Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon. As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
This is the Sixth part and probably final part of this series, since I don't think I'm going to get to Best Series this year. I have previously reviewed the nominees for Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award) and for Best SF/F Short Story, Best SF/F novelette, Best Novella, and Best Novel.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This post will look at the nominations for The Astounding Award for Best New Writer, formerly known as The Campbell Award (and good riddance to that name). I normally mock the awards like the Lodestar that are technically "Not-a-Hugo" but awarded alongside the other Hugo Awards (cmon, seriously?) but the Astounding Award is actually different in that it covers two years of eligibility: these are writers who debuted in the genre over not just 2019, but 2018 as well. This means that one of the nominees here were nominated last year, while others may be nominated a second time in the future if they haven't won already.
I'd actually only read four of the six authors on this ballot before the awards were announced, which was a pleasant surprise: it meant I had two new authors to check out! And I was not disappointed when I did.....
Showing posts with label 2020 Hugo Award Nominee Discussion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2020 Hugo Award Nominee Discussion. Show all posts
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Thursday, July 2, 2020
Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novel
Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon. As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
This is the Fifth part of this series. I have previously reviewed the nominees for Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award) and for Best SF/F Short Story, Best SF/F novelette, and Best Novella.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This post is about what's generally considered the big award, the award for best novel (40K words or more) of 2019. It gets the most attention and the most votes (although Best Series has matched it recently?) and serves not only as a mark of what is one of the best books in the genre, but as a historical marker of what is valued at any given time - at least to the type of voters who make up the Worldcon audience (admittedly a niche group). We can see that pretty clearly with this year's Nebula Award winner, which was a book about a future world ravaged by pandemic forcing live music scenes underground as everyone instead lived in virtual space without human contact.
But that book - A Song for a New Day - did not make the Hugo Ballot. So it's less clear what is going to win this year, and we have some pretty strong books on the ballot.
This is the Fifth part of this series. I have previously reviewed the nominees for Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award) and for Best SF/F Short Story, Best SF/F novelette, and Best Novella.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This post is about what's generally considered the big award, the award for best novel (40K words or more) of 2019. It gets the most attention and the most votes (although Best Series has matched it recently?) and serves not only as a mark of what is one of the best books in the genre, but as a historical marker of what is valued at any given time - at least to the type of voters who make up the Worldcon audience (admittedly a niche group). We can see that pretty clearly with this year's Nebula Award winner, which was a book about a future world ravaged by pandemic forcing live music scenes underground as everyone instead lived in virtual space without human contact.
But that book - A Song for a New Day - did not make the Hugo Ballot. So it's less clear what is going to win this year, and we have some pretty strong books on the ballot.
Thursday, June 25, 2020
Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novella
Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon. As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
This is the 4th part of this series. I have previously reviewed the nominees for:
Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award), Best SF/F Short Story, and Best SF/F Novelette.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This time around we're getting to one of the more popular awards, the Hugo Award for Best Novella. Novellas are defined as being between 17,500 and 40,000 words long, which tends to roughly come out to about 90-200 pages on average (although a lot of novellas don't count as such by the Hugo definition leading to some books missing out). The result is that Novellas are a type of work that fast readers (like myself) might finish in one day, but others will take a few days to get through them, and they have a lot more substance for characters, story, and ideas.
This has also meant that my feelings on the quality of these works is a lot more varied than for the shorter fiction, with some works I just plain didn't like having been nominated in the last few years (same is true of Best Novel for the same reason). And yet this year, despite the works being perhaps the most varied in origin in a number of years (there are only two Tor.com novellas, which used to dominate this category), I like pretty much every novella on the ballot - I scored each one with a rating out of 10 when I posted my initial review, and all of them rated an 8 out of 10 or above.
And yet, there's a clear winner for me here, and an easy favorite......which I'll get to after the jump.
This is the 4th part of this series. I have previously reviewed the nominees for:
Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award), Best SF/F Short Story, and Best SF/F Novelette.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This time around we're getting to one of the more popular awards, the Hugo Award for Best Novella. Novellas are defined as being between 17,500 and 40,000 words long, which tends to roughly come out to about 90-200 pages on average (although a lot of novellas don't count as such by the Hugo definition leading to some books missing out). The result is that Novellas are a type of work that fast readers (like myself) might finish in one day, but others will take a few days to get through them, and they have a lot more substance for characters, story, and ideas.
This has also meant that my feelings on the quality of these works is a lot more varied than for the shorter fiction, with some works I just plain didn't like having been nominated in the last few years (same is true of Best Novel for the same reason). And yet this year, despite the works being perhaps the most varied in origin in a number of years (there are only two Tor.com novellas, which used to dominate this category), I like pretty much every novella on the ballot - I scored each one with a rating out of 10 when I posted my initial review, and all of them rated an 8 out of 10 or above.
