Reading roundup, Farscape, Hugos homework, and recs
4. Steven Brust, Good Guys -- this is an urban fantasy standalone, and it's pretty good? But like everything by Brust that I read which is not Dragaera, it makes me realize that while I pretty much always end up respecting and appreciating the way Brust writes things -- the negative-space storytelling, the dialogue-heavy prose, characters who are complex and shades of grey at best -- it all adds up to a fairly high activation energy for getting INTO his books, and if it's not Dragaera, I'm not too invested to fight my way up that initial slope, even though I trust him enough to know that I'll enjoy the ride down. (Or, as I put it to Best Chat more succinctly, "Needs more Morrolan." :P) It was pretty much the case here: it took me about halfway into the book to properly figure out what was going on, between the worldbuilding and the multiple POVs and different parties all with their own agendas and serets. And I really enjoyed the last third/quarter of the book where everything comes together, gathering momentum -- that was when I was eager to keep reading until I was done, as opposed to setting the book aside for weeks, as was true of the first half. Spoilers from here!
The worldbuilding reminded me of Lukyanenko's Dozor books, kind of unexpectedly -- magical secret societies who position themselves as Mortal Enemies but are actually deeply in each other's pockets behind the scenes, secrecy from your own members as primary MO, overarching bureaucracy, and just a general sense of bleakness. cyanshadow mentioned that the magical police premise of the Ranch sounded like Rivers of London, which made me realize just how completely different the books are in tone -- Peter is such a determined force for Clair, and this (and Dozor) isn't even Noir, but just a sort of Grey.
I think the splintered narration was part of what made this book less of a draw for me. At first I was mostly enjoying the first-person Nick POV (partly, I think, because he's going around assassinating people in first person, and I've been kind of conditioned -- though he's not much like Vlad at all in other respects), and even by the end Nick was one of the characters I liked best -- yes, he's been murdering people in gruesome ways, but honestly I kind of felt for him, more than most of the others. The other character I liked, the one who ended up my favorite was Matt -- who also starts off trying to kill Our Heroes, come to think of it XP Anyway, I liked Matt's combination of competence (at some really shady stuff), surface amiability and Not a Good Person past, and the way his motivations for wanting to join the Foundation are unclear even to him -- is it really because he wants to wipe out the "red in the ledger" (explicitly quoting Nat in Avengers) or is it because he can't stand to be a "civillian"? -- or more likely both. Anyway, I liked Matt, and enjoyed his POV parts of the book more than any other. The trio of protagonists we had from the start never actually grew on me: I probably would've liked Donovan, but I found Brust writingout "the PO-lice" really distracting and unnecessary, so he kind of grated; I never felt like I got much of a feel for Susan, so her death left me completely cold; and Marci was OK, I guess, but not particularly memorable, except that I liked her relationship with Lawrence the boyfriend -- I kind of think I liked Lawrence, supportively cooking her meals and worrying about her and getting her a goldfish, more than I liked the main three. And then we get a bunch of POVs of other Foundation folks, which I guess is supposed to give this mosaic feeling, and it kind of does, but it also scatters attention. And I find that Brust's negative space/understated storytelling approach works really well in combination with first person (or probably tight third), but this book was more omniscient, and between those two things there was just too much distance.
I do appreciate the thematic complexity underscored by the title -- the way pretty much everyone is one of the "good guys" in their own mind: Nick, who is offing terrible people in reenge for getting screwed over for doing the right thing; Charlie, who is continuing to fight the good fight, as he sees it, in any way he can, after being stripped of magic; Becker, who is apparently still an idealist, after trading in his guerilla ways for the sanctioned campaign of the Foundation; Donovan and team, who are doing their job even when it means protecting people who decidedly don't have any moral superiority; Matt, as described above, and who goes around robbing drug dealers to supply himself with money and firepower, even the heads of the Foundation (and presumably the Mystici), who are doing their own shady things for what they feel are good reasons. But interesting themes only go so far without truly compelling characters, and I felt that lack here.
Some random notes: While I appreciated having one of the Foundation sorcerers be a Jewish guy from Odessa, dear Steve, the chances of a person likethat being named Vasily Vasilyev are non-zero but pretty low -- and the chances of him, someone roughly my age, being named Vaily Ilyanovhich Vasilyev are lower still. Also, the W-instead-of-V thing does happen with Russians speaking English -- I'm slightly prone to it myself, with certain combinations -- but I'm pretty sure you got that from Chekov. Anyway, this is obviously a very minor point, since he is around for like a chapter, but it made me side-eye all the other international bits.
Also, there were a couple of places I spotted that had lear copy editing errors -- "we" in a Donovan section, which makes me wonder if that POV was first person once upon a time, too, and the wrong name appearing in at least one place. From browsing reviews, it sounds like the ARC was full of errors, and like they caught most of them, but two very noticeable goofs in a short book is still not great (and there were probably more I was missing, because I don't tend to catch things like that).
Anyway, not bad, but not Hugo-worthy for me. Plz rite moar Vlad.
6. John Scalzi, The Consuming Fire -- I had been pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed The Collapsing Empire last year, the first Scalzi book where I made it past the first page, and then ikel89, whom I recced it to, enjoyed it even more than I had, which made me even fonder. So when K wanted to read the sequel, I was game, too. It was still quite readable, but I enjoyed it a lot less, alas. (On a positive note, this did finally succeed as an actual syncread with ikel89, in that we both finished the book at more or less the same time. You can see our in situ thoughts here.) Spoilers!
Things from book 1 which I continued to like here:
- Kiva fucking Lagos, leveling up in business dealings and, surprisingly, relationships. I had still liked her more in book 1, where she was a much more morally gray character, charging refugees for offworld passage to make a buck, vacuum-boarding a guy, and so on, but she was the only interesting character that got a reprise, so she as still one of the best things about book 2. (Although: "Kiva considered that she might be developing a thing for Fundapellonan, which on one hand would be a very not-Kiva thing to do, but on the other hand who gave a fuck if it was "not-Kiva", because she wasn't some fucking fictional character destined to do whatever some goddamn hack wanted her to do." I see what you're doing there, Scalzi, and ha-ha-ha and all, but this book kind of is written by a hack, for reasons other than Kiva, so, you know.)
New things in book 2 that I liked:
- Nadashe's POV, which wasn't AS entertaining as Kiva's, but as still miles ahead of everyone else's.
- Chenevert the hologram dead king/sentient ship/representative of the mysterious orld beyond the Interdependency, who is charming and a hilarious troll and should've been in way more of the book.
- That one scene describing a random ship that gets dumped in the middle of nowhere when a Flow stream collapses and continues to be progressively more and more annihilated over decades and centuries and millennia. I don't even mean this sarcastically/pejoratively -- that brief scene I found more moving than all the Cardenia chapters put together.
- Acknowledgement that a missing colony isolated for 800 years would have different germ resistance and that needs to be taken into account in a renewed contact situation.
- The ship name The Princess is in Another Castle, my favorite yet.
Things I liked less than I had in book 1:
- Cardenia, in the absence of Naffa Dolg. And also, in book 1 she at least had the fish-out-of-water thing going for her. Here, she is supposedly coming into her own as an emperox, except that she is a) really boring and b) not actually believable to me as this amazing emperox, and all the efforts to make her look like one by having the other characters oh-so-impressed and by letting her pull off all these coups just makes me roll my eyes. And the titledrop speech at the end was just plain cringeworthy, ugh.
- Marce, in the absence of his cool older sister to tweak him or Kiva to discomfit him. The awkward relationship with Cardenia is not cute-awkward, it's just awkward and not compelling. I did enjoy his brief interaction with the other Flow scientist lady, but that didn't last long, did it.
- The not-a-main-character scene-setting prologue. While book 1's felt like an effective borrowing of GRRM's trick, here it just felt divorced from the action and really random. I did enjoy the insight it offered into the very secular church, where religious visions are inevitably viewed as probably hypoxia, but one can still have real faith in the church as an institution -- but as a book opening it felt really pointless. Especially since I didn't feel like Cardenia's visions even ended up playing a role really.
Things from book 1 I missed:
- Seeing what Count Claremont and Ghreni (and Vrenna) are up to on End. I was quite surprised we did not get any part of that thread in this book, because, really, Cardenia and the rigamarole around here are Just Not That Interesting.
New things I really didn't care for:
- Jiyi the super-secret omniscient AI that exists for hand-wavy reasons and whom Cardenia discovers in highly hand-wavy ways. So deus ex machin-y, meh.
- Random irrelevant political drama via interchangeable Wu cousins
- SO MUCH RECAPPING. Not even just recapping events of book 1 -- which, honestly, were not that complex to need a lot of recapping -- but having them come up multiple times, in multiple POVs, ust in case we'd forgotten in the last 30 pages.
Thing that felt like a bait and switch between the books:
The whole collapsing empire business. I'd found the premise of the first book interesting -- an intricately (and deliberately) interconnected world that will fall apart and needs to be prepared to have the planets function independently. I mean, yes, it's a depressing premise and the climate change analogies were pretty anvilicious, but it was an interesting idea. Apparently not what Scalzi actually intends to put his precious Cardenia through, though, because in this book we kept discovering things that walked back from the looming disaster -- the Flow streams won't totally collapse, they will change, but in ways that should be theoretically possible to predict. And it appears that it's possible to collapse (and therefore maybe create?) Flow streams intentionally. TBH, this development kind of pissed me off, because it turned the series narrative into a different kind of story. And also I found it hard to believe as a scientific model twist, too.
