Never mind the fact that there are no “judges” for the Hugos (other than the voting members themselves.)
- Dune
- Hyperion
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
There hasn’t been much discussion about “Hyperion” in the thread. For those who studied Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, “Hyperion” was a bit of a thrill. A very motley crew on a pilgrimage, with hidden secrets between them, all telling their tales. There is a sense of hidden inevitability that they are all there.
I liked the Mars books. They struck me as eminently believable.
Lords of Light
[nitpick]Lord, singular.[/nitpick]
Yeah, Lord of Light knocked me over when I first read it. And Hyperion was a titanic achievement.
There really are a lot of good books on the list. Along with the clunkers.
My gosh, that’s a hard one to decide.
But the winner is, The Dispossessed. In particular for a passage from it that I will never forget.
I will be a better person for the rest of my life, because I read that book.
Regards,
Shodan
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is my favorite to read. The best written book on the list is probably The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
I will say, that when they got to the part about the cows, I sort of jumped and said “Whoa, are they really going there!?”.
I’ve read 25. My favorite is Dune. Runners up are Gateway, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Ancillary Justice.
I am both astonished and delighted that you chose this as well. The things that bridge us…
I have to admit I’ve always preferred The Left Hand of Darkness, possibly because I wasn’t politically or philosophically mature enough to appreciate *The Dispossessed *when I read it.
Ursula Le Guin is as wonderful in person as she is a writer, you’ll be glad to know. She was one of the teachers at the Clarion workshop when I attended and everybody instantly fell in love with her. She so liked a surrealistic little story I wrote in response to an exercise she assigned that she gave it to her agent to place in a publication, my first professional sale. Believe me, that’s rare behavior in the f&sf world.
Sheesh. How could I forget Neuromancer.
Maybe the chip in your head is full?
(It is funny how “hundreds of megabytes” used to sound like a lot.)
Wow - quite a list! I see I’ve read 48 of the nominees (not counting 7 from the Retro list), and 22 of the winners. Some lifetime favorites of mine - I could reread any of these just about any time:
Starship Troopers
Glory Road
Dune
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
The Mote In God’s Eye
The Forever War
Mindbridge
2010: Odyssey Two
The Robots of Dawn
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Old Man’s War
Zoe’s Tale
Redshirts
Childhood’s End
If I absolutely, positively had to pick just one of the Hugo winners, though, it would be… Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.
Never understood all the love for A Canticle for Leibowitz. Total meh for me.
Yes! Be sure to check out “A Separate War,” a short story Haldeman wrote in which he tells us what Marygay was doing during William’s last mission. An excellent addendum to the novel.
It’s a funny, well-written, meta take on Star Trek. No reason it shouldn’t be there.
I always preferred the original short story, “A Canticle for Leibowitz” that he wrote for F&SF in 1955 (IIRC). It eventually became the first part of the novel. To me, writers who excel at short stories should stick with that medium; turning them into novels simply ruins something exquisite. (I have much the same opinion about the relative merits of the short story version of “Flowers For Algernon” compared to the novel.)
Ender’s Game was also a short story before it was stretched into a novel. I’ve read both and prefer the novel.
Faulty modem connection, perhaps. 
Good to see Heinlein getting so much love in this thread.
Some excellent books which didn’t make it to the Hugo finals, but IMHO should have:
Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster (1974) - Humans struggle to survive on a frozen world and befriend the aggressive race which lives there
All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman (1977) - A spy for an interstellar republic, reindoctrinated for each mission, begins to lose his sense of identity
Elleander Morning by Jerry Yulsman (1984) - A minor starving artist named Hitler is killed in 1913 Vienna, and the world is changed forever
Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin (1986) - Brilliant sf/environmentalism satire
Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins (1987) - Ambitious, engrossing, multigenerational superhero graphic novel
Fatherland by Robert Harris (1992) - Alt-hist murder myster set in 1964 Nazi Berlin
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003) - Tragic romance about… well, you know…
One of the few times I agree that the novel was better. But, then, that author is well-known for writing excellent novels to begin with.
I’d go so far as to say that the short story is the natural format for science fiction in general. Not that there aren’t good SF novels, of course, but in general, the genre is best-suited to the short story.
I think I’ve read 27 of them, but I’m not sure about several. I read through the list to see if I could pick out a single one, or even just a small set of them. I gave up. I’ve read too much. I can no longer pick just a few best ones. A lot of them are very good, and I don’t want to distinguish between them anymore.