2017 Hugo and Campbell finalists

Are at Locus, and no doubt other places.

A lot of interesting stories, and no more than one apparent puppy contribution per fiction category. The new nominating process seems to have done the trick.

And Tor Books and Tor.com reign supreme.

I really like the addition of best series category!

The problem with Best Series is that voters are spoiled for choice! There isn't one of those that I haven't read and enjoyed. I guess I'd put Bujold's Vorkosigan series at the top of my list, but it's tough.

I can safely say that science fiction has passed me by. I didn't recognize a single writer's name in any of the fiction categories.

>4 rgurskey:

That may be but it speaks more about you than it does SF.

Yes there are lots of younger writers but surely you can't have not heard of Lois McMaster Bujold (13 previous Hugo nominations, first in 1989, with 5 wins)? Or China Mieville (5 previous nominations; 1 win)? NK Jemisin won Best Novel last year. Cixin Liu won Best Novel two years ago.

>4 rgurskey: >5 andyl: And we have Ursula K. LeGuin and Robert Silverberg in related works - though Silverberg is an interview subject, not an author.

I somewhat share the feeling - who are these people - but I've read enough of them to know that they're by and large a terrific set of writers.

(duplicate post, removed)

>6 dukedom_enough: Notice I said 'fiction categories." I am quite familiar with Robert Silverberg and have heard of LeGuin. I still don't know anyone else.

Bujold and Mieville were nominated in fiction categories. You have to have been passed by almost three decades worth of science fiction to be unfamiliar with either of those two.

>8 rgurskey: Sorry about misreading you.

But this still is an opportunity to catch up on some great, newer writers. You're a bit handicapped by the fact that the Jemisin, Chambers, and Liu are later books in novel series (numbers two, two and three respectively), but if you're not voting, you could start with the first books in those series.

The Jemisin series starts with The Fifth Season, which is excellent, although frequently grim and horrifying. Freedom and responsibility, in a world where major earthquakes/volcanic eruptions happen all the time, and world-shattering tremors every few centuries. The Obelisk Gate is the only one of the nominees I've read.

I've read the first in the Liu series, The Three Body Problem. Liu is Chinese, and his novel was quite different from the US/English/Canadian/Australian stories I'm used to. Parts reminiscent of 1920s sense-of-wonder stories, parts are a realistic, critical account of China's Cultural Revolution.

I've heard good things about the rest of the novels, too. Many of the short fiction nominees are available free online.

I found the first Becky Chambers and Cixin Liu disappointing. Hard to see why their sequels crop up for best novel mind you it hasn't exactly been a stellar year.

I am going to give rgurskey the benefit of the doubt and assume he's willing to try new sf, and that this isn't really just the sort of complaint we've seen so much of in the past few years regarding the Hugos that SF is no longer just clones of Asimov and Heinlein.

rgurskey, you seem to primarily read old-school space opera, based on which I'd definitely recommend you pick up The Three-Body Problem, the first book in Liu's trilogy of which this year's nominee is the final volume. I haven't read the Lee, but based on its description it also sounds right up your alley. I think Palmer and Jemisin are brilliant - I haven't read this particular series of Jemisin's since the first book opens with an event that I know would be very triggery for me so I'm leaving it for a couple years, but everything of hers I have read is great - but if you require spaceships they may not be to your taste.

>12 lorax:

Ninefox Gambit is a bit strange. At first glance it looks like it will suit someone who likes milSF and space opera. However the world-building is quite dense and you are just dumped into the world with no explanations of how everything works (you pick that up as you go along). So on that front it might not suit someone who likes trad SF. Also the underpinnings of how things work tends more to the science fantasy end of spectrum which might also be a disappointment.

>11 justifiedsinner: I was underwhelmed by The Three Body Problem but found The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet a bit of harmless fun that played with many SF tropes. It was actually a very political book and was a statement that some people may have not been happy with.

