Talk:Hugo Award for Best Novel

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Featured listHugo Award for Best Novel is a featured list, which means it has been identified as one of the best lists produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do so.
Featured topic starHugo Award for Best Novel is part of the Hugo Awards series, a featured topic. This is identified as among the best series of articles produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do so.
Main Page trophyThis article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured list on March 20, 2015.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
May 19, 2010Featured list candidatePromoted
August 13, 2011Featured topic candidatePromoted
In the newsA news item involving this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "In the news" column on August 21, 2018.
Current status: Featured list

Well done[edit]

Well done for putting it up. But it seems to me that it should be on the Hugo Award page, since that is scarcely too long. The Nebula award uses that format. : ChrisG 14:18, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Possibly; however, the Novel award isn't the only recognition: if, at some future time, we choose to list each category, akin to Academy Award. That would also give plenty of room to list nominees as well, something I'm partial to. -- Seth Ilys 19:10, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The latest retro Hugos are for 1953 according to the Noreascon website but this page lists them as 1954. -- TRS-80 11:28, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

That's understandable confusion -- the retro Hugos are what would have been awarded in 1954 if any had been awarded then, for work published in 1953. -- Arwel 14:52, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Table/list formatting[edit]

Here's an excerpt from the current version:

2001 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Here's the same part from the old version:

In my opinion, the multicolumn table format doesn't work as well, since the entries are single lines of text, mostly. Does anyone besides Phil Boswell or myself have a preference? If the winner isn't emphasized enough, it could be bolded or set off vertically with a <br/><br/> afterward:

—wwoods 19:43, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)


  • Disagree with the change. It's intrusive, jarring, and makes ready perception of what year an award was nominated and who the winner was much more difficult to easily see. Request a revert to the previous formatting.

Nominations[edit]

  • About the 2006 nominations (or 2005), why wasn't Kazou Ishigura's "Never Let Me Go" nominated. It is science fiction if you read it. Is there some technical requirement I am unaware of.
    • I think it is sci-fi, but it has to be chosen for the shortlist by a judge, afaik, and perhaps none of them thought it was as good as the competition? -- Jon Dowland 10:45, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hugos are fan-based awards. Those registered to attend the convention nominate the books they liked best, and the 5 books with the most nominations are put on the ballot. http //www.awardannals.com/detail/1400043395/ Never Let Me Go was actually nominated for a SF award, but probably didn't receive enough Hugo nominations. Fan-based awards sometimes overlook good writing in favor of an entertaining story. KennyLucius 14:17, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As mentioned above, 'Never Let Me Go' *was* nominated for an award - the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I checked this year's Hugo nominations and it didn't appear in the top 15. See [1] VJDocherty 21:07, 24 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

headers for years[edit]

I would like to be able to wikilink to this article and jump straight to a year (e.g. Hugo Award for Best Novel#2006. Would it be possible to re-structure the listing so that the years were headers? -- Jon Dowland 10:45, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Two comments on formatting[edit]

First, I don't much like the heading "Other nominees" as it feels too general to me. Every year many books get nominated for a Hugo, from which a shortlist is produced and voted on. It looks very much to me like the books in this column are the shortlisted books rather than also including books which were nominated but not shortlisted. However I am unable to verify that for many of the earlier years, which is why I haven't changed it yet.

Second, the list is upside-down. According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lists of works), the first awards should be at the top, going down chronologically to the most recent awards at the bottom. H. Carver 03:48, 22 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Hugo Awards don't have a shortlist, (unlike some other book awards). The members of the current and previous Worldcons nominate works in various categories, including Novel, and the top 5 of these (more, only if there is a tie for 5th place) go onto the voting ballot as 'nominees'. So there are always only a limited number of nominees and these are the ones listed in the table, and no other 'shortlist'. The title 'Other Nominees' is therefore technically correct. VJDocherty 08:13, 28 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Noting for anybody reading old comments, the current Manual of Style says "Items should normally be listed in chronological order of production, earliest first." - Dravecky (talk) 18:07, 7 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Request for help[edit]

If anyone interested in this page would also be interested in helping me populate the winners with Template:Hugo/Best novel, please do so. I've gotten the most recent two novels in but I won't have time to do any of the rest today. See Spin and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for examples. Thanks, MrZaiustalk 13:38, 29 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Order of Nominees[edit]

