I've mentioned in earlier posts (Ancillary Justice, Annihilation, Old Man's War) about the disconnect between my tastes and those of people who sit on panels or are members of societies that give out the Best Novel awards in science fiction and fantasy. So out of curiosity, I went back and looked at the past award winners, to see if there is a gap, when it happened, and whether it happened for all awards or just specific ones.
Here, I'll summarize what I found, what I think that says about awards, and some of the strange patterns I found in the winners.
METHODOLOGY
I looked at the Best Novel winners in 9 science fiction and fantasy awards from 1980-2017 (maximum 38 novels each, if one was awarded every year). The awards chosen were just the ones I was most familiar with and have most often seen promoted/advertised:
Hugo, Nebula, Locus (both Science Fiction and Fantasy), Aurora (Canadian), BSFA (British), Philip K Dick, Arthur C Clarke, World Fantasy Award
The awards break down as follows.
- By category: 4 Science Fiction, 2 Fantasy, 3 Mixed (i.e. SF&F)
- By nationality: 7 International (heavily skewing to US), 1 Canadian, 1 British
- By award type: 2 Selected by poll, 1 By a panel of judges, 6 By members of a society
I've gone through and checked which of the winners I've read, and if so, how I'd rate them on a simple, 5-point scale--highlighted in the image, from dark red (worst) to dark green (best).
FINDINGS
For science fiction, I've gone from mostly agreeing with the award choices in the 80s, to either not reading, or reading and disliking the winners since the turn of the millennium. Oddly, for fantasy that hasn't been the pattern--the period when I was closest in taste to the dedicated/purely fantasy awards was right around 2000.
By decade:
80s: Lots of SF winners I read & liked. Which is odd, as I was age 10-15 at the time, so selection committees had the same tastes as a teenager.
90s: Sparser here, but generally liked the winners that I did read. Think I was into a lot of fantasy at the time--Tad Williams ("Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" '88-'93), Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana '90, A Song for Arbonne '92) and Terry Pratchett (Hogfather, '96).
00s-10s: Oddly, I read more of the winners but didn't like them as much. All but one of the winners I disliked were published after '09. I was back to reading SF in this period, Iain M Banks, William Gibson, Richard Morgan and S.A. Corey, but by and large they weren't winning awards.
CONCLUSIONS
I'll admit, I was a little surprised to see how far back the split in taste between me & the awards began. I'd lazily assumed this was a recent thing, brought about by the awards' preference for non-traditional stories and characters, but even in the 90s I'd already stopped reading most of the winners.
So yeah, I'm out of sync with them, but I now realize I've been out of sync almost all my life. Nothing new there.
What has changed is my evaluation of those winners I do read. Especially in the last 10 years, my enjoyment of these books has taken a nosedive. Just looking at the list I can't really say why, other than they're just not my thing any more.
WEIRD FACTS
Couple of random things I noticed going through the lists:
- The Hugo and Locus awards are pretty similar
They awarded the same book 19/38 times (half), and in particular from 1980-99 chose the same book 14/20 times (70% of the time). Makes me wonder a little about the point of having a separate award, if you're just going to pick the same books as everyone else.
- The Aurora (Canadian SF&F award) really likes what they like
Author Robert J Sawyer has won Best Novel eight times in the last 26 years (1992-2017). So about a third of the time, they just say "fuckit" give it to the same guy and all take off to Timmy Ho's for coffee & timbits.
- "The City and The City" (China Mieville) blew everyone's socks off
From 2009-10, the weird fiction/crime caper won five of the nine awards I tracked. Have I read this novel that wowed the members of all these award committees? No. But am I going too, now that I've seen the buzz? Also no.
Doesn't really sound like my thing.
