Far Sector

Far Sector, N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell. I did not expect to get much out of this - previous DC or Marvel franchises written by big names from the SFF prose world have generally not done much for me (McGuire's Ghost Spider, Okorafor's Black Panther, Ahmed's Black Bolt). But in fact I really liked it! I think a big part of that is how Jemisin's story sits within the franchise - instead of writing about an existing character and expecting people to already care about the character (and maybe be familiar with their whole dang backstory), Jemisin uses the most general details of the Green Lantern universe that even I knew (Corps, rings, power to manifest glowy green things) to set up a new character in a new setting, and puts all the reasons to care right there on the page I was actually reading (and not some other page I was supposed to have read in some other book earlier). I thought basically everything here was really well done - the main character, the alien world with its three very interestingly different alien species, the central conflict of the big arc and the pacing and specifics of how it played out issue-to-issue. I am not very far into my Hugo Graphic reading but I think I'd be pretty happy to see this win - it seems like a really good example of how it's possible to tell interesting standalone stories within an established franchise, by being willing to develop original material instead of just rehashing the same tentpole characters all the time.

A couple of specifics behind a spoiler cut: ( Read more... )

2022 Locus winners

I feel like a Locus should be a cross between a lotus and a ficus. Which would look sort of like a magnolia? Anyways. here, or behind the cut. ( Read more... )