Hugo Roundup: Semiprozine

One day I'll sell something to one of these magazines. I'm working on it. Well, except FIYAH, obviously.

They're all excellent, and each one deserves to win. For the same reason as editor, short form, I'm not doing a pick or prediction:

• Beneath Ceaseless Skies, editor Scott H. Andrews - a bit of a niche fantasy magazine, but always excellent.
• Escape Pod, editors Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya, assistant editor Benjamin C. Kinney, audio producers Adam Pracht and Summer Brooks, hosts Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart - pretty much the premier audio magazine of science fiction
• Fireside Magazine, editor Julia Rios, managing editor Elsa Sjunneson, copyeditor Chelle Parker, social coordinator Meg Frank, publisher & art director Pablo Defendini, founding editor Brian White - Rios left this year, but Fireside should continue strong.
• FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, executive editor Troy L. Wiggins, editors Eboni Dunbar, Brent Lambert, L.D. Lewis, Danny Lore, Brandon O’Brien and Kaleb Russell - Looking for an afrofuturism sampler? You could do a lot worse.
• Strange Horizons, Vanessa Rose Phin, Catherine Krahe, AJ Odasso, Dan Hartland, Joyce Chng, Dante Luiz and the Strange Horizons staff - A beautifully diverse magazine in both author and story type.
• Uncanny Magazine, editors-in-chief Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, nonfiction/managing editor Michi Trota, managing editor Chimedum Ohaegbu, podcast producers Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky - Just plain awesome.

I almost don't care which one wins. They're all amazing.

Hugo Roundup: Best Editor, Long Form

Pretty much all I ever have to say here is that as I publish my longer works independently, I don't work with these people.

I do know they all deserve to win, though.

Nominees are:

• Sheila E. Gilbert
• Brit Hvide
• Diana M. Pho
• Devi Pillai
• Miriam Weinberg
• Navah Wolfe

As usual with editors I'm not going to give a pick, and I'm not really feeling confident on a prediction either.

Friday Update

So, this Friday I am going to talk about myself.

I have two Prolific Works group giveaways ongoing: Claim The Throne is a fantasy giveaway (No, it's not all grimdark). Read and Relax is all genre.

I have finally come up with an overall name I like for the Transpecial/Araña universe. It's the Council of Worlds universe, thanks to language in the next book, of which the working title is Kyx. I'm working on the first draft now.

Wolfshead is back from beta readers and will go to my editor in the not-too-distant future. I'm trying to head down and get Kyx written because the Hugo packet distracted me far too badly.

The Secret History of Victor Prince is still sitting at one editing pass done because I need to think about some stuff with it.

At a personal level: Fine, still avoiding the Roni, and no actual news to share.

Hugo Roundup: Best Editor, Short Form

Editor categories are always difficult for me, and I am not going to do a pick or prediction here because ya know, I have to work with these people!

The nominees for short form are mostly the usual suspects:

Lynn M. Thomas and Michael Damien Thomas - Uncanny Magazine - all I'm going to say is they keep running award-worthystoryes.

Jonathan Strahan - He just stopped doing Year's Bests, so there may be a nostalgia advantage here.

Neil Clarke - Clarkesworld, always runs high quality stories.

Sheila Williams - Asimov's Science Fiction, pretty much same note.

Ellen Datlow - she's editing short fiction for Tor, and I'm less familiar with her.

They all deserve to win. And I'm not just saying that because I hope to sell them a story!

Hugo Roundup: Best Graphic Story

Confession: Yeah, I'm a comic book fan.

I love my comic books. So, I have feelings about a couple of things on this list:

Die, Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker - Kieron Gillen often hits my sweet spot, and this new creator-owned series is for RPG people everywhere. (It's a parody, but not in the sense of being funny...it's in conversation with D&D tropes). I love it, but it's a little more uneven than his previous work.

LaGuardia - okay, I have never been a huge fan of Okorafor. Apparently that's because...she's a better comic writer than prose writer. I may have to pick this book up just to own it in physical form. Gorgeous art and a story that pulls no punches.

Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen - I still can't get into Monstress. It's the art. Sorry, guys.

Mooncakes - Cute lesbian witches. I mean cute here as a descriptor of the art. And the characters. It's not an insult.

Paper Girls, Volume 6 - Not my favorite Vaughn. Still not my favorite Vaughn. I don't like the ending. It feels like the reader is being told to grow up and set aside childish wonder. Possibly not intentionally.

The Wicked + The Divine, Volume 9: Okay - I have loved this book from issue one. I am biased. The ending was perhaps not quite up to par (it went on a bit after where it should have ended). But...it's Wic+Div.

