psocoptera | Entries tagged with 2017hugo

See the winners and links to detailed results here.

Overall, I think it was a strong ballot and I'm pretty happy with most of the results. Disappointed about Splendor&Misery, but as we'll see in the detailed results, I think the answer to "can an album compete with series television" is "I guess not".

So, yeah! Analysis and reactions, behind this cut for length! ( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://psocoptera.livejournal.com/401046.html

My entire Hugo ballot, behind this cut. ( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://psocoptera.livejournal.com/399550.html

I don't think I ever posted about this - I honestly can't remember now if I heard about the winners when they came out in May or not.

Anyways, Nebula winners!

All the Birds in the Sky beat Obelisk Gate and Ninefox (and other things) for Novel; that was (and remains) my prediction for the Hugo as well.

Every Heart a Doorway beat Dream-Quest, Black Tom, and Taste of Honey for Novella, which is also my prediction for the Hugo. (Also, whoops, never read Runtime, I should do that.)

"The Long Fall Up", which I have not read (was in F&SF), won for Novelette, beating "Jewel&Lapidary" and "Surely Drown Here" (my prediction for the Hugo). Okay.

"Seasons of Glass and Iron" beat "Our Talons" and "Fist of Permutations" for Short Story, making me more optimistic it can beat them on the Hugo ballot too (I had predicted "Our Talons" but without confidence.)

Arrival beat Rogue One for Dramatic but I think Hidden Figures is going to pull more from Arrival than Rogue One on the Hugo ballot.

Arabella of Mars beat Newbery winner Girl Who Drank The Moon for the Norton. (Goal for next year: HAVE READ SOMETHING NOMINATED FOR THE NORTON.)

Crossposts: http://psocoptera.livejournal.com/399174.html

Rivers of London aka Midnight Riot, Ben Aaronovitch. Fun! I like this sort of thing (police procedural + geek discovers magic) and look forward to reading more in the series at some point. I wouldn't call it unmissable or anything but it was a fast read I wanted to keep reading.

Deadpool. I guess technically I watched this rather than read it. Did not enjoy (and am left baffled by how much my mother loved this movie (???)).

Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey. So technically I didn't read this either, in that I started reading the pdf excerpt they gave me in the packet and it seemed to be missing lines at many of the page breaks, to the point where I found it unreadable. Also did the thing of describing what all the women looked like and none of the men and tralala life is too short to read dude authors who piss me off in the first chapter. Feel free to make the case for this book in a comment if you think it's worthy of a second chance; I am queued for it at the library so might get a readable copy one of these days.

Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex, Stix Hiscock. This was pleasantly not bad! I mean, I don't think it deserves a Hugo, but it was competently-written porn-comedy. The pole-dancing scene with the nipple lasers was fun. I thought there was a little too much dick (did dinosaurs even have dicks? come on, you're writing xeno, sexualize the cloaca) but it was better than watching Deadpool.

Ms. Marvel Vol 5: Super Famous. A strong installment of a terrific series. Ms. Marvel reminds me of Buffy at its best in how it literalizes issues, except with a much more diverse and interesting cast.

Paper Girls Vol 1. Super-compelling in characters, premise, and pacing; I can't wait to read volume 2.

Crossposts: http://psocoptera.livejournal.com/398626.html

Volume 6 being the one presently up for a Hugo. I had last read Saga back in 2015 when volume 3 was nominated, so I started with 3 again and caught up. I'm not sure I recommend doing that - on the one hand, it's super page-turny, so not putting it down is a good solution to the problem of not wanting to put it down, on the other hand, it started to feel a little formulaic, in the pacing of the introduction of new characters/character deaths so that the cast size doesn't become completely unmanageable? And reading so much of it at once, it was hard to not start asking questions like "is there really a point to all this soap opera", which I think is an unfair question - is there a "point" to Girl Genius, or Astro City (which I just found out is apparently going again and has been for awhile), or Firefly, or any other serial story? But possibly it would be more fun to be reading Saga issue by issue, caught up in all the immediate dramas, speculating with other fans about what could happen next, etc.

I didn't do that, though, so here I am. I haven't read the rest of the nominees yet, but I strongly suspect it's going to be hard for a middle volume of a serial to compare with the introductory, world-establishing Volume One of something new, and there are four of those on the ballot. Saga vol 6 has some good beats but it's not like the Big New Idea rush of plunging into the story in the first place.

