The New Hugo Winners
Volume IV
by Gregory Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis, Isaac Asimov, Nancy Kress, Connie Willis, Janet Kagan, Lucius Shepard, Charles Sheffield, Harry Turtledove · first published 1997
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2015–2023first – last mentioned
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A Walk in the Sun - short story by Geoffrey A. Landis Gold - novelette by Isaac Asimov Beggars in Spain - novella by Nancy Kress Even the Queen - short story by Connie Willis The Nutcracker Coup - novelette by Janet Kagan Barnacle Bill the Spacer - novella by Lucius Shepard Death on the Nile - novelette by Connie Willis Georgia on My Mind - novelette by Charles Sheffield Down in the Bottomlands - novella by Harry Turtledove
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…off trying more of him by his current 1-for-3 record. I do like the movie 2001, though :-) Bester's probably my biggest blind spot among the sci-fi greats—I've read nothing by him. I can recommend The New Hugo Winners collections over The Hugo Winners, pretty much universally, if you're looking for short stories. Asimov all but sneers at them in his torch-passing introduction, but the reason he feels out of touch with…
on “Choose your reading carefully” ↗Bradbury. [edit] also, if you like short stories and novellas, I found the New Hugo Winners series (in which Asimov had taken a back seat as editor, writing in his introduction, to paraphrase, “I do not understand these kids”) has a way higher average quality of writing than the older Hugo Winners…
on “J. G. Ballard’s Brilliant, “Not Good” Writing” ↗…Barbarian) and a few works playing with folk-tale and fairy tale motifs. Sci-fi is easy because it's a genre full of great short stories and novellas. Arguably, it's better suited to those than to novels. The New Hugo Winners collections showcase a lot of shorter works that tend to be a bit more "literary" (in an early Asimov-penned forward to one of these, he claims to have passed off editing duties on the "New Hugo" series…
on “Why Read Classic Books?” ↗…action, more believable characters and dialog, and so on. The improvements there are really obvious when reading, say, an early 70s The Hugo Winners or collections of 1950s stories, and then a 90s The New Hugo Winners. Whether their ideas and worlds stand up to Asimov and company, or happen to be appealing to a particular reader, is another matter, but the command of writing itself is overall better, I'd say. I don't…
on “Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada” ↗> 1. "Wow, have you read all these books?" means "I never read books." There's a short story, I think in one of my New Hugo Winners volumes, in which a character responds to that question with something like, "who the hell wants a library full of books they've already read?!" But yes, that's definitely the kind of question only someone…
on “Love the smell of old books? This bookseller would like you to leave” ↗