My pick: The Wicked + The Divine

My prediction: LaGuardia, given Okorafor's popularity and that art.

Hugo Roundup: Best Short Story

Short story is often the strongest category due to the sheer amount of short fiction produced in any given year. I wouldn't be at all upset if any of these won.

"And Now HIs Lordship Is Laughing" by Shiv Ramdas - my least favorite of the stories, although I can see its merit.

"As The Last I May Know" by S.L. Huang - a take on the concept of the nuclear missile codes being implanted into somebody's heart and the President having to murder them to use them. Except they made it worse.

"Blood Is Another Word For Hunger" by Rivers Solomon - really, anything by Solomon is worth reading, although this is a dark story that verges on body horror.

"A Catalog of Storms" by Fran Wilde - gorgeous worldbuilding and beautiful prose.

"Do Not Look Back, My Lion" by Alix E. Harrow - again, some really interesting worldbuilding. Epic fantasy is hard in the short form.

"Ten Excerpts From An Annotated Bibliography On The Cannibal Women Of Ratnabar Island" by Nibedita Sen - an interesting experiment in form.

My pick: A Catalog of Storms

My prediction: A Catalog of Storms

Hugo Roundup: Best Novelette

Also a strong (and varied) category.

"The Archronology of Love" by Caroline M. Yoachim. A love story. Not a romance. Very bittersweet.

"Away With The Wolves" by Sarah Gailey. It's nice to see something reasonably original done with werewolves.

"The Blur In The Corner Of Your Eye" by Sarah Pinsker. Stories about writers don't often work. Pinsker pulls it off.

"Emergency Skin" by N.K. Jemisin. Taking on white supremacy in a very interesting way.

"For He Can Creep" by Siobhan Carroll. Cats. Need I say more?

"Omphalos" by Ted Chiang. What would it be like to live in a world which really was created X thousand years ago by God? And then find out you might not be the center of it. Highly philosophical.

My pick: The Archronology of Love. It's just beautiful and sticks with you.

My prediction: Most likely Emergency Skin, but another really strong category. Omphalos has some good hype too.

Happy Juneteenth!

Normally, I talk about myself on Fridays.

But I'm not going to talk about myself this Friday because it would really be kind of tacky to talk about my pasty white self on a holiday that celebrates African-American freedom (something which we still don't all the way have).

So, instead I'm going to mention a few names. These are Black authors I think you should be going out and reading.

Rivers Solomon. Read "The Deep." Please. Also listen to the song. It's kind of shared world/invented folklore. Solomon has won multiple awards and they write amazing fiction.

P. Djeli Clark. His work includes "The Black God's Drums" and "The Haunting of Tram Car 015." He's a writer of short fiction, with his best work at the novella length. Oh, and he's also a historian, which very much shows in his stories.

Tomi Adeyemi. She's working on a YA fantasy trilogy that is just amazing. (Book one is Children of Blood and Bone and book two, which just came out, is Children of Virtue and Vengeance). Classic fantasy tropes refreshed by West African sensibilities. There's supposedly going to be movies. I really hope so, because her work deserves wide recognition.

And of course, while I don't think they need to be highlighted, don't forget Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor.

The best way for us white people to celebrate Juneteenth is by uplifting black people (and please no fried chicken parties).

Hugo Roundup: Best Novella

Perhaps the most interesting work in this category is Rivers Solomon's "The Deep." I don't know of any other occasion when a song has been nominated for Best Related Work and then somebody wrote a novella inspired by it.

If you read it, dig out the song too. It has interesting things to say about collaborative storytelling.

So, my thoughts:

"The Deep" by Rivers Solomon is already mentioned. It's a beautifully-written piece that plays with concepts of humanity, gender and memory. I'm not sure I buy all of their worldbuilding, but these are mermaids I am down with.

"To Be Taught, If Fortunate" by Becky Chambers. Abandoned and forgotten astronauts on other worlds, and an exploration of the future. It's very much a Chambers work; she has an approach to space fiction that's quite distinctive.

"Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. Well written, but...as already mentioned I have issues with pop culture quantum mechanics as the basis of a story.

"The Haunting of Tram Car 015" by P. Djeli Clark. Fun steampunk ghost/possession story. Quite enjoyable.

"This Is How You Lose The Time War" by Ama El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Won the Nebula and deserved it. Epistolary fiction is hard.

"In An Absent Dream" by Seanan McGuire. It's my firm opinion that McGuire is the current master of fairy tales, with Naomi Novik not far behind. This story demonstrates that.

As has often been the case recently, the novella category is amazingly, ridiculously strong.

