This Is The Story That Won The Hugo, Nebula, and WF Awards

Books, comics, TV, music
1

Ken Liu’s Paper Menagerie is the first story to win all three awards.

2

Thanks Telefrog. Saved for offline reading.

3

I read it earlier this week and liked it. It’s a short story that took me about 20 mins to finish. I actually think it would have worked well as a story without the fantasy element.

4

Thanks a lot! That made for good lunch time reading.

5

Here are my thoughts on the story:

  1. Overall, I liked it. The story resonates with me because my mother is asian and I went though some of the same emotional self-conflict when I was younger. My mother taught me origami when I was a child and we would spend Saturday mornings folding paper animals while cartoons were on.

  2. I found the ending a little too emotionally manipulative and kind of a cop-out. It still made me tear up, but I’m not sure that was due to effective writing or the aforementioned personal relevance.

  3. I know this sounds uncharitable, but I’m surprised this story swept all three awards. It was good, but I just don’t know if it was all that and a bag of chips.

6

Fucking onions, man.

7

I agree. It was readable, but I expected something much more awesome for something that won all three awards.

8

Thanks for the link! Good story, but yeah, I expected a bit more too, given the hype.

Reminds me a lot of this.

Rereading that now, that animal crossing comic really gets to me. Apples and oranges, but it’s better than the Paper Menagerie.

9

Hm, I too went in with pretty high expectations and found it to be decent, but well short of what I would even expect of a story that would win even one of those awards. Ted Chiang’s stories are head and shoulders above this, IMHO.

I wonder if the award committees are overly impressed by the Chinese culture elements. Having lived in Asia and speaking enough Mandarin to be able to read the Chinese (which is overly simple) that stuff didn’t impress me at all.

10

That pretty well describes my reaction, too. Good story, but nowhere near award-winning.

11

The story made me cry!

So did that. What can I say, I’m something of a sad sap.

12

An article of this year’s best Novella nominees for the Hugo. They all sound great.

https://www.tor.com/2019/08/12/hugo-spotlight-the-years-finalists-for-best-novella/

13

This was interesting. The winner of the John W Cambell award, Jeanette Ng accepted the award and in her speech pointed out that John Campbell was a Fascist.

14

Great article. Cory Doctorow can write. The Scalzi post that he links to is worth reading as well.

16

I was there for her speech. It was great.

17

I have some familiarity/awareness of authors from the early years of SF but hadn’t heard of John W. Campbell until now, probably because he was primarily an editor rather than author. But I think everything I need to know about him can be derived from this article.

A small sample of insanity:

He then blathers on about how thalidomide was completely “safe for man” and the babies affected are acceptable losses as humanity pushes into the unknown and describes a doctor who refused to approve thalidomide usage as being incompetent because her decision was based on “women’s intuition”.

Ok, maybe I’ve been had by “A Modest Proposal” scenario but for some reason I don’t think so. Occam’s razor says he was an idiot.

18

Your quote sounds pretty reasonable if you don’t know what thalidomide is. (I’m not quite sure what it is either.)

19

Exactly! Only from the viewpoint of ignorance could what he’s saying appear reasonable.