Crossposts: http://psocoptera.livejournal.com/397868.html

I think this is a great ballot, by which I mean there are lots of things on it that I nominated, and not so much dog crap that it won't be easy to just step around it. See them here. Further thoughts: ( Read more... )

I should do a better job with this category, because a) art is fun to look at and b) I suspect getting an art Hugo actually helps artists land future illustration/cover jobs, but in fact I did not fall in love with many illustrations or covers in my Hugo reading this year and came up with some nominees via some half-assed browsing at the hugonoms2017 wikia, hugoeligibleart.tumblr, looking at people on last year's long list who didn't make the cut, etc. As always, I find these categories challenging to figure out who's a fan and who's a pro, what's 2016 work, etc, but hey, anyone is better than Brad Foster and Steve Stiles for the umpteenth time. (I was tempted to nominated Julie Dillon again because who is better than Julie Dillon but I'm trying to promote variety.)

Pro Artists:
Reiko Murakami - an illustration here
Victo Ngai - been doing awesome covers for awhile, including the Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe cover
Stephanie Law - was the artist GOH at Arisia
Galen Dara - http://www.galendara.com/
Niroot Puttapipat - https://himmapaan.wordpress.com/

Fan Artists:
Iguanamouth - http://hugoeligibleart.tumblr.com/post/155288778097/iguanamouth-kept-getting-requests-for-gryphons-so
Euclase - photorealistic portraits of fannish subjects, euclase.tumblr.com
Sara Kipin - http://sarakipin.tumblr.com/
Marissa Garner - cool stained-glass-style fanart http://nenuiel.deviantart.com/
Alexandra Kern - http://www.zandraart.com/

Powerful shorter-than-novel fiction piece about a human colony living in an uneasy incorporation into an alien society, and the relationships of two collaborators and two separatists. Some stuff here about slow change vs burning things to the ground that really packs a punch here in the age of the destruction of the American government. I am mildly unsure of the length of this story - Asimov's called it a novelette in their table of contents, but Locus listed it with the novellas - but I'm inclined to assume Locus can count, and nominate it as a novella. Not sure though whether I'm replacing Every Heart a Doorway, which I wasn't that enthusiastic about, or Last Days of New Paris, which I'm pretty sure is too long to qualify (Locus called it a novel, so if we're going by Locus...).

So rap group Clipping. offered free downloads of their album Splendor & Misery for Hugo nominators, suggesting it was eligible for Best Dramatic Short. I know very little about rap, but not having much to nominate there, I figured there was no downside to listening, and OH MY GOD. I have this vague memory of the first time I was working my way through the early Rush discography, 2112 and the Cygnus X-1 songs, laying there completely caught up in it, and, like, narrative audio IS NOT MY THING 90% of the time, but, man, the other 10%. SPACE SCIENCE FICTION IN MY EARS, I don't know, this has gotten very capslocky, but the whole idea that you can couple pushing the boundaries of music with telling a spec-fic story, it's such a powerful synergy. There's pretty obviously a lot going on in Splendor & Misery that I don't understand - it's extremely reference-dense, the kind of literary poem puzzle someone who knows what the fuck they're talking about can dissect for pages - but even the bits I can get, slavery narratives/songs plus hip-hop as a specifically Black genre plus a delightful blender of science fiction references, it's clever and fascinating and *different* and, yes, absolutely nominating it.

ETA: let me know if you want the download link, I'll share it with anyone else who's nominating this year.

See them here!

Novel:
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
Borderline, Mishell Baker
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
Ninefox Gambit,Yoon Ha Lee
Everfair, Nisi Shawl
I've read four of these and haven't even heard of Borderline. Birds and Ninefox are on my Hugo list, Obelisk and Everfair certainly seem like plausible choices, if not in my personal sweet spot of entertainingness.

Novella
Runtime, S.B. Divya (Tor.com Publishing)
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Kij Johnson (Tor.com Publishing)
The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle (Tor.com Publishing)
Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
“The Liar”, John P. Murphy (F&SF)
A Taste of Honey, Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com Publishing)
So, Tor's novella line is doing pretty well, eh? I liked "Dream-Quest" and "Taste of Honey" a lot and am not at all surprised to see "Every Heart" here too. I might put "Runtime" on my to-read list.

