The Nominees
Kiln People by David Brin
The Scar by China Mieville
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
The Actual Results
- Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
- Kiln People by David Brin
- Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
- The Scar by China Mieville
- The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
How I Would Have Voted
(Abstain)
Explanation
None of these books were so bad/woke that I felt No Award merited a vote for this year. In fact, if my memory serves me, few of these books were woke at all (or else they were just a lot better at hiding it. Whatever.) But at the same time, I didn’t enjoy any of them enough to feel that I could affirmatively vote for any of them. In fact, I ended up DNFing all of them, for various reasons (that’s right, China Mike—I didn’t feel it was necessary to finish any of these books to know how I would have voted).
Kiln People and The Years of Rice and Salt were both books that I didn’t bother to pick up, because I’ve read enough from each author to know that I don’t care to read anything they write. Way back in high school, I read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, but I never felt compelled to finish the rest of the series, and DNFed the second book when I picked it up years later, as well as every other Hugo-winning book he’s written. With David Brin, I started his first Uplift Trilogy book but DNFed it about a hundred pages in, and decided to DNF him as an author after throwing The Postman across the room.
For both of these authors, my reason for DNFing them has less to do with their politics (though I’m sure we have irreconcilable differences there) as it does with their dogmatic, almost fanatical adherence to materialism: the view that everything in the universe is reducible to physical, material phenomena, and that if something cannot be measured it might as well not exist. You can see this in the dismissive way that they treat religion in all of their books, especially Christianity—as if faith, in any form, is a delusion that ought to be beneath all clear-thinking and enlightened people. From long experience, I’ve learned that authors with this particular worldview almost never write anything that I feel is worth reading. Hence, I didn’t feel it was necessary to read either of their books.
The Scar is book two of China Mieville’s New Crobuzon series, and since I DNFed the first book, I didn’t read the rest of the series. I’ll explain my reasons more when I write up my post for how I would vote now in the 2002 Hugo Awards, but it basically comes down to the sex scene in the first chapter, which was too graphic for my tastes. Call me a prude, but I prefer to avoid graphic sex scenes. I suppose I could be persuaded to try the series again, though, on a strong enough recommendation.
I forget why I DNFed Hominids. I read it back in 2002, when I made—and kept—my resolution to read (or DNF) all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels. I think it came down to getting bored with the story, or not really liking any of the characters. I could probably be persuaded to try it again, though I doubt the results would be different a second time around.
Lastly, Bones of the Earth was my biggest disappointment from the books on the ballot this year. I had previously DNFed Swanwick’s Station of the Tide, which struck me as the sort of thing an author writes when they don’t really care what readers think of it and they just want to wallow in their own self-indulgent fantasies. Also, there was a lot of weird sex stuff that I found off-putting.
But Bones of the Earth started out really well. It’s basically about a bunch of time traveling paleontologists, and the bureaucracy built around the time travel machinery to keep all the timelines from falling into contradiction and paradox. Think Jurassic Park meets The Adjustment Bureau. The first half of the book was really well done, to the point where I started wondering why I’d never heard of this book before, or why it hadn’t gotten more commercial traction.
Then I found out why.
The inciting incident happens when a creationist terrorist sends a bomb out to a group of paleontoligists somewhen in the Cretaceous period, killing one of them, destroying their time beacon, and stranding them in time. I wasn’t actually bothered at all by the creationists being the bad guys, since 1) several of the paleontologists were various stripes of Christian, and 2) I can totally believe that radical fundamentalist creationists would resort to sabotage, or even terrorism, to derail the whole project. But about midway through the book, after the band of marooned time travelers go through some pretty hefty forming and storming, as they just start to enter the norming phase, they all decide, at the same time and on a total whim, to throw off their clothes and have a group orgy together.
I can believe that there are people in this world who would do that sort of thing. I can even believe that a group of randomly selected people might consist entirely of this sort of person. I just don’t want anything to do with them. I’ve been in a fair amount of group situations, and the worst ones I’ve ever had to endure were the ones where everyone either wanted to all get drunk together, or all get sexy together (thankfully, none of them turned into an actual orgy like the one in this book).
But frankly, the impression I got while reading it was that the author was a little too sex-deprived (if not an outright pervert) and indulged in that scene purely as an act of wish fulfilment. Any editor worth her salt would have told Swanwick to remove or totally rework that scene, so the fact that it’s still in the book probably means that he’s too bull-headed for his own good—which is a shame, because the book probably would have sold better if he’d cut that scene out. The orgy scene added very little and certainly alienated more readers than it brought in.
One of the things I’m trying to be more careful about, as a writer, is writing books for other people, not just myself. I was a lot more self-indulgent in my early career, which is probably a major factor in why many of my older books haven’t gained much traction outside of a small readership. While it’s important not to try to write for everybody, authors who write only for themselves are too often inaccessible to anybody.
