I know that 2008 hasn't ended yet, but by this time most years I already have a list of five or ten science fiction and fantasy books that I plan to consider for a Hugo Nomination. Not this year. I can think of several books that I will NOT nominate, but except for Anathem by Neal Stephenson, I can't think of many that I want to nominate. What am I a missing?

At least I have a great short story/novel, Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi.

What are your nominations?

These are the novels published in 2008 I've bought:

Necropath, Eric Brown
Omega, Christopher Evans (stupid touchstones can't find it)
The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod
The Hidden World, Paul Park
Astropolis: Earth Ascendant, Sean Williams
Black and White, Lewis Shiner
House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds
Rolling Thunder, John Varley
The Reef, Mark Charan Newton
Debatable Space, Philip Palmer
Matter, Iain M Banks
Blood in the Fruit and Stretto, L Timmel Duchamp
Template, Matthew Hughes

I've only read so far the Reynolds (disappointing), Palmer (didn't like), Banks (very good), and Hughes (good).

I've heard good things about:
Flood, Stephen Baxter
The Quiet War, Paul J McAuley

Also due for publication later this year, and on my wants list:
Going Under, Justina Robson
Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant, Gwyneth Jones

I haven't read too many books published this year, but there are at least two novels I am going to nominate:

Kéthani by Eric Brown
Tracking by David R. Palmer (serialized in Analog)

Don't know why I missed Kéthani. Yes, it's good.

These are the 2008 books I'll choose from (I'm not a Stephenson fan at all)

Elizabeth Bear All the Windwracked Stars
Greg Bear City at the End of Time
Sylvie Berard Of Wind and Sand
Ben Bova Mars Life
Mike Brotherton Spider Star
Eric Brown Necropath
Tobias Buckell Sly Mongoose
Cory Doctorow Little Brother
Michael Flynn January Dancer
John Grant Leaving Fortusa
Joe Haldeman Marsbound
Tanya Huff Heart of Valor
Matthew Jarpe Radio Freefall
Kay Kenyon Bright of the Sky
Nancy Kress Dogs
James Kunstler World Made by Hand
Paul McAuley Cowboy Angels
Sandra McDonald Stars Down Under
Paul Melko Singularity's Ring
Elizabeth Moon Victory Conditions
Richard Morgan Thirteen
Niven & Lerner Fleet of Worlds
Susan Beth Pfeffer Life as we knew it
Terry Pratchett Making Money
Terry Pratchett Nation
John Scalzi Zoe's Tale
Charles Stross Saturn's Children
Karen Traviss Judge
Edward Willett Marseguro
Walter Jon Williams Implied Spaces

And wasn't there a Dune book published in 2008?
(Running away very quickly!)

#5

A number of the books you list are not eligible as they were published in 2007. From memory this includes Bright Of The Sky, Cowboy Angels, Making Money, and Black Man (aka Thirteen).

Omega is good but will not get a nomination. Same with The Quiet War.

Other 2008 books I have read, which haven't been mentioned yet, are -
Principles Of Angels by Jaine Fenn
Weaver by Stephen Baxter
Incandescence by Greg Egan
The Last Book by Zoran Zivkovic (neither touchstonable)
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton
Winterstrike by Liz Williams
Multireal by David Louis Edelman

#7 - Isn't there some kind of corkscrew rule about publish date in another country and publish date in the US?
Ie, Cowboy Angels hit the shelves in Great Britain in 2007, but was released in 2008 in the US?
::: shrug ::: I'm too lazy to go look it up :-)

#8

Sometimes. To some extent it depends on how easily available it is. I guess Cowboy Angels may qualify then (I hadn't realised McAuley had such a big delay between UK and US editions to be honest).

I don't really expect any of the books I mentioned to be nominated. I tend not to read the populist or popular stuff - well, the populist or popular US stuff.

Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery probably won't get a Hugo nomination but it might get some attention for the PKD.

Woo, this thread confirms this hasn't been a stand-out year for sci-fi. Spook Country by William Gibson was one of his least engaging, and Small Favor by Jim Butcher doesn't rise to this level. Lois McMaster Bujold seems on an unfortunate detour from the high level of the Miles Vorkosigan books. I'm waiting for Territory by Emma Bull to come out in paperback, but it got great reviews. After Dark by Haruki Murakami, while bizarre and otherworldly, probably doesn't qualify as sci-fi.

