The 1993 Hugo Awards were given in ConFrancisco in San Francisco. The novel award was a tie, Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (post), and Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book (post). A Fire Upon the Deep is galactic science fiction, a book sizzling with ideas and alien names and characters and adventures. Doomsday Book is about time travel and disease—a quieter book altogether, and one focused on character and history. I really like both of them.
There have only been three ties in Hugo novel history—Zelazny and Herbert, Vinge and Willis, and last year’s Bacigalupi and Mieville. One of the reasons I started to write this series is because Mike Glyer on File 770 said “history has broken the tie between Willis’ and Vinge’s novels.” This astonished me, and made me decide to revisit the Hugos in the light of history, starting right in the beginning when they really are history. Because for me, the tie between Vinge and Willis definitely hasn’t been broken, and certainly not in Willis’s favour as Glyer believes. These are two genuinely great books, and they have remained poised neck and neck through time in their very different excellences. I’m sure there are people who don’t like one or other of them, and even people who don’t like either of them, but I feel that the two of them between them display the best the genre has to offer in its depth and diversity. People are always saying to me “What one book should I read?” and I am always growling ungraciously that no one book can do it, you need a cross section. Two isn’t enough either. But if you read both A Fire Upon the Deep and Doomsday Book and consider that science fiction readers gave them both our highest accolade in the same year, you might get the idea.
They’re both in print. The Vinge is in the library in English only, and the Willis is in the library in French and English. (“The library” for this week is played by the Grande Bibliotheque as usual.)
And it was a brilliant year even apart from them.
There were three other nominees and I’ve read all of them.
Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang (post) was a first novel and a paperback original. It’s a mosaic novel set in a Chinese-dominated near future communist USA. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’m delighted to see nominated. I picked it up because of the nomination. I wasn’t voting that year, but I saw the nominees in Locus and wondered about this and picked it up to see, liked the beginning and bought it. And it’s wonderful. It won the Tiptree award and the Lambda. It’s in print, and it’s in the library in English.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars is a huge book about people who live for a very long time terraforming Mars. I didn’t like it, but I recently realised that the reason I didn’t like it was because I liked Icehenge so much that I prefered that vision and couldn’t really focus on this story. I need to read it again and be fair to it. But even not liking it, it’s a good nominee—it’s an ambitious SF book that’s using up to date science and telling a story that couldn’t be told any other way. It’s in print and in the library in French and English.
John Varley’s Steel Beach is perhaps the weakest of the nominees. It’s set in a retconned version of his Eight Worlds stories (post), and it’s about a journalist on the moon. It has an excellent and much quoted first line. I wanted to like it, but I found it unsatisfying and overlong. It’s not in print and it’s in the library in French only.
So, three men and two women, all Americans. One far future space opera, one time travel, one near future Earth, two middle distance solar systems. What else might they have picked?
SFWA’s Nebula Award went to the Willis. Non-overlapping nominees were Jane Yolen’s chilling Briar Rose, John Barnes’s masterpiece A Million Open Doors (post) and Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary. Any of these would have been a good Hugo addition, and I really think the Barnes should have made it.
The World Fantasy Award was given to Tim Powers Last Call. Other nominees not previously mentioned were Anno Dracula, Kim Newman, Photographing Fairies, Steve Szilagyi, Was, Geoff Ryman.
The John W. Campbell Memorial Award was awarded to Charles Sheffield’s Brother to Dragons. Second place was Sherri Tepper’s Sideshow, with Vinge third.
The Philip K. Dick Award was given to Through the Heart, Richard Grant with a special citation for In the Mothers’ Land, Élisabeth Vonarburg. Other nominees were Æstival Tide, Elizabeth Hand, Iron Tears, R. A. Lafferty, Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland. This is a consistently interesting award that often turns up things where nobody else is looking.
The Tiptree went to McHugh. Other nominees not mentioned so far were Correspondence, Sue Thomas, Lost Futures, Lisa Tuttle, Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream, Judith Moffett, Venus Rising, Carol Emshwiller.