The whole "you missed the new streams because you weren't looking for them" thing -- I won't say it couldn't happen, but it seems like a contrived sort of mistake. I was thinking about this because spoilers, I guess, but not plot-destroying ones for The Calculating Stars? "things aren't actually as dire as we thought!" is a revelation in The Calculating Stars, too, and I'd really liked it there, so why does it bug me/feel like a cop-out here? I think it's two-fold. First, Calculating Stars was always a going-to-space story, so the fact that the Earth was not quite as screwed as originally thought did not materially change the plot, themes, or anything. But The Collapsing Empire was all ABOUT the loss of the Interdependency, so the reveal that, hey, Flow isn't fully collapsing feels kind of like a cheat / changing the premise. And second, the reason for the discrepancy in the original model and the later model in 'Stars' made a lot more sense to me -- the model is being built by someone working outside her primary area, trying to extrapolate from similar-but-unlike things, and she gets it right qualitatively, but some of the assumptions are off -- this seems very plausible to me. Here, a guy has been studying this problem for years (yes, in isolation, and I do appreciate the "yay peer review!" message), and tunnel vision is definitely a thing that happens, but I find it harder to believe that in all this time he wouldn't have taken a broader look.
Quotes (all Kiva, all the time):
"A lawyer is here"
Kiva: "Toss him out the window."
"Her, actually, I think."
"So toss her out, then. Equally defenestrable."
SF: Maybe I'm avoiding you.
Kiva: You're doing a fucking poor job of it, then, standing in my office.
S: I was on assignment.
Kiva: Bearing gifts.
S: From someone else.
Kiva: Which you chose.
S: Yes, I did.
I've also been reading a bunch of graphic novels, in a search to have something to nominate for the Hugos in this category:
5. Saga vol.9 (Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples) -- OK, no. This is pretty much the opposite of what I want from this series. Like, I'm definitely OK with a certain degree of darkness and corruption, but in past volumes it was always offset by something positive -- family ties or found family stuff. The last couple of volumes were starting to skew darker in that regard, MAJOR SPOILERS from here with Izabel's death, but this one? Marko's death is the big one, of course, but I was also really sad about Doff. Prince Robot never fully grew on me, but over the course of book 3 (the last three volumes) I'd finally gotten used to him, so I was sorry to see him killed for narrative reasons if not for his own sake. I assume Alana and Upsher will recover, and I'm glad Petrichor (whom I like) seems to have escaped the general carnage so far, but, yeah, I'm not really enjoying where we are at the moment. /spoilers I didn't realize when I picked up this volume, but after this comes a year-long hiatus. From comments in that article, it seems like this is roughly the halfway point of the story, so probably the nadir, the darkest hour. And, well, I'll keep reading, when there's more because I am invested in these characters, but I hope it will start making me happier...
7. Runaways, vol.2: Best Friends Forever (Rainbow Rowell, Kris Anka) -- OK, I liked this volume more than the first one, though most of that is probably because I already knew who these characters were and what they were like. Still not a fan of the art, still find the layout occasionally confusing -- I can't seem to find the logic or signal by which you sometimes read the top panels across the pagespread instead of reading down the page like normal -- but I'm reading these for Rowell's words, and I am enjoying those. The comicness is also not really my thing, the references to past fights and superpowers on the fritz and whatnot, but it's easy enough to mostly ignore those. Anyway, I continue to like Molly best, followed by Chase; Victor and Gert grew on me over the course of these issues -- Spoilers from here! although the Gert/Victor's disembodied head thing is WEEEIRD, and also totally random from a character perspective, as far as I can tell, even more than the disembodied head thing. I do like Gert's new look, though. And the Doombot was hilarious: A+ addition, especially the bickering with Chase. Victor zooming around on a Roomba and needing Molly to manipulate his sunglasses was the best! And speaking of scenes I liked, so was the one of Chase driving Molly home from school when she asks him if she's cute.
Anyway, I liked the central plot with the 'Neverland' cupcake -- the way the adult problems of getting a job and cleaning the house and making tough grown-up decisions all that meant that all the older Runaways were telling Molly how great she had it, being a kid. I also thought it was great that Abbie had spent her 50 years as a little girl training in all sorts of martial arts and fencing and could kick their asses. And I liked the way the different arcs paralleled and echoed each other -- Molly and Abigail's BFF breakup and Karolina and Julie's, or the question of, essentially, body autonomy that Julie (and Molly, and Abigail, though they got to make the choice, sort of -- Abigail was guilt-tripping Molly into eating the cupcake, and as Karolina points out, Abigail wasn't exactly making an informed choice at 13), Victor making the choice to stay a disembodied head while other people want to fix him (even though he is making the choice out of probably(?) unfounded fear), even the tiny non-magical choice Gert makes to change the way she looks. It's not that I was invested in Karolina and Julie, but I was annoyed that they broke up (though Julie was definitely in the right there), because I thought the contrast of Julie to the Runaways made for an interesting dynamic: the way she kept expecting them to function as a proper team, with plans and post-mission debriefings, and they kept explaining to her it wasn't like that. Also, it feels like they broke up primarily so that Nico and Karolina could get together, which I find pretty boring. And this also seemed like the reason the one parallel that didn't feel organic was shoehorned into the book -- the visit to Klara and her gay foster parents, as prelude to showing that Nico had changed her mind/is no longer in denial about her attraction to Karolina. (It's very possible I wouldn't gotten something more out of the Klara interlude, or the Nico and Karolina stuff if I were familiar with the older stories, but as it is, meh.)
8. Skyward vol.1: My Low-G Life (Joe Henderson, Lee Garbett) -- ikel89 read this and posted an intriguing write-up, and indeed this turned out to be a rare graphic novel actually up my alley: the artwork and the elegant but easy-to-follow storytelling made me think of Saga, as advertised. The worldbuilding is neat -- and the upside-down physics even made sense to me after a little while or if I stopped to think about it for a bit -- the visuals are very cool, there's nice diversity (at least when it comes to the sky-world). I liked Willa and her dad a lot, the way both were believably flawed and with plausible conflicts but still both people I wanted to root for. Spoilers! I'm sad that Nate died at the end (or presumably did, anyway) -- I think the Saga-like feeling made me think this was going to be more of a family story and less a lone hero's journey story, but if he had to die, that was not a bad way to play that, I guess. Anyway, definitely want to read on, though I hope my library gets actual hard copies of this series, because volume 1 had to reed via hoopla, and while that's doable, it's definitely not my preference!
9. Water Weed (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel) -- RoL graphic novel #6. I was not expecting the "weed" in the title to be pot but I guess I really should have XP This was a neat case of the week, though fairly divorced from the larger story in a way I felt like a lot of the comics are not -- like, I didn't feel like anything that happened in here had any effect on the arc of the novels, or major relationships. But it was fun! I liked the case itself a lot -- spoilers! that the werelight weed is not actually exploitation, like Peter thought, but actually motivated by kind of a sweet thing, that the Hoodette gets a slap on the wrist because she looks harmless and has a heartwarming story, the medical/magical mystery at the core. And the allusion to Nightingale's youth and its legal heroin was quite interesting XP/spoilers My favorite bit, though, was one of the mini-comics which shows Varvara and Abigail shopping for lingeree and Varvara showing Abigail how one deals with catcallers.
*
A bit more Farscape:
2x01, Mind the Baby -- Rygel and Pilot look a bit different -- though it might just be the set lighting. EW at Scorpius's... uh, brain things? getting replaced? The expressions on both John's and Aeryn's faces during the "how many times have we been close?" scene were priceless (even if the line as an obvious setup, I don't care, the looks are worth it XP). And heh at John and D'Argo playing RPS for ho gets to go after Crais. Speaking of, Crais is annoying me again, now that he isn't being bullied by Scorpius. Guess my only interest in him as a character is to watch him suffer. John's "You want to have a midlife crisis?" line to him was pretty great. Actually, all of John and Crais's dynamic this episode was great, including "You hunt me down? That would complete the symmetry nicely". I had to wonder at the forehead kiss, too (actually, I'm kind of surprised people don't seem to ship Crichtron/Crais more...) I'm not very interested in the Talyn drama, so those scenes were pretty lost on me, and I assume I have a bunch more Talyn drama to look forward to -- maybe not immediately, though? Oh, but the space effects and special effects in general are looking better. (I see from the wiki that a different SFX company took over this season; it shows.)
2x02, Vita Mortis -- John's been shouting at people a lot this season (D'Argo here, Aeryn last ep); I'm not a fan of this development. I don't have much else to say about this one, tbh. D'Argo's moral and/or romantic and/or family struggles just don't do much for me (at this point anyway). I think my favorite part as John beating an awkward retreat when the rejuvenated sorceress lady was perving on him, and then later awkwardly waiting outside the chamber.
2x03, Taking the Stone -- yeah, this one didn't work for me so much. Too many high people, which isn't that interesting to see, too much chanting, WAAAY too much screaming. And I didn't really feel like I connected with the Chiana arc -- it seemed kind of artificial, and just plunked down for the episode. It felt like one of the earlier season 1 eps, just with more audacious graphics, really. And the Rygel going grave-robbing B plot was equally underwhelming.
2x04, "Crackers Don't Matter" -- this episode was a really interesting trajectory for me. I was quite skeptical at first, because I didn't like the way the alien looked, and the "make the crew behave crazy for no reason" is not my favorite trope. But the further things went on, the more I liked it, because it really committed: it's not just them bickering and acting paranoid they're being genuinely awful to each other in ways that the ending implies won't be just reset, and the crazy starts getting REALLY crazy. I especially liked John in this, trying to hold on to some shred of sanity/civility while everything was crumbling (OK, probably because he's "deficient"/has weaker eyes, but it was still neat to see), and hallucinating (?) Scorpius in a Hawaiian shirt and getting into shootouts with Aeryn. By the time I got to the scene where they were all outfitting John with puke masks and goggles and reflective cape and sword to o fight the alien, I was laughing out loud because everything was both really ridiculous and yet consistent with the setup. Ultimately, this felt like the "DNA Mad Scientist episode done in a way that worked much better for me -- the crew turning on each other but a) with more believable reason, b) with much greater impact because by this point they both have gone through a lot together and actually care about each other AND know enough about each other to hurt the others when they try, and c) presumably with some consequences. Oh, and John killing T-apostrophe-alien dude -- I think this is the first time John like, kills someone execution-style. He's caused other deaths and IIRC also killed in the middle of fighting, but I don't think we've seen him hands-on kill a defeated enemy before. It was while he was in the altered state, but still jarring to see. There was a lot of fun and/or punchy dialogue, like pretty much all the crazy things Scorpius says, and Aeryn's "When I'm old and fat-- *looks down at herself* when I'm old", and John is actually quite good at being awful to people -- and I liked the acknowledement that "it was there" when Chiana asks him about it later -- and the allusions, to Space Odyssey and The Shining. Anyway, starting from a point of skepticism, I ended up liking this one a lot, EXCEPYT that I found everything about the villain alien awful and melodramatic and ridiculous not in the impressive way the rest of the episode is, but just, you know, bad.
