silversandbea

Congrats, we're all nominees, but especially the technical staff and volunteers. Let's talk about the rest of the nominations.

This is the first year where I've voted (and I've been putting in my nominations and voting for about four years now) that I feel like a good number of things that I've nominated made it onto the final list. I didn't feel like I'd read more than usual last year, and I've already read two of the novels, one of the novellas, two of the novelettes, three of the short stories, and two of the graphic novels -which leads me with only 20 out of 30 things to read in four months. Doable! I might even get to the YA stuff this year!

On the novels side - I'd started Trail of Lightning but hadn't finished it (and didn't count it in my read total), and I'd read the first two of the Machineries of the Empire - which is good, because that series has such a steep immersion curve (math is magic, exposition doesn't happen, just go with it) that I can't imagine trying to read that quickly or jump into the third book cold and having any fucking clue as to what was going on. I mean, moreso. I used my audible credit to get Space Opera, so I guess that's where I'm starting. So far it's a pretty good Douglas Adams impression. So far I think my vote is for Spinning Silver, but I also have high hopes for The Calculating Stars.

Going over it, I guess the one thing that I really expected to see up there and haven't was Circe - maybe it wasn't really genre enough? I was also guessing The Poppy War might make an appearance, but the author is also in her twenties and that's her first novel - there were a lot of good choices this year, and it's not like I feel like she was robbed. Especially after last year (and not to knock The Stone Sky, but everything else felt a little weak), this felt like a really strong year for scifi/fantasy novels.

I think it's also a good sign that there's a decent number of different publishing sites listed - even a few years ago, it felt like it was 90% TOR for the shorter stuff, and now there's at least a half dozen different places listed. It seems like maybe a healthier ecosystem, maybe. I didn't get the impression it was because of a not-a-slate like the Nebulas - The Fireside short stories ("STET" and "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington") are both my frontrunners so far, even if Fireside's websites make them difficult to find.

It's super predictable, but I'm sad about having to choose between Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Black Panther again. In another year, Annhilation or Sorry to Bother You would be my top choice, but they have a misfortune of being pitted against two damn-near perfect movies.

I thought it would be a good idea to start a club on metafilter's fanfare for the Hugos (someone else talked about doing this last year, I stole the idea). The link to it is here, and contains the posting order. I was thinking of waiting until the voter's packet came out, but the voter's packet can come out so late that it would be a rush to try and read even the shorter stuff in time - plus I'd feel bad dumping that many posts out at once. I've tried to at least start with the stuff that's more widely available or at least available online, then put the sequels at the end. Even so, there's probably stuff I'll probably end up reading long after I end up putting up the post.