The Locus SF Award went to Willis. Other nominees not mentioned yet were: The Hollow Man, Dan Simmons, Anvil of Stars, Greg Bear, Chanur’s Legacy, C. J. Cherryh (post), Mars, Ben Bova, The Memory of Earth, Orson Scott Card Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson, Worlds Enough and Time, Joe Haldeman, Crystal Line, Anne McCaffrey, Count Geiger’s Blues, Michael Bishop, Hellburner, C. J. Cherryh (post), Aristoi, Walter Jon Williams (post), Labyrinth of Night, Allen Steele, Mining the Oort, Frederik Pohl, Lord Kelvin’s Machine, James P. Blaylock, Hearts, Hands and Voices (The Broken Land), Ian McDonald, Jaran, Kate Elliott (post), Glass Houses, Laura J. Mixon, A Deeper Sea, Alexander Jablokov, Alien Earth, Megan Lindholm.
And here we see the difference between “books I really like” and “books I think are good.” I adore Jaran and Hellburner, and I don’t really like Snow Crash, but I actually gasped when I saw that it was here and hadn’t been nominated for a Hugo or a Nebula, because like it or not, I do think it was one of the most significant books of the year.
The Locus Fantasy Award was won by Last Call. Other nominees not previously mentioned were The Spirit Ring, Lois McMaster Bujold, A Song For Arbonne, Guy Gavriel Kay (post), Winds of Change, Mercedes Lackey, The Magicians of Night (UK title Magicians of the Night), Barbara Hambly, The Shadow Rising, Robert Jordan, Domes of Fire, David Eddings, Small Gods, Terry Pratchett, Last Refuge, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, The Cutting Edge, Dave Duncan, A Sudden Wild Magic, Diana Wynne Jones, The Gypsy, Steven Brust & Megan Lindholm, Forest of the Night, S. P. Somtow, Flying in Place, Susan Palwick.
The Mythopoeic Award was won by Briar Rose. Nominees not yet mentioned were Susan Schwarz’s Grail of Hearts and James Blaylock’s The Paper Grail.
So with all these awards was there anything that was overlooked? Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, Greg Egan’s Quarantine, Terry Pratchett’s Only You Can Save Mankind (post) (we give Hugos to YA now, even if we wouldn’t have thought of it then), Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South (post) and Debra Doyle and James Macdonald’s The Price of the Stars.
This is a year where I remember thinking at the time how exciting the nominees were, and yet now I can’t understand how Snow Crash isn’t on the ballot. I’m sure I read Snow Crash because everybody was talking about it. But maybe it was one of those books where word of mouth took time to build, because I read Snow Crash because everybody was talking about it in 1994. I’m also sorry A Million Open Doors didn’t make it, not just because it’s a terrific book but also because I’d then have discovered Barnes with a good book instead of Mother of Storms. I think it’s also possible to argue that Briar Rose and Last Call could well have made the list. So on the whole I am slightly less happy with this list than I was in 1993, but I still think it’s pretty good—a good view of where the field was, with some omissions. Great winners. And China Mountain Zhang.
Other Categories
NOVELLA
- “Barnacle Bill the Spacer”, Lucius Shepard (Asimov’s Jul 1992)
- “Protection”, Maureen F. McHugh (Asimov’s Apr 1992)
- Stopping at Slowyear, Frederik Pohl (Pulphouse/Axolotl; Bantam Spectra)
- “The Territory”, Bradley Denton (F&SF Jul 1992)
- “Uh-Oh City”, Jonathan Carroll (F&SF Jun 1992)
I’d have voted for the McHugh, which still gives me chills thinking about it. But the Shepard is also very good.
NOVELETTE
- “The Nutcracker Coup”, Janet Kagan (Asimov’s Dec 1992)
- “Danny Goes to Mars”, Pamela Sargent (Asimov’s Oct 1992)
- “In the Stone House”, Barry N. Malzberg (Alternate Kennedys)
- “Suppose They Gave a Peace…”, Susan Shwartz (Alternate Presidents)
- “True Faces”, Pat Cadigan (F&SF Apr 1992)
SHORT STORY
- “Even the Queen”, Connie Willis (Asimov’s Apr 1992)
- “The Arbitrary Placement of Walls”, Martha Soukup (Asimov’s Apr 1992)
- “The Lotus and the Spear”, Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Aug 1992)
- “The Mountain to Mohammed”, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Apr 1992)
- “The Winterberry”, Nicholas A. DiChario (Alternate Kennedys)
I’ve never been all that excited by “Even the Queen.”
