Congrats to the new winners of the Hugo Awards, announced today!
Here are the top-rated Hugo winners of the past 15 years, according to GoodReads.com.
| Rank | Year | Author | Book | GoodReads.com |
| 1 | 2021 | Martha Wells | Network Effect | 4.47 |
| 2 | 2018 | N.K. Jemisin | The Stone Sky | 4.34 |
| 3 | 2022 | Arkady Martine | A Desolation Called Peace | 4.31 |
| 4 | 2025 | Robert Jackson Bennett | The Tainted Cup | 4.30 |
| 5 | 2016 | N.K. Jemisin | The Fifth Season | 4.29 |
| 6 | 2017 | N.K. Jemisin | The Obelisk Gate | 4.29 |
| 7 | 2023 | T. Kingfisher | Nettle & Bone | 4.14 |
| 8 | 2020 | Arkady Martine | A Memory Called Empire | 4.11 |
| 9 | 2015 | Cixin Liu | The Three-Body Problem | 4.08 |
| 10 | 2024 | Emily Tesh | Some Desperate Glory | 4.05 |
| 11 | 2014 | Ann Leckie | Ancillary Justice | 3.99 |
| 12 | 2011 | Connie Willis | Blackout / All Clear | 3.97 [average of 3.86 & 4.08] |
| 13 | 2019 | Mary Robinette Kowal | The Calculating Stars | 3.91 |
| 14 | 2013 | John Scalzi | Redshirts | 3.87 |
| 15 | 2012 | Jo Walton | Among Others | 3.71 |
As a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, I devoured my dad’s science-fiction paperbacks from the ’50s and ’60s, his books from the SF Book of the Month Club, and his Asimov magazine issues. My own acquisitions ran to fantasy series and every single ST:TOS Pocket Book. Sometime in the late ’90s I began reading more history books and other nonfiction and drifted away from the science-fiction and fantasy scene altogether. So back in June, 2024, I decided to read recent Hugo Award winners to get a sense for the consensus of the best of the science fiction genre today. Awarded, annually since the 1950s, Hugo Awards are—to my mind—the most prestigious science-fiction award.
To my surprise, it wasn’t easy to buy Hugo winners. I first tried to buy some at Barnes & Noble, the closest bookstore to me. From the 25 winners from the year 2000 on, all they had were American Gods, Three-Body Problem, Jemison’s first two winners but not her third, and some bigot’s magic-school book. They had no works at all from quite a few of the winning authors! Winning a Hugo apparently doesn’t guarantee you shelf-space at America’s largest bookstore chain. The award apparently means much less to genre readers than I’d assumed.
A trip to Portland, Oregon, led me to Powell’s, the world’s largest bookstore, where I was able to fill out the collection extensively. I often struck out at smaller independents altogether (but made sure to buy something else, because I love independent bookstores).
(I’d originally planned to read the award-winning novellas, but those are even harder to find.)
While I read the winners in random order as I found them, I’m going to lead with the newest winners and work my way back. For works in series, where the other books didn’t win the Hugo, I did read the earlier releases as well.
2025 – The Tainted Cup
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ An able murder mystery set in a corrupt Empire threatened by giant sea monsters. (The book is the first in The Shadow of the Leviathan series, currently consisting of two books, with a third planned.) The causes of death are magical and the two lead investigators are magically augmented, as are many of the suspects. While the novel only has two swordfights, both are really fascinating and well done. (I love a good swordfight.) The author does that thing where the narrator keeps a secret of their past from you to try and keep you in suspense. Yawn.
2024 – Some Desperate Glory
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, is an action story that also addresses fascism, gender politics, and understanding one’s enemy. While there’s Clarkesian magic, which I usually dislike, it didn’t hurt my enjoyment of the story.
2023 – Nettle & Bone
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher is a repudiation of fairy tales rather than high fantasy. Great world-building and a plot that centers women: really phenomenal. For me, this was a page turner, as the novel starts in media res, and I was eager to figure out how the heroine ended up where she was, doing what she was doing. There’s a nice twist near the end, and the climax was so good I re-read it the next day, to better savor it.
2022, 2020 – A Memory Called Empire, A Desolation Called Peace
My friend Mark Rosenfelder has reviewed both Arkady Martine’s 2020 winner, A Memory Called Empire (⭐ ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐), and her 2022 winner, A Desolation Called Peace (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) better than I could do here, so go read his reviews. The main character has a chip in her head with the memories of her predecessor as ambassador to the empire.
2021 – Network Effect
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Martha Wells’ Network Effect is sadly my least-liked book in the Murderbot series. My specific complaint involves the nature of consciousness of these machine intelligences. Two aspects of the plot strained the credibility of these for me and verged on Clarkesian magic, in ways very unlike any of the other books.
I may also like it less because it is the sole novel in a series of novellas. I like the novellas better; they remind me of ERB books but modern: short (actually even shorter than ERB’s works), written in the first person, a hero with an unusual ability (in this case, a cyborg that has overridden its governor circuit). Her books also offer fascinating and clever takes on combat, bots, and drones.
Wells has written Stargate: Atlantis and Star Wars novels, and these are the same breezy fun you might expect from licensed tie-ins. Overall, I like the series a lot, except for the titles themselves, which are bland nothings that—having read all of them—don’t even recall the specific stories back to me: All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, etc.
Do read Fugitive Telemetry (#6 in the series) before Network Effect (#5), as they were published out of order.
Also, see below for Ancillary Justice, which Wells specifically cites as an inspiration for Murderbot.