2x05, The Way We Weren't -- On a tiny random note, I love that John and D'Argo have at this point adopted Rock Paper Scissors as the way to solve all their macho impulse-driven disagreements -- good job, boys XD On a very different note, ouch. I'm impressed the show actually went into exploring Aeryn's Peacekeeper past rather than just glossing over it -- and while rationally I do feel like, well, what did the others expect she had been doing, I can definitely see that it would be different knowing vaguely she must've done some bad/questionable things under orders and watching her execute a defenseless alien. So I thought the episode struck a good balance. Velorek was an interesting character -- I think the episode does a good job of showing someone who would be a good person in other circumstances working within a sick system, and it's not pretty -- the small kindnesses, the attempts at decency are important, but don't actually change much, and he goes through and does the things he must do. I did *not* see Aeryn's betrayal of him coming, and saw the deal he'd made the with (the new) Pilot even less, and that added all sorts of interesting nuances. The scene of Aeryn breaking down at the punching bag was interesting and uncomfortable -- she is so self-contained most of the time, watching her manifest strong emotion, vulnerability, like this was striking (and I appreciated that this isn't pretty crying, just raw and uncomfortable). And I noticed the visuals and the music in this, which I normally haven't been doing except in episodes like "Through the Looking Glass" where both were intentionally jarring (so, like, not in a good way). I saw in the wiki later that there were some firsts in both in this episode so hopefully this will be more true going forward, too.
So, like, the first 3.3 episodes of the season felt like a letdown after the crescendo of the end of season 1, but partway through "Crackers" I was starting to feel the momentum building again and appreciating the show again for what it was doing, which was reassuring.
*
A rainy weekend last week, which I spent catching up on Hugos homework. Updates from my post as soon as nominations opened, and it didn't feel like I'd made all that much progress, but it was more than I had expected!
Best Novel
My list so far:
- Spinning Silver
- Lies Sleeping
- Philosopher's Flight
- Revenant Gun
- The Calculating Stars
(Because I have a full ballot I'm happy with, I'm not necessarily planning to prioritize reading the books below in time to nominate, but if I do happen to do so, maybe the list will shift a bit.)
Other eligible works I have some interest in checking out (in approximate order of probability of me getting to them in time):
- The Poppy War (40% in and really enjoying it, though I don't expect it to unseat any of my favorites already on the list. If I had an extra spot, though!)
- Trail of Lightning (Roanhorse) -- sitting on my TBR pile
- A Conspiracy of Truths (in progress but looking unlikely to overtake any of the ones on the list)
- Foundryside (sync read with K?)
- Semiosis (started, want to continue)
- Swordheart (ursulav)
- Blackfish City (Sam J Miller)
- Record of Spaceborn Few
- The Fated Sky
- Space Opera??
Other eligible works I've read or otherwise dispositions:
- Witchmark -- definitely not
- The Last Sun -- as fond as I am of it, no XP
- The Consuming Fire -- nope, as I liked it a lot less than the first book
- Good Guys -- not bad, but not as good as the ones already on my list
Best Novella:
My list so far:
- An Artificial Condition
- The Flowers of Vashnoi
- maybe: Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night -- it's kind of grown on me more with distance? from "fun but not Hugo-caliber" to "hey, why not"
Other eligible works I have some interest in checking out:
- Rogue Protocol (started, want to finish)
- Exit Strategy
- Tensorate (The Descent of Monsters)
Other eligible works I read:
- I pulled up the Longest Night novella to the ballot for now
Best Novelette
(bless Rocket Stack Rank's algorithms! <3)
My list so far:
- The Thing about Ghost Stories, Naomi Kritzer -- I usually like Kritzer's stories, and I found this one really affecting. I liked the narrator (folklorist dealing with her mother's death after a long descent into Alzheimer's), and I liked the way this unfolded, and it made me tear up a bit.
- Adriftica (Maria Dahvana Headley) from Robots vs Fairies -- I'd written: "another really great story from an author I'd not read before. This is a riff on Midsummer Night's Dream, with bits of Tam Lin and Pied Piper stories, and an aesthetic all its own, with an enjoyable narrator and a hopeful ending to its bleak setting. The story is all about music, and specifically rock'n'roll, but in a way that managed to make me care about it in this context, which is impressive."
- The thought that Counts (K.J.Parker) -- a really fun narrative voice, and a really fun setting, and I enjoyed the clever way this unfolded.
- Thirty-Three Percent Joe (Suzanne Palmer) -- I'd liked her previous Hugo-winning story pretty well thought it wasn't my top pick. This one's also a little too paint-by-numbers, but I like the premise, and I loved the final scene.
Other eligible works I may still check out (although I've read through all the ones that grabbed me, so I think it's unlikely any of these would make my nominations ballot):
- Do As I Do, Sing As I sing (Sarah Pinsker) -- I started this and wasn't really feeling it, but I might go back. But maybe Pinsker is just a SF writer for me, not fantasy...
- Fitting In (Max Gladstone) [Wild Cards] -- 'cos it's Gladstone
- If At First You Don't Succeed, Try Try Again (Zen Cho)
- The Only Harmless Great Thing (Tor freebie) -- but I kind of doubt that I want to read about radiation and elephants... :/
Other eligible works I've read:
- The Nearest (Greg Egan) -- near-future police procedural, and I'd wanted to read some Greg Egan. I might have conceivably considered kicking this one up, too, but it's so near-future, it hardly feels like SF -- there are police drone swarms to examine the scene and autonomous cars that need to be disabled to drive them into a river, and facial recognition and cameras everywhere, but, like, all the technology described exists today, I'm pretty sure -- just not as widely adopted. And I didn't feel like the wider adoption made for a substantially different feel to the world, or a substantially different way the story unfolded. I did appreciate the story -- vague spoilers! I think it did a good job with the unreliable narrator while still making Kate feel like a smart person good at her job. And I appreciated that the ending is bittersweet -- hopeful and happy, but not a reset.
- Left to Take the Lead (Marissa Lingen) -- this was sweet, but I felt like it had too little plot for a novelette. I appreciated the spacer POV and the way it revealed the multiple differences between what's normal for her and what's normal for Earthers, and the musings on family. There was some lovely prose and it was a very easy read, pulling me into the POV and pulling me along, but I don't think this one will stay with me to any significant degree. (Side note: the early scene where space-born Holly who is unused to weather is freaking out in the tornado shelter while everyone else is not worried/having a fine time reminded me a lot of going to the apartment building bomb shelter in Israel, here I seemed to be the only one affected by the circumstances, and everyone else was like, ho-hum, how's your mother? let's arrange an impromptu playdate XD)
- What Is Eve (Will McIntosh) -- I liked the central idea and the psychological factors, but the narrator did not work for me (12-year-old boys don't sound like this), the B&W morality was ridiculous, the Very Special Lesson was not believable, and I hated the food fight.
- Murmured Under the Moon (Tim Pratt) from Robots vs Fairies -- it was fine, but I wasn't overly impressed
- Quality Time (Ken Liu) from Robots vs Fairies -- I liked aspects of it but found the story as a whole facile
Best Short Story
My list so far:
- A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compenidum of Portal Fantasies (Alix E. Harrow) -- this was great! I read it straight through and quoted it to Best Chat and send the link to
lunasariel (a librarian of, I assume, the second type :)
- Talk to Your Children About Two-Tongued Jeremy, Theodore McCombs -- wow, ouch. This is a near-future AI story narrated super-fittingly in first-person-plural by a town's parents, and it is darly funny and brutal and creepily plausible. Wow. The author is Campbell eligible (second year) and I'm seriously considering adding him to my list
- The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society, T.Kingfisher -- Look, I love fairies and I love Vernon's fairy tale subversions, so of course I love this.
- Madeline Ashby, "Work Shadow / Shadow Work" (Robots vs Fairies anthology)
- Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions), Debbie Urbanski -- RSR review of this is one word: "Shattering", and yeah, it is. I wasn't sure it would make the ballot for me, but it really stayed with me after reading, which I think is a sign it should. And I think this is a good example of a story where an "identity" type of story is all about that identity -- in this case, the narrator is a sex-repulsed asexual -- but it's still a powerful story (and I think a universally powerful? or at least I, as someone not at all in that demographic was affected/was able to appreciate it), and feels like a SF story rather than a "[minority identity]" or "[minority identity] sci-fi" story (unlike the trans dinosaurs short story I started reading and abandoned, because like with the author's previous work that I'd read, the two aspects ust didn't mesh together for me).
Other things I've read specifically for Hugos homework and enjoyed, though they didn't quite make the list:
- Field Biology of the Wee Fairies, Naomi Kritzer -- I like this one, but it feels a little formulaic compared to the Kritzer novelette. If I didn't already have a full ballot, I might have included it, but it fell just below the line of the other stories for me.
- My Favorite Sentience, Marissa Lingen -- very cute! I had it on the ballot at first, but then meatier stories kicked it off.
- Blessings, Naomi Novik -- a Sleeping Beauty retelling that I quite liked
- You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You, Maria Dahvana Headley -- I really enjoy this author's style, even when the stories aren't thematically or plot-wise exactly my cup of tea
- The Court Magician, Sarah Pinsker -- I enjoyed it, but it didnt stick enouh with me to be Hugo material. Possibly further evidence that I should stick to sci-fi with Pinsker.