NONFICTION BOOK
- A Wealth of Fable: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the 1950s, Harry Warner, Jr. (SCIFI Press)
- The Costumemaker’s Art, Thom Boswell, ed. (Lark)
- Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Camille Bacon-Smith (University of Pennsylvania Press)
- Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man, Dave Langford (NESFA Press)
- Monad: Essays on Science Fiction #2, Damon Knight, ed. (Pulphouse)
- Virgil Finlay’s Women of the Ages, Virgil Finlay (Underwood-Miller)
DRAMATIC PRESENTATION
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: “The Inner Light”
- Aladdin
- Alien 3
- Batman Returns
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Bah, humbug.
PROFESSIONAL EDITOR
- Gardner Dozois
- Ellen Datlow
- Beth Meacham
- Kristine Kathryn Rusch
- Stanley Schmidt
PROFESSIONAL ARTIST
- Don Maitz
- Thomas Canty
- David A. Cherry
- Bob Eggleton
- James Gurney
ORIGINAL ARTWORK
- Dinotopia, James Gurney (Turner)
- Ron Walotsky, Cover of F&SF Oct/Nov 1992
- Michael Whelan, Cover of Asimov’s Nov 1992
- Jim Burns, Cover of Aristoi (by Walter Jon Williams; Tor)
- Michael Whelan, Cover of Illusion (by Paula Volsky; Bantam Spectra)
SEMI-PROZINE
- Science Fiction Chronicle, Andrew Porter
- Interzone, David Pringle
- Locus, Charles N. Brown
- The New York Review of Science Fiction, David G. Hartwell, Donald G. Keller, Robert K. J. Killheffer & Gordon Van Gelder
- Pulphouse, Dean Wesley Smith
Not Locus. Odd.
FANZINE
- Mimosa, Dick & Nicki Lynch
- File 770, Mike Glyer
- FOSFAX, Timothy Lane & Janice Moore
- Lan’s Lantern, George “Lan” Laskowski
- STET, Leah Zeldes Smith & Dick Smith
FAN WRITER
- Dave Langford
- Mike Glyer
- Andy Hooper
- Evelyn C. Leeper
- Harry Warner, Jr.
FAN ARTIST
- Peggy Ranson
- Teddy Harvia
- Merle Insinga
- Linda Michaels
- Stu Shiffman
- Diana Harlan Stein
JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER (not a Hugo)
- Laura Resnick
- Barbara Delaplace
- Nicholas A. DiChario
- Holly Lisle
- Carrie Richerson
- Michelle Sagara
Laura Resnick was nominated on the basis of some excellent short work. She has since gone on to write a large number of well-received fantasy and paranormal romance novels, with more books due out this year.
Barbara Delaplace and Michelle Sagara were discussed last week in their first year of eligibility.
Nicholas DiChario had also published short work only at the time of his nomination. He has gone on to have a quiet career publishing SF novels and short stories, he has been a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award twice.
Holly Lisle’s first novel Fire in the Mist had just come out at the time of her nomination. She has gone on to have a successful career publishing fantasy and paranormal romance novels, alone and with co-authors ranging from Marion Zimmer Bradley to S.M. Stirling.
Carrie Richerson had published some well received short stories, and has gone on publishing short work but has not had a very visible career.
Other people who might have been eligible for the Campbell this year include Susan Palwick, Stephen Gould, Maureen McHugh, Poppy Z. Brite and Maya Kaathryn Bornhoff.
If we had a Hugo for best first novel instead, it would be much easier to compare like with like and to know what was eligible. But on the other hand, it might blight the prospects of astonishingly brilliant first novels that would otherwise make the main Hugo ballot—like this year’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, last year’s The Windup Girl, or indeed China Mountain Zhang and Neuromancer, if people nominated them only as best first novel and not for the novel Hugo.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two poetry collections and nine novels, most recently Among Others, and if you liked this post you will like it. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
One of the flaws Doomsday Book suffers from is the same one later books in the series – and I am looking at the two recent Hugo nominees here – suffered from, which is that Willis’ internal model of How Stuff Works in the UK and in particular how telecommunications work seems to have frozen technologically some time in the 1930s [1]. Now, in her defense, I cannot see any way for an American author in the 1990s to research a faraway semi-mythical land like the UK, as I assume there were no libraries in the US at that time and that all British people must have been kept carefully sequested from Americans, forcing her to rely entirely on Georgette Heyer and Dorothy L. Sayers novels as her guides to modern and future Britain. The alternative is to cast doubt on her basic research skills.
