The poor freshman gives me a confused look but tries again, blowing into his clarinet. Thomas makes a spluttering, sad excuse for a sound, then lowers the clarinet and sighs.
Next up in my reading of the Lodestar Award finalists, this is a sweet sapphic love story about two Asian-American girls in Los Angeles, one in our world or somewhere very close to it, one in a parallel world where magic works and tech is less well developed. They meet through a rift between the worlds, struggle to manage teenage problems and also prevent the bad guys from destroying both versions of the city. And there’s also lots of food and coffee. Very breezy and cheerful. You can get Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universehere.
Today, Bersun was plainly dressed. An iron band for a crown, stamped with an ∞ – sacred symbol of the Eternal Path. His black tunic was slashed with five scarlet claw marks, a reversal of his bodyguards’ uniform. He wore chain mail beneath his tunic, and a longsword at his belt. Orrun was at peace, the rebellion a long-faded scar. But Bersun was a warrior to the bone. Even now, after more than two decades on the throne, he looked more natural dressed as one.
First of the Hugo Best Novel finalists that I acquired and read after the ballot was announced and before the Packet was made available. (These posts are a couple of weeks behind my actual reading at the moment.) Hodgson is apparently already well known as a writer of eighteenth-century crime novels; this is her first fantasy, set in a world (or at least a country) where eight totemic elemental animals (including the titular Raven) dominate human culture, and the new king is determined in a series of Hunger Games-style trials. It’s an intricate and well constructed plot, as leading characters turn out to be completely different to who we thought they were, and indeed the game plan of the bad guys turns out to be completely different to what it looked like. I found the brutal violence a bit ick though. You can get The Raven Scholar here.
One of this year’s Hugo finalists for Best Graphic Story, a straightforward short book, perhaps for younger readers, about coming to terms with grief through celebrating the day of the Dead with otherworldly entities. You can get The Invisible Parade here.
1) John Picacio2) Tran Nguyen3) Tom Roberts4) Kelly Chong5) Dave Kellett6) Lulu Chen
NB that Lulu Chen’s website has several bogus links.
In previous years I have also posted my votes for Best Fan Artist, but I know too many of the finalists to feel comfortable doing that this year. I will say, however, that I will not give a high preference to the finalist who stated that they got onto the Hugo final ballot out of spite.
I had already seen four of the finalists here, and so it did not take lonmg to get through the other two – especially since I gave up on one of them 15 minutes in. Many thanks to the studios for including the shooting scripts for most of the episodes in the Hugo Packet, which is helpful for following the plot, but also for illustrating how much more a dramatic presentation is than just the words.
Two of these six are the climax of a season-line storyline, another is the first in a series and another is the second last (and perhaps winds up the main storyline for that show, the last episode being more of a coda). I have said it before: I do wonder if we would be better served by a Hugo for episodic fiction, and a Hugo for one-shot stories, regardless of length. Only one or two of these finalists actually works well as a standalone piece, and almost everyone who watched and nominated one of them will have watched and appreciated the entire series.
Anyway.
1) The Story and the Engine (Doctor Who) – of course, I must vote for Doctor Who anyway, but this is a very good episode (my second favourite of the season) and also takes the show to a place it had not been before, the largest city of Africa’s largest country, with a spider-god and a cameo from Jo Martin. Good stuff.
2) We is Us (Plur1bus) – a great setup for the season ahead, and probably the best single episode of a generally excellent show. Later episodes built on the premise, but this is very good scene-setting of our imperfect world being turned upside down.
3) All Systems Red (Murderbot) – I was one of the three people in fandom who bounced off the original Murderbot stories, but I really enjoyed the TV series, and the final episode of the main story arc (ninth of the ten) really combined tension, action and humour to take us where we needed to get to.
4) The Perimeter (Murderbot) – This didn’t work as well for me, dancing very close to Murderbot-as-cute-robot, which is a trope I hate. The show-runners were given the choice of two out of three episodes to have on the ballot, and decided to drop the first episode, Free Commerce; I would have preferred it to this one.
