Question

[james_davis_nicoll]

Noticed because this mentions me and the review I am going to link to in the next sentence.

This raises an interesting question: what is the worst Nebula-winning novel that you've read?

A list of winners and nominees.

I wonder if we could get Jo Walton to do for the Nebulas what she did for the Hugos?

Comments

[eagle]

My list says The Terminal Experiment was the worst Nebula winner I've read, with Rendezvous with Rama a close second.

[wild_irises]

I haven't read The Terminal Experiment, and I don't hate Rendezvous with Rama; I just thought it was boring.

My two "worsts" would be Ender's Game, which I never liked, and Camouflage, which I only read because it also won a Tiptree Award. (I haven't read Forever Peace either.)

[mishalak]

I am going to agree with you on the subject of Ender's Game in that it is the worst I have read all the way through. I tried to read Neuromancer and could not get more than a little way in so if it continues in the same vein as the first chapter I would call that the worst.

[seawasp]

First link says "Page was not found."

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

The first link is broken.

I should probably say Red Mars, which is the only book on that list I started but didn't finish. But I just remember it being really dull, not actually bad, so I'm going to say Ringworld instead.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Of the winners that I've read, the worst was, I think, Ender's Game.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I didn't read that one, but Speaker for the Dead would definitely come in 3rd on my list of bad Nebulas after Dune and Man Plus.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Link should be fixed now. Could not see the problem so I just redid it from scratch.

[(Anonymous)]

The Quantum Rose, by Asaro.

I've read at least 68 of those books....wow....


--Awesome Aud

[jamoche]

Tehanu. My copy had an extra dozen or so pages of advertising, of which I was unaware. I remember thinking "if it ends in the next page it really will be as bad as everyone says, but there are at least a dozen pages to go, so... oh. That's the end. Well, that sucks."

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

I'm waffling between this and "Ender's Game".

Ender is obviously massively more problematic, but Tehanu has to struggle with comparisons to the first three Earthsea books that are just plain better in every way.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I never finished Rite of Passage, though I wouldn't say it was a bad book. I think the trouble was that I tried to read it a dozen years or so after publication, and it had already influenced a generation of writers. I haven't finished The Wind-Up Girl either, though it's still on my iPad. Maybe one day. I didn't enjoy Timescape much, though I did finish it. Blackout/All Clear is one I never want to read, thanks to the bad press it got.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I have finished Rite Of Passage and I think it was a pretty good claim to being the worst Nebula winner. Nothing surpasses Blackout/All Clear though.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I think that I read The Terminal Experiment in its Serialized By Analog format. If I'm right, it has a part where a guy's mind is uploaded to a vacuum cleaner (well, a robot vacuum cleaner). At least that's my snarky recollection of the scene, anyway.

I had generically good memories of Man Plus although coming across a review in the past couple weeks pointed out enough ways the plot doesn't make sense that I'm not sure I want to re-read it.

Also, what the heck happened in 1975 that they decided every book ever made by anybody in any language, ever, deserved a Nebula nomination?

[gareth-wilson.livejournal.com]

That's The Modular Man by Roger McBride Allen.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I think my vote would go to Forever Peace.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The best thing I can say about that book is that I didn't find it as bad as Forever Free. I have no idea what happened to Haldeman's writing, but starting with his dreadful ending to a previously enjoyable series Worlds Enough and Time, IMHO his writing suddenly got really bad.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I can see that this may be one of those posts where everybody stares at everybody else in confusion over how they could dislike X or like Y.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

+1

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

I like lots of Delany's work, but I didn't think much of The Einstein Intersection. I can't claim to have read all the winners though. Wasn't crazy about Moving Mars, either, though I forget now why I disliked it.

I'd be more interested in people's notions of what was the best novel nominated that didn't win. I have two candidates from the annus horribilis of 1975 when, if Mr. Wikipedia isn't lying, there were eighteen novels nominated: Calvino's Invisible Cities and Russ' The Female Man.

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

Those are good choices, yeah. Also "Lord of Light" and "Stand on Zanzibar".

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Dune.

It has the plot of a short story.

In 800 pages.

[bibliogrrl.livejournal.com]

I have tried reading Dune 4 times, I've never gotten more than a third of the way in.

[mondyboy.livejournal.com]

Why so many novels in 1975?

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

I would like to second that.

[thebluerose.livejournal.com]

Amazed to find I have read (or started reading) 66 books on that list!

