Second paragraph of third section:His voice was like bubbles rising in a swamp. “Kicktoad no more, Little Tommy! I am called Bufotenine the Great now, yes I am. Apprentice no more, but Master! Yes!”
This ended up on my unread list as part of the 2015 Hugo packet. It was a story that was slated onto the Best Novella ballot, which I refrained from ( Read more... )

More for my own records than anything else, these were my votes in the short fiction categories. I did not keep good notes of the two shorter categories but can say a bit more about Best Novelette.

Best Short Story1. "That Game We Played During the War", by Carrie Vaughan - came third (narrowly missed second) in the actual vote, would have missed ( Read more... )

18) The Golden TranscendenceSorry, but I've got a hundred pages into it and I'm giving up. The unlikeable protagonist is locked in mental battle with his adversary using various nanotech and other superpowers, and I suddenly realised I didn't really care which of them won (indeed, as Ian Hislop said about the Mohamed al-Fayed vs Neil Hamilton libel ( Read more... )

4) The Phoenix Exultant, by John C. Wright

I read the first in this series, The Golden Age some time ago and quite enjoyed it. This second volume is also enjoyable - still the same dense writing, but our hero turns out to be pretty fallible on a human level and appears to learn and change as the book goes on, and Wright appears to be questioning ( Read more... )

21) The Golden Age, by John C. Wright

Enjoyable space opera romp. Reminded me a bit of the setting of Wil McCarthy's The Collapsium but I thought this was better. Took a few chapters to get into and understand what was going on, and I was worried at first that I was going to repeat my C.J. Cherryh experience, but in fact by the end all had become ( Read more... )