Title: The Hugo Winners: Volume One

Author: Isaac Asimov

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 368

Rating: 3.5/5

I’ve got to be honest, I’m not actually sure if this book is even what I think it is, because it said something at the beginning about being split into two, so maybe this is just half of Volume One? It’s kind of hard to tell. This seems to happen a lot with old Asimov books, because the publishers realised they could make more money if they split their publications in two. But then the introduction was the introduction for Volume Two, so I have no idea. Maybe the first and second ones were originally published together.

The idea here is that Asimov introduces the Hugo Award winners from 1963 to 1967, and so we basically have five novellas that won the iconic science fiction award. The problem is that it just reminds me why I don’t really believe in awards, because while the stories were okay, they weren’t particular standouts for me. If anything, I think that they just act as a pretty good representation of “standard” science fiction.

The good news is that the writing was still pretty decent, and a few of the ideas were okay. It was just that the good stuff was diluted by quite a lot of eh. With that said, I wasn’t expecting great things from this because I knew that it was only edited by Asimov and that a bunch of different authors contributed the actual stories, and so reading a book like this as an Asimov fan meant that I already knew I wasn’t going to be all that into it.

Still, I am still glad that I read it, and I will be continuing with The Hugo Winners series, even though I’m now expecting every one of them to be just okay at best. That way, if a sudden story takes me by surprise, it’ll be a nice surprise instead of just living up to my already high expectations. And please – no more stories about dragons. There are enough of those and it seems like most of them suck. And that’s it.

Learn more about The Hugo Winners: Volume One.