81st World Science Fiction Convention Announces 2023 Hugo Awards (gizmodo.com) 22
The World Science Fiction Society "administers and presents the Hugo Awards, the oldest and most noteworthy award for science fiction," according to Wikipedia. Its members vote on each year's winners, and this year they received 1,847 nominating ballots.
This year the 81st edition of their World Science Fiction Convention was held from October 18 to 22 in Chengdu, China. More details from Gizmodo: While fan-favorite cozy fantasy novel Legends & Lattes lost Best Novel to T. Kingfisher's excellent horror-fantasy Nettle & Bone, Legends & Lattes author Travis Baldtree won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Everything Everywhere All at Once snagged film's top honor, and The Expanse's finale episode did the same for televsion, beating out both nominated Andor episodes among others. Some other great standouts include short fiction editor Neil Clarke, who has kept Clarkesworld magazine running despite getting swamped by AI-generated submissions earlier this year.
And "By winning Best Graphic Story or Comic, [Bartosz] Sztybor-who also served as a producer on the overwhelmingly popular Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners-also becomes the first Polish author to win a Hugo," reports Forbes: [Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams] is set in Night City-as seen in Cyberpunk 2077-and follows the story of two small-time thieves, Tasha and Mirek, who are trying to survive the harsh metropolis together. "Tasha and Mirek make a living for themselves stealing cyberware and indulging in parties and braindances," the official teaser explains...
Other highlights from this year's awards:
This year the 81st edition of their World Science Fiction Convention was held from October 18 to 22 in Chengdu, China. More details from Gizmodo: While fan-favorite cozy fantasy novel Legends & Lattes lost Best Novel to T. Kingfisher's excellent horror-fantasy Nettle & Bone, Legends & Lattes author Travis Baldtree won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Everything Everywhere All at Once snagged film's top honor, and The Expanse's finale episode did the same for televsion, beating out both nominated Andor episodes among others. Some other great standouts include short fiction editor Neil Clarke, who has kept Clarkesworld magazine running despite getting swamped by AI-generated submissions earlier this year.
And "By winning Best Graphic Story or Comic, [Bartosz] Sztybor-who also served as a producer on the overwhelmingly popular Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners-also becomes the first Polish author to win a Hugo," reports Forbes: [Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams] is set in Night City-as seen in Cyberpunk 2077-and follows the story of two small-time thieves, Tasha and Mirek, who are trying to survive the harsh metropolis together. "Tasha and Mirek make a living for themselves stealing cyberware and indulging in parties and braindances," the official teaser explains...
Other highlights from this year's awards:
- Best novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
- Best Novelette: "The Space-Time Painter", by Hai Ya (Galaxy's Edge, April 2022)
- Best Short Story: "Rabbit Test", by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2022)
- Best Series: Children of Time series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit)
- Best Related Work: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins (Doubleday)
As an avid SF reader... (Score:5, Insightful)
...I increasingly find myself in trouble in where to turn to for new fiction. I've read through all the Hugo and Nebula winners and follow-ups, and I've been mostly happy with what I've read.
However, there are some issues with the Hugos at present.
The one thing is the conflagration of Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It seems that many people think the two are either synonyms, or closely related, or at the very least "made of the same stuff". I couldn't disagree more - I think Sci-Fi is a completely different thing from Fantasy. The Hugos have leaned heavily towards SF in the past, and this no longer seems to be the case. This saddens me.
The second thing is more controversial. I think the quality of the novels in the Awards is declining, or getting more irrational. This might be politics - I did not follow the whole "rabbits" debate in its entirety, but "The Calculating Stars" - Winner in 2019 - was a really bad piece of fiction. I mean really bad! I read some stuff from self-published authors on Amazon, and this compares. I'm really unhappy that this made it into the Hugos.
So, Nettle & Bone. Not SF. But I can recommend "The Kaiju Preservation Society" which is a runner-up and is definitely SF.
