The last three Hugo-nominated novelettes are stories by Sarah Pinsker, A.T. Greenblatt, and Isabel Fall. These ones are slightly more…challenging? Thought-provoking? Whatever you want to call it, we’ve got a story about memory, a story about trying to fit in with a group of super-powered heroes, and a very controversial story that I’m not sure
Next up for the Hugo awards, three of the stories nominated for Best Novelette. For this group we’ve got a dystopian commentary on body image (and how society’s treatment of it is so much more poisonous than “don’t you want to be healthy?”), a tale of high school friendship mixed with genetic tampering and revenge,
The third book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “A Lady Astronaut” series is up for a Hugo award this year, and it’s an absolute cracker. Book One told the story of a world-ending disaster and humanity reaching for the stars from the point of view of the women fighting for their place aboard the spaceships. Book
You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small. Nghi Vo’s Hugo-nominated debut novella is set in a fantasy-version of Imperial China, and tells the story of an exiled Empress and her loyal, rabbit-toothed servant girl. Both of them were too lowly to be kept around the palace, but too important
This year’s list of nominated short stories covers a pretty wide range of themes. In this group there are two re-told fairy tales, a portal to another world via a book-loaning program, ruminations on wholesale slaughter by a sentient house, a day in the life (well, week in the life) of a couple of brand
The Hugo Award finalists for 2021 were announced by DisCon III on April 13, 2021. This year’s award ceremony will take place in person (I know, right?) at the 79th Word Science Fiction Convention in Washington DC on December 15-19, 2021. Due to (gestures vaguely in all directions) everything, the award ceremony has been pushed
The winners of the 2020 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend, and while the award ceremony needs a lot of improvement (mispronouncing names in a live ceremony would be careless; doing it repeatedly in a prerecorded video is just bizarre), there were some amazing stories in all the categories, and the wins were well-deserved. Click
Back in its day, at least, it would have been a monument to wealth and beauty. In the present it was a castle that had been killed. The Emperor of the First House (King of the Nine Renewals, the Necrolord Prime) has issued a summons to the other eight Houses. The heir to each House
Two of this year’s Hugo-nominated stories are only available via short-story collection (the same short story collection. C’mon, Ted Chiang, stop hogging the noms), so this week I’ll be reviewing a tale of an interstellar colony that sends an agent back to the ruined homeworld, a roundabout explanation for why a poet would write an