- Pistol Grip (Vina Jie-Min Prasad) -- confirmed I want to nominate her for the Campbell (2nd year) but does not rise to Hugo level for me
- Suize Q, Jacqueline Carey -- the first urban fantasy by her I've read, and I definitely want to read more, because I do prefer this style to Kushiel
Best Series
(thank you, Dublin, for making the eligibility criteria VERY clear, entirely unlike San Jose last year - "at least three (3) volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2018, at least one of which was published in 2018" and for repeat nominees, "at least two (2) additional installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words after they qualified for their last appearance on the final ballot and by the close of 2018"
My list so far:
- Machineries of Empire (
yhlee has posted wordcount which confirms it's qualified)
- Seraphina-verse (via Tess of the Road)
Other eligible series I'm familiar with:
- Tolkien Legendarium -- Fall of Gondolin makes this eligible, and is reportedly the last shot for Tolkien to get on the ballot... This totally feels like cheating, and I don't want it to landslide over newer series I'd like to get recognition, so I'm waffling...
- Wayfarers
- Dark Gifts (Gilded Cage et al)
- Kate Daniels
- Alex Verus
- Tortall (with Numair pub) -- I may just have to add this one...
Not eligible:
- Rivers of London -- it has published 2 installments since 2017, but I don't think Furthest Station + Lies Sleeping (+ even all the GNs and short story) total 240k words. Which sucks.
- Vorkosigan for sure
Best Related Work
My list so far:
- Jo Walton's Hugo book (THE RELATEDEST)
- Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth -- I'm only a little ways in so far, and have leafed through the exhibits, but it's like walking through the Bodleian's exhibition on Tolkien, i.e. 1000% relevant to my interests
Other eligible things I might want to check out:
- Ursula LeGuin, Conversations on Writing
Best Graphic Story
My list so far:
- Skyward, vol 1
- Cry Fox, maybe? it wasn't stellar, but I did like it...
- Runaways vol 2?
Other eligible things I've read:
- Paper Girls 4 -- disappointing after how much I liked 3
- Saga 9 -- not what I wanted out of this series...
- Runaways by Rainbow Rowell (vol 1)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
My list so far:
- Into the Spider-Verse
- Incredibles 2
- Black Panther
- maybe: Infinity War?
Other eligible movies I've seen:
- Deadpool 2
- Venom -- definitely not for the Hugo ballot, LOL
Other movies I might conceivably see in time:
- Ant-Man and the Wasp -- now on Netflix, so a definite possibility
- Aquaman
- Ready Player One
- Ralph Breaks the Internet
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
My list so far:
- The Good Place, s2, Best Self
- The Good Place, s2, Leap to Faith
Other eligible things I've seen:
- The Dragon Prince
- Castlevania season 2 -- lol, nope
- Disenchantment -- maybe episodes 5 and/or 10?
Other things I might conceivably see in time:
- The Good Place s3 (through episode 10)
- Killjoys s4
Best Editor, Short Form
To be eligible, the person must have edited at least four anthologies, collections or magazine issues devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy, at least one of which must have been published in the year of eligibility.
My list so far:
- Dominik Parisien (since Navah Wolfe is not eligible in this category and I'd really liked Robots vs Fairies)
- Strahan again, probably?
- Ellen Datlow
- Julia Rios, maybe? (Fireside) h
File770 list here
Best Editor, Long Form
This Award is given for the editing work that person has done in the year of eligibility. To be eligible the person must have edited at least 4 novel-length (i.e. 40,000 words or more) books devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy in the year of eligibility, which are not anthologies or collections.
Possibilities who are eligible per the File770 post:
- Gillian Redfearn and/or Betsy Wolhein (Lies Sleeping)
- Joe Monti -- I'm not totally sure he's eligible, but the File770 list turned up 3 publications so hopefully there's one hiding in the wings (Trail of Lightning)
- Navah Wolfe (whom I wish I could nominate in the other category, really) -- but Space Opera... but it could be a matter of taste... She's also the editor on A Conspiracy of Truths
- David Pomerico (The Poppy War)
alternate: Anne Groell (Spinning Silver) -- but... 1) chapter breaks! and 2) and also they should've talked maybe?
Most of my favorite books from this year, the editors are not eligible or at least not clearly eligible from that list...
Last year's people I liked:
- Miriam Weinberg -- but she was the editor for Vengeful and from what K has quoted, that was NOT an endorsement...
Best Pro Artist
Rocket Stack Rank to the rescue again with novel covers and short fiction artwork.
Artists I liked:
- Alan Bao (like his range, icons and Asian art and silhouettes)
- Alyssa Winans -- I like the sort of clean, almost infographic style?
- Armando Veve -- intricate doodly weird drawings
- Chris McGrath? (I like his Gladstone covers but am kind of meh on his other stuff)
- David Palumbo (Binti covers, which I like more than the books)
- FORT (EHAD covers and similarly mono-hue and atmospheric ones)
- Galen Dara (though I wasn't sold on last year's crop)
- Goñi Montes -- I like the sort of bold colors and strong lines
- Jamie Stafford-Hill -- Calculting Stars cover and more atmospheric covers
- John Picacio -- I really liked his stuff last year
- Jon Foster -- a bit more mixed, but I like the sort of muted tones covers
- Micah Epstein (mixed on the foreground figures but like the more object/landscape ones)
- Rovina Cai -- shadowy sort of art, very dreamlike
- Sarah Anne Langton -- Lavie Tidhar covers on which I love the sort of ye olde travel posters style
- Tommy Arnold (Trail of Lightning cover and some other "action" covers I like)
- Yuko Shimuzu - Tensorate covers and http://yukoart.com/category/work/
Others:
- Ron Miller did the covers of LMB's assorted novellas, but I don't like the art all that much
- Will Staehle did the Witchmark cover, which is neat, and some other covers -- quite a lot of range -- but I mostly don't care for the style
I need to narrow this down to 5, but currently I'm thinking
- Alyssa Winans
- David Palumbo
- Goni Montes
- Sarah Anne Langton
- Yuko Shimuzu
Best Semiprozine
My list so far:
- Escape Pod
- Fireside Quarterly
- Uncanny (based on the number of stories I liked that came from there)
- Strange Horizons (based on the number of stories I liked that came from there)
(Apex and Lightspeed are not eligible, as they're pro)
Best Fanzine
My list so far:
- Rocket Stack Rank
(since File770 is no longer an option)
Best Fancast
My list so far:
- Be the Serpent!!! (everybody else can go home now)
- The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 -- I know a single-fandom podcast for a show that hasn't aired for 20 years is not actually going to make it onto the list, but it's eligible and I've been enjoying it a lot, so I'm going to put it on my list
Best Fan Writer
My list so far:
- Rebecca Fraimow (
skygiants)
- Foz Meadows
Last year's people I liked whose 2018 writings I checked out:
- Bogi Takacs -- not feeling it this year
Best Fan Artist
My list so far:
- Spring Schoenhuth (whose work I got to admire in person at Worldcon, and bought some of it) - http://springtimecreations.com/
- Laurie Toby Edison - https://laurieopal.dreamwidth.org/ (the jewelry artist of my Glorious Bug from Worldcon)
- Ariela Housman (Geek Caligraphy) - https://geekcalligraphy.com/art-prints/ (Lady Astronauts, Penric manuscript)
- Naomi Vandoren - https://www.naomivandoren.com/more-watercolors
Best Art Book (special category)
- Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth (does that qualify? it has quite a lot of Tolkien's own art, and photographs, so it might?)
Books that are possibly relevant to my interests:
- A Middle-Earth Traveler (John Howe) -- I got a copy of this figuring it would likely make a good present for my friend R anyway, plan to at least leaf through it
- Terry Pratchett's Imaginarium (Paul Kidby -- although I dislike his style)
- Daydreamer's Journey: The Art of Julie Dillon
- the Art of Into the Spider-Verse
(This is the only one where I don't have at least one solid entry for a nomination so far, but am hopeful about the John Howe...)
Lodestar
My list so far:
- Tess of the Road (which I need to finish, but even just based on what I read)
Other eligible books I've read:
- The Cruel Prince -- alas, no
Other eligible books I might
- Numair book
(Wow, this was a weird year for me in terms of reading genre YA...)
Campbell
http://www.writertopia.com/awards/campbell
Last year I didn't have anyone to put on this list, and this time I have more names than nomination slots! After some pondering, I decided to follow the logic of giving priority to people in their second year of eligibility ho had never been finalists, then everyone else.
My list so far:
- Alex Yuschik (who I think is eligible? Their Escape Pod publication of "Texts from the Ghost War" is an eligible publication, and I think the 2016 story was not, so I think they're in their second year.
- Theodore McCombs (Two-Tongued Jeremy short story)
- Tom Miller (? I haven't been able to confirm eligibility)
Need to figure out which of these to put on the list since I can't put all three:
- Rivers Solomon (second year)
- Vina Jie-Min Prasad (second year)
- R.F.Kuang (first year)
- Alexandra Rowland (first year)
Last year's folks still eligible this year whom I liked:
- Katherine Arden -- I'm definitely less enamoured of her this year... on the fence but as have more than enough candidates at this point -- pass
Other eligible folks whose work I've read:
- Jeannette Ng -- last year's finalist, hard pass
- D.A. Xiaolin Spires -- not impressed at Fireside reading
Folks I might be interested in checking out:
- Chakraborty??
*
And a few quick recs (non-fic):
Only a little late, VALENtines day cards, which have been my favorite manifestation of the Love Month on
babylon5_love :D
Fanart from Chocolate Box that I really liked: it's all been done (Aziraphale/Crowley, G)
And fanvids are not my usual medium of fannish consumption, but a bunch of these I've seen recced around my flist are brilliant and stuck with me and I have to share:
The Good Place: a Jason vid to "All Star" with is PERFECT and I've now listened/watched it a bunch of times.
