Spent some time yesterday and today to transfer my reviews of Hugo nominees from past years onto the sf portion of this site. Doing the actual HTML and formatting and everything took part of the time, and then of course while you're messing around with them you have to read them, so that took the rest of the time. It's kind of fun, partly because of what I had to say and partly to track what I reviewed and what I didn't. The first three years, 1995-97, went like clockwork, then in '98, not only did I not review any of the nominees I didn't read any of them, at least not the novels. That was the year Justin was born and the Worldcon was being held a month earlier than usual, in Baltimore, and I wanted to go but couldn't because it was at almost exactly the same time as his due date. Also, until a few years ago the period between finding out what the nominees were and the voting deadline was much shorter, and the fact that the Worldcon was in early August probably made it shorter than normal. I was faithfully reading the classics group books through that time, and just didn't have time for the Hugo nominees on top of that. In more recent years I've kind of backpedalled on the classics during this time of the year in favor of Hugo nominees. This year I'm caught reading Vanity Fair as the nominations are announced, and won't be able to start reading any novel nominees until mid-May, so only 10 weeks to read all five, if I don't read anything else, with a nine-day trip to Illinois in the middle, seems aggresive, as we say at work.



But back to the previous year's reviews. In '95 I read everything, and I had actually read the novel nominees even a year or two before that but '95 was the first year I kept track. The short fiction reviews are kind of interesting because they were in some cases early stories of certain authors or in others my first exposure to certain authors. Because at that time I was reading Asimovs and F&SF faithfully every month, I could compare the stories that were nominated with those that weren't, and there were always a couple that got short-changed. It makes the reviews sound more educated, anyway. In '96, for my first Worldcon, there were also the first Retro-Hugo nominees ever, and some of them were impossible to find. Between Boskone and Readercon I scrounged a couple, and got a few through Pandora Books, which had a website even then with basically the same search engine they have now. Ebay wasn't a factor then, or ABEbooks.com, although they probably both existed. In '97 I read everything but Blue Mars. I saw Kim Stanley Robinson as Guest of Honor at Readercon that year, only a couple of weeks before the voting deadline, and told him in that I hadn't read Blue Mars but intended to get it in. "Read it slowly" he advised. Weighted down with guilt, I ended up not reading it at all. Now it's been so long since I read the first two I have to go back and re-read those before I dive into it. Hope to get to that before the end of the year.



'98 was, as I mentioned, a washout. In '99 I read all the books except "Children of God" (although I'd read and liked "The Sparrow"), but I don't think I read any of the short ficiton nominees. In 2000, same story, except the odd one out that year was the third Harry Potter book, mostly because I didn't have time to read the first two ahead of it. I only just got around to it last year. Again, ignored the short fiction nominees. The next year was the toughest for novels as you had The Sky Road, which was the third (actually 4th in the UK) book in a loosely connected series. You had A Storm of Swords, the third book in a series of 800+ page books which were all one continuous story. You had the 4th Harry Potter book, and I hadn't read any of them yet. And you had Retro-Hugos again, which at least are short but still that' s five more books to read. So in a massive undertaking I was able to read all the retro's, all three MacLeod books, all three George R.R. Martin books, plus the Sawyer and Hopkinson books before the deadline, thanks mostly to taking the Marlborough bus to work and having a nice long ride back and forth every day to do nothing else but. So the one I didn't get to was "Goblet of Fire", and guess what, it won. I still haven't read it.



Last year I read everything, and did vote, but didn't write any reviews down. So from '98 to '02 is a big lacuna, which would be nice to fill in but I'm not very optimistic, as it would probably entail re-reading some books I've read comparatively recently when I already have 400 books kicking around waiting to be read the first time. For right now I'm just going to try to keep up with this year's batch, and see how it goes.