6) Harrow The Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Second paragraph of third chapter:Her birth had been expensive. Eighteen years ago, in order to wrench a final bud from this terminal axil, her mother and father had slaughtered all the children of their House in order to secure a necromantic heir. Harrow had been created in that hour of pallor mortis, while the ( Read more... )

OK, to the top half of my ballot for this year's BSFA Award for Best Novel. Two of the below (Piranesi and The City We Became) are also on the Nebula ballot. In transparency, I nominated Piranesi myself; at that point in January I had read very few of this year's potential award nominees. They are all really good and it's a really tough choice
( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter: Tonkee and Hoa lag behind with you. It’s almost like the old days, except that now Hoa appears as you walk, gets left behind as you keep walking, then appears again somewhere ahead of you. Most times he adopts a neutral posture, but occasionally he’s doing something ridiculous, like the time you find him in a ( 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... )

As the Hugo administrator this year, I refrained from posting my own reviews of the finalists in the spring. But we're now 75 days on from the ceremony, and I think enough time has passed for you all to point and laugh at how my tastes differ from the voters ( Read more... )

Now on the Nebula shortlist (where it's second among Goodreads, third on LibraryThing) this is one of the most buzzed novels of last year. I very much enjoyed the world-building, both the existence of a minority with powers of manipulating rock and other elements, and the politics of how that works out in practice. I was less excited by the plot ( Read more... )

There's been a lot of buzz around this book, partly perhaps because of the author's online visibility, but mainly I suspect because it is a rather good book. It is an immersive fantasy, to use the Mendlesohn typology, about Yeine, a young woman who discovers that she is a potential heir to the rulership of the entire world, and who has to grapple ( Read more... )