Month: April 2017

Novel: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

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Patricia and Laurence are rather odd kids.  Patricia can talk to birds – well, so can pretty much anyone, but not everyone gets meaningful answers.  Laurence, meanwhile, has an intuitive understanding of science and technology and is building his own emergent artificial intelligence as a hobby project.  Both of them have fairly miserable school lives, and they come to rely on and trust each other, at least until circumstances pull them apart.  When they meet again, as young adults, both of them have progressed along their unconventional career tracks: Patricia is a fully-qualified witch, educated at an ancient magical academy, while Laurence is part of a technological cabal operating somewhere way ahead of the cutting edge.  Both groups are aware that the world is in danger, from a gradual but accelerating process of decay and disruption called the Unraveling.  Both groups have plans for dealing with this.  Unfortunately… well, they say no battle plan survives contact with the enemy; in this case, the plans will be hard put to survive contact with a friend….

This is one that’s hard to categorize; its deliberately lightweight tone, and the youth of the two main characters, might make it a young adult novel, but there’s a bit too much sex, and a lot too much moral complexity, for it to sit happily in that category.  It’s unabashedly a cross between SF and fantasy, with both ancient magic and high technology at work.  Fortunately, I don’t have to decide where to shelve it, I just have to read it and decide a) if I like it, and b) if it’s any good.  I will answer “yes” to both, there, unequivocally.  The Bildungsroman elements are, I suppose, fairly straightforward, but they’re really there to set up the main thrust of the story – to build up the dynamic between Patricia and Laurence,  so that, when the chips are down, they will love and trust each other enough, even though they’re not supposed to.

The essence of drama (so they say) lies in conflict, and the conflict here is not so much good against evil, as good against good.  The Unraveling is, pretty obviously, an evil, and both Patricia’s and Laurence’s people have their ideas about how to fight it.  The problem is that one group’s bold plan to save the world looks very much like an apocalyptic existential threat to the other group…. It makes for complications, so much so that our heroes have to take dangerous risks and pay steep prices in order to save the day.

Save the day they do – at its heart, this is an optimistic book, and one with positive messages about love, and trust, and the building of bridges between disparate world-views.  At the grand finale, it’s a synthesis of science, magic and ordinary human virtues which wins through.  I’ve never been a fan of the whole C.P. Snow “two cultures” divide, personally, so I found myself heartily approving of All the Birds in the Sky on that basis alone.  (And it’s nice to read something positive for a change.  I have been up to my eyes in Joe Abercrombie and Daniel Polansky recently, you can’t move in here for all the grimdark.)

As per that dictum about the definition of the novel, you can find faults with this one.  The early Bildungsroman stuff might, possibly, hit slightly too predictable a set of story beats… and there’s at least one plot thread left hanging (the Nameless Order of Assassins to which Theodolphus Rose belonged, and which I thought was going to be important, but which just sort of faded out of the story after Rose was turned into an ornamental netsuke.)  And, as I said, the tone of the writing is deliberately lightweight, and that sort of stylistic choice won’t suit everyone.  But this is just me carping and niggling about what’s actually, on the whole, a damn good book.  Another one where I’m going to have to think carefully.)

(There will now be a delay before I do any more of the novel finalists.  The reason for this is, well, Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning is inexplicably unavailable, at least in ebook format, in the UK, so I haven’t read it.  And not only have I not read Cixin Liu’s Death’s End yet, I have (err, umm) inexplicably failed to read the preceding volume, The Dark Forest, as well.  So there will be a pause while I do that, then.  Talk amongst yourselves.)

Novel: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

~ stevejwright ~ 1 Comment

Time to start reviewing Hugo finalists for 2017!  And, gosh, I am efficient, for I have already looked at two of the novels, The Obelisk Gate and Ninefox Gambit, and, well, I don’t really have anything cogent to add to my previous comments.  N. K. Jemisin’s intricately-written bleak fantasy and Yoon Ha Lee’s storming space opera with the slightly baffling world-building… are both books I enjoyed, are neither of them without flaws, but remain solid and viable contenders in my opinion.  I’m not immediately required to decide which one’s better, so I will put that decision off until nearer the deadline.

