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> Best Novel: Emily Tesh -- Some Desperate Glory (Tordotcom, Orbit UK) A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, an

> Best Novel: Emily Tesh -- Some Desperate Glory (Tordotcom, Orbit UK) A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you > Best Novella: T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) -- Thornhedge (Tor, Titan UK) A retelling of sleeping beauty from the perspective of an atypical fairy godmother and knight. There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn’t her story. > Best Novelette: Naomi Kritzer -- “The Year Without Sunshine” (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2023) One tiny community pulls together – and does it effectively – because one community member is suffering from COPD and will only live as long as her oxygen concentrator has power. > Best Short Story: Naomi Kritzer -- “Better Living Through Algorithms” (Clarkesworld May 2023) Linnea, a young woman working a boring office job, is told about a new productivity and wellness app called Abelique from a friend. When her boss encourages her to download it to increase her productivity, she is surprised when the app encourages her to prioritize her personal life to the neglect of her professional life. > Best Series: Ann Leckie -- Imperial Radch (Orbit US, Orbit UK) Ancillary Justice is a space opera set thousands of years in the future, where the principal power in human space is the expansionist Radch empire. The empire uses space ships controlled by AIs, who control human bodies ("ancillaries") to use as soldiers. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender, which Leckie conveys by using "she" pronouns for everybody, and by having the Radchaai main character guess, frequently incorrectly, when she has to use languages with gender-specific pronouns.

noch 2y ago
Thank you for this summary. It's too late for me to scream at clouds, about the politicization of literature awards. Should I lament the rise of the MFA and the institutionalization of writing fiction in the academy? That ship has sailed and many celebrate that, which is fine. And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression. I especially want to read writing by authors who can hold conflicting ideas in their heads without imploding and are able to say to themselves, "there's a high probability that all my fundamental values and beliefs are wrong and it is instead 'they' — the spectral, despicable They! — who are ethically and philosophically correct." I imagine a sci-fi author who has seen further than other humans, and wants to share what they have seen. I'd also love beautiful sentences if possible. Then I'd love literary sci-fi prizes whose judges have a deep and principled understanding of human history, who aren't activists in spirit, but want contrarian ideas that set the imagination and intellect on fire about the possibilities of technology and science and human problem solving. Finally, I want a sci-fi prize that conveys optimism about humanity on the cusp of great accomplishments; humanity on the verge of even greater and more bewildering and challenging adventures.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  Speaking as someone who rolled his eyes at the synopsis of each entry in GP's list... I mean, you can just ignore the awards. Like, think of it like the Oscars. It has been a very long time that "winning an Oscar" was predictive of how much I would enjoy a movie. What would some book awards be any different? Just look for authors that write the sort of things you want to read, awards be damned.
  - noch 2y ago
    > I mean, you can just ignore the awards. > Just look for authors that write the sort of things you want to read, awards be damned. Indeed. We can simply ignore many things in life. I'm not complaining that I have no agency. I was making a different point.
    - surgical_fire 2y ago
      Your point is that you wanted some sort of awards that matched your interests more closely. And that is fair, I think? I can empathize with the sentiment. A lot of the themes covered there just don't appeal to my tastes either.
      - noch 2y ago
        > A lot of the themes covered there just don't appeal to my tastes either. Yes. That's how I feel. Sorry I didn't elucidate. The broader point I was making is about what I see as a pipeline problem. I don't want to generalize too much but if you've also attempted to get a novel or short story published, or apply for a writing workshop/grant/fellowship/retreat so that you can work on a novel you've drafted, you tend to encounter strange dynamics that I'm not sure I can competently describe without sounding like a "reply guy". Nevertheless, I'm … concerned that literary culture is being (already has been) shaped into something that makes the books I'm interested in increasingly rare. Either they never get published, or take longer to get published than they otherwise would, or they are self-published and don't receive the editorial attention they deserve, or are never promoted, making them harder to find and subsequent work from that author unlikely. I don't have comprehensive data to demonstrate this and it's impossible to prove counterfactuals. But to the extent that prizes are how an industry or community presents its culture to the rest of the world, I worry about ideological capture and try to pitch different directions.
ReptileMan 2y ago
Yup. For me the cutoff date is 2010 when it comes to "is there any chance to enjoy it".
- katzinsky 2y ago
  If you pay enough attention to metapolitics it will ruin most media going back as far as the 70s even. Asimov himself was a communist and it shows in a lot of his work. I try to just ignore it.
  - ReptileMan 2y ago
    I am more of Zelazny or Sheckley guy. Asimov is brutally overrated. His only semi decent book is the "prelude to the foundation"
akuchling 2y ago
I think this just shows it's possible to write boring summaries, and log lines are often very non-specific. I read almost all of the Hugo-nominated fiction, and wrote these summaries for my own blogging: SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh, is set roughly twenty or so years after the Earth was destroyed by an antimatter bomb, deployed by a galactic civilization called the majoda. Now a small remnant of a few thousand humans live in an authoritarian military encampment, hiding in a small planetoid called Gaea. 17-year-old Valkyr and her brother Magnus are teenagers about to be assigned to their own duties, perhaps in the attack squads or perhaps to the internal divisions such as Oikos (maintenance), Nursery (pregnancy and childrearing), Suntracker (energy production), etc. Valkyr and Magnus are both warbreed, biologically enhanced for combat, so she's horrified to be assigned to Nursery. This leads to her escaping Gaea with an alien prisoner, and then things get complicated and timey-wimey. ... T. Kingfisher's THORNHEDGE is another re-spin of Sleeping Beauty that takes a different angle: our POV character is Toadling, the fairy who now lives in the forest surrounding the castle and spends a lot of her time in toad form. She watches passers-by with suspicion, hoping they don't notice the castle hidden behind the hedge, and then after a few centuries a knight arrives in search of the lost castle. Its approach is reminiscent of Gaiman's story "Snow, Glass, Apples", but brighter ... "The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer, is set in St Paul MN after an unspecified disaster and follows a neighbourhood as they self-organize, share resources, and face different obstacles over the course of a year.

