Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
My problem with these books were that the seemed only to aim to be just entertaining. They lacked the depth I require for voting on the book as the best book that year.
|
I personally enjoyed all the Newsflesh novels (and to be fair, there were some ambitious societal change/political elements in them even if aside from the bloggers-influentially-dominate-stuff it wasn't really explored all that thoroughly, IMHO), but ranked them pretty low in the actual voting, since I didn't think they were "best of year/best of breed" sorts of things that Hugo Award-winners personally mean to me.
I've usually put "No Award" above the stuff that I've read and might have liked, but seemed to lack the extra "oomph" required*, long before the puppies started saddening things with their previous attempts, and will continue to do so†, albeit maybe with an extra smidgen of sweet, sweet schadenfreude this year for the stories foisted upon us which seem especially sub-par (VD's story in last year's packet was umpteen minutes of my life I'll never get back, and I really did try to give it a reasonably fair chance to see if it would turn out to be unexpected genius with sufficient milliHarlanEllisons to merit its inclusion on its actual merits rather than the author's shenanigans, which it was most decidedly not).
* Including more than half of the 2011 Best Novel nominees, because much as I like and collect both Bujold and Willis' writing in multiple languages and enjoyed their series continuations, those were in no way among the better of their works and Blackout/All Clear especially was an overlong meandering mess (which I happened to otherwise like and was happy to read and find out what happened next to the characters, incidentally) and Hugos shouldn't be for "eh well, if there's nothing else better available, then this is probably good enough" IMHO, so I voted for Jemisin's novel for first place that year since I felt that one was unusually imaginative and interesting and truly excellent from an author I'd never read before.
† Though I expect to have a lot more things in the packet this year to slog through that will not pass the "is this good enough to have a reasonable expectation of belonging here" test, sigh.