probably would have placed very high, if not outright won first place—excluded them for no other discernible reason other than that they might have offended the Chinese Communist Party, since China was hosting the awards—but they also disqualified thousands of Chinese ballots for the same reason that they disqualified thousands of Sad Puppy ballots in subsequent years since the big kerfluffle in 2015: namely, that they were Wrongfans having Wrongfun.

Apparently, to get on the Hugo ballot, you have to either 1) pander to or be a member of the SFWA mean girls club (for crying out loud, two of the authors on this year’s ballot were former SFWA presidents), or 2) write a lesbian love story. I suppose you can also get on the ballot if you write a love story that’s gay, transgender, polyamorous, or some other flavor of queer, but lesbians are easier because the male readers are less likely to be grossed out or confused by it.

Anyways, I didn’t enjoy any of these books, though I have to admit that I didn’t even try to read The Kaiju Preservation Society (because I cannot stand Scalzi, either as an author or a human. The Collapsing Empire with its random throwaway sex scene in the second or third chapter was the last straw for me) and The Spare Man (my wife picked it up and was so confused and turned off by the non-gendered pronoun dickery that I knew it was too woke for me). I DNFed Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series with Gideon the Ninth, for reasons that I detailed in my recap of the 2021 Hugo Awards.

As for Nettle & Bone, I was pleasantly surprised at first, because the love interest was heterosexual—which, for the Hugos, is very unusual these days. But there were other things about the book that turned me off, such as the anachronism of a religious medieval world that’s been gutted of anything religious that might offend a non-religious reader in 2023, and a very anti-natalist bias with some lines that could have come straight from Margaret Sanger. So that’s why I put Nettle & Bone below No Award, and didn’t even bother ranking it anywhere on my ballot.

Legends & Lattes wasn’t terrible, but I got bored after the first couple of chapters, and because of the lesbian love story I’m not too keen to try it again (though I suppose I could be persuaded otherwise). As for The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, I didn’t find anything objectionable with that one, and actually got about halfway through, but… I just didn’t care about any of the characters. Not a terrible book, but it just wasn’t for me.

Of the two, I think I liked The Daughter of Doctor Moreau better, or disliked it less, which is why I put it on the ballot above Legend & Lattes and below No Award. Why include anything on a ballot below No Award? Because the way that ranked choice voting works, you can still influence the outcome that way even if No Award is eliminated during the counting. It’s basically like saying: “I don’t think any of these books deserve an award, but if I had to award one of them, I’d give it to (1) and (2), in that order.”

So that’s my take on the infamous 2023 Hugo Awards. Frankly, I think it would have been much better if the Chinese wrongfans had completely taken it over, and made it so that Worldcon was held in China every other year, with Chinese authors dominating the Hugos from now on. There are certainly enough Chinese sci-fi readers to justify such a move. But alas, it seems that the Trufans are going to keep clutching the Hugos with a deathgrip until 1) they’re all dead (since most of them are boomers anyway), or 2) the Trufans and the Hugos both become culturally irrelevant, if indeed they aren’t already.

(Speaking of China, hi Mike Glyer! Still buying views from Chinese clickfarms to boost your online rankings? It must be a real slow news week if you pick up this blog for your File 770 pixel scroll.)

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 1977 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

Man Plus by Frederik Pohl

Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sing by Kate Wilhelm

The Actual Results

  1. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sing by Kate Wilhelm
  • Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
  • Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
  • Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman
  • Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
  2. No Award
  3. Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
  4. Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg

Explanation

It’s interesting to see which of these books hold up after nearly fifty years, and which of them really don’t. Of the five here, I think Children of Dune is the only one that still has any lasting cultural relevance, and that only because of the first book, Dune.

Children of Dune is also (perhaps not surprisingly) the only book that I would consider worthy of voting for. It’s nowhere near as good as Dune, but of the Dune sequels, it’s the best one I’ve read so far (though the way Leto transformed into a… whatever really seemed to come out of nowhere). Man Plus and Shadrach in the Furnace weren’t terrible, but I didn’t finish them. I can’t speak to Mindbridge, because I didn’t bother reading it: I’ve read enough Haldeman to know that he has a penchant for nihilism that really rubs me the wrong way.

