I grew up reading science fiction. Although I enjoyed the genre a great deal, most of my reading was confined to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke (with a dash of Ray Bradbury).

By the end of my college years, I had read most of the fiction from those two authors. I stopped reading science fiction around then. Instead of trying to discover more authors, I focused on my graduate studies, and the occasional non-fiction book. [1] I did briefly join a science fiction reading club when I started my job. I read some nice works (The Forever War, Spin, etc) but then life got busy and I dropped out.

Lately I’ve wanted to get back into reading fiction. After several failed attempts, I discovered that digesting them as audio books is far more effective - the only other thing I can do while driving is listen to the radio. This was my first foray into audio books, and I wish I had started much earlier. It takes me about 3 weeks to finish a novel.

So, which SF stories to read? Perhaps I should use the Hugo and Nebula Awards as a guide? [2] The list of winners and nominees is large. How can I narrow it down? I decided to focus on those that have a LibraryThing rating of 4.0 or higher. [3]

I wrote a PlayWright script to crawl the awards’ Wikipedia pages to get the list of nominees. I then had it search LibraryThing with the book + author’s name, and got the rating of the first title in the results. You can find the full results in the novels.csv and novellas.csv files.

There are over 100 novels that were nominated with a rating of 4.0. Too much to handle - how about I focus on those that won at least one of the awards? It brings the list down to a manageable 41. I summarize my findings below:

Novels

The top 20 novels that won at least one of the awards:

The top 20 novels that did not win either award:

Novellas

The top 20 novellas that won at least one of the awards:

The first 3 have very few ratings. I wonder if these are hard to find…?

The top 20 novellas that did not win either award:

As you can tell from the roundness of the values, many have very few ratings. I’m guessing most of these appear in various anthologies, and not as independent works. Dedicated fans must have created independent entries in LibraryThing for these novellas. Hence, the few votes.

As an aside, I just completed Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. I thoroughly recommend it. Especially the audio version narrated by Adjoa Andoh.

Footnotes

[1]Frankly, the Internet is to blame. I read a lot, but my reading consisted mostly of blogs and online articles.
[2]Clearly, there are plenty of great books that were never nominated. And plenty of the winners are horrible, in my opinion. I mean, seriously: Dune?!
[3]Why LibraryThing and not Goodreads, you ask? Because I’m a snob.