Review:
An Informal History of the Hugos, by Jo Walton
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
August 2018 |
| ISBN: |
1-4668-6573-3 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
564 |
An Informal History of the Hugos is another collection of Jo
Walton's Tor.com posts. As with
What
Makes This Book So Great, these are blog posts that are still available
for free on-line. Unlike that collection, this series happened after
Tor.com got better at tags, so it's
much easier to
find. Whether to buy it therefore depends on whether having it in
convenient book form is worth it to you.
Walton's previous collection was a somewhat random assortment of reviews
of whatever book she felt like reviewing. As you may guess from the
title, this one is more structured. She starts at the first year that the
Hugo Awards were given out (1953) and discusses the
winners for each year up through 2000. Nearly all of that discussion is
about the best novel Hugo, a survey of other good books for that year,
and, when other awards (
Nebula,
Locus, etc.) start up, comparing them to the
winners and nominees of other awards. One of the goals of each discussion
is to decide whether the Hugo nominees did a good job of capturing the
best books of the year and the general feel of the genre at that time.
There are a lot of pages in this book, but that's partly because there's a
lot of filler. Each post includes all of the winners and (once a
nomination system starts) nominees in every Hugo category. Walton offers
an in-depth discussion of the novel in every year, and an in-depth
discussion of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (technically
not a Hugo but awarded with them and voted on in the same way) once those
start. Everything else gets a few sentences at most, so it's mostly just
lists, all of which you can readily find elsewhere if you cared.
Personally, I would have omitted categories without commentary when this
was edited into book form.
Two other things are included in this book. Most helpfully, Walton's
Tor.com reviews of novels in the shortlist are included after the
discussion of that year. If you like Walton's reviews, this is great for
all the reasons that
What Makes This Book
So Great was so much fun. Walton has a way of talking about books with
infectious enthusiasm, brief but insightful technical analysis, and a
great deal of genre context without belaboring any one point. They're
concise and readable and never outlast my attention span, and I wish I
could write reviews half as well.
The other inclusion is a selection of the comments from the original blog
posts. When these posts originally ran, they turned into a community
discussion of the corresponding year of SF, and Tor included a selection
of those comments in the book. Full disclosure: one of those comments is
mine, about the way that cyberpunk latched on to some incorrect ideas of
how computers work and made them genre conventions to such a degree that
most cyberpunk takes place in a parallel universe with very different
computer technology. (I suppose that technically makes me a published
author to the tune of a couple of pages.) While I still largely agree
with the comment, I blamed
Neuromancer
for this at the time, and embarrassingly discovered when re-reading it that
I had been unfair. This is why one should never express opinions in
public where someone might record them.
Anyway, there is a general selection of comments from random people, but
the vast majority of the comments are discussions of the year's short
fiction by Rich Horton and Gardner Dozois. I understand why this was
included; Walton doesn't talk about the short fiction, Dozois was a
legendary SF short fiction editor and multiple Hugo winner, and both
Horton and Dozois reviewed short fiction for
Locus. But they don't
attempt reviews. For nearly all stories under discussion, unless you
recognized the title, you would have no idea even what sub-genre it was
in. It's just a sequence of assertions about which title or author was
better.
Given that there are (in most years) three short fiction categories to the
one novel category and both Horton and Dozois write about each category, I
suspect there are more words in this book from Horton and Dozois than
Walton. That's a problem when those comments turn into tedious catalogs.
Reviewing short fiction, particularly short stories, is inherently
difficult. I've tried to do a lot of that myself, and it's tricky to find
something useful to say that doesn't spoil the story. And to be fair to
Horton and Dozois, they weren't being paid to write reviews; they were
just commenting on blog posts as part of a community conversation, and I
doubt anyone thought this would turn into a book. But when read as a
book, their inclusion in this form wasn't my favorite editorial decision.
This is therefore a collection of Walton's commentary on the selections
for best novel and best new writer alongside a whole lot of boring lists.
In theory, the padding shouldn't matter; one can skip over it and just
read Walton's parts, and that's still lots of material. But Walton's
discussion of the best novels of the year also tends to turn into long
lists of books with no commentary (particularly once the very-long
Locus recommended list starts appearing), adding to the tedium.
This collection requires a lot of skimming.
I enjoyed this series of blog posts when they were first published, but
even at the time I skimmed the short fiction comments. Gathered in book
form with this light of editing, I think it was less successful. If you
are curious about the history of science fiction awards and never read the
original posts, you may enjoy this, but I would rather have read another
collection of straight reviews.
Rating: 6 out of 10
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