>14 pgmcc: This was my review of the Chamber's book on WWE:

I read a comment somewhere that The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was like reading Firefly fanfic. It is. It's also like reading a fanfic of Star Trek, Star Wars and every other soft-core SF TV and movie series that's ever been. There is really nothing original here.
In her bio blurb Becky Chambers says she spends a lot of time thinking about space. She might spent a bit more time thinking about science (or a least avoiding the subject altogether). Using algae for fuel in deep space where there is no sunlight might sound eco-conscious to the anti-science Whole Food crowd but just doesn't work.
And despite the twaddle-laden explanation the chances of having a bunch of aliens with so similar a biochemistry that they react to stimulants and narcotics the same way is next to zero, Star Wars cantinas not withstanding. Even my cats don't react to drugs the same way and we are from the same planet.

>5 andyl: Seems legit. Before joining this group the newest writer I'd heard of was William Gibson. But yes, rediscovering the genre has been fun.

I hope the alien stripper story is a lot more cerebral than it sounds.

>17 Cecrow:

Probably not, just another pathetic attempt to troll the Hugo voters.

18: Alien Stripper Boned from Behind by the T-Rex is indeed a troll nomination courtesy of the Rabid Puppies. The finalists from the Rabid Puppy slate are:

Best Novella: This Census-Taker by China Miéville
Best Novelette: Alien Stripper Boned from Behind by the T-Rex by Stix Hiscock
Best Short Story: An Unimaginable Light by John C. Wright
Best Related Work: The View From the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman
Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation: Deadpool
Best Long Form Editor: Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale)
Best Semiprozine: Cirsova Heroic Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine edited by P. Alexander
Best Fanzine: Castalia House Blog edited by Jeffro Johnson
Best Fan Writer: Jeffro Johnson
Best Fan Artist: Alex Garner
Best Fan Artist: Mansik Yang
Best Fancast: The Rageaholic presented by RazörFist
Campbell Award for Best New Writer: J. Mulrooney

Other than the Mieville, Gaiman, and Deadpool, these Puppy-driven finalists all pretty much range from fairly bad to unimaginably shitty.

To the extent that I have read or viewed the other non-Puppy entries on the ballot, they range from pretty good to excellent. The dichotomy in quality between the "normal" finalists and the Puppy finalists is painfully large.

>15 justifiedsinner:

Wow, way to needlessly alienate half the readers of your review. "anti-science Whole Food"? So now shopping at a particular grocery store means you're an idiot?

>15 justifiedsinner:

Using algae for fuel in deep space where there is no sunlight might sound eco-conscious to the anti-science Whole Food crowd but just doesn't work.

Haven't read the book, don't know the author, but I'll make a wild guess that perhaps she was assuming use of some kind of artificial light source here?

And despite the twaddle-laden explanation the chances of having a bunch of aliens with so similar a biochemistry that they react to stimulants and narcotics the same way is next to zero, Star Wars cantinas not withstanding. Even my cats don't react to drugs the same way and we are from the same planet.

How does anyone bothered by twaddle bear to read in the genre? :) Anyway--again, don't know what sort of "twaddle" was involved here but I can easily imagine a broad evolutionary hypothesis linking different species' biochemistry--not unlike the actual case on earth. Assuming some degree of relatedness, homologous or analogous, I don't see what's the problem with having an imaginary drug work the same way in different imaginary species, if that's what the author wants--or work differently, if THAT's what they want. But there's certainly no absolute impossibility to the notion of different species reacting biochemically in a similar or even identical way to a given agent.

In real life, we use animal models in pre-clinical drug trials, to say nothing of myriad other comparative applications. Heck, yeast and bacteria have been used to elucidate human biochemistry--precisely because commonalities exist.

>20 lorax:

Ha, I avoided saying anything about that, remembering the nightmarish thread in Pro & Con Tim had started on the theme (stupid hypocritical libr'uls being more anti-science than Republicans). That crap ran for 800+ posts--and possibly was continued, I lost consciousness at some point...