Machineries of Empire: Ninefox, a really cool vid (instrumental) that captures the feel of the series in a really neat way, considering it's a book series full of weird space magic, a lot of which is happening inside a person's head. Basically sorcery!
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego: Glass Coffins -- this is a really neat case where the combination of the song and the video is something I find way more interesting and affecting than I ever have each thing on its own. Like, usually the music is just a pleasant background for me or a song I like listening to, or it's neat witnessing the words/image matches selected, but this was a true symbiosis.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1101019.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
The worldbuilding reminded me of Lukyanenko's Dozor books, kind of unexpectedly -- magical secret societies who position themselves as Mortal Enemies but are actually deeply in each other's pockets behind the scenes, secrecy from your own members as primary MO, overarching bureaucracy, and just a general sense of bleakness. cyanshadow mentioned that the magical police premise of the Ranch sounded like Rivers of London, which made me realize just how completely different the books are in tone -- Peter is such a determined force for Clair, and this (and Dozor) isn't even Noir, but just a sort of Grey.
I think the splintered narration was part of what made this book less of a draw for me. At first I was mostly enjoying the first-person Nick POV (partly, I think, because he's going around assassinating people in first person, and I've been kind of conditioned -- though he's not much like Vlad at all in other respects), and even by the end Nick was one of the characters I liked best -- yes, he's been murdering people in gruesome ways, but honestly I kind of felt for him, more than most of the others. The other character I liked, the one who ended up my favorite was Matt -- who also starts off trying to kill Our Heroes, come to think of it XP Anyway, I liked Matt's combination of competence (at some really shady stuff), surface amiability and Not a Good Person past, and the way his motivations for wanting to join the Foundation are unclear even to him -- is it really because he wants to wipe out the "red in the ledger" (explicitly quoting Nat in Avengers) or is it because he can't stand to be a "civillian"? -- or more likely both. Anyway, I liked Matt, and enjoyed his POV parts of the book more than any other. The trio of protagonists we had from the start never actually grew on me: I probably would've liked Donovan, but I found Brust writingout "the PO-lice" really distracting and unnecessary, so he kind of grated; I never felt like I got much of a feel for Susan, so her death left me completely cold; and Marci was OK, I guess, but not particularly memorable, except that I liked her relationship with Lawrence the boyfriend -- I kind of think I liked Lawrence, supportively cooking her meals and worrying about her and getting her a goldfish, more than I liked the main three. And then we get a bunch of POVs of other Foundation folks, which I guess is supposed to give this mosaic feeling, and it kind of does, but it also scatters attention. And I find that Brust's negative space/understated storytelling approach works really well in combination with first person (or probably tight third), but this book was more omniscient, and between those two things there was just too much distance.
I do appreciate the thematic complexity underscored by the title -- the way pretty much everyone is one of the "good guys" in their own mind: Nick, who is offing terrible people in reenge for getting screwed over for doing the right thing; Charlie, who is continuing to fight the good fight, as he sees it, in any way he can, after being stripped of magic; Becker, who is apparently still an idealist, after trading in his guerilla ways for the sanctioned campaign of the Foundation; Donovan and team, who are doing their job even when it means protecting people who decidedly don't have any moral superiority; Matt, as described above, and who goes around robbing drug dealers to supply himself with money and firepower, even the heads of the Foundation (and presumably the Mystici), who are doing their own shady things for what they feel are good reasons. But interesting themes only go so far without truly compelling characters, and I felt that lack here.
Some random notes: While I appreciated having one of the Foundation sorcerers be a Jewish guy from Odessa, dear Steve, the chances of a person likethat being named Vasily Vasilyev are non-zero but pretty low -- and the chances of him, someone roughly my age, being named Vaily Ilyanovhich Vasilyev are lower still. Also, the W-instead-of-V thing does happen with Russians speaking English -- I'm slightly prone to it myself, with certain combinations -- but I'm pretty sure you got that from Chekov. Anyway, this is obviously a very minor point, since he is around for like a chapter, but it made me side-eye all the other international bits.
Also, there were a couple of places I spotted that had lear copy editing errors -- "we" in a Donovan section, which makes me wonder if that POV was first person once upon a time, too, and the wrong name appearing in at least one place. From browsing reviews, it sounds like the ARC was full of errors, and like they caught most of them, but two very noticeable goofs in a short book is still not great (and there were probably more I was missing, because I don't tend to catch things like that).
Anyway, not bad, but not Hugo-worthy for me. Plz rite moar Vlad.
6. John Scalzi, The Consuming Fire -- I had been pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed The Collapsing Empire last year, the first Scalzi book where I made it past the first page, and then ikel89, whom I recced it to, enjoyed it even more than I had, which made me even fonder. So when K wanted to read the sequel, I was game, too. It was still quite readable, but I enjoyed it a lot less, alas. (On a positive note, this did finally succeed as an actual syncread with ikel89, in that we both finished the book at more or less the same time. You can see our in situ thoughts here.) Spoilers!
Things from book 1 which I continued to like here:
- Kiva fucking Lagos, leveling up in business dealings and, surprisingly, relationships. I had still liked her more in book 1, where she was a much more morally gray character, charging refugees for offworld passage to make a buck, vacuum-boarding a guy, and so on, but she was the only interesting character that got a reprise, so she as still one of the best things about book 2. (Although: "Kiva considered that she might be developing a thing for Fundapellonan, which on one hand would be a very not-Kiva thing to do, but on the other hand who gave a fuck if it was "not-Kiva", because she wasn't some fucking fictional character destined to do whatever some goddamn hack wanted her to do." I see what you're doing there, Scalzi, and ha-ha-ha and all, but this book kind of is written by a hack, for reasons other than Kiva, so, you know.)
New things in book 2 that I liked:
- Nadashe's POV, which wasn't AS entertaining as Kiva's, but as still miles ahead of everyone else's.
- Chenevert the hologram dead king/sentient ship/representative of the mysterious orld beyond the Interdependency, who is charming and a hilarious troll and should've been in way more of the book.
- That one scene describing a random ship that gets dumped in the middle of nowhere when a Flow stream collapses and continues to be progressively more and more annihilated over decades and centuries and millennia. I don't even mean this sarcastically/pejoratively -- that brief scene I found more moving than all the Cardenia chapters put together.
- Acknowledgement that a missing colony isolated for 800 years would have different germ resistance and that needs to be taken into account in a renewed contact situation.
- The ship name The Princess is in Another Castle, my favorite yet.
Things I liked less than I had in book 1:
- Cardenia, in the absence of Naffa Dolg. And also, in book 1 she at least had the fish-out-of-water thing going for her. Here, she is supposedly coming into her own as an emperox, except that she is a) really boring and b) not actually believable to me as this amazing emperox, and all the efforts to make her look like one by having the other characters oh-so-impressed and by letting her pull off all these coups just makes me roll my eyes. And the titledrop speech at the end was just plain cringeworthy, ugh.
- Marce, in the absence of his cool older sister to tweak him or Kiva to discomfit him. The awkward relationship with Cardenia is not cute-awkward, it's just awkward and not compelling. I did enjoy his brief interaction with the other Flow scientist lady, but that didn't last long, did it.
- The not-a-main-character scene-setting prologue. While book 1's felt like an effective borrowing of GRRM's trick, here it just felt divorced from the action and really random. I did enjoy the insight it offered into the very secular church, where religious visions are inevitably viewed as probably hypoxia, but one can still have real faith in the church as an institution -- but as a book opening it felt really pointless. Especially since I didn't feel like Cardenia's visions even ended up playing a role really.
Things from book 1 I missed:
- Seeing what Count Claremont and Ghreni (and Vrenna) are up to on End. I was quite surprised we did not get any part of that thread in this book, because, really, Cardenia and the rigamarole around here are Just Not That Interesting.
New things I really didn't care for:
- Jiyi the super-secret omniscient AI that exists for hand-wavy reasons and whom Cardenia discovers in highly hand-wavy ways. So deus ex machin-y, meh.
- Random irrelevant political drama via interchangeable Wu cousins
- SO MUCH RECAPPING. Not even just recapping events of book 1 -- which, honestly, were not that complex to need a lot of recapping -- but having them come up multiple times, in multiple POVs, ust in case we'd forgotten in the last 30 pages.
Thing that felt like a bait and switch between the books:
The whole collapsing empire business. I'd found the premise of the first book interesting -- an intricately (and deliberately) interconnected world that will fall apart and needs to be prepared to have the planets function independently. I mean, yes, it's a depressing premise and the climate change analogies were pretty anvilicious, but it was an interesting idea. Apparently not what Scalzi actually intends to put his precious Cardenia through, though, because in this book we kept discovering things that walked back from the looming disaster -- the Flow streams won't totally collapse, they will change, but in ways that should be theoretically possible to predict. And it appears that it's possible to collapse (and therefore maybe create?) Flow streams intentionally. TBH, this development kind of pissed me off, because it turned the series narrative into a different kind of story. And also I found it hard to believe as a scientific model twist, too.
The whole "you missed the new streams because you weren't looking for them" thing -- I won't say it couldn't happen, but it seems like a contrived sort of mistake. I was thinking about this because spoilers, I guess, but not plot-destroying ones for The Calculating Stars? "things aren't actually as dire as we thought!" is a revelation in The Calculating Stars, too, and I'd really liked it there, so why does it bug me/feel like a cop-out here? I think it's two-fold. First, Calculating Stars was always a going-to-space story, so the fact that the Earth was not quite as screwed as originally thought did not materially change the plot, themes, or anything. But The Collapsing Empire was all ABOUT the loss of the Interdependency, so the reveal that, hey, Flow isn't fully collapsing feels kind of like a cheat / changing the premise. And second, the reason for the discrepancy in the original model and the later model in 'Stars' made a lot more sense to me -- the model is being built by someone working outside her primary area, trying to extrapolate from similar-but-unlike things, and she gets it right qualitatively, but some of the assumptions are off -- this seems very plausible to me. Here, a guy has been studying this problem for years (yes, in isolation, and I do appreciate the "yay peer review!" message), and tunnel vision is definitely a thing that happens, but I find it harder to believe that in all this time he wouldn't have taken a broader look.
