Hugo Awards: Best Fan Writer

Oh boy this is a hard category. Some very deserving people have been nominated this year, many of whom I’d already been following. This is another category in which whoever it wins will have deserved it, though I still have opinions. One of which is that we shouldn’t be surprised to see that the ballot is 4/5ths female, as in my experience most of the interesting voices last year were female, some of which, but by no means all, represented here. At least two of the nominees (Hurley and Meadows) have been involved in driving the debate about gender, harassment and feminism in science fiction fandom and it’s good to see this rewarded.

  1. Kameron Hurley is one of those wretched pros slumming in fandom and some nitwit will surely raise an outcry if she’s nominated, but she deserves to win this category if only for we have always fought.
  2. Abigail Nussbaum is perhaps the best, most incisive critic and reviewer in science fiction today.
  3. Foz Meadows, like Kameron Hurley, has written a lot about feminism and sexism in fandom as well as reviewing all sorts of science fiction, written or otherwise. It’s telling of how serious an issue sexism in fandom was and still is that top ten posts of 2013 are devoted to it.
  4. Liz Bourke is another great critic/reviewer for Tor.com and Strange Horizons; I tend to run across her reviews when writing my own.
  5. Mark Oshiro does readings/reviews of sf and fantasy books. What he does, he does very well, but I still think he’s the weakest of the nominees, though it’s a tight race

So yeah, all of these are people worth following.

Hugo Awards: Best Short Story

The next Hugo Awards category is the short story because, well, those take the least time to read. This year the category has only four candidates, as none of the other nominees cleared the five percent of total ballots threshold. Which either speaks to the health of the short story market, that apparantly there were so many good stories to nominate, or its splintering, as no clear consensus exists about the top stories, depending on your outlook.

As I think I set before, I personally don’t pay much attention to short stories (or any non-novel length stories to be honest). I do read the occasional short story anthology or author collection, but don’t seek them out on their own. The Hugo Voters Package therefore was a godsend, as it enabled me to at least make an informed choice from amongst the nominees. (Though of course I have no idea how they compare to all the non-nominated stories).

Interestingly, all the nominated stories are fantasy and all were published online, two at Tor.com. None of these are traditional fantasy stories, though “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” has the structure of a fable or fairy tale; the other three are more on the magic realistic end of the fantasy spectrum, where you could take the fantastic as metaphor rather than something real.

What’s more, each of “Selkie Stories Are for Losers”, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” and “The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere” are grownup stories about relationships and family. grief and loss. It’s interesting to see Hugo voters, of all groups in fandom, go for such mature stories.

Below are my choices in order. There’s little difference in quality between the first three, with “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” somewhat disappointing. That story was somewhat too smug for my tastes. But read all of them if you haven’t yet.

  1. Selkie Stories Are for Losers” by Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons, Jan-2013)
  2. If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky (Apex Magazine, Mar-2013)
  3. The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu (Tor.com, 02-2013)
  4. The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Tor.com, 04-2013)

The Hugo Awards: things I won’t consider (II): categories

For Loncon3 there are sixteen Hugo Award categories, plus the not a Hugo John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, to vote in. That’s a lot to be knowledgeable about. They reflect the history of the award, as categories came and went:

  • Best Novel
  • Best Novella
  • Best Novelette
  • Best Short Story
  • Best Related Work
  • Best Graphic Story
  • Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
  • Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
  • Best Editor – Short form
  • Best Editor – Long form
  • Best Professional Artist

Those are all what you might call the professional awards, the ones most like other literary awards. The first four are perhaps the core Hugos, though the distinction between novella and especially the novelette and short story is more of historic than actual importance and nobody outside fandom pays attention to anything but the novel award anyway. Best professional artist in one way or another has been around since the beginning as well; illustrations, especially cover paintings have of course always been important in science fiction.

Meanwhile the editor and dynamic presentation –basically anything that isn’t written science fiction– awards are split up the way they are because voters over time thought that e.g. writing a single episode of a tv series is slightly different from writing a movie and the same for editing short stories vs novels. Best graphic story is for comics.

The next category is sort of a transition category, where the smaller commercial magazines mix with the bigger fanzines, always a bit of a mess. Beyond that there are the fan awards, awarded for work inside of fandom. It’s always a bit of a surprise for newcomers to discover that yes, professional writers too can be eligible for these awards, as long as they are active in fandom in some way or another. That I think is the real charm of the Hugos: they’re for all of us, not just fans voting for their favourite “celebrities”.

