psocoptera

The Campbell Award for Best New Writer goes to a person rather than a work - I sometimes think of it as the "if only one of them was going to get a book contract for their next book who would I give it to" award.

Sofia Samatar. I nominated her and she's still my number one pick. A Stranger in Olondria is beautiful and about big things and her stories are sharp and powerful and I want to read everything she writes.

Max Gladstone. Three Parts Dead had the best hook of anything I'd read in awhile and was tons of fun. Inventive world, vivid action, great characters, and the writing craft was really strong not so much in the "beautiful sentences" way but in the architecture of it, or the "screenwriting" or something. I mean very satisfying handling of how various elements were introduced and developed. My second pick, and I'd like to recommend this book to fantasy readers and maybe also people who like courtroom dramas.

Wesley Chu. I feel like I recall someone - crystalpyramid? - read Lives of Tao and liked it, but... I didn't. I mean, I really didn't, to the extent that after about six chapters I started flipping around and skimming bits because I was bored. I wasn't interested in the premise (aliens have been possessing famous people throughout history to influence human progress; one accidentally ends up in an IT worker who has a few months to shape up into a Bond-type agent), I didn't care about the characters, and the narrative POV felt fatphobic and dude-centric (as in, "women are viewed through the male gaze").

Ramez Naam. It was a little weird to be reading Nexus about the powerful dangerous drug/cybertech Nexus 5 at the same time as Josh was shopping for his Nexus 5 phone. Like naming your rocketship "Prius" or something. I am really interested in the big topics of this book - the early days of the adoption of transhuman technology, the conflict between humans and posthumans - but I just wasn't interested in the page-to-page plot which had a lot of fighting and blackmail and... thriller stuff. Reading this book reminded me a lot of reading Afterparty with the same issues of "why are we focusing on this less-interesting part of these affairs" (and even a few of the same characters like the magical ethereal little girl exposed to the nanotech in utero - is Alia from Dune the type character for this trope?). A lot of the writing felt clunky and heavy-handed and Naam made some missteps (in my eye) - when he first introduces one of the main characters, I thought we were meeting the villain - we see him at a party using the drug/tech in a really skeevy manner that leads to him losing control and committing what I read as sexual assault - but then we see him again from someone else's point of view and he's supposed to be so brilliant and beautiful and sensitive and shy and I guess maybe the party scene was meant by Naam to be more like sympathetically embarrassing than gross? Ew. And yet, I might read the next one, just to skim for the bits about what's going on more generally in the world.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew's stories have some neat images and ideas but tend to leave me a little cold. I did like "Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade" more when I reread it than when I read it the first time, and also found it easier to follow (I have to confess that I generally enjoy breezier, faster prose, Sriduangkaew can be a little too ornate or formal for my taste). But I do feel like she's working on interesting stuff, and I would happily put her on a list of "new authors to watch".