However.  This time I’m talking about another finalist, Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit, billed as the second book of her “Wayfarers”… ongoing thing, I don’t know if it’s a trilogy or an open-ended series or what… the first one of which was The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, which attracted a lot of mostly favourable responses last year.  Personally, I thought it was… likeable, but a bit diffuse, low-key, and slightly rambling.

There’s less of the rambling in A Closed and Common Orbit, which follows one ex-member of the previous book’s cast… sort of.  Lovelace, the shipboard artificial intelligence of the spaceship Wayfarer, was caught in a sort of doomed romance with the ship’s engineer… at the end of the book, she had been downloaded into an illegal humanoid android body, as part of a situation whose tragic side effect was to reset her to her factory defaults and wipe out all memories of the relationship.  Now calling herself Sidra, and coming to grips with the whole human-appearing thing, the AI lands on the planet Coriol, where she needs to find her feet in society and also avoid the notice of the authorities, who will shut down her illegal body and delete her if they catch her.  Fortunately, Sidra falls in with Pepper, a freelance fixer and tech expert who is happy to help an AI on the lam.  Twenty years before, Pepper was Jane 23, one of a batch of cloned slaves working in a tech reclamation plant; when a freak accident opened up an escape route to the outside world, she took it – to find herself wandering in a junkyard infested with feral dogs, which did not offer her much in the way of prospects.  Jane was saved when she ran into Owl, the still-functioning AI of a scrapped shuttlecraft; with Owl’s help, she survived and eventually escaped, and now she’s paying it forward by helping Sidra.  And she’s also trying to pay it back by finding out what happened to Owl after her eventual rescue – which is something, it turns out, Sidra might be able to help with.

The book’s written in alternating chapters, following the careers of Sidra in the present and Jane in the past; their situations are by no means parallel, but they echo each other in ways, as both of them find out more about what it means to be human, kick out a bit at their older and wiser mentors in the process, face some trials and some dangers…. The planet Coriol, where Sidra and Pepper end up, is tidally locked with its moon and its sun (the geometry of this does my head in a bit, but it is possible, I think), but the “closed and common orbit” of the title doesn’t so much refer to this, as to the interlocking character development arcs.  A Closed and Common Orbit is more focused than the amiably rambling The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet – and is, I think, a better book for that.

It’s all still pretty low-key, though, and that is interesting in itself.  The “Galactic Commons” in which Pepper and Sidra live is, well, a pleasant enough place if you’re not a cloned slave or a rogue AI; it’s neither an overt utopia nor a strong dystopia, it’s simply a place where people live – mostly, indeed, non-human people; though the protagonists may be human or passing for it, humans aren’t a majority, or even a significantly important factor, in the everyday life of the Galactic Commons.  And Pepper and Sidra don’t get up to anything wildly world-changing, either; Sidra comes to terms with her own life as an illegally-embodied AI, but she doesn’t go off to lead a crusade for AI rights or anything like that, for instance.  The GC’s hang-up about AIs in humanoid bodies, interestingly, is presented simply as a commercial thing – it makes it a lot easier for people to see the ubiquitous AIs as, well, commodities instead of self-determining beings.  Even some of Pepper’s tech-head friends, who are happy to help modify and extend AIs, think this way… even, to some extent, Sidra herself, when she’s considering what memories she wants to keep, or how to modify her own program code.

The “Wayfarers” novels are, if you like, blue-collar SF – stories not about the movers and shakers in this future world, but about ordinary people simply trying to get by in it.  And, in the process of telling these fairly mundane stories, Chambers sneaks in a whole lot of rather interesting questions about what it means to be an ordinary person… particularly when you can be a person who’s been constructed to order, or a non-human with a novel and interesting set of biological, cultural and personal imperatives.  In her low-key, diffuse and amiable way, Chambers has a habit of sidling up to the reader and planting some questions and some ideas that you do, actually, have to think quite hard about.  It’s deceptively effective writing, that.

