“We are here, exactly where we should be, at exactly the right moment, because we are the Raven, and we are magnificent.” As the longest of the Hugo-nominated novels, I gave myself an extra week to get through all 643 pages of The Raven Scholar. I shouldn’t have worried, because I finished the whole thing
Really good short stories, or at least the ones I like the most, hold up a mirror to something going on now, and either act as a cautionary tale, or an inspirational one. This year’s Hugo-nominated short stories cover the range from dystopian, to near-dystopian, to utterly weird futuristic situations that everyone except the protagonist
…arguing over what could be causing such irregular, constant, chaotic transmissions. All of us dancing about the question of Life, could it be life? A whole civilization with their radios turned up to top volume, down there in the dark… Like Tchaikovsky’s book Alien Clay, the main character of Shroud and all her colleagues are
…It was January 8, 2064. His last recorded memory was from July 31st, 2063.. Waking up from a deep sleep to find yourself in a restaurant that’s about to be flooded by an apocalyptic storm is disorienting enough. Much worse when you and your coworkers are robots, your employers have left town ahead of their
Fans of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (deliciously cozy fantasy) and Bookshops & Bonedust (also cozy fantasy, but with more zombies) will find a lot to like about Brigands & Breadknives, even though it’s the least cozy of the trilogy. On purpose! Setting up a coffee shop or rescuing a struggling bookstore were fun ideas
Two of the remaining three novelettes this year could be considered dystopian (depending on how negatively you view the universe of Martha Wells’s Murderbot series), and the third takes place in America in what could be called the Golden Age, just not for everyone. “Never Eaten Vegetables” – H.H. Pak She glides through the night
How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury? I went into Freya Marske’s novella completely cold, and I thought maybe this was going to be a humorous retelling of Cinderella. Ha ha, a poor house that has to slave away for its evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters, how droll. Nope. This particular retelling is
Let’s take a break from hard-hitting topics for a while and bring in some frikkin’ whimsy. The novellas by Amal El-Mohtar and Olvia Waite have wildly different settings: a small town on the border of Fae and the banks of a river where the water is highly-concentrated magic, versus a detective story in space. But
Catherynne Valente, Scott Lynch, and Cameron Reed all have novelettes up for a Hugo Award this year, and the scope of the conflict in each of them is wildly different. The first three novelettes I’m reviewing range from a dystopian story of generational wealth-hoarding running smack into one girl’s complicated relationship with her own body,