The Hugo Award for Best Novel is “the big one,” the last to be presented at every Hugo ceremony (well, except that one year when Lester del Rey screwed up the presentations), the category that typically draws the most nominations and the most votes (well, along with Dramatic Presentation), the most prestigious award in the field, and the oldest. Other Hugo categories have come and gone over the decades, but Best Novel has been there since the beginning. The first one was awarded in 1953, and went to Alfred Bester for THE DEMOLISHED MAN. The books and authors that have won the award in subsequent years form a virtual Hall of Fame for our genre, the best that SF and fantasy have to offer. Heinlein won it four times. Zelazny, Le Guin, Simmons, Haldeman, Leiber, Pohl, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Walter M. Miller… that’s company that any writer worth his salt would be proud to keep.

So who should be nominated for the Big One this year? Well, once again, I do have a horse in this race. A DANCE WITH DRAGONS was published in July, and is among the eligibles. I should probably leave it at that. My best chance of making the ballot would be for all those fans of mine who liked DANCE to nominate it, and nothing else.

I can’t do that, however. There are five lines on the nomination form, after all, and it wouldn’t feel right to leave four of them blank when there were so very many good books published in 2011. I am sure many of you have your own favorites. I won’t pretend to have read all the books published last year, or even just the good ones. There’s just too much. But I have read some terrific ones, so let me recommend them to your attention.

For science fiction, my favorite novel of the year was a classic old-fashioned space opera titled LEVIATHAN WAKES, by James S.A Corey.

I’ll be the first to admit that I was favorably disposed toward this one, since “Jimmy” Corey is actually a collaborative pseudonym for two of my friends, my sometime collaborator Daniel Abraham and my assistant Ty Franck. However, I have a lot of friends who published books last year, and this is the one that kicked my ass the hardest. It’s a terrific read, a page turner. If you love SF the way they used to write it, you will love this book.

Also worthy of a good look when filling out your ballot is HEAVEN’S SHADOW, another solid and engrossing hard SF novel from David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt.

In fantasy… well, damn, it was a great year for fantasy. I read at least half a dozen books so good that they made me say, “I wish I’d written that.” THE HEROES by Joe Abercrombie was an action tour de force, an entire novel built around a single battle. Lev Grossman’s THE MAGICIAN KING was a worthy successor to THE MAGICIANS, and proof that last year’s Hugo voters knew what they were about when they voted Grossman the Campbell Award as the best new writer in the field. And Daniel Abraham… yes, him again, damn him… did something I would not have thought possible. He published a novel called THE DRAGON’S PATH, the first volume in the new epic fantasy series called THE DAGGER AND THE COIN, and it was just as bloody good as his Long Price Quartet.

Any of those books would be worthy nominees, but none of them were the best epic fantasy I read last year. For my money, that has to be THE WISE MAN’S FEAR, by Patrick Rothfuss.

WMF is the second volume in Rothfuss’s Kvothe series, and it took him nearly as long to write it as I took for A DANCE WITH DRAGONS (hey, I’m glad it did, he drew some of the fire). But it was worth the wait. I gulped it down in a day, staying up almost to dawn reading, and I am already itching for the next one. He’s bloody good, this Rothfuss guy. THE WISE MAN”S FEAR should rightly contend not only for the Hugo, but also for the World Fantasy Award.

Last, but far from least, is yet another huge tome of a book that kept me up reading all night, a science fiction novel by a writer best known for horror — and that’s 11/22/63, by Stephen King.

Now, I’m a major Stephen King fan, and have been for decades. King is tremendously prolific author, and when you write that many books, inevitably some of them are going to be better than others. That being said, 11/22/63 is the best King for at least a decade, a major piece of work… and it’s NOT horror. This is King working outside his usual comfort zone, stretching his considerable talent to write a pure-quill time travel novel, about an English teacher who steps through a hole in space and time to prevent the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

That’s hardly a new idea. Lots of people have done it before. Hell, we even did it on THE TWILIGHT ZONE back in the mid 80s, when I was working on the show (an episode called ‘Profile in Silver’). But no one has ever done it as well as King does here. He handles the JFK/ Oswald stuff masterfully, I think… but there’s so much more to the book than that. This is a love story as well. A wonderful period piece that brings the late 50s and early 60s to vivid life. This is a classic proof of something that I have long contended: that story is more than plot, that it’s the journey that matters, not how fast you arrive at your destination.

Stephen King has never been nominated for a Hugo, so far as I know. That’s truly absurd. Yes, he writes horror… but the Hugo Awards have always recognized horror as well as science fiction, and when you get down to it, horror is really just a subgenre of fantasy. Dark fantasy, if you will.