>5

Making Money and Nation won't get nominated as, even if they get enough votes, Terry Pratchett always declines Hugo nominations.

Regarding the eligibility question for works like Black Man (Thirteen) which were published in the UK outside the date but within the date in the US, I did some research and found this:

"Because such a huge proportion of the people who nominate on the Hugo Awards are in the USA, and because those people often do not get to see works first published outside the USA until a year later when those works get US publication, WSFS has been experimenting with extending the eligibility of works first published outside the USA. This extension has to be renewed annually by the WSFS Business Meeting, and historically has not always been extended since the rule was adopted allowing it. Check the Hugo Award nominating ballot for the current year to see whether works published in prior years outside of the USA are eligible if they were published for the first time in the USA in the current year."

(Source: http://www.thehugoawards.org/?page_id=3 Emphasis mine.)

As I bought and read Thirteen in December 2007 here in the US, I doubt it's eligible this year.

I haven't really read much Sci-Fi (or Fantasy) published this year; I can't think of anything I'd particularly want to nominate either.

I very much enjoyed Territory but it's defn. fantasy crossed w/ alternative history and not SF in my mind. Agree that Spook Country was not up to snuff, though it did improve on rereading. I think i bought Thirteen last year too; hough it'd be my pick, if eligible. After Dark, as much as i liked it, would really have to be shoved in sideways to qualify as SF. Hell, then you could have what i think about when i think about running. I give up..gonna read about college basketball in the Sporting News..go Heels!~

15>

Fantasy and alternate history are both eligible for the Hugo, as a glance at the last few winners (to say nothing of the nominees, which include several Harry Potter books) would suggest.

true, my bad, i hadn't bothered looking at the Hugo nominations for a while...actually i guess i should say years, since i hadn't noticed the Harry Potter books noms. (i mean i liked the Potters a lot, but i clearly wasn't thinking of the hugo in non-SF terms) Well then, i'll happily give it to Territory...or if they want to be a little strange..After Dark.

Phooey. I'll suggest the very fantastical life and death are wearing me out by Mo Yan ..has a book by a PRChina author ever been nominated? well that's out..2006. double phooey.

Message edited by its author, Nov 11, 2008, 9:38pm.

I wouldn't call the Mo Yan book science fiction by any stretch of the imagination, but it sure was an incredible book.

>19 but would you call it (Mo Yan) fantasy? i think it fits in there....

The best 2008 novels I've read

Tracking - David R. Palmer

In the Court Of the Crimson Kings - S. M. Stirling
Implied Spaces - Walter Jon Williams

The Last Argument Of Kings - Joe Abercrombie
Line War - Neal Asher
Little Brother - Cory Doctorow
Black Magic Woman - Justin Gustainis
The Steel Remains - Richard Morgan
House Of Suns - Alastair Reynolds
The Alchemy Of Stone - Ekaterina Sedia
Earth Ascendant - Sean Williams

4 of these are fantasy, wouldn't be nominating them for a Hugo if I ever did that.

10

Rolling Thunder and Going Under aren't populist then? :)

Would have thought elf-shagging paranormal romance stuff is about as populist as you could get these days.

Elf-shagging paranormal romance? Populist isn't the word I would use.

#22 - not like the big fat fantasies or Pete Hamilton or Charlie Stross...

Thanks for all the lists. Unfortunately the one I really liked, I nominated last year -- Thirteen Black Man.

And the ones I have already read I either disliked:
City at the End of Time, Going Under, Matter, Spook Country

or found entertaining, but trivial:
Rolling Thunder, Implied Spaces, Palmer's Tracking, Singularlty's Ring

I am almost finished with Saturn's Children and House of Suns (which I started over a month ago and put down). I have Little Brother, Multireal, and The Scourge of God here, but am not expecting much from any of them.

Maybe I will have to nominate Daniel Abraham's A Betrayal in Autumn which is very well written, but suffers from being the third of four books.

You didn't like Matter? I didn't think it was Banks' best novel, but it was much better than The Algebraist.

