The Scale of Hugo Winning Short Fiction

I was placing my biweekly Amazon order today and it has come time to order the final anthologies containing Hugo winning short fiction. Looking at the results I thought it was worth it to look at scale of this collection.

The complication for anyone who is attempting to read every single Hugo winner is the dividing line between 1994 and 1995.

You can read the entire history of the short fiction awards between 1955 and 1994 in just nine volumes comprising only about eleven inched of shelf space, though if you get paper back editions the scale increases a bit since the Hugo Winner collections that Asimov started editing in the early sixties were subdivided further. The biggest complication for any collector in this is that the Hothouse stories by Brian Aldiss are hard to acquire. The only collection of the original stories I was able to find was a leather bound Easton Press edition. An edited version of the stories is available in The Long Afternoon of Earth and that is likely to be a better solution for most readers.

In my collection these years are covered by:

The Hugo Winners Volumes 1 & 2 (in one omnibus)
Hothouse
The Hugo Winners Volume 3
The Hugo Winners Volume 4
The Hugo Winners Volume 5
The New Hugo Winners Volume 1
The New Hugo Winners Volume 2
The New Hugo Winners Volume 3
The New Hugo Winners Volume 4

There is no hardcover edition of The New Hugo Winners Volume 4 which is annoying but then many of it's descendants are only available as trade paperbacks.

After 1994 things get bad. It took me 23 books to fill out my collection through 2007 (I read the 2008 winners which I read when they were offered through some websites and they'll enter my collection once they've had some time to be anthologized). That's thirty-three inches of shelf space though in this case the anthologies purchased often contained more worth reading than just the one or two stories that won an award. The books that I acquired to complete this collection are (with authors noted for single author anthologies):

The Nebula Winners Volume 30
Stories of your Life by Ted Chiang
The Hard SF Renaissance
Quartet: Four Tales from the Crossroads by George R. R. Martin
Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon by Kristine Katharyn Rusch
New Dreams for Old by Mike Resnick
The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick
The Winds of Marble Arch by Connie Willis
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Chronospace by Allen Steele
Terraforming Earth by Jack Williamson
Inside Job by Connie Willis
Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2003
Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007
The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realms
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
Hart & Boot & Other Stories by Tim Pratt

The Science Fiction: Best of the Year anthologies are only available in small paperbacks while Resnick, Swanwick, and Pratt's anthologies are only available as trade paperbacks. Also two stories ("...Where Angels Fear to Tread" and "The Ultimate Earth") are only available expanded into novels.

It's the curse of being a collector I suppose that sometimes it takes a great deal of effort for very little gain but there's something to be said for completing a collection.