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
If there are two words that can describe this year’s nominees for Best Short Story, it would be “triumphant” and “bleak”. Every one of them features someone overcoming a trial, whether it’s living life on their own terms, or making the hard decision to sacrifice their life for others. These are all lyrical and fierce,
The Hugo Award finalists for 2020 have been announced! The convention (July 29 – August 2) will be online only, for obvious reasons. So there’s less than three months before the award ceremony, and between this year and the retro 1945 awards there are 186 separate finalists and I’ve read…two of the novellas, and a
By an odd coincidence, all three of the Hugo-nominated novelettes I saved for last are about memory and death. Hard-hitting stuff here. They’re also about the stories we tell and why we tell them: to remember the past, to link us to each other, and to make us reach for something more than just survival.
“Dr. York. What does the upturn on that chart represent?” “That…that is when the oceans begin to boil.” Mary Robinette Kowal’s Hugo-nominated novel starts in a 1952 America that’s just slightly different from ours. Thomas E. Dewey defeated Harry S. Truman, and then gave famous rocket scientist (and former Nazi) Wernher von Braun the leeway
This last flood, the one you call the Big Water, ended the Fifth World and began the Sixth. It opened the passage for those like myself to return to the world. The climate disaster that left a lot of the world underwater also left the Navajo reservation mostly untouched. Not that the Dinétah is an
I’m going to space out the Hugo Award Best Novelette entries a little this year to try to make them last. Click the jump for a brief review of three stories of invasion, transformation, and memory.