Continuing with the awards season, this week featured the other big one: the Hugo Award nominee announcements. The Hugo Awards are given at the World Science Fiction Convention which this year is LoneStarCon 3 and are nominated and voted for by members of the World Science Fiction Society. That's anyone going to WorldCon in that year and anyone that's paid to get an affiliate membership (which is good value as you get the Hugo "packet" which amongst other things includes all novels that are nominated). As these are given by popular vote, the nominees tend to skew towards the more readable books so you can get some real shockers like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire winning in 2001.
The Hugos give awards across a wide range of science fiction (including some great podcasts that I'll talk about in another post), but as usual, I'm primarily interested in the novels. So, the nominees for the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel are:
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Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed and 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson which I already talked about in my discussion of the Nebula nominees.
Suffice it to say that I think both are very deserving, but I don't think either will win, even though I think 2312 is the best book in the field. You've also got to hand it to Saladin Ahmed with nominees for two extremely prestigious awards for his first novel.
While we're on the subject of the Nebulas, it's a small surprise that N. K. Jemisin's book didn't get on this list, but it's no surprise at all not to see Caitlin Kiernan's. It just goes back to this award being by popular vote, and while I can see that the Drowning Girl is incredible and worthwhile and would be a critic's favorite thing, I just don't think it's much fun to read.
Blackout by Mira Grant (pseudonym of Seanan McGuire). This series has been a bit of a darling of the Hugos with all three getting a nod in the years that they came out. (And I can just about hear the guys from the Incomparable podcast screaming from here), and it's also the only one of the field I haven't read yet. All I can say is that I haven't read a Seanan book that I didn't like and she's good enough that I have this zombie series on my to read list ... and I hate zombie books.
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold is the latest (14th!) in her highly awarded Vorkosigan series. It's an interesting departure from most of the rest of the series because it follows Ivan, a bit player in most of the books and usually someone smart enough to stay out of the action. One of the things Bujold likes to do with these books is to muck around with genre, in that the series has included action romps, love stories, comedies of manners, war stories and murder mysteries. This one has a bit of a few of those, but it's mostly a romantic comedy. I quite enjoyed it, but it's far from my favorite in this series.
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi is the novel I actually expect to win. In many ways it's just as much a love letter to science fiction as last year's winner, Among Others by Jo Walton and John Scalzi is beloved by science fiction fans everywhere as well.
This one has an interesting premise, in that the characters begin to realize that they're world is a science fiction story, and that it's a badly written one, and that they're role is that of Star Trek "red shirts" ie., cannon fodder for bad plotting. It's good, heart-warming and a great light read, but I'm not sure that it doesn't do anything that the movie Stranger than Fiction did a while ago (and better).
As an aside, I was really disappointed that the second James S. A. Corey book, Caliban's War didn't make it on to the ballot this year. I thought it was superior to the first book in the series, and that one was good enough to get nominated last year in a really stiff field. There were quite a few others that I thought were good enough to rate a mention on this list too, including Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson (my review here) and Year Zero by Rob Reid.
This one has an interesting premise, in that the characters begin to realize that they're world is a science fiction story, and that it's a badly written one, and that they're role is that of Star Trek "red shirts" ie., cannon fodder for bad plotting. It's good, heart-warming and a great light read, but I'm not sure that it doesn't do anything that the movie Stranger than Fiction did a while ago (and better).
As an aside, I was really disappointed that the second James S. A. Corey book, Caliban's War didn't make it on to the ballot this year. I thought it was superior to the first book in the series, and that one was good enough to get nominated last year in a really stiff field. There were quite a few others that I thought were good enough to rate a mention on this list too, including Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson (my review here) and Year Zero by Rob Reid.
Currently Reading: I just finished Daughter of the Sword by Steven Bein (brilliant) and I'm a couple of pages into Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain by A. Lee Martinez.
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