Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Hugo Thoughts: Best Related Work

I have a particular standard I apply to "Best Related Work" - it has to be in some way useful to the fans. Keep that in mind. Most of this year's offerings were awfully specific, with three of the six being biographies or tributes and a fourth being a writer's blog.

Crash Override by Zoe Quinn - I appreciate this work, and I've been doing some work to help people deal with trolls myself. It's a good thing that she's telling her side of the story. Is it useful? Yes. Does it belong in the Hugos? No more than the other side. Don't get me wrong, I think she was wrong. But I feel that the book is too political to belong. (And the excerpt ended before any useful tools were provided).

Ian M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction) by Paul Kincaid - Haven't read it, no excerpt provided, no vote.

A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life Of Harlan Ellison by Nat Segaloff - I wonder if this one will be helped by Ellison's recent death. It definitely gave me more of an insight into the man, but it was more "interesting' than "useful".

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Hondal. Confession time: I've never read anything by Butler. This book made me want to fix that. Well done. It was still more a tribute than anything else.

No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin. This one will likely get a boost. It's a collection from Le Guin's blog. (I hope somebody's looking after the cat). I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Sleeping With Monsters by Liz Bourke. A collection of reviews, quite useful, but perhaps not as interesting as the others.

Which left me kind of torn about my standards.

In the end I have to break the rules:

My pick: No Time To Spare
My prediction: No Time To Spare

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