Hugo Nominations and Awards - Now onto 2021 Nominations

[williamjm]

For novel at the moment I'd consider

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin

Guy Gavriel Kay's A Brightness Long Ago

Joe Abercombie's A Little Hatred

Ian McDonald's Luna : Moon Rising

James S.A. Corey's Tiamat's Wrath

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Cage of Souls

For novella:

Becky Chamber's To Be Taught, If Fortunate

For the Lodestar

Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

I don't think you'll find a lot of people will say there was a better fantasy epic show on this particular forum, lets put it that way.

The Witcher and His Dark Materials are still to hit before the end of the year, so that could still be up in the air (depending how you classify HDM, of course).

Also, The Dragon Prince Season 3 should arrive before the end of the year.

[Darth Richard II]

Jeez,it's been a good year. I'll have to think, but the one that really stood out to be was R. J. Barker's The Bone Ships

[Werthead]

Kameron Hurley's The Light Brigade feels like a shoe-in for Best Novel in 2020. Excellent novel, riffing off some established classics (particularly The Forever War and Starship Troopers) but doing its own thing as well. Probably her most accessible book to date as well.

[felice]

If anyone's interested in checking out some Kiwi SF, I'd recommend From a Shadow Grave for novella. It's not big on plot, but very nice character work. I have met the author, so it's possible I'm slightly biased, but I'm pretty confident it's objectively good writing.

[Wall Flower]

2 hours ago, felice said:

If anyone's interested in checking out some Kiwi SF, I'd recommend From a Shadow Grave for novella. It's not big on plot, but very nice character work. I have met the author, so it's possible I'm slightly biased, but I'm pretty confident it's objectively good writing.

Thanks for the recommendation. Really liked the premise so I downloaded it straight away. Living just across the ditch, I would love to read more Kiwi authors (not just SF).

[Seli]

I haven't read much new stuff so far, and have a horrible memory for short fiction.

However, in novels:

The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson would be a great candidate. But suffers because it works best in conjunction with the 2 previous books in the trilogy (The Rosewater Insurrection is also eligible this year).

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley of course.

There is a bunch more that I expect might come far, but haven't personally read yet.

[felice]

13 hours ago, Wall Flower said:

Thanks for the recommendation. Really liked the premise so I downloaded it straight away. Living just across the ditch, I would love to read more Kiwi authors (not just SF).

Cool, I hope you enjoy  The publisher has also put out a Year's Best Kiwi SF anthology, which might provide a good sampling of current authors (it collects works published in 2018, though, so not award-eligible). I don't know much about non-SF authors, sorry!

[Wall Flower]

9 hours ago, felice said:

Cool, I hope you enjoy  The publisher has also put out a Year's Best Kiwi SF anthology, which might provide a good sampling of current authors (it collects works published in 2018, though, so not award-eligible). I don't know much about non-SF authors, sorry!

No worries! Due to family stuff, I've struggled to finish a book this month, so I think short fiction may be just the thing for December.

[felice]

The Outside by Ada Hoffmann should definitely be on the ballot for Best Novel. A galaxy-spanning human civilisation is watched over by the Gods - evolved AIs that are basically benevolent aside from the whole literally eating the souls of the dead thing. Human technology is limited to the level of vacuum tubes and CRTs , with limited access to God-made tech including warp drives and portals. Yasira Shien, the inventor of a radical new power source for an entirely human-made space station, gets recruited by angels (cybernetically enhanced servants of the Gods) to help hunt down her former mentor, who has been doing science the Gods outlaw as heretical (for very good reason - it causes madness, death, disruption of the very fabric of reality, etc).

