More pondering about nominations. Hugos feel pretty weird to be doing, tbh - how many of the non-USian authors can safely come to Seattle? I assume none of the Canadians will? Can USian trans authors even safely take domestic flights (like, without having their drivers licenses confiscated)? By this time next year, are all my favorite trans authors going to be hiding in attics so they don't get deported to a concentration camp in Panama, a weirdly specific yet terrifyingly reality-based scenario now that we have a concentration camp in Panama, and will that perhaps cut into their fiction output, and should we try extra hard to give them awards now? I've read Solzhenitsyn (well, I've read
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), am I supposed to have some thoughts about Literary Awards And The Gulag? My thoughts are mostly "how the fuck did we end up in a timeline where we might be going to have a gulag?" Also, how many of Musk's minions were Sad Puppies voters in 2015? I guess probably none of them because they're all like twenty years old?
Anyways, I promise no more crushing doom in the rest of this post, just sometimes it's hard to find the balance between "still trying to enjoy things" and "it feels gross to just pretend everything is normal". Onwards.
Novels:
Every 2024 sff novel I've read so far: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Malka Older; The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden; A Sorceress Comes to Call, T Kingfisher; Lady Eve's Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow; Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera; The Forbidden Book, Sacha Lamb; The City in Glass, Nghi Vo; Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan; Glass Houses, Madeline Ashby; The Sapling Cage, Margaret Killjoy; The Last Dragon of the East, Katrina Kwan. (Also I'm partway through Swordcrossed, Freya Marske, Sheine Lende, Darcie Little Badger, and I've read the first few pages of The Wings Upon Her Back, Samantha Mills. And even further away I'm still in hold queues for Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins and The West Passage, Jared Pechaček.)
Some of these I didn't like at all. Warm Hands of Ghosts and City in Glass jump out at me as "best written", in some sense. Sorceress Comes to Call and Glass Houses were gripping; Long Live Evil was a fun ride. Sapling Cage I'm probably nominating as YA for the Lodestar even if nobody else thinks so.
Novellas:
Every 2024 sff novella I've read so far: What Feasts At Night, T Kingfisher; The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler; The Brides of High Hill, Nghi Vo; The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P Djèlí Clark; Haunt Sweet Home, Sarah Pinsker; The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed; The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar; It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over, Anne de Marcken; North Continent Ribbon, Ursula Whitcher. (Also I have Yoke of Stars, R.B. Lemberg sitting on the table. And I'm still in hold queues for Transitive Properties of Cheese, Ann LeBlanc and In the Shadow of the Fall, Tobi Ogundiran.)
North Continent Ribbon and It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over for sure; maybe also The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, and can I possibly read enough Yoke of Stars to form an opinion about it.
Novelettes:
See previous post, except maybe I *should* nominate "Fisher of Stars" as a secondary outlet for my North Continent Ribbon feelings, because I'm kind of having a premonition about being less than thrilled by the novella ballot. (What Feasts At Night and Brides of High Hill and Haunt Sweet Home were all fine but two of them are sequels to things that were better and one is not Pinsker's most exciting work and I can totally see them all making the ballot on familiarity, bah.) I could ditch the Thomas Ha riff on Fahrenheit 451, I guess.
Short Story:
See previous post.
Series:
Has Singing Hills hit 240k words yet? If they're all novellas and there's five of them, then no, right? What else is even out there? I guess the third one of those Roanhorse books came out, I should queue for that, but I don't think I want to nominate the series without having read it.
Related Work:
It's always sort of interesting to see what turns up here, but I have nothing to contribute.
Graphic Story:
I'm nominating My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 2 despite its problems. And Ver's Sacred Bodies despite its obscurity.
Dramatic Long:
"Will I attempt to watch the Hugo Dramatic Long nominees" is a very open question but I'm leaning towards "no" on the grounds that they're going to be, like, Dune and Deadpool and Wicked and I already didn't want to see them when they were just movies. Anyways, no nominees.
Dramatic Short:
Someone wake me up if it turns out clipping did another SF album or something.
Pro Artist:
... if I come up with some artists it's going to be in a separate post.
Game:
Not only have I not managed to play The Ghost and The Golem, I haven't even managed to write my post about why I haven't managed to play The Ghost and The Golem. Gah.
Semiprozine:
Strange Horizons!
Fanwriter:
Bitter Karella is not on the spreadsheet - eligibility problem or just overlooked?
Fan Artist:
After years of exhorting everyone to nominate fan artists I feel like I had better nominate some fan artists. Perhaps in that separate post with the pro artists... definitely...
Poem:
Poem?? I look forward to reading in this category. Actually it would be neat if someone did an ebook anthology of, like, the whole longlist.
Lodestar:
As previously mentioned, I think Sapling Cage is. I'm enjoying Sheine Lende well enough but I don't think I'm excited enough about it to throw it in.
Astounding:
Moniquill Blackgoose is eligible again. Plus I think I'll go with Zohar Jacobs, Nadia Radovich, A.W. Prihandita, and Grant Collier from my short fiction nominees.
Links to their other work:
Zohar Jacobs: a story in each of Asimov's and Analog, plus
this.
Nadia Radovich:
this in Apex and
this in Strange Horizons.
Grant Collier: nothing else
A.W. Prihandita:
here,
here,
here,
here.