My vote for Best Novel

[nwhyte]

I thought I might start by looking back at the last 15 years, which is the period in which I have really paying attention to the Hugo process year on year. My strike rate at choosing winners has been rather poor.

2000: Best Novel award won by A Deepness in the Sky. I preferred A Civil Campaign.
2001: Best Novel award won by Harry Potter and the

Comments

[redfiona99]

One of my friends really loves Sarah Monette's stuff as Sarah Monette, but it's different enough that I was a bit o_O to find out they're the same writer.

[martin_wisse]

Still reading the Three-Body Problem, so currently my vote would be The Goblin Emperor at one, with Ancillary Sword at two. I'll be happy if either of those wins the Hugo, but found Addison's novel just a mite better.

The Three-Body Problem Is great!

[ext_3136760]

I am a newbie to Hugo voting. So, even though I am opposed to the Puppies and think that their tactic of using slates to dominate the Hugo nominations was tacky, misguided and obnoxious, I am glad that it has led to the information that all it takes is $40 to have a vote for the 2015 Hugo and nominate for the 2016 Hugos.

Anyway, so since the only category I really care about is Best Novel (like a large percentage of the Hugo-voting population, as Chaos Horizon's analysis has shown) I have tried to read all 5 nominees regardless of how painful it might be.

I had heard about Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor mentioned as one of the best fantasy books of the year (and it was nominated for a Nebula after all) so I was happy to try it. I got through the first 50 pages or so and found that I just did not care about ANY of the characters and found it just painful to continue so I stopped. I may try and pick it up again later in the summer for completeness, but right now I simply do not understand what people are seeing in this book as

Re: The Three-Body Problem Is great!f

[martin_wisse]

Another newbie, but I care passionately about the short forms. So far *shudder* they are almost uniformly awful

Re: The Three-Body Problem Is great!f

[nwhyte]

Welcome! I guess I've been File770'd.

You are very brave to struggle through the short fiction. I have read only the one non-slate finalist, but reports of the others from elsewhere are not encouraging...

[flick]

I finished Goblin Emperor last night, and I'm slightly surprised by how much I liked it. I very nearly bounced off it because of the use of language, but the thees and thous thankfully got a lot less frequent once he was emperor: I don't think I'd have managed to finish it otherwise, even if the replacement (you know, we have different words for singular and plural numbers of people for a reason) was also rather irritating. I very rarely knew who any of the characters were, because my brain just goes 'meh, made up name' and doesn't take it in (but it was pretty easy to tell from context most of the time, after they'd been in the page for a little while), and the other bits of made up language were even worse, particularly because half the time they were only translated on the third or fourth use, if ever, and when they were translated most of the translations were perfectly good phrases that could just as well have been used instead