Is there an explanation for the ordering of the list of Nominees? Through most of the Hugo's history the various nominees are listed in order of which received the most votes— Usually 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th place. See: http://www.nesfa.org/data/LL/Hugos/ But this list has the nominees in an apparent random order. What would be the proper way to format the list to show that all nominees are not equal? —Preceding unsigned comment added by JW Bjerk (talk • contribs) 08:02, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]


I've added the ranking from this official source: http://www.nesfa.org/data/LL/Hugos/ It may look incomplete, but for some of the early years runners up were simply listed without any explicit ordering. Previously as noted above, many of the nominees were ordered randomly, neither alphabetically, nor according the the second-place, third-place, etc. which the novel won.JW Bjerk (talk) 15:56, 5 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

1964 wtf?[edit]

What is this supposed "World of Dune" by Frank Herbert, and why is it listed as a runner up for 1964? The hyperlink for that just links to Dune, which of course was published 1966. I could just remove the reference here, but this presumably needs to have the actual fifth candidate put in. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.167.126.79 (talk) 19:11, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's Dune World, the original title under which the material which later became the novel Dune was serialized in Analog (Dec. 1963- Feb. 1964 issues). I thought everybody knew that. --Orange Mike | Talk 21:55, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Some argued that since the 1963-64 version was nominated already, the final novel shouldn't have been nominated again for 1966; but the fans in charge of the award disagreed. --Orange Mike | Talk 22:14, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This happens occasionally. For instance, this year's Novel nominee Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America is expanded from the 2006 novella "Julian: A Christmas Story" which got a Hugo nomination in 2007. VJDocherty (talk) 22:00, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reliable sources[edit]

The twin purposes of proper referencing are verifiability and establishing notability. If Aurealis Award for best fantasy novel is the standard to which you aspire, you should note that the list is sourced from the award's official website, the Locus database, plus several reliable third-party sources including The Courier-Mail and ABC Radio and Regional Content. If it had been single-sourced from the award's official website (as has happened here, after the fruit of hours of research has been stripped from it without comment or explanation) then it would need to be tagged as one-source and taken to FLR. - Dravecky (talk) 06:06, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about the refs vanishing. I just didn't see any point in keeping around a few random NYTimes obituaries when there was a perfectly good source that also included the publishers/runners up. I completely agree about the single-source thing, but if you notice, pretty much the entire table on that article is from one source (locus) and the last year/honorable mention table are from Aurealis. There are three other sources used; these are up in the lead talking about the event itself/why it's important. There aren't any such sources in this article because I haven't written that yet- if you wait a bit, I'll have them. --PresN 15:16, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Logo description[edit]

I know that promotional use is the intent but it's so new that the Scalzi book in your citation is, apparently, the first book to actually place the logo on its cover... and it won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book, not Best Novel. Perhaps a press release from the logo announcement or some other source that actually backs up this assertion could be found. - Dravecky (talk) 21:03, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. There's the official rules for the contest where they say that the intent is for it to be put on books that win, but that only proves the intent, not that it has happened. I think that I'll put both citations- that it was intended to go on the book jacket, and that it has been put on book jackets. In the mean time, I'll look to see if i can find a source for a novel winner that has the logo- difficult since for it to actually be part of the jacket it would need to have been republished since Octoberish- otherwise it would just be a sticker slapped on it with no reason that it would be in the promo photos on a website.--PresN 21:23, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of section[edit]

I've removed a rather interesting analysis concerning wins and nominations on the basis that is was pure original research. I liked the section, but even though the summary is obviously carefully compiled from references listing nominations and winners, synthesis and original research are eschewed on Wikipedia. -- Scjessey (talk) 21:57, 26 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reverted per this section in WP:SYN - "This policy does not forbid routine calculations, such as adding numbers, converting units, or calculating a person's age, provided editors agree that the arithmetic and its application correctly reflect the information published by the sources from which it is derived. The community even supplies some templates to help perform such calculations." Everything in that paragraph is based on counting and adding. It's not original research to say that, for instance, Heinlein has won five times, when anyone can see in the table five instances with sources where he is noted as the author of a winning book. --PresN 22:22, 26 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Error in sortablity[edit]

It's nice to see that this article made featured list status, however there is currently one VERY BIG ERROR: The titles column does not sort correctly into alphabetical order. No title that starts with "A", An", or "The" should sort under those words. This should have been fixed before FL status was granted! Jimknut (talk) 14:46, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure about this. Titles are chosen to use the words they have on purpose. For example, no one ever refers to it or looks for it as as "Canticle for Leibowitz", they know it as "A Canticle for Leibowitz". Does anyone else have an opinion on this? --PresN 15:53, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, when sorting by title I'd expected to find A Civil Campaign and A Deepness in the Sky under "C" and "D", respectively. This expectation holds for The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, and all of the other "The" titles, too. The Postman should sort with as "P" not "The". - Dravecky (talk) 18:53, 21 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Eh, alright. I'll sort out how to do this. It might take a bit, I'm out of town this upcoming week so I'll be editing on my phone, which makes everything slower. --PresN 03:12, 22 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Article badly garbled in Lynx and Links[edit]

