So here I am, cranking up the handle on the long-disused blog. The 2015 Hugo Awards are freshly awarded (and, frequently, not awarded). That means the nominating stats are available. And that means we can reconstruct what the ballot would have looked like* if the two Puppies slates had not been involved. Tobias Buckell has already done the hard work there; you should check out his blog post.
All of that means it's time for the 2015 Not A Hugo Awards.
This is my plan: I'm going to read the works that would have been nominated in the four fiction categories. I'm going to pick my favourites. If anyone else wants to read along with me, I'm happy to collate votes**, and award the winners completely-unofficial, in-no-way-affiliated Not A Hugo Awards. So, on with the nominees:
Best Novel
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US/Orbit UK)
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) (Tor Books)
The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator (Tor Books)
Lock In, John Scalzi (Tor Books)
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennet (Broadway Books/Jo Fletcher Books)
Three of the five Not A Hugo novels were also nominated for Hugo Awards, so hopefully this one should be easy for Hugo voters.
Best Novella
The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss (DAW)
The Regular, Ken Liu (Upgraded, Wyrm Publishing)
Yesterday's Kin, Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
Grand Jete, Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Press)
The Mothers of Voorheesville, Mary Rickert (Tor.com)
Two of the nominated works are available to read free online at the links provided: Grand Jete by Rachel Swirsky, and The Mothers of Voorheesville by Mary Rickert. In the remaining three cases, I've linked to the publisher's websites, where you can find lots of places to buy. None of these stories were nominated for Hugo Awards.
Best Novelette
The Day the World Turned Upside Down, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed)
Each to Each, Seanan McGuire (Lightspeed)
The Devil in America, Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com)
The Litany of Earth, Ruthann Emrys (Tor.com)
The Magician and Laplace's Demon, Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld)
Happily, all five of these stories can be read online for free, at the links provided. Only one--The Day the World Turned Upside Down by Thomas Olde Heuvelt--was also nominated for a Hugo Award.
Best Short Story
The Jackalope Wives, Ursula Vernon (Apex)
The Breath of War, Aliette de Bodard (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
The Truth About Owls, Amal el-Mohtar (Kaleidoscope, Twelfth Planet Press/Strange Horizons)
When it Ends, He Catches Her, Eugie Foster (Daily Science Fiction)
A Kiss with Teeth, Max Gladstone (Tor.com)
Again, all five nominees can be read for free at the links provided. None of these stories were nominated for Hugo Awards.
At some point I'll come back and set a deadline for the 2015 Not A Hugo votes. In the meantime, suggestions welcome!
* There are caveats, of course. Tobias Buckell points out that two of the short stories--the Eugie Foster and the Max Gladstone--may not have received enough votes to climb above the 5% threshold required for nomination. Like him, I'm including them anyway. Also, without digging carefully through the numbers I can't say with 100% confidence that none of the Puppies' nominees would've made it under their own steam. I'm excluding them anyway.
** If I do receive any votes, I'm totally using the official Hugo Awards voting system.
A couple of weeks back, I started reading Deadline [2011] by Mira Grant. It's the sequel to Feed [2010], which I read when it was on the Hugo ballot last year, and liked well enough. Deadline is on the Hugo ballot this year; that's why I picked it up.
A quarter of the way through, roughly 130 pages, I made the difficult decision to stop reading. As far as I can remember, this is the first time I've ever given up on a book part way through. I didn't stop because Deadline was bad. I stopped because I felt like I'd read it before, when I read Feed.
The plot was somewhat different (a logical extension of the first novel, as befits a proper sequel), and the characters had been shuffled around, but for all intents and purposes it was the same thing again: a gritty zombie conspiracy thriller. Which is fine if that sort of thing really excites you, or if you developed a particular attachment to the characters from the first novel. I didn't particularly, and so it ultimately didn't seem worth my while to keep reading.
That got me thinking about sequels in general, and specifically sequels on award ballots. Honestly, sequels on award ballots annoy me. For a start, they're rarely readable in isolation -- you couldn't possibly read A Dance With Dragons [2011] by George R. R. Martin without having read the previous four books in the series. Even if you could you probably wouldn't want to; much of the enjoyment of a sequel is in seeing how the story continues, or what happens to characters you love.
My second issue with sequels on awards ballots is more a matter of personal taste. I think a big part of my enjoyment reading science fiction and fantasy comes from a sense of discovery. I want to be surprised by an author's ideas, and I have lots of fun figuring new things out. I feel like a lot of that creative heavy lifting, with setting and concept and often character, occurs in the first novel in a series.
Which isn't to say that I dislike sequels. This last year I've read two series that I've really enjoyed: Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder series, and N. K. Jemisin's The Inheritance Trilogy. But I think I can honestly say that in each case, the first book in the series was the best.
There's one exception to this rule, and that's the sequel that utilises a familiar setting, but a completely new set of characters and situations. China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels fit the bill (I liked the second, The Scar [2002], best). So do (most of) Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels (Chasm City [2001] is my pick, the second in the series). Also Iain M. Banks' Culture novels (I'd probably go with Use of Weapons [1990], the third Culture novel).
I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that no sequel (of the continuing-story kind) should ever be eligible for an award. But I am going to contend that there has to be something really special going on for it to appear on a ballot. For me, sequels have an extra hurdle to overcome before I consider them worthy of award nominations. It's not enough that I love the series, or that I enjoyed the previous novels in it. It has to truly, honestly stand on its own.