noch 2y ago

Thank you for this summary. It's too late for me to scream at clouds, about the politicization of literature awards. Should I lament the rise of the MFA and the institutionalization of writing fiction in the academy? That ship has sailed and many celebrate that, which is fine. And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression. I especially want to read writing by authors who can hold conflicting ideas in their heads without imploding and are able to say to themselves, "there's a high probability that all my fundamental values and beliefs are wrong and it is instead 'they' — the spectral, despicable They! — who are ethically and philosophically correct." I imagine a sci-fi author who has seen further than other humans, and wants to share what they have seen. I'd also love beautiful sentences if possible. Then I'd love literary sci-fi prizes whose judges have a deep and principled understanding of human history, who aren't activists in spirit, but want contrarian ideas that set the imagination and intellect on fire about the possibilities of technology and science and human problem solving. Finally, I want a sci-fi prize that conveys optimism about humanity on the cusp of great accomplishments; humanity on the verge of even greater and more bewildering and challenging adventures.

surgical_fire 2y ago
Speaking as someone who rolled his eyes at the synopsis of each entry in GP's list... I mean, you can just ignore the awards. Like, think of it like the Oscars. It has been a very long time that "winning an Oscar" was predictive of how much I would enjoy a movie. What would some book awards be any different? Just look for authors that write the sort of things you want to read, awards be damned.
- noch 2y ago
  > I mean, you can just ignore the awards. > Just look for authors that write the sort of things you want to read, awards be damned. Indeed. We can simply ignore many things in life. I'm not complaining that I have no agency. I was making a different point.
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    Your point is that you wanted some sort of awards that matched your interests more closely. And that is fair, I think? I can empathize with the sentiment. A lot of the themes covered there just don't appeal to my tastes either.
    - noch 2y ago
      > A lot of the themes covered there just don't appeal to my tastes either. Yes. That's how I feel. Sorry I didn't elucidate. The broader point I was making is about what I see as a pipeline problem. I don't want to generalize too much but if you've also attempted to get a novel or short story published, or apply for a writing workshop/grant/fellowship/retreat so that you can work on a novel you've drafted, you tend to encounter strange dynamics that I'm not sure I can competently describe without sounding like a "reply guy". Nevertheless, I'm … concerned that literary culture is being (already has been) shaped into something that makes the books I'm interested in increasingly rare. Either they never get published, or take longer to get published than they otherwise would, or they are self-published and don't receive the editorial attention they deserve, or are never promoted, making them harder to find and subsequent work from that author unlikely. I don't have comprehensive data to demonstrate this and it's impossible to prove counterfactuals. But to the extent that prizes are how an industry or community presents its culture to the rest of the world, I worry about ideological capture and try to pitch different directions.

ReptileMan 2y ago

Yup. For me the cutoff date is 2010 when it comes to "is there any chance to enjoy it".

katzinsky 2y ago
If you pay enough attention to metapolitics it will ruin most media going back as far as the 70s even. Asimov himself was a communist and it shows in a lot of his work. I try to just ignore it.
- ReptileMan 2y ago
  I am more of Zelazny or Sheckley guy. Asimov is brutally overrated. His only semi decent book is the "prelude to the foundation"

akuchling 2y ago

I think this just shows it's possible to write boring summaries, and log lines are often very non-specific. I read almost all of the Hugo-nominated fiction, and wrote these summaries for my own blogging: SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh, is set roughly twenty or so years after the Earth was destroyed by an antimatter bomb, deployed by a galactic civilization called the majoda. Now a small remnant of a few thousand humans live in an authoritarian military encampment, hiding in a small planetoid called Gaea. 17-year-old Valkyr and her brother Magnus are teenagers about to be assigned to their own duties, perhaps in the attack squads or perhaps to the internal divisions such as Oikos (maintenance), Nursery (pregnancy and childrearing), Suntracker (energy production), etc. Valkyr and Magnus are both warbreed, biologically enhanced for combat, so she's horrified to be assigned to Nursery. This leads to her escaping Gaea with an alien prisoner, and then things get complicated and timey-wimey. ... T. Kingfisher's THORNHEDGE is another re-spin of Sleeping Beauty that takes a different angle: our POV character is Toadling, the fairy who now lives in the forest surrounding the castle and spends a lot of her time in toad form. She watches passers-by with suspicion, hoping they don't notice the castle hidden behind the hedge, and then after a few centuries a knight arrives in search of the lost castle. Its approach is reminiscent of Gaiman's story "Snow, Glass, Apples", but brighter ... "The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer, is set in St Paul MN after an unspecified disaster and follows a neighbourhood as they self-organize, share resources, and face different obstacles over the course of a year.