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 |  | Hugos Dismiss Star Trek, Space Novels
posted: 11:46 am ET
07 September 1999
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Hugos Dismiss Star Trek, Space Novels
Space was not necessarily the place in science fiction this year according to the results of the 1999 Hugo Awards, which honored a number of shorter space-oriented works but handed the best novel and best dramatic presentation categories to more earthbound fare.
The "Hugos," named in honor of pioneering SF editor Hugo Gernsback, are widely considered the highest honor that science fiction fans, as opposed to professionals, can bestow on their favorite works of speculative art. While the Nebula Awards are decided by the vote of members of the professional Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), any fan attending the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) can cast a vote for the Hugos.
Connie Willis picked up a seventh Hugo, this one for "best novel," for her time-travel romance To Say Nothing of the Dog, which beat out Mary Doria Russell's Children of God and Robert Sawyer's Factoring Humanity along with two non-interplanetary contenders. She had previously won the "best novel" award in 1993 for her Doomsday Book.
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| "Colliding Galaxies," from Bob Eggleton, 1999 Hugo Award Winner for professional artist.
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In the category of "best dramatic presentation," this year's predominantly Australian voting pool snubbed both Star Trek and Babylon 5 in favor of native Australian Peter Weir's metaphysical exploration of illusion and the media, 'The Truman Show'. "Sleeping in Light," the final episode of Babylon 5's fourth season, made a valiant showing but still placed only second in the overall results; 'Star Trek: Insurrection' placed a distant fifth.
Among the other categories, Greg Egan's 'Oceanic' won the "best novella" award for its depiction of the conflict between religion and science in one man's life on distant planet Covenant, which was colonized by "Angels" millennia before.
Bruce Sterling's 'Taklamakan', a tale of near-future intrigue in Central Asia, won the "best novelette" award, and Michael Swanwick's 'The Very Pulse of the Machine', a psychological thriller set in Jupiter orbit, managed to fend off competition from two other Swanwick stories to win "best short story."
All three winners of the shorter fiction categories came from Asimov's magazine, which took home a Hugo for "best pro editor" Gardener Dozois.
Bob Eggleton , known for his luxurious paintings of space vistas among other subjects, won "best pro artist." Noted SF writer Thomas M. Disch won the "best related book" award for The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World .
The awards were handed out Sunday at the 57th annual Worldcon, held in collaboration with Aussiecon III in Melbourne, Australia. In honor of the convention's antipodean setting, voters ranked all nominated works in each category according to the "Australian ballot" system, which eliminates candidates with the least amount of votes, redistributing those votes until one candidate has a clear majority.
The SFWA maintains a full list of 1999 Hugo winners on its Web site.
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