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
Empire was empire – the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died. Next up in the Hugo nominees is Arkady Martine’s novel of interplanetary intrigue, A Memory Called Empire. The book’s cover art of a lone figure
Next up on the Hugo finalists are two novellas, one set in outer space and other in a Cairo of the early 1900’s that looks very different from the one we know, what with the djinn and all. Click the jump to read reviews of stories by Becky Chambers and P. Djèlí Clark.
The original plan was to review the first of the Hugo-nominated novels this week. However, I’ve been enjoying the book so much that I want to take another few days to read it (check back later week for a review of that). Therefore I’m changing course and reviewing three of the Hugo-nominated novelettes instead. This