The other issue is that if any of the characters ever had a meaningful conversation with another character, rather than keeping vital, need-to-know information to themselves either on purpose or by chance, then Willis wouldn’t have the running-around-like-a-chicken-with-its-head-cut-off plots that she loves.
1: Except that somehow in the next fifty years, a time when some reading this may still be alive, all knowledge of the dark technology known as the revolving door will be lost to the extent a time traveller – a curiously ignorant supposed historian – will suffer SAN loss when confronted by one.
Mining the Oort, Frederik Pohl
Minor Pohl but one of the very few SF novels to consider the financial issues involved in a long-term terraforming project, as I recall.
From the Hugo list Varley’s novel is the one that I would have given the
Hugo to, with the Vinge a close second. Willi’s is on my ignore list, I
can’t stand anything she writes.
As for other novels that were Hugo-worthy that year: Walter Jon William’s Aristoi, Pat Cadigan’s Fools and William Barton’s Dark Sky Legion.
As for Snow Crash, I like it, but it’s not much more than a well-written cyberpunky-action adventure, minor compared to his later The Diamond Age.
I think this was one of the great years ever for SF novels. I loved both novels that tied for the win. I was surprised to see that Mike Glyer thinks history has broken the tie in favor of Willis — when I started reading the sentence I was sure he’d say it had been broken in favor of Vinge! Doomsday Book is often disparaged for its historical inaccuracies (not to mention its Latin inaccuracies) — also, as James notes, its inaccurate portrayal of the UK, and the later novels in the series have not particularly enhanced its reputation (though neither have they destroyed it). While A Fire Upon the Deep‘s succeeding novel (the prequel A Deepness in the Sky) greatly enhanced Vinge’s reputation and that of the first novel. Moreover, it seems to me A Fire Upon the Deep is perceived as more influential — or more accurately, more “foundational” to SF.
I still love both books, mind you. I found Doomsday Book really powerful. And A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the great Sense of Wonder books ever.
But what an embarrassment of riches! Snow Crash is tremendous fun, in my opinion. (And I don’t mind the lack of an ending.) I didn’t read it until years later, but I can see why it made a splash. A Million Open Doors is also excellent. Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi was his first major novel, seems to me. And I really like Red Mars, despite the science flubs (probably less significant in context than Willis’ history flubs), and despite some longeurs.
In first novel, besides China Mountain Zhang, there was Steven Gould’s Jumper, which is really good (much better than the movie!). And not precisely a first novel, but the first novel most people saw by him, and the first to be characteristic of him: Greg Egan’s Quarantine. And Susan Palwick’s Flying in Place is heartbreaking — I was in tears for the last 50 pages or so of the book, which I read in a rush at an unplanned long lunch at my desk at work.
I also really loved Michael Bishop’s superhero novel Count Geiger’s Blues, which I don’t think has got as much notice as it should have.
Two more very good novels came from true SF legends, and neither got the attention it deserved either. One is Algis Budrys’ Hard Landing, which is very short (maybe 45K?), and which was published in one issue of F&SF. It is really first rate, and very underrated (as with almost all of Budrys). And Damon Knight’s quite strange Why Do Birds was not much noticed in the field, but it too is excellent.
Other novels worth a look:
Jonathan Carroll’s After Silence
Ian McDonald’s Hearts, Hands and Voices aka The Broken Land
Donald Westlake’s Humans
James P. Blaylock’s Lord Kelvin’s Machine
Debra Doyle and James MacDonald’s The Price of the Stars
Judith Moffet’s Time, Like an Ever Rolling Stream
and even Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Spirit Ring — one of her weaker novels, no doubt, but still enjoyable
Really a wonderful year in novel.
—
Rich Horton
One is Algis Budrys’ Hard Landing,
Was that really this late? I could have sworn I read it in the 1980s.
