Congratulations to
Three cases of people with three nominations who won one but lost two (and since
Larry Niven, 1976
won for The Borderland of Sol (novelette) but lost for:
ARM (novella)
Inferno [by LN & Jerry Pournelle] (novel)
Bruce Sterling, 1999
won for Taklamakan (novelette) but lost for:
Distraction (novel)
Maneki Neko (short story)
Michael Swanwick, 1999
won for The Very Pulse of the Machine (short story) but lost for:
Radiant Doors (short story)
Wild Minds (short story)
More details here supplemented by Rich Horton here.
Also congratulations to
I didn’t like the world building: for me, it collapsed because he never thought through the consequences of the daemons.
What was Jesus’s Daemon? And why are there no sects arguing about it? (and if this isnt a Christian universe, why do the Oxford colleges exist?)
We are told that daemons are always of the opposite sex, except for one or two strange people that others avoid: in a world where sexuality is indicated by daemons either all gay people are out and taken for granted (and bi people’s demons must shift sex all the time) or gay people are killed at birth, or targetted for discrimination of the kind we associate with colour, but it *can’t* be just an uncomfortable semi secret.
If servants tend to have dog daemons, is this cause or effect? How much is the class structure embedded in daemons? How much is prejudice and how much destiny.
Karen Traviss does a brilliant job of riffing off all (And more) of these issues in :
* I Gotta Get Me One of Those, in the essay anthology, Navigating the Golden Compass: Religion, Science & Daemonology in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (Smart Pop Series, BenBella Books, August 2005)
[And on another occassion I will riff on the *nerve* of the man complaining about Lewis’s depiction of women, when he a) gets Lyra to hand over her adventure to a boy in book 2–quite literally–and b) puts her in a glass coffin for most of book 3.]