>Another of my faves - John Barth, wrote my all time favourite novel - "The Sot Weed Factor" (imho, one of the great achievments in English literature), but he also wrote one of my alltime least favourites - "Chimera" (which incidentally won some awards - so what do I know).
>
>Just proves you can't always just bank on the author's name.

Maybe you can, but you can't bet on awards. Sometimes an author gets awarded a big award for a minor work, as a consolation prize for the last time, when his masterpiece was pushed aside for political reasons. That includes politics at any level, from publisher's internal, to guild to local to world level.