In case you hadn't heard:

Best Novel: Ian McDonald's The Dervish House - congratulations, sir!

Best Short Fiction: "The Shipmaker", by Aliette de Bodard.

Best Art: Joey Hi-Fi's cover for Zoo City.

Best Non-Fiction: Paul Kincaid's Blogging the Hugos - at least I gave this my first preference.

Not a bad set of results at all.

Just realised that I needed to catch the voting deadline for the BSFA awards, and I have hastily ranked the nominees for Best Art as follows, before scanning and emailing my ballot:

1) Ben Greene - ‘A Deafened Plea for Peace’, cover for Crossed Genres 21
2) Andy Bigwood - cover for Conflicts (Newcon Press)
3) Charlie Harbour - cover for Fun With ( Read more... )

The BSFA award for non-fiction is a peculiar pancake, as Sergeant Pluck might have said. Three of this year's nominees are blog entries; to be precise, seventeen blog entries, one by Abigail Nussbaum, four by Paul Kincaid and twelve by Adam Roberts. One is a book, and one a series of podcasts. My final vote will have to wait until I have sampled ( ( Read more... )

This is a really interesting book, a light on an important period of history (the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1969) of which I knew much less than I had realised, looked at through the eyes of true believers in the economic system of Communism as it developed under Khrushchev, who were then bitterly disappointed as Brezhnev and Kosygin (and later ( Read more... )

So, my votes for the BSFA award for Best Novel this year:

5) Lightborn, by Tricia Sullivan, a story of cyber-warfare and devastation in a near-future California. Really failed to grab me. I note also that it has much the fewest owners on Librarything (10, to 35 for MacLeod, 65 for Beukes, 189 for McDonald and 1205 for Bacigalupi ( Read more... )

This is the last of this year's shortlisted novels for the BSFA award for me to read. It's a remarkable story which picks up the urban fantasy sub-genre and takes it to a completely new place - specifically, Johannesburg, in a world very similar to ours except that in the last few years criminals have mysteriously acquired animal familiars similar ( Read more... )

I had already read three out of the five novels on the BSFA shortlist, so have duly equipped myself with the other two. This is a story of a near-future cyberdisaster in California, with all the adults' brains corrupted by a massive software malfunction and two teenagers caught in the peculiar interactions of the badly damaged society. Neuromancer ( Read more... )

I was rather pleased to find that I had already read three of the novels on this year's BSFA Award shortlist, and it seems eminently possible to assess everything on the list; though I would appreciate guidance on Notes from Coode Street - any particularly good episodes to recommend? I doubt I will have time to listen to all of it ( Read more... )

It's 2027 and Turkey has joined the European Union. In an old tekke in Istanbul, six people find their lives intertwined around a plot involving nanotechnology, the Nabucco gas pipeline, and the arcane secrets of the mellified man. There is a lovely echo between microcalligraphy and encoding information on junk DNA. It's Ian McDonald's best ( Read more... )

It's the time of year when I am working my way through the Hugo nominees, and occasionally find myself looking at the bookstack (or, in these enlightened days, the folder of PDFs) and wondering which to read next. Last weekend's Nebula awards saw two wins for books also nominated for this year's Hugos, so I worked through them in the course of this ( Read more... )