In both the Lynx and Links browsers, this article (along with at least some of the other Hugo articles) is badly garbled. It didn't used to be. Here's how part of it looks in Lynx: 

 20091 ¿2009 Gaiman, NeilNeil Gaiman* Graveyard Book ¿The Graveyard
 Book HarperCollins ^[65]
 20092 ¿2009 Doctorow, CoryCory Doctorow Little Brother Tor Books ^[65]
 20092 ¿2009 Stephenson, NealNeal Stephenson Anathem Morrow ^[65]
 20092 ¿2009 Stross, CharlesCharles Stross Saturn's Children Ace Books
 ^[65]
 20092 ¿2009 Scalzi, JohnJohn Scalzi Zoe's Tale Tor Books ^[65]

Here's the same thing with the Links browser: 

 20091 Gaiman, NeilNeil       Graveyard Book *The HarperCollins         [65]
 *2009 Gaiman*                Graveyard Book
 20092 Doctorow, CoryCory     Little Brother      Tor Books             [65]
 *2009 Doctorow
 20092 Stephenson, NealNeal   Anathem             Morrow                [65]
 *2009 Stephenson
 20092 Stross, CharlesCharles Saturn's Children   Ace Books             [65]
 *2009 Stross
 20092 Scalzi, JohnJohn       Zoe's Tale          Tor Books             [65]
 *2009 Scalzi

Keith Lynch (talk) 02:54, 18 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Huh. Weird. Well, I can tell you what it is- the "Sort" template, which works with some sort of invisible css, is apparently not acting so invisibly with those browsers. The article uses that template to sort the winners above the others by year (the "20091" bit) and to sort the authors by last name (the Gaiman, NeilNeil Gaiman) bit, as well as some other minor sorting. This is a big failure on the part of the template, as far as I can see- it's not degrading nicely for browsers that don't use css. Please bring it up at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)- this is way outside my wiki coding expertise to fix. --PresN 05:51, 18 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I can see, the template isn't doing anything at all when the browser doesn't use css, and the data are simply displayed in the same order as in the original source. I'm not sure this is fixable at the template level, but it can be trivially corrected by putting the table lines into correct order in the source.BunsenH (talk) 01:54, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

External Links[edit]

Not sure how three external links is excessive unless you mean excessively few. The link was to a site that is in fact a very useful resource to anyone wishing to find out more about the books and authors in the award. Htaccess (talk)

Just checked out your link (I wasn't one of the ones that reverted) and... It doesn't really add anything. It has the covers of the books and links to more info on each one, but that's exactly what those blue links in this article are for. It's exactly the same list, just in a slightly different format. --PresN 18:23, 23 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
meh Htaccess (talk) 00:33, 7 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Jack Vance's Star King[edit]

There's this idea floating around the net that Jack Vance won the Hugo in 1963 for his novel Star King. The cover of that book that illustrates the article in question even says "Winner of the 1963 Hugo Award". What's up here? Why isn't Star King in the list in this article? I daren't put it in since I have no first-hand info myself. Martin Rundkvist (talk) 22:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is why there's a reference for each line of the table- Star King did not win any Hugo award. As you can plainly see at the official list for that year. Jack Vance, on the other hand, did win a Hugo in 1963, for his novella The Dragon Masters. This, in turn, means that Jack Vance was a winner of the 1963 Hugo Award, which is the other way that the Star King cover can be read. --PresN 04:13, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent, thank you. Martin Rundkvist (talk) 09:02, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Retro Hugos[edit]

Just a placeholder note - Retro Hugos will need some work now for the 75 year old award, new fourth time year, etc. Retro table is sorted by novel year and not by award year. --Thomcat (talk) 16:37, 20 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Controversial voting[edit]

I noticed some attempt was made (and reverted) to mention the controversial voting for the latest awards. I think there is significant national press coverage to warrant a mention of this; however, it should be restricted to the main Hugo Award article. -- Scjessey (talk) 16:54, 9 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Decline Nominations[edit]