And yet, there's a clear winner for me here, and an easy favorite......which I'll get to after the jump.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novelette
Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon. As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
This is the Third part of this series. I have previously reviewed the nominees for Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award) and for Best SF/F Short Story.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
In this post, we're going to continue covering the nominees in the Short Fiction categories with the nominees for Best Novelette. Novelettes are stories between 7500 and 17500 words, basically longer "Short" Stories - you should probably consume these all in a single sitting unlike a Novella or Novel, but it will take you more than a few minutes to do so. But the Hugo Nominees in this category have generally been worth it to do so.
4 of this year's 6 nominees are available freely online, and are linked below when I discuss them. As with my prior posts, I'm going to separate the works below into tiers in addition to just straight ranking them.
This is the Third part of this series. I have previously reviewed the nominees for Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award) and for Best SF/F Short Story.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
In this post, we're going to continue covering the nominees in the Short Fiction categories with the nominees for Best Novelette. Novelettes are stories between 7500 and 17500 words, basically longer "Short" Stories - you should probably consume these all in a single sitting unlike a Novella or Novel, but it will take you more than a few minutes to do so. But the Hugo Nominees in this category have generally been worth it to do so.
4 of this year's 6 nominees are available freely online, and are linked below when I discuss them. As with my prior posts, I'm going to separate the works below into tiers in addition to just straight ranking them.
Saturday, June 13, 2020
Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Short Story
Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon. As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
This is the second part of this series. You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
In this post, we're going to start covering the nominees in the Short Fiction categories - specifically, the nominees for Best Short Story. These are works of no more than 7500 words, and can often be particularly short, such as only a 1-3 pages long. This length requirement does not mean that these stories cannot make a big impact - indeed past and present nominees often come with a punch so strong to make one feel it for a while. Which isn't to say that all of the nominees for this category have to be serious or impactful - fun, wistful, and heartwarming stories get nominated all the time.
That said, we actually don't have any fun stories in this year's batch of nominees; instead we have a sextet of stories with punch, with the lightest two stories being more bittersweet and longing than anything. Which is not to say it isn't a hell of a ballot, and an incredibly hard one to rank - and with the Nebula Award winner in the same category not on this ballot, it's really hard to know what will win. But well, I Have to rank these in order to vote, so I guess I shall.
All of this year's nominees are available online, and as such I have provided links to them for you to read below. I encourage you to do so.
This is the second part of this series. You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
In this post, we're going to start covering the nominees in the Short Fiction categories - specifically, the nominees for Best Short Story. These are works of no more than 7500 words, and can often be particularly short, such as only a 1-3 pages long. This length requirement does not mean that these stories cannot make a big impact - indeed past and present nominees often come with a punch so strong to make one feel it for a while. Which isn't to say that all of the nominees for this category have to be serious or impactful - fun, wistful, and heartwarming stories get nominated all the time.
That said, we actually don't have any fun stories in this year's batch of nominees; instead we have a sextet of stories with punch, with the lightest two stories being more bittersweet and longing than anything. Which is not to say it isn't a hell of a ballot, and an incredibly hard one to rank - and with the Nebula Award winner in the same category not on this ballot, it's really hard to know what will win. But well, I Have to rank these in order to vote, so I guess I shall.
All of this year's nominees are available online, and as such I have provided links to them for you to read below. I encourage you to do so.
Sunday, June 7, 2020
Reviewing the 2020 Hugo Nominees: The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon. As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
ConZealand has basically dropped the ball this year, and Hugo voting is not yet open at the time of this writing, meaning voters will have basically a month to vote on the award, so I'm starting these posts before I even get a chance to log my votes. I know COVID has given them the difficult task of switching to a virtual convention, but they really don't have an excuse for not opening voting even yet, especially when the convention and voting end dates are the earliest in years. Oh well.
The Lodestar Award is in its third year at being awarded with the Hugo Awards. It's the Hugo equivalent of the Norton Award - the Nebula Award for the Best Young Adult (YA) Science Fiction or Fantasy Book of the year - and I remain really glad it was added, because YA has added a ton of excellent works to the genre - and deserves extra recognition for it. I keep waiting for one of my favorite books to make both the Best Novel and Lodestar Award Nomination shortlists, and the quality of YA in the genre is so high that it's only a matter of time....but we're not there yet.
Which is not to say this year's nominees aren't high quality, because this is another tremendous slate of award worthy books, that are really worth your time. I have no idea what's going to take home this award, but am pretty sure whatever will do so will be a worthy winner. But since I have to rank the books in question, here's my ballot....after the jump.
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