> 19 courtesy of the Rebid Puppies

Seems like a telling typo. :)

Puppies making another bid, each less successful than the last.

>15 justifiedsinner: I wouldn't disagree with much of what you said, but I still enjoyed the romp. I would add some films to your list of TV programmes, in particular, "Silent Running". Smoking on a spaceship is also something that was totally off.

>22 LolaWalser:

I avoid Pro and Con, so I fortunately missed that bit of nonsense. Ah well, if that starts up here the "ignore thread" button is just a click away.

>15 justifiedsinner: >21 LolaWalser:

As I've learned more science over the years, I've become pretty good at finding errors in almost all SF stories, including those written by hard-SF writers. So I've become more easygoing about those errors. It's usually fairly easy to imagine a way to save the appearances, as per LolaWalser's suggestions. YMMV, of course.

>26 dukedom_enough:

Yeah, I don't read SF for the science. If I demand complete scientific rigor, I'm left with Hal Clement and maybe some Greg Egan.

>Right.

It's also funny how knowing (too) little or a lot (or hey, maybe knowing just enough) can actually have opposite effects on accepting to go with this or that "mad" idea. Sometimes people get bogged down by strict adherence to some--usually extremely basic--notion somebody else who is actually exploring the matter may see more flexibly or in a different context. Doctor Who's "reversing the neutron flow" became a catchphrase illustrating silly technobabble and general "unscientificness" of the genre but when I first heard it my mind immediately went to spin-polarized neutrons. You can, in fact, reverse the polarity of such a neutron beam.

But if ALL you know about neutrons is "they have no electric charge", then you can probably do no other than haw haw at how stupid it is to talk about neutrons and polarity, period.

There's ignorance that accepts everything uncritically and then there's ignorance that sticks to a few bare bones notions, without fuel to imagine how they might be different, or more complex, or changed.

I will say, though, that failures both of fact and verisimilitude regarding science in serious fiction still annoy me greatly (the more so the closer to my field! ;)) Houellebecq's "Elementary particles" ("Atomised"?), obnoxious in general as he always is for the same reasons, REALLY irritated me from the get go by the vapid cartoon of molecular biology. The language was wrong, fake. And understanding a science means speaking that language, one isn't possible without the other.

But in science fiction? I say get your freak concept on, only do observe your internal logic.

Piling on here >15 justifiedsinner: with the rest of the group....in a friendly manner.

Shame on you for giving your cat drugs!, however thanks for the implication the catnip has no effect on you - I can cross that off my list. ;-)

>31 supercell: Simple, dilithium crystal controlled fusion reactors with a space vacuum energy emergency back up generator! ;-)

>31 supercell:

I'd like a contract and an advance before I write the book. :)

Science, (good or bad), aside... I also did not really care for The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. IANAS but am merely a simple reader that loves science-fiction. Anyone that gets overly worked up about the type of scientific concepts and jargon that y'all are bandying about in this discussion is perhaps forgetting the 'fiction' part of the genre label...? Aliens that are really just humans in rubber suits and science that doesn't make sense in the real world are not things that generally bother me too much, (but yes, as Lola says, an author does need to keep their universe consistent).

My issues with this particular book had more to do with the lack of character development and world-building. Both fell flat for me and the book ended up being just about mediocre as a result. I didn't fully hate it - but I also scratched my head a bit over all the hype. It's possible that my expectations were artificially elevated by the hype - but I don't think so. I felt the writing lacked spark and the characters and their motivations were simply not all that believable. I won't be reading the sequel as I had to pretty much force myself to even finish the first book.

