Fantastika

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.

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)