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.

Finland Enacts Marriage Equality

Finland becomes the last of the Scandinavian countries this week to embrace marriage equality when its Parliament enacted a bill to do so by a vote of 105 to 92. Finland has had the equivalent of civil unions (called registered partnerships) since 2002.

Think Progress reports:

Prime Minister Alexander Stubb praised the legislature for “approaching the same level as that of other Nordic and Western countries on this very delicate and difficult issue,” referring to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, all of which already allow same-sex couples to marry. Finland previously allowed same-sex couples to register their partnerships, but they were not allowed to marry. 

Although the law might not take effect until 2016, the vote makes Finland the 18th country in the world to approve allowing same-sex couples to marry nationwide. This tally does not include the United States and Mexico, where marriage equality is still localized, or countries like Australia and Colombia who have extended some recognition to same-sex couples, but not full marriage rights. The last country to approve marriage equality was Luxembourg in June, and that law could take effect as soon as January of 2015.

The bill was considered by the Finnish Parliament through an unusual process by which citizens were able to sign a petition to encourage lawmakers to vote on the issue.