Received my email today from WorldCon 76, telling me Hugo nominations are open and giving me a link to nominate with. Apparently, some people are being told their names are #REF! #REF!, but I’m not, I’m just me, and now I’m thinking about what to nominate.
I will probably be thinking about this for quite some time, but I might as well mention some of the stuff that’s already got a firm lock on my nominations slots.
First off, as previously mentioned, Jeannette Ng’s throbbing gothic first novel Under the Pendulum Sun, while not perfect, is quite impressive enough to get her my vote for the Campbell – she has some short story credits for 2016, but I can’t find anything else, so she’s eligible. And, IMO, deserves it.
Two completed trilogies this year, Robert Jackson Bennett’s “Divine Cities” trilogy (concluding with City of Miracles) and Peter Newman’s “The Vagrant” trilogy (concluding with The Seven). Bennett’s saga of lurid political machinations, high adventure, and the reconstruction of society after the deaths of its gods… has a lot going for it, I think, and has regrettably been overlooked in the Hugos. The final chapter, starring the inimitable Sigrud and a villain who, although it isn’t safe to speak his name, is no cheap Voldemort Nokov (I’m here all week folks), is well worth reading. As is The Seven, the conclusion to a more than slightly subversive science-fantasy trilogy – a sort of Warhammer setting for grown-ups, if you like. With the shape-changing body horror of the invading infernals on one side, and the steely determination of the angelic Seven on the other, Newman’s characters find themselves looking at their situation and saying, “err, right, guys… you know the whole endless genocidal war without pity or remorse or quarter thing? That one you’ve got planned? Could we sort of not do that, please?” It’s more fun than it ought to be, and more humane than you’d think it could be. Vote for the goat, folks, vote for the goat.
Oh, yeah, there was another trilogy that got finished in 2017, wasn’t there? And it was called “The Broken Earth” and it was by N.K. Jemisin and the final volume was The Stone Sky, and do I need to pass any further comment? On what might well be the most significant fantasy trilogy of the decade? No, I suspect I do not.
A few other things have already sprung to my mind. There was something of a flap about Rocket Stack Rank, a few months back, with people accusing Greg Hullender of using it as a bully pulpit to push retrograde opinions… I raised my eyebrows at this, because I disagree with Greg Hullender about virtually every rating he posts anyway, so it’s hard for me to see his opinions as unduly influential, given that I just ignore them all anyway. Regardless, Greg and Eric Wong do a hell of a lot of work collating other reviews (and even just listing so much short fiction is a full time job in itself), so RSR continues to be an invaluable fannish resource, and it continues to get a nom from me. Mention of this leads me to a short story Greg disliked, Andy Dudak’s “Cryptic Female Choice” in Interzone 271, which I liked rather a lot, so it’s going on my noms ballot. Of course, Andy Cox is still editing Interzone, and Dave Senecal’s covers for 2017’s issues have been interesting (even if not entirely to my taste), so there’s a couple more nominations right there.
Then there’s the non-written categories – Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) could get interesting; I don’t think there are any individual episodes of Star Trek: Discovery which need trouble the judges, but there were a couple of stand-out episodes of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, and of course the good Doctor has been busy this year, so….
In fact, I suspect I’m not going to have a lot of trouble filling up that nominations form – well, apart from the new Young Adult category, maybe (I may be childish, but it’s a long while since I could pass for a Young Adult.) However, I’m sure it deserves more thought, and maybe more reading, than I’ve yet given it. So I will stop now, I think.
(Technically, I suppose I’m eligible as a fan writer myself. Seems weirdly presumptuous. Anyway, I don’t know what particular pieces might merit it – my secret vice of Star Trek Online fanfic, or my openly displayed poor judgement in tackling A Throne of Bones? Both of those seem to deserve a poke in the eye more than an actual award. Never mind.)
stevejwright 
Any thoughts on candidates for the retro-Hugos this year?
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Errr… I will have! At some point. Honest.
(I did briefly glance at ISFDB’s novels list… actually, there was quite a marked contrast with 1941; I think the war must have been hitting SF a lot harder by that point. Front runners, to my mind, include Das Glasperlenspiel, C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, and maybe Leiber’s Conjure Wife, with all its 1940s attitudes….)
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Perelandra was published in 1943, according to the ISFDB. Aren’t we looking at 1942 for the candidates this year (for what would have been the 1943 Hugos)? Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters came out in 1942, and seems to be the one 1942 novel in that list that I’ve read. That’s worthy of a nomination, but I’d like to hear other recommendations.
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You are of course quite right (and should probably be getting suggestions from someone who has mastered basic skills like counting, instead of me 😉 ).
So far, the only other things I’ve found that I’m vaguely familiar with are “Doc” Smith’s “Second Stage Lensmen” (good galaxy-smashing stuff, but Smith’s inventiveness was starting to fray at the edges in this one, I think), Olaf Stapledon’s “Darkness and the Light” (I will re-read it, but I think it’s pretty minor Stapledon), Curt Siodmak’s “Donovan’s Brain” (perfectly sound evil-disembodied-brain story, not my favourite Siodmak – that’d be “Hauser’s Memory” – but it’ll do in a pinch) and Austin Tappan Wright’s vast imaginary travelogue “Islandia” (which is, well, vast and travelogue-y).
Although the ISFDB lists them for this year, I’m not going anywhere near Boucher’s “Rocket to the Morgue” (detective story set in SF fandom, not actually SF) or Camus’s “L’Etranger” (mainstream existentialist novel with absolutely no claim to be SF in any way, shape or form.)
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Could Rocket to the Morgue be nominated for Best Related Work? (In practice, almost certainly not, because of the ‘if fictional, noteworthy…’ clause, but given the vagueness of ‘noteworthy’ it would be interesting to try.)
It seems that, as I noted with regard to 1940, the Golden Age still hadn’t really reached novels at this point. Islandia looks interesting, though.
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Meanwhile, the SHORTFICTION list for 1942 at ISFDB looks quite promising: several of Asimov’s early Foundation novellas plus Runabout (where he first articulated the Three Laws), Heinlein’s “Waldo”, del Rey’s “My Name is Legion,” van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shop” – there should be lots of good selections there. Too bad many of those stories aren’t easily available on the internet – I’d like to read or re-read some of the less well-known stories by authors whose collections I don’t have.
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Short fiction also includes “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” (which is certainly on my list), George O. Smith’s first Venus Equilateral story “QRM-Interplanetary”, and “The Twonky” by “Lewis Padgett” (Kuttner and Moore) – all worth considering in my opinion.
Jorge Luis Borges is technically eligible again, but I don’t think “Funes the Memorious” is one of his better ones, to be honest. It certainly doesn’t pack the same sort of punch as “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, which notably failed to resonate with the voters for the 1941 Retros.
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