The last essay was about the books only one of science fiction's two big awards chose. This one is about the books both did.
The Nebula began in 1966, and in the sixty-one years since, the two electorates have picked the same novel twenty-six times. The Hugo is voted by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention, the Nebula by the writers' association, so that is two quite different rooms arriving at one answer. The full list is below. A handful of it reads like a syllabus: Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, The Dispossessed, The Forever War, Gateway, Neuromancer, Ender's Game, Doomsday Book, American Gods, Ancillary Justice, The Stone Sky. If you were building a reading list for someone new to the genre and had to do it without thinking, you could do worse than this one.
Here is the part I did not expect. The agreement is not spread evenly. In the 1970s the two awards chose the same book in eight years out of ten. In the 1990s they managed it twice. The 2010s came back to six years out of ten. Since Network Effect in 2021 there has not been one in five years, which equals the longest run without a double winner since the Nebula began: the five years between Speaker for the Dead in 1987 and Doomsday Book in 1993.
I do not know why the 1970s agreed so much, and I would be suspicious of anyone who said they did. Whatever drives it, it is not a straight line, and a five-year gap has happened before.
A few names come up more than once. Ursula K. Le Guin did it twice, five years apart. Arthur C. Clarke twice. Joe Haldeman twice, twenty-two years apart, with The Forever War and Forever Peace. Orson Scott Card twice in consecutive years, Ender's Game and then Speaker for the Dead, which nobody else has done. And Connie Willis twice: Doomsday Book, and Blackout/All Clear, one novel published in two volumes, which both awards took as a single entry. The database lists the two volumes separately, so the list below has twenty-seven books for twenty-six novels — Willis's second win gets a tile for each half.
The same names turn up on the other list, too — Le Guin, Bujold, Haldeman, Gaiman and McIntyre all have a double winner and a book only one award chose. Whatever the awards agree or disagree about, it is the book in front of them, not the writer.
Tap the ones you have read. I have read eleven of them.