An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953-2000

by Jo Walton

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD Winner: Julia Ecklar Nominees: Nancy A. Collins John Cramer Scott Cupp Michael Kandel

This is Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks. It’s my favorite Banks novel, using Banks’s preferred twisty structure to perfect effect, with lots of SFnal neatness and a powerful emotional story. It wasn’t published in the United States until a bit later, as I recall, which probably accounts for it not getting any notice.

(That said, I don’t consider it fantasy. But I do most strongly recommend you read The Walled Orchard!) There is, though, one very intriguing potential Campbell nominee: Ian R. MacLeod. His first story appeared in Interzone in 1989, and it didn’t make much of a splash: “Through.” But four major stories appeared in 1990, in Interzone and Weird Tales: “Green,” “1/72 Scale,” “Well-Loved,” and “Past Magic.”

But I would also strongly recommend Dafydd ab Hugh’s “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, a Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk,” which is exceptional, a strange postapocalyptic thing about intelligent mutated animals. Ab Hugh never did anything else remotely as good; that’s quite a story.

Second place probably goes to Elegy for Angels and Dogs, which I believe still may hold the title for longest single novella ever published in Asimov’s.

Ian MacLeod’s “Green,” which, by the way, appeared in the mid-December 1990 Asimov’s, not in Interzone, was a significant step toward the type of fantasy that MacLeod would later develop;

Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide is another wonderful book that’s hard to describe succinctly. I think “surreal hard SF” is about as close as I can get—it’s kind of cyberpunk and kind of space opera, and it’s really all about the people.

The John W. Campbell Memorial Award went to Bradley Denton’s very odd Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede.

A Woman of the Iron People, by Eleanor Arnason. I like the Arnason a great deal—I like everything she has written. As well as this Campbell nod, it won the Mythopoeic Award and the Tiptree. I think it was one of the most significant and talked-about books of the year, and it should have been a Hugo nominee.

The Philip K. Dick Award was given to Ian McDonald’s brilliant metafantasy King of Morning, Queen of Day, which I wouldn’t exactly call science fiction, but never mind.

Somebody should do a collection of all the novella nominees ever, or ebooks of all of them or something. They’d make a great book club. (Novella club?)

BEST NONFICTION BOOK Winner: The World of Charles Addams, by Charles Addams

The Bakery Men Don’t See Cookbook, edited by Diane Martin and Jeanne Gomoll

Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, edited by Stephen Jones The Science Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History: Third Edition, by Jack L. Chalker and Mark Owings Science-Fiction: The Early Years, by Everett F. Bleiler

Greer Gilman’s Moonwise was a first novel that had made a big impression. She has since won the World Fantasy Award with a short story and the Tiptree with her second novel, Cloud and Ashes. Gilman is one of the genre’s great stylists, and it’s great to see her nominated.

The best novel of the year, in my opinion, was Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary. It’s genre is ambiguous—I read it with Clute, as SF, but one could read it as historical fiction. Themes include gender, race, class, and the American West. It’s exceptional work. I’d have given it all the awards (Tiptree included, much as I like Eleanor Arnason) (though possibly KJF, a founder of the Tiptree Awards, if memory serves, disqualified herself)

Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations probably isn’t really SF, but it is fiction about science, and it’s very, very good. And Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow is a holocaust novel, but with a fantastical premise (an entity that perceives that it is living backwards in the consciousness of a German doctor guilty of crimes at Auschwitz).

I probably would have gone for “Understand” (one of the few stories about supergeniuses where the supergenius is actually CONVINCING as one) over “Gold,”

Lethem’s “The Happy Man” is one of the most harrowing stories ever published in Asimov’s.

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.

Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang was a first novel. It’s a mosaic novel set in a Chinese-dominated near-future communist USA.

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 realized that the reason I didn’t like it was because I liked Icehenge so much that I preferred that vision and couldn’t really focus on this story.

John Barnes’s masterpiece A Million Open Doors,

The Mythopoeic Award was won by Briar Rose.

Protection, by Maureen F. McHugh (Asimov’s, April 1992)

Uh-Oh City, by Jonathan Carroll (F&SF, June 1992)

Winner: A Wealth of Fable: An Informal History of Science Fiction Fandom in the 1950s, by Harry Warner Jr.

Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, by Camille Bacon-Smith

Monad: Essays on Science Fiction 2, edited by Damon Knight Virgil Finlay’s Women of the Ages, by Virgil Finlay

Winner: Science Fiction Chronicle, edited by Andrew I. Porter

Not Locus. Odd.

And Susan Palwick’s Flying in Place is heartbreaking—I was in tears for the last fifty 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.

And Damon Knight’s quite strange Why Do Birds was not much noticed in the field, but it too is excellent.

And the two halves of A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects: Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugal Angel

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”

“The Cool Equations,” by Deborah Wessell (one of the better reexaminations of the notorious Tom Godwin classic)

Also completely overlooked, oddly, is one of Fred Pohl’s strongest novellas ever, Outnumbering the Dead, which might well have gotten my vote.

Also of at least historic interest is the last story Isaac Asimov submitted to me while he was still alive, Cleon the Emperor, which, to me, demonstrates the failure of the whole idea of “predicting” the future scientifically through social calculations, since in spite of all Seldon’s intricate calculations, the Emperor is unexpectedly killed by a disgruntled gardener who’s pissed off over some minor offense.

Yes, as Rich pointed out, political satire dates fast, and the Sargent was dated within months of it coming out; I thought she was rather kinder in her portrayal of Quayle than he deserved, actually.

“Snodgrass,” where the change in history is that John Lennon had left the Beatles very early on, before they became famous, and it follows, movingly, what the rest of Lennon’s life might have been like.

When she won the Hugo for “The Nutcracker Coup,” Janet went up to the podium and blurted out, “This was supposed to be Cadigan’s!” That was very Janet.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Michael Swanwick;

It seems to me that The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is a major significant work that should not have been overlooked by the Hugo nominators.

Against a Dark Background is the standout book here, probably Iain M. Banks’s best book, and definitely the kind of groundbreaking book you’d expect to get some Hugo attention. It probably suffered from timing of UK and US publication, and that sucks.

Dog Wizard, Barbara Hambly;

Matt Ruff’s Sewer, Gas & Electric (which probably would have made my ideal nominee list).

Jeff Noon’s Vurt

Neal Barrett Jr.’s “Cush” is one of the weirder stories ever to appear in an SF magazine.

John Barnes’s Mother of Storms was a terrible introduction to John Barnes for me, although he went on to become one of my favorite writers despite it. It’s a near-future disaster novel about global warming and a hurricane, written in bestseller omniscient, with really nasty sex scenes. It is, unfortunately, deeply memorable.