{"id":7652,"date":"2018-11-01T10:42:29","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T14:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/?p=7652"},"modified":"2018-11-01T10:42:29","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T14:42:29","slug":"history-of-the-hugos-by-jo-walton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monsffa.ca\/?p=7652","title":{"rendered":"History of the Hugos by Jo Walton"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews An Informal History of the Hugos<\/b> by Jo Walton<\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
<\/i> Gary K. Wolfe<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

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\"\"<\/a>An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953-2000<\/strong>, Jo Walton (Tor 978-0765379085, $29.99, 576pp, hc<\/a>) August 2018.<\/p>\n

Since their inception in 1953, the Hugo Awards have been SF\u2019s most unignorable elephant in the room, providing generations of readers with a de facto <\/em>canon and reading list, despite an often wild inconsistency and occasional tendency to reward beloved authors simply because they\u2019re beloved. For those reasons and others, it\u2019s a fairly easy game to spot oddball or undeserving winners \u2013 Mark Clifton & Frank Riley\u2019s They\u2019d Rather be Right<\/strong>, which won the second novel Hugo in 1955, is the favorite whipping boy \u2013 but quite another to look at other books published in the same year, whether or not among the nominees, and show just how many now-canonical works inexplicably seemed invisible to Hugo voters. This is essentially what Jo Walton has set out to do in An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953-2000<\/strong>, a series of columns written for Tor.com <\/em>beginning in 2010 and now collected in book form. In the case of They\u2019d Rather be Right<\/strong>, she points out that overlooked novels included Clement\u2019s Mission of Gravity<\/strong>, Pangborn\u2019s A Mirror for Ob\u00adservers<\/strong>, Asimov\u2019s The Caves of Steel<\/strong>, Anderson\u2019s Brain Wave<\/strong>, Matheson\u2019s I Am Legend<\/strong>, and even Tolkien\u2019s The Fellowship of the Ring <\/strong>(although it would be quite a few years before Hugo voters began giving serious consideration to fantasy). By the same token, we could find such oddball misses among almost any list of awards, in or out of genre; in 1961, certifiable classics like Lee\u2019s To Kill a Mockingbird <\/strong>and Updike\u2019s Rabbit, Run <\/strong>lost the National Book Award to a now-forgotten Conrad Richter novel, The Waters of Kronos. <\/strong><\/p>\n

So the value of Walton\u2019s book \u2013 in some ways a companion piece to her other collection of Tor.com <\/em>columns, What Makes This Book So Great <\/strong>\u2013 lies not in identifying such howlers \u2013 in fact, she con\u00adcludes that Hugo voters got it more or less right some 69% of the time \u2013 but in the lively and opinionated discussions of the winners and losers, of which books have lasted and which haven\u2019t, and why. Walton includes not only her original columns, but selec\u00adtions from the online comments, and the comments, especially from Locus <\/em>contributors Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton, are so extensive and thoughtful as to make the book virtually a collaboration. (It also, sadly, becomes another reminder of Dozois\u2019s encyclopedic knowledge of the field, and the degree to which he, as much as anyone, shaped the evolution of short fiction from the 1980s on.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Head on over to the Locus Magazine site to read more of Gary K. Wolfe’s review.<\/strong> <\/a>