williamjm

Hugo voting closes tomorrow so I've filled out the bits of the ballot where I have something to nominate.

For Best Novel I went for:

• Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky

• Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

• The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

• The Fall of Babel by Josiah Bancroft

• The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

For Best Novella:

• What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

• Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

• Knot of Shadows by Lois McMaster Bujold

• The Age of Madness by Joe Abercrombie

• The Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft
• Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

5 hours ago, ljkeane said:

Fun game in Edinburgh yesterday. The French played some excellent attacking rugby, it really is starting to look like their year, and Scotland played some pretty good rugby themselves. If I was a Scottish fan I'd have been pretty annoyed with the Wales game but I don't think this game reflects too badly on Scotland, France are going to put a few sides to the sword and the margin in the scores didn't really reflect how much Scotland offered. Darge was very good in the absence of Watson.

On the other hand the game at Twickenham really wasn't fun to watch, very scrappy performance from both sides. Both sides are probably staring down the barrel of embarrassing defeats against France in particular if they don't improve.

It's pretty obvious why Wales weren't great, their breakdown was a bit of a disaster so they really struggled to maintain consistent attacks. It did get better in the second half but the concern for me would be is that because Wales improved or just because two of England's better breakdown operators in Curry and Cowan-Dickie went off injured?

England were pretty dire. They just don't put any stress on teams in defence. Randall sped up the service from the breakdown but when all you're doing with that ball is passing it to fairly static forward pods or Smith with nothing outside him hoping he's going to step his way through a set defence you aren't going to consistently cause international defences problems.

I was thinking the same that it did feel like Scotland were playing better despite how the scoreline ended up. Darge did look like a good replacement for Watson.

I think Wales should probably be reflecting that was a game they could have won. Their lineout was a shambles at times, particularly gifting England their first try.

2 hours ago, ljkeane said:

Ridiculous game in Edinburgh. England have absolutely battered Scotland and somehow contrived to lose the game. The defence for the Scotland try in first half was pretty bad, Cowan-Dickie's effort in the second half was completely atrocious.

It was one of those odd games where the winning team was the one which hardly had the ball for most of the game, not that any Scots will care about such stats. As well as the defensive mistakes England rarely looked turning their dominance in possession into tries.

Judging from today's games it looks like Ireland must be the big favourite from the Home Nations. We probably won't really be able to judge France properly until next weekend since they likely won't have to exert themselves too much to defeat Italy tomorrow.

20 hours ago, Underfoot said:

I finished a couple days ago and have been thinking a lot about the ending (loved it). Something that I've been turning over in my head: epilogue aside, do you think humanity is - on scale - better off having found and utilized the protomolecule with all that came with it, or would it have been better if they'd never found it at all? 

I like the idea that humanity had 1300 chances to do better, but it was also 1300 chances to do worse as well, alongside all the tragedy that came along with the protomolecule - experiments, new weapons, new wars, inability to sustain life on some systems. 

I'm torn. 

I think perhaps not in the short term but maybe in the long term? I think without the expansion to other star systems there was a serious risk of humanity wiping itself out given how much antagonism there was between the different factions and how fragile the planets were to attacks such as the one we saw in the series. That risk is significantly reduced with multiple apparently viable colonies which at least initially don't have any contact with each other.

On 12/17/2021 at 11:03 AM, Ran said:

Looks like Chengdu is going to host the Worldcon in 2023, if reports are right. Much drama around this.

They've now been confirmed as the winner by 2006 to 807 despite what seems to have been a late attempt to change the counting procedure to disqualify 3/4 of the Chinese votes for not having a postal address on the ballot paper.

Since it's only a day and a bit until the deadline I voted for the Hugos today.

I went for:

Best Novel: Piranesi, Harrow the Ninth, Black Sun, Network Effect, The City We Became (didn't get round to catching up with the Lady Astronaut series).

I think Piranesi was definitely my favourite, but the others were also good.

Best Novella: Empress of Salt and Fortune, Ring Shout, Come Tumbling Down, Upright Women Wanted, Riot Baby, Finna

I thought the first two were particularly good.

Best Novelette: Inaccessibility of Heaven, Monster, Two Truths and a Lie, Burn, No Award, The Pill, Helicopter Story

I think this the weakest of the fiction categories although the first three were good. There were a couple I thought were awful.

Best Short Story: Open House on Haunted Hill, Metal Like Blood in the Dark, A Guide for Working Breeds, Little Free Library, Mermaid Astronaut, Badass Moms of the Zombie Apocalypse

This on the other hand was much stronger and more difficult to rank the different stories against each other.

Series: Daevabad, Murderbot Diaries, Lady Astronaut

Best Drama (Long form): Palm Springs, Tenet, Old Guard, Birds of Prey

Not the strongest year for films for obvious reasons.