I found House of Suns disappointing. I've not read Rolling Thunder yet, but I very much doubt it's award-winning material. Same for Going Under.

Matter is certainly much, much better than City At The End Of Time which I have just read. Nothing really worked for me about the Bear book - the narrative drive was stop/start, the characters not clearly enough delineated, even the locations blurred into one (which considering some sections were set in a featureless grey void and others in contemporary Seattle is some feat). The book however does have plenty of ambition and even some reasonable writing but as a novel it didn't work for me.

Do you guys ever find a good SF book. Right smart much of what I see in these lists is that people read nine or ten books and feel like maybe one of the ten was not a waste of time, and an occasional one was worth the time. Why do you continue with this genre if so much of it is not worth the time?

#28

Sure but I guess it isn't very enlightening to say "yep that was OK, did what I expected". It is far better to talk about those that disappoint and those that blow you away. There will always be far more disappointing books than those that excel so it will always look as if people are a bunch of whingers.

22

If Charlie Stross is populist, what is Iain Banks then, Michael Crichton?

28

List of 11 good or better, how many do you want? I can throw in a few more decent for you if you like.

For me it seems to be something like this :-

2% Outstanding
4% Excellent
20% Good
33% Decent

Any other fiction genre those numbers will be lower, for me.

The above is basically what andy is saying.

Charlie Stross was originally published in the US, and probably has a bigger readership there than in the UK. Banks has only just been published in the US, and I doubt he's as popular there as Stross.

Message edited by its author, Nov 16, 2008, 4:24am.

Well Banks has had a lot of different publishers in the US, usually quite large ones but The State of The Art was originally published by Ziesing, two years before the UK publication. However he has never had the success there he has had in his home market. I would agree that he isn't as popular in the US as the UK.

I thought the recent Night Shade editions were the first of his books to be published in the US - not counting the Zeising The State of the Art, that is. But now Orbit has started Orbit US, they're pushing him as one of their big writers.

Message edited by its author, Nov 16, 2008, 4:26am.

#30

Ditto the comment about good SF books.

Certainly, there are good books outside of the SF genre, but SF seems to be more audacious in pushing boundaries, presenting new concepts, asking hard questions, and describing thought-provoking situations, while most other genres, (in my opinion) seem to be quite happy in following set formulae.

#33

St Martin's Press published him in hardcover for Consider Phlebas and Player Of Games. Inversions and Look To Windward were published in hardcover by Pocket. The others weren't published in hardcover (except for a SFBC edition of Excession). Paperback editions (although for a few just large trade paperbacks) exist for most of them published by either Harper, Bantam Spectra or Pocket.

I happen to have a copy of the first US edition of Inversions in hardcover in addition to my true first (the UK edition).

The situation for the non-M books is a bit more patchy - a number of those have never seen US editions. But if you add in the publishers of those that have you are adding in Simon & Schuster and Doubleday (for hardcover), and Macadam/Cage, Warner, Scribners and Bantam (for paperback).

I think he is a bit philosophical about it all. The American market just doesn't 'get' his books.

They didn't "get" Take Back Plenty either. Mind you, it's about time that book was reprinted, or added to the SF Masterworks series...

Ian, is this the Plenty they need to "Take Back"?

#28 sshhhhhhhhh! My main reason for hanging out here is to avoid the 9 time wasting books & maybe browse the 1 recommended before reading. Normally I just look at award winners but Snowcrash flys in the face of that logic, I saw it recommended in Whole Earth Magazine I think {whatever happened to W. Earth?}

geneg at #28: Why do you continue with this genre if so much of it is not worth the time?

(Sounds like the topic for a new thread of its own...)

Why? Because i'm still looking for that rush. And the more of the genre one has read, the harder it becomes to find something that will make your head explode. ("What? Yet another space battle with the Fate Of The Galaxy at stake? Yawn. Show me something new.")

(Me, I think Bluetyson at #30 has the percentages too high... )

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

To address the OP, this year I've only read
Spook Country (which I liked, but it didn't really strike me as "sf"..)
Saturn's Children (entertaining, but not Hugo-caliber);
Little Brother (not really Hugo-caliber either);
I'm working on Matter (I've read enough to consider it Hugo-worthy);
and I've read just a few pages of
Anathem (which has not yet grabbed me...).

