An Informal History of the Hugos
"A remarkable guided tour through the field ― a kind of nonfiction companion to Among Others. It's very good. It's great." ― Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing on What Makes This Book So Great
Engaged, passionate, and consistently entertaining, An Informal History of the Hugos is a book for the many who enjoyed Jo Walton's previous collection of writing from Tor.com, the Locus Award-winning What Makes This Book So Great
The Hugo Awards, named after pioneer science-fiction publisher Hugo Gernsback, and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Society, have been given out since 1953. They are widely considered the most prestigious awards in science fiction.
Between 2010 and 2013, Jo Walton wrote a series of posts for Tor.com, surveying the Hugo finalists and winners from the award's inception up to the year 2000. Her contention was that each year's full set of finalists generally tells a meaningful story about the state of science fiction at that time.
Walton's cheerfully opinionated and vastly well-informed posts provoked valuable conversation among the field's historians. Now these posts, lightly revised, have been gathered into this book, along with a small selection of the comments posted by SF luminaries such as Rich Horton, Gardner Dozois, and the late David G. Hartwell.
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Jo Walton
Jo Walton has published thirteen novels, most recently Necessity. A fourteenth, Poor Relations is due out early in 2018. She has also published three poetry collections and an essay collection. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002, the World Fantasy Award for Tooth and Claw in 2004, the Hugo and Nebula awards for Among Others in 2012, and in 2014 both the Tiptree Award for My Real Children and the Locus Non Fiction award for What Makes This Book So Great. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are much better. She gets bored easily so she tends to write books that are different from each other. She also reads a lot, enjoys travel, talking about books, and eating great food. She plans to live to be ninety-nine and write a book every year. She takes writing biographies of herself terribly seriously at all times.
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