July SFFKit: Award Winners and Nominees

Our topic for July is SFF Award Winners and Nominees, and there are plenty of awards to choose from. Any book that has either won or been nominated for an SFF award, past or present, qualifies. Here are some of the major awards and recent winners:

Hugo: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (2016 winner for best novel); LibraryThing CK list
Nebula: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2016 winner for best novel); LibraryThing CK list
Arthur C. Clarke Award: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2016 winner); LibraryThing CK list
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award: Uprooted by Naomi Novik (2016 winner for best novel); LibraryThing CK list
World Fantasy Award: The Chimes by Anna Smaill (2016 winner for best novel); LibraryThing CK list
James Tiptree Jr. Award: When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore (2016 winner); LibraryThing CK list
Shirley Jackson Award: Experimental Film by Gemma Files (2016 winner); LibraryThing CK list
Bram Stoker Award: The Fisherman by John Langan (2016 winner); LibraryThing CK list
Locus Award: Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (2016 winner for best SF novel)

Most of the 2017 shortlists have been announced. Awards also go to novellas, short stories, anthologies, even plays and screenplays, so there is a lot of choice for this category. You’ll find the full lists and even more awards at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/award_directory.cgi.

Please share what you will be reading on this thread and on the Wiki.

*Note: This read also qualifies for the July AwardsCAT.

I have a few that I would like to get to in July:

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making by Catherynne Valente - 2010 Andre Norton Award
Half A King by Joe Abercrombie - 2015 Locus Award for Best YA Book
Blackout by Mira Grant - nominee for Best Novel; 2013 Hugo Award
Uprooted by Naomi Novik - 2016 Nebula Award for Best Novel

>2 DeltaQueen50: I'm planning on reading The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making too!

>3 casvelyn: We'll have to compare notes!

I'm hoping to read War for the Oaks - a Locus winner, and possibly Children of Time.

I won't have trouble finding books for this month's challenge. I'll still be working through my Hugo Voter Packet and just last week, the Aurora Voter Packet was released. The Aurora is the Canadian SFF award and this year, they have a "Best of Decade" award. Some of the books I hope to read in the remainder of this month and in July are:
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman
The Nature of a Pirate by A. M. Dellamonica
Angel Catbird by Margaret Atwood
Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson
Hominids by Robert Sawyer

Actually, the amount of material in these packets is rather overwhelming. The Hugo packet includes the entire 10-book October Daye series by Seanan McGuire and the 5-book Craft series by Max Gladstone, while the Aurora packet includes the 10-book Malazan Book of the Fallen series (over 8000 pages!) by Steven Erikson. Needless to say, I won't be getting through all of these works in the near future, but I certainly feel as if I'd gotten great value from my membership fees this year!

I'm also still working on the Hugo Voter Packet! I'm hoping to have Too Like the Lightning done by the end of this month, but I'll still have All the Birds in the Sky to read and a few of the novellas and novelettes, plus the first book in the Craft sequence if I can fit it in (it's the only nominated series I haven't read at least one book from).

messed up entry!

>7 archerygirl: Nice to find someone else here reading from the Hugo Voter Packet! I'm working on Too Like the Lightning right now. It's unusual and quite challenging to read, but it's also very compelling. By the way, I see that you're from Canada. Are you an Aurora voter as well? If not, I highly recommend you consider membership (only $10), as this year's voter packet is incredibly good. Unfortunately for others, membership is restricted to Canadian citizens.

>10 archerygirl: I hadn't realised I was eligible for the Auroras! I might do it next year. Right now, I'm buried under the Hugo Voter Packet. I'm going to Worldcon, so I'll be able to see the awards ceremony, so I'm even more motivated to read than usual :-)

I'm struggling with Too Like the Lightning, more because I know I have limited time than a lack of interest. I might have to put it in hibernation and focus on the rest of the packet for a while and then go back to it later. It's one I can tell will be rewarding and the plot is starting to grab me, but it's a slow read due to the style.

>10 archerygirl: I'm jealous that you're going to Worldcon. Have a great time! Do keep in mind that the voting deadline for the Auroras is about a month and a half after the Hugo deadline, so there's still lots of time to sample from the packet if you change your mind. It's the "Best of Decade" category that makes this year's packet especially worthwhile.

I'm feeling the same way about Cixin Liu's books. I'd planned to read #2 and #3 in the trilogy before the voting deadline but they're just too intimidating right now. I'm going to use the time to work through the shorter fiction and graphic novels instead.