  • Best Semiprozine
  • Best Fanzine
  • Best Fancast
  • Best Fan Writer
  • Best Fan Artist

In short, there’s a split in awards categories that deal in the business of science fiction and awards that deal in the business of science fiction fandom, but pros can be nominated and win in fan categories and vice versa. It’s one of those things that are utterly charming about sf fandom even if it made a lot more sense back in 1953 when every other fan was a pro writer and the rest were aspiring pro writers. There is still much less of a pro-fan distinction than there is in related fandoms like media sf or comics.

Now, if I’m completely honest, the only two Hugo categories I’m truly interested in are the Best Novel and the Best Fan Writer ones; these are the only ones I can form opinions about without the help of the Hugo Voter Package. But thanks to the voter package I can at least make a stab at rating the candidates for the other categories too. Which I’m going to do with the following exceptions: I won’t vote in either of the dramatic presentation categories, nor in the graphic story one, because I don’t believe the Hugo is suited for them. These are not where this fandom’s strengths and interests lie and they always default to already well known, well established works.

The two other categories I’m wavering about are the editorial categories. It’s not the awards themselves so much that are the problem, but rather my ability to judge them. Editing is a largely invisible art to me as a reader, not helped by the lack of editorial acknowledgement in most sf books. And since I don’t read sf magazines, where the role of the editor is much greater in shaping the magazine as a whole, it’s hard to judge those kind of editors too. Some editors have been thoughtful enough to include samples of the stories/books they’ve edited, but just because I like a story doesn’t mean the editing was any good, nor the other way around. Therefore I probably will take a look at these categories and decide later if to vote on them.

All other categories I will be voting on, which means a lot of reading and thanks again for the Hugo Voters Package for making this so easy. I think I’ll be blogging about the various awards throughout July and aim to have made my choices by August. For some that will be easy; for others, not so much.

The Dark Griffin — K. J. Taylor

Cover of The Dark Griffin


The Dark Griffin
K. J. Taylor
369 pages
published in 2009

One of the things I’ve been trying to do more of these past five years or so has been to try out more new to me authors. K. J. Taylor is one of these authors, an Australian fantasy writer whose Black Griffin looked interesting when I was browsing the Amsterdam library shelves. I had no choice but to like a writer who said of herself: “a lot of fantasy authors take their inspiration from Tolkien. I take mine from G. R. R. Martin and Finnish metal”. A bit of research online discovered that she isn’t even thirty years old, published her first book at twenty in 2006 and has had seven books published since. Which makes her on a par with Elizabeth Bear with regards to productivity (and here I have trouble writing a blogpost sometimes…)

The Dark Griffin is the first in a fantasy trilogy, which in turn was followed by another trilogy. You may suspect therefore that this is pretty much a setup book and you may be right. What this is, is an origin story, both of the titular dark griffin (literally, as the book starts with his birth) and his ride, Arren Cardockson. As the story starts Arren is the only Northerner griffin rider in the city of Eagleholm, of far humbler origins than his fellow griffineers. His parents are freedmen, ex-slaves, while all other griffin riders are aristocrats. Nevertheless and despite the occassional tension, he feels well supported by the city’s elite. Even more so when lord Rannagon, one of the leaders of the griffiners and master of law, suggest a way for Arren to get out of his money problems.

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Blood Price — Tanya Huff

Cover of Blood Price


Blood Price
Tanya Huff
272 pages
published in 1991

Tanya Huff has quickly has become one of my favourite authors, ever since I first read Valor’s Choice two years ago. Which is why when the local secondhand bookstore turned out to have her entire Blood… urban fantasy series, I bought them all. Urban fantasy is a subgenre I can take or leave, but Huff is one of those writers of who I’ll read anything she writes. So far her novels have always been at least entertaining; Blood Price is no exception.

Vicky “Victory” Nelson is, retired from the Toronto police for health reasons, now turned private eye, is taking the subway home one night when she hears a terrible scream coming from the other platform and sees a man slumbed to the floor, dead. Taking a gamble as a train arrives, she sprints over the track to the other side to see that he’s had his throat ripped out and a shadowy figure disappearing down the underground. What Vicky witnessed is the first in what would become known as the Toronto vampire murders, as in quick succession several more people are killed this way, throat slashed and drained of blood. Though interested in the murders out of old police instincts, Vicky knows it’s not her problem anymore, not until the lover of the first victim hires her to find the vampire, as the police “insist on looking for a man”.

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