Worst book ever to win a Hugo

On Tor.com, Jo Walton continues her highly entertaining series of posts analyzing all the past Hugo winners and nominees. She's just made it to 1955 and They'd Rather Be Right, the "worst book ever to win a Hugo": "The book is generally believed to be so awful that there are conspiracy theories about why it won. Goodness knows what the voters at Clevention in Cleveland in 1955 were thinking. The most sensible suggestion I've heard is Dave Langford's--Clifton had written good short stories, the voters hadn't read the novel and were going on past performance. In which case, oops. It isn't in print. It is barely in the memory of having been in print."

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Entertainment

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Anonymous

Hey?!? I LIKED /They’d Rather Be Right!/ It’s a trifle uneven, and arguably /Slan/ did the same thing better before and /Stranger in a Strange Land/ something similar better after. But the central conceit, a simple modification to people’s brains, one that makes it impossible for them to believe two incompatible things at the same time, turns people into immoral super-geniuses, and the vast majority turn the operation down and hunt down the people who get the operation because, as the line that gives the book its title says, “They’d rather be ‘right,’ and die,” has always seemed plausible to me and has stuck with me to this day. Heck, it’s sitting in my to-be-reread pile right now.
Purplecat

If she thinks that’s bad, wait until she gets to the mid-80′s
Bierchen

Recently I have decided to brush up my knowledge of SF classics and started to read all the Hugo winners and nominees (or at least started to try).

Oh well, I guess I will skip this one…
Anonymous

Besides Amazon, the ebook is also available at Sony, Fictionwise, and B&N. At Fictionwise, it’s Multi-Format, which means it’s DRM-free, and available in many different formats, including Mobi/Kindle and ePub. I think it’s also without geo-restrictions.
pimlottc

“This book is terrible. What were the voters thinking? They must not have read it, lol. Oh, btw, I haven’t read it either.”
That Neil Guy

The book is available as a Kindle download for less than five bucks. http://bit.ly/d6nCue Maybe it’s so bad it’s good…?
- Donald Petersen
  
  I’ll step up. I’m sure I’ve spent more on worse before. I’ll let you guys know how it turns out.
  
  Yer welcome.
fyreflye

My not necessarily accurate memory is that I read the book serialized in Analog (though it may still have been Astounding then.) If so, the original blame has to lie at John W Campbell’s door and the speculation that it sounds like half-baked pseudoscientology becomes
plausible.
JArmstrong

The Departed may be the worst film to win an Oscar. Martin Scorcese had directed amazing films. The voters hadn’t seen The Departed (or didn’t want to publicly admit that they didn’t “get it”) and went on past performance.
Anonymous

The blogging the hugos series over at io9 is also pretty great.
grikdog

By Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, presumably. I can’t tell for sure, but judging by TFA and other blogs, the book sounds like half-baked pseudoscientology. “Marmelade all the way down” is a great line. I’ll scribble a note.