Now that Hugo voting is finally available online, I'm going to post about a few categories over the next few days. I'm involved with the administration of the awards again this year, so I won't be revealing my exact rankings; back to my normal procedure next year.
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The James Tiptree Jr Award, "encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender", has announced that it is changing its name to the Otherwise Award, based on feedback received after the similar decision of Dell Magazines to change the John W. Campbell Award to the Astounding Award (also in the context of the 2015 decision a couple of years ago to ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:The bed, a massive bed on four legs, with a mattress far softer than that of the bunk on the Mindful, and complex bedclothes, some silky and some warm and thick, and a lot of pillows like cumulus clouds, had a room all to itself. The floor was covered with springy carpeting; there was a chest of drawers of ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter of Larque on the Wing:Emergency bells were ringing in Larque’s bones. She had to find Sky.
I confess I had never heard of Nancy Springer before reading this novel, which shared the 1995 James Tiptree Jr Award with "The Matter of Seggri". It turns out that she is much better known for her YA novels about Sherlock ( Read more... )

Not to begrudge the others which have made it to the ballot in recent years, but I am ever so slightly relieved that the Best Related Work ballot consists solely of actual books this year, for the first time since 2010; it's easier to compare apples with apples than with oranges. This year is also likely to be the first year since 2013 that a Hugo ( Read more... )

Two more Hugo finalists for Best Related Work - both of them books of essays and blog posts, originally published online.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Second paragraph of third chapter: One of the things people often find when they get there [old age] is that younger people don’t want to hear about it. So ( Read more... )

76 days on from the awards, I think it's OK to reveal my own preferences in the category that was hardest hit by the recent unpleasantness, with No Award (rightly) winning in 2015 and 2016. Thanks to the new arrangements, we had six viable candidates this year, and No Award came last.

My first preference vote went very firmly to Words Are My ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third story ("Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your crisis", by Kate Wilhelm): They were in the mountains. That was good. Lotte liked it when they chose mountains. A stocky man was sliding down a slope, feet out before him, legs stiff - too conscious of the camera, though. Lotte couldn't tell if he had meant to slide, but he did ( Read more... )

When you meet a Gethenian you cannot and must not do what a bisexual naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or opposite sex. Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is ( Read more... )

A rather laid-back novel by Le Guin, tracing the life story of a slave boy with very limited powers of seeing into his own future. We are taken in detail through several carefully and intensely described settings - the slave-holding city of his boyhood, a rebel stronghold, his birth village and culture, a flight to freedom which draws from both ( Read more... )