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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Like the Leg in the Window,
By
This review is from: The Hugo Winners (Volume I & II): Twenty-three Prize-winning Science Fiction Stories (One and Two) (Hardcover)
In that wonderful movie, _A Christmas Story_, the Old Man (played with great gusto by Darren McGavin) wins a hideous lamp in the shape of a woman's leg. He thinks that it is the most wonderful thing in the world, and he places it proudly in the living room window, runs outside, and is shouting instructions to those inside to position it more prominently. A passing neighbor asks him, "But what is it?"
"What is it?" the Old Man says. "Why, it's a... a _major award_!" Well, here are the first two volumns of science fiction stories that have won the Hugo-- one of the Major Awards of science fiction. (The other Major Award is the Nebula.) There is one clear advantage that you will have when you are reading these stories. You know that they will all be good at the very least, and you know that a fair percentage of them will be great. None will be poor or mediocre. Now I did not say that you will like them all equally. Some will be more your cup of tea than others. But I think that you will acknowledge that even those that you don't care for as much will be passably well-crafted. After all, they _did_ win a Major Award. There are twenty-three stories in all. They are: "The Darfstellar," by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; "Allamagoosa," by Eric Frank Russell; "Exploration Team," by Murray Leinster; "The Star," by Arthur C. Clark; "Or All the Seas with Oysters," by Avram Davidson; "The Big Front Yard," by Clifford D. Simak; "The Hell-Bound Train," by Robert Bloch; "Flowers for Algernon," by Daniel Keyes; "The Longest Voyage," by Poul Anderson; "The Dragon Masters," by Jack Vance; "No Truce with Kings," by Poul Anderson; "Soldier, Ask Not," by Gordon R. Dickson; "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," by Harlan Ellison; "The Last Castle," by Jack Vance; "Neutron Star," by Larry Niven; "Weyr Search," by Anne McCaffry; "Riders of the Purple Wage," by Philip Jose Farmer; "Gonna Roll the Bones," by Fritz Leiber; "I Have no mouth and I must Scream," by Harlan Ellison; "Nightwings," by Robert Silverberg; "The Sharing of Flesh," by Poul Anderson; "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World," by Harlan Ellison; and "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones," by Samuel R. Delany. I am not going to discuss these stories individually here-- though I will in reviews of each seperate volumn-- I believe that I can safely say that this is a lot of good reading. And if you can't find _any_ of these stories satisfactory... Well, maybe the problem isn't with the stories. Perhaps it would be appropriate to close with a few historical notes. The stories in these volumns come from Conventions between 1953 and 1970, when awards were given. But in 1953 and 1957, no awards were given for short stories. In 1962, the short fiction award was given to a _series_ of stories-- Brian W. Aldiss's Hothouse stories. Later Convention rules blocked this practice. Today, if you have a series of tales, the series as a whole can compete-- but only as a novel. Otherwise, one story must be selected from the series to compete with other short stories of a comparable length. This is certainly fair, but I can't be sorry that Aldiss won that year. Finally, there was another winner besides the Delany story in 1970: Fritz Leiber's novella, "Ship of Shadows." But for reasons of space, it was reprinted in volumn three of the series.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
2 books in one, twenty years of Hugo's, NO L Ron Hubbard!,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Hugo Winners (Volume I & II): Twenty-three Prize-winning Science Fiction Stories (One and Two) (Hardcover)
Great collection of arguably the best science fiction from the fifties to the seventies. Bonus: Isaac Asimov's tongue-in-cheek introductions. Hugo's are voted for by the authors' peers so there's no ring-ins like L Ron Hubbard (unlike the Nebula awards). Excellent stuff.
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