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HUGO_SKIMMER

                                             September 12, 2015

                                             From a comment
                                             posted to usenet.

The question at hand is, are the Hugo Awards
a useful way of finding interesting books?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

Despite the weird misstep with Clifton & Riley's "They'd Rather
Be Right" in the second year, the early history of the award
contains quie a few really good, and many at least interesting,
books:

    Bester's "The Demolished Man"
    Leiber's "The Big Time"
    Blish's "A Case Of Conscience"
    Heinlien's "Starship Troopers"
    Walter M. Miller. Jr.'s "A Canticle for Leibowitz"

If you include the nominations, there's a lot of
favorite books of mine included there, which strike
me as being unjustly obscure, these days:

   Budry's "Rogue Moon"                                               AJAY
   Heinlein's "Have Space Suit-- Will Travel"                    HEINLEIN
   Simak's "Time is the Simplest Thing" (aka "The Fisherman")    GOING_ALIEN
   Samuel R. Delany's "Babel-17"                                 BABEL-17

Someone on rec.arts.sf.lovers once made the
experiment of reading through the winnners
in sequence, and ended up complaining about
Leiber's "The Wanderer" quite a bit, but if
you ask me it's problems are fairly minor--
that's another really good book.

Looking through the recent history of the award
(I haven't been paying very much attention to of
late) there's still quite a lot of good stuff:

  Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" (the 2010 winner)

  Cixin Liu's "The Three-Body Problem" (the 2015 winner)

    But with this book, I first heard about
    it when I saw it on the bestsellers list
    for Borderlands Books in SF...



  And Charles Stross looks like he's
  going for a record for most           Seven nominations,
  nominations without a win.            from 2004 to 2014.

    But then, I didn't *need* this
    award to tell me I want to pay
    attention to Charles Stross.        
                                        CHARLES_STROSS
                                        MERCHANT_PRINCES

              


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