Novelette
“The Long Fall Up”, William Ledbetter (F&SF)
“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea”, Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed)
“Red in Tooth and Cog”, Cat Rambo (F&SF)
“Blood Grains Speak Through Memories”, Jason Sanford (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
The Jewel and Her Lapidary, Fran Wilde (Tor.com Publishing)
“You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay”, Alyssa Wong (Uncanny)
"Sooner or Later" is the only one of these in my Hugo noms - I thought "You'll Surely Drown Here" had its moments but didn't quite pull it off for me, and I haven't read the rest. (I feel like I like Cat Rambo in general, maybe?)

Short Story
“Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies”, Brooke Bolander (Uncanny)
“Seasons of Glass and Iron”, Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood)
“Sabbath Wine”, Barbara Krasnoff (Clockwork Phoenix 5)
“Things With Beards”, Sam J. Miller (Clarkesworld)
“This Is Not a Wardrobe Door”, A. Merc Rustad (Fireside Magazine)
“A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers”, Alyssa Wong (Tor.com)
“Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station│Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0”, Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed)
"Things With Beards" prediction fulfilled! I liked "Seasons" too. I must have read "Talons" but I can't remember it, do remember "Welcome" but thought it was more gimmick than story. I'm disappointed to not see "Between Dragons and Their Wrath" on this ballot, it was the other standout story of the year for me (with "Things").

Bradbury
Arrival
Doctor Strange
Kubo and the Two Strings
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Westworld: ‘‘The Bicameral Mind’’
Zootopia
I read this list and immediately went and replaced Star Trek on my Hugo noms with Kubo.

Norton
The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Kelly Barnhill
The Star-Touched Queen, Roshani Chokshi
The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge
Arabella of Mars, David D. Levine
Railhead, Philip Reeve
Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies, Lindsay Ribar
The Evil Wizard Smallbone, Delia Sherman
How am I always so clueless about the Norton nominees? Whatever happened to my being in the YA sff loop? Well, "Girl" was already on my to-reads from the Newberys, I guess I can add a few more.

Probably at least one more followup after this with more artists and possibly more novellas, I have a couple of candidates on request with the library.

Behind the cut if you would rather not be influenced or whatever. ( Read more... )

People who care about my fiction recs may have noticed that I haven't recommended much 2016 short fiction. Well, I haven't given up yet, but in fact I have quite a bit of work between me and nominating short fiction. However, I've read a bunch of this year's novels this year, and I thought I'd start with those in case any other nominators wanted to check out any of my picks.

So going through my tags, here's the quick list I put together of 2016 eligible books I've read:

The Raven and the Reindeer
A Closed And Common Orbit
Goldenhand
Obelisk Gate
Swarm
Sleeping Giants
Last Days of New Paris
Too Like The Lightning
Company Town
The Core of the Sun
Necessity
All The Birds In The Sky
The Census Taker
Ninefox Gambit
Winged Histories
League of Dragons
Carry On
The Raven King
Tell the Wind and Fire
Burning Midnight

Of which here is what I'm right now thinking about nominating, with comments:
A Closed And Common Orbit - Becky Chambers - semi-sequel to "Long Way to a Small Angry Planet". Powerful premise & execution.
Necessity - Jo Walton - third in trilogy about magically creating Plato's Republic.
Ninefox Gambit - Yoon Ha Lee - first in trilogy about space-empire strategy and treachery.
Winged Histories - Sofia Samatar - semi-sequel to A Stranger in Olondria, brilliant, gorgeous fantasy.
The Core of the Sun - Johanna Sinisalo - Finnish dystopia. I'm not sure I would be nominate it if Worldcon weren't in Finland but I did really enjoy it and it just seems like it would be awesome to have a Finnish author end up on the ballot. All The Birds In The Sky is probably my runner-up.

In Graphic works, The Nameless City and Delilah Dirk and the King's Shilling, although I don't think either will be familiar to enough nominators to make the longlist. (I think all of my novel noms have a shot at the longlist, being either authors who have gotten some Hugo traction before (I think, although I now can't find evidence of this for Yoon Ha Lee), or, in the case of Sinisalo, hypothetically riding a wave of Finnish noms.)

In Dramatic Long, Hidden Figures, Arrival, Ghostbusters, and, I dunno, Rogue One and maybe Star Trek Beyond or X-Men Apocalypse or something? Presumably one of the big franchise movies will win, I just like the idea of trying to get some other stuff onto the ballot. I have not started looking the Locus list, what other people are recommending, etc, so all of this is subject to change as I am reminded of things I've forgotten or try to game my nominations to support things that are both awesome and have a chance.