Re: (Score:2)
Are the Hugos still politicised? There was some group a few years back which stuffed the virtual ballot boxes for candidates espousing certain values. One of those candidates - Marko Kloos - was so enthused by this that he withdrew his story from consideration.
Re: (Score:1)
The Hugo is no longer a representative of the best of sci fi and fantasy. They are now excluding many others because their personal political views are different, completely ignoring the quality of the work. They are giving awards to authors for espousing the "right" politics for works that are far below the standards the award should represent. For example, Scalzi's "Red Shirts" got best novel. It's not a bad story, but it's not a great story, and Best Novel must be a great story.
When the conservative
Re: (Score:2)
Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries - a collection of short stories - didn't even make it halfway through before giving up.
Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub - this one I did finish, but not really scifi, very Kafka-esqe what is real type stuff, but if I wanted that, I'd read Kafka.
Re: (Score:2)
AFAIK, nothing of at all that Lem has written has been included in the Hugo Awards.
This doesn't mean that you are wrong though - stuff can, and will, get old.
But I think that bodies such as the organization behind the Hugos should explicitly watch out for this, ie. exclude titles that have problematic references to the current world. I do think they mostly did a good job of this.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of what the average person things of as sci-fi, stuff like Star Trek and Star Wars, is actually fantasy and adventure. The sci-fi aspects are basically the adoption of a few tropes like space ships and robots, with none of the science part. So that's why there is conflation.
As for declining quality, it always seems that way because when we look back we only remember the good stuff. Most years are pretty average, the true classics come along rarely.
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sci-fi is based on rules. "Science" in it may be fantastic but it has rules and those rules must be followed.
Fantasy is based on magic. There are no rules, anything can be hand-waived and explained with magic. It is lazy writing.
Both Star Trek and Star Wars USED TO follow strictly defined rules.
Even literal hand-waive like "These aren't the droids you are looking for" was explained with logical rules - "The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded".
Hell, midi-chlorians are a representation of a rule-based story universe. It is BAD, but it is a rule the story tries to adhere to.
Now it is no longer the case.
Both Star Trek and Star Wars are written by people who neither understand the original material nor care about it - nor do they know how to write.
E.g. Jar Jar Abrams's Kirk gets cured from a case of BEING DEAD through an injection of Khan's blood. In the same movie teleporters send people literally across the entire galaxy.
Both of those things, a literal cure for death and obsolescence of spaceships, are completely ignored in the sequel.
That's lazy writing by incompetent hacks.
Who basically adopt a few tropes like space ships and robots, with none of the science part - but write garbage where there are no rules but the will of the plot and the rule of cool.
That's where the conflation is.
Same goes for quality.
Yes, 90% of everything is crap. [wikipedia.org]
But now there is MORE OF IT, barrier to entry is lower, there is far more low-taste audience for crap (literally billions of new humans) and everything is cheaper to produce.
I.e. We are way beyond 90% now.
We literally have a new genre for "not children but not quite adults" [wikipedia.org] now.
Neither Sci-fi nor fantasy used to have to be pigeonholed like that - it was one-size-fits-all.
You know... Kids would play being Luke Skywalker and Han Solo (or Flash Gordon) - no one played as Wesley Crusher.
There was no need to hand people an age appropriate in-story surrogate.
The reason there is a need for that now is that the quality is such that the publishers and authors have to hook the audience with something other than the story.
No wonder isekai [wikipedia.org] and LitRPG [wikipedia.org] are now genres.
Both are about wish fulfillment fantasies of the reader.
Re: (Score:2)
Sci-fi is based on rules. "Science" in it may be fantastic but it has rules and those rules must be followed.
Fantasy is based on magic.
That's your definition, which is purely as subjective as anybody else's. Ask a hundred people to define either genre, and you'll get a hundred different answers. Ask again tomorrow, and you'll a hundred other different answers. The only meaningful answer is "I know it when I see it." For most, it amounts to "what I like is sci-fi, what I don't is fantasy" or the opposite.
