2014 hugo winners. have you read any?

Vince W

Vince W

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I haven't read a single Hugo winner or nominee for that matter. My TBR pile just is getting higher. I considered picking up the winner Ancillary Justice, but never bothered.

I did see Gravity, but I don't really consider that SF/Fantasy and shouldn't have been nominated in the first place.
 
Yes, unusually, as I don't read very much new material at all. I've read the winning novel, Ancillary Justice: reviews of the book on Chronicles can be found here.
 
Of the winners, I've seen Gravity and read Ancillary Justice. I've purchased Stross' Neptune's Brood, but haven't gotten to it yet. Gravity was interesting enough and I liked it okay, but it was not all that great to me. I didn't like Ancillary Justice.

Of the nominees, I've read Brad Torgersen's "The Chaplain's Legacy" and "The Exchange Officers" and, for something completely different, Rachel Swirsky's "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love". I can't speak to the winners but it must be a damn good story to be better than "The Chaplain's Legacy" (a tale of an atheist assistant to a dead preacher helping humans and trying to achieve peace when confronting xenocidal aliens). On the other hand, while I enjoyed the heck out of "The Exchange Officers" (the Chinese try to steal a US satellite and telepresence warriors defend it), I don't feel it was intrinsically Hugo-worthy (in an ideal sense - Hugos aren't worth anything any more). It was nominee-worthy, but not winner-worthy. With "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" (which you can read free online along with several others) I can easily see hating it if it hits you wrong and I agree with the arguments that it isn't SF or F but it's an excellent story to me. I can't really describe the very short piece without spoiling it.

For nominees below the cutoff, I've seen Europa Report for BDP-L and the Sleepy Hollow pilot for BDP-S. I didn't like the pilot but gave it another try and then quit at the "witchburning is good" episode. Having seen both Gravity and Europa Report I can speak to the winner this time and it's a disgrace to the SF community that Europa Report was cut off when it should have not only made the final ballot but beaten the winner. Yeah, the "found footage" and "artfully glitchily edited" aspects of the production are too cute but the tale of a privately funded expedition to explore Europa, especially in terms of extra-terrestrial life, was one of the few truly "proverbially good SF movies" ever.

It's not a Hugo but presented at the same time and place and, of the JWC nominees, I've read Madeleine Ashby and Ann Leckie. I wasn't overwhelmed with either debut but I enjoyed Ashby's much more - she's more likable and seems much fresher and energetic than the 60s-feeling Leckie. (The actual winner was Samatar (who?) because Leckie withdrew herself on a technicality, IIRC. Otherwise, Leckie's actual fiction winning 67 awards and Samatar's winning possibly none and her beating Leckie is inexplicable. Leaving aside that the awards shower for Leckie is inexplicable in the first place.)
 
J-Sun said:
Leaving aside that the awards shower for Leckie is inexplicable in the first place.)
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For me, the awards can be explained or justified by the fact that she wrote an excellent SF book. Sounds like we'll have to agree to disagree on this one; horses for courses and all that. I usually look for fault if something wins so much (being British and naturally supporting the underdog, not the winner), but Leckie's novel really won me over despite reservations going in. I actually think its one of the better Hugo/Nebula winners I've read. By contrast, I'm reading A Deepness in the Sky now, which everybody lauds to the skies, and I'm really struggling. Its overly long and badly paced. I'd say Leckie's novel is superior, just to make one (admittedly fairly random) comparison with an earlier winner.
 
Yep, horses, as Deepness was great (at least really, really, good) to me - similarly, I have reservations about any gigantically long book going in but both Vinge's won me over. (Of course, he had help from the fact that I'd already read and liked shorter Vinge pieces and Deepness had help from Fire.)

It's not that people like it - as you say, horses, again - or even that it won an award (who can explain any award?) but it's that it's won more awards than any first novel I can think of unless maybe Neuromancer - maybe even that - that baffles me. (Orbit's PR/marketing folks deserve some kind of award themselves.)

(BTW, since I posted about Torgersen on this thread and Michael Colton's thread made me realize people "in the know" might misconstrue the comments, I'd like to link to that: post.)
 
Yes, the fact that Leckie's novel won quite so many awards is unusual. If you didn't like it so much J-Sun, you could pop a few comments in the review thread to offer some balance - all the reviews are quite positive at the moment, though I suspect it does divide readers, its a "marmite" kind of book I suspect. (Do folk in the US know what that means?)
 
Bick said:
Yes, the fact that Leckie's novel won quite so many awards is unusual. If you didn't like it so much J-Sun, you could pop a few comments in the review thread to offer some balance - all the reviews are quite positive at the moment, though I suspect it does divide readers, its a "marmite" kind of book I suspect. (Do folk in the US know what that means?)
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I think I do - it's some kind of food - maybe a spread of some kind or something - that some people love and some people hate. But I doubt many Americans would know it - I think just people who hang out on "Anglosphere" boards might know it. (If I'm getting it right, I got it from a Buffy, the Vampire Slayer board, I think. :))

As far as posting something on the review thread, thanks for the invite and I may try but I'm not sure I can say much sensible. It was the sort of book that didn't really make enough of an impact for me to articulate why it seemed the way it did or to remember it well even if it was just six months ago or so.
 
