A young girl defies her tribal traditions and sneaks off-world to university. Binti has magical artifacts, powerful rituals, strange races, and arcane institutions – it’s not science fiction that is obsessed with, or even interested in technology. Instead, Binti is about leaving home, encountering new cultures, and becoming part of the big scary world. Two […]
Tag: Hugos
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2018 – Novelette
Novelettes tend to be long short stories (7500-17500 words). The little bit of extra space gives more flexibility and can lead to greatness (last year’s Tomato Thief springs to mind), but far to often they fall into the uncanny valley where the length makes them flabby without gaining the depth of a longer work.
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2018 – Short Story
Hugo short stories can be surprisingly long (7500 words or less). I tend to prefer the vignette, but regardless of length, I want a self contained story that hits its mark.
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2018 – Introduction
Hugo time again. If you want a primer on the Hugo awards and where I fit in, I did one last year. This year, some personal stuff happened and I got a little bit sidetracked.
Hugo Nominee Suggestion Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) 2018 – Badwater (Alice Isn’t Dead)
I haven’t read enough new books or short works to tell anyone what to nominate, and I’m behind on movies, but I have been a voracious consumer of TV. The Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category is generally dominated by tv episodes, so of course, what I would like to do is instead suggest you nominate a podcast episode.
Review – Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
A young woman in private practice after being cast out of the academy in disgrace, is hired by a partner in a major firm to assist in a post bankruptcy restructuring of a global entity, but a range of opponents both old and new are arrayed against her. Oh and the practice is wizardry, the academy was above the clouds, and the entity being restructured is a god.
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 – Shorter fiction recommendations – aka what to read beyond the winners!
One of the tragedies of the Hugos is that once the winners are announced, all the other worthy nominees tend to get forgotten. This can be particularly egregious when there is a large disparity in the categories, or there is an instant classic in a category that overshadows works that would have won in any other year. So instead of discussing the Hugo’s in terms of winners and losers, let me instead present a list of nominated stories that I think are worth reading. I hope you find something that peaks your interest…
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 – Categories I probably shouldn’t have voted in…
I’m a big believer in trying to read all of the eligible works in a category before voting, but I sometimes, hypocritically vote in some of the “fan” categories for sites or writers I regularly read. Obviously these awards shouldn’t become popularity contests in terms of site readership, but by the same token, unless an […]
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 – Best Series
Now we get to the category where I can actually seem vaguely competent because I’ve read most of them before. As you would hope, this is an extremely strong category, and my only regret is that I didn’t have time to read more books in these series.
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 – John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
As mentioned before this is not strictly a Hugo category, it just uses the same voting system with the same electorate and is given out at the same time. It’s also an odd duck, as novels duke it out with short stories and mixtures of both. Still, the Campbell Award often ends up being my favourite slate – in previous years I have preferred the novels represented here to those in the novel category.