Vernor Vinge – One Thousand And One Parsecs

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

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
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

How I Would Vote Now: 2000 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear

A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

The Actual Results

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

How I Would Vote Now

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

Explanation

It’s been a long time since I read any of the Harry Potter books, but I thoroughly enjoyed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and would have no issue voting for it in one of these awards. But I DNFed all of the other books on the ballot for this year, so I couldn’t bring myself to vote for any of them.

I really wanted to enjoy A Deepness in the Sky, and will probably read it again at some point, especially since my wife really enjoyed this one and gives me a hard time for DNFing it. Also, it’s the kind of science fiction that’s right up my wheelhouse, so I kind of feel bad about not finishing it.

So what’s the deal? The first time I tried to read it, I got caught up in this enormous subplot where the good guys, after having been mentally enslaved by the bad guys, try to figure out a way to break them all free. It goes on for over 100 pages, with an elaborate plan that involves secretly drilling into an asteroid and taking enormous risks. I got really into it, rooting for them to succeed… only for the whole thing to fail miserably, to the point where all of the characters involved in the actual escape attempt to die horribly, and everyone else who was enslaved (including a 14 year old girl, a major character in the book, who is sexually exploited by the villain of the novel) to go on about their happy little mentally enslaved lives without even realizing what had happened.

After that enormous letdown, I just couldn’t get back into the book. The stuff with the aliens was really cool, and I enjoyed that very much, but all of the stuff with the humans just made me want to stop reading the book. It was a little bit like my experience with Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, except with that book, there was never the false hope that the humans were on the verge of heroically saving themselves; things just kept getting progressively worse and worse until the alien and human storylines converged, in an awesome and thoroughly satisfying way. And maybe that happens in A Deepness in the Sky too, but I don’t know if I’ll ever find out. Maybe someday.

I enjoyed the first few Vorkosigan Saga books, especially The Warrior’s Apprentice. I even enjoyed some of the spinoff novels that aren’t about Miles Vorkosigan, like Ethan of Athos. But the later books in the series just feel too much like a soap opera rehash of the characters from the earlier books. That was why I couldn’t really get into A Civil Campaign.

It also doesn’t help that I read a bunch of the books out of order, partially because they were written out of order and partially because the order of the books isn’t clearly labeled (and how can they be, with how Bujold is always skipping around writing in different parts of the timeline?) Whenever I start a new series, I always try to read it in chronological order, not publication order, but in every Vorkosigan novel I read, it seems that Bujold refers to at least half a dozen things that happened in some previous book that I haven’t read. Some of these, apparently, are books she hasn’t written yet (or books that she hadn’t yet written at the time when I was reading).

So my whole experience of the Vorkosigan Saga has just been very confusing all around. And looking back, I can say that neither the publication order nor the chronological order is the right way to read the series. Shards of Honor and Falling Free really aren’t the best books to start out with, even though they happen first chronologically, but a part of me wishes I’d read Barrayar before The Warrior’s Apprentice, since that would have made a lot of the political intrigue much more satisfying.

Honestly, though, it seems to me that the Vorkosigan Saga has just gone on way too long in general. Which is probably why I couldn’t get into A Civil Campaign.

As for Cryptonomicon, it was way too dense and raunchy. The first chapter has more homoerotic innuendo than explicit gay sex, but it was still just too much for me, and the writing was so dense that I never really got into the novel itself. Neal Stephenson’s writing has always been like that for me, and I’ve read enough of his other books to know that he definitely crosses the line in terms of explicit sexual content. I’ve never been able to finish anything he’s written. I was tempted to put Cryptonomicon beneath No Award, but I decided it didn’t quite cross that line for me. It’s close, though.

I forget why I DNFed Darwin’s Radio, but I think it mostly had to do with how I really didn’t care about any of the characters. I think the main character was having an affair or something, too, which made me really not like him. That’s the thing about high-concept science fiction: the plot or characters are often not nearly as well thought out, and since that’s what I often read for, I sometimes find it really difficult to get into those kinds of books. But it wasn’t terrible, just not my kind of story.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

Reading Resolution Update: June

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

This is the last one of these resolution updates that I’m going to post here on this blog. I’ve only got three books left now: Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold (1989 Nebula), A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1993 Hugo), and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (1993 Hugo and Nebula). Since I already own all of those, I’ll probably finish reading them by the end of July, and the only other books I need to acquire to finish the resolution are Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1964 Hugo), Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007 Hugo), and Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin (2009 Nebula).

I will, however, do an in-depth study of the final results and post them here. There should be some interesting trends, and hopefully my own reading preferences will provide some useful insights, though really those preferences say more about me than they do about these books. Reading tastes are very subjective, so I’m sure there are a lot of good and brilliant people who love some of these books that I’ve passed on, and vice versa. But maybe sharing my own reading preferences will help others to develop their own, and if that helps to encourage more reading, that would be great.

