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

[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.