One of the nominees for Best Related Work in this year's Hugo, this is a collection of essays about sf cinema, mostly published before in fanzines and on the now sadly defunct Internet Review of Science Fiction. Several of the early pieces are a bit peevish, but most of them brim with enthusiasm and certainly gave me a few thoughts for films which ( Read more... )

The nominees for John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer submitted a diverse portfolio of work for voters to consider last year - five novels and five short stories between the five candidates. This year it is even more diverse and overall a little sparser: one long novel, one short novel, three short stories (twice) and one short story. It is ( Read more... )

A really excellent short novel, part of the Hugo Voter Package as Lord is a Campbell nominee this year; a fairy-tale set in Senegal, with various spirit creatures (some of which clearly have sfnal counterparts) helping our heroine interrogate the roles that society has set for her. I can't really do it justice in a short write-up and haven't the ( Read more... )

I can be absolutely certain that I have never voted in this category before, because neither has anybody else. I'm not a big podcast listener - my audio enjoyment tends to be Big Finish plays, Doctor Who-related audiobooks, and the odd documentary or drama from the BBC. I did listen to the Big Finish podcasts regularly at one point but have lost ( Read more... )

I'm a bit concerned that my write-ups of the Hugo nominations so far have been too grumpy. Perhaps it's due to my listing the nominees in reverse order of preference; writing about the ones I didn't like puts me (and possibly my reader) in a bad mood before I reach the ones I did like. So for the next few lists I'm going to apply the principle of ( Read more... )

My reading of this year's nominated fiction for the Hugos did not end particularly well. Although I very much liked my favourite in this category, I was disappointed by the other five and indeed found three of them rather poor.

( 7) Kiss me Twice, 6) Countdown, 5) The Ice Owl, 4) No Award, 3) Silently and Very Fast, 2) The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary, 1) The Man Who Bridged The Mist )

I have nearly finished my reading of the Hugo nominees in the fiction categories, and reached Ken Liu's fascinating story, "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" (available here in PDF). It is a sparsely told but emotionally wrenching tale of a Japanese-American/Chinese-American couple who develop a technology that allows one to experience ( Read more... )

This is another category that I don't think I have ever voted in before, but the Hugo Voters Package has enabled me to educate myself. I found this very difficult to choose; while I didn't much care for any of the Don Dos Santos pieces, each of the others had submitted at least one work that I found breathtaking, and I rearranged the order of my ( Read more... )

Once again, thanks to the Hugo Voters Packet, I have been able to read the five nominees in the Best Novelette category and decide how to rank them.

( 6) Ray of Light, 5) No Award, 4) Fields of Gold, 3) The Copenhagen Interpretation, 2) What We Found, 1) Six Months, Three Days )

A couple of extracts from this Hugo-nominated novelette for your enjoyment. At one point our narrator writes of:...risking my life and the old sub to chase a wild hair through the vast, dark ocean.
This would be a jarring enough metaphor if "hare" had been spelt correctly, as a waterlogged animal would not get very far once submerged in the vast ( Read more... )