I really liked Doomsday Book but it fits poorly with To Say Nothing of the Dog (which I also liked). Doomsday highlight how you’re not supposed to take big risks during time travel and To Say Nothing is a frivolous farce where they send exhausted students all over time to save a bird sculpture and nearly cause a disaster – with the same guy in charge of time travel decisions in each book. Each works well on its own but the themes are at such cross purposes that, read together, they diminish enjoyment of each one.
Rob
One of the better lists for novels that we’ve seen for a while. I’d probably have voted for Red Mars, which for me is the best of the trilogy. Nothing wrong with any of the others, either, though I just can’t get into Vinge.
Not much to say about the short fiction. Most of the winners seem reasonable, from what I can remember. But it is rather amusing to look at the short story publication: 4 of the 5 nominees are not just from Asimov’s, they’re from the same issue. In fact, the McHugh novella is also from that issue. Five stories out of, what, seven or 8? That’s pretty impressive.
Most of the dramatic presentation nominees are only barely genre. On top of that, Alien, Batman, and Dracula were all pretty bad. That said, given a decent slate, “The Inner Light” would be a worthy winner. There’s some very good acting there from Patrick Stewart and the story is nice. (Though they may have borrowed the general concept from a Jack Chalker story, now that I think about it.)
Worlds Enough and Time, Joe Haldeman
Third in the Worlds series, as I recall, and oddly ’70s and ’80s in its sensibilities, AIfR. That may be because the first two books were from the early 1980s and also because I think the story that eventually became, in a much altered form, this novel was “Tricentential”, the cover story for Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1976 (with a Rick Sternbach cover that depicted planet backset by the North American Nebula, as I recall).
for
So, oddly perhaps for me, the short fiction was less compelling.
I think Shepard’s “Barnacle Bill the Spacer” is OK, but not close to his best work, and surely not the best work on the ballot, which is probably “Protection”, though I also really like “Uh-Oh City”.
No other novellas leap out at me as criminally neglected, but there are some good ones:
“Gypsy Trade” and “The Virgin and the Dinosaur”, by R. Garcia y Robertson
“Grownups”, by Ian R. MacLeod (probably should have made the ballot, wouldn’t have been a bad winner)
“Naming the Flowers”, by Kate Wilhelm
“The Final Folly of Captain Dancy”, by Lawrence Watt-Evans
and the two halves of A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects: “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugal Angel”
In novelette, “The Nutcracker Coup” is really fun. Sargent’s story seems very very dated, and indeed seemed so to me within about a year — Dan Quayle was really not important enough to expend all that much energy on, seems to me. The other novelettes are fine work — does any of them much stick with me? Not really.
Maybe Greg Egan’s “Dust” would have been a better choice? Or Jonathan Lethem’s “Vanilla Dunk”? Actually, I really liked Thomas Disch’s rather savage (as usual for him) “The Abduction of Bunny Steiner, or a Shameless Lie”. I also like R. Garcia y Robertson’s “Breakfast Cereal Killers” and Alex Jeffers’ novel excerpt “from The Bridge“. (I don’t think The Bridge has ever been published. Maybe it was planned as “just an excerpt” from the beginning?)
In short story, I do like “Even the Queen”, though it’s a cause celebre for Willis-haters. “The Arbitrary Placement of Walls” is excellent — Soukup is a good writer, shame she hasn’t written much lately (that I’ve noticed, anyway!) A short story I really liked that year that didn’t get much notice was “Steelcollar Worker”, by Vonda N. McIntyre.
Also worth notice:
“The Last Robot”, by Adam-Troy Castro
“Are You For 86?”, by Bruce Sterling
“The Lost Sepulcher of Huascar Capec”, by Paul Park
“The Cool Equations”, by Deborah Wessell (one of the better reexaminations of the notorious Tom Godwin classic)
“Yellow Rome”, by Avram Davidson
—
Rich Horton
Maybe I was really poor this year, or maybe I didn’t trust any of the writers, or maybe it was just that kind of year, but I have not read any of the books nominated. I suspect I had just hit the used bookstores and caught up on books I had not read before. Anyway, there might be a couple there I will keep an eye out for or download onto my kindle.
Movies were pretty much meh for me too. Aladdin was adorable, but not really sure its genre.