The only objective definition of any genre is the marketing one: "We're calling this sci-fi because we want book stores to shelve it with
Re: (Score:3)
Have you seen the original series of Star Trek? They took Spock's brain out and turned it into a computer, then put it back in again.
TNG was little better. The very first episode introduced Q, whose powers are seemingly unlimited. Voyager went beyond Warp 10 (infinite velocity).
Really magic blood is low on the scale of nonsense that Star Trek regularly came up with. As for Star Wars, sound in space should be enough to tell you how lightweight that is. More than that, it misses opportunities to look at inter
Re: (Score:2)
Spock's Brain was poorly written, but it was science fiction. Not even all that fantastical when you think about it. It's just brain surgery... Kelly sold it.
Then again, it's not like classic Trek wasn't full of energy beings who could make stuff appear and disappear at will... but at least it was the 60s. I'm less inclined to give slack to modern writers.
Re: (Score:2)
None of it really matters. Strange New Worlds in particular has great stories and great characters. The rest is just the background. It looks incredible too.
Re:As an avid SF reader... (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole Sci-Fi and Fantasy genre is a strange one.
Because in the beginning, the whole point was to be able to do political stories without writing a political story. It's really hard to get someone to reflect on themselves if they get disgusted by what they're reading.
For example, racism is a really hard topic - the racists will never read a story about it, while the non-racists aren't really the audience you want to reach.
But now transform the worlds. Instead of racists, you go speciesist. It's certainly easier to talk about racism in the form of treating aliens badly (or androids, or cyborgs, or mutants, or anyone else "different'), especially if you start setting the locales in mystical places.
Your spaceship suddenly models a small community. Your little orc village becomes a representation of a town, etc.
That's the real truth to why it's "Sci-Fi and Fantasy" - because that was the whole reason for the genre - political science studies wrapped up in metaphor.
And some times it's easier to do things that way - "in a future where humanity discovers itself" we can have spaceships where the bridge has a Black woman, a Russian and other minorities - yes Star Trek TOS was designed to be woke from the get-go. And yes, it did work, for many female astronauts saw Nichelle Nichols play Uhura and got encouraged.
That's the truth of the genre. It's an exploration of humanity, removed from humanity. All the Sci-Fi and Fantasy writers used it to explore what it means to be human. It was a genre that allowed projection and portrayal from other points of view. You want to see what happens when government is managed like a business? There are books on it that explore what happens when every breath you take is billed for.
I suppose those complaining about "political" simply want a story where the subtext is less obvious and more subtle, to hope a story in the genre doesn't irk their beliefs. Though some do really make their point a bit too obvious
Re: (Score:1)
"Star Trek TOS was designed to be woke from the get-go. And yes, it did work, for many female astronauts saw Nichelle Nichols play Uhura and got encouraged."
Indeed. But perhaps they've passed the point of diminishing returns?
TNG was quite 'liberal' but still a terrific show.
DS9 was on the verge of work, and was pretty shit until the last couple seasons where they had nothing to lose. Is it worth watching 4 seasons of pap to get to 2 seasons of good? Meh?
Voyager was WIDELY recognized at the time as driven
Re: (Score:2)
The TNG casting was, for me, a massive let-down. Set 100 years after, and produced 25 years after TOS, I expected it to push beyond the edges of TOS' casting, but instead it mostly regressed:
TOS had a young white male captain, TNG had an old white male captain.
TOS had a mixed-breed human/alien guy as first officer - and originally was going to have a woman as first officer! TNG had a young(ish) white male human first officer.
TOS had Uhuru, TNG had zero black women characters in the main cast.
TOS started wit
Thank goodness! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I had to go double-check that somehow, Stanislaw Lem never won a Hugo. They give out at least one retro award, so hopefully that will be remedied.
I've only read a few of his books but they were all excellent, and all hilarious yet usually still quite thoughtful. The Cyberiad in particular is a tour de force, exploring many of the possibilities around artificial intelligences, well before cyberpunk.
Science Fiction Magazines (Score:3)
Top 10 Science Fiction Magazines [everywritersresource.com]