2017 HUGO AWARDS: Nominations Announced

The finalists for the 2017 Hugo Awards were announced yesterday. In the category of Best Novel, the nominations are:

Best Novel (2078 ballots)

• 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 (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)

Last year's winner was N.K. Jemisin, for The Fifth Season, the first book in her Broken Earth trilogy, which continues with The Obelisk Gate. That, and Death's End, the third book in Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy which began with the Hugo-award-winning The Three-Body Problem, are the only two books on the list I have read. I tried to read Ninefox Gambit  and couldn't get past the first chapter. I read the first book by Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet but it didn't engage me enough to have a strong desire to read the sequel.

Charlie Jane Anders is probably the first transgender author to be nominated in this category but I don't really have an interest in reading All The Birds in the Sky, which is apparently about debates between science and magic and childhood. Too Like the Lightning is in my burgeoning TBR pile, but people seem to love or hate this ambitious work.

If I had a vote, I would probably pick Cixin Liu's Death's End, as an awesome end to an awesome hard sci-fi trilogy. We will get the results in late August, at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland.