Congratulations to all of the Hugo Awards winners! We are still in the hospital, and since the award ceremony was in Reno and didn’t start until 11pm here on the East Coast, I couldn’t watch it live streamed online. I had the Little Miss sleeping in my arms while I followed the various Twitter feeds announcing the winners of the various award categories. This was the first time that I knew a number of the winners: Mary Robinette Kowal, who won in the Best Short Story category for her story “For Want of a Nail”; Allen Steele, who won in the Best Novelette category for his story, “The Emperor of Mars”; and Connie Willis won in the Best Novel category for what I think I one of the best novels I’ve ever read, regardless of genre, Blackout/All Clear. You can find a list of all of the winners over at SF Signal.
Everyone has their disappointments when it comes to the winners (mine was that Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg’s outstanding book, The Business of Science Fiction didn’t win for Best Related Book; but that category was dominated by the highly popular Doctor Who series) but in the end, I really think that we all–science fiction fans and writers alike–are winners. As I wrote recently in a my Wayward Time Traveler column on SF Signal, the Hugo Awards are a way for fans to express their appreciation to their favorite writers and admiration for their favorite works. It is a celebration of what fans think of as the best the genre has to offer–and isn’t that why we write? To produce the best we have to offer? The Hugo awards are also a long standing tradition in science fiction, going all the way back to 1953, nearly sixty years. For me, it’s nice to know that, despite the changing and evolving nature of the genre, we still share something in common with those folks who participated in the first Hugo awards.
From the tweets I read while my little girl was curled up in my arms in the wee hours of the morning, most people sounded genuinely excited and thrilled as the awards were announced and the winners made their speeches. That kind of comeraderie is hard to come by, but we have it in droves in our genre–which is why we are all of us winners when it comes to the Hugo Awards.
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I’ve seen a fair amount of disappointment that the Willis won.
I haven’t read it, myself. Too many books, too little time. But Willis is a popular Hugo nominee, and so I thought it was going to come down to her and Bujold.
I was surprised that Feed very nearly won, in the end.
I think I could make a case that I don’t belong to the set of “We’re all winners when it comes to the Hugo Awards.” 🙂
Steven, of course, I was speaking of the collective “we”, meaning science fiction as a whole. It must be frustrating to get nominated again and again and not win. But the high quality of the nominees raises the bar as much as the works and people that win. So your hard work is by no means for nothing. You help to make the genre better. 🙂
You’re a winner in my book Steven!
(Unfortunately, the name of my book isn’t “The Long List of Hugo Award Recipients”.)