Of course, sometimes she plants some ideas and the reader, or this reader at least, quirks a quizzical eyebrow and goes “hold on a minute”.  The technical details are one place where the book, err, slightly falls down.  I have no idea how the algae-powered space drive is supposed to work, but I’m prepared to let that one slide… I can’t do the same, I’m afraid, with the “kinetic energy harvesters” that power Sidra’s illegal body kit.  It’s pretty much explicit, she is powered by the kinetic energy of her own movements, and is thus an honest-to-goodness, no-holds-barred perpetual motion machine.  (The body is initially charged with an external “boost”, which I like to think comes from the rotational energy of Isaac Newton turning in his grave.)  But this is only one flaw in a novel which, the more I think about it, is otherwise a damn fine piece of work.  (And my favourite definition of the novel remains “a prose fiction of some length that has something wrong with it”, so there we are.)

Viable Hugo contender?  Absolutely.  Its position on my ballot? … Well, we’ll see.  More stuff to read, first.

And the Hugo finalists for 2017 are….

~ stevejwright ~ 4 Comments

List shamelessly ganked from the Hugo awards website, inane additional commentary is all my own.

Best Novel

2078 ballots cast for 652 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 156 to 480.

  • All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Books / Titan Books)
  • A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager US)
  • Death’s End, by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor Books / Head of Zeus)
  • Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris Books)
  • The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)
  • Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer (Tor Books)

Well, this all looks sound enough to me.  I nominated The Obelisk Gate and Ninefox Gambit myself; of the others, one’s a book I’ve read, two are sequels to books I’ve read, one I’m not allowed to read in ebook format in the UK, which is annoying.

Best Novella

1410 ballots cast for 187 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 167 to 511.

  • The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle (Tor.com publishing)
  • The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson (Tor.com publishing)
  • Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)
  • Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum Literary Agency)
  • A Taste of Honey, by Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com publishing)
  • This Census-Taker, by China Miéville (Del Rey / Picador)

Three of my nominees on this list, and I’ve heard good things about all of the others.  Again, I’m pretty cheerful about this lot.  (This Census-Taker is a “hostage” nomination on the Rabid Puppies slate – that is, a legitimate nominee that they have added in, either in the hope that they will turn legitimate voters away from it, or that they can claim credit if it wins.  Silly.  It was one of my nominees too – a good one, if maddeningly oblique.)

Best Novelette

1097 ballots cast for 295 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 74 to 268.

  • Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex, by Stix Hiscock (self-published)
  • “The Art of Space Travel”, by Nina Allan (Tor.com , July 2016)
  • “The Jewel and Her Lapidary”, by Fran Wilde (Tor.com publishing, May 2016)
  • “The Tomato Thief”, by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016)
  • “Touring with the Alien”, by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld Magazine, April 2016)
  • “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay”, by Alyssa Wong (Uncanny Magazine, May 2016)

I’ve read two of these, and nominated one myself (“You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay”.)  I remain convinced that the Nina Allen one is a good story, but not a science fiction story, despite the presence of a manned Mars expedition.  There may be more on this later, you have been warned.  Oh, and one of these six finalists is not entirely a legitimate nominee, see if you can guess which one it is.

Best Short Story

1275 ballots cast for 830 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 87 to 182.

  • “The City Born Great”, by N. K. Jemisin (Tor.com, September 2016)
  • “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers”, by Alyssa Wong (Tor.com, March 2016)
  • “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies”, by Brooke Bolander (Uncanny Magazine, November 2016)
  • “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)
  • “That Game We Played During the War”, by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, March 2016)
  • “An Unimaginable Light”, by John C. Wright (God, Robot, Castalia House)

Only read (and nominated) one of these, “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies”; looking forward to reading the rest, with, perhaps, one exception.  I’m expecting the slate’s pick, by my evil twin John C. NoRelation Wright, to be his usual pile of ten-dollar words heaped on top of three cents’ worth of plot and characterization.  Go ahead, John, prove me wrong.  Please.