Quotes (all Kiva, all the time):
"A lawyer is here"
Kiva: "Toss him out the window."
"Her, actually, I think."
"So toss her out, then. Equally defenestrable."
SF: Maybe I'm avoiding you.
Kiva: You're doing a fucking poor job of it, then, standing in my office.
S: I was on assignment.
Kiva: Bearing gifts.
S: From someone else.
Kiva: Which you chose.
S: Yes, I did.
I've also been reading a bunch of graphic novels, in a search to have something to nominate for the Hugos in this category:
5. Saga vol.9 (Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples) -- OK, no. This is pretty much the opposite of what I want from this series. Like, I'm definitely OK with a certain degree of darkness and corruption, but in past volumes it was always offset by something positive -- family ties or found family stuff. The last couple of volumes were starting to skew darker in that regard, MAJOR SPOILERS from here with Izabel's death, but this one? Marko's death is the big one, of course, but I was also really sad about Doff. Prince Robot never fully grew on me, but over the course of book 3 (the last three volumes) I'd finally gotten used to him, so I was sorry to see him killed for narrative reasons if not for his own sake. I assume Alana and Upsher will recover, and I'm glad Petrichor (whom I like) seems to have escaped the general carnage so far, but, yeah, I'm not really enjoying where we are at the moment. /spoilers I didn't realize when I picked up this volume, but after this comes a year-long hiatus. From comments in that article, it seems like this is roughly the halfway point of the story, so probably the nadir, the darkest hour. And, well, I'll keep reading, when there's more because I am invested in these characters, but I hope it will start making me happier...
7. Runaways, vol.2: Best Friends Forever (Rainbow Rowell, Kris Anka) -- OK, I liked this volume more than the first one, though most of that is probably because I already knew who these characters were and what they were like. Still not a fan of the art, still find the layout occasionally confusing -- I can't seem to find the logic or signal by which you sometimes read the top panels across the pagespread instead of reading down the page like normal -- but I'm reading these for Rowell's words, and I am enjoying those. The comicness is also not really my thing, the references to past fights and superpowers on the fritz and whatnot, but it's easy enough to mostly ignore those. Anyway, I continue to like Molly best, followed by Chase; Victor and Gert grew on me over the course of these issues -- Spoilers from here! although the Gert/Victor's disembodied head thing is WEEEIRD, and also totally random from a character perspective, as far as I can tell, even more than the disembodied head thing. I do like Gert's new look, though. And the Doombot was hilarious: A+ addition, especially the bickering with Chase. Victor zooming around on a Roomba and needing Molly to manipulate his sunglasses was the best! And speaking of scenes I liked, so was the one of Chase driving Molly home from school when she asks him if she's cute.
Anyway, I liked the central plot with the 'Neverland' cupcake -- the way the adult problems of getting a job and cleaning the house and making tough grown-up decisions all that meant that all the older Runaways were telling Molly how great she had it, being a kid. I also thought it was great that Abbie had spent her 50 years as a little girl training in all sorts of martial arts and fencing and could kick their asses. And I liked the way the different arcs paralleled and echoed each other -- Molly and Abigail's BFF breakup and Karolina and Julie's, or the question of, essentially, body autonomy that Julie (and Molly, and Abigail, though they got to make the choice, sort of -- Abigail was guilt-tripping Molly into eating the cupcake, and as Karolina points out, Abigail wasn't exactly making an informed choice at 13), Victor making the choice to stay a disembodied head while other people want to fix him (even though he is making the choice out of probably(?) unfounded fear), even the tiny non-magical choice Gert makes to change the way she looks. It's not that I was invested in Karolina and Julie, but I was annoyed that they broke up (though Julie was definitely in the right there), because I thought the contrast of Julie to the Runaways made for an interesting dynamic: the way she kept expecting them to function as a proper team, with plans and post-mission debriefings, and they kept explaining to her it wasn't like that. Also, it feels like they broke up primarily so that Nico and Karolina could get together, which I find pretty boring. And this also seemed like the reason the one parallel that didn't feel organic was shoehorned into the book -- the visit to Klara and her gay foster parents, as prelude to showing that Nico had changed her mind/is no longer in denial about her attraction to Karolina. (It's very possible I wouldn't gotten something more out of the Klara interlude, or the Nico and Karolina stuff if I were familiar with the older stories, but as it is, meh.)
8. Skyward vol.1: My Low-G Life (Joe Henderson, Lee Garbett) -- ikel89 read this and posted an intriguing write-up, and indeed this turned out to be a rare graphic novel actually up my alley: the artwork and the elegant but easy-to-follow storytelling made me think of Saga, as advertised. The worldbuilding is neat -- and the upside-down physics even made sense to me after a little while or if I stopped to think about it for a bit -- the visuals are very cool, there's nice diversity (at least when it comes to the sky-world). I liked Willa and her dad a lot, the way both were believably flawed and with plausible conflicts but still both people I wanted to root for. Spoilers! I'm sad that Nate died at the end (or presumably did, anyway) -- I think the Saga-like feeling made me think this was going to be more of a family story and less a lone hero's journey story, but if he had to die, that was not a bad way to play that, I guess. Anyway, definitely want to read on, though I hope my library gets actual hard copies of this series, because volume 1 had to reed via hoopla, and while that's doable, it's definitely not my preference!
9. Water Weed (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel) -- RoL graphic novel #6. I was not expecting the "weed" in the title to be pot but I guess I really should have XP This was a neat case of the week, though fairly divorced from the larger story in a way I felt like a lot of the comics are not -- like, I didn't feel like anything that happened in here had any effect on the arc of the novels, or major relationships. But it was fun! I liked the case itself a lot -- spoilers! that the werelight weed is not actually exploitation, like Peter thought, but actually motivated by kind of a sweet thing, that the Hoodette gets a slap on the wrist because she looks harmless and has a heartwarming story, the medical/magical mystery at the core. And the allusion to Nightingale's youth and its legal heroin was quite interesting XP/spoilers My favorite bit, though, was one of the mini-comics which shows Varvara and Abigail shopping for lingeree and Varvara showing Abigail how one deals with catcallers.
*
A bit more Farscape:
2x01, Mind the Baby -- Rygel and Pilot look a bit different -- though it might just be the set lighting. EW at Scorpius's... uh, brain things? getting replaced? The expressions on both John's and Aeryn's faces during the "how many times have we been close?" scene were priceless (even if the line as an obvious setup, I don't care, the looks are worth it XP). And heh at John and D'Argo playing RPS for ho gets to go after Crais. Speaking of, Crais is annoying me again, now that he isn't being bullied by Scorpius. Guess my only interest in him as a character is to watch him suffer. John's "You want to have a midlife crisis?" line to him was pretty great. Actually, all of John and Crais's dynamic this episode was great, including "You hunt me down? That would complete the symmetry nicely". I had to wonder at the forehead kiss, too (actually, I'm kind of surprised people don't seem to ship Crichtron/Crais more...) I'm not very interested in the Talyn drama, so those scenes were pretty lost on me, and I assume I have a bunch more Talyn drama to look forward to -- maybe not immediately, though? Oh, but the space effects and special effects in general are looking better. (I see from the wiki that a different SFX company took over this season; it shows.)
2x02, Vita Mortis -- John's been shouting at people a lot this season (D'Argo here, Aeryn last ep); I'm not a fan of this development. I don't have much else to say about this one, tbh. D'Argo's moral and/or romantic and/or family struggles just don't do much for me (at this point anyway). I think my favorite part as John beating an awkward retreat when the rejuvenated sorceress lady was perving on him, and then later awkwardly waiting outside the chamber.
2x03, Taking the Stone -- yeah, this one didn't work for me so much. Too many high people, which isn't that interesting to see, too much chanting, WAAAY too much screaming. And I didn't really feel like I connected with the Chiana arc -- it seemed kind of artificial, and just plunked down for the episode. It felt like one of the earlier season 1 eps, just with more audacious graphics, really. And the Rygel going grave-robbing B plot was equally underwhelming.
2x04, "Crackers Don't Matter" -- this episode was a really interesting trajectory for me. I was quite skeptical at first, because I didn't like the way the alien looked, and the "make the crew behave crazy for no reason" is not my favorite trope. But the further things went on, the more I liked it, because it really committed: it's not just them bickering and acting paranoid they're being genuinely awful to each other in ways that the ending implies won't be just reset, and the crazy starts getting REALLY crazy. I especially liked John in this, trying to hold on to some shred of sanity/civility while everything was crumbling (OK, probably because he's "deficient"/has weaker eyes, but it was still neat to see), and hallucinating (?) Scorpius in a Hawaiian shirt and getting into shootouts with Aeryn. By the time I got to the scene where they were all outfitting John with puke masks and goggles and reflective cape and sword to o fight the alien, I was laughing out loud because everything was both really ridiculous and yet consistent with the setup. Ultimately, this felt like the "DNA Mad Scientist episode done in a way that worked much better for me -- the crew turning on each other but a) with more believable reason, b) with much greater impact because by this point they both have gone through a lot together and actually care about each other AND know enough about each other to hurt the others when they try, and c) presumably with some consequences. Oh, and John killing T-apostrophe-alien dude -- I think this is the first time John like, kills someone execution-style. He's caused other deaths and IIRC also killed in the middle of fighting, but I don't think we've seen him hands-on kill a defeated enemy before. It was while he was in the altered state, but still jarring to see. There was a lot of fun and/or punchy dialogue, like pretty much all the crazy things Scorpius says, and Aeryn's "When I'm old and fat-- *looks down at herself* when I'm old", and John is actually quite good at being awful to people -- and I liked the acknowledement that "it was there" when Chiana asks him about it later -- and the allusions, to Space Odyssey and The Shining. Anyway, starting from a point of skepticism, I ended up liking this one a lot, EXCEPYT that I found everything about the villain alien awful and melodramatic and ridiculous not in the impressive way the rest of the episode is, but just, you know, bad.