Best Drama (short form): Good Place, Doctor Who, 2 * Mandalorian

I really need to catch up with The Expanse on TV

4 hours ago, Lily Valley said:

Ok.  Finally finished Harrow.  I am likely going to rank it #1 for the sheer gleeful Gore and the reference to Miette.  Also NUN HUMOR!!!

I don't think I'll rank it #1 myself but I definitely wouldn't be upset if it won since I do admire its ambition and willingness to be different.

21 hours ago, Kyoshi said:

Bittersweet for sure. Unless they try to be (extra) edgy next year by giving it to him anyway (crossing my fingers).

Just saw on twitter Abdulrazak Gurnah has sold only 3000 copies of his books worldwide, combined.* The Swedish Academy is sketchy for sure, but I can't say I'm not also really happy about this one.

*of course one has to take into account the accuracy of twitter claims.

Looking on Goodreads he's got about 3000 ratings for his books, which is not a huge number but that would only be a fraction of the total readers so I think significantly more than 3000 copies.

7 hours ago, sifth said:

The CW, the show that gave us 5 good seasons of Supernatural......................and 10 pretty bad ones. Even if this show is popular, expect it to go on well past it's proper ending point.

That was one thing I was thinking that as long as the ratings for the first season aren't a flop it will probably go on for as long as JMS wants to.

At some point in the earlier development of B5 wasn't there some sort of plan to do 5 season of B5 and then a sequel show about Babylon 4 being used in the war against the Shadows?

Alternatively, he could remake Crusade as a sequel and make it longer-lived and a bit less rubbish.

16 hours ago, ants said:

His website doesn't have an update on the Craft Sequence in the last few years, and his blog seems to have stopped. I bought and read his latest book (Empress of forever, quite enjoyable but not as good), so maybe he isn't writing any more. Which is a damn shame. The Craft Sequence is amazing, and the last book was arguably the best of them. 

I agree The Ruin of Angels might have been my favourite of the series. I suppose at least it ends on a high if he isn't going to do more.

It looks like he has a new (non-Craft sequence) book out soon:

https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Last-Exit-Max-Gladstone/dp/0765335735/ref=sr_1_7?dchild=1&keywords=max+gladstone&qid=1632852353&sr=8-7

American Gods meets The Dark Tower in Last Exit, a dark, contemporary fantasy of the open road, alternate realities, and self-discovery, from a Locus Award-nominated and Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer Max Gladstone.

13 hours ago, ants said:

Added the Craft Sequence to the #2 list of completed series. It doesn't seem like there are anymore coming (I can't find any references anyway). 

I would definitely read more if Gladstone wrote them and there's plenty of scope for doing so but I also haven't seen any indication that more are planned.

33 minutes ago, Ran said:

I saw JMS hinting that there may be B5 news. I supposed it should not be a surprise that it's a reboot rather than a continuation, but.. the CW is not the place I'd have wanted it to be at. Yes, they are very genre-heavy, lots of Arrowverse shows and the like, but the budgets are constrained and the "house style" of most of their shows is aimed at a younger crowd.

The was my first thought as well, the typical CW style does not seem a good fit for B5 at all. I'm also now imagining all the ambassadors being played by young 20-somethings.

19 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

And now  not certain what to do. Read all of Kay's stories set within the same over arching world now...I suppose I should finish the Fionavar Tapestry...but its always been hard to read through for some reason...what about Ysabel?

Ysabel does feel different to his other books, although there are still some familiar features. There was something slightly disconcerting about a Kay protagonist talking about listening to Coldplay on his iPod, although he still managed to put in quite a lot of historical elements as well. I did enjoy it but wouldn't rank it among his best works.

56 minutes ago, ithanos said:

Deserved MotM award for Maro Itoje. SA will have to come out blazing in the 2nd test. They would've rued the small errors that cost them. Haven't looked up where the next game is being played at, but hopefully it won't be at the same ground (which is a multi-purpose ground, hence the poor field traction for rugby).    

I think they're all at the same ground. 

6 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Finished. It was fine. As tropey as it gets, and with some actual cliche storytelling, mainly the Nina/Matthias plot, which I didn't the understand the purpose of until the neatly wrapped end.

  Hide contents

The plot was filled with small deus ex moments. At least that's how the show really portrayed it. Is there a prevalent theme in the books about manifest destiny, or something like that? I'm not talking about the grand destiny of one becoming a living saint. For example, Mal escapes from his chains in the camp because Milo the goat happens to wander in front of the tent, with Jasper's bullet necklace still attached. Or Alina just happens to jump in the coffer of the stagecoach the Crows were planning to steal. And at the end, they all converge on the same ship leaving Ravka, to allow for Nina's story to mix with the others. Why are Mal and Alina on the same ship? Weren't they supposed to make their own way?