Anyway, those are my recommendations. I hope some of them make the final ballot. And I hope A DANCE WITH DRAGONS makes the ballot too, so I can kick their butts… winning (and losing, for that matter) is much more meaningful when you are going up against the best.

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In this category I do have a horse in the race, obviously: the first season of HBO’s series GAME OF THRONES. So it goes without saying that, if you enjoyed the show and think it worthy, I’d be most pleased if you included it amongst your nominations.

However, it is not quite that simple. So, a little background for those who are maybe new to the Hugo Awards and the nomination process.

First off, what the hell is a “dramatic presentation,” you may ask. Well, most of the time, it is a television show or a feature film. But the category is actually broader than that. It was named “dramatic presentation” rather than “best tv and film” way back when to suggest that. And indeed, over the years, radio series, albums, live theater, and even convention slide shows have been nominated. A few have even won. That’s rare, however. Nine years out of ten, the category is all about television and film.

Secondly, there are actually TWO categories. Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form and Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. For most of the long history of the award, that was not true. There was only one category, and TV shows and movies competed against one another for the Hugo. With the occasional interloper in the form of a radio series or slide show. Most of the time, a movie won, but that made some of the television folks unhappy, so they started showing up at the worldcon business meeting year after year to try to split the award. That effort was defeated a whole bunch of times, until finally one day it wasn’t. And the split was ratified the next year, so now we have the two categories.

Given the realities, it might have been simpler to call the new categories “Best Film” and “Best Television Show,” but of course that would have excluded the radio series, live theatre, etc, so instead we have the split we have. And there’s wiggle room there too. It call comes down to RUNNING TIME, not budget, means of distribution, etc. So in theory, a eighty-minute-long feature film could be nominated in Short Form, and a long television movie or miniseries… or season… can be nominated in Long Form. The break comes at ninety minutes.

And to how all of this impacts GAME OF THRONES… well, it makes it complicated.

As I understand the rules — (and I know there are SMOFs who read this Not A Blog, so if I get anything wrong, please step in and correct me) — the HBO series is eligible for nomination in both categories.

You can nominate the entire first season of GAME OF THRONES, which had a running time of ten hours, in Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Considering it as one long story. Which it was, kinda, being an adaptation of the first of my Ice & Fire novels. Should the show make the ballot in Long Form, it would most likely be competing for the award against four major motion pictures.

Or, you can nominate the show in Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, the usual TV category, where it will vie against other TV shows. However, for this category, you need to nominate INDIVIDUAL EPISODES. If you just write GAME OF THRONES on your nomination form in Short Form, your nomination will not be counted. You need to list an episode title.

FYI, here are the season one episodes:
101 Winter Is Coming (written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss)
102 The Kingroad (written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss)
103 Lord Snow (written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss)
104 Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things (written by Bryan Cogman)
105 The Wolf and the Lion (written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss)
106 A Golden Crown (written by Jane Espenson and David Benioff & D.B. Weiss)
107 You Win or You Die (written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss)
108 The Pointy End (written by George R.R. Martin)
109 Baelor (written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss)
110 Fire and Blood (written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss)

There is nothing in the rules to prevent more than one episode from the same show from making the ballot, if they receive sufficient nominations. In theory, one series could have two, three, or four nominees, or even fill up all five slots on the ballot. I do not believe that has actually happened in recent times, though DR. WHO had three nominations just a few years ago, I recall, and way back when, I believe there was a year when the original STAR TREK monopolized the entire ballot, in a year when there were no good SF movies.

What’s less clear (to me) is whether a show can be nominated in both Long Form and Short Form. THAT has never happened,and I don’t believe it’s allowed to. I suspect that if the series as a whole gets sufficient votes to make the Long Form ballot, while one or more individual episodes place among the top five in Short Form, we’ll end up in one category or the other, but not both. However, I have no idea who actually gets to make that choice. Is it prescribed by the Hugo Rules? Is it a judgement call to be made by Chicon’s 7 Hugo administrators? Or will someone connected to the series need to make the decision? David and Dan, perhaps. Or HBO.

I do know it won’t be ME who makes the call, and for that I am grateful. It is by no means an easy choice. In Long Form, we’d be competing against some major feature films (HUGO, if it is considered fantasy, is probably the favorite, and I have to admit there’s something cool about the idea of HUGO winning a Hugo). In Short Form, any GOT episodes to make the ballot would be up against episodes of all the other SF and fantasy shows now on the air… and in particular against DR. WHO, which has been the unstoppable juggernaut in the category since Short Form was calved off, winning year after year after year.

Of course, all this could be moot. The two Dramatic Presentation categories, along with Best Novel (‘the Big One’) are the categories that get the largest number of nominations, so unless a lot of people nominate the HBO series, it may not get on the ballot at all.

That, of course, is up to you. All I can do is explain these arcane rules, and keep my fingers crossed.

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