J-Sun said:
I think I do - it's some kind of food - maybe a spread of some kind or something - that some people love and some people hate.
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Exactly.
Literally, it is this.
But commonly now the term is used to mean this.

[Sorry - thread can now get back to discussion of the Hugo winners :oops: ]
 
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J-Sun said:
I didn't like Ancillary Justice.
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I ran across a small free portion of AJ on the net. An AI that was a starship somehow had it mind incorporated into a human body and is on some cold primitive planet where it encounters a drunken human that was once crew aboard the ship.

It wasn't either bad or good, the story could go either way. But an AI turned human does not really appeal to me.

psik
 
I've read Kameron Hurley's God's War (part one of the Bel Dame Apocrypha). She didn't actually win for that book, but it is excellent. I've already got the second one, Infidel, lined up on my Kindle.
 
Bear with me, as I'm doing this from a phone using the mobile interface.

Okay...I read at least the extended previews of all the best novel nominees ( and 7 WOT books). I think the best of the short listed novels won. I thought AJ was good and thought-provoking; I don't think, however, it was the best SF/F novel of 2013. (See my review at the blog for more extensive opinions...sorry I can't link here). Yet it was clearly better than the other short listed novels, so it deserved to win over the other choices.

I was not impressed by the short fiction category winners (or many of the other nominees, frankly); odd, as I usually find these more reliable than best novel. Some great stories got robbed.

All that said, I was very happy that A Dribble of Ink won best fanzine and that Sofia Samatar won the Campbell Award.
 
Okay, on the computer now. Here's the review of Ancillary Justice. Summary quote:

Ancillary Justice, simply put, is a novel of big ideas, and one that works unusually well at this level. It manages to pose questions while avoiding both the neat, ideological answers and overwrought pontificating that plague so much self-consciously "intellectual" genre. Unfortunately, the book's nuts and bolts at times fail to live up to the promise of these big ideas. Leckie also has a frustrating tendency to world-build via infodumping and, worse, through information relayed in dialogue that no character would actually speak because it would be too obvious to them and to the person they are speaking with. I understand that there's a lot of background information to relay, but the effect of leaving character perspective is jarring.

Given the theme of fragmented consciousness (both that of One Esk and Anaander Mianaai), it's perhaps unsurprising that Ancillary Justice is presented by way of a fragmented narrative. I like fragmented narratives, but they put additional pressure on the writer to resolve their fragmentation in a satisfying manner, Banks' Use of Weapons being a great example of how to apply this maxim to space opera. As the narratives come together, though, Leckie abandons the contemplative, atmospheric and deeply philosophical tone of the first 3/4 of the book for the kind of zippy action-adventure I expect from the average fantasy novel. It isn't that the ending is bad, per se, just that it fails to deliver on the book's promise.

Though Ancillary Justice is by no means perfect, it's also worth remembering that it is a debut novel; its teething problems, for the record, are also evident in Banks' Consider Phlebas and Reynolds' Revelation Space. Like those debuts, Ancillary Justice is a rewarding, if imperfect, read, and furthermore suggests that Leckie is a considerable talent whose best work is ahead of her.
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Oddly enough, as a hugo voter this year, I read... um, the vast majority of things that were nominated. I read all of the Novella, Novelette, and short stories, all of the related works and most of the novels but not the one that you would pick were you to be answering the question "Which best Novel nominee would you choose to weigh down your tent if it was threatening to blow away." I have in the past attempted the first part of it and fell into the slough of despondency and stopped.

My single favourite thing was "The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere" by John Chu, which won best short story - whilst the gimmick (the water that falls on you from nowhere) is under-explored in the sense of "How? Why? Where?" the exploration of the impact on one particular person and family, and the exquisitely invisible prose style, completely won me over.

Also beautiful, and I'm sad that it didn't win, is Jeff VanderMeer's "Wonderbook". A lovely, lovely thing for the ages.

On the other hand, Opera Vita ohgodIcan'tbebothered would now be lining the kitty litter tray, were it not in ebook form.
 
Pretty strong list of winners, though except in the Novel category I would've voted for other nominees. Ancillary Justice IMO isn't all that great to deserve the numerous awards, but it was still easily the best of the nominees which I've read. I would've chosen The Waiting Stars and Six-Gun Snow White in their categories, but the winners are strong stories too.
 
I can honestly say I've not read any of them-though I have seen Gravity.

Hugo awards do not generally cause me to impulse buy or read anything.

I am familiar with Julie Dillon's wonderful Art, though.
 
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