The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would be my #1, of the ones I’ve read. Others I love would include Rendezvous with Rama and Ender’s Game, There are a lot there I haven’t read yet, but I’m updating my wish list.
I’m about halfway through Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell right now, and really enjoying it.
I don’t always agree with the selections, but boy is there a lot of crappy winners! Ringworld Engineers? Children of Dune? Did they actually read the books, or just vote by author name recognition? It’s worse than the Oscars! 
I won’t try to say which is best, but the ones I like rereading again and again are Deathworld and The Forever War,
IMHO the list of Hugo winners and nominees looks like it can’t make up its mind whether it wants the Hugo to be a science fiction award or a science fiction and fantasy award—for what I’m sure are good historical reasons; but it still feels wrong to me to even consider a fantasy novel for “all time best Hugo award winner.” It’s just too apples-and-orangey.
As with the Newbery list, I surely can’t judge fairly, since I’ve read only a fraction of the books, and those at vastly different times of my life. I’m going to go with The Dispossessed, though that might easily change if I went back and did some reading/rereading (or even just thought about it some more).
Ringworld Engineers and Children of Dune did not win. They were nominated, but not winners.
The Hugo process is this. The award is given by the World Science Fiction Convention each year. Members of the convention (and members of one or two previous conventions*) may nominate words for an award. The five works in each category that get the most nominations are on the ballot.**
Members can then vote for the winner. It’s a ranked ballot – you rank the works 1-5. You also have the option to vote for no award in any position. So a ballot could be
(Once you select “No Award,” you can’t rank anything lower.)
The ballots are counted in what’s called (for no reason anyone can articulate) an “Australian Ballot.” What happens is that each book is given its ranking. Thus if 100 people vote for Really Great Novel as #1, it gets 100 votes.
If a work gets over 50% of the ballots, it wins. This rarely happens.
For the next round, the novel that got the fewest #1 votes is eliminated. The judges look at the #2 votes for that novel and distribute them. Thus if 16 people voted for the novel that got the lowest vote total, those votes are given to their second choice.
The process is repeated until a work gets a majority of ballots.
There are flaws in the system (but there are flaws in any voting system). The one here is that controversial works can’t win. Something that a lot of people love, but a lot of people hate will be winnowed out and lose to those where no one really strongly dislikes. The people that love the work won’t get enough to win, but will accept their second or third choice.
*I forget the details.
**Subject to a certain minimum number of nominations.
Thanks! I read the chart incorrectly.
Some of my faith is restored.
As much as I despise Orson Scott Card for his personal opinions… Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead are brilliant.
I’ll also give a happy shout-out to Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, not least because Vinge (unlike Card) is a super sweet-heart of a kindly-souled gentleman. (And it’s a darn good book, too, although I actually like his A Deepness in the Sky better.)
I’ve read 26. Lots of great ones on there, and many of them are sentimental to me (I read a lot of classic SF as a teenager: Asimov, Niven, Clarke, Heinlein, Zelazny, etc).
But that aside, I pick * Ender’s Game* as best ever, with Stranger in a Strange Land as runner-up.
Moon is A Harsh Mistress is a favorite, but the one I recommend, especially to those who don’t read SFF, is Lord of Light
Most people in the field don’t differentiate, and writers often move from one to the other. There are more similarities in the genres than differences.
“And Call Me Conrad” isn’t the hefty feast “Lord of Light” is, but I’ve reread it several times in the last decade, and it’s just purely charming. “Dune”, I’ve never felt the need to revisit – especially after it was turned into a franchise.
I really, really enjoyed Ender’s Game. And I weekly think about a central theme–“The enemy’s gate is down”–as a key to living life right.
But the forward to the re-release of it, in which Card petulantly and stupidly claims that his portrayal of gifted kids is psychologically accurate, and Card’s later descent into a racist parody of himself, makes it hard for me to appreciate the book.
It certainly seems out of place compared to the rest of the winners, all general more serious in tone. It was a fun read and a great send-up of Star Trek tropes but I would have voted for 2312. Then again, I’m a KSR fan.
I would agree with you if I hadn’t read the codas at the end that sucked all the joy out of the story and, ultimately, life itself. Which is disappointing because Scalzi’s usually an upbeat writer. I haven’t read *2312 *but one day I will because I’m adding the entire list to Mt. ToBeRead which is growing by the minute.
I agree on both points. I read only 100 pages of Red Mars, and I would have quit much sooner if I hadn’t heard how good it was. It just never caught, let alone held, my interest.
Another book I can’t believe has so many fans and won so many awards is the Doomsday Book. I thought it was a mediocre tear-jerker wrapped in absolutely awful sci-fi, and I’m a sucker for time travel stories. I mean, seriously, you have a fucking time machine, and hardly anyone is even interested in using it, and the administrator considers it an annoying distraction from his more important work? But at least I read the whole thing.
Dune, far and away, for me. I read it once, over 40 years ago, and I still remember how it completely transported me as I read it. I’ve read almost everything Heinlein, Asimov, and the other golden age writers put out, and enjoyed almost all of it, but Dune got into my bones.
Too late to edit, but I would say that the first two books of AGOT were also in my top five of all time. If I’m reading the list right, they weren’t even nominated for a Hugo, although ASOS, the third book, was. That does not speak well for the Hugo nominating process.
Yeah the Doomsday book is very prominent in its mediocrity in that list, like you can see some books are very polarising, loved and hated. But that one is just so average, no one’s going to hate it, but the idea that people might rate it as Hugo material is unfathomable really.
Maybe she wrote something previously that unfairly missed out, so the judges wanted to write a wrong. That sort of stuff is typical for all sorts of awards.
I’ve read 47of them. My favorite book is The Left Hand of Darkness, but there are many on that list I really liked as well. I enjoyed the structure and plots of The Paladin of Souls and Among Others.
I’ve read 43 on that list.
My favorite (note my username), is Keye’s Flowers For Algernon.
Many great books on that list. And a few clunkers (in my opinion).
Based on the number of my personal re-reads, I have to give these a mention:
Lucifer’s Hammer, (Niven, Pournelle)
Mote in God’s Eye (Niven, Pournelle)
Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut)
Though I confess, it has been decades since I’ve re-read any of these so I’m not entirely confident that they’d hold up with yet another re-read.
The problem with that theory is that besides the Hugo, Doomsday Book also won the Nebula, the writers award, and the fan-based Locus Award, and the Ignotus Award, the Italia Award, and the Kurt Lasswell Award, for works published in Spain, Italy and Germany respectively, and the fantasy-based Mythopoeic Award and came in second in the Science Fiction Chronicle Readers Poll, as well as being shortlisted for the juried Arthur C. Clarke award, for books published in the U.K., and the fan British SF Association Awards.
According to the evidence, everybody loved the book for being the book. She also won six awards that year for the short story “Even the Queen,” so if people just wanted her to win something they could have stopped there.