Results are out all over the net, best source is here. The fiction winners were all born (as far as I know) between 1958 and 1972 - indeed, the Best Novel Award was shared by two writers both born in 1972, China Miéville (for The City & The City) and Paolo Bacigalupi (for The Windup Girl). Four of the five are first-time Hugo winners (the exception ( Read more... )

This short book (100 pages, 113 including front matter) is one of those made available to Hugo voters electronically because of its presence on the shortlist for Best Related Work. This prompted me also to read Hope Mirrlees' classic, Lud-In-The-Mist, last month; and for anyone whose mind was boggled by Mirrlees' novel, Swanwick's biography and ( Read more... )

Finally, rounding up my reviews of the Hugo written fiction nominees, here is my rating of the candidates for Best Short Story, as before in reverse order of preference ( Read more... )

Here are my votes for the Best Novelette category, in reverse order ( Read more... )

I've written up the other three novella nominees in separate entries, as is my usual practice with books, and now come to the final two.

( 'Palimpsest' by Charles Stross )

I rated the previous volume in this series last in my Hugo voting last year, as did the voters, despite it being the only nominee that was made available to all as part of the Hugo voters package. This year all five nominees are available, though I'd already bought hard copies of the three that have been published in dead-tree format, and I am ( Read more... )

Well, it has happened: I have finally read a John Scalzi story that I actually liked. The God Engines is a very tight story about a future spacefaring humanity which relies on harnessing the powers of captive gods for spaceflight; there are a number of very good set-pieces as Ean Tephe, the central character, deals with shipboard crises, confronts ( Read more... )

Rather fortuitously I read this novel while also working through Gibbon's chapters in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire on Julian the Apostate, the mid-fourth century Roman emperor who tried to reverse his uncle's adoption of Christianity and failed. (See here, here, here and here.) Julian Comstock, nephew of the 22nd century president of a ( Read more... )

This is the ninth volume in the Foglios' Girl Genius saga, originally published online, but now available as part of the Hugo Voters' Packet; it's not a series I know other than having read Volume Eight last year when it too was up for the Hugos. I liked this one more; perhaps it is that I am now even a little more familiar with the characters, but ( Read more... )

Palimpsest probably gets my vote for the Hugo this year. Like The City & The City, its central device is a parallel place visible just out of the corner of one's eye; but where Miéville takes this concept as background, hangs a murder mystery over it, and then disappoints with the big reveal at the end, in Valente's book the parallel city ( Read more... )