review dump: things unfinished

[psocoptera]

Keeping track of some stuff I didn't care to finish, for Hugo voting purposes:

Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods was unbearably twee.

Ogres felt like a tiresome belaboring of worn tropes.

Severance had an interesting premise - a writer I trusted (Greg Egan, say) might have really said some stuff with it. I did not trust the show to actually deliver anything and was not enjoying its glacial high-atmosphere low-content pacing meanwhile. Gave up after three episodes, read the summaries, am not sorry to have not spent those six hours watching all that with that payoff.

Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak I managed to miss my checkout window with the library and am going to have to get back in the queue for. Or maybe it will be in the packet? Is there ever going to be a packet? Has there already been a packet and I just can't find any information about it?

Comments

[glassonion]

We own Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, at least until we give it away at the end of the voting period. You can borrow it.

[psocoptera]

Thank you, I may take you up on that!

[ursula]

I enjoyed Ogres, though I feel like I'm the only person I've seen around dw who did. I'd rank it around the middle of the pack if I were voting, but I'll probably also end up giving it to glasseye, who likes stories about proletarian revolutions.

[psocoptera]

Having already read four of the others that I liked better probably made me more willing to give up on it than I might have been otherwise.

[elysdir]

I’ve now skimmed _Ogres_, and liked it more than I expected to, especially the ending. But I haven’t read any of the others in that category yet.

(I started with _Ogres_ because my expectations were low, so I think that worked in its favor for me. :) )

[elysdir]

I have yet to hear anything about a packet. I also have yet to hear back from the administrators who I contacted several times to offer to help with the packet. My guess would be either (a) they are running very far behind, or (b) there won’t be a packet this year. But that’s just speculation—I have no inside info.

(And I’ve been holding off on starting my reading in hopes of getting a packet, but I suppose I should stop waiting.)

[psocoptera]

Thank you for this answer, I find it reassuring to know that I haven't just missed it. It would have been a really handy year to get all the short fiction, though. (Huh... I wonder if there's any chance that the delay is due to waiting on some or all of the Chinese-language short fiction being translated and republished in English? Like, I would think there would be some mutual interest in such a thing happening, between the nominees and English-language publishers who might like to reprint some Hugo nominated works... I can totally imagine something like Clarkesworld, which already publishes a lot of stuff translated from Chinese, reaching out to the nominees to try to expedite something like that.)

[elysdir]

…And the first part of the Packet has now supposedly been released!

I say “supposedly” because the URL given in the email that I received doesn’t work. A tweet from the Chengdu Worldcon people 7 hours ago said that they were setting up a CDN to handle downloads and it might take a while to propagate, so I’ll try again later today or tomorrow.

I still haven’t heard back at all from the Hugo committee, and I have no idea whether they followed my advice about the ebooks. Guess I’ll find out when I get access.