Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels discussion

I was thinking I might try to do 2 spreadsheets of H & N novelettes and novellas.

Can anyone point me to the data?

I usually use wiki, but I suppose there are other, better sources out there.

Hugo:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_...

Nebula:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebul...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebul...

There's also the Hugo Awards website http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-his...
and the Nebula Awards website
https://nebulas.sfwa.org/awards-by-year/

Thanks, guys.

OK, I will do this in the next few days and then if you guys want the lists, I'll try to figure out what to do to get them up somewhere!

None of you have done these spreadsheets already right? I mean, no reason to reinvent the wheel . . .

Kateblue wrote: "None of you have done these spreadsheets already right? I mean, no reason to reinvent the wheel . . .


I made a program that simplifies their making, so if you wait, I'll try it on these as well

Cynthia wrote: "There's also the Hugo Awards website http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-his...
and the Nebula Awards website
https://nebulas.sfwa.org/awards-by-year/"

Thanks Cynthia, I remember using that at first as well. The best thing about those websites is that you can see all the winners and nominees across all the categories of that year.

I've compiled a draft list, will give a link shortly. I have two issues
1. how to parse multi-author works?
2. I add publishers but Hugo and Nebula sometimes name them differently like Analog Science Fiction and Fact vs Analog Science Fact & Fiction, which makes my program list them as different

Here is the list of novelettes, which were nominated or won Hugo and/or Nebula. If the novelette was written by more than one author it appears once for each author

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

wow, thanks! I am not done with my novelette list yet ( I have to combine some lines), and I haven't even started the novella. So I will just let you do it! You are quick.

Belated answer to your questions above . . .

I think you can put both authors in one square and a filter will find both if you use a "contains" requirement, but you could just have two separate lines. If so, though, you should probably list the title twice, or you will get an author name with a blank line . . .

I don't really care about publishers independently of their works, so I would not worry about the publisher names. Also, if you really needed an complete "Analog" list, you can use a filter that will find both by a "contains" requirement as I said before

I am getting in to reading Novellas. Quicker than novels, but not as short as short stories. Oleksandr, will you do that list, too?

I'll do novellas as well.

re putting authors together, I just planned to do some statistical analysis [yes, I'm that nerdy] and separate line are preferred

However you want to do it is fine with me!

Thanks

Must sleep now

Novella list https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

TY!

That Novella and Novelette list are awesome. Thanks!

Was there a short story one ever done as well?

Dan wrote: "Was there a short story one ever done as well?"

Yes, I have to dig in out in my GoogleDocs. Will do shortly

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

short stories, excluding 2019 and 1944 nominations (was made in 2018

Publisher might be a good thing - or some other indication of where we might find them. Novels are relatively easy to find, but short stories & novellas not so much. Usually I'd guess they'd be parts of anthologies that might not be so easy to find. We could add sources to the list if we find them ourselves.

Thanks Oleksandr. That really helps me complete my spreadsheets!

Allan wrote: "Publisher might be a good thing - or some other indication of where we might find them. Novels are relatively easy to find, but short stories & novellas not so much."

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you on listing publisher, but I see a downside to doing so.

I am so grateful for the existence of isfdb.org. It locates almost any work of speculative fiction through author name. Then, when you pull up that individual work it provides all the places it has been published. If only the original publisher (or publication) is provided in the list, less expensive, or in some other way preferable alternatives listed in ISFDB, may be be overlooked.

I agree, I'm thinking of it not so much as publisher, but as how I can find it. If you can't find the stories, a reading list doesn't do you much good.

I can always find it, usually at minimum expense and maximum convenience. Let me give you an example.

1) Choosing a story at random from an author I've never heard of from the list Oleksandr provided I arrive at Jane Beauclerk's "Lord Moon" from 1966.

2) Looking the name up in ISFDB.org I learn this is a pseudonym for M. J. Engh, who I have (barely) heard of. I look up Engh's few works and see that she used this psedonym twice in the sixties for just this series of two and wrote nothing further for twelve years. There's probably an interesting story there. Another time.

3) I'd want to read the entire series in order, so I start with "We Serve the Star of Freedom" and press that link.

4) I see it has only been published twice. The first time was in the July 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. (The second publication is a French translation that appeared in a French SF magazine.) Searching at the Internet Archive I find the F&SF issue available for free here and can now read the story: https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_S...

5) Let's say the story wasn't available for free at the Internet Archive. Then the only option is to buy that back issue. Ebay has a copy available from Australia for $6.98 plus $8.77 shipping. Searching on Bookfinder.com I find a copy available in Sweden for about the same price. Usually, award winning stories have appeared in anthologies listed in ISFDB that can be had for fairly cheap using bookfinder.com.

