I read...a LOT, largely speculative fiction, and while I won't claim especially discerning taste, I do enjoy a good yarn. I happened to be looking at the wiki for the Nebulas last year with my husband, and realized that there were a lot of entries, both nominees and award winners, that I'd never read. I decided that I should. Then I decided to add the Hugo nominees and winners, and the Dick and Clarke nominees and winners. I see as I am doing a general search on sci-fi awards that Wikipedia thinks I should also be following the John W. Campbell award--I'm not familiar with it, but I will look it up, and most likely add those nominees and winners as well. You really can't have too many books on your to-read list...
So, I got together a spreadsheet listing the nominees (and noting the winners) for each award each year, beginning with the 1953 Hugo award winner, The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (the earliest entry according to my records). I decided right away that I wanted to read these books chronologically--I was expecting to run into a lot of gender bias, especially early on, and that can really rub me the wrong way. I also wanted to watch how the genre grew and changed over time.
Let me set some ground rules: this is a totally for-fun project for me. I enjoy intense, critical discussion of literature, but day-to-day I mostly read for fun. I am also not knocking myself out locating long-lost copies of difficult or out-of-print tomes: in fact, I am limiting my reading to the books I can get through my local library system. Surprisingly, so far that's been hardly any limitation at all, which has been wonderful.
Also, as of this writing, I'm almost a decade into my spreadsheet, so I will not be starting with an in-depth analysis of The Demolished Man. I would like to do a sort of catch-up entry with some of my impressions and surprises from the thirteen books I've already read, but I'm almost done with Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon, and that entry may sneak in first. So far, I've had to skip two books: Algis Budrys' Who? of 1959 and Mark Phillips' That Sweet Little Old Lady (alternate title, Brain Twister) of 1960.
I think that's it for the introduction; I will be back in the next week or so with the entry for Rogue Moon and hopefully a review of what I've read so far.
