Books That Won Both the Hugo and the Nebula
1965–2021
Twenty six novels have won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, which science fiction readers call the double crown. The two prizes could hardly be decided more differently. Members of the World Science Fiction Convention vote the Hugo, so it measures what readers loved. Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association vote the Nebula, so it measures what working novelists admired. Agreement between them is the closest thing the genre has to a consensus, and it happens often enough to make a shelf rather than a curiosity. The run opens with Dune in 1965 and reaches Martha Wells and Network Effect in 2021, taking in Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson and N. K. Jemisin along the way. American Gods sits here too, carrying a Bram Stoker Award as well.
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Network Effect
Murderbot is a security construct, part cloned tissue and part machine, that hacked its own governor module years ago and could kill everyone in the…
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The Calculating Stars
On a cold morning in March 1952 a meteorite hits the water off the coast of Maryland and destroys Washington and most of the eastern seaboard. Elma…
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The Stone Sky
The concluding volume of the Broken Earth, and it should not be read first. Essun has crossed a dying continent looking for her daughter and has…
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Ancillary Justice
Breq is one body walking across an ice planet with a weapon and a grudge. She used to be the Justice of Toren, a troop carrier with a distributed…
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Among Others
Morwenna Phelps is fifteen, Welsh, walks with a stick, and has been sent to an English boarding school she loathes, having run from a mother who…
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Blackout/All Clear
Historians at Oxford in 2060 travel to the past to observe. Three of them go to the Second World War: Michael to Dover for the Dunkirk evacuation,…
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The Windup Girl
Bangkok, in the twenty third century. The oil is gone, the seas have risen, and the city survives behind levees and pumps kept running by a king's…
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The premise is a single change to history. In 1940 the United States opens Alaska to Jewish refugees, so the destroyed millions instead arrive in…
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Paladin of Souls
Ista is forty, a dowager royina, and everyone around her believes she is mad. She spent years cursed, watched her husband and her house destroyed by…
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American Gods
Shadow is three days from the end of a prison sentence when he is released early, because his wife has died in a car accident. He learns at the…
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Forever Peace
In 2043 the United States fights its wars with soldierboys: armoured remote units controlled by soldiers jacked in from a bunker near the front, ten…
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Doomsday Book
In a near future Oxford, history is a field discipline. Historians travel to the period they study, and Kivrin, a student, has spent years preparing…
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Speaker for the Dead
Three thousand years after Ender Wiggin destroyed an entire species, he is thirty five years old, kept young by relativistic travel, and works under…
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Ender's Game
Andrew Wiggin, called Ender, is six years old when the military takes him. Two alien invasions have nearly ended humanity, and the fleet believes the…
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Neuromancer
Case was a console cowboy, a thief who jacked his nervous system into the global data network and stole from corporations. He cheated the wrong…
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Startide Rising
The Streaker is the first starship crewed mostly by uplifted dolphins, with seven humans and one chimpanzee aboard, and it has found something in a…
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The Fountains of Paradise
Vannevar Morgan built the longest bridge on Earth and now wants to build something considerably harder: a tower from the equator to geostationary…
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Dreamsnake
Snake is a healer on an Earth left broken by nuclear war, and she travels the desert with three serpents in a case. Grass, Mist and Sand are her…
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Gateway
The Heechee left. Nobody knows why, or where, or what they looked like. What they left behind is a hollowed asteroid parked near the sun containing…
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The Forever War
William Mandella is conscripted under an elite draft that takes the most educated young people on Earth and sends them to fight the Taurans, an enemy…
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The Dispossessed
Anarres is a dry moon settled a hundred and seventy years ago by anarchists who were given a barren world to leave the rich one alone. There is no…
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Rendezvous with Rama
In 2131 an object enters the solar system on a hyperbolic path. It is fifty kilometres long, twenty across, perfectly cylindrical, spinning, and made…
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The Gods Themselves
A scientist discovers that a lump of tungsten in his laboratory has become plutonium 186, an isotope that cannot exist under the physical laws of…
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Ringworld
Louis Wu is two hundred years old, bored, and celebrating his birthday by teleporting round the Earth to stay ahead of midnight, when he is recruited…
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The Left Hand of Darkness
Genly Ai is an envoy from a federation of worlds, sent alone to the planet Gethen to invite it to join. Gethen is in an ice age, its politics are…
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Dune
The desert planet Arrakis produces the spice melange, which extends life, sharpens the mind, and without which the Guild navigators cannot fold…