And just as a parenthesis, this is only the second time that the Nominee Diversity provision has been applied to a TV series since it was enacted into Section 3.8.6 of the Constitution. Would it really have been so awful to have three episodes of Murderbot on the ballot, which is what voters actually voted for? (Knowing full well that Doctor Who would probably have lost out.)
5) Cold Harbor (Severance) – not having watched a single episode of this show before, and being only vaguely familiar with the premise (the main cast find that they have been psychologically severed between different personalities for their work and non-work lives), I really enjoyed this although I did not understand everything that was going on (having the script to hand helped a bit, but not much). Fantastically well shot and directed; though I did wonder if Adam Scott is capable of wearing more than one expression on his face.
6) The Road to the Spear (Wheel of Time) – I watched the first ten minutes and realised that I did not have a clue what was going on, and was curiously distracted by the utterly wooden acting of Josha Stradowski as protagonist Rand al’Thor. So then I read the script, and I still didn’t understand what was going on. Better uses for an hour of my life than to finish watching it.
“Who briefed you?” My own voice sounds distant as a stranger’s.
My first Hugo book since the 2026 ballot was announced, this is one of the finalists in the Lodestar category, and turns out to be the third in a fantasy trilogy. I enjoyed it for the frenemy relationship between the two central characters and the convoluted magical fantasy plot; I felt I did not lose out too much by having missed the first two books. The breathless first-person present-tense narration annoyed me, as did the many mistakes in German in what is explicitly a Bavarian-based world; and I wondered how it comes about that teenagers get given senior law enforcement responsibilities in this particular society. So I suspect it won’t get my top vote in the category, but it was a good start. You can get Holy Terrors here.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this year’s Hugo Voter Packet is out, with tremendous efficiency; I had however already located a lot of the finalists online, and wrote up this listing of the stories in advance.
1) My top vote goes to “In My Country”, by Thomas Ha. I thought this was a tremendously creepy depiction of a totalitarian society where thought control and euphemism are heavy and omnipresent. Also on the Nebula ballot.
You didn’t know these things about him when he first moved to your city. You’d talked yourself out of the associate’s degree before high school graduation, pragmatism trumping college dreams, and taken an apprenticeship as an electrician with a program specializing in bot tech. You were progressing well, nearing the end of your training. You liked unravelling tricky problems the best, diagnosing a malfunctioning bot like a doctor might a patient.
We adopt a pair of cats. We name them Shaun and Liz.
4) “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim. What do you do if you are a teenager whose mother has been replaced by an AI? Second paragraph of third section:
Rina’s in her late twenties. Before there was Rina, there was Wren, and before Wren, there was Agatha, all of whom were pretty, strawberry-blonde women who Cassie’s father had dismissed before they turned thirty. On the screens, Cassie’s mom is forever twenty-five. Some digital people age in simulacrum. Others stay the same as when they were created, and AMY was made the moment that Cassie’s father had the funds to make himself a wife
5) “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg, about a superhero who is also a wheelchair user. I appreciate the message but I found the prose a bit clunky. Second paragraph of thirdsection:
The union leader, a woman named “Big Dig” with hands like gopher claws, went through the agenda. Most of it was assigning press stuff. But eventually we got to the one real thing on the agenda—the union wanted to defeat Doctor Croc, a green scaly menace who’d been razing buildings, most recently a conference center.
6) “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson. I didn’t really understand this one, and to the extent that I did, I wasn’t sure if it was sf. Second paragraph of third section:
I’m still not totally sure about the Best Poem category, but I’m going to kick off my Hugo reviewing for this year by revealing my own votes, as follows.
