between the rock and the cold, cold sea

And since I can nominate, I thought I should share the list of things I mean to nominate. And ask for recommendations, since I'm pretty thin in some categories.


Best Novel

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword
Elizabeth Bear, Steles of the Sky
Max Gladstone, Full Fathom Five
Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon.


Best Novella

I don't think I read a novella last year. Recs?

Best Novelette

"The Litany of Earth" by Ruthanna Emrys at Tor.com
"The Devil in America" by Kai Ashante Wilson at Tor.com.

...I realise that's heavy on Tor.com. Also, I didn't read a lot of short fiction, and longer short fiction I read even less. Other recs?

Best Short Story

"She Commands Me and I Obey" by Ann Leckie at Strange Horizons
"This Chance Planet" by Elizabeth Bear at Tor.com
"Covenant" by Elizabeth Bear in Hieroglyph
"The Breath of War" by Aliette de Bodard at Beneath Ceaseless Skies
“The Truth about Owls” by Amal El-Mohtar in Kaleidoscope


Best Related Work

Rocket Talk.
Foz Meadows, "Gender, Orphan Black, and the Meta of Meta."

Recommend me things?

Best Graphic Story

G. Willow Wilson, Ms Marvel Vol. 1: No Normal.
Gail Simone, Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues.

Recommend me more things?


Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay
Maleficent

...didn't really see a bunch of things. Going to try to see Snowpiercer, though.


Best Dramatic Presentation Short Form

"Séance" (Penny Dreadful S1)
"Governed As It Were By Chance" (Orphan Black S2)
"To Hound Nature In Her Wanderings" (Orphan Black S2)


Best Editor Long Form

Category is opaque to me. Will not be nominating.


Best Editor Short Form

Who should I nominate? Jonathan Strahan, maybe?


Best Professional Artist

Julie Dillon
Galen Dara
Cynthia Sheppard
Chris McGrath


Best Semiprozine

Strange Horizons
The Book Smugglers
Pornokitsch


Best Fanzine

I haven't really been reading widely this year. Rec me some people?


Best Fancast

Galactic Suburbia.

I'm not really a podcast listener, except in certain specific cases.


Best Fan Writer

Amal El-Mohtar
Abigail Nussbaum
Hello Tailor


Best Fan Artist

Rec me someone?



JOHN W CAMPBELL NOT A HUGO

I don't know who's eligible. Karina Sumner-Smith?

So, here's a thought I had while trudging through my reams of notes and books by people you've never heard of: an academic history book is like science fiction.

No, really. It is.

I assume anyone reading this journal has cracked the spine of a history book more than once. Probably, you're aware of the distinctions between the ones directed at a scholarly audience, and the ones directed more broadly. Popular (or introductory: although the handful of Actual Textbooks I have had the misfortune to encounter have all been written in the most graceless style and prose) books are careful not to give you more information than you can expect to digest: they simplify, sometimes appallingly, and very often they fail to engage with the fundamental arguments that inform modern scholarship at anything more than the most superficial level.

Books for a scholarly audience, on the other hand…

Not so very long ago, I read Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a history of the maritime world between 1700 and 1750. It's a very solid work of history, but I came to it cold, with no background in the area, and found myself in the midst of an ongoing conversation which was clearly engaging not only with its subject, but with other work done in the field, and so I feel damn sure that I lost half of what that book was saying through not being able to follow the references.

A couple of days ago, I was reading a chapter from - oh, it must have been The Villages of Roman Britain, a tiny wee book, no more than fifty pages long. But it assumed a level of knowledge and engagement in the conversation - familiarity with, at least, Wacher's work on the towns and "small towns" of Roman Britain, and the Iron Age background, and how that informs scholarly discussion of villages and agriculture and "villas", and why the terms in inverted commas are in inverted commas. And I had sufficient level of knowledge to follow the conversation, if not, quite, to make my own points.

And so it occurred to me that history is like science fiction. There are books that throw you in the deep end, to sink or to swim, to follow a bewildering array of connections and references and terms and characters, concerned with a world that is entirely alien. To follow academic history in its native environment requires many of the same reading protocols one uses to infer sense and meaning in the background of a science fiction or fantasy novel: the ability to fill in the gaps with inference and extrapolation; to read meaning into widely-scattered signs and symbols, and crack one's brain open to attempt to understand alien ways of looking at the world.

And there are books that downplay the strangeness, and go steadily forward, neither inspired nor disappointing, but lacking a certain depth and scope.

So this is the extent of my thought. Yours?

Because I am too sleepy to turn this into a post with actual paragraphs:

hawkwing_lb (23:04:19): Possibly this is a thought brought on by the last vestiges of cold medicine.
hawkwing_lb (23:04:57): but it occurs to me that there are many alien worlds or world-experiences very close at hand.
stillnotbored (23:05:30): there are indeed
hawkwing_lb (23:06:02): and for all the vaunted sensawunda of science fiction, most of it is very conservative when dealing with 'alienness,' and even more conservative in dealing with human people.
cristalia (23:07:38): That sounds like a thought worth chasing.
stillnotbored(23:07:50): it does
hawkwing_lb (23:08:02): I mean, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the recent science fiction novels I've read where people are less strange to me than the Nigerian immigrants who have church service in the local community centre of a Sunday.
tanaise (23:09:10): Liz, that's basically why I always think of my stuff as SF.
tanaise (23:09:36): because it's not this culture, so it is 'the other' and SF is about 'the other'
hawkwing_lb (23:10:18): (I mean, their experience of life is different to mine in ways I can hardly begin to imagine. For starters, they come from somewhere warm. And the congregation sings in church, all of them, every Sunday)
tanaise (23:11:09): Yeah. Sociological SF is part of the sf that gets most overlooked , I notice.
hawkwinglb (23:11:13): or to pick another example, I have read science fiction novels where the people were less strange to me than some of the people I went to school with
stillnotbored (23:11:51): you should chase that for sure
hawkwing_lb (23:12:04): (and certainly less strange to me than my good friend from Tallaght whose best friends all go to art school.)
hawkwing_lb (23:12:55): this is as far as my chasing goes, tonight.

So, does anyone have any thoughts on this? Because I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining the lack of strangeness in SF, or at least, the SF I've read recently.