 

47 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

hmm, so is Ketterdam? on the western side of the Fold? The old lady who ran the orphanage implied that the Ravkans were being pressed, that they had nowhere to go. Since the map shows a sea on the western edge, that means Ravka is being pressed from the east by other nations?

Ketterdam is on an island in the sea on the western edge of that map.

There's a map from the books here: https://www.leighbardugo.com/grishaverse/ravka-map/#iLightbox[55445bff8c5ec825a87]/0

17 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

I have three or four Kay books I've scored for a quarter at thrift stores but haven't ever gotten around to reading them.

Separately, 27 pages?  This thread is an abomination.  I feel dirty and corrupted even posting on the 21st page of a thread.  This feels transgressive and I kind of like it.

eta: egaaaads!!? 28! 

The thread somehow survived for over a decade (it began in 2009) without being quiet enough to be closed for inactivity or busy enough to exceed 20 pages. I think Ran felt sentimental about this and decided not to close it.

1 hour ago, TrackerNeil said:

We're back at work on the fourth novel in the series. The pandemic wrecked my creativity, but now my imagination is recovering. 

That's good to know. I can see how the last 18 months is likely to have been tricky for a lot of authors, even doing simple things can seem challenging in these times let alone writing a novel.

3 hours ago, The Grey Wolf Strikes Back said:

Version 1: https://artistsnclients.com/uploads/5jo/jobs/641611_Ebook cover 1.png?0
Version 2: https://artistsnclients.com/uploads/5jo/jobs/642273_Ebook cover back.png?0

Any preferences?

I'd vote for the first one.

On 6/10/2021 at 9:08 AM, ants said:

Its maybe not technically urban fantasy (although its entirely set within urban limits), but has anyone else read the Grey City series?  Its very enjoyable, set in a medieval city where intrigue is a way of life.  Follows the protagonist as she tries to claw her way up the power system, and slowly learns more about the city.

On the face of it no magic, but that comes subtly later. 

I think the city almost feels like one of the characters in it, so urban fantasy does seem like a reasonable description.

A long time ago @TrackerNeil posted a link to the first chapter of Duchess of the Shallows possibly in the 'boarders writing a novel' thread and I thought it seemed intriguing so I did pick up the book and I enjoyed it. I thought the second and third books improved on the first one and had some interestingly convoluted plotlines although there were times when I think Duchess maybe shouldn't have been trying to multitask quite so much. It did develop a good cast of characters as well. I'd definitely read a fourth book although I haven't heard any news about one.

1 hour ago, Caligula_K3 said:

My impression is that the Hugos are just becoming too insular. I'm sure this has been a problem before, and familiarity bias is always going to be a thing.

That sort of thing has definitely happened in the past as well. David Langford won the Best Fan Writer Hugo for 18 years in a row, for example.

9 hours ago, lady narcissa said:

Thanks for sharing the information. I do get that. I am probably okay with that so long as he keeps writing the Peter stories - and enjoys writing them and has fresh stories to tell. 

He said then that he is still enjoying writing the books, and I think his publisher is probably going to be happy for him to continue doing that as well.

But I do feel it speaks well for this world he created when the stories are not dependent on Peter being in them.  Not all authors are so successful when trying to broaden their universes.

I'd definitely be happy to read, for example, a sequel to The October Man if he wrote it.

On 3/31/2021 at 3:51 AM, lady narcissa said:

Oh and speaking of Aaronovitch's novellas,  I should add I finished What Abigail Did That Summer and I found it very enjoyable and satisfactory.  I do like how he expands the universe with these novellas and they show how the universe works with multiple characters outside of Peter.  If he wanted to, he could come up with a successful middle grade / YA fantasy series with Abigail as a main character.  I could see him not wanting to get locked into that.  But an occasional novella like this would be enjoyable.

I saw Aaronovitch at a book signing shortly before such things stopped being possible and he did comment that one problem with introducing new characters to the supporting cast is that there is a temptation to tell their stories as well and he doesn't have the time to do that for all of them. This was before the Abigail book was announced but I get the impression that no character other than Peter is going to have regular stories focusing on them.

I've not read the new book but I'll probably get it soon.

54 minutes ago, ljkeane said:

A real lack of composure from France though. They had a number of opportunities in Scotland territory that they let slip by trying to force things. They're pretty clearly the most talented team at the moment, they need to be doing a bit better than coming close to winning Six Nations titles.

The bit where they steal the ball after 80 minutes while leading and then somehow manage to concede a penalty rather than kicking it off the field was not their finest moment.

It was a good match, lots of swings in momentum where one team or other were on top for a period before it shifted the other way. I was convinced Scotland had messed up by not kicking penalties with 10 minutes to go (I can understand in the last couple of minutes when it would have probably lead to a draw) but they did manage to pull it off at the last minute.