This year’s Hugo award nominees are up. The big thing to note is how many of the entries have “read online” links next to them.
The only novel nomination I’ve read is Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother which, while definitely not high-end prose (its usually classified as young-adult fiction), is something everyone should read RIGHT NOW to understand the way our paranoid society and technology interact. Seriously, go, right now, Free in your format of choice or on dead trees from a bookstore. It’ll only take a couple hours at most. I also find Anathem promising; its on my reading list, but I haven’t got to it yet and doubt I will for some time.
Otherwise, I’m not terribly impressed by most of the options, too many of the nominees are derivative, or adaptations, even down into the short stories. Some of them are very good adaptations, and many of them are very enjoyable if you’ve read the precursors, in particular, “Shoggoths in Bloom” is good fun if you’ve read “At the Mountains of Madness” (Available here via Aussie copyright law and Project Gutenberg) or any of Lovecraft’s related works. I’m working my way though the ones with read links, thus far “26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss” is the most original thing in the collection, both in terms of content and format. The format and diction is genuinely bizarre, but I found it well suited to the story and the context of reading it online.
