Voting For 2011 Hugo Awards Now Closed

The nominations for the 2011 Hugo Awards were announced in April 2011 but I just noticed at John Scalzi's blog that voting on the nominations have now closed. The nominations and winners of the 20111 Nebula awards have already been announced. The Hugo and Nbula awards are tyhe most prestigious awards for speculative works of fiction. Generally, authors select the Nebula award winners and fans pick the Hugo winners.

This year, only two books managed to make the Best Novel category of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, both of which I have read. They are The One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin and Blackout/All-Clear by Connie Willis. Willis has won the Nebula-Hugo double before, for the brilliant Doomsday Book. She has already won the 2011 Nebula Award for her diptych Blackout/All-Clear. Jemisin is a first-time author whose book people either love or hate (I hated it).

Last year there was a tie for the Hugo Award for Best Novel between Paola Baacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl  and China Mieville's The City and the City, neither of which I thought was amazing.

This year's winner will be decided at the World Science Fiction convention on August 20 in Reno, Nevada.
Here's the full list of nominees for Best Novel.

Best Novel

• Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
• Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
• The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
• Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

    

I hope Connie wins!

Celebrity Friday: Connie Willis Wins '11 Nebula Award For Blackout/All-Clear

Connie Willis

Connie Willis is the author of one of my all-time favorite books, the suspenseful, award-winning Doomsday Book. Her most recent book is the diptych Blackout/All Clear, a sequel of sorts to Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, which are all time-travel based, suspenseful novels set in Great Britain and usually filled with biting comic wit.

I previously blogged about this year's nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards, which included Blackout/All Clear. Now comes word that Connie Willis has won her seventh(!) Nebula award, her second for Best Novel, for Blackout/All Clear.

The Guardian reports:

Willis, already the recipient of 10 Hugos and six Nebulas and recently inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, took the Nebula best novel prize this weekend in Washington for her titles All Clear and Blackout. The prestigious science fiction and fantasy award is voted for by the 1,500 author members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and has been won in the past by Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Larry Niven's Ringworld and Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves.

Blackout and All Clear, two volumes making up one novel, see three Oxford historians from 2060 time-travelling back to an England in the middle of the second world war. When the three become trapped in 1940, they start to uncover small historical discrepancies and begin to realise that, contrary to a core part of time travel theory, it might just be possible to "horribly, tragically" alter the past.

The Left Hand of Darkness and The Gods Themselves and Ringworld are widely regarded as some of the best science-fiction books of all time. The Hugo awards are the other prestigious awards in science fiction, voted on by the fans of the genre, while the Nebulas are voted on by the writers.

I have read both Blackout and All Clear but I'm still working on my official review. In short, they weren't as impressive as Doomsday Book but they are noteworthy achievements and well worth reading. They give you a new appreciation for Britons during World War and are an intelligent handling of the mind-bending implications of time travel.