I've been reading Jo Walton's Revisiting the Hugos posts on Tor.com recently

[snarp]

Here! I have rarely read more than one or two of the mentioned books for any given year, but they're still very interesting.

They also discuss the Nebulas, and I will be interested to see what she says when she gets to 1988, because I just realized that Bujold's worst book, Falling Free, won the Nebula that year.

WHY DID THAT HAPPEN

I know I'm probably too harsh on Bujold sometimes - but Falling Free was not a good book. I mean, this is objectively so; it's actually something you can test using a couple drops of bromothymol blue, if you don't mind staining your book puce. Did people feel they'd slighted her in some previous year? What happened there?

And I just looked at Wikipedia, and - come on, The Satanic Verses came out in '88. I guess if they were going to pretend Midnight's Children didn't count, they were going to do the same for The Satanic Verses, but geez. (Not to suggest that TSV is better than MC; it's not.)

Comments

[holyschist]

I am really interested in your dislike of Falling Free (I disliked it less than Ethan of Athos, but that's not saying much. I liked Cryoburn more, which is...sad).

I WANT ALL THE VORKOSIGAN META.

[snarp]

I don't actually have much to say about it, which is part of why I think it's Bujold's worst book. I just don't see that there's much going on it; it just seems to be a bunch of poorly-fleshed-out characters hurtling randomly through plot developments. Reading Ethan of Athos, which I agree is really weak, I think you can tell it's by the same person who wrote her better books, but not really with Falling Free. It's just too thin.

[malkingrey]

Did people feel they'd slighted her in some previous year? What happened there?

If I recall correctly, Falling Free won in a year when there were several very strong nominees -- William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive and Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun, to pick the two standouts, plus entries by Orson Scott Card and Greg Benford and George Turner and Lewis Shiner -- and there was a lot of what I suppose you could call partisan spirit going on, where the cyberpunk crowd who picked Gibson for their first choice wouldn't vote for Gene Wolfe if you paid them, and vice versa. The Nebula ballot uses a preferential voting system, so in a year where you've got a couple of strong candidates that divide the electorate it's entirely possible for all the supposed front runners to knock each other out of the running and have the election go to the candidate who's nobody's favorite but is the second or third choice of a lot of voters.

[cerusee]

By what sane standard is Falling Free not a good book? It's not my favorite Bujold book, at all; it's not the Bujold book I'd personally single out for an award (I'd go for Shards of Honor, or Mirror Dance, or Memory, or Warrior's Apprentice, or The Curse of Chalion), but what on earth makes you feel it's actually a bad book?

[snarp]

See my response to holyschist. Maybe I'm being too hard on it because it's Bujold and I expect more of her, but it didn't work at all for me.