HugoAwards

The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) has been awarding the Hugo Awards to reward excellence in science fiction and fantasy since 1953. However, there has not been an annual anthology of award winners until now. Hugo Award winners have been published, and the shorter fiction award winners have often appeared in anthologies, but not in an exclusive (and official) Hugo Award anthology.

The WSFS is not a publishing company, but they have licensed Prime Books to produce an anthology including the 2009 award winners. The 2009 Hugo awards were announced in August, with winners in categories such as Best Novel, Novella, Short Story, Graphic Story, Editing, and more. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.

The anthology will be edited by Campbell award winning writer Mary Robinette Kowal with a cover designed by 2009 Hugo Awards Best Artist winner Donato Giancolo. The image is a mock-up of the proposed cover.

Other 2009 Hugo Award winners include Neil Gaiman for Best Novel (The Graveyard Book) and Nancy Kress for Best Novella ("The Erdmann Nexus" published in Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008).

(via Hugo Awards website)

Over at AMC's SciFi Scanner blog, author John Scalzi takes a look at the five nominees for 2009's Hugo Award for Best Novel and examines the chances any of them will one day be adapted into a film. It's an interesting perspective on how a studio may view a popular science fiction/fantasy property (What's it about? What's the pitch? Who wrote it?) rendered even more insightful considering Scalzi himself is up for the award.

Though out of fairness, Scalzi abstains from putting his own novel, Zoe's Tale, under the film audit. The four other nominees for this year's Hugo are: Anathem by Neal Stephenson (yay!), The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. However, I'm actually a little late to this post. This year's Hugo Awards ceremony were held yesterday with The Graveyard Book nabbing top honors (read all the winners here).

With that acclaim in its pocket and Neil "I wrote the books for Stardust and Coraline and co-wrote the screenplay for Beowulf"Gaiman's prowess in Hollywood on the rise, I'm starting to think Scalzi was dead-on when he pegged the tome about a boy raised by ghosts as destined for the big screen. The Graveyard Book is already in the option stage, perhaps this win will push it into production.

Past Best Novel Hugo winners later adapted to film have included: Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Frank Herberts Dune (soon to make its 4th trip to the land of motion pictures) and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.