My Hugo Votes: Best Novelette 2014

[sierra_le_oli]

It's sad to have to employ the No Award Hammer again, but once it's out, it's out.

(1) “The Waiting Stars” - Aliette de Bodard. Here De Bodard brings the same high quality space opera that made me vote her into first place last year. The ending has a twist, which I only just saw coming.

(2) [Hugo winner] “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” - Mary

Comments

[silly_swordsman]

No accounting for taste. :-)

I struggled with The Waiting Stars - I found the language too forced and overcomplicated, and I saw the ending a third in. Given that it was nominated, and not through shenanigans, I tried to find what had earned it the honour, without finding it.

On the other hand, I loved Lady Astronaut when I first read it last year, and still do on rereading.

[sierra_le_oli]

It's funny that you have that problem with the language in The Waiting Stars because it's just the complaint I have about Charlie Stross sometimes.

So what did you think of The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling then?

[silly_swordsman]

I can agree with you about Stross, though he tends to keep his sentences simpler. De Bodard had a sentence with 75 words, 5 comas, and one each of colon, semicolon, and dash, on the first page. That felt like too much work (a complaint I have of some 19th century litterature