China Miéville and Paolo Bacigalupi tie for Hugo awardThe City and the City and The Windup Girl draw equal numbers of votes for prestigious science fiction prize

Alison Flood guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 September 2010

The Hugo awards logo


For only the third time in its 57 years of existence there has been a dead heat in the Hugo award for best novel, with China Miéville's The City and the City and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tieing for first place.

The two books scored an equal number of votes from members of the World Science Fiction Society, beating authors including Robert J Sawyer and Cherie Priest to jointly win the prestigious science fiction award in Melbourne, Australia yesterday. The last time two books tied for the Hugo best novel prize was in 1993, when Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Connie Willis's Doomsday Book shared the award. And 44 years ago, in 1966, Frank Herbert's Dune and Roger Zelazny's ... And Call Me Conrad also tied to take the prize.

With Miéville's novel a fantastical twist on a crime story, and Bacigalupi's a futuristic tale about an engineered girl grown for sex tourists, this year's winning titles show the range of science fiction today. Set in Thailand, The Windup Girl tells the story of the beautiful Emiko, grown in a creche for a Kyoto businessman but now abandoned in Bangkok, and her encounter with AgriGen's "Calorie Man" Anderson Lake, whose job is to look for "extinct" foodstuffs to help his company "reap the bounty of history's lost calories". It has been compared to William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer in the Washington Post, which also cited Margaret Atwood, JG Ballard and Philip K Dick as influences. The book also carried off this year's Nebula award for best novel.
More at The Guardian.