My pick: In An Absent Dream

My prediction: Who the heck knows. I'm going to say probably This Is How You Lose The Time War but everything here deserves to win.

Hugo Roundup: Best Related Work

This is never my favorite category. Last year was a classic example of having to compare not just apples and oranges, but mango and papaya as well.

This year wasn't as bad with four of the offerings being books. The other two were a short documentary and...an acceptance speech.

Worlds of Ursula K. LeGuin - a cute, well made documentary that offered no new information, really. However, the animation was really nice and the production values good.

Joanna Russ - from the Masters of Science Fiction Series. Only an excerpt was provided and I felt I couldn't fairly judge because the formatting was a bit off, but it appeared solid.

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein - Okay, I'm a Heinlein fan. And an exploration of the themes of gender and sexuality in his work is right up my alley. Unfortunately, this book started off as a PhD dissertation...and it showed. I needed a drink afterwards. With all apologies to the author.

Jeannette Ng's acceptance speech - I'm pretty much never going to vote for an acceptance speech, and I question their eligibility. If you want me to, provide a recording of the speech, not a transcript. Please.

Becoming Superman - oh wow. J. Michael Straczynski's autobiography is snarky, witty, if dark. He did not have a fun childhood at all. I may also be biased because I owe him for Ivanova.

My pick: Becoming Superman

My prediction: I hate predicting this category, so I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and say Becoming Superman.

Hugo Writeup - Best Novel

Okay, so I'm finally going through the Hugo packet. I'm going to start with the big one, Best Novel.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. This was my Nebula pick, but lost to Sarah Pinsker (which is not a tragedy. Everything on the ballot was good). It's a brilliant space opera which explores cultural colonization and conquest, speaking to a struggling nation on the borders of a vast empire. It's very much about how empire actually works. I love this book.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Also on the Nebula ballot. This is a very popular book that I personally found excellent, but not to my taste. I'm picky about horror and horror-adjacent stuff. (This is a dark fantasy...in space...which is an amazing concept).

The City In The Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. Anders is going to be Unicorn Girl to me forever thanks to her fun little stunt during the Nebulas ;). This book is another exploration of colonialism, with aliens almost as good as those created by Vernor Vinge (and very much in that tradition. I'd love to ask her if she has read those books), and also a reasonably feasible description of life on a tidally-locked planet. I love this one too.

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. This attempts to be an anti-war novel in the tradition of Haldeman's Forever War but I personally found the timey wimey stuff confusing. And I normally do well with timey wimey stuff.

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire. This book was both good and disappointing; I like pretty much everything else I've read by McGuire better. I think she just does a better job with fairy stories. Or it's the fact that I get faintly irritated by pop culture quantum mechanics.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. Redhook let this author down. They provided a 100 page excerpt. Exactly 100 pages. Nobody looked. The excerpt ended in the middle of a sentence. I feel bad that I wasn't able to fairly judge this book.

My pick: A Memory Called Empire

My prediction: Gideon the Ninth

Archaeology!

I'm an archaeology major. So I still squee about things like this.

They used radar to map an entire Roman town in a non-invasive way, even to multiple layers. Now we just need to refine that technology so it works when it rains. (Right now you can only use it in places that have a dry season...)

Friday Updates

Just got my digital contributors' copy of Powered Up! For those of you who need the paperback, there will be a paperback edition, but it has been delayed until early 2021.

Other that no real news on this front. I'm planning on sending The Secret History of Victor Prince to betas in a few weeks tops. Hopefully I'll have both Secret History and Wolfshead out this year and I'd like to get the as yet untitled Transpecial sequel on shelves too.

How Many States of Matter Are There?

In school, you probably learned that there are three - solid, liquid, and gas. And somebody probably used water to demonstrate.

You have probably learned that no, there are four. The fourth state is plasma, which we knew about in the 1920s. Plasma is essentially a charged gas, and is generally found in and around stars. The interior of the sun is mostly plasma.

Except.

There are actually five states of matter.

The fifth is what's called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Some things really, really don't want to be anything but a gas. Cool them down far enough and they become something else....and it's quite interesting indeed.

BEC's are quantum. They are a wave as well as matter. We've never observed them in the wild and making them in the lab is tricky because they warm back up at the drop of, well, an atom. Enter the ISS: We've actually been able to make BECs that last more than a second in space. Now we might be able to study them properly...and learn some things about the universe we didn't know.

Heights to Depths...

...but in a good way. Dr. Kathy Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space decided that her next trick would be to go to the other extreme of pressure.

She's now the first woman to descend to the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean.

And the first person to do both of these things.

Oh, and the submersible she and her pilot used, the DSV Limiting Factor, is the first craft to make the trip more than once.

