I adore short stories; it’s my favorite medium. A really good short story can convey an entire world and the backstory of the characters in the shortest amount of space, and make you care about all of it. This year’s Hugo Nominees are all excellent examples, while being as different from each other as possible. Click
It’s that time again, the finalists for the 2018 Hugo Awards have been announced! I’ve only read four of the 114 nominees this year so far, so I have quite a bit of catching up to do… This will be the same format as last year: between now and when the winners are announced on
The Hugo Awards are this Friday, 7:30 PM Eastern European time (that’s 12:30 in the afternoon for those of us on the East Coast). The Worldcon 75 youtube channnel should be streaming the ceremony live, just in case you’d like to watch the announcement for Best Novel (or Best Editor Short Form, if that’s what
The clock’s ticking; we only have a few more weeks before the 2017 Hugo Award ceremony in August. Since I think it would be a crime to leave any of the shorter fiction entries unread, this week I’m reviewing three of the nominees for Best Novella at once. Click the jump for a review of
Alice fell down a rabbit hole to Wonderland. Dorothy was whisked away to Oz by a tornado. Wendy, Michael, and John flew away to Never Land with Peter Pan, and Harry Potter could just go to Platform 9¾ whenever he needed to enter the wizarding world. Literature is full of examples of children who stepped
Father Earth did not always hate life, the lorists say. He hates because he cannot forgive the loss of his only child. The first book of The Broken Earth series introduced us to the earthquake-prone world of Stillness, plus the orogenes who calm earthquakes, and the Fulcrum Guardians who keep the orogenes in line. It
Hands up, anyone who knows the difference between a novelette and a novella. Anyone? Okay, a novelette is a work of fiction that clocks in at anywhere from 7500 – 17500 words; basically it longer than a short-story but shorter than a novella. Everyone take notes because there’ll be a test later. This year the
Okay, it’s time to buckle down and start trying to see how many of this year’s Hugo Nominees we can review before the awards are given on August 11. Everyone who reads this column probably knows by now that I’m really fond of short stories, so let’s start with those. Click the jump for a short (naturally,
It’s the quintessential American Dream: a respectable government job and a house in the DC suburbs. The picture wouldn’t be complete without a beautiful wife and two happy children, or at least that’s what the Vision thinks. So he went to a lot of trouble and made them. Nominated for a Hugo Award this year,