Two for Five
The Hugo Award nominations have been announced for this year's Worldcon. The Best Novel list is:
- The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
- Iron Council by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
- Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross (Ace)
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
- River of Gods by Ian McDonald (Simon & Schuster)
Unsurprisingly, given that Worldcon will be held in the UK, this is a very UK-heavy list. Two of the books (The Algebraist and River of Gods) I haven't seen on this side of the Atlantic, other than some very expensive import editions at last year's Worldcon.
The final list isn't all that similar to the list I sent in, but I don't have any problems with it. Had I been able to find the Banks, I might well have voted for it myself-- I'll certainly try to locate a copy before the voting for the actual award. What I've heard about the McDonald sounds interesting as well, and I'm willing to believe that lots of people like the Mieville, even if I couldn't make it through more than about a third of Perdido Street Station.
For those who care, here are the nominations I sent in:
- Neal Stephenson, The System of the World
- Sean Stewart, Perfect Circle
- Ken MacLeod, Newton's Wake
- Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise
- Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Of the books I nominated that didn't make the list, I thought Perfect Circle might well have been the best book I read last year, but it was a small-press publication, and more of a World Fantasy Award kind of book anyway. The System of the World was brilliant, but its chances were always sort of slim, given that it's the third in a trilogy of thousand-page novels set three hundred years in the past, and the only unquestionably SFnal element is alchemical in nature. The MacLeod was one of the best straight SF novels (its main competition being Iron Sunrise) I read that was published in the relevant window (though I'm not entirely sure it was actually eligible).
I didn't nominate in any of the other fiction categories, owing to not having read enough short fiction to have an informed opinion. I was 0-for in my other nominations (both Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden for Professional Editing and Fan Writing, and Fafblog for Best Website-- they're clearly doing journalism from another dimension, and if that's not SF, I don't know what is...).
Posted at 8:15 PM | link |