Trolling

[snarp]

* Lord of Light is a stupid bullshit whiny-baby-Mary-Sue book that's not even paced competently and should never under any circumstances be referred to as a "classic."

* You can call A Night in the Lonesome October a classic, though. That's fine.

* The Hugo and Nebula awards are invalid on the basis that Salman Rushdie never won either of them.

* It's hilarious for reasons I cannot define that in 1989, the year The Satanic Verses would have been up, the Hugo went to Cyteen, Cherryh's probably-best sci-fi book, and the Nebula to Falling Free, Bujold's probably-worst.

I mean, you're not really going to get me to argue about Cyteen, I will allow that it defeats The Satanic Verses in several categories, including the ones that matter most to me personally. But Falling Free? For real? They can't have been serious. Did Bujold get snubbed for something else and they were going, oh, shit, gotta fix this gotta fix this, quick let's pin a gold star on this hastily-edited first draft!

* The Wikipedia page for the thing that beat Midnight's Children to the Nebula is also pretty funny. I'm sure that all of these ideas seemed very compelling in 1980.

Comments

[malkingrey]

What happened with Falling Free -- in those days (though not now) the final Nebula ballot was a preferential ballot. The 1988 final ballot had novels on it by, among others, Greg Benford, Orson Scott Card (then still riding high in fannish esteem), William Gibson (then busy creating cyberpunk), and Gene Wolfe. These entries, each of them individually stronger than Falling Free, all had separate passionate voting blocs -- which effectively worked to knock all of them out of the running, leaving the award to go to most people's second (or maybe third or fourth) choice.

Which is why a voting system that works well to produce political consensus doesn't do so well at picking works of literary merit, and SFWA eventually stopped doing it that way.

[snarp]

Okay, that makes much more sense. I was digging around trying to figure out when she might have been unfairly passed over, but nothing was exactly standing out, particularly before 1989.

[ajnabieh]

You know, I had never thought of Rushdie as a sff writer, but of course he is, in some very clear ways (and in most of the ways that make sff a compelling genre to me). I was about to type "I wonder why he doesn't get framed as such very often" and then I realized that was a stupid question and I know the answer(s).

[snarp]

POC SFF authors don't happen! There are only POC magical realism authors. That is the rule!

Seriously, Midnight's Children is what would happen if you took Marvel and DC's "gritty" output since Watchmen - including the casual misogyny, that's an integral part of the whole - and made something that was actually worth reading out of it.