2023 Hugo Awards • Hacker News Board

Re: 2023 Hugo Awards

#71

Post by lacker » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 6:25 AM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #67

lacker wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, is there some novel that you think was underlooked at this year's Hugo awards, like if you were running the show you would have given them the award? I feel like my tastes probably agree with yours but I am not sure if the problem is the Hugo voters or if there are just very few great books of the sort I most prefer the past few years.

2022 books? Sure. "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Nayler. "Beyond the Burn Line" by Paul MacAuley. "Eversion" by Alastair Reynolds. "The Thousand Earths" by Stephen Baxter. (Who, surprisingly, has never won a Hugo. This fact alone reflects very poorly on the Hugos.) "How High We Go in the Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu. I feel that all of these books were better than any of the nominated ones. I like Ken MacLeod's Light…

Ah, interesting - I did like The Mountain in the Sea, I forgot about that one. Eversion was decent too. I am going to get Beyond the Burn Line as a result of this comment's recommendation. So thanks!

Re: 2023 Hugo Awards

#72

Post by A_D_E_P_T » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 12:46 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #71

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2022 books? Sure. "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Nayler. "Beyond the Burn Line" by Paul MacAuley. "Eversion" by Alastair Reynolds. "The Thousand Earths" by Stephen Baxter. (Who, surprisingly, has never won a Hugo. This fact alone reflects very poorly on the Hugos.) "How High We Go in the Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu. I feel that all of these books were better than any of the nominated ones. I like Ken MacLeod's Light…

Ah, interesting - I did like The Mountain in the Sea, I forgot about that one. Eversion was decent too. I am going to get Beyond the Burn Line as a result of this comment's recommendation. So thanks!

McAuley's recent output (Austral, War of the Maps, Beyond the Burn Line,) has been very good -- and I'd say that those three books are all equal in terms of literary and entertainment quality.

All of them are, in a sense, the same type of story -- Person Goes on Journey Through Strange Territory -- but that's a solid foundation for a science fiction novel, and McAuley does it well, with more than enough variation to keep things interesting. Austral has near-future climate fiction and crime fiction elements; War of the Maps takes place on a Dyson Sphere around a white dwarf star in an aged and dying universe; Beyond the Burn Line is a middle-distance cautionary tale about AI and, in a sense, religion...

McAuley has a novella in this month's Asimov which is also quite similar, and also very good. "Blade and Bone" is about the sole survivors of an annihilated infantry battalion as they make their way across a hostile Mars -- which has been terraformed but is reverting to a cold and dry baseline.

This kind of engaging hard SF is, emphatically, not appreciated by the people who vote on Hugo awards. So much the worse for them, I think...

Re: 2023 Hugo Awards

#73

Post by senectus1 » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #63

I used to really love the Hugo and Nebula awards but over time they seem to be shifting away from the harder science fiction that I like the best, more in the fantasy direction. I miss the days of Hugo winners like Neuromancer, A Fire Upon the Deep, Green Mars, The Diamond Age, The Windup Girl, The Three-Body Problem. That might be just tracking what gets written nowadays rather than the opinions of the people giving…

It didn't win a hugo, but Project Hail Mary was excellent.