As John Scalzi noted on his blog, it’s worth noting and celebrating that Robert Charles Wilson won the Hugo Award for Spin, which was an award not only well-deserved for the novel in question, but long-overdue when it comes to that writer’s career.   

Here’s what I wrote about Spin, when I read it back in June of last year:

Spin is a superb novel full of Big Ideas, but those Big Ideas don’t come at the expense of rich character development as is so often the case with books of this sort.  Wilson has a real knack for creating characters one can empathize with and can really grow to care about.  The family relationship depicted here, between the narrator, Tyler Dupree, and his childhood friends Jason (the genius) and Diane (his first, unrequited love), is the real driving force of this novel, and is what makes it such a compelling page-turner.  The prose is clean and fluid, and Wilson expertly paces the book, keeping the reader engaged and anxious to find out what comes next.  This can be tricky in a novel that spans several subjective years (and billions of relativistic years), but Wilson pulls it off marvelously. 

Spin is exactly the sort of novel that I think we need to see more of, one that infuses the reader with that gosh-wow sense of wonder that many writers seem to have forgotten is the reason we all fell in love with the genre in the first place. 

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Speaking of the Hugos, I was informed of a wonderful game you can play called Hugo Golf. The idea is to take your program booklet and rank each category in the order you think the nominees will fall. So, for novel, say, you might (as I did) rank your ballot like this:

Learning the World by Ken MacLeod – 5

A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin – 3

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi – 4

Accelerando by Charles Stross – 2

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson – 1

(Note: this was not necessarily my preference for the books; that’s just how I thought the voting would turn out.)

At the end of the award ceremony, you tally up your score, based on how many you got right. So if you ranked Spin 1, then that’s good, and you only add one point to your score (a lower score is better, this being golf). If, however, the Ken MacLeod had one, I would have done very badly in this category, because I would have had to add 5 to my score. You grok?

I didn’t do terribly well. I got a 33, which is far too high for my taste. I did well in some categories, but got hosed in others. For instance, I really got nailed on pro artist, which I was sure was going to John Picacio, and had to take a 5 for Giancola’s win. Likewise on Best Pro Editor — I had to take a 5 for Hartwell; I figured that the book editor wouldn’t win, and it was just a matter of guessing the right short fiction editor (I thought Ellen would win, as a sort of SCI FICTION thank-you).

Of all categories though, I have to say my biggest surprise was that “Magic for Beginners” didn’t win. I was sure it was going to, and thought it had momentarily, because Robert Silverberg, who was presenting, said “Oh, she isn’t here,” and since Kelly was the only one not there (Gordon would have accepted for her), I thought it was going to her. But Silverberg was just continuing the schtick that he and Connie Willis had been doing throughout the ceremony. I should have known though — Connie Willis is a Hugo magnet. I don’t think it was the best novella of the year, but I read the story and liked it quite a bit.

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