Hugo nominations open!
The 2008 Hugo award nominations have opened -- if you were a member of the 2008 WorldCon in Denver, or have bought a membership to the 2009 WorldCon in Montreal, you're eligible to nominate. I'll be sending in my nominations this week, and just in case you were wondering, here's the stuff I wrote that's eligible for this year's ballot:
* Best novel: Little Brother, Tor, 2008
* Best related book: Content, Tachyon, 2008
* Best novella: True Names (with Benjamin Rosenbaum), published in Fast Forward, Pyr Books, 2008, edited by Lou Anders
* Best novelette: The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, Tor.com, July 2008
No matter what you plan on nominate, I urge you to send in your form! Hugo participation seems to dwindle every year. The present form's just a PDF, but they're promising a web-based one shortly (I'll post again when it's live).
the latest
latest episodes
A life-time of using the Hugo's a guide when buying new SF books has recently become tarnished for me when I tried John Scalzi's Old Man's War & the 1st sequel Ghost Brigade. I found both books appalling, morally and ethically offensive, based on the kind of thinking responsible the Iraq war and Abu-Graib (may sound like hyperbole but exactly what I mean- in the books -AMERICAN- special forces save the world/worlds), and also ignorant of contemporary world politics (e.g. peace in Ireland at the time the book was written, doesn't require US intervention in the future to save us) that the Hugos suddenly became for me akin to the Academy Awards, that is, utterly irrelevant to the quality of actual contemporary books. I'll stick to the SFWA awards from now on.
Will you be telling us which ones you nominate?
@1/Donal Just finished Old Mans War and I was under the impression the CDF(The human space military) was separate from earth's governments. And yeah they are aggressive but so are all the enemies they fight. I think you are reading to much into the story. Plus what's a good military sci-fi book without lots of warfare.
Do people still take the Hugo's seriously?
@1
(spoilers for the Old mans war universe follow)
Are you sure you read the books? The CDF leadership certainly aren't shown to be the good guys and their goals are arguably at odds with whats best for humanity.
It is just that the pov characters are grunts with zero political clout.
The united states together with the rest of the western nations in the book are just about the weakest politcal players of all. They scerwed up earth with their wars and are not allowed to leave the planet to colonize, they have no idea whats going on outside the solar system, they don't get any of the new technologies the CDF has and when the CDF recruits their citizens as cheap cannon fodder they have to let them go.
And that's all before we get to The Lost Colony were the theme of 'stupid CDF militarism may doom hummanity... again' gets REALLY OBVIOUS.
I'm as left as they come, but I dont screw on my idealogical filters hard enough to distort reality.
Cory, I just finished Little Brother. I would have loved reading this years ago when I was a kid. It's an excellent story and one I'll be recommending to lots of folks. Good luck!
#4: "Do people still take the Hugo's seriously?"
Yes.
Plus what's a good military sci-fi book without lots of warfare.
A past Hugo AND Nebula winner.
@ #6,
I haven't read Little Brother, but I have to say that Stanza and Creative Commons have made it such that I have read far more of Cory's fiction than any other novelist-whose-work-I-don't-really-get-into-despite-thoroughly-enjoying-his-nonfiction-and-respecting-him-as-a-thinker-and-IP-law-activist.
my wife got me "Little Brother" for xmas and i plowed through it in 24 hours flat. fantastic work.
Donal @1 -
I am disturbed that you think Scalzi is advocating those positions just because he took the not even particularly unusual step of writing stories in a universe where the dominant human interstellar government are not "good guys". Surely you don't believe George Lucas advocates planetary extinctions (Star Wars - Organia), etc.
I believe that his actual opinions on the situation were clear in the first two books. Hoever, if you disagree, what Scalzi (assuming John Perry is Scalzi's in-world alter ego) thinks about the situation is made abundantly clear at the end of the third book in the series, "The Last Colony". He ultimately has very little sympathy for the methods of the Colonial Union and rejects them rather severely.
I personally prefer some interesting moral tangles, rather than unambiguous fairy tales.
Cory,
"True Names"....
Isn't that one of the early cyberpunk stories by Vernor Vinge??