Prospective Hugo Nomination Update

The Hugo Award nomination deadline is fast approaching, so I’ve been doing a bunch of reading to make sure I’ve covered a reasonable range of potential nominees. I’ve been really bad about book-logging recently, but I thought I’d at least post some brief comments on my crash reading here, for those who are just dying to know my thoughts on the awards this year.

Recently read books:

• Undertow by Elizabeth Bear: A professional assassin on a corporate-controlled frontier planet gets involved with a group of people who want to help the exploited indigenous aliens. I probably would’ve liked this book more had I not just finished writing a book about quantum mechanics– the plot involves a great many invocations of quantum theory, most of them very slightly… off.
• Shelter by Susan Palwick: A dystopian future in which altruism is regarded as a mental disorder. I only made it a hundred-odd pages into this one, because I kept tripping over the premise. The writing is lovely, the characters are good, and I just can’t take the premise. I’ve had the same problem with lots of other much-loved books (Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower chief among them), and I just can’t get past it. If it were nominated, and I were voting, I’d probably make myself finish it, but for just the nomination, I can’t do it.
• Acacia by David Anthony Durham: epic fantasy in which barbarians from the north overrun a continent-spanning empire, and the children of the slain king are scattered through the empire to find themselves and lead the resistance. This was good, but not as innovative as I had hoped. There’s also a message to it that is delivered with an almost Mieville-ian lack of subtlety.
• The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente: Not actually an eligible work this year, but the second volume is. A beautifully written, brilliantly structured fantasy of nested stories. It’s rich with detail and the worldbuilding is outstanding. Unfortunately, it’s poorly served by being read twenty pages at a time right before bed, which is all I really have time for. I doubt I would be able to finish the second volume before the deadline, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to do it justice, so I may move on to other things, but this is far and away the best of these four books, and I highly recommend it.

And that’s where things stand at the moment. For the record, my current list of prospective nominations for Best Novel is:

• The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
• Spook Country by William Gibson
• Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff
• Axis by Robert Charles Wilson
• The Last Colony by John Scalzi

While I’m talking about this, though, let me plug Shaun Tan’s The Arrival a wordless graphic novel about the immigrant experience. t’s absolutely fantastic, and should definitely be nominated for Best Related Book. If you haven’t read it, go find a copy. Now. The Internet will be here when you come back.