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Redshirts wins Hugo for Best Novel


Ser Scot A Ellison

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I enjoyed Among Others too, actually. But all its virtues are superficial ones-- it isn't actually about anything except how much fun it is to discover fandom. (Well, there's a very general sense in which it's about recovering from personal tragedy and escaping one's past, but it treats the topic so briefly and superficially that that scarcely counts.) I prefer award nominees to offer something a bit more surprising or challenging.

This discussion also demonstrates why "reforming" the Hugos is tricky. There's a broad agreement that its results are often lacking, but get down to the nitty-gritty and you find disagreements about what didn't deserve to win and why. I bet someone somewere has a problem with the Hugos as a whole but thinks that Redshirts was well-written, engaging, and funny, and would say Scalzi's personal popularity was an inevitable factor but not the whole story.

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I agree with Brandon about Among Others - I enjoyed it, and I'm something like in it's demographic (I'm a bit younger, but I grew up on the SF you could find on Israeli public library shelves, so it might as well have been the UK in the 70's) but the more I think about it the flimsier and more annoying it becomes. It probably would have stayed enjoyable if it hadn't won the Hugo and I didn't find myself thinking about it.

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No, it was nominated. It lost to Among Others. That's the point: at the Hugos, cuddly fan nostalgia trumps original SF-nal ideas. (To the extent that Embassytown's ideas were original.)

I consider myself reasonably well-read in fantasy/SF genre and I thought that the main SF-nal hook of "Embassytown" was fresh and original. With really interesting literary and theological references too.

Much as I loved "Among Others" - and I thought that magic in it was well written too, for instance (did get a bit too fannish in the end, admittedly) and the whole family history/relationship mess as well, if they ran the same year "Embassytown" should have won, IMHO, because it is a really well-rounded book with a fresh and interesting "big" idea.

But I couldn't disagree more that "Among Others" is supposed to be something to be ashamed of.

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Much as I loved "Among Others" - and I thought that magic in it was well written too, for instance (did get a bit too fannish in the end, admittedly) and the whole family history/relationship mess as well, if they ran the same year "Embassytown" should have won, IMHO, because it is a really well-rounded book with a fresh and interesting "big" idea.

Well, I still put ADWD first on my ballot, above Among Others and Embassytown, because ASOIAF, doh, but I would be happy with any of those three winning.

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I'd echo everything that others have said about Scalzi and have little to add (other than I don't think Redshirts is his worst novel...Fuzzy Nation was worse by far).

Personally speaking, I think the Hugo and Nebula awards are both helplessly broken and just about impossible to fix. There are lots of ways you could expand the voting base for the Hugos, but I think that would tend to increase awards going to the less worthy than decrease - more voters does not necessarily equal better results. Likewise, the Nebula awards have tended towards giving awards to writers other writers like, regardless of the actual book itself's quality (though generally speaking, I have fewer problems with the Nebulas other than that they're are completely divorced from the actual year they're given).

I was hoping that maybe next year might be the year that Guy Gavriel Kay finally gets recognition from the Hugos since a slightly different voting body will be in play and River of Stars is the best book I've read in 2013...but honestly...it'll probably be more of the same.

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Who is this demographic for Among Others supposed to be?

Alienated kids who grew up reading SF in the 70s who like SFF fandom is the impression I get.

Even more narrowly, people who have read those books. A lot of the appeal of the book, I think, comes from that pang of recognition. Ooh, she's gotten to Leguin, she's in for a treat! Hey, there's Zelazny, that's fun! Reading Heinlein and thinking about sex because you don't know any better, oh the lolz! etc, etc. (pretty much like Ready Player One, in my estimation.) Since Among Others' book list stops at 1980, there's a definitely age barrier there. That same book written for people a few decades younger is probably going to include reading Harry Potter or stumbling into your first online fandom and so on. That whole business with the Tuesday evening book club meeting at the library and the Ace doubles or whatever was going on in the book might as well be a fantasy setting if you were born after 1980.

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Even more narrowly, people who have read those books. A lot of the appeal of the book, I think, comes from that pang of recognition. Ooh, she's gotten to Leguin, she's in for a treat! Hey, there's Zelazny, that's fun! Reading Heinlein and thinking about sex because you don't know any better, oh the lolz! etc, etc. (pretty much like Ready Player One, in my estimation.) Since Among Others' book list stops at 1980, there's a definitely age barrier there. That same book written for people a few decades younger is probably going to include reading Harry Potter or stumbling into your first online fandom and so on. That whole business with the Tuesday evening book club meeting at the library and the Ace doubles or whatever was going on in the book might as well be a fantasy setting if you were born after 1980.

Wait, that stuff actually happened?

Wow. History is weird.

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I'm still amused by the account from Worldcon 2006 (IIRC), when KJA came out of a reading which only a few people had turned up to and saw a long line of people waiting for GRRM. Apparently he tried joking that he should brought some booze along to get more people to turn up, which seemed a random and confusing comment to make.

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I've always wanted to go to either of these events as a fan (especially to actually meet some of y'all that I've known going on 12 years now) and hope that some day I'll go there as a writer...but the weekend is just terrible for me. I'm a teacher and I usually have loads going on right before and definitely right afterwards. The fact that there is some attention being paid to YA makes me wonder if I'm going to give it a go someday soon.

I certainly understand your problems being a teacher - one of my best friends is a high school teacher and besides the costs, the timing of Labor Day WorldCons just doesn't work for her since school has already been in session for 5-10 days and she can't be taking days off so early in the semester.

Voting/supporting/advocating for off-Labor Day bids because of the conflict with your schedule (and the schedules of hundreds of teachers/parents/students who have the same problems you do) is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

In certain circumstances I would support non-Labor Day bids in NA. My fella is a traditionalist and believes that WorldCon in NA should be on Labor Day and when in the UK it should be on the bank Holiday in August.

But for a lot of working people, the chance of a 'free' day off to use in doing WorldCon is best served by keeping to one of the few 3-day weekends we have during the summer months. See how hard it is to do the 'right thing' for so many people with so many different needs? Maybe the best we can hope for is variation over the years with dates as well as locations and people can accept that maybe they can't make 2020 because of the dates, but 2021 they can go because it's being held just a few hundred miles form where they live. You know, share the good and the annoying bits to even out to a reasonable 'fairness' for more people.

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I'm still amused by the account from Worldcon 2006 (IIRC), when KJA came out of a reading which only a few people had turned up to and saw a long line of people waiting for GRRM. Apparently he tried joking that he should brought some booze along to get more people to turn up, which seemed a random and confusing comment to make.

Yeah, someone in here, I think peterbound, went to one of his panels once. Apparently he has absolutely zero idea about how his work is..uh...regarded by the scifi community at large.

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