Monthly Archives: May 2012

The Homecoming

By Mike Resnick

Best Short Story Hugo Nominee. Read or listen at Escape Pod.

Well done, especially for the portrayal of caring for an Alzheimer’s sufferer, but ultimately, for me, too heavy handed compared to the other entries so far. An interesting exploration, but not achieving the same insights or heights as the others.

On a related note; wow; that’s all the short stories bar Scalzi’s. Escape Pod rock – thank you guys! They didn’t get the rights to Scalzi’s story, but that’s OK, it means its only one short story to read instead of five. With two months to get through the rest of the Voters Packet, I’m making a good start!

The Paper Menagerie

By Ken Lui

Best Short Story Hugo Nominee. Listen or read at http://escapepod.org/2012/05/17/ep345-the-paper-menagerie/.

This was a heartbreaking story. The fantastical elements were part of the story, but only just. Just thinking about it now makes me slightly sad for those people who have gone through similar experiences. Very Nice work.
Not sure how it should stack up against the more fantastical but that’s a greater debate on what the Hugo is about.

Might be worth a debate next peramble (you know who you are)?

Movement

By Nancy Fulda

Hugo Nominee for Best Short Story. Read or listen to it via Escape Pod.

This was a moving, touching story that I was thinking about for a while after reading it. Well crafted, nicely done. All about the human consequences of cloning. One to point people at when they say science fiction is all about tech and not about people.

Levathian Wakes

by James S. A. Corey (aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck)

This is the first of the Hugo nominees I’ve read from the packet (already read Deadline by Grant).

I’d certainly not pick this out for myself; it seemed to me to be space opera/military sci fi, and I’m just not interested in that (unless Cheryh writes it, it seems). Its one of those books that you’re reading the first third, thinking, “this is OK, I guess, nothing special”, and then its 11:30pm. Again. The book definitely improves as it goes on; there was a space battle I was genuinely rooting for the crew in, and some excellent transhuman tech (I almost felt that the authors had recently read Eclipse Phase and wanted to write in that world; it would have fitted in superbly). Plus, vomit zombies, so that’s a theme this Hugo so far..

It wasn’t until I read the addendum at the end that I realised Corey was an amalgam (appropriate for the book, too); I’ve encountered Abrahams work on Podcastle and have his latest on my wishlist, so that was a nice surprise.

Its a definite challenger for Grant; doesn’t have her flair, but has her verisimilitude. I’m looking forward to the other candidates now! I have until the end of July to read as much of the packet as I can; I’m cautiously optimistic.

Note on the Hugo Voters Packet; as James_ mentioned to me, most of the Hugo Voters Packet this year comes in PDF; this works fine for me, since the iPad displays this fine in Goodreader, but sucks to convert into, say, mobi (Kindle) or ePub (most everything else), as things like page numbers break up the flow of text, assuming that the PDF converts at all using Calibre; at least two of the novels caused Calibre to go into a death spiral trying.

Hopefully the committee will be able to source other formats for the works. I’m not too upset, since I’ve already got £10 value from the $50 membership, and that’s just one book, some estimates range as high as $300 for the full voters packet if you went out and bought them all, but since last year they were all multi format, its disappointing.

Hebrewpunk

by Lavie Tidhar

I came across Tidhar’s work via Escape Pod, where he has had a couple of stories read. While none of them particularly grabbed me, they made mention of this collection of short stories based around fantastic characters from the Jewish cannon, which intrigued me enough to pick up the work on Kindle for a couple of pounds, and it was very enjoyable; I’ll be looking out for more works from him in this world.

Greylady

By Peter Morwood.

I first read Morwood’s ‘Horse Lords’ saga in secondary school, and can remember debating them with a friend, as we were properly starting to get into fantasy fiction. Looking back, he introduced me to a lot of good fiction.

I bought this because of a fan effort on twitter highlighting the plight of Morwood and his partner Diane Duane who had had their bank account emptied by a fraudster, and while the bank would be refunding the money, it wouldn’t be in enough time to meet that months bills, so they’d organised an eBook sale to raise some cash. I’d read scads of Duane’s Star Trek franchise fiction a few years later (thanks Tomesy!), and loved Morwoods works so I bought one of each of their self published works.

Initially I’d hesitated in buying this as it was effectively a prequel, and focusing on the establishing of the Horse Lords at that, where my interest had always been in the magic of the world. It turns out I shouldn’t have doubted Mr Morwood!

It has a sequel, Widowmaker, and to be honest it appears like the two were one book split to make two (odd in eBook world), or at least it did to me. Going back to his site, it appears both of these ‘prequels’ have been pulled for editing and re-issue in October, so perhaps there’s something in that. To be frank, I’m a bit grumpy about that; if I’d have known before starting I’d have held off reading until the reissue (not that he’s under any obligation to provide that to me F.O.C. of course), now I need to decide if I’ll reread the new edition *and* I need to wait for the sequel! Its a hard life..

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees

By E. Lily Yu

First of the 2012 Hugo Nominees! Listened to thanks to the fine folks at Escape Pod (I’ve finally got round to donating, too), but you can also read it online at Clarksworld Magazine.

It was a lovely, odd piece. Still thinking about it and not sure what it had to say; I suspect this will haunt me for a while, in a good way. Lovely imagery.

This is a great start to Hugo season! :-)