The Seasons Turn and Turn Again
... and Hugo nominations season is once more upon us.
I've got my personalized link and everything, and have started sticking some possibles in. I have at least three Best Novel noms, breaking my rule from last year because all of them are parts of trilogies - Ninefox Gambit, The Obelisk Gate and City of Blades. I should be able to come up with at least two more. Campbell-wise, my list already includes Jo Zebedee (for Abendau's Heir and Inish Carraig, which struck me as a perfectly decent start to a skiffy writing career), Cassandra Khaw (discussion on "Hammers on Bone" to follow) and Scott Hawkins (whose tour-de-force debut The Library at Mount Char should have got a lot more attention last year, I think.) Still much reading and mulling-over of shorter stories to go, though. At least there's no Retros to add to my workload this year.
Other reading has happened. I've been delving into Layton Green's "Dominic Grey" sort-of-paranormal thriller series (so far, done The Summoner and The Egyptian). I can't bring myself to a high pitch of enthusiasm over it, but it's competent enough stuff, mostly. Dominic Grey is one of those alienated hero types, a well-intentioned, even heroic, character whose background includes an appallingly abusive childhood which has made him, among other things, very good at hitting people. The people he hits, in these books, tend to be involved in obscure and dangerous religious cults - it's "sort-of" paranormal because there is a mundane explanation for just about everything Grey runs into, but there is also a suggestion that the mundane may not be all there is to life. The first book has him facing off against an African sorcerer with eerily hypnotic powers of compulsion; in the second, the adversary is a sinister Egyptian biochemist who may have the (non-magical) secret of eternal life. It's all... reasonably exciting, though it could do with better editing - the occasional malapropism or other solecism leaks through (a minor character in The Summoner is called "Sir David Naughton", and two people who should know better call him "Sir Naughton" instead of "Sir David".)
Also delving into a pile of H.G. Wells - suddenly, there's a lot of Wells available in cheap ebook format, it's almost as if he died in 1946 and is now out of copyright in the UK or something. I have acquired a Complete Collection for the princely sum of £1.99, and am pleased to discover that it actually is reasonably complete, there's none of this "eh, it's a representative sample of his best work, you didn't really want to read The Open Conspiracy or The World of William Clissold, now, did you?" that I've seen elsewhere. (Yes, I do, dammit. I've already read The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine, now I'm trying to find the obscure ones....) Anyway. Spent a pleasant hour or so with "Mr. Belloc Objects to the Outline of World History" - this was Wells's response when Hilaire Belloc wrote a series of articles condemning Wells's history book on the grounds of excessive Protestantism and Darwinism and suchlike, and it is a pleasure to watch ol' H.G. putting the boot in. "I am the least controversial of men," he starts out, before giving poor old Hilaire a thorough Bellocing. Good mean-spirited fun.
In the real world... I think I won't bother with the real world. On the wider stage, a nuclear arsenal is about to fall into the hands of a thin-skinned, petulant, irresponsible man-child (and if North Korea gets ICBMs, there will be two of them), and, closer to home, my mother has managed to spill coffee on the ceiling. A retreat into the cosier world of literature sounds like a plan, just now.
I've got my personalized link and everything, and have started sticking some possibles in. I have at least three Best Novel noms, breaking my rule from last year because all of them are parts of trilogies - Ninefox Gambit, The Obelisk Gate and City of Blades. I should be able to come up with at least two more. Campbell-wise, my list already includes Jo Zebedee (for Abendau's Heir and Inish Carraig, which struck me as a perfectly decent start to a skiffy writing career), Cassandra Khaw (discussion on "Hammers on Bone" to follow) and Scott Hawkins (whose tour-de-force debut The Library at Mount Char should have got a lot more attention last year, I think.) Still much reading and mulling-over of shorter stories to go, though. At least there's no Retros to add to my workload this year.
Other reading has happened. I've been delving into Layton Green's "Dominic Grey" sort-of-paranormal thriller series (so far, done The Summoner and The Egyptian). I can't bring myself to a high pitch of enthusiasm over it, but it's competent enough stuff, mostly. Dominic Grey is one of those alienated hero types, a well-intentioned, even heroic, character whose background includes an appallingly abusive childhood which has made him, among other things, very good at hitting people. The people he hits, in these books, tend to be involved in obscure and dangerous religious cults - it's "sort-of" paranormal because there is a mundane explanation for just about everything Grey runs into, but there is also a suggestion that the mundane may not be all there is to life. The first book has him facing off against an African sorcerer with eerily hypnotic powers of compulsion; in the second, the adversary is a sinister Egyptian biochemist who may have the (non-magical) secret of eternal life. It's all... reasonably exciting, though it could do with better editing - the occasional malapropism or other solecism leaks through (a minor character in The Summoner is called "Sir David Naughton", and two people who should know better call him "Sir Naughton" instead of "Sir David".)
Also delving into a pile of H.G. Wells - suddenly, there's a lot of Wells available in cheap ebook format, it's almost as if he died in 1946 and is now out of copyright in the UK or something. I have acquired a Complete Collection for the princely sum of £1.99, and am pleased to discover that it actually is reasonably complete, there's none of this "eh, it's a representative sample of his best work, you didn't really want to read The Open Conspiracy or The World of William Clissold, now, did you?" that I've seen elsewhere. (Yes, I do, dammit. I've already read The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine, now I'm trying to find the obscure ones....) Anyway. Spent a pleasant hour or so with "Mr. Belloc Objects to the Outline of World History" - this was Wells's response when Hilaire Belloc wrote a series of articles condemning Wells's history book on the grounds of excessive Protestantism and Darwinism and suchlike, and it is a pleasure to watch ol' H.G. putting the boot in. "I am the least controversial of men," he starts out, before giving poor old Hilaire a thorough Bellocing. Good mean-spirited fun.
In the real world... I think I won't bother with the real world. On the wider stage, a nuclear arsenal is about to fall into the hands of a thin-skinned, petulant, irresponsible man-child (and if North Korea gets ICBMs, there will be two of them), and, closer to home, my mother has managed to spill coffee on the ceiling. A retreat into the cosier world of literature sounds like a plan, just now.