Second paragraph of third section:Port, five gods be thanked. Maybe.
Another of the great sequence of novellas featuring novice sorceror Penric and his possessing demons, this time kidnapped by pirates and thrown together with two young parentless girls. Bujold is one of the very few genre authors who can convincingly take parenthood (in this case, ( Read more... )

Last year I had read at least one book in all but one of the series on the final ballot in this category. This year all but one of them were completely new to me. In three of those five cases I decided to just read the first volume, for another I picked the volume with the highest rating on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and for the fifth the author ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter: The chapterhouse of the Bastard’s Order lay two streets behind the great stone bulk of the city’s, and the Weald’s, main temple. The old wooden merchant’s mansion that had formerly housed the servants of the white god had burned down twenty years ago, and been replaced with a fine new edifice, built more to the ( Read more... )

More for my own records than anything else, these were my votes in the short fiction categories. I did not keep good notes of the two shorter categories but can say a bit more about Best Novelette.

Best Short Story1. "That Game We Played During the War", by Carrie Vaughan - came third (narrowly missed second) in the actual vote, would have missed ( Read more... )

The Hugo nominations took a lot of what would otherwise have been reading and blogging time so far this year, so I am only now beginning to catch up. Here are four Hugo-eligible books which I read as the votes were coming in, which did not however make the final ballot. It's some time since I read each of them, so my notes are fairly cursory.

( Read more... )

As noted previously, it is more difficult this year than last year to assess the impact that slate voting had on the final ballot for the Hugos. For some guidance on that question, once again I'm looking at the File 770 straw poll, where the top novellas that readers reported nominating were:

Penric’s Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold (25)
Binti, by ( Read more... )

There are 25 candidates on the BSFA Best Non-Fiction long list (the shortest of the four long lists); I nominated three of them myself - Space Helmet for a Cow, Letters to Tiptree and Companion Piece. (My fourth nomination, The Story of Kullervo, appears to have been disqualified.) Of the other 21, ten are available online (nine blog posts/articles ( Read more... )

After ten years away, we are back to the world of The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt, with a novella about a young lordling who, much to his dismay, is possessed by a demon with several mature female personalities. It retreads some ground from the earlier books, but is basically a good read from one of my favourite writers ( Read more... )

Ivan drew a long breath. "Tej. Will you marry me?"
"What?" she said. It wasn't a thrilled sort of what? either, that ought to greet such a proposal, more of a have-you-lost-your-mind? what. Ivan cringed.
This is a very welcome return to familiar territory for Bujold, as the bumbling cousin Ivan Vorpatril of the Vorkosigan sequence of stories finally ( Read more... )

The end of the four-volume Sharing Knife series, in which the romance / action plot, of mutual suspicions between two human cultures, equally threatened by an 'orrible supernatural menace, resolves in entirely satisfactory manner, with much character-building wisdom being imparted to the foolish younger relatives. But I found myself a bit ( Read more... )