China Miéville and Paolo Bacigalupi tie for Hugo award

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China Miéville and Paolo Bacigalupi tie for Hugo award
September 6, 2010
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk


For only the third time in its 57 years of existence there has been a dead heat in the Hugo award for best novel, with China Miéville's The City and the City and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tieing for first place.

The two books scored an equal number of votes from members of the World Science Fiction Society, beating authors including Robert J Sawyer and Cherie Priest to jointly win the prestigious science fiction award in Melbourne, Australia yesterday. The last time two books tied for the Hugo best novel prize was in 1993, when Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Connie Willis's Doomsday Book shared the award. And 44 years ago, in 1966, Frank Herbert's Dune and Roger Zelazny's ... And Call Me Conrad also tied to take the prize.

With Miéville's novel a fantastical twist on a crime story, and Bacigalupi's a futuristic tale about an engineered girl grown for sex tourists, this year's winning titles show the range of science fiction today. Set in Thailand, The Windup Girl tells the story of the beautiful Emiko, grown in a creche for a Kyoto businessman but now abandoned in Bangkok, and her encounter with AgriGen's "Calorie Man" Anderson Lake, whose job is to look for "extinct" foodstuffs to help his company "reap the bounty of history's lost calories". It has been compared to William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer in the Washington Post, which also cited Margaret Atwood, JG Ballard and Philip K Dick as influences. The book also carried off this year's Nebula award for best novel.

Bacigalupi pronounced himself "blown away and so pleased with this huge honour", describing his fellow winner's novel as "excellent". The City and the City, which has already won Miéville the UK's top two science fiction prizes, the Arthur C Clarke and British Science Fiction Association awards, is very different to Bacigalupi's novel. The story of a murder investigation in the decaying city of Besźel, it quickly emerges that things aren't quite as they seem: Besźel exists in the same physical space as another city, Ul Qoma, and Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad must travel there to solve the mystery. "Miéville thickens his plot with exceptional mastery," wrote Michael Moorcock in the Guardian.

"Keeping his grip firmly on an idea which would quickly slip from the hands of a less skilled writer, Miéville again proves himself as intelligent as he is original".

Won in the past by authors including Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Ursula K Le Guin, the Hugos have been running since 1953. This year, the best novella prize was taken by Charles Stross for Palimpsest ("I am gobsmacked. But happy," blogged Stross), the best novelette by Peter Watts's The Island and the best short story by Will McIntosh's Bridesicle.