As for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, it was really awful. I don’t remember the plot exactly, but the book is full of leftist 70s doom porn regarding climate change and Malthusian resource shortages, combined with a resurgence of The Patriarchy that forces all the female characters into becoming breeders. It’s dark, dystopian, and apocalyptic in all the worst ways, with a very strong political bent to it that holds up about as well as all of the end-of-the-world predictions that the climate cultists have been peddling since the 70s. Basically, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is why I’d vote “No Award” after Children of Dune.

Man Plus had some interesting writing, but it didn’t really hold my interest, probably because of all the Malthusian and Freudian undertones. It wasn’t insufferably political, though, which is why I would actually affirmatively vote for it after “No Award.” I would certainly rather that Man Plus had won out over Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Same with Shadrach in the Furnace, which isn’t terrible, though it does have some weird communist power fantasies in it. I really love the way Silverberg writes, but the things he chooses to write about just seem totally pointless to me.

The 70s was a very weird time for science fiction… and probably a weird time for the world in general. As you can probably tell, I’m not a huge fan of New Wave science fiction (with a few notable exceptions). Things got a lot better after Reagan’s Morning in America, not just for the country, but for science fiction as well. Then we hit the 90s, which the Zoomers tend to look on as a simple, idyllic time when all was bright and wonderful in the world, which strikes me as hilarious because I remember it as a time of rampant school shootings and MTV-driven cultural decay. But that’s a subject for another post.

How I would vote now: 2020 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Actual Results

  1. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
  2. Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
  3. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
  4. The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
  5. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
  6. The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

How I Would Have Voted

  1. No Award

Explanation

The wokery was strong this year.

I have a list of tropes that I cannot stand anymore, to the point that I will usually DNF any book that uses them. All of the nominated books this year fell fell into at least one of those tropes, including:

  • All true love is LGBTQ love
  • A profane and vulgar childhood
  • Death is chic
  • Life is not worth saving
  • Badass woman warrior, slay!

One of these days, I’ll write a blog post describing all of these tropes. If they weren’t so common in fiction these days, I would have more tolerance for them, but I’ve seen them all so much that they get an immediate “nope” whenever I see them.

The City in the Middle of the Night was like something written by a mental patient, and not in a good way. If I wrote a parody of a book written by a leftist, it would read no differently than this book.

I forget why I DNFed The Ten Thousand Doors of January, but I think it was because of the trope I call “a profane and vulgar childhood,” where children lose (or are never really allowed to experience) their innocence before they grow up, and the author doesn’t treat this like the tragedy it truly is. There may have also been an anti-racist / anti-colonialist bent that turned me off, if I remember correctly.

I wanted to like The Dark Brigade, because I enjoy reading Kameron Hurley’s op-eds in Locus Magazine, but the book was way too dark and profane. Also, it suffered from “all true love is LGBTQ love” and “badass woman warrior, slay!” which I am just so tired of reading.

A Memory Called Empire is one of those sprawling space operas about a massive galactic empire, but it read too much like something written by an English major with little to no understanding of how geopolitics actually works. Also, the “all true love is LGBTQ love” was strong with this one.

Finally, Middlegame and Gideon the Ninth are both prime examples of “death is chic,” a trope which plays right into the death cult that currently dominates our culture. But even if the macabre obsession with death is just an aesthetic, it’s one that I personally cannot stand. With that said, though, I think it goes beyond the aesthetic for both of these books—but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.

For all of these books, the characters fell completely flat for me. One of the things I need in order to connect with a character is to get a sense right off the bat that they’re a good person—or, if they’re a bad person, that needs to be lampshaded clearly as a flaw. But in so many books that are published these days, the characters are just downright awful people who care only for themselves, and rarely is this pointed out as a flaw.

Increasingly, it seems that we live in a world where the culture tells us that nothing is true and everything is permitted. Screw that.

