My latest short story, Refusing the Call, is now available in Third Flatiron’s Abbreviated Epics for Kindle, DRM-free ePub, or just plain paper.
It wasn’t easy figuring out how to write an epic in only 3,000 words. In the end I just started at the beginning, and stayed there. Enjoy!
This was a really easy category to vote in. I was already familiar with all the nominees here, and had really clear preferences. They’re all good, but ranking from first to last (not that last is bad in this group) my choices are:
(more…)
This is a tough vote. The best movie among the nominees is clearly Gravity (though you could make a case for Frozen) but my concern is that it’s not speculative. This is set in the present day, with present day technology. If it had been done 40 years ago it would have been SF. Today it isn’t. IMHO, merely being set in space does not qualify a movie as SF, so as good as it is, it doesn’t get my vote.
(more…)
The Novella category has some good nominees and one probable example of ballot-box stuffing. My first place vote goes to “The Chaplain’s Legacy†by Brad Torgersen. This was the only one of the group I’d read before the nominees came out. It’s solid, post-Vietnam, military SF. It’s a really good story and worth the nomination. Usually I don’t remember 90% of what’s published in the magazines two months after I’ve read them, but I remembered this one.
(more…)
There’s a weird effect in Hugo voting where the longer the work is the more popular and less literary the nominees get. In the shortest category, short stories, all the nominees are very literary and tend toward magical realism. There isn’t a hard or even soft SF story in the bunch:
(more…)
Given the thousands of comics and graphics novels published every year, not to mention web comics, it’s really surprising the nominees weren’t better. I suspect there’s a strong aversion to including any superhero comics in the group. There’s no other way to explain their complete absence from the nominees, especially given that any midlist mainstream Marvel/DC title is the equal of all but one of the nominees.
(more…)