Mission Control, you told me not to be shocked. I’m just an envoy among these meetings. A pleasure just to be invited and all that. And you told me not to sell myself short, I know I am neither peerless nor no less a peer as the others here, but you don’t get it. I… get emotional. When we gather here, we consensus the stars. We draft the laws that carve diamonds fine, we dictate the portent paths, we school and are thus schooled; in a ten-minute parley between panels we broker treaties that move stories through the digit-lines; in a brief passing twixt moving platforms two colleagues will draft new craft guidances for new worlds; in a barcon brokerage tomorrow night two lords will strike delicate business firm; all weekend we will declare truces— sparing doubt without relying on fear, holding sorrow without swelling to hopelessness, saving our blades for the armies of capital growth and the rattle of the badly impersonating clanker swarms and oh God the fascists why are there still fascists but that’s why we have these meetings in the first place. I would risk a rank or more if I could fellowship here forever. Because are we ever still together if we can’t break bread or ice or our own bad habits of not being personable? Aren’t I allowed to dream of more realms being let into our commonwealth?
A witty depiction of a space explorer visiting a Worldcon.
Bitch got stuff done. Lightning hits a bit different now. Still pounds against the clouds, of course. Still kills when it lands too close. But doesn’t pierce the way it once did, or leave half-orphans in its wake. And those temples. You’ve seen them, right — still gleaming over broken fields. And her hands, a sudden gentle touch, slicing through the sharpest pains.
You can spend your days sitting on the rocks, stirring the tidal pools as though they were cauldrons, causing shipwrecks if you want to, granting wishes, stealing the voices of mermaids and seabirds to make yours especially shrill, screeching like a gull, or sonorous, like buoy bells ringing far from shore. You can gather and store the treasures of the waves—bits of glass worn smooth, coral and pearls, gold vessels from Phoenician ships. How rich you will be! And how deeply you will dream, sea witch— as deeply as the dark hidden depths of the sea.
The Hugo final ballot is out, and I understand that as is usual, the Hugo team is working hard to assemble a Voter Packet which will be made available for free to all Hugo voters (WSFS members of this year’s Worldcon). This is obviously a Good Thing, but as a matter of fact you can start your Hugo reading right now; there is no need to wait until the Packet is available.
Below, I give links to works which are available for free online, and Amazon links to other works, skipping individual people and Dramatic Presentations. The Packet, when it is available, is likely to also include samples of work by individuals who are finalists, and if we’re lucky also a Dramatic Presentation or two. But you can get started right now.
Finally, a couple of people have challenged me over linking to Amazon from my various book posts, such as this one. I get no reward at all for writing this blog, apart from £25 in Amazon credits about once a year from people clicking on my affiliate links. If you can point me to an independent bookselling site, preferably in the UK where the largest segment of my readers are based, where I would get similar credits for referred sales, then I’m all ears.
And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.
This is a 60,000 word essay, a single web page on Sandifer’s Eruditorum Press website. It hasn’t been published separately (though will apparently become part of Sandifer’s projected second volume of Last War in Albion, her history of the magical rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison); but I am treating it as a book for bookblogging purposes.
This is mainly because there is a strong case for nominating it in the Best Related Work category in this year’s Hugo Awards, for which nominations open this week. In general the Hugos should not celebrate last year’s controversies; but this is an analysis of the Sandman comics, and of Gaiman’s other work, especially in the graphic medium, over several decades, taking into account what we now know about Gaiman’s personal life and appalling behaviour. It’s not so much about the scandal (though it is about that), as about how Gaiman constructed his career and everything else.
It’s not framed as a hatchet job. Sandifer starts by sympathetically analysing Gaiman’s childhood in Scientology, and the abuse that he certainly suffered at the hands of his father, Britain’s leading Scientologist. She then goes on to look at the roots of Sandman, and at the high points of the story (of which there are many) and its occasionally troubled publications history.
But the pattern of exploitation and abuse of young fans, and later of other women, began pretty early on – Dave Sim refers to one of Gaiman’s convention flings in the notorious Cerebus #186, in 1992. And it’s not at all difficult to find reflections of Gaiman’s behaviour in his work. We may contain multitudes, but perhaps not all that many.
