2018 HUGO Awards: Nominations Announced

The nominations for the 2018 Hugo Awards were announced on Saturday March 31. The picks for Best Novel is the category I really only follow and care about. The nominees are:

Best Novel

• The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor)

• New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)

• Provenance, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)

• Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)

• Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)

• The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Last year, N.K. Jemisin won this award for the second consecutive year for the second book in her Broken Earth trilogy, The Obelisk Gate. She previously won the award for the first book in the series, The Fifth Season, in 2016. It is very possible that she could win the award for the third book in the series, The Stone Sky, this year.  I think that would mean she would become the first author to have all three books in a trilogy win speculative fiction's most prestigious honor.

Of the other books she is competing with Scalzi, Leckie and Robinson have all won Best Novel Hugo awards before, with Leckie probably being the biggest threat to Jemisin since all three books in her Imperial Radhch series were nominated for Best Novel (although only the first, Ancillary Justice, went on to win the 2014 Hugo award). Provenance is set in the same universe as those books but has not been as universally celebrated as the Ancillary novels. I do intend to read it eventually but haven't felt an urgent need to do so. Lots of people are very high on the work on Yoon Ha Lee but I tried the first book in the series, Ninefox Gambit, and found it almost unreadable. 

I read Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire, and while it is amusing in parts it is nowhere as diverting or enjoyable as his Hugo-award-winning Redshirts, but his work is very popular. The reviews for Robinson's 2140 were similarly not kind, and I don't really intend to read it. I do intend to read Six Wakes, because it is a genre mashup of murder-mystery and science fiction.

The winners will be announced at Worldcon which is being held in San Jose, California August 16-20, 2018.

2016 LOCUS AWARDS: Nominations Announced

The Locus Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy Novel were announced this week. These awards are selected via an open online poll conducted by Locus magazine online between February 1 and April 15 every year.

This year there is a significant overlap between the Locus awards and the Hugo award nominations and the Nebula award nominations.

Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy has been nominated for the Locus, Hugo and Nebula. It is the third book in a series which began with Ancllary Justice which won every single possible science fiction award there is (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Clarke and BSFA). Two other books which have also been nominated for the Hugo, Locus and Nebula are N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and Naomi Novik's Uprooted.

Other notable books of 2015 include Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, which has been nominated for the Locus and Hugo, and Aliette de Bodard's The House of Shattered Wings which has been nominated for the Locus award and won the British Science Fiction Award.

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

• The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi (Borzoi; Orbit UK)
• Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• Seveneves, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)
• A Borrowed Man, Gene Wolfe (Tor)

FANTASY NOVEL

• Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
• The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard (Roc; Gollancz)
• Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand (PS; Open Road)
• The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

2016 HUGO AWARDS: My Selections For Best Novel

The 2016 Hugo award nominations close on March 31st. Since I was a member of the 2015 Worldcon and helped to select last year's winners, I have the right to submit a nomination ballot for the 2016 Hugos. The main category I am interested in is Best Novel. My nominations for the Hugo Award for Best Novel are:

• The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
• Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey
• Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Rebirths of Tao by Wesley Chu
• The Providence of Fire by Brian Staveley

This was a hard list to compile. There are several other books which could easily be on this list, which basically represents what I think are the best works of speculative fiction released in 2015 that I read. For example:

•  Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
• Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
• The Skull Throne by Peter V. Brett
• The Ark by Patrick S. Tomlinson
• The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

It will be exciting to see the final nomination list in early April. Last year they were revealed on 12noon on April 5th.

BOOK REVIEW: Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Aurora is actually structured as seven medium-length chapters that are really connected novelettes (or is it novellas?) All I knew about this book was that it was written by Kim Stanley Robinson (who is best well-known as the award-winning author of the Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars trilogy), that it is one of the most well-received hard science fiction books of 2015 and that it is about a generation ship or arc ship flying 12 light years to Tau Ceti (a trip that takes nearly 2 centuries at sub-luminal speeds). Although Robinson's Mars trilogy is well-regarded by many people, I have never been able to finish one of his books before (including trying the first book in that trilogy). However this time my experience with a book written by Kim Stanley Robinson was quite different since I couldn't put Aurora down and raced through it from start to finish in under 24 hours! Some other readers have complained about a slow beginning to the book but I'm not one of them. I was sucked in right away by the setting of the book on a space ship that has been on a journey to the stars for well over a century. This scenario is one of the classic situations of science fiction and represents a real, possible future for humanity. The verisimilitude of the situation I found completely compelling and this had me immediately invested in the characters, especially Devi, Freya's mom, the unofficial Chief Engineer of the Ship.

Devi's daughter Freya becomes the most important human character in the book, the person we follow for the rest of the book after Devi's departure from the narrative after the end of the second chapter. The character I identified with the most, and the one probably most important to the narrative arc of the story is The Ship, the name given for the central computer on the ship, who is re-programmed by Devi to use "greedy algorithms" and other modifications which eventually lead to something resembling self-awareness by Ship.

There are stretches of the book where I found it impossible to put down, even there is always a LOT of information and technical data being thrown at the reader (providing context and details of the journey of the ship and its human inhabitants). In particular, chapters 2 through 4 are increasingly compelling as the stakes for our Ship dwellers get raised higher and higher and the suspense becomes more and more intense. Interestingly, it is not just the hard science of interstellar travel which comes to dominate the book but the ``soft" sciences of sociology, psychology and politics that become increasingly important as the interpersonal dynamics of the ship's population change dramatically as the ship reaches its destination and the dwellers are forced to respond to what they find there. Also biology (or more specifically zoology) also plays a key role in what happens on the ship and to our Ship dwellers.

I was somewhat disappointed by the ending, which basically seems to make an argument AGAINST the premise of man's colonization of the stars. This seems like a curious position to take for a hard sci-fi author and is a view I think is antithetical to how most science fiction fan's view humanity's future. To be fair, Robinson does seem to endorse man's travel to other planets in the solar system, it's interstellar travel that the book seems to be frowning upon. In fact, Robinson explicitly endorses a notion of Earth exceptionalism that for humans to prosper they need to have the possibility of returning to Earth in  a single lifetime; by definition this curtails the possibility of sub-luminal interstellar travel. 

Regardless of Robinson's questionable concluding message Aurora is a gripping, compelling work of speculative fiction that I am confident will capture the imagination of many other science fiction fans.

Title: Aurora.
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson.
Paperback: 480 pages.
Publisher: Orbit.
Date Published: July 7, 2015.
Date Read: August 30, 2015.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A-.