How I would vote now: 1958 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber.

The Actual Results

  1. The Big Time by Fritz Leiber.

How I Would Have Voted

  1. (Abstain)

Explanation

The Big Time has a lot of things in it that I normally would like. It’s a time travel story that bucks the popular convention of the butterfly effect—the idea that small changes in the past lead to big changes in the future. Instead, Leiber’s view of time travel is much closer to Connie Willis’s, in that the continuum itself tends to seek a stable equilibrium, negating the effect of small changes. But unlike Willis’s books, the time travelers aren’t just a bunch of cloistered academics looking to be passive observers of history. Instead, there’s a full-on time war between two monolithic factions, each of which has screwed so much with the timeline that they hardly know who they are anymore.

So what’s so bad about it that I feel it didn’t earn my vote? I’ve tried twice to read this book, and I’ve DNFed it both times because I just can’t get over the fact that it’s about a bunch of comfort women—with everything that term implies—servicing the time warriors of their particular faction. In WWII, “comfort women” was a euphemistic term for civilian sex slaves taken captive by the Japanese Imperial Army. That’s basically what’s happening here, except it’s played straight, with no ick factor, or even really an acknowledgment that an ick factor might exist. And that’s what turns me off—not just the ick factor itself, but the way that the author treats it as something normal and blase—progressive, even. After all, every good time soldier needs a “sex therapist.” </sarc>

Usually when older science fiction turns me off, it has something to do with the sexual content. So many scifi writers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s had these almost utopian visions of a free love future, or at least a very optimistic view of the sexual revolution. They never imagined that we might become even more prudish than the Victorians, or that incels would be a thing, or that we’d be facing a loneliness epidemic, a population collapse, and both a war on men and a war on women because, in large part, of how the Boomers tore down all the boundaries around sex and sexuality—which is to say nothing of how so many people can’t even define what a woman is these days.

These scifi writers were supposed to be our visionaries, but they were so totally blinded by their own carnal lusts that they failed to predict the second- and third-order effects of the kind of free love future they were writing about. That’s not exactly the case with The Big Time, but it falls into that same trap, along with most of Fritz Leiber’s work that I’ve read. However, it wasn’t so bad that I’d vote No Award over this book. Rather, it was more of a background element that rubbed me the wrong way, to the point where I just couldn’t finish the book.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2021 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

Network Effect by Martha Wells

The Actual Results

  1. The Network Effect by Martha Wells
  2. The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
  3. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
  4. Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
  5. The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal
  6. Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Network Effect by Martha Wells
  2. No Award
  3. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Explanation

Network Effect was pretty good. In fact, it’s my favorite Murderbot book. There was a little bit of wokery, mostly in the form of the polyamorous relationships of the humans, but that didn’t bother me as much because part of the point of the Murderbot books is that the humans are (for the most part) aggravatingly dumb and slow, so the polyamory kind of blended into the rest of the nonsense that muderbot constantly has to deal with. But I can see how it would bother some readers.

I DNFed all the other books, but I didn’t want to lump Piranesi in with all the others because it just wasn’t my kind of book. All the other ones had woke themes or tropes or other issues that turned me off immensely. I DNFed the first Lady Astronauts book when it turned into a story about the brave little woman that could and her band of misfit minorities fighting back against Captain Patriarchy. The City We Became dropped half a dozen f-bombs in the first chapter, and I think it had a gay rape scene too. Also, I have no love whatsoever for New York City. As for Black Sun and Harrow the Ninth, they both suffer from the trope that I call “death is chic.” At best, it’s an aesthetic that turns me off, and at worst it’s just a cover for outright nihilism and a pro-death, anti-life worldview that undergirds everything that I hate about our current culture.

As a side note, I just want to say that when it comes to book blurbs, Neil Gaiman is one of the best contrarian indicators for my own personal tastes that I’ve found. He may have blurbed a book or two that I actually enjoyed, but for every book or author that I can remember, if he gave them praise, I not only didn’t like it, but actively hated it. He may actually be a better indicator for me than the Hugo Award itself, since I actually enjoyed the book that won this year—but I cannot think of a single book that Neil Gaiman blurbed that I didn’t despise.

