Unscientific Poll

[coalescent]

[Poll #167483]

Explanation to follow, although I suspect at least three of you will be able to figure it out.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing you looked up the answers to Pat Cadigan's question last night...

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

We have a winner. :)

(Well, sort of - I went with Nebulas rather than Hugos, since that seemed a fairer comparison. The sample period is 1965-1975, since that's the furthest the Nebulas go back. I debated using the Booker instead of the Pulitzer, but that only goes back to '69 and I wanted as large a historical perspective as possible...)

[fba.livejournal.com]

I am *so* not an SF-lit geek.....

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Trust me, that's not really the point. In fact, since the majority of my friends list probably is, it's actually really helpful that you're not...

[ang-grrr.livejournal.com]

I've not read any of them.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Not a problem. The idea I'm testing is that Nebula winners are better-known than Pulitzer winners from the same period. Given the makeup of my friends list it's a horribly biased poll, mind...

[snowking.livejournal.com]

Did you find out if Catch-22 had won anything?

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Doesn't seem to have done. It was published in 1961; that year, To Kill A Mockingbird took the Pulitzer (fair enough), and The Waters of Kronos took the National Book Award (eh?).

Interesting trivia: The National Book Awards create and discard categories at random. None seems to have been so short-lived as 'best science fiction novel (hardcover),' awarded to Jem by Fred Pohl in 1981 but never before or since...

I looked up the results for the Pulitzer, the Booker, the NBAs, the Hugos, the Nebulas and the Clarke; did I miss anything important?

[scribeoflight.livejournal.com]

This is a useful list of UK prizes...

These are the UK Fiction prizes I'd heard of:

Booker Prize for Fiction
Commonwealth Writers Prize
Guardian First Book Award
Somerset Maugham Awards
Orange Prize for Fiction
Betty Trask Award
Whitbread Book Awards

I suppose the Guardian one is worth factoring in, but probably doesn't go back far enough (?). The Whitbread goes quite far back...

What was Pat Cadigan talking about?

[scribeoflight.livejournal.com]

Just a thought: how many of the above are still in print? I was looking at some past National Book Award winners a few weeks back, and found that quite a few weren't all that available (I was looking for stuff to read that I'd never heard of before, and found a fantastic-looking novel, very promising, called Big If by Mark Costello, a nominee for the National Book Award last year...).