Second paragraph of third story ("Ten with a Flag", by Joseph Paul Haines): It only took him a couple of seconds to connect to the traffic web. Johnnie didn't like being out of control, it was one of the things I'd found endearing in him; quaint even. This time though, he didn't even double check the connection. The steering wheel folded and ( Read more... )

One of the complaints I've seen, more than once, from those who believe that the hijacking of the Hugo Awards by racist misogynists was a justifiable tactic, is that back in 2011 a collection of Doctor Who essays by women called Chicks Dig Time Lords defeated a collection of articles by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg in the vote for Best Related ( Read more... )

Full stats are here.

Best Novel: Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (beating Feed, which got the most first preferences, by 24 votes on last count; The Dervish House came fifth, though the honours were fairly evenly divided, third place going to Cryoburn by a six-vote margin over The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms)

Best Novella: The Lifecycle of ( Read more... )

Back in the days when the internet was less than half its present size, ie the mid-noughties, I did an annual survey linking to online reviews of all the Hugo nominees in the written fiction categories (see my efforts for 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006). It would be very difficult to repeat such an exercise now; a lot of online material is difficult to ( Read more... )

Consolidated:

( Read more... )

I haven't actually finished this, but I've simply lost interest; despite having read the two previous volumes in the series (this is the tenth) I can't remember why I was supposed to care about any of the characters, and I'm going to do something else with my time.

Which concludes my reading for the Best Graphic Story category of this year's Hugo ( Read more... )

The Hugo Voter Package includes five novels and five short stories by this year's nominees for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. I don't think I had ever cast a vote for this award before, so I found this tremendously helpful. I am a little uneasy that there is not a really equal basis of comparison - two novels, vs a novel and a ( Read more... )

One of the books included in the Hugo Voter Package to help us to determine our votes for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. It's a contemporary novel of a clandestine organistion fighting the supernatural nasties, à la Buffy and many others, with the monsters mostly taken straight from the D&D manual; the protagonist is a wise- ( Read more... )

This is a collection of written dialogues between two well-established sf writers, originally published over the last ten years in the SFWA Bulletin. I was surprised by just how interesting I found it to be. I have an inkling of the problems facing the professional sf writer from reading their blogs and talking to them, but Resnick and Malzberg ( Read more... )

Like most sf fans, I passed through a phase of total fascination with Robert A. Heinlein as a young reader - possibly even before my teens; and like most sensible people, I was repelled and appalled by the awfulness of his last few novels, to the point of wondering if they had all been like that and I was just too young to notice. (Though when I ( Read more... )