Best Related Work

1122 ballots cast for 344 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 88 to 424.

  • The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley (Tor Books)
  • The Princess Diarist, by Carrie Fisher (Blue Rider Press)
  • Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg, by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Fairwood)
  • The View From the Cheap Seats, by Neil Gaiman (William Morrow / Harper Collins)
  • The Women of Harry Potter posts, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com)
  • Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)

Two read-and-nominated here.  It looks like a good year for this category (Neil Gaiman is a slate “hostage”, as he was last year; it didn’t do him any harm, and his attitude of “these people are not even worth ignoring” seems pretty sensible to me.  I’m not ignoring them, true, but no one ever said I was sensible.)

Best Graphic Story

842 ballots cast for 441 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 71 to 221.

  • Black Panther, Volume 1: A Nation Under Our Feet, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze (Marvel)
  • Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, written by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image)
  • Ms. Marvel, Volume 5: Super Famous, written by G. Willow Wilson, illustrated by Takeshi Miyazawa (Marvel)
  • Paper Girls, Volume 1, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, colored by Matthew Wilson, lettered by Jared Fletcher (Image)
  • Saga, Volume 6, illustrated by Fiona Staples, written by Brian K. Vaughan, lettered by Fonografiks (Image)
  • The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man, written by Tom King, illustrated by Gabriel Hernandez Walta (Marvel)

Two read-and-nominated here, Black Panther and Monstress…. rather regret not seeing a couple more of mine; it’s rather a safe and predictable looking list.  Not that there’s anything remotely wrong about Ms. Marvel or Saga getting on – but I’d have liked to see something maybe a little wider-ranging.  I thought Mooncop was good – and I will continue to recommend ongoing webcomic Stand Still, Stay Silent for as long as it stays a) active, b) good and c) eligible.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

1733 ballots cast for 206 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 240 to 1030.

  • Arrival, screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on a short story by Ted Chiang, directed by Denis Villeneuve (21 Laps Entertainment/FilmNation Entertainment/Lava Bear Films)
  • Deadpool, screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick, directed by Tim Miller (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Marvel Entertainment/Kinberg Genre/The Donners’ Company/TSG Entertainment)
  • Ghostbusters, screenplay by Katie Dippold & Paul Feig, directed by Paul Feig (Columbia Pictures/LStar Capital/Village Roadshow Pictures/Pascal Pictures/Feigco Entertainment/Ghostcorps/The Montecito Picture Company)
  • Hidden Figures, screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, directed by Theodore Melfi (Fox 2000 Pictures/Chernin Entertainment/Levantine Films/TSG Entertainment)
  • Rogue One, screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, directed by Gareth Edwards (Lucasfilm/Allison Shearmur Productions/Black Hangar Studios/Stereo D/Walt Disney Pictures)
  • Stranger Things, Season One, created by the Duffer Brothers (21 Laps Entertainment/Monkey Massacre)

A bunch of good films, fair enough.  Rogue One and Arrival were my own picks…. There has been ongoing discussion about Hidden Figures; my own preference was to nominate it as a Best Related Work, but eh, it’s a film, it fits in this category just fine.  Slate “hostage” here is Deadpool, which is unlikely to matter one way or the other.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

1159 ballots cast for 569 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 91 to 193.

  • Black Mirror: “San Junipero”, written by Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris (House of Tomorrow)
  • Doctor Who: “The Return of Doctor Mysterio”, written by Steven Moffat, directed by Ed Bazalgette (BBC Cymru Wales)
  • The Expanse: “Leviathan Wakes”, written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, directed by Terry McDonough (SyFy)
  • Game of Thrones: “Battle of the Bastards”, written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, directed by Miguel Sapochnik (HBO)
  • Game of Thrones: “The Door”, written by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, directed by Jack Bender (HBO)
  • Splendor & Misery [album], by Clipping (Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes)

Interesting.  The Who episode, of course, I nominated… otherwise, well, episodes of Black Mirror and GoT that I didn’t (but they are none the less valid for that),  the opener for the big new skiffy series based on the ongoing book series, and… a music album?  Well, that’s going to be an intriguing listen, at least.  (Albums have cropped up in the Dramatic Presentation categories before – I even nominated Public Service Broadcasting’s The Race for Space myself, in a previous year, IIRC – but it doesn’t happen often.  Maybe it should – see comments above, about lack of adventurousness in the Graphic Story category.)