One of the major insights that I’ve already discovered is that the best predictor that I will not like a book is if it won a Nebula without winning a Hugo. In a post last month, I speculated as to why that may be. I’ve already expanded my Hugo/Nebula award spreadsheet to include all of the nominated books as well, but I’ve blacked out the Nebula nominated books and will probably skip most of them. After all, if there’s something about the Nebula books that rubs me the wrong way, maybe I can get more use from that award by using it as a “do not read” list rather than a recommended reading list.

I’m also branching out to the Dragons and Goodreads Choice award-winning books, starting with the most recent ones and working my way back. The really neat thing about Goodreads Choice is that they post how many votes each top-20 book got in each category, and how many votes were cast in each category overall, so it’s very easy to quantify and rank each book. For example, in the science fiction category, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir won first place in 2021 with 92,831 votes out of 281,584, or a 32.97% plurality. That is the largest plurality that any book has ever won in that category, so either Project Hail Mary is a damned good book, or all the other books really sucked—and I tend to think it’s the former, which is why I’m reading it now.

The Dragons are very different, but I haven’t read enough of them to notice any trends or form any opinions. However, there are some indications that the Dragons are the anti-Hugos/Nebulas, and to some lesser extent the anti-Goodreads Choice Awards, which seem to swing more toward the Hugo/Nebula crowd, even if most of the Hugo and Nebula nominated books only typically get between 5% and <1% of the vote. To gather more data, I’ve decided not to skip any of the Hugo/Nebula books that placed in the Goodreads Choice Award, especially since 2015 when the Sad Puppies schism really shook things up in the science fiction book world. So it will be interesting to see which of these books I think are worth reading and owning, and which ones I think aren’t.

So in short, now that I’ve (just about) read all of the Hugo and Nebula winning books, I’m going to move on to the Hugo (but not Nebula) nominated books, the Dragons, and the Goodreads Choice winners and nominees. But I’m not going to set a deadline, or hold myself to reading all of them. Rather, I’m just going to take it as a starting point, and instead set a goal of 100 pages per day, reading whatever strikes my fancy.

Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired

Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1990 Hugo)

Books that I did not finish

Startide Rising by David Brin (1984 Hugo and Nebula)
The Uplift War by David Brin (1988 Hugo)
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (1999 Hugo)
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2000 Hugo)
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear (2001 Nebula)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke (2005 Hugo)
A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark (2022 Nebula)

Reading Resolution Update: April

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

In 2007, when I was a sophomore in college, I went up to Salt Lake City with some friends and was browsing the awesome (and fairly run down, even at the time) used bookstore near the Gallivan Plaza TRAX stop, which has since changed names and moved to another location. It was a really awesome used bookstore, and I determined to buy a SF novel while I was there, since I was really getting back into SF after my mission. I saw a massive 600+ page trade paperback edition of Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, and since I was reading Downbelow Station at the time, I decided to get that one.

For the next fifteen years, I lugged that book everywhere, through more than a dozen moves (though for the biggest move, where I made the pioneer trek in the wrong direction and repented 8 months later, I boxed it up with my other books and left it in a friend’s basement). In all that time, I never actually read it—or even opened it up, really—but it was always there, somewhere in the middle of my dismally long TBR list.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read it: I just didn’t have (or make) the time. Downbelow Station had been an okay read, if not spectacular, but I had really enjoyed some of C.J. Cherryh’s shorter books, like Merchanter’s Luck and Voyager in Night. Also, space opera books about sprawling galactic empires were right up my wheelhouse, so it didn’t seem odd for me to own such a book that I hadn’t yet read. In fact, most of the books that I owned throughout this time were books that I wanted to read but hadn’t gotten around to yet. If I have a superpower, it’s an uncanny ability to acquire books no matter where I am. Unfortunately, I’m not as good at reading them.

Fast forward to 2022. I’ve gotten married, had a daughter, launched my own writing career, and become a homeowner—and I’m still lugging this massive 600+ page trade paperback book that I’ve never read. But I’ve just set a resolution to read (or DNF) every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, and Cyteen is on the list. So around the middle of March, I finally open it up and start reading it.

After about a month, I decided to DNF it.

It’s not that it was terrible. Perhaps you enjoyed it, and that’s fine. I just found it to be too drawn out and confusing. I think C.J. Cherryh does better when she’s focusing on just a few characters, rather than trying to give the grand sweep of galactic civilization or whatever. I didn’t finish Foreigner for similar reasons. Maybe someday I’ll return to that one and Cyteen, but for now, I’m counting it as a DNF.

But the thing is, I was hauling around this massive book for most of my adult life. When I bought it in 2007, I figured that since it had won a Hugo, it had to be good. Perhaps, if I’d read it back then, I would have been more patient with it and slogged through to the end. Perhaps I would have decided it was just as good as Downbelow Station. Or perhaps, if I read Downbelow Station today, I would end up DNFing it as well.

The point is, I wish I’d been a lot more discerning about my reading when I was younger, and not just acquired books that I hoped to read “someday”… because books (at least the paper ones) are heavy and take up a lot of space. And a lot of them really aren’t worth reading. Of course, you’ve got to read a few stinkers to figure out what you really like, so it isn’t always a waste… but libraries exist for a reason.