[Maester Llama]

I mostly lurk these days, but these threads are fun. I have yet to vote in the Hugos, but if this is the year when I finally go ahead and buy a supporting membership I'll probably be thinking along lines like:

 

Best novel: I agree with others that Kameron Hurley's The Light Brigade is very strong here. While there are still plenty of anticipated books from last year to get to / fail to get to, I'd be pretty surprised if my shortlist didn't also include A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine and Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone, both of which are just killer; high recommendation. Beyond that I'd think about filling up final slots, based on what I've read so far, with some combination of Guy Gavriel Kay's A Brightness Long Ago, which is his best since Under Heaven for me, a very fine book, Annalee Nevitz's The Future of Another Timeline, Walton's Lent, McGuire's Middlegame, Muir's Gideon the Ninth, and Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House, all of which I found did fun and compelling stuff. Or maaaybe Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree -- although I think my reaction to some of the pacing late in the book and what I felt was some wildly varyingly successful characterization might put that one just below award stuff for me, much as I enjoyed my time. Also probably slipping just under would be Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which takes a bit to get going in the character-driven plot / stakes realms for some strong artistic reasons, but "takes a bit to get going" is still "takes a bit to get going."

 

I've still got a lot to get to, though, including Hoffman's The Outside, Krooger's Steel Crow Saga, Leckie's The Raven Tower, and so on. Oh and Fonda Lee's Jade War, which I confidently expect will own enormously, although the middle volumes of fantasy series don't exactly have Hugo track record.

 

Best novella: Haven't read much yet. I like Gladstone and El-Mohtar's This Is How You Lose the Time War a bunch, which is cool for me because I suspect it might win, but would maybe place Emily Tesh's Silver in the Wood alongside or slightly above it. Haven't read the Chambers or Solomon's The Deep or Hossein's The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday yet and they sound like stuff I might like.

 

Lodestar: Dunno; haven't read enough ya yet from last year. I like Holly Black; I think she's great and I think her new thing is great -- first one was maybe the best, but the second one's also pretty sharp. E. K. Johnston's The Afterward was really interesting. Wexler's City of Stone and Silence was fun times.

 

Best series: Right now my only strong thoughts here are about Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy, which I think held together pretty great, and Melissa Caruso's Swords and Fire epic fantasy trilogy, which is tense and pacey and well-characterized and uncompromising without being grimey and I think could use quite a bit more attention.

[felice]

Another Kiwi book worth checking out: The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry. It's about a young man who can read characters out of books into physical reality, and his relationship with his older brother (the primary narrator). While there are a lot of references to classic literature, Dickens in particular, it doesn't rely on familiarity with the older works, fortunately for me! The narrator isn't particularly well-versed in the classics himself, unlike his precocious literature professor sibling.

[Seli]

Starting to go through nominations, I am utterly under-read in short fiction last year.

And I did not get around to most of the big-hype novels of 2019, but plenty of others will nominate those of course.

[Corvinus85]

For the first time I'm going to nominate works for the Hugo's and have some questions. (I skimmed over the constitution)

- What publisher do you write if the work was published in multiple countries and at the same time? Or is it even necessary to write the publisher?

- What if you mess up, spelling and such, or writing the wrong studio/publisher?

- Is it fine to nominate more than one episode from a show in the short form dramatic presentation category?

- Can Joe Abercrombie's books from the First Law be a considered a series? The plot changes, but they are linked by setting and characters. And would the series be called The Circle of the World, the First Law or something else?

I only have a few categories to nominate stuff in, mainly focusing on the two dramatic presentation categories.

[Ran]

17 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

For the first time I'm going to nominate works for the Hugo's and have some questions. (I skimmed over the constitution)

- What publisher do you write if the work was published in multiple countries and at the same time? Or is it even necessary to write the publisher?

Put in whatever English language publisher you want. It's more to help them figure it out if there's any reason that there may be confusion.

17 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

- What if you mess up, spelling and such, or writing the wrong studio/publisher?

Won't matter unless it happens to seem similar to some other work, which is unlikely.

17 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

- Is it fine to nominate more than one episode from a show in the short form dramatic presentation category?

Yes.

17 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

- Can Joe Abercrombie's books from the First Law be a considered a series? The plot changes, but they are linked by setting and characters. And would the series be called The Circle of the World, the First Law or something else?

I would think so. Even if the different series have different overarching titles, the administrators generally trust that the WSFS members who vote are choosing appropriate works.

