Stross Says Give Discworld the 2016 Best Novel Hugo

Charles Stross didn’t invent this idea, but he is the first person with a large platform to advocate it.

263 thoughts on “Stross Says Give Discworld the 2016 Best Novel Hugo

  1. Alas, here in 1334 monks are laboriously transcribing Pratchett. In Latin. With illuminations. Needless to say, it may be years before they get me my copy of “The Shepherd’s Crown”….

  2. I was able to squint enough to see WoT falling under the novel category. If all the info dumps and a strong editor had gone over it and tightened it I think it might have been possible to publish it as a single 1200 page book… Or broken that into a few smaller books because “readers don’t like books that big”. I can say that as a WoT fan – it and David Weber taught me a lot about enjoying books while skipping hundreds of pages. It’s a good skill to have. 😉

    I don’t remember if I put it above No Award or not but I know it was a tough debate as it took a fair amount of squinting and expecting voters to read some 2 million words + the rest of the voter pack just felt wrong. But as with Lord of the Rings; no book in WoT stood on its own IMHO.

    From what I’ve heard of Discworld (I so need to read these) we’ve got a totally different situation. Books standalone, there are a number of trilogies, it’s more of a “within universe” than a true serial which must be read in order. Sounds more like the Milesverse/Bujold or Honorverse/Weber where you can read out of order and there are a number of different recommended entry points.

    Looking over the rules. They were stretched a bit for WoT. We have a committee working on a series award. Would putting Discworld up for best novel setback work on creating a series award?

    Is this the best way to honor P’Terry? Would he want his death to be part of a Hugo dissension? Is this fair to the person handling his estate? Would he appreciate her being put in this situation while grieving? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions.

    Coming to you from 1821 where I’ve used a time machine to enter the debate.

  3. @Tasha Turner,

    If you do read the Discworld books, DO NOT start with “The Colour of Magic” & “The Light Fantastic”: they are the first two and coincidentally, are actually one story split into two volumes. TCOM ends on a cliffhanger. The early Discworlds are Pratchett playing it mostly for laughs as Sword’n’Sorcery parodies. It’s not until a few volumes in that he finds his voice.

    I’d go with “Guards! Guards!”, the first of the City Watch sub-series, or “Pyramids” or “Small Gods” which are true stand-alones. “Mort” is also good. There are other good places to start aside from the ones I’ve mentioned; just not the first two.

    Posted from 3827, [INSERT PITHY INSIGHT HERE]

  4. Besides, unless something gets enough votes to require a decision, the Hugo Administrators will be needlessly making a withdrawal from the goodwill account by making a ruling.

    Nobody wants to waste a nomination slot. If I was going to nominate a series and I found out before nominations begin that it wouldn’t be eligible — or read general guidance on what makes a series eligible in the eyes of the 2016 Hugo administrators — I’d be glad to know this.

  5. @Laertes

    For most things it just requires checking publication date and length. I shouldn’t think that takes long (it didn’t for any individual 1941 work, although in aggregate it took quite awhile; but the administrators only have to check five per category rather than the amount I was doing). It would be interesting to know how long an edgeish case like Wheel of Time took.

  6. Sir Pterry was not a stickler for consistency between works”

    “There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; occasionally, however, there are alternate pasts.” – Pterry, alt.fan.pratchett

  7. @Snowcrash

    Another ticky rampage, I see?

    As I know you post over on MGC: Freer has gotten a bit testy, and is wielding the banhammer, just FYI.

  8. @Mark

    …Freer has gotten a bit testy,…

    Enh. Man is remarkably thin-skinned from what I’ve seen.He’s not particularly fond of having his assumptions challenged, or even questioned for that matter. Most of the other Mad Geniuses are willing to give a pass on people questioning their postulations, but Dave…not so much. The best thing to do is to not engage directly with his posts or comments, and hope he doesn’t decide to arbitrarily enforce some new requirement on you.

    Are they still on about Wendig’s Star Wars book? I think they had like 4 posts in a row about how he was such a no good evil person for doing something that they had to make up a word for.

  9. Yes, Freer was on the Wendig bandwagon when he banned me. His version is that I was a sealion and a nitpicker. My version would be that he didn’t like having an inconsistency in his argument pointed out, and having a fact he claimed refuted (so, basically I was doing everything you just said was a bad idea!)

    Never mind, it’s not like posting there was a particularly sensible use of my time. I just wanted to make you aware he might be particularly tetchy if you posted over there again soon, but I think you’ve got that covered.

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