Clearly, I am in the minority as a lot of people are obviously enjoying these books - and I'm 100% ok with that... ;)

>34 ScoLgo: et al. I read a review/criticism of The Long Way... saying that it was a pretty crude way of representing diversity in both race, gender and sexuality, with too much happy happy and no attention for the difficulty of the situation. Now, I have no idea what the background of the reviewer was, and how he/she views other books (and I can't find the review again to view it in the right light), but I have to admit, it kind of put me off. I am not quite that sensitive (I have no qualms about reading old, very non-PC SF) but to me it also seemed that the characters weren't very well developed. I don't know, it put me off the book and I haven't seen/read anything that gave me reason to pick it up.

Now, if it wins I have to, just to keep my Hugo collection complete...

>19 StormRaven: The 'Alien Stripper' title looked to me like an attempt to reverse-troll Chuck Tingle. These people just don't get irony, do they? And putting some titles on their slate that stand a good chance of winning without their support strikes me as an effort to claim some false legitimacy if/when they do win. "See? Hugo voters agree with us, after all!" And I can't believe that they would put China Miéville on their slate so readily if they had the first idea where he stood on political issues.

>27 lorax: "...and maybe some Greg Egan." Only maybe? After all, this is the writer of whom it was once said "Greg Egan doesn't just write Hard Science Fiction. He writes BLOODY DIFFICULT science fiction."

>36 RobertDay:

It's been a while since I've reread his earlier stuff, so I'm not willing to swear to its complete accuracy. I do remember thinking at the time that Egan knows very exactly what rules he is breaking. (Some of his more recent stuff is "rigorous exploration of counterfactuals", which qualifies as hard SF but not as the 'At least as accurate as the journals' that justifiedsinner seems to require.)

Continuing on with the current topic, :-), about a year ago, I was reading an article that said that scientists had proven that gravity was a light speed phenomenon. I think the example they used was that if the sun suddenly disappeared, the earth would continue to revolve for eight minutes before taking off in a straight line.

My first thought was that that's interesting and it must have been a really tricky thing to prove.

My second thought was, hmmm, that means the short distance FTL communication system David Weber designed for his Honorverse series isn't valid since it was based on using gravity pulse modulation to send messages.

It must be sad to find that out when you're already 20ish books deep in a series. :-)

My personal bugaboo is engineering/common sense problems particularly with near current day things. A prime example is Justin Cronin's book The Passage where current day tech is still going strong decades later. My humble opinion is that some things would be useable but a lot of the things would be rusted or otherwise unusable and his characters were casually scavenging and using them in the novel. That's one of the things that ruined that book for me.

I have no problem with unobtainium science - dilithium crystals, flux capacitors etc. You tell the reader what it does but don't tell them how and rely on Clarke's Law to bluff your way through. Using bad science is something else. It's sloppy and, in the age of Wikipedia, it's lazy. It's as bad as writing an historical novel and peppering it with anachronisms (apologies to any Connie Willis fans) or an American writing a British detective story and using American police procedures and jargon (or visa versa). If you are writing in a genre there are guidelines to observe. If you don't want to deal with science write a fantasy novel I happily read those too.

>20 lorax: I shop at Whole Food (sometimes, it's rather overpriced) but to me it's a food store to some it's a religious experience dogma, ritual and all.

>21 LolaWalser: >31 supercell: highlights the problem of using artificial light to grow algae. In fact it's worse - entropy would mean you are getting less energy than you put in and that's without taking into account that photosynthesis has only a 3-5% efficiency over the whole spectrum.

Cats (and dogs) react very differently to drugs - aspirin and acetaminophen are toxic to cats. Chocolate is toxic to dogs. As is becoming increasingly clear animals can be very poor models for drug tests and the thinking is that some potentially useful drugs could have been rejected because of adverse affects in test animals.

>15 justifiedsinner: It might have been me that said that. I was distinctly underwhelmed by The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and have no desire to read the sequel. I also thought The Three-Body Problem started well but nose-dived about a third of the way in.

I have to read the short fiction categories this weekend for a panel at Eastercon. I'm not really looking forward to it...