 

[williamjm]

3 hours ago, Corvinus said:

For the first time I'm going to nominate works for the Hugo's and have some questions. (I skimmed over the constitution)

- What publisher do you write if the work was published in multiple countries and at the same time? Or is it even necessary to write the publisher?

I think I've often just left this bit blank.

- Is it fine to nominate more than one episode from a show in the short form dramatic presentation category?

I think this is probably very commonly done, there's no rule against it.

[Maester Llama]

Okay, so, re best series: I've been waiting for several years to read Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy -- sociopolitical and family opera and middle-distance future history of the moon -- all in a row once they were all released. The third book came out last year and I had a very flexible schedule this week, so I achieved my series-binging dream. God damn. I remember thinking McDonald was great, but I hadn't read him in a while and thought my tastes might have swerved away from some of the stuff he tends to be about. They have not. And he's just as good as he was in the 00s, or better.

 

I had a fantastic time with these: They're grounded in character but also doing big-picture let's-visit-lots-of-parts-of-this-future-society stuff, and they're invested in blending the rhythms of drama with the rhythms of history and politics, so sometimes characters disappear for long stretches and the plot is sometimes shaped in ways that may seem odd to us. One of the pitches for Luna: New Moon when it came out, if I recall correctly, was "Game of Thrones on the moon" -- and also "Dallas on the moon" -- and as much as pitches like "x meets y" are crude these aren't bad pitches at all, but these books that cover more povs than Martin tends to are 400 pages a piece and they've got places to be; status quo changes are swift and jarring, sometimes dizzyingly so. These things are not just worth working through, but are part of the experience, at least for me. I do think the series benefited from being read together though, possibly a fair bit.

 

I dunno quite what happened to these. I remember New Moon being pitched pretty hard in 2015, but, as so often happens, continued awareness doesn't seem to have followed, so I wouldn't be surprised if commercially they hadn't done that hot, at least in North America. Wow they're great, though. They would suit the best series shortlist just fine. If you like big sweeping near-to-middle distance future sf with lots of characters and ideas and feelings and A+ writing about everything from how fast the moon can kill you to making a cake in lunar gravity give yourself this gift.

[williamjm]

1 hour ago, Maester Llama said:

I do think the series benefited from being read together though, possibly a fair bit.

I did read them as they came out, and I think there might have been advantages to reading them together because there are so many characters and factions that I did forget some of the details between books.

I agree they are good books, although perhaps not quite McDonald's best. With so many plotlines some of them more interesting than others, but there are plenty of great scenes in it and I did find the lunar society he has constructed fascinating.

I just read The Menace From Farside which you should probably enjoy as well, it's only loosely connected to the Luna novels since it is set several decades beforehand. It is interesting to see the Moon at a point in time when many of the key parts of the Lunar society in the novels are either new or still taking shape.

[williamjm]

Since the nominations close this coming Friday I've started to fill in the form.

So far I've provisionally got:

Novel:

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay

A Little Hatred by Joe Abercombie

Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Novella:

The October Man by Ben Aaronovitch

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

The Orphans of Raspay by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mothar and Max Gladstone

The Menace From Farside by Ian McDonald

Best Series:

Luna by Ian McDonald

The Expanse by James S.A. Corey

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronvitch (I don't really know whether and one novel and two novellas published since its last nomination is enough to meet the word count required for a second nomination)

The Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft

I'm also wondering whether it could be argued that all the novels in the First Law world are all the same series, in which case A Little Hatred would make it eligible.

Best New Writer

Stuart Turton (The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle)

David Craig (Resurrection Men)

Best Fan Writer

Adam Whitehead

------

I haven't really read much eligible for the novelette or short story categories so will probably skip them. I still need to fill in the dramatic presentation sections.

What are other people putting down?

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

44 minutes ago, williamjm said:

Since the nominations close this coming Friday I've started to fill in the form.

***

Best New Writer

Stuart Turton (The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

David Craig (Resurrection Men)

 

Thanks!

You have excellent taste