Last Minute Hugo Nominations

by Doctor Science

I really dropped the ball on Hugo nominations this year. Or, to be fair to myself, the time and energy I had expected to spend on the Hugos turned out to be needed for historic levels of political action (and anxiety). Nominations will close on 2017-03-18 06:59 UTC (at 11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time on 17 March).

Snow Goddess Stella gave me time to make up this list, but I then got Mr Dr Science's cold and my brain is now 20% mucous by volume, so I'm not going to do as much of a write-up as I'd hoped of my nominees for Novel, Best Dramatic Long Form, and Best Series. For all, I used the Hugo eligibility Google Doc to jog my memory.

Novel

Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee
My review.

The Summer Dragon, by Todd Lockwood. Lockwood is a first-rate artist, but this is his first published novel. Of course, he did the cover and the interior illustrations. There are a LOT of similarities to Marie Brennan's "Lady Trent" series, for which Lockwood also does the covers and illustrations, but in a good way: they're both exploring the "sort-of-SFnal dragons" space pioneered by Anne McAffrey. I love this stuff.

Lockwood's heroine isn't an outsider who finds out about dragons, she's someone brought up to raise and understand dragons who is finding out about the world. It doesn't seem to be marketed as YA, though it could be (AFAICT). There are violent battles of various sorts, but no sexual violence (though the danger is discussed), and the aftermath of every battle involves dealing with mental/emotional trauma in a way I found unusually realistic. I confess that Lockwood is a better writer than I expected: he includes more descriptive details than most, though I could have used even more (because I love that sort of thing when Tolkien does it and it's rarely imitated).

It's a long book that I read at a breakneck pace, and finished with a bounce and a wish for the next in the series. Warning: though Lockwood hasn't said anything that I can see, I expect the series to be at least 4 volumes, one per season. I'll be there!

Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer. My review

Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff. My review.

Rosewater, by Tade Thompson. Set in a future Nigeria, there's an extra layer of distance (for me) because the characters keep referring to places, history, and food for which I have no clear mental picture. The protagonist keeps saying that he's not a hero, and he really isn't. It's an alien-invasion story, a telepathy story, a noir-ish detective-ish story that my currently-addled brain is having a hard time describing. But it's the best thing I read this year that didn't really have a hopeful ending--I'm at the point where fictional dystopias are unacceptable.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

For this category, I listed all the ones on the spreadsheet that I actually saw -- about 8 -- and whittled it down to 5. I haven't seen enough BDP Short Form to nominate.

• Arrival
• Hidden Figures
• Kubo and the Two Strings
• Moana
• Rogue One

Best Series

Every Worldcon gets to add one "Special" category. This year's is Best Series:

A multi-volume science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, which has appeared in at least three (3) volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2016, at least one of which was published in 2016.

This category takes a lot of strain off my "Best Novel" decisions.

The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone. 2016 book: Four Roads Cross

Temeraire by Naomi Novik. 2016: League of Dragons

The Expanse by James S. A. Corey. 2016: Babylon’s Ashes

The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan. 2016: In the Labyrinth of Drakes

Thessaly by Jo Walton. 2016: Necessity

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Now I'll go look at Artists.

Comments

[Yama]

Tolkeinesque descriptive writing, I love that stuff. Thanks, I will give Todd Lockwood a try.

[Priest]

They've been doing an Ada Palmer seminar over at Crooked Timber the last 10 days, and Henry Farrell just put up a post with his Hugo suggestions for anyone who wants to compare and contrast.

[Matt McIrvin]

I liked Ninefox Gambit a lot--it is both brutal and challenging reading, though. The closest recent comparison would be the Ancillary Justice trilogy, but the machinations in Ninefox Gambit actually grabbed me more.

It may not be intended as such, but I sort of imagined it as the spaceships-and-zap-guns distant future of a fantasy universe with functional magic, in which they've turned their (often cruel and barbaric) ritual magic into a highly developed technology. There are glimmers of hope for something better, though.

[Dave W.]

Since you haven't posted artists yet, I'd like to note that for Best Professional Artist, I’ve been pushing the team of US artist Xin Ye and Finnish artist Lauri Ahonen for their joint work on Erfworld.com – see the wiki page at http://hugonoms2017.wikia.com/wiki/Xin_Ye_and_Lauri_Ahonen . I’ve addressed a number of issues there, such as whether a team nomination is legal (there’s precedent for it, but we won’t get a formal ruling unless they get enough nominations to make the finalists) and how to do it (put them both on the same line of the nomination ballot), along with a list of some particularly notable images from 2016.

I’ve been amazed by the quality of their work since they started working together as a team, and I also think it would be really cool if we could have a Finnish artist on the ballot for the Helsinki Worldcon. Erfworld Book 3 won’t be eligible in the Graphic Work category until next year (serially published works are eligible in the year the last installment is published, and it is still being published at 2 pages a week), but we can still recognize them as artists for the pages they illustrated that were published in 2016.

If you get a chance before the deadline, check their work out, and see if you think they deserve a place on your ballot.

[Doctor Science]

Thanks, Dave! I saw a comment you made at Rocket Stack Rank and checked them out, but they're not really to my taste. As you can see from my artist post, I *did* make it a point to include a Finn, and also a Swede, one in each category. Hey, maybe they'll BOTH win!

[Nombrilisme Vide]

Four years late, and mostly mentioning it up since I picked it up based on recommendations here, but I read Redshirts Saturday night. If I may resort to a tired cliche... I want those (5? 6?) hours of my life back.

I can definitely see why it won a Hugo, but that was painful. As the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest once eloquently said of a non-trivial portion of their entries, it was bad writing masquerading as good writing masquerading as bad writing...