It’s Hugo Awards nomination time again!
The nomination period for the 2016-2017 Hugo Awards is now open. If you’re a member of last year’s Midamericon in Kansas City, this year’s Worldcon 75 in Helsinki or next year’s Worldcon 76 in San Jose, you can nominate your favourite Sci-Fi & Fantasy works of 2016 for a Hugo Awards in a whole host of categories.
Every year I try to read works as they are being published but I end up falling behind because there are just So. Many. Great. Books.
As a side effect, come Hugo nomination time, I’m left with a very small field of works I’ve actually read or watched and I have to leave blank spots in my nomination ballot which I just don’t like doing.
Shockingly it happened again in 2016 & there’s some catch up to do…
Here’s what I read and watched in 2016 that’s eligible:
- Novels: Ghost Talkers, False Hearts, Obelisk Gate, The Family Plot
- Novella: Every Heart A Doorway, Forest of Memory
- Novelette: Superior
- Short stories: None. Absolute FAIL.
- Graphic novels: Descender Vol 2, Saga Vol 6
- Films: Arrival
- TV: Game of Thrones, Doctor Who
I’d be happy to put most of these on my ballot (Every Heart A Doorway and Superior will definitely be on there, as both made my Favourite Reads of 2016 list). But I would still love to have a wider selection to pick from, so I decided to get some reading & some watching done…
Making it into a bit of a project to make it more fun:
For the next three months, I’ll try and read, watch and consume some works that came out in 2016 – stuff I heard was good, or stuff I wanted to get to but didn’t – and then hopefully by the end of three months I’ll have a wider pool of eligible works to nominate from.
I decided to keep all of this fairly casual and not put too much pressure on myself. Instead of targeting things I should *absolutely* get to, I just amassed a giant list of STUFF that fits the bill, with help from Renay’s excellent Hugo Eligibility Spreadsheet of Doom. My own personal Hugo List of Doom is 4 pages long so far, with a full page dedicated to short stories!
That might seem daunting, but since I already know I won’t get through everything, I don’t feel pressured to try and get to everything. I’ve printed out a copy of The Hugo List of Doom, and I’ve started marking works off with a highlighter once I’ve checked them out. To me, that smattering of colour throughout The Hugo List of Doom proves that I gave the project a good try, and it’s satisfaction enough on its own.
If you have any recommendations for Hugo-eligible things I should try to get to before the end of the nomination period in March, let me know in the comments!
Author: Becky Chambers
Renata Ghali believed in Lee Suh-Mi’s vision of a world far beyond Earth, calling to humanity. A planet promising to reveal the truth about our place in the cosmos, untainted by overpopulation, pollution, and war. Ren believed in that vision enough to give up everything to follow Suh-Mi into the unknown.
Nobody the planet Kalgash has ever experienced full darkness or even seen the stars, bathed in the ever-present light of their six suns. But once every two millennia, a rare eclipse plunges the world into night. When the suns start setting one by one and night falls for the first time in living memory, the terror of darkness overthrows civilisation & brings with it unfathomable chaos & destruction.
A mysterious passageway leads Coraline from her the drawing room into a flat decorated exactly like her own, but strangely different, and into the arms of her “other” parents. They’re much more interesting than her own, despite their disturbing black button eyes, but they want to keep her forever & Coraline isn’t keen on having buttons sawn into her eyes. With only the help of a bored-through stone and an aloof cat, Coraline sets out to rescue her real parents & the three children trapped in the mirror.
“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one…”
Eighteen-year-old Laura lives alone with her widower father in an isolated Austrian castle, until one day, an unexpected carriage accident brings Carmilla into their midst. On meeting her, Laura recognises Carmilla as the beautiful visitor that came to her bedchamber in a dream when she was six years old.
Out of the wreckage of four simultaneous plane crashes, three child survivors are found. Amidst global panic, officials frantically search for the cause of the crashes, the press focuses its relentless attention on ‘The Three’ and their trauma-induced behavioural problems, and the charismatic leader of a rapture cult insists the children are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse. Forced to go into hiding, the children’s behaviour becomes so disturbing that even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival…