Eagle's Path: New review index (2005-06-19)

I got curious about something, so I cobbled together a bit of code this evening. The result is this index of books that won multiple SFF awards. It's an interesting list, and probably one that I'll use to prioritize my reading.

I haven't done a statistical analysis of ratings on those books yet, but just looking at the ratings column, I'm not seeing a lot of difference in average rating between books that won two awards and books that won three awards. Certainly, the two that won four awards (Rendezvous with Rama and Gateway) are not books that blew me away, but the sample size is small. However, it looks like winning at least two awards weeds out a lot of the crap; while most awards seem to eventually produce at least one book that I rate lower than a 5 (meaning I thought reading it was a waste of time), there are no ratings below 5 on this list.

The most common pairing is Hugo/Locus, which doesn't surprise me. The most common triple is Hugo/Locus/Nebula, also not particularly surprising. There are some political and qualification-based reasons why those awards are likely to run in parallel, but they also all have been running for quite a while and Locus hands out two awards a year. (I really should split Locus SF from Locus Fantasy rather than just blending them together on both the awards page and here. Project for another night.)

BTW, for those who didn't already realize it, my SFF awards pages aren't nearly as comprehensive as Locus's, but they're also updated much more frequently. If you're interested specifically in award-winning novels, I try to get the latest award winners recorded within a week or so of when I hear about them, and I follow enough blogs and similar news sources that I generally hear about them within a day or two.

Thanks a lot for putting together this list! I'm trying to work my way through all the hugo winners but getting discouraged; your list may help me select which ones to read first. (Your ratings of books I've read seem to mostly concur with mine.)

Posted by Stef at 2005-06-20 00:37

I personally would recommend the Nebula winners over the Hugo winners; the quality seems generally a touch higher. But I'm doing the same thing myself (for a whole bunch of different awards, in fact).

I've read all the Hugo winners but 15 at this point, and have 14 of the 15 remaining books (The Forever Machine appears to be hard to track down, but David Langford also says it's the worst book to win a Hugo, so I'm not in a hurry).

Posted by eagle at 2005-06-21 07:39