Just a quick update today. The voting deadline for this year's Hugo Awards was yesterday. The hard reading work is done; now we wait until August 20th to find out who won. Over on his livejournal, Nicholas Whyte has gone to the trouble of collecting together the voting intentions of a whole bunch of bloggers (myself included). I recommend popping over to take a look; it's pretty interesting. Most of the categories have clear front-runners, and they're generally the ones I picked. I wonder if they'll go on to win?
I'm going to take advantage of Nicholas' work to read up on some of the lists that differed wildly from my own. That should be a fun exercise.
I'm also reminded that although I've spoken separately about each of the Best Novel nominees I read, I haven't discussed them together. My final vote was: 1) The Dervish House, 2) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 3) Feed, 4) No Award. I did read Cryoburn, but I didn't get to Blackout/All Clear before the voting deadline. With that caveat, my feeling is that The Dervish House and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms were clearly superior to the other nominees. I'd be happy if either of those books won.
And if you're interested, at least at the time of writing the vast majority of the nominees in the shorter fiction categories (Novella, Novelette, Short Story) are available online, so you can still have a read and see what you think.
With any luck I'll be back later this week, with something a little different. I'm planning to talk about Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, a storytelling game by Daniel Solis. Here's a sneak peak: I think it's cool!
Is the gaming stuff a break from Sci-Fi reading or has it been concurrent? I'm taking a sci-fi break at the moment myself.
ReplyDeleteBit of both, really. Sometimes I read novels and rulebooks concurrently, but more often I'm reading one or the other. The List tells me I've read one rulebook for every six works of fiction this year.
ReplyDeleteSo are you taking a break from the sci-fi, or reading sci-fi as a break from something else? What are you reading? Any good?
I found Palimpsest hard going (was not engaged). Read some personal military history as a break. An oral history of the Dam Busters and the memoirs of a US P51 Mustang pilot based in Italy.
ReplyDeleteThat's Palimpsest the novel by Cat Valente, right, not Palimpsest the novella by Charles Stross? Both nominated for Hugos in the same year, which was confusing. If it is the novel you're talking about, I'm right there with you -- I wanted to like that book very much, but in the end I felt like the prose kept me at a distance. Which may well have been the point, given the subject matter. I think it's one of those books that might be good, but which I didn't actually enjoy.
ReplyDeleteI really need to sit down and talk to you some day about the non-fiction you read. I'm curious about what it is you find appealing about it, as opposed to reading fiction.
It was the Cat Valente one, yes. I enjoyed the Charles Stross one.
ReplyDeleteAs for the non-fiction, it is hard to say really. Certainly things such as oral histories and memoirs I find more compelling than most fiction.