Surprisingly, the follow on story, "Lord Moon", the one that actually won the Hugo, is in exactly the same predicament. It appeared in the April 1965 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, available here for free with the story: http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/1/1f.... (It also appeared in French translation in a later issue of the same French magazine.) Buying the back issue of F&SF both from eBay or off bookfinder.com is a few dollars less expensive this time.

My point is that these award winning stories are not that hard to find, either freely available on-line, or for purchase at a reasonable price, usually through a number of anthologies.

EDIT: Doing a little more research, I find the author actually considers these stories along with a 1987 one, a trilogy and has this to say about them on her website: “Aurin Tree,” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1987. The three stories constitute a little trilogy of what Baird Searles once called “Dunsanian, Baroque SF.” (In fact, he called the first two “true, lost masterpieces,” and who am I to argue with Baird Searles?) “Lord Moon” was written first, though published second. I was so fond of its fairytale-like world that I wrote “We Serve the Star of Freedom” to explore it from a different social viewpoint. Years later, I wrote “Aurin Tree” so that the heroes of those two stories could meet. Looked at another way, the three stories poke fun at the scientific mind ("Lord Moon"), the commercial mind ("We Serve the Star of Freedom"), and the military mind ("Aurin Tree") respectively. I acknowledge with gratitude the influence of Dunsany, as well as of James Branch Cabell and especially of E.R. Eddison’s masterpiece, The Worm Ouroboros.

Thanks for the info and the research Dan, I'm sure members will find it useful.

By the way, nomination threads are up if you want to throw in a Hugo nominee you are interested in.

Link Here

re: Publisher in spreadsheets. Initially, I had it as a way to see which sources gave most nominees. The problem with them is that both Hugo and Nebula lists I took from wiki and they had different publication title, e.g. Analog Science Fiction and Fact vs The Astounding Science Fiction, or Interzone #3 vs Interzone-3, which calls for clearing up the data before processing

I've copied over the info on the spreadsheets provided here in the group and have created my own four different spreadsheets, one each for the type of work: novel, novella, etc.

I'm in the process of checking the entries over myself, cleaning up information, like putting titles that start with "The" and "A" at the end after a comma. One discrepancy is that I show the number of novels through 2019 currently at 566. I deleted the multiple entries for Jordan from 2014, going with just Memory of Light, A, and included his co-author. I'm going to start a fifth sheet for series and put Wheel of Time, The, there. That's not a perfect solution, but neither is giving Jordan fifteen lines on the spreadsheet as the sole exception.

Also, even though it's challenging, I think it important to list co-authors. To provide one example why, one novel only 59 have rated by an author very few read or I imagine have heard of was nominated for a 1965 Nebula (listed under 1966). The book is The Clone. We list the author as Theodore L. Thomas, but he had a co-author: the late Kate Wilhelm. What a shame to miss her from the count of how many titles she has on our list!

I consider it so important to list co-authors that in my sheets I have two author columns. The second column lists co-authors. It's not a perfect solution for obvious reasons, but it does more than is currently being done.

Dan wrote: " To provide one example why, one novel only 59 have rated by an author very few read or I imagine have heard of was nominated for a 1965 Nebula (listed under 1966). "

I guess such out-layers become less frequent - after all it was just the initial year for Nebula and I think they were in search of themselves so to speak.

Also, if you see any errors, please notify!

Dan wrote: "Also, even though it's challenging, I think it important to list co-authors.."

If my memory serves me right, out of 500+ works there are only five Hugos with co-authors (3/5 are for Niven & Pournell duo) and four Nebulas (with the same 2 entries by Niven & Pournell). So in practice there are 7 entries that will be listing co-authors, that is of course if I am not remembering my data wrong.

Now I don't do spreadsheets, I just use those wonderful documents others took the time to compile. I dare not even say how much time it would take for me to compile one from scratch. So if you decide to download someone's spreadsheet and edit it as you see fit, you are welcome to. Let us know whether adding a whole colomn to list 7 co-authors was just the thing needed, maybe someone else will incorporate it in their sheet.

As for Wilhem, she won four times as many Nebulas as she did Hugos, an award you were not as much as interested. Maybe that will make you revise that decision!

In any case, "what is currently being done" imho is plenty, but together we can make it an even better experience for everyone. Thanks for pitching in the ideas.

A note on co-authors:

They don't fit well in table structure, so I used the following method for shorter works - duplicate the title for each author, but keep only 1 author's column. This messes with works' total but very slightly - there are few works with two or more authors and if correct count is paramount then add another column with logic T/F on whether title is copied.