We don't know enough about the oceans...but exploring both them and space in one lifetime? She rocks.

I Also Love Crows

...even the ones having some kind of family argument repeatedly outside my apartment.

Crows are at least as intelligent as the great apes. The corvids (which include ravens, crows, jays, and magpies) have brains that weigh 2% of their body mass, equivalent to humans, and birds have particularly efficient brains because they have to be so light.

They have extended childhoods, staying with their parents for about 4 years (a very long time for a bird). And even after they leave, they come back to visit, a very rare behavior in animals. Crows also form inter-species friendships and have been seen demonstrating inter-species altruism.

Basically, we should watch out; the crows are coming for our status of "most intelligent creature on the planet."

Or maybe it's already too late and we should just be glad we don't directly compete.

I Love Mules

...and hopefully one day I'll get to ride one again. This article talks about studies that explain why mules are, in fact, superior for some purposes.

The big thing they discovered is that mules have more efficient "fast skeletal muscles." Which...explains a lot.

There's also differences from either parent species in the brain, as any mule will tell you. And believe me, they communicate real well...

Friday Updates!

So, the first news is this!

This is Green Ronin's latest Mutants & Masterminds anthology, and it contains my story "Fortune Favors." My first official tie-in! You can get it straight from the publisher here, which will give you both epub and PDF versions.

Everything else is chugging along.

Smart buildings, smart phones, smart blood?

Smart blood? Researchers have developed synthetic red blood cells that can carry things other than oxygen through your bloodstream. They might be used to transport cancer therapy or detect toxins.

(Red blood cells are basically just cargo transporters, they don't even have a nucleus).

Now I need to actually try and start this draft...

Why does everything spin?

The Earth spins. The sun spins. Our galaxy spins. Everything in the universe spins. We kind of take it for granted. It's how we have, well.

Life probably couldn't exist if everything wasn't imitating a figure skater.

And that may include the very seed of the universe. Patterns in the spin direction of spiral galaxies indicate that the early universe was, well.

Spinning.

Or more accurately tumbling; spinning on more than one axis.

It makes so much sense. Here's an article that explains it better than I can.

So, if the universe is tumbling...what exactly is it tumbling through?

We Have Liftoff!

I got distracted by the Nebulas from posting about the launch.

It went off without a hitch on Saturday, a bit after noon Eastern, and the astronauts safely docked on Sunday morning.

I know some people have mixed feelings about commercial space flight, but it was inevitable. Inevitably, space will be a place of commerce. Of tourism. Of trade. And yes, likely of conflict armed and otherwise.

We can worry about those things, or we can accept that this is humanity and the things we take with us and be happy that two guys had a relatively uneventful ride to space on a bird that had been extensively tested, but had not previously flown with men on board.

I'm choosing to celebrate it while considering the implications fodder for speculation and, of course, stories.

Oh, and not so side note:

Black Lives Matter

Nebula Winners!

So, here's my analysis of this year's Nebula winners. It's brief because I'm tired from way too much videoconferencing over the weekend.

Ray Bradbury:

Good Omens: "Hard Times." I need to see this show. I need to see this show. Somehow. I don't want to subscribe to Prime... (Please don't suggest anything involving a skull and crossbones).

Andre Norton:

Riverland by Fran Wilde. Many congratulations, Fran. My number one remains Henry Lien's delightful Peasprout Chen, but apparently people wanted a more serious book this year.

(Content warning: Riverland deals with domestic violence. It does so beautifully and with wonderful nuance, but it goes there).

Game Writing:

The Outer Worlds from Obsidian Entertainment.

Unfortunately, the only tabletop supplement nominated was one I would have given an ENnie to for sure, but not a Nebula. Amazing work, but the Nebula should be about story.

Short Story:

"Give the Family My Love" by A.T. Greenblatt. I preferred "A Catalog of Storms" but everything in this category deserved to win.

Novelette

"Carpe Glitter" by Cat Rambo. Amazing story that well deserved its win.

Novella:

"This Is How You Lose The Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. How is this Gladstone's first win? The epistolary form is hard and perhaps works better when you have two different writers...

Novel:

A Song For A New Day by Sarah Pinsker.

I thought the pandemic was going to screw this wonderful exploration of a dystopia where people are not allowed to gather face to face. Instead, it looks like the opposite happened.

My #1 book of 2019 remains Arkady Martine's wonderful space opera, A Memory Called Empire, but I can't say this book didn't deserve to win.

They all did.

This was a tough year for sure. 2020 may bring some oddities with many books delayed by the pandemic (which probably means 2021 is going to be...fun).