Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
And what about The Martian and Ready Player One, both great books. Have they been recognized by the Hugo? If not, bin the Hugo as irrelevant.
But these two works and others I have mentioned do show that great works of SF do still appear and that the genre is far from dying. But for conventional SF as headed by the Hugo and other traditional deciders of what is good, the future is not so good.
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Ready Player One was not on the nomination short list in the year after it was published. It was eligible in 2012. The winner was Among Others by Jo Walton, and I suspect that it had a lot of appeal to the Worldcon attendees because it was a fantasy coming of age story from the mid-1970s, and a lot of the Worldcon attendees probably came of age within 10 years of that era. Also on the short list was A Dance of Dragons by George R.R. Martin, which is part of the Game of Thrones, Deadline by Mira Grant, a zombie apocalypse story told by bloggers, Embassytown by China Mieville, a tale of a city in the far future, with aliens, and Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A. Corey, a kickass space opera taking place in the solar system around the discovery of an alien artifact.
My personal take on the Hugos is that the winner and the short list are generally good books, but they're usually not the most popular books in the genre. For example, books with TV/movie tie-ins often wildly outsell anything that is straight genre with no TV/movie tie-ins. I also find that some of my favorite books published in any given year are not on the short list. No big deal, you're never going to totally agree with any best of lists, unless you're the only one compiling it.