Towing Jehovah would be a contender but the Connie Willis Blackout books were just dire.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The Eskimo Invasion - never realised it had won any awards, it's dreadful.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Not even well-written racism.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I already mentioned the Nebulas in my Hugo posts, I see no need to consider them separately.

I mean my Hugo posts were pretty much "This year, how about it?" and doing that again would be repetitive.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I have two asnwers. Man Plus was trash, I enjoyed it when I read it at age 16, but it was poorly written fun trash (which IME is fairly rare for Pohl, he's normally well better than that). While slightly better written, the true winner of the worst for me would be Dune. I enjoyed it when I read it when I was 11, but I attempted to reread it when I was in my 20s and threw it across the room. It's as deeply sexist as all of the rest of Herbert's work, it's ponderous, dull, massively offensive on several levels, and just plain bad.

[montedavis.livejournal.com]

Tossup between The Gods Themselves and The Terminal Experiment. Left as a tossup because I couldn't flog myself very far into either.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Asaro, Sawyer, both Bears, "Forever Peace".

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I've found a number of winners and nominees to be unreadable. De gustibus, and all that.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Ctrl+f:"Neuromancer"

no matches found.

I am disappoint, James Nicoll's comments section.

One can only charitably assume that no one has read the book except for me, and that's not good because it means I suffered alone.

ETA: COUNTZERO ALMOST WON A FUCKING AWARD FUCK YOU SF COMMUNITY HOW TERRIBLE ARE... SPEAKER OF THE DEAD BEAT OUT A Handmaid's Tale!?!?!?!?!?!

I!? JUST!? WHAT!? HOW!? WHO!?

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I very much preferred Count Zero, which I thought did all the same things better (and which I read first) but I didn't think Neuromancer was bad exactly. It's like a band's first self-produced recording before they got their shit together. There are some knee-jerk genre reflexes that don't really work, like the whole technothriller angle, and there's a reliance on grimdark as a signifier of Real Meaningful Stuff that gets pretty heavy-handed, but you can see the good stuff in there.

From another post

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

My Long List of What the Hell, SWFA? nominees:

2011 Connie Willis Blackout
2011 Connie Willis All Clear
2010 Paolo Bacigalupi The Windup Girl
2006 John C. Wright Orphans of Chaos
2002 Catherine Asaro The Quantum Rose
2002 Connie Willis Passage
2001 Greg Bear Darwin's Radio
1999 Joe Haldeman Forever Peace
1997 Robert J. Sawyer Starplex
1996 Robert J. Sawyer The Terminal Experiment
1990 Mike Resnick Ivory
1985 Larry Niven The Integral Trees
1983 Isaac Asimov Foundation's Edge
1976 Alfred Bester The Computer Connection
1976 Marion Zimmer Bradley The Heritage of Hastur (creepiest dedication ever)
1974 Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love
1968 Hayden Howard The Eskimo Invasion (at least, going by the descriptions I have read)

I see a strong temporal bias to this. Also, I was this >< close to including everything by McDevitt but his stuff is just not very good as opposed to the actively bad stuff above.

The worst four (that I have actually read, each author only allowed on once)

2011 Connie Willis Blackout

Bloated and poorly researched demi-book driven by half of an idiot plot.


2010 Paolo Bacigalupi The Windup Girl

This Orientalist dystopia's author's loving descriptions of brutal rapes failed to distract me from his shit world-building. What's worse is as soon as I read it, I knew A: that it was going to be wildly popular, and B: spawn a lot of even shittier knock-offs.

1997 Robert J. Sawyer Starplex

This would be the green star, laser dodging one? Heh.

1976 Alfred Bester The Computer Connection

Most lousy books make me angry but this one just made me sad. The drop off in quality between his previous novel and this was just horrible (and Golem 100 would be even worse).

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The Integral Trees was 1984, and lost to Neuromancer. Are you sure you don't mean 1985's actual winner? Or were you just thinking Integral Trees was insane to nominate in the first place?

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Wow, Darwin's Radio actually won something? What a terrible, terrible book. It's possible that there's something worse on that list (haven't really read all that many of them), but Darwin's Radio has miserable science and hideous character interactions and a plot that I didn't finish. (It has that thing where it switches between roughly three viewpoints every chapter; I ended up giving up on reading all the way through and just followed one set of viewpoint characters to the end and never got around to reading the rest of the other two threads).

[death4breakfast.livejournal.com]

It sure wasn't good. I also think it was the *last* Bear I ever bought.