Best Editor, Short Form

951 ballots cast for 191 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 149 to 229.

  • John Joseph Adams
  • Neil Clarke
  • Ellen Datlow
  • Jonathan Strahan
  • Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
  • Sheila Williams

Strahan and Datlow were on my own nominations ballot… and everyone else could have been, if I’d been in a slightly different mood when I submitted it.  This category will require thought.

Best Editor, Long Form

752 ballots cast for 148 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 83 to 201.

  • Vox Day
  • Sheila E. Gilbert
  • Liz Gorinsky
  • Devi Pillai
  • Miriam Weinberg
  • Navah Wolfe

Gorinsky, Pillai and Weinberf were on my own nominations ballot… Sheila Gilbert might have been; I don’t know the name of Navah Wolfe, but am keen to find out more.  There is a slate nomination, can you guess who it might be?  If he put as much effort into editing as he does into trolling, he might deserve a legitimate nomination.  Or maybe not.

Best Professional Artist

817 ballots cast for 387 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 53 to 143.

  • Galen Dara
  • Julie Dillon
  • Chris McGrath
  • Victo Ngai
  • John Picacio
  • Sana Takeda

Only one of mine (Galen Dara) got through, but all the rest are good.  (The slate submitted two nominees here, neither of whom had produced any qualifying work in  2016.  Well done, that slate.)

Best Semiprozine

857 ballots cast for 103 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 80 to 434.

  • Beneath Ceaseless Skies, editor-in-chief and publisher Scott H. Andrews
  • Cirsova Heroic Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, edited by P. Alexander
  • GigaNotoSaurus, edited by Rashida J. Smith
  • Strange Horizons, edited by Niall Harrison, Catherine Krahe, Vajra Chandrasekera, Vanessa Rose Phin, Li Chua, Aishwarya Subramanian, Tim Moore, Anaea Lay, and the Strange Horizons staff
  • Uncanny Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, Julia Rios, and podcast produced by Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky
  • The Book Smugglers, edited by Ana Grilo and Thea James

My nominees here were Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and GigaNotoSaurus.  Two of the others are just fine, too.  The slate pick here was Cirsova, which I have looked at, and found well up to the slate’s usual standards.

Best Fanzine

610 ballots cast for 152 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 53 to 159.

  • Castalia House Blog, edited by Jeffro Johnson
  • Journey Planet, edited by James Bacon, Chris Garcia, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Helena Nash, Errick Nunnally, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, Chuck Serface, and Erin Underwood
  • Lady Business, edited by Clare, Ira, Jodie, KJ, Renay, and Susan
  • nerds of a feather, flock together, edited by The G, Vance Kotrla, and Joe Sherry
  • Rocket Stack Rank, edited by Greg Hullender and Eric Wong
  • SF Bluestocking, edited by Bridget McKinney

None of mine made it in, here (File 770 declined nomination), which says more about the health of the fanzine scene than it does about evil gatekeepers turning away people like me.  Obvious troll pick is obvious.

Best Fancast

690 ballots cast for 253 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 76 to 109.

  • The Coode Street Podcast, presented by Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan
  • Ditch Diggers, presented by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace
  • Fangirl Happy Hour, presented by Ana Grilo and Renay Williams
  • Galactic Suburbia, presented by Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce and Tansy Rayner Roberts, produced by Andrew Finch
  • The Rageaholic, presented by RazörFist
  • Tea and Jeopardy, presented by Emma Newman with Peter Newman

My nominees are Coode Street and Tea and Jeopardy.  I remember the slate’s pick (Rageaholic) from last year, he was the guy whose schtick was being VERY VERY SHOUTY ALL THE TIME.  If he’s quietened down a bit this year, fine, but my hopes aren’t high.  Galactic Suburbia, of course, is a previous winner; the other two I don’t know, but the names involved look promising.    Though, again, I suspect I’m going to spend a lot of time being vaguely frustrated about listening to a conversation I can’t be part of.