How I would vote now: 1953 Hugo (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

The Actual Results

  1. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

How I Would Have Voted

  1. (Abstain)

Explanation

I didn’t hate this book—I did finish it, after all—but I had some issues with it, especially the ending. It’s basically a futuristic murder mystery / true crime piece, where the protagonist is a telepathic detective who figures out immediately who committed the murder, but has to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to gather the evidence and prosecute the case. The story isn’t a whodunnit so much as a character piece about the motivations behind murder, with a fair amount of action and some intriguing world-building thrown in for good measure.

There’s a lot of good, old-fashioned sci-fi stuff in here, especially with the espers and the telepaths (which were all the rage back in the science fiction of the 50s), but the ending rubbed me the wrong way, because it’s not about putting the murderer behind bars, but in “demolishing” him, brainwashing him so completely that he’s not even really capable of committing such a crime. Just like telepathy and extra-sensory perception were big in golden-age sci-fi, so was the idea that an elite class of benevolent technocrats could use The Science to usher in a futuristic utopia. That was what rubbed me the wrong way about this one.

There were also some hippy/beatnik elements in it that I didn’t like, such as a dinner party with some flagrant and gratuitous nudity. For all that golden age and new wave authors loved to project a post-sexual revolution future, most of them did a really piss-poor job anticipating its second- and third-order effects (Heinlein being one of the chief offenders—but we’ll get there). In spite of all this, I wouldn’t go so far as to vote “no award” over this one. Rather, I’d probably just abstain.

As a side note, 1953 was the first Hugo Award ever issued. As such, the nominating and voting process hadn’t been ironed out yet, so The Demolished Man was the only nominee.

How I would vote now: 2022 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Actual Results

  1. A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
  2. Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
  3. A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark
  4. The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers
  5. She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
  6. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
  2. No Award

Explanation

Project Hail Mary was a fun read, and a really good hard SF novel. There were a couple of minor things that made me roll my eyes, but the story itself was solid, and the science was fascinating. Also, the ending really stuck with me for several days. I don’t think it was better than Hyperion or Ender’s Game, but it certainly was deserving of a positive vote for best novel.

I DNFed everything else on the ballot. Normally, that alone wouldn’t be a reason for voting No Award, but some of these books were just insanely woke: in particular, Light from Uncommon Stars was full of transgender madness (and judging from the author bio in the back, the author herself is caught up in the madness as well).

I didn’t read A Desolation Called Peace or The Galaxy, and the Ground Within because I’d already DNFed the first book in the series, mostly for the “all true love is LGBTQ love” trope (I should do a blog post dissecting that particular trope), so I can’t speak to the relative wokeness of either of those titles. But it says something that I tried and DNFed the series.

But the most infuriating read for me was She Who Became the Sun, since by all indications it should have been right up my alley, what with all the steppe nomad warriors and all. The writing was pretty good too, and the setup was fantastic. Yes, there was some gender bending stuff, but for the first half of the book I generally didn’t find it any more offensive than Mulan. I forget why I decided to skip to the last chapter, but the ending was so infuriating that it put this author solidly on my blacklist, just like The Fifth Season did for N.K. Jemison (more on that when we get to 2016’s Hugo ballot). I can’t say much without spoiling the book, but it has to do with what many conservative and alternate media commentators rightly call the death cult. Really infuriating.

As for A Master of Djinn, having traveled across Egypt and the Middle East, the worldbuilding was so fundamentally broken that I just couldn’t swallow it. The author basically created a steampunk Middle East that embraces several tenets of modern wokism. The only alternate reality in which the main character wouldn’t be tossed off of a high building for being a lesbian is a reality where the source code of Islam has been rewritten so entirely that it isn’t really Islam anymore. Which I suppose is fine for a pulpy escapist fantasy, but this one just didn’t appeal to me.