Our Most Award Winning Science Fiction & Fantasy Books series is going to document the most award-winning Science Fiction and Fantasy books of the last 47 years (starting in 1970 and working up year by year until we hit 2017). If we manage to stick to our goal of one a week we will hit present day sometime in early 2018. At the end of each decade, we will look back on the previous 10 years as a whole and see which books reigned supreme. Obviously, a book winning awards doesn’t mean it is better than others. In fact, unless your name was Ursula K Le Guin, “Award Winning” in the 1970’s pretty much only meant books written by men.
Overlooked and underappreciated books of each year or decade could, and probably will, be good lists to do on their own in the future, but for these, we are just going to look at which books were nominated and won the most awards. Which brings us to the awards themselves.
(Click here to actually read the articles instead of about them)
We wanted a pool of several awards to gather our info from, but not too many that this became an impossible task. As a result, we ended up choosing 20 different Awards (see the bottom of this post for complete list) that have been given out at one point or another over the last 46 years.
A quick rundown about the award sources:
“Why start at 1970 when the Hugos have been giving out awards since 1954?” You might ask before continuing “Olaf Stapleton probably won some awards, and don’t forget about HG Wells. There has to be more awards from earlier in the century!”
Well my dear fictional friend, if we went back any further than 1970 it was hard to find a single year where more than one bigger award was given out. There were a few years previous when both Nebula and Hugo awards were given out, but that is literally all a 60’s lists would be, just recaps of those two awards. The first few years in the 70’s aren’t much better, but they at least have three different awards for each.
If all of these caveats weren’t enough, there is also the actual ranking of the books. For our normal lists we don’t look at a books rank on a list, only it’s inclusion, deeming that to be worthy enough. We changed that a bit for these lists, although not by much. Each inclusion in a finals pool for an award is worth 5 points. If a book wins the award that is another 5 points. That way a book that is nominated and wins a single award is equal to another book that is nominated for two different awards but wins none. There are no second place points or anything like that. We kept it simple while still trying to allow a book that was nominated a bunch, but never won, to rank high.
Why 5 points instead of 1, 10, 100, or literally any other number?
Because we felt like it. Also, it’s easier to add together.
Long story short, this all started because we were curious about award-winning books from previous decades and couldn’t find a good source that grouped them all together (Goodreads and a few other places have some lists, but nothing comprehensive…yet). After a few google searches a (somewhat) simple excel sheet was started in an attempt to see a snapshot of what those previous years award winners looked like. Eventually, more awards were added and then, well, we decided to just do this.
So, if parts of this process seem haphazardly planned out, it’s because they were. This wasn’t started as a project, it was started out as a curiosity. It is almost guaranteed that as soon as we post this, someone will show us the exact comprehensive list we were looking for, which would actually be amazing. More SFF articles the merrier!
Years Active: 1987-Present
https://www.clarkeaward.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke_Award
Years Active: 1969 – Present
http://www.bsfa.co.uk/bsfa-awards/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSFA_Award_for_Best_Novel
Years Active: 1969 – 1989 (Not awarded 1974, 1987, & 1988)
(The Ditmar Awards still exist, but they no longer have International Awards)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditmar_Award
Years Active: 1953-Present (Not awarded 1954 & 1957)
http://www.thehugoawards.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel
Years Active: 1991 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr._Award
https://tiptree.org/
Years Active: 1973 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell_Memorial_Award_for_Best_Science_Fiction_Novel
http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/campbell-finalists.htm
Years Active: 1974 – 1978
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Award
Years Active: 2009 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitschies
http://www.thekitschies.com/awards/red-tentacle/
Years Active: 1981 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurd-La%C3%9Fwitz-Preis
Years Active: 1971 – Present (1971-1977 & 79 Were awarded for “Best Novel”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Award_for_Best_Novel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Award_for_Best_Science_Fiction_Novel
Years Active: 1978-Present (-1979)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Award_for_Best_Fantasy_Novel
Years Active: 1981 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Award_for_Best_Fantasy_Novel
Years Active: 1981 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoeic_Awards
http://www.mythsoc.org/
(Stories of 40,000 words or more)
Years Active: 1966-Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Award
Years Active: 1982 – Present
http://www.philipkdickaward.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick_Award
Years Active: 1991 – 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premio_Ignotus
Years Active: 1979 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Award
Years Active: 1982 – 1998
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/award_category.cgi?473+1
Years Active: 1970 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiun_Award
Years Active: 2007 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Jackson_Award
http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/
Years Active: 1975 – Present
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Fantasy_Award_for_Best_Novel
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