2015 Hugo reading

[coffeeandink]

I am nominating things for the Hugo for the first time! And yes, this is mainly in reaction to the Puppies hijacking last year's ballot. Even though the Puppies were decisively cut out of winning, they prevented a lot of good work from receiving the recognition it deserved. I'm focusing on short fiction and other categories that are the most vulnerable to slating because they tend to have a low number of nominations over all. Sadly, since I have not read much short fiction over the past year, it means I'm trying to crowd a lot of it into the next four weeks, which may not go so well. I've been semi-avoiding other recommendation lists to try to find overlooked pieces, but given the time constraints, I may well turn to them. Feel free to rec stuff to me, but don't bother rec'ing the big rec lists; I promise you I already have them bookmarked.

I have, of course, lots of thoughts about Dramatic Short Form and Dramatic Long Form and quixotic nominations for Bojack Horseman, The 100, and Jane the Virgin, as well as less futile nominations for Jessica Jones and Agent Carter. I really want to nominate TV seasons for Long Form, although that's basically a thrown-away vote, since no one's going to watch even an entire short season if they haven't already, and anyway The Force Awakens will win.

Anyway! Short fiction and related work I have tried so far, with asterisks next to the most likely nominations, in case it will be helpful to you:

Novella

• Iona Sharma, Quarter Days
  Post-WWI AU with interesting magic, people of color, genderqueerness, and a quiet sense of people putting together a better world by careful work. There's a sense of kindness between the characters in this, although it by no means erases prejudice and cruelty.
  
  I'm not 100% sure it will go on my nomination list, but I will definitely be checking out more of Sharma's work with an eye towards the Campbell and towards seeing if there are any of the other individual stories I want to nominate.
  
  
• Kai Ashante Wilson, The Sorceror of the Wildeeps
  Far-future hard sf heroic fantasy reminiscent of Neveryona, because of the sophisticated look at race, gender, sexuality, and a kind of anthropological world-building. I'm not sure about some of the language choices, not the often-commented (and brilliant) use of Black English, but the separate sf-stream footnotes. Wilson is very fond of metafictional framings and I am not so much.

Short story

• Beth Bernobich, "The Ghost Dragon's Daughter"
  A Chinese fantasy world with magical tech, girl genius mathe-magical engineers, and many kinds of queerness. Also dragons.
  
  
• Rachael K. Jones, "Courting the Silent Sun" (Accessing the Future, ed. Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad)*
  Accessing the Future was a disappointment as a whole, but I love this story about Deaf diplomats en route to negotiate with aliens. TW for consent issues.
  
  Jones is another author I'll be checking out for the Campbell.
  
  
• Vandana Singh, "Ambiguity Machines: An Examination"
  Neat Borgesian thought experiment/fables about imaginary machines.
  
  
• Isabel Yap, "The Oiran's Song"
  Tokugawa Japan, a troupe of soldiers, a boy, an oiran, humans indistinguishable from monsters or possibly vice versa. Beautiful prose; the painterly stillness of the scenes disrupted by sudden bloody violence reminds me a bit of the Lady Snowblood manga. TW for violence and sexual assault.
  
  Another potential Campbell nominee.

Best related work
Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce, Letters to Tiptree*
Dominick Grace, The Science Fiction of Phyllis Gotlieb*


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