Whew, made it! All entries in the first four categories of the 2018 Hugo nominees read and reviewed before the award ceremony on August 19. Short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels, including the novel Provenance by Ann Leckie. And in a list of stories that include murder mysteries, con artist capers, incomprehensible alien etiquette, races
“The saying goes, ‘The black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives.’ To which a wise teacher said, ‘But as with all waters, one can swim against the tide.’” We start with the the head abbot of the Grand Monastery, climbing the eight hundred steps to the Great High Palace of the Protectorate.
The crew of the generation spaceship Dormire wakes up in the middle of a zero-gee slaughter. Floating droplets of blood are everywhere, bodies are hanging in mid air roughly wherever they were stabbed, or poisoned, or strangled. The victims are…the crew. The ship is run entirely by clones, who have no memory of the last twenty-six years. Mur Lafferty’s
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Hugo-nominated novel is set in a Manhattan where some of the worst fears of sea-level rise have already taken place. Don’t expect a Mad-Max-On-Waterskis type of situation though. The year 2140 is far enough into the future that there are plenty of technological advances to keep a 50-foot sea-level rise from getting into the
This is actually the second novella in Nnedi Okorafor’s “Binti” series, but it’s worth it to pick up the first one too in order to get the whole story. (Binti won the Hugo for Best Novella in 2015, and it’s only about a hundred pages. Go on, I’ll wait…) All done? Okay, in the first book, Binti
I wanted to give myself some extra time to catch up with all the Hugo Nominees, just in case one of my favorite authors decides to release something between now and August 19 (or if I wanted to take a week off to just read comic books. I’M ONLY HUMAN.) so this week’s review will
It starts with an interrupted mutiny, and the death of an Emperor; two unrelated events taking place in the sprawling mass of humanity that is the Interdependency. What we start to realize though is that these are just the first steps in a dance that’s eventually going to lead to the end of the Interdependency,
Longer than a short-story but shorter than a novella, six entries and each one packed with as much world building as you can fit into 15000 words or so. Click the jump for a review of this year’s Hugo Award finalists for Best Novelette.
The title plays off of a decades-old murder mystery by Agatha Christie, but this Hugo-nominated novella is something quite new. Sarah Pinsker (yes, the main character has the same name as the author. It doesn’t really play into the story as much as you’d think) has been invited to attend a convention. Specifically, an alternate-universe