I was a fan of Neil Gaiman. My first entry in the original version of this blog was about meeting him at a signing in Brussels. I have more of his books in my LibraryThing catalogue than for any other author bar Justin Richards, Roger Zelazny and Terrance Dicks. I had generally friendly if slightly spiky correspondence with him over Hugo stuff over the years (his last time on the final ballot was my first time administering the awards in 2017, and he wrote in 2024 to ask “why Sandman Episode 6 was ruled ineligible for the Hugos at Chengdu?” – a question to which unfortunately I did not and do not know the answer).
I will find it very difficult to open any of Gaiman’s work ever again, and yet I wanted some sort of closure for myself. This essay provides it, acknowledging the high points of Gaiman’s work but linking it to the low points of his personal life. I’m lucky; I barely knew him apart from through his writing. Other friends are much more personally devastated. Sandifer ends the essay with one of Roz Kaveney’s heartfelt poems about the end of her friendship with Gaiman. Here’s another, published on 7 February 2025:
Heart is a traitor even when it breaks. Love friendship given cannot be returned. All that I once thought my friend was once has burned To trash shame ruin. Even his mistakes His sins his crimes are of a piece with all The things I valued. His embarrassed smile His weighted pauses. I am certain while He fucked those girls they’d see the shutters fall Behind his eyes. Some random witty thought Would take him for a moment quite elsewhere. Sometimes I want to slap him maybe swear. He was extraordinary until caught. All the good times, the brilliance flawed. Hearts crack. Yet friendship given can’t be taken back.
To a greater or lesser extent, all of us who liked the man and/or his work will have felt that betrayal, and Sandifer’s essay is an important part of moving on. I’m nominating it for this year’s Hugos, and I hope that you do too.
Its lamps lit very little. The colourless sheen of the arching, segmented stems, that looked more like plastic than wood or anything living. The faint flurries of the feeding fans or gills or whatever their function actually was. The limited range of the lamps the drone could mount barely cut through the sheer gloom, the curdled soup of what passed for air on Shroud. All was in shades of brown-grey, light and dark. Nothing had invested the energy into manufacturing pigments, because why put on an art show if nobody can see the pictures? Light and dark, and some yellowish tones, like old bone or diseased teeth or mustard gas. The brown of mud or excrement.
Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps doing it; this is yet another gripping story of the encounter between human explorers and a new form of alien life. The human protagonists trek across the hostile surface of a dangerous moon, and we also get viewpoint snippets from the perspective of the globe-spanning alien entity itself, as the two sides gradually come to understand more of each other, and the humans’ masterplan of converting Shroud into a hob of exploitation becomes less and less realistic. It’s really vivid, and Tchaivkovsky plays fair with the reader, with a coherent and credibly built world. Good stuff. You can get Shroud here.
Second paragraph of third essay (on The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint):
It is clear that this volume is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.
A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves
While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.
Kenning was right underneath their new visitor. What was she doing?
Emily Tesh again shows her extraordinary versatility, with a story of a queer teacher in charge of safeguarding vulnerable pupils at a magical boarding school against dark forces while securing her own back against bureaucratic enemies. This is contemporary Britain, but with demons and a professional structure for the magically talented people who control them; it’s also a Britain where our friends class and race are alive and well, especially in a school where some of the scholarship pupils are also orphans. There’s cracking emotional chemistry as well between Sapphire Walden, the damaged but still idealistic protagonist, and her love interests; and finely observed dynamics of how a small group of gifted teenagers interact with the outside world.
It’s brilliant stuff, and really it makes you realize how few of the well-known magic school stories, from Roke to Hogwarts to the Scholomance, tell the story from the viewpoint of the teachers rather than the pupils. (There’s Unseen University in Discworld, but it’s a third-level institution rather than school and it also seems to have very few students.) Of course there’s always mileage in a rite-of-passage story, but the children’s point of view sees only the part of the educational iceberg that is above the surface. If you see what I mean.