2019 – The Calculating Stars
⭐ Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars ended too soon, as a bit of a deus ex machina after all the buildup. I’d gone on this long journey with the character, and it didn’t pay off, certainly not in the way promised by the series title (The Lady Astronaut Series).
2016-2018 – The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky
⭐⭐⭐⭐ N.K. Jemisin became the first writer to win the Hugo Award for Novel three years in a row, winning for The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky. Fascinating stories, excellent world-building, and thought-provoking. But unlike other novels that jump between characters, I found the jumps more annoying than salivating or enticing. Usually such jumps make me eager to keep reading to find out what happened to the other characters. For The Fifth Season, there are two big twists that I could have done without.
2015 – The Three-Body Problem
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem reads like a long Philip K. Dick novel, where the protagonists gradually realize that something is wrong with reality. In this case, reality—at least normalcy—starts to unravel in China in 1967 during the chaotic era of the Cultural Revolution. Fast forward to the present day, and scientists have begun to commit suicide, and no one knows why.
The ideas are well imagined and the novel deals with the reality of a particular trope of science fiction in a fascinating and plausible way. This is hard science fiction, more interested in the ideas than the characters. Many of my friends love that, but it’s no longer to my tastes. For instance, the protagonist Wang Miao has a wife and child and job, who later on are conveniently omitted from the narrative altogether as he gets wrapped up in the investigation, disappearing at all hours with strange people, traveling overseas. The wife doesn’t complain. One main character’s actions are later revealed to have caused harm to her daughter, yet she never thinks of that or wrestles with it.
Unlike Philip K. Dick novels, though, which often have endings that are arbitrary and unsatisfying, The Three-Body Problem answers the questions it raised in a satisfying way, which I mulled over for days afterward.
The Netflix series covers the events of the book in the first five episodes of its eight-episode first season, introducing many new characters and relocating most of the action to England.
⭐⭐⭐ The Dark Forest, the sequel, didn’t win a Hugo. Again, old-school SF in that the ideas dominate. Good ideas, thin characters, not a page-turner like The Three-Body Problem but had a solid ending.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Death’s End, the final book in the trilogy, didn’t win a Hugo either but was still a worthwhile, thought-provoking read.
2014 – Ancillary Justice
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice is the only book to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. If you want space opera, or if you’re looking for some fiction with a heroine who is ace, check it out. The protagonist is a fragment of a ship’s AI.
Leckie conveys the differences between languages in ways other than invented words. Some languages use a generic pronoun regardless of gender, which the author translates “she/her”, and she makes much of having to identify the gender in this gender-fluid future, for those languages that do require it to be specified. The description of poetry is the imperial language is also well done.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Ancillary Sword – Not a Hugo winner but a good read.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Ancillary Mercy – Not a Hugo winner either. I was mildly disappointed with the end of the trilogy—not the end itself, but how we got there, which seemed atypical of the protagonist.
2013 – Redshirts
⭐⭐⭐⭐ John Scalzi’s Redshirts is a fun parody of Star Trek that takes a sudden turn. And another. And another.
2012 – Among Others
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Like Redshirts, this is a love letter, in this case to science fiction and fantasy books in general. A YA novel—a diary really, a bildungsroman—about a young Welsh girl whose life has been shaped by encounters with fairies and who ends up at a boarding school in England. There her best friends initially are all the books she reads. (Which made me want to re-read many old favorites and some notable works I’d missed.) Sadly, one of the most interesting things that happens to her occurs in the past and is discovered through flashbacks instead. Despite the lack of any urgency to the plot, I found it to be a page-turner.
2011 – Blackout / All Clear
⭐ “A mildly interesting 200-page novel about the ordinary heroism of British civilians during the war, bloated to 800 pages via an egregiously handled time-travel conceit.” – Adam Roberts, The Guardian
This is actually two books that have to be read together (neither tells a standalone story). As a fan of time travel, WW2 history, and Doomsday Book (also by Connie Willis), I had high hopes. Instead, I became so disenchanted by this that I gave up without finishing it, after having read Blackout and 100 pages of All Clear. I read the Wikipedia summary of its plot, which made me glad I’d given it up. The author kept too many secrets from the reader.
2010 – The City & The City / The Windup Girl
Two different books, as two different authors tied for the award in 2010.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The City & The City – A page turner with great world building. As the blurb said, definitely a cross between Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler. Written in the first person, which I always enjoy. A meditation on taboos, cities, what we choose not to see, and how we divide ourselves.
⭐ The Windup Girl – The titular windup girl was genetically engineered to be sexually available. Once I realized that, I noped out on reading the rest of the book. It also suffers from Orientalism, absurd scientific extrapolation, and unlikable characters. To quote the author, as interviewed by Christie Yant, “With Windup Girl, I felt ashamed all the time. I felt ashamed while I was writing it, I felt ashamed that I had written it, I felt ashamed that I was inflicting it on other people, and now I feel ashamed when people criticize it.”
Parting Thoughts
I’m glad Hugo voters love cyborg or augmented protagonists: Mahit Dzmare (A Memory Called Empire, A Desolation Called Peace), Murderbot (Network Effect), Breq (Ancillary Justice). They’re creative and fun.
I’m also glad Hugo voters value both indulgent, pulpy science fiction (Redshirts, Murderbot) as well as serious literary fiction (The Fifth Season).
Reading the Hugo winners was a great way to catch up a little bit with the genre.
Updated: 25-09-01 with review of The Tainted Cup. 25-09-21 with review of All Clear / Blackout. 25-12-12 with reviews of 2010 winners.