>39 justifiedsinner:

As I said, haven't read the book so no idea what exactly was proposed, but surely there are infinite ways to fantasize a solution--interstellar travel isn't exactly a novelty in the genre. IMO complaining about "bad science" is pertinent insofar the propositions play a role in the narrative. The more important the point, the better the explanation should hold. If the most important thing about this particular story is the imaginary ship's engineering, I can see getting frustrated over inadequacies. Otherwise, not really: you'd be demanding that a science-fictional-fantastic scenario actually BE scientific.

In fact it's worse - entropy would mean you are getting less energy than you put in and that's without taking into account that photosynthesis has only a 3-5% efficiency over the whole spectrum.

Every mechanical process, all work involved in moving material from A to B result in increased entropy, entropy is a given, not something special to one kind of engine or fuel. As for photosynthesis, I presume you're talking about the efficiency of conversion of light to chemical energy. It's low per reaction, but cumulatively it produces an enormous pool of energy and from a self-replicating source, so that's a very deceptive complaint. A relatively "inefficient" process that can be enormously amplified and constantly renewed might be preferable to a more efficient one with a short expiration date. The winning point may not be the efficiency of energy conversion, but initial energy capture. (Nothing beats plants in that regard.)

As is becoming increasingly clear animals can be very poor models for drug tests and the thinking is that some potentially useful drugs could have been rejected because of adverse affects in test animals.

This is a meaningless criticism. We can't experiment in humans as we please and computer models are limited, so animal testing isn't going away because of the useful that we do and did achieve. One good drug is worth a thousand failing. Research is doing the best we can, not the best that can be dreamed up.

But this is beside the point here, which is that there's no barrier to imagining different species with biochemical similarities and explaining how they came by those.

Anyway, sorry about the digression, all.

>8 rgurskey: I deduce from "and have heard of LeGuin" that you haven't read any of her work? Boy, have you missed out. Best writer of fantasy and science fiction since Tolkien (and he was in no way a genre writer). I'm a returning SF reader after a pretty long absence, and I haven't read anything by any of the nominated fiction writers either, I hasten to say.

>42 dajashby: (a well-numbered post BTW) Maybe rgurskey was being ironic?

>42 dajashby: I repeat what I said about Liu and Jemisin at 10 above, though both are later books in series. I've seen Ada Palmer on panels at Readercon; very smart person - you must see her talk on the history of the physical book if you can. Too Like the Lightning is discussed at great length in a series of posts at Crooked Timber, in one of their book events. I've heard a lot of good remarks about the Lee and the Anders.

In the novellas, Mieville is always interesting, though I haven't read this book yet. The McGuire is well done, and clearly loved by a great many readers.

>19 StormRaven:

What? You mean the Puppies weren't responsible for the Ta-Nehisi Coates nomination? ;)

(Actually, looking at the list again, I imagine about 75% of the authors nominated are anathema to those guys.)

>43 dukedom_enough: There should be an irony font.

>44 dukedom_enough: I wasn't making a value judgement, it's just that I've missed out on rather a lot and its been hard to know where to start. I have been making an attempt on reading award nominations, but I've avoided the Hugo lists for the last couple of years, for obvious reasons.

On the whole I'm disappointed in the current short fiction I've read, but I think there's more emphasis on longer work these days, which is a bit of a pity.

Mieville is definitely on my list. Currently plowing through Red Mars, which I'm finding heavy going. On the other hand, I'm flying through my latest reread of The Lord of the Rings...

I was on a panel at Eastercon on the 2017 Hugo short fiction categories, but it was cancelled after 3 people had to pull out. Unfortunately, this was after I'd made an effort to read the nominated short stories (but not the JCW one, I'm not a masochist). Can't say I was especially impressed. The only two that seemed like actual stories and not writing exercises - the Vaughn and Jemisin - both reminded me of stuff done back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Jemisin in particular reminded me of Ernest Hogan's fiction from then.