How I would vote now: 2011 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold

Feed by Mira Grant

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

The Actual Results

1. Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis
2. Feed by Mira Grant
3. Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold
4. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
5. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

How I Would Have Voted

1. Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis
2. No Award
3. Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold
4. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Explanation

2011 was the only year in which I actually attended Worldcon and voted in the Hugos. This was, of course, before the Sad Puppies and before I became totally disillusioned with the awards. I have to confess that I didn’t actually read any of the novels, though I did get the free ebooks in the voter packet and tried to read a couple of them. Mostly, I voted based on whether I recognized the author’s name, and whether or not the book descriptions appealed to me. I remember that I voted for Blackout and All Clear in the top slot, but I don’t remember how the rest of the ballot shook out.

If I had to do it again, I would still put Blackout and All Clear at the top of the ballot (which are two separate books, though they form a duology and were published in the same year, which is why they appear together). However, I ended up DNFing all of the other books, and because Feed and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms struck me as being horrible enough to warrant a No Award vote, I couldn’t merely abstain from voting positively for any of the others.

But first, Blackout and All Clear is a delightful time travel story from Connie Willis’s Oxford University Time Travelers series. Unlike The Doomsday Book, the story is quite a lot of fun with an upbeat and hopeful ending, and unlike To Say Nothing of the Dog, the time travelers find themselves in some very real peril when their time machine breaks down. The first book was okay, but the second book was fantastic, and wrapped things up very nicely. A fun and uplifting read.

I DNFed Feed for a number of reasons, but the main reason was that I couldn’t stand the sexual innuendo between the brother and sister. Yes, I know that technically they’re supposed to be step-brother and step-sister, and yes, I know that meaningless and gratuitous sex is supposed to be a trope of zombie fiction, but still. Yuck. I could be wrong about this, but the vibe I got was that the author is addicted to pornography, and that’s just not a mind I want to spend any time with. Also, the world makes no sense: the zombie apocalypse has brought our country to a state of collapse, but 1) basic infrastructure like electricity and internet still operates without any problems, and 2) bloggers need to get a permit from the federal government in order to blog? Sorry, but I just can’t buy any of it.

I don’t remember much from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, since it’s been several years since I first tried to read it, but I think the main reason I DNFed this one was because all of the characters struck me as being terrible people, and I frankly didn’t care what happened to any of them. For the same reason, I didn’t read A Song of Ice and Fire past book one (though there were other reasons I DNFed that series, most of them content related). And I think there were some content-related issues in this one too, which is also why I would place it under No Award, as opposed to merely abstaining.

I really wanted to like Cryoburn, since I enjoyed many of the other Vorkosigan Saga books, especially Young Miles and Barrayar. But this one takes place when Miles is middle-aged, and powerful enough that he’s not really threatened at all. Instead, we follow the story of a misfit street urchin who’s trying to earn his freedom, or something like that, and I frankly didn’t find his story or his character all that interesting or compelling. About four or five hours into the audiobook, I just got bored of it, which I wasn’t expecting at all.

The Vorkosigan Saga is different from most other series, in that all of the books are basically standalones linked only by the recurring characters, and the fact that Bujold has written it completely out of order, basically dropping books randomly into the chronology however it suits her fancy. The latest book, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, was such a disappointment to my wife that the way she described it to me made me feel totally disillusioned. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, so I can’t say for sure that it’s terrible, but it definitely took the series in a direction I wish it had never gone. I suppose that the lesson from all this is that it’s possible to draw out a series way too far, especially a non-linear one. The early Vorkosigan books are great… the later ones, not so much (and by “earlier,” I mean the ones that Bujold wrote earlier, not necessarily the earlier ones in the chronology).

As for The Dervish House, it was fine. Very pretty and well written, I guess. It just wasn’t for me. I got bored about a hundred pages in and dropped it. I suppose I could be convinced to give it another shot, but from what I can tell, it’s not really my kind of book.