2x05, The Way We Weren't -- On a tiny random note, I love that John and D'Argo have at this point adopted Rock Paper Scissors as the way to solve all their macho impulse-driven disagreements -- good job, boys XD On a very different note, ouch. I'm impressed the show actually went into exploring Aeryn's Peacekeeper past rather than just glossing over it -- and while rationally I do feel like, well, what did the others expect she had been doing, I can definitely see that it would be different knowing vaguely she must've done some bad/questionable things under orders and watching her execute a defenseless alien. So I thought the episode struck a good balance. Velorek was an interesting character -- I think the episode does a good job of showing someone who would be a good person in other circumstances working within a sick system, and it's not pretty -- the small kindnesses, the attempts at decency are important, but don't actually change much, and he goes through and does the things he must do. I did *not* see Aeryn's betrayal of him coming, and saw the deal he'd made the with (the new) Pilot even less, and that added all sorts of interesting nuances. The scene of Aeryn breaking down at the punching bag was interesting and uncomfortable -- she is so self-contained most of the time, watching her manifest strong emotion, vulnerability, like this was striking (and I appreciated that this isn't pretty crying, just raw and uncomfortable). And I noticed the visuals and the music in this, which I normally haven't been doing except in episodes like "Through the Looking Glass" where both were intentionally jarring (so, like, not in a good way). I saw in the wiki later that there were some firsts in both in this episode so hopefully this will be more true going forward, too.
So, like, the first 3.3 episodes of the season felt like a letdown after the crescendo of the end of season 1, but partway through "Crackers" I was starting to feel the momentum building again and appreciating the show again for what it was doing, which was reassuring.
*
A rainy weekend last week, which I spent catching up on Hugos homework. Updates from my post as soon as nominations opened, and it didn't feel like I'd made all that much progress, but it was more than I had expected!
Best Novel
My list so far:
- Spinning Silver
- Lies Sleeping
- Philosopher's Flight
- Revenant Gun
- The Calculating Stars
(Because I have a full ballot I'm happy with, I'm not necessarily planning to prioritize reading the books below in time to nominate, but if I do happen to do so, maybe the list will shift a bit.)
Other eligible works I have some interest in checking out (in approximate order of probability of me getting to them in time):
- The Poppy War (40% in and really enjoying it, though I don't expect it to unseat any of my favorites already on the list. If I had an extra spot, though!)
- Trail of Lightning (Roanhorse) -- sitting on my TBR pile
- A Conspiracy of Truths (in progress but looking unlikely to overtake any of the ones on the list)
- Foundryside (sync read with K?)
- Semiosis (started, want to continue)
- Swordheart (ursulav)
- Blackfish City (Sam J Miller)
- Record of Spaceborn Few
- The Fated Sky
- Space Opera??
Other eligible works I've read or otherwise dispositions:
- Witchmark -- definitely not
- The Last Sun -- as fond as I am of it, no XP
- The Consuming Fire -- nope, as I liked it a lot less than the first book
- Good Guys -- not bad, but not as good as the ones already on my list
Best Novella:
My list so far:
- An Artificial Condition
- The Flowers of Vashnoi
- maybe: Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night -- it's kind of grown on me more with distance? from "fun but not Hugo-caliber" to "hey, why not"
Other eligible works I have some interest in checking out:
- Rogue Protocol (started, want to finish)
- Exit Strategy
- Tensorate (The Descent of Monsters)
Other eligible works I read:
- I pulled up the Longest Night novella to the ballot for now
Best Novelette
(bless Rocket Stack Rank's algorithms! <3)
My list so far:
- The Thing about Ghost Stories, Naomi Kritzer -- I usually like Kritzer's stories, and I found this one really affecting. I liked the narrator (folklorist dealing with her mother's death after a long descent into Alzheimer's), and I liked the way this unfolded, and it made me tear up a bit.
- Adriftica (Maria Dahvana Headley) from Robots vs Fairies -- I'd written: "another really great story from an author I'd not read before. This is a riff on Midsummer Night's Dream, with bits of Tam Lin and Pied Piper stories, and an aesthetic all its own, with an enjoyable narrator and a hopeful ending to its bleak setting. The story is all about music, and specifically rock'n'roll, but in a way that managed to make me care about it in this context, which is impressive."
- The thought that Counts (K.J.Parker) -- a really fun narrative voice, and a really fun setting, and I enjoyed the clever way this unfolded.
- Thirty-Three Percent Joe (Suzanne Palmer) -- I'd liked her previous Hugo-winning story pretty well thought it wasn't my top pick. This one's also a little too paint-by-numbers, but I like the premise, and I loved the final scene.
Other eligible works I may still check out (although I've read through all the ones that grabbed me, so I think it's unlikely any of these would make my nominations ballot):
- Do As I Do, Sing As I sing (Sarah Pinsker) -- I started this and wasn't really feeling it, but I might go back. But maybe Pinsker is just a SF writer for me, not fantasy...
- Fitting In (Max Gladstone) [Wild Cards] -- 'cos it's Gladstone
- If At First You Don't Succeed, Try Try Again (Zen Cho)
- The Only Harmless Great Thing (Tor freebie) -- but I kind of doubt that I want to read about radiation and elephants... :/
Other eligible works I've read:
- The Nearest (Greg Egan) -- near-future police procedural, and I'd wanted to read some Greg Egan. I might have conceivably considered kicking this one up, too, but it's so near-future, it hardly feels like SF -- there are police drone swarms to examine the scene and autonomous cars that need to be disabled to drive them into a river, and facial recognition and cameras everywhere, but, like, all the technology described exists today, I'm pretty sure -- just not as widely adopted. And I didn't feel like the wider adoption made for a substantially different feel to the world, or a substantially different way the story unfolded. I did appreciate the story -- vague spoilers! I think it did a good job with the unreliable narrator while still making Kate feel like a smart person good at her job. And I appreciated that the ending is bittersweet -- hopeful and happy, but not a reset.
- Left to Take the Lead (Marissa Lingen) -- this was sweet, but I felt like it had too little plot for a novelette. I appreciated the spacer POV and the way it revealed the multiple differences between what's normal for her and what's normal for Earthers, and the musings on family. There was some lovely prose and it was a very easy read, pulling me into the POV and pulling me along, but I don't think this one will stay with me to any significant degree. (Side note: the early scene where space-born Holly who is unused to weather is freaking out in the tornado shelter while everyone else is not worried/having a fine time reminded me a lot of going to the apartment building bomb shelter in Israel, here I seemed to be the only one affected by the circumstances, and everyone else was like, ho-hum, how's your mother? let's arrange an impromptu playdate XD)
- What Is Eve (Will McIntosh) -- I liked the central idea and the psychological factors, but the narrator did not work for me (12-year-old boys don't sound like this), the B&W morality was ridiculous, the Very Special Lesson was not believable, and I hated the food fight.
- Murmured Under the Moon (Tim Pratt) from Robots vs Fairies -- it was fine, but I wasn't overly impressed
- Quality Time (Ken Liu) from Robots vs Fairies -- I liked aspects of it but found the story as a whole facile
Best Short Story
My list so far:
- A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compenidum of Portal Fantasies (Alix E. Harrow) -- this was great! I read it straight through and quoted it to Best Chat and send the link to
lunasariel (a librarian of, I assume, the second type :)
- Talk to Your Children About Two-Tongued Jeremy, Theodore McCombs -- wow, ouch. This is a near-future AI story narrated super-fittingly in first-person-plural by a town's parents, and it is darly funny and brutal and creepily plausible. Wow. The author is Campbell eligible (second year) and I'm seriously considering adding him to my list
- The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society, T.Kingfisher -- Look, I love fairies and I love Vernon's fairy tale subversions, so of course I love this.
- Madeline Ashby, "Work Shadow / Shadow Work" (Robots vs Fairies anthology)
- Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions), Debbie Urbanski -- RSR review of this is one word: "Shattering", and yeah, it is. I wasn't sure it would make the ballot for me, but it really stayed with me after reading, which I think is a sign it should. And I think this is a good example of a story where an "identity" type of story is all about that identity -- in this case, the narrator is a sex-repulsed asexual -- but it's still a powerful story (and I think a universally powerful? or at least I, as someone not at all in that demographic was affected/was able to appreciate it), and feels like a SF story rather than a "[minority identity]" or "[minority identity] sci-fi" story (unlike the trans dinosaurs short story I started reading and abandoned, because like with the author's previous work that I'd read, the two aspects ust didn't mesh together for me).
Other things I've read specifically for Hugos homework and enjoyed, though they didn't quite make the list:
- Field Biology of the Wee Fairies, Naomi Kritzer -- I like this one, but it feels a little formulaic compared to the Kritzer novelette. If I didn't already have a full ballot, I might have included it, but it fell just below the line of the other stories for me.
- My Favorite Sentience, Marissa Lingen -- very cute! I had it on the ballot at first, but then meatier stories kicked it off.
- Blessings, Naomi Novik -- a Sleeping Beauty retelling that I quite liked
- You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You, Maria Dahvana Headley -- I really enjoy this author's style, even when the stories aren't thematically or plot-wise exactly my cup of tea
- The Court Magician, Sarah Pinsker -- I enjoyed it, but it didnt stick enouh with me to be Hugo material. Possibly further evidence that I should stick to sci-fi with Pinsker.