So what this experience really tells me is that Mrs. Vasicek and I are doing the right thing by taking our family to our local library once a week. Also, it tells me that the second part of my resolution—to actually acquire all of the books that I think were worth reading—is just as important as actually reading them. Because, if the ultimate goal is to “seek… out of the best books words of wisdom,” then it’s not enough to just make a list: you actually have to read the damned things, and keep your own personal library in order to revisit those words and share them with others. Because ultimately, you have to discover which books are the “best books” on your own, and your best books list isn’t going to be the same as anyone else’s best books list. Which means that you can’t rely on anyone else’s list. You can use it as a starting point to make your own list, but that’s all you should use it for.

So now I want to go through all of the books I’ve acquired over the years and figure out which ones I ought to get rid of, because Cyteen certainly wasn’t the only one. In fact, most of the books in our family library are books that I haven’t (yet) read. By my count, there are just under 150 of them, totalling about 55k words. Even at a rate of 100 words or two hours of reading each day, that’s still going to take almost two years… and that’s not counting all the library books that we’re sure to check out in the meantime.

Oh well. I suppose this is more of a process than anything else. Journey before destination, and all that. And I’m sure I’ll have fun in the process, since despite the fact that I DNF far more books than I actually read, I do genuinely enjoy reading.

In any case, here are all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books that I read (or DNFed) in the month of April:

Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired:

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007 Hugo)
Blackout by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo and Nebula) (audio)

Books that I read and do not plan to acquire:

Blackout by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo and Nebula) (print)

Books that I did not finish:

A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg (1972 Nebula)
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (1973 Hugo and Nebula)
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (1980 Hugo and Nebula)
The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe (1982 Nebula)
Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh (1989 Hugo)
Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (1991 Nebula)
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1996 Hugo)
The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N. McIntyre (1998 Nebula)
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler (2000 Nebula)
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2013 Nebula)
Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein (1943 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2018)
The Nemesis from Terra by Leigh Brackett (1945 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2020)

Total books remaining: 26 out of 110 (currently reading 12 and listening to 3).

Reading Resolution Update: January

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

I had expected to DNF a lot of these books, but I was a little dismayed at how terrible they are. Or rather, how some of them can be so well-written and yet so idelogically possessed.

For a while, I worried that I was pre-judging some of these books too harshly, based on my opinions of the author. After all, shouldn’t art be treated separately from the artist? But then I decided that it would be better to lean into that bias, and trust my intuition. After all, it’s impossible to approach reading without a personal bias—and even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be advisable.

One of the key things I’m hoping to take away from reading these books is a better understanding of my own personal tastes. Toward that end, it’s much better to DNF early and often, since that tells me something valuable about my own tastes. I’ll get much more out of this exercise if I pay attention to that than whether or not I’m being “fair” to a particular book or author.

As for how my bias against an author might prejudice me against a book, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem so long as I’m aware of those biases. Yes, it makes it more likely that I’ll read a book with a critical eye, and not in the way that I typically read for enjoyment, but that goes both ways, since if I do enjoy a book, that’s going to improve my opinion of the author (or at least make me reconsider my opinion). So long as I’m aware of my biases and make sure that they aren’t set in stone, I think it should be fine

Besides, it’s not like I have anything to prove. Sure, China Mike Glyer might pull out an excerpt from this post to use as content (hi China Mike!), but I couldn’t care less what that particular corner of fandom thinks about my public ruminations. I will know if I’m being too “unfair” to a book or an author, and the only criterion that really matters is whether I have a clear reason for DNFing the book, separate from my biases about the author.

And honestly, what I’ve found so far is that my biases are pretty spot on. Authors who behave insufferably in public or on the internet tend to write some pretty insufferable books, especially if they’re woke.

Fortunately, I have found a few new-to-me books and authors who are really fantastic. And my decision to DNF early and often is helping to keep it from becoming too much of a slog, which is good. It also means that I may complete this resolution a lot sooner than I’d expected, at which point I’ll probably move on to the Dragons or the Prometheus awards.

In any case, here are all the Hugo and Nebula awared-winning novels that I read or DNFed in January 2022:

Books that I read and plan to / have already acquired:

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1964 Hugo)
Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov (1983 Hugo)
The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (1991 Hugo)
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2015 Nebula)

Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:

None

Books that I did not finish:

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (1958 Hugo)
A Case of Conscience by James Blish (1959 Hugo)
The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1965 Hugo)
The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany (1968 Nebula)
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (1969 Hugo)
Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin (1969 Nebula)
Man Plus by Frederik Pohl (1977 Nebula)
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1979 Hugo and Nebula)
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (20000 Hugo) (My wife recommended this one, and I will probably try it again, since I took a break midway through and forgot who all of the characters were. But for now, I’m counting it as a soft DNF.)
Camouflage by Joe Haldeman (2006 Nebula)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010 Hugo and Nebula)
Redshirts by John Scalzi (2013 Hugo)
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2014 Hugo and Nebula)
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2017 Nebula)
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (2019 Hugo and Nebula)
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2020 Hugo)
A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker (2021 Nebula)