2014 NEBULA Awards: Nominations Announced!

The nominations for the 2014 Nebula Awards have been announced. The Nebula award and the Hugo award are the highest awards given in recognition of excellent in writing science fiction and fantasy. The Nebula awards are given by the writers and the Hugo awards are given by the fans.

This year's nominees for the Nebula award for best novel are:

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood) 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline Review) 

Fire with Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen) 

Hild, Nicola Griffith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK) 

The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island) 

A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar (Small Beer)

The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker (Harper)

The only nominees I had heard of on this list are by Leckie and Gaiman. Gaiman, because he has won before and Leckie because Ancillary Justice is in the military sci-fi genre that I greatly enjoy and thus Amazon.com keeps on suggesting her books when I am browsing for the latest book by James S.A. Corey, Peter Hamilton or Alastair Reynolds.

It seems like the more and more mysteries I read (I'm currently working my way through the Inspector Alan Banks books by Peter Robinson, the Harry Hole books by Jo Nesbo and the Chief Inspector Henri Gamache books by Louise Penny) the weaker my connection to science fiction becomes. Apart from the books by James S.A. Corey (Abaddon's Gate, Caliban's War and Leviathan's Wake) I have not founda new author recently who makes me eager to read their books. (I'm eagerly awaiting the next book in Corey's The Expanse series, Cibola Burn.) For example, I had to go and look up that last year's winner was 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Gaiman has been hit or miss for me (mostly miss lately although I did like American Gods) so I'm not going to rush out to read The Ocean at the End of the Lane, but reviews seem to indicate that it's not really science fiction anyway, but some kind of horror-fantasy hybrid. However, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice sounds cool enough I will put it on my Amazon wishlist:

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest.

Breq is both more than she seems and less than she was. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren--a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy.

An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose--to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.

From debut author Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice is a stunning space opera that asks what it means to be human in a universe guided by artificial intelligence.

Any thoughts?

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Iain [M.] Banks, Sci-Fi Author (1954-2013)

I finally decided to blog about some sad news, the death of best-selling Scottish author Iain M. Banks. Banks was unusual in that he was well-known both for his genre works in science fiction (published using the name Iain M. Banks) as well "regular" non-genre works of fiction published under the name Iain Banks. The only books of Banks that I read were his science fiction ones, namely the ones set in his famous "Culture" series.

I read the most recently published Culture novels The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), Surface Detail (2010) and Matter (2009) as well as a few of the earlier ones like Use of Weapons and Excession. The only one that I thought was truly outstanding was Matter. They tend to be quite long books, with intricate plots the author uses to comment wittily on different aspects of our own (western) culture using (very dark) humor. I also read one of his earlier books, The Algebraist (mainly because the title seemed mathematical).

Banks had apparently announced earlier this year that he had terminal gall bladder cancer but his death a mere two months on June 9 later came as a shock. His final book, The Quarry was published just days later in Europe. It's not another Culture novel, but a semi-biographical book about the final weeks of middle-aged guy dying of cancer. Write what you know, I guess!

Banks passing was noted by several famous British authors like Neil Gaiman, Ian Rankin and fellow scot Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting).

BOOK REVIEW: Neil Gaiman's GRAVEYARD BOOK

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book is one of the most celebrated books of 2009, having won the most prestigious award in juvenile fiction, the John Newbery Medal, earlier in the year.

Gaiman is the celebrated author of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning American Gods (MadProfessah is still working on a review after reading the book in May 2008--see my earlier post on the relationship between the excellence of a book and the longer it takes me to review it).

Gaiman's book was also recently awarded the Hugo Award, beating out the expected winner, Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

The Graveyard Book is the story of Bod, the toddler who should have died when his parents and a sibling were all brutally murdered by a knife-wielding assassin and the child was protected by the inhabitants of a graveyard.

Bod is short for Nobody Owens, Owens being the family name of his adopted parents, Mr. & Mrs. Owens who were unable to have children when they were alive, and are ghosts who inhabit the graveyard in which Bod lives.

That Bod is a baby who grows up in a graveyard and thus can interact equally with ghosts and non-ghosts equivalently is a bit of a macabre, but interesting concept. The cast of characters in the graveyard a quirky, but generally uninteresting group. The most interesting of the bunch is Silas, the person(?) who rescued Bod and to an adult reader appears to have all the characteristics of a vampire (although he is never described as such--he also is never placed in either the living or non-living category definitively by the Omniscient Narrator.)

What truly limits The Graveyard Book, however, is its plot. The story follows the growing pains of a teenage boy who has an unusual family situation (he's the only living person among his family and his home is a graveyard!) but this is depicted in a completely predictable and surprisingly unimaginative fashion. The main tension in the story is that the assassin who killed Bod's family is still out there and looking to correct the one blemish on his perfect record of murders-for-hire. However, since this is juvenile fiction and Bod is the hero, this reader never really believed that Bod would be killed, although Gaiman does try his best to place Bod and some other characters the reader has invested time in learning about in real and extreme peril.

The final impression of The Graveyard Book is of a good idea that doesn't quite have enough meat on the bones of the plot to make a satisfying meal for the discerning (adult) reader, although someone less experienced (i.e. younger) may be more favorably impressed.

Published by HarperCollins. 320 pages.

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

OVERALL GRADE: B-.