Second paragraph of third chapter:
He batted her hand away. “Just ’cause you finally be sixteen, you know it all, huh?”
A pretty intense novel set between 1898 and 1913 (with a brief excursion to 1893), partly in Georgia and partly in Chicago, about the relationship between Redwood, a young black woman, and Aiden Wildfire, half Irish and half Seminole, and their friends and relatives in the course of their separate journeys. There is a lot of magic; there is a lot of racist oppression; there is a decent amount of romance; I thought it was pretty good. You can get it here.
Redwood and Wildfire won what was then the James Tiptree Jr Award for 2011 in 2012. The Honor list included five novels and four short stories; I have read I think one of the five novels, God’s War by Kameron Hurley. The long list included eight novels, five shorter works and one collection. Again I have read one of the novels, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, which won the previous year’s BSFA Award.
I was interested to see that one of the other long listed novels is Outies by my old friend Jenny Pournelle, who I had not realised was also a published author among her many other talents; it’s an authorised sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand by her father.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award went to The Testament of Jesse Lamb, by Jane Rogers; I read the entire shortlist for an Eastercon panel, the others being Embassytown by China Miéville, The End Specialist by Drew Magary, Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear, Rule 34 by Charles Stross and The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper. This was the shortlist that Chris Priest famously excoriated.
Priest himself won the BSFA Award for Best Novel with The Islanders, which I also voted for, the other shortlisted novels being By Light Alone by Adam Roberts, Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith, Embassytown by China Miéville and Osama by Lavie Tidhar.
Next in this sequence are the two Tiptree winners for the following year, The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan and Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam, as I have already read the BSFA and Clarke winners.