- Pistol Grip (Vina Jie-Min Prasad) -- confirmed I want to nominate her for the Campbell (2nd year) but does not rise to Hugo level for me
- Suize Q, Jacqueline Carey -- the first urban fantasy by her I've read, and I definitely want to read more, because I do prefer this style to Kushiel
Best Series
(thank you, Dublin, for making the eligibility criteria VERY clear, entirely unlike San Jose last year - "at least three (3) volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2018, at least one of which was published in 2018" and for repeat nominees, "at least two (2) additional installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words after they qualified for their last appearance on the final ballot and by the close of 2018"
My list so far:
- Machineries of Empire (
yhlee has posted wordcount which confirms it's qualified)
- Seraphina-verse (via Tess of the Road)
Other eligible series I'm familiar with:
- Tolkien Legendarium -- Fall of Gondolin makes this eligible, and is reportedly the last shot for Tolkien to get on the ballot... This totally feels like cheating, and I don't want it to landslide over newer series I'd like to get recognition, so I'm waffling...
- Wayfarers
- Dark Gifts (Gilded Cage et al)
- Kate Daniels
- Alex Verus
- Tortall (with Numair pub) -- I may just have to add this one...
Not eligible:
- Rivers of London -- it has published 2 installments since 2017, but I don't think Furthest Station + Lies Sleeping (+ even all the GNs and short story) total 240k words. Which sucks.
- Vorkosigan for sure
Best Related Work
My list so far:
- Jo Walton's Hugo book (THE RELATEDEST)
- Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth -- I'm only a little ways in so far, and have leafed through the exhibits, but it's like walking through the Bodleian's exhibition on Tolkien, i.e. 1000% relevant to my interests
Other eligible things I might want to check out:
- Ursula LeGuin, Conversations on Writing
Best Graphic Story
My list so far:
- Skyward, vol 1
- Cry Fox, maybe? it wasn't stellar, but I did like it...
- Runaways vol 2?
Other eligible things I've read:
- Paper Girls 4 -- disappointing after how much I liked 3
- Saga 9 -- not what I wanted out of this series...
- Runaways by Rainbow Rowell (vol 1)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
My list so far:
- Into the Spider-Verse
- Incredibles 2
- Black Panther
- maybe: Infinity War?
Other eligible movies I've seen:
- Deadpool 2
- Venom -- definitely not for the Hugo ballot, LOL
Other movies I might conceivably see in time:
- Ant-Man and the Wasp -- now on Netflix, so a definite possibility
- Aquaman
- Ready Player One
- Ralph Breaks the Internet
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
My list so far:
- The Good Place, s2, Best Self
- The Good Place, s2, Leap to Faith
Other eligible things I've seen:
- The Dragon Prince
- Castlevania season 2 -- lol, nope
- Disenchantment -- maybe episodes 5 and/or 10?
Other things I might conceivably see in time:
- The Good Place s3 (through episode 10)
- Killjoys s4
Best Editor, Short Form
To be eligible, the person must have edited at least four anthologies, collections or magazine issues devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy, at least one of which must have been published in the year of eligibility.
My list so far:
- Dominik Parisien (since Navah Wolfe is not eligible in this category and I'd really liked Robots vs Fairies)
- Strahan again, probably?
- Ellen Datlow
- Julia Rios, maybe? (Fireside) h
File770 list here
Best Editor, Long Form
This Award is given for the editing work that person has done in the year of eligibility. To be eligible the person must have edited at least 4 novel-length (i.e. 40,000 words or more) books devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy in the year of eligibility, which are not anthologies or collections.
Possibilities who are eligible per the File770 post:
- Gillian Redfearn and/or Betsy Wolhein (Lies Sleeping)
- Joe Monti -- I'm not totally sure he's eligible, but the File770 list turned up 3 publications so hopefully there's one hiding in the wings (Trail of Lightning)
- Navah Wolfe (whom I wish I could nominate in the other category, really) -- but Space Opera... but it could be a matter of taste... She's also the editor on A Conspiracy of Truths
- David Pomerico (The Poppy War)
alternate: Anne Groell (Spinning Silver) -- but... 1) chapter breaks! and 2) and also they should've talked maybe?
Most of my favorite books from this year, the editors are not eligible or at least not clearly eligible from that list...
Last year's people I liked:
- Miriam Weinberg -- but she was the editor for Vengeful and from what K has quoted, that was NOT an endorsement...
Best Pro Artist
Rocket Stack Rank to the rescue again with novel covers and short fiction artwork.
Artists I liked:
- Alan Bao (like his range, icons and Asian art and silhouettes)
- Alyssa Winans -- I like the sort of clean, almost infographic style?
- Armando Veve -- intricate doodly weird drawings
- Chris McGrath? (I like his Gladstone covers but am kind of meh on his other stuff)
- David Palumbo (Binti covers, which I like more than the books)
- FORT (EHAD covers and similarly mono-hue and atmospheric ones)
- Galen Dara (though I wasn't sold on last year's crop)
- Goñi Montes -- I like the sort of bold colors and strong lines
- Jamie Stafford-Hill -- Calculting Stars cover and more atmospheric covers
- John Picacio -- I really liked his stuff last year
- Jon Foster -- a bit more mixed, but I like the sort of muted tones covers
- Micah Epstein (mixed on the foreground figures but like the more object/landscape ones)
- Rovina Cai -- shadowy sort of art, very dreamlike
- Sarah Anne Langton -- Lavie Tidhar covers on which I love the sort of ye olde travel posters style
- Tommy Arnold (Trail of Lightning cover and some other "action" covers I like)
- Yuko Shimuzu - Tensorate covers and http://yukoart.com/category/work/
Others:
- Ron Miller did the covers of LMB's assorted novellas, but I don't like the art all that much
- Will Staehle did the Witchmark cover, which is neat, and some other covers -- quite a lot of range -- but I mostly don't care for the style
I need to narrow this down to 5, but currently I'm thinking
- Alyssa Winans
- David Palumbo
- Goni Montes
- Sarah Anne Langton
- Yuko Shimuzu
Best Semiprozine
My list so far:
- Escape Pod
- Fireside Quarterly
- Uncanny (based on the number of stories I liked that came from there)
- Strange Horizons (based on the number of stories I liked that came from there)
(Apex and Lightspeed are not eligible, as they're pro)
Best Fanzine
My list so far:
- Rocket Stack Rank
(since File770 is no longer an option)
Best Fancast
My list so far:
- Be the Serpent!!! (everybody else can go home now)
- The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 -- I know a single-fandom podcast for a show that hasn't aired for 20 years is not actually going to make it onto the list, but it's eligible and I've been enjoying it a lot, so I'm going to put it on my list
Best Fan Writer
My list so far:
- Rebecca Fraimow (
skygiants)
- Foz Meadows
Last year's people I liked whose 2018 writings I checked out:
- Bogi Takacs -- not feeling it this year
Best Fan Artist
My list so far:
- Spring Schoenhuth (whose work I got to admire in person at Worldcon, and bought some of it) - http://springtimecreations.com/
- Laurie Toby Edison - https://laurieopal.dreamwidth.org/ (the jewelry artist of my Glorious Bug from Worldcon)
- Ariela Housman (Geek Caligraphy) - https://geekcalligraphy.com/art-prints/ (Lady Astronauts, Penric manuscript)
- Naomi Vandoren - https://www.naomivandoren.com/more-watercolors
Best Art Book (special category)
- Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth (does that qualify? it has quite a lot of Tolkien's own art, and photographs, so it might?)
Books that are possibly relevant to my interests:
- A Middle-Earth Traveler (John Howe) -- I got a copy of this figuring it would likely make a good present for my friend R anyway, plan to at least leaf through it
- Terry Pratchett's Imaginarium (Paul Kidby -- although I dislike his style)
- Daydreamer's Journey: The Art of Julie Dillon
- the Art of Into the Spider-Verse
(This is the only one where I don't have at least one solid entry for a nomination so far, but am hopeful about the John Howe...)
Lodestar
My list so far:
- Tess of the Road (which I need to finish, but even just based on what I read)
Other eligible books I've read:
- The Cruel Prince -- alas, no
Other eligible books I might
- Numair book
(Wow, this was a weird year for me in terms of reading genre YA...)
Campbell
http://www.writertopia.com/awards/campbell
Last year I didn't have anyone to put on this list, and this time I have more names than nomination slots! After some pondering, I decided to follow the logic of giving priority to people in their second year of eligibility ho had never been finalists, then everyone else.
My list so far:
- Alex Yuschik (who I think is eligible? Their Escape Pod publication of "Texts from the Ghost War" is an eligible publication, and I think the 2016 story was not, so I think they're in their second year.
- Theodore McCombs (Two-Tongued Jeremy short story)
- Tom Miller (? I haven't been able to confirm eligibility)
Need to figure out which of these to put on the list since I can't put all three:
- Rivers Solomon (second year)
- Vina Jie-Min Prasad (second year)
- R.F.Kuang (first year)
- Alexandra Rowland (first year)
Last year's folks still eligible this year whom I liked:
- Katherine Arden -- I'm definitely less enamoured of her this year... on the fence but as have more than enough candidates at this point -- pass
Other eligible folks whose work I've read:
- Jeannette Ng -- last year's finalist, hard pass
- D.A. Xiaolin Spires -- not impressed at Fireside reading
Folks I might be interested in checking out:
- Chakraborty??
*
And a few quick recs (non-fic):
Only a little late, VALENtines day cards, which have been my favorite manifestation of the Love Month on
babylon5_love :D
Fanart from Chocolate Box that I really liked: it's all been done (Aziraphale/Crowley, G)
And fanvids are not my usual medium of fannish consumption, but a bunch of these I've seen recced around my flist are brilliant and stuck with me and I have to share:
The Good Place: a Jason vid to "All Star" with is PERFECT and I've now listened/watched it a bunch of times.
Machineries of Empire: Ninefox, a really cool vid (instrumental) that captures the feel of the series in a really neat way, considering it's a book series full of weird space magic, a lot of which is happening inside a person's head. Basically sorcery!
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego: Glass Coffins -- this is a really neat case where the combination of the song and the video is something I find way more interesting and affecting than I ever have each thing on its own. Like, usually the music is just a pleasant background for me or a song I like listening to, or it's neat witnessing the words/image matches selected, but this was a true symbiosis.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1101019.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).