I wonder if there should be some mention that the nominees can decline a nomination and that and many authors have declined nominations. Could there be a note about Marko Kloos declining a nomination after nominations were announced and that he was replaced by Cixin Liu? It does alter the perception of the award knowing that authors can and have declined to be nominated. Edit Ferret (talk) 21:14, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Without a comprehensive list of which works have been declined over the years, I'd like to keep the notes to just works that got declined/removed after voting started- after all, we only know that 3 works got declined this year because 2 of them were after the nominations were announced; authors usually decline beforehand so we would never have known about the other one if they hadn't posted it on their blog. Hugo Award mentions that some were declined this year and is the better place for discussion of the rules as a whole; it may make sense to put a note that authors can decline there. --PresN 23:32, 17 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Intro section needs updating[edit]

I'd fix it myself if I had the time, but the last paragraph seems to be a few years out of date. There have been nominations for 67 years (including Retro Hugos), Sawyer has had nine nominations, everything else should be checked. 209.179.76.220 (talk) 03:29, 6 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see the problem- Originally retro hugos counted as their own nomination year, but at some point they stopped being counted separately so now the count is in between the two. The Sawyer miscount seems to be separate, as he would have had 9 when I wrote the list in the first place. Fixed. --PresN 03:48, 6 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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Edit to Sylva ('63) Entry[edit]

I've added the translator to this entry based on this article: [2]. I'm a bit out of my element here, as I don't follow the Hugos. Supposedly this has been added to the official archive. Could someone tidy up for me? Thanks. Pkeets (talk) 18:18, 28 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, interesting. It does appear that it's been added to the official Hugo site- [3] - so it's perfectly reasonable and correct to note the translator. It's a bit odd to list the translator in the table, though, as at the time they were not awarded anything, it's a fix 56 years later, but I can see the argument for it. I'll leave it in and clean it up a bit. --PresN 19:20, 28 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Better late than never, I guess. Thanks! Pkeets (talk) 03:40, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"Publisher" column heading in table[edit]

A recent edit changed the column header in the Winners and Nominees table from "Publisher" to "Publisher in the United States". While "Publisher" didn't really make sense since there are multiple publishers, and it was probably irritating to non-Americans, "Publisher in the United States" isn't actually true. Some of the publishers (Gollancz, Hodder & Stoughton, Macmillan, Bloomsbury, early Orbit, possibly others) are British. The entries all have citations, which are pages from http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/, and these give both U.S. and British publishers. This table uses the first of those two. It looks like the intent is to list the U.S. publisher first for U.S. authors and the British publisher first for British authors. Though "A Closed and Common Orbit" is still a mystery to me. This didn't seem worth trying to describe in the table, and may count as original research, so I'm leaving the table as is. But in case someone else wants to change it, or if posterity is interested, it isn't really true. Dan Bloch (talk) 22:17, 25 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On further reflection I've changed the column header to "Publisher (U.S. or U.K.)". Having it tell the truth seems like a good idea. Dan Bloch (talk) 22:39, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Series" column heading in table[edit]

For novels which are part of a series, a column naming the series it belongs to would be helpful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:6C67:5E3F:CF76:71F6:7ECA:E85A:9CE8 (talk) 01:46, 21 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Number of Awards & Nominations Table[edit]

I created a table showing the total number of wins and nominations per author. You can see it here. PresN deleted it all with this comment:

I'm sorry, because this does look like a bunch of work, but reverting the whole thing. It's a massive table add-on that presents the same information in a different order, confusingly and un-accessibly. The lead already discusses the people who have won/been nominated a notable number of times, and making a giant table out of the rest of them is just trivia

I'd like to see it restored. Yes, it was a lot of work, but I argue it is also valuable and interesting. It is a common feature of pages like List of World Series champions, List of Super Bowl champions, etc. It may be trivia, but it is interesting trivia. When I first came to this page it was a question I was trying to answer, but the list of awards by year was just a jumble. An author I came across had won a number of awards and I wanted to see how she compared to other authors. Authors will brag about how many nominations or wins they had, but without any context to compare it to it is hard to know what that means. Was her 5 nominations a lot? Was it par for the course? Collecting everything into a sortable table makes that information more readily available and accessible.

It is interesting to compare authors who had a lot of nominations and few wins, or those with few nominations that won most of the time. Or those who dominated different decades, or had a long span of relevance. It is a good way to find authors I hadn't heard of otherwise, and just the list of awards by year doesn't tell that story. KPalicz (talk) 15:32, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I don't think it added an value. Furthermore, I would argue that the award is given to novels, not authors. -- Scjessey (talk) 19:25, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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