Best Fan Writer

802 ballots cast for 275 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 80 to 152.

  • Mike Glyer
  • Jeffro Johnson
  • Natalie Luhrs
  • Foz Meadows
  • Abigail Nussbaum
  • Chuck Tingle

My only nominee here is Mike Glyer; Abigail Nussbaum and Natalie Luhrs were bumped out of this category by slate picks in previous years, so I’m glad they finally got their chance, which they deserve.  I’ve read Foz Meadows, too, and she’s good.  Chuck Tingle’s epic counter-trolling of the Rabids last year… well, it’s a thing that happened, and not a bad thing at that, but even voting the good Dr. Tingle a Hugo feels like it’s paying the Puppies too much attention, to me.  Slate pick here is Jeffro Johnson; I look forward to his commentary about exciting new SFF authors like Ted Tubb and Eando Binder.

Best Fan Artist

528 ballots cast for 242 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 39 to 121.

  • Ninni Aalto
  • Alex Garner
  • Vesa Lehtimäki
  • Likhain (M. Sereno)
  • Spring Schoenhuth
  • Mansik Yang

I recall Spring Schoenhuth and Ninni Aalto from 2015, and I’ve heard good stuff about Likhain.  Unfortunately, there are two slate nominees spoiling this category, Alex Garner and Mansik Yang.  No idea what they do; I’m sure I’ll find out.  (Anime babes?  Monster Manual illustrations?  Exploding spaceships? Unfunny cartoons?)

Worldcon 75 has elected to exercise its authority under the WSFS Constitution to add an additional category for 2017 only:

Best Series
A multi-volume science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, appearing in at least three (3) volumes consisting in total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the previous calendar year, at least one volume of which was published in the previous calendar year. If any series and a subset series thereof both receive sufficient nominations to appear on the final ballot, only the version which received more nominations shall appear.

Note that there is a pending amendment to the WSFS Constitution that, if ratified by the 2017 WSFS Business Meeting, will add Best Series as a new permanent category. The definition above is based on the wording of the proposed new category.

1393 votes for 290 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 129 to 325.

  • The Craft Sequence, by Max Gladstone (Tor Books)
  • The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey (Orbit US / Orbit UK)
  • The October Daye Books, by Seanan McGuire (DAW / Corsair)
  • The Peter Grant / Rivers of London series, by Ben Aaronovitch (Gollancz / Del Rey / DAW / Subterranean)
  • The Temeraire series, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Harper Voyager UK)
  • The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)

I suspect much reading will have to be done, here – at least enough to get a feel for the series as a whole.  My only nominee here was Max Gladstone, so at least I know that one; I’m very familiar with the Vorkosigan books, and I know at least part of the Corey and Aaronovitch series, too.  Despite multiple recommendations, and liking Uprooted, I’ve yet to make a start on Toby Daye or Temeraire, though…. Well.  There’s time yet to dip in, at least.

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Award for the best new( professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2014 or 2015, sponsored by Dell Magazines. (Not a Hugo Award, but administered along with the Hugo Awards.)

933 votes for 260 nominees.
Votes for finalists ranged from 88 to 255.

  • Sarah Gailey (1st year of eligibility)
  • J. Mulrooney (1st year of eligibility)
  • Malka Older (2nd year of eligibility)
  • Ada Palmer (1st year of eligibility)
  • Laurie Penny (2nd year of eligibility)
  • Kelly Robson (2nd year of eligibility)

Laurie Penny is the only one of my nominees to make it; four of the five others look good, though.  (The last is slate pick J. Mulrooney.  Previous experience with the slate picks has not left me optimistic about J. Mulrooney.  If I’m lucky, s/he will at least be able to punctuate correctly.  If I’m lucky.)

So that’s the list.  Now to start reading and thinking, I suppose.