My Hugo Votes: Best Novelette 2014

[sierra_le_oli]

It's sad to have to employ the No Award Hammer again, but once it's out, it's out.

(1) “The Waiting Stars” - Aliette de Bodard. Here De Bodard brings the same high quality space opera that made me vote her into first place last year. The ending has a twist, which I only just saw coming.

(2) [Hugo winner] “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” - Mary

Comments

[silly_swordsman]

I can agree with you about Stross, though he tends to keep his sentences simpler. De Bodard had a sentence with 75 words, 5 comas, and one each of colon, semicolon, and dash, on the first page. That felt like too much work (a complaint I have of some 19th century litterature).

I enjoy his worlds, though, and he tends to be decent at keeping the story chugging along, so I keep reading him.

TToF,TToF was... meh. Not only for the misremembered event, but also because there was an awful lot of words spent getting to the conclusion that some things are good to write down, and some are good to remember. I actually liked the Tiv story - it was interesting, non-condescending, and felt true.

But the narrator's story of "this is what has happened in the world" was too detailed and infodumpy to feel like it was set in the world it described, and the style made it unclear who he was telling the story to: is it a diary (no), a slice-of-life piece for a magazine (no, because such things hardly exist now that nobody reads), a letter to his daughter (no), or what?