{"id":2291,"date":"2008-02-22T10:52:03","date_gmt":"2008-02-22T10:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/22\/prospective-hugo-nomination-up\/"},"modified":"2008-02-22T10:52:03","modified_gmt":"2008-02-22T10:52:03","slug":"prospective-hugo-nomination-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/22\/prospective-hugo-nomination-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Prospective Hugo Nomination Update"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Hugo Award nomination deadline is fast approaching, so I&#8217;ve been doing a bunch of reading to make sure I&#8217;ve covered a reasonable range of potential nominees. I&#8217;ve been really bad about book-logging recently, but I thought I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Recently read books:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><cite>Undertow<\/cite> by Elizabeth Bear<\/strong>: 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&#8217;ve liked this book more had I not just finished writing a book about quantum mechanics&#8211; the plot involves a great many invocations of quantum theory, most of them very slightly&#8230; off.<\/li>\n<li><strong><cite>Shelter<\/cite> by Susan Palwick<\/strong>: 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&#8217;t take the premise. I&#8217;ve had the same problem with lots of other much-loved books (Octavia Butler&#8217;s <cite>Parable of the Sower<\/cite> chief among them), and I just can&#8217;t get past it. If it were nominated, and I were voting, I&#8217;d probably make myself finish it, but for just the nomination, I can&#8217;t do it.<\/li>\n<li><strong><cite>Acacia<\/cite> by David Anthony Durham<\/strong>: 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&#8217;s also a message to it that is delivered with an almost Mieville-ian lack of subtlety.<\/li>\n<li><strong><cite>The Orphan&#8217;s Tales: In the Night Garden<\/cite> by Catherynne M. Valente<\/strong>: Not actually an eligible work this year, but the second volume is. A beautifully written, brilliantly structured fantasy of nested stories. It&#8217;s rich with detail and the worldbuilding is outstanding. Unfortunately, it&#8217;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&#8217;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. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that&#8217;s where things stand at the moment. For the record, my current list of prospective nominations for Best Novel is:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><cite>The Yiddish Policemen&#8217;s Union<\/cite> by Michael Chabon<\/li>\n<li><cite>Spook Country<\/cite> by William Gibson<\/li>\n<li><cite>Bad Monkeys<\/cite> by Matt Ruff<\/li>\n<li><cite>Axis<\/cite> by Robert Charles Wilson<\/li>\n<li><cite>The Last Colony<\/cite> by John Scalzi<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While I&#8217;m talking about this, though, let me plug Shaun Tan&#8217;s <cite>The Arrival<\/cite> a wordless graphic novel about the immigrant experience. t&#8217;s absolutely fantastic, and should definitely be nominated for Best Related Book. If you haven&#8217;t read it, go find a copy. Now. The Internet will be here when you come back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Hugo Award nomination deadline is fast approaching, so I&#8217;ve been doing a bunch of reading to make sure I&#8217;ve covered a reasonable range of potential nominees. I&#8217;ve been really bad about book-logging recently, but I thought I&#8217;d at least post some brief comments on my crash reading here, for those who are just dying&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/02\/22\/prospective-hugo-nomination-up\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Prospective Hugo Nomination Update<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}