ravings

Alright, let's talk about last year's winners, first.

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemison won Best Novel, Binti by Nnedi Okorafor won Best Novella, "Folding Beijing" by Hao Jingfeng (translated by Ken Liu) won Best Novelette, and "Cat Pictures Please" by Naomi Kritzer won Best Short Story. The only one of these that is at all surprising if you assume the psychology of the majority of voters was "vote for whatever the Rabid Puppies will hate most" is "Folding Beijing," since that was on the Rabid slate, but even that one is not so very surprising, since it likely would have gotten nominated anyway (one anonymous commenter suggested it was on the Rabid slate so they could claim they're not totally racist; they're cool with Asians) and is thematically very much in tune with the Jemison and Okorafor pieces. So, whatever. At least the Rabid Puppies can't really be said to have gotten their way with the winners.

Next up, my personal nominations for this year.

For best novel I nominated All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, Death's End by Cixin Liu, The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu (it puts the "science" in "epic fantasciencey"), and The Monster on the Road is Me by J. P. Romney (a perfect mixture of cleverness and awkwardness). The first two made the final cut, so that's nice.

I didn't read much new short fiction last year, and none of what I did read struck me as award-worthy, so I didn't make any novella, novelette, or short story nominations.

I nominated Arrival for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, and two episodes of Black Mirror ("San Junipero" and "Hated in the Nation") for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Arrival and "San Junipero" made the final cut.

Finally, then, initial thoughts on the actual nominations.

Noticeably, there is no more than one obviously Puppy story in each category, which is kind of a relief. But it turns out there was a rule change this year that is kind of convoluted but essentially means that the force of any given vote is divided by the number of other nominations that voter made in the same category. (I might have nominated differently, particularly in the novel category, if I'd realized that earlier.) So the Puppies ended up focusing down on one nominee per category, though they are also claiming this was all according to plan (I guess along the same reasoning it's assumed the 9/11 attackers must be happy about America's apparent slide into autocracy). Whether the rule change will turn out to have been a good idea in the long run, I'm not sure, but the fact that I only have to read one John C. Wright story this year (and a short one at that) feels like a victory.

Once again, four from the Rabid slate and one from the Sad. Though I was actually surprised to find that I didn't hate any of these. In fact, I think I actually enjoyed reading every single one (which is in stark contract to last year's pickings in this category). So that's a positive sign, at least.( Read more... )

This category is mostly a disaster. Four out of five are Rabid picks of varying degrees of trollishness, and the last is a Sad pick. Whatever, let's do this. ( Read more... )

2015 Hugo picks: Novels

This post is of course too late to influence voting (life intervened, though I did vote (and who am I kidding about influence?)), but these are my rankings. ( Read more... )

Not all of these were terrible. ( My picks for novelette. )

I'm not generally a huge fan of spouting my opinions on the internet, but one exception seems to be the Hugo Awards. Far more posts in this blog in recent years have been devoted to that topic than any other (the complete list of my Hugo posts is here).

This year the Hugo nominations were announced at a time when I was too busy to pay much attention to them, but I do remember noticing that I had never heard of most of the nominees, and that one guy in particular who I had never heard of got three out of five of the novella nominations. On Twitter people were angry.( Read more... )

Let's wrap this up! ( Read more... )

This is the category where the SF culture war partisans seem to be out in most force. Alright, let's wade in, then. ( Read more... )

Is it that time of year again already? Here we go. ( Read more... )

Just before the voting deadline, my picks for the novels. I read at least the first few chapters of all of them.( Read more... )