All the Hugo winners

I realized the other day that, after a year and a half of frequently award-focused SF reading, I've now read all Hugo winners but thirteen. That's the closest I am to having read every winning novel for any award (Nebula, Clarke, and Tiptree are all tied at fifteen left), and by far the closest percentage-wise.

That's almost in sight of a final push to finish them all. If I just read Hugo winners for a month and a half....

Of the one's left (not counting The Snow Queen, which I've already read and which is pending review), I expect I'll like The Man in the High Castle and The Wanderer. I just haven't gotten around to them. I'm reading The Big Time right now; so far, not my thing, but then I just started it.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go I have a bad feeling about. Those are often reliable, even when they're based on very little. But it's short, at least, unlike Stand on Zanzibar, which can intimidate me from across the room.

The one Hugo winner I've both not read and don't own is the one you've probably also never heard of, The Forever Machine by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley. I hear it's hideous. Hopefully it will also be short.

The really hard ones are going to be Green Mars and Blue Mars, books two and three of a series that I'm pretty sure I'm going to at best dislike, and that's on top of being large and apparently fairly dense books. Those may end up being last.

That leaves the Bujold (The Vor Game and Mirror Dance), which I've not really gotten into but for which I have some evidence that it will improve, and the Heinlein (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, and The Double Star), which I'll read at some point when I have a high tolerance for libertarian bullshit. I'm not going to force myself to re-read Stranger in a Strange Land, at least right now, despite it being the only book I've ever given up on reading within fifteen pages from the end.

Not very much at all, particularly given the number of those books that are refreshingly brief. I bet I'll be down to five or six left to read by the end of the summer, given how goal-oriented I tend to be as soon as a nice, achievable goal presents itself.

Posted: 2005-07-10 22:26 — Why no comments?

Are you planning to include the Retro-Hugo winners too?

(Though I guess there's only three, judging by Locus's list.)

Posted by Jon Lennox at 2005-07-11 05:36

To Your Scattered Bodies Go was one of my favorite science fiction books back in middle school. I re-read it in college, along with its many sequels, and it stood up pretty well. I haven't picked it up in a while, but was actually just thinking about it the other day.

Good luck with Green Mars and Blue Mars, though. I really enjoyed Red Mars, and immediately went out and started in on the sequels. Took me about three months to get through the two of them, and I'm a fast reader. They keep getting longer and longer...

Posted by Alexei Kosut at 2005-07-11 07:52

I was including the retro Hugos at one point and then decided that they were just too silly, particularly since there will probably only ever be three of them.

Posted by eagle at 2005-07-11 15:28

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04