I usually wait for the Hugo nominations, and then make some sort of effort to at least look into the nominees before the winner is announced. In theory, I make an effort to acquire (and maybe even read) all of the nominees - but for some of the nominees, I'm perfectly happy to wait for it to be remaindered

Anathem takes a while to get going but IMO it is Hugo worthy and stands a good chance of winning.

Stephenson's reputation seems out of all proportion to the numbers who read and like his books. I wonmder how much of it is left over from Snowcrash. Because a lot of people couldn't finish Cryptonomicon, and I'm far from being the only one who gave up on the Baroque Cycle...

I absolutely loved Cryptonomicon. The Baroque Cycle was uneven IMO but the best sections were great. I can certainly understand those who felt that there wasn't enough reward for ploughing through the not-so-great sections. I certainly didn't care that much for Snowcrash - it was a good book, I just didn't see it as anything special unlike some others. For me Anathem is up there with the best of his work.

I loved Cryptonomicon too. But the anachronisms in the Baroque Cycle spoilt it for me. I also thought Snow Crash was over-rated - I much preferred his The Diamond Age.

I think Stephenson is one of those authors that loses some readers with every book but also picks up new readers to replace them. And he keeps readers wondering what direction he's going to go in next. If I had to predict, I'd say Anathem has as good as chance as anything out there for the Hugo.

OTOH, I've never heard anyone say anything positive about Robert Sawyer's novels, and yet they routinely get shortlisted...

The Diamond Age was excellent and i liked Crypto a great deal, though it could've been a great deal shorter. I read 2/3 of the Baroque cycle books and 40 pages of Anathem. I'll wait a few months before deciding that this is another book to go to our town library.

Message edited by its author, Nov 18, 2008, 8:03pm.

40 pages of Anathem isn't enough. It is merely setting up the world. In fact the story proper doesn't get going for a while. It is much better (and much more SFnal) than the Baroque Cycle. I rank it in the first tier of Stephenson books however there isn't much of a grab for your attention at the start of the book if you don't care for the setup with the Concent with its fraas and suurs but the book eventually breaks free of that constrained society.

39

Yeah, that is a lazy combination of everything that was easy to look up.

for novels only, as of the other day

5 = 0.016 (66/1)
4.5 = 0.034 (33/1)
4 = 0.185 (11/2)
3.5 = 0.238 (4/1)

Which is considerably lower than the other numbers

A current year's best anthology is about guaranteed to be good at least or decent at the outside. There's no Year's Best Omnibus though.

41

Ian, my spousal unit likes Cryptonomicon more than me, actually, and really likes Snow Crash too, speaking of people that don't read heaps of SF.

Not sure how Stephenson's numbers are out of proportion? 35000 people have stuff by him here, and his average is 4.12. Pretty hard to beat that, for that sort of thiing.

Message edited by its author, Nov 19, 2008, 9:13am.

Thanks Andy - i'll keep Anathem around, reskim the opening, and then get into it..

I am feeling lie I am in the same boat as kd9. I thought Anathem was the best book I have read this year. I was not too found of the Baroque Cycle but Anathem was incredible.

But I do have to say that Greg Bear's City at the End of Time was pretty mind blowing and kinda fresh. It wasn't one of my favorite books and I will probably not read it again but I thought it was unique.

I am going to have to check out Matter, but I have to admit I am not a big Iain Banks fan. My wife loves him.

Probably going to get laughed at for this one but The Graveyard book is a cool story. Hey what can I say...

Little Brother sounds pretty interesting.

Word

Message edited by its author, Nov 22, 2008, 10:58pm.

Nope, I liked the short story that was apparently part of the Graveyard Book, so if the rest is like that, sounds ok to me.

>28 We keep reading because every so often there is a book that I run around screaming, "READ THIS. THIS IS GREAT." Especially when it comes from a little known author, like In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan. Then there are the authors that we know aren't great, but are comfortable, like George R. R. Martin, Peter J. Hamilton or John Varley (who used to be GREAT). Or even authors like Iain Banks who have great books mostly, but not always. In the end I'd rather be annoyed by bad writing about a good idea than bored by a stale idea in a modern package.

#52
Well said.