Hugo Winners Since 2000 Trivia Game | Literature

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. In 2001, J. K. Rowling won the Hugo for Best Novel for the fourth book in this series featuring a boy wizard.

Answer: Harry Potter

Though this is most certainly the famous book I'll mention on this quiz, the 2001 win for "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" is the only Hugo win that J. K. Rowling has received. She was also nominated for "Prisoner of Azkaban" the previous year.

2. Several authors have won the Best Novel Hugo more than once, including this author who won in 2002 for "American Gods" and again in 2009 for "The Graveyard Book".

Answer: Neil Gaiman

Though these are the only two novels of Gaiman's to receive Hugo wins, he is also well known for his work on the "Sandman" comics, as well as the novels "Coraline", "Stardust", "Neverwhere", and "Good Omens" (the last of which was co-authored with Terry Pratchett).

3. Only two authors have won the Hugo Best Novel award at least four times, including this author, whose most recent win came in 2004 for the fantasy novel "Paladin of Souls", but who is better known for writing the Vorkosigan Saga.

Answer: Lois McMaster Bujold

As mentioned in the question, Bujold has won four Best Novel Hugos. In addition to "Paladin of Souls", she has won for "The Vor Game", "Barrayar", and "Mirror Dance", all of which are part of the Vorkosigan Saga, an ongoing series of novels all set in the same science fiction universe. The only author to have won more is Robert Heinlein, who won six times, including retro-Hugos.

4. Part alternate history and part fantasy, this lengthy novel by Susanna Clarke, which won the 2005 Hugo Award, is set in a version of England during the Napoleonic Wars where magic once existed. It was later adapted into a BBC One miniseries.

Answer: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

"Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" was Susanna Clarke's debut novel. It follows a pair of "theoretical magicians", who believe magic died out several hundred years before the novel is set. The book was extremely well-received. In addition to receiving the Hugo Award, it was longlisted for the Booker Prize and reached number three on the New York Times bestseller list.

5. An alternate history novel won again in 2008 with this book by Michael Chabon, a murder mystery set in a word where Jewish refugees settled in Sitka, Alaska.

Answer: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" posits a world in which the State of Israel collapsed shortly after its founding, but Jewish refugees during World War II had escaped to Alaska (based on a real failed proposal), leading Sitka to be the largest Jewish population center.

In addition to the Hugo, it won a number of other prominent science fiction awards, including the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best SF Novel.

6. The 2011 Hugo went to a pair of books, "Blackout" and "All Clear", both by this author. Both books feature time travel and are set in the same universe as this author's earlier "Doomsday Book".

Answer: Connie Willis

"Blackout" and "All Clear" are a part of a series featuring a near future where historians use time travel to do field research. Previous books in the series include "Doomsday Book" and "To Say Nothing of the Dog".

7. The 2013 Hugo went to John Scalzi for this book, which follows a group of characters as they realize that they are extras in a "Star Trek"-like TV show.

Answer: Redshirts

"Redshirts", named after the red-shirted security staff in "Star Trek" who often died, is a parody of "Star Trek". It follows a group of new recruits on the Intrepid, a starship in which low-level crew die frequently but senior staff are mysteriously immune, who eventually realize that they exist in a TV show.

While Scalzi is a prolific author, "Redshirts" is his only Hugo Best Novel win. Additionally, he has been nominated several times for novels in his "Old Man's War" series, a science fiction series about a space war fought by senior citizens.

8. Amid controversy at the 2015 Hugos, this Chinese novel about an alien invasion was only nominated after one of the original nominees was withdrawn, but it eventually won the Best Novel award.

Answer: The Three-Body Problem

Hugo nominations and voting are open to anyone who has registered for Worldcon. In 2015, as a backlash to increasing diversity among Hugo winners, a group of right-wing voters exploited this fact to all nominate the same slate of nominees, many of which would not have been nominated under normal circumstances. As a result, many authors withdrew their works from consideration, and voters voted for "no award" in several categories.

In the Best Novel category, "Lines of Departure" by Marko Kloos was initially nominated, but the author chose to withdraw his work, as it had been promoted by this right-wing group. "The Three-Body Problem" replaced it as a nominee and ultimately won, becoming the first work in translation to win a Best Novel Hugo.

9. While there have been relatively few authors who have won the Best Novel Hugo in consecutive years, this author won three times in a row, in 2016, 2017, and 2018 for the three books in the Broken Earth trilogy, beginning with "The Fifth Season".

Answer: N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin is the only author to win three consecutive Best Novel wins. She won for her books "The Fifth Season", "The Obelisk Gate", and "The Stone Sky", which focus on the effects of geological disaster on a fictional world, particularly focusing on an oppressed group of people who can magically control tectonics.

10. Finally, the 2019 Hugo went to this alternate history novel by Mary Robinette Kowal, the first in her Lady Astronaut series. It is set in a world where space exploration in the 1950s proceeded at a more rapid pace than in ours, and follows one of the first female astronauts in this world.

Answer: The Calculating Stars

Winner of the 2019 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, "The Calculating Stars" takes place shortly after a 1952 meteorite strike, which leads global warming to occur at an accelerated rate, giving humans about 50 years before Earth becomes uninhabitable. The novel follows Elma York, a pilot and calculator working on the space program, as she fights to have women included as astronauts.

Source: Author rose1729

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor looney_tunes before going online.
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Hugo Winners Since 2000 Trivia Quiz

The Hugo Award for Best Novel is given each year to a speculative fiction novel from the previous year. Though this award was first given in 1953, this quiz will focus on winners from the 21st century, some well-known, some more obscure.

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