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Hugo time! Your packet is available! 2018


Lily Valley

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29 minutes ago, Calibandar said:

Jemisin's work in general is highly overrated and the fact that she keeps racking up this award speaks to the well known uselessness of the Hugo Award as an indicator of quality books.

She's also an NYT Bestseller and has received very positive reviews among a broad swath of reviewers, in and outside the genre. None of these things necessarily prove she is not overrated, but if she is, it's not just the WSFS membership doing so. Alternatively, it might just be your tastes that are at issue.

 

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2 hours ago, Calibandar said:

Jemisin's work in general is highly overrated and the fact that she keeps racking up this award speaks to the well known uselessness of the Hugo Award as an indicator of quality books.

Have you actually read the books in question? Or just her earlier stuff? The broken Earth is a noticeable improvement on her other stuff, demonstrating nicely her growth as an author.

And if you have read these books and didn’t enjoy them, see Ran’s post above. Just because they aren’t to your taste doesn’t indicate lack of quality, or that they are overrated

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Jemisin is totally in the zeitgeist with the Broken Earth, it's really unsurprising that many people love the series.

I mean, it's very well written but beyond that, it's written by an African American woman, it's about radical climate change, about racism, about slavery, about women seizing power, and about family in times of oppression. How many boxes does it check for an US readership?

Having said that, I am curious about its popularity outside the US, and I am not convinced it will have a great staying power, it feels really tied to the current times.

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3 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Complains about award then says award sucks and doesn’t matter. Riiiught.

Sounds like the response I got when I inquired about tweets hinting at "Nazis at worldcon" (we don't care, but we still complain):

 

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7 minutes ago, Errant Bard said:

 

Having said that, I am curious about its popularity outside the US, and I am not convinced it will have a great staying power, it feels really tied to the current times.

I think a lot of "issue SF" of the 60s and 70s are kind of the same, really. They're still great works of fiction, even if issues they spoke of may now seem trite, unnuanced, or passé.

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21 minutes ago, Ran said:

I think a lot of "issue SF" of the 60s and 70s are kind of the same, really. They're still great works of fiction, even if issues they spoke of may now seem trite, unnuanced, or passé.

True, I did not mean to imply that her books were different from most of the award-winning works of the past in that regard. Just musing about the zeitgeist and which other books would be the popular choice in another environment (in my country or in the future, for example)

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I haven't read the series, but it at least seems like a well-regarded winner, has put the memory of the embarrassing win of Redshirts behind us.

I do have an overwhelming feeling of dread that Space Opera (the lightest and frothiest of the light and frothy) will win next year, which might tilt us back towards that kind of situation, but fortunately the book's near-obscurity among the UK and Irish readership (who will probably be the voting majority next year) should put paid to that.

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Space opera would compete in the novella or novelette category, wouldn't it?

Why would a win be embarassing? It's a popular vote, the winner has a majority that chose to vote for him. Where is the problem?

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Quote

"...this is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers—every single mediocre insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor, that when they win it it’s meritocracy but when we win it it’s 'identity politics' — I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining, rocket-shaped middle finger in their direction." N.K. Jemisin

Sums up how I feel about the whingers in this thread. Your tears are delicious to me. 

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Overall I thought the winners were pretty solid. The only category where I seriously side-eyed the winner was novella, because I don't think that the winner was even the third best work in that category. On every metric -- writing, worldbuilding, narrative arc, character building, intellectual conceit -- it lagged, sometimes seriously, behind other nominees. But them's the breaks. Oh yeah, Rivers Solomon should have nabbed the Campbell award. 

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7 minutes ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

Overall I thought the winners were pretty solid. The only category where I seriously side-eyed the winner was novella, because I don't think that the winner was even the third best work in that category. On every metric -- writing, worldbuilding, narrative arc, character building, intellectual conceit -- it lagged, sometimes seriously, behind other nominees. But them's the breaks. Oh yeah, Rivers Solomon should have nabbed the Campbell award. 

So, I have come around on All Systems Red.  I will admit to being totally Team Gailey, and so my ballot reflected.  And, I balloted McGuire above as well (which I think was a mistake, upon reflection).  But the Wells offering has a weirdness to it, an incompleteness to it, that kind of still nags at me in a good short story kind of way, and, when I get around to it, will make me read the other 4/5 Murderbot books.   I thought the Orkorafor books are better as a bundle, and didn't think any of them hung together singly (but I love them all together - does that make sense?)

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14 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

Out of curiosity, who accepted the award on behalf of Wonder Woman?

A fan, Jonathan Grace -- possibly a member of the committe for the convention? -- who remarked on stage that Hollywood really needs to start sending people out to receive these awards.

BTW, full ceremony is online at https://youtu.be/Pt4UI_te7bs

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10 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

I'd say all the nearly all the other, if not all the other, awards, make sense in their way, but... Wonder Woman picked over Get Out and Shape of Water (or arguably over Blade Runner), really? (granted, that's more a discussion for Entertainment than for Literature).

Looking at winners from 2011 on, there's a pretty simple flow chart:

Is it a decent adaptation of an SF/F work by an established writer within the community? If yes, it wins. If no,

Is it a comic book film with a big box office? If yes, it wins.

Pre-2011 was a lot more interesting, and winners were less obvious in advance.

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