>11 mathgirl40: Ooh, good point about the Auroras! I may well be taking part, then :-) I read #2 of Cixin Lui's books (and #1 when it was nominated a couple of years ago) and I found it a bit tough going. I really can't see where #3 can possibly go from there, so I'll be trying to at least get through the first part just to find that out, but it may not get finished by the deadline.

There's a lot of good stuff in the shorter fiction and the graphic novels are an amazing selection this year.

This will be my second Worldcon (and second Hugo ceremony) and I'm excited :-)

Since both Seanan McGuire's October Daye series and Naomi Novik's Temeraire series have been nominated for the 2017 Hugo "best series" category, I'll likely read either A Red-Rose Chain (McGuire) or Blood of Tyrants (Novik).

I'm planning on reading Speaker for the Dead, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and The Great Hunt, the second book in The Wheel of Time series, which was nominated for a Hugo best series award in 2014.

First up in July...Mona Lisa Overdrive: nominated for Huga, Nebula, and Prometheus Awards; Ditmar shortlist; and Prix Aurora Award winner.

My plans are to read Leviathan Wakes, nominated for the 2012 Hugo Award and the 2012 Locus Award for best science fiction novel, and The Obelisk Gate, nominated this year for best novel for both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, with the first book of the series having won the Hugo last year. I've been procrastinating on both of these and they are both supposed to be really good. Already read all of the books in four of the nominations for Best Series this year, those being Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, Seanan McGuire's October Daye series, Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Sage and Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series and all simply excellent. The other two are Naomi Novik's Temeraire series (I read the first three and then burnt out on them) and, yes, James Corey's Expanse series, of which Leviathan Wakes is the first book.


>9 mathgirl40:, >10 archerygirl: Too Like the Lightning is excellent but quite complex. In fact, I sent Seven Surrenders back to the library unread because I will need to reread everything before reading the next book anyway. This is one that now, I think, I will wait for the series to be completed so that I can read it all at once.

>16 ronincats: I've read Leviathan Wakes, and the second book, Caliban's War too. Both are excellent.

I've read The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin, which is nominated for a Hugo award this year. (I'm hoping to read several more Hugo-nominated works this July, before the voting deadline.)

I'm planning to read Stand on Zanzibar- by John Brunner.

I read When the Moon Was Ours, James Tiptree Jr. Award, by Anna-Marie McLemore (2016 winner); LibraryThing CK list. I did not feel that this book was so much fantasy but more so Magical Realism. The James Tiptree is an award that goes to a literary work of SF or Fantasy that expands the understanding of gender. This book is about transgender. Not really one that I liked much. I thought it was a whole lot of teenage angst and allusions to things like cutting but it definitely had a reality/magical realism feel.

I have completed Blackout by Mira Grant which was nominated for a 2013 Hugo Award. I'm sorry that this trilogy is over.

I finished Half A King by Joe Abercrombie. Winer of the 2015 Locus Award for Best YA Book. Review is up on the book page.

I completed Leviathan Wakes by James Corey, nominated for 2012 Hugo and Locus awards.

>22 AHS-Wolfy: Dave, I am planning to read Half A King as well this month and I have been wondering how Abercrombie will do with YA material. I see from your review that the very things that I love about his writing - his ability to go for the extreme and his vivid and often dark characters - have been toned down but I remain hopeful as he is such a favorite of mine.

>24 DeltaQueen50: Judy, I have gone straight on to the 2nd book in the series, Half the World, and am finding the characters much more to my liking in this one. More Abercrombie-ish!

I finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman--winner of the Hugo, the Nebula + others.
I was underwhelmed. : (
Perhaps my expectations were too high.
Final rating: 3 stars.

>25 AHS-Wolfy: Excellent!

I am loving the theme this month, so far I have read a couple of excellent books with Uprooted by Naomi Novik being the latest. This book was nominated for a 2016 Hugo Award.

I will be reading The Underground Railroad in late July or early August, so I'm going to earmark it as my book for this month's challenge. Not only did it win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, but it was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and a finalist for the Locus Award.

>16 ronincats: I agree with you that most of the series nominees are excellent. I had a very hard time deciding on how to rank them and I'm not sure I was sufficiently qualified to do so, as I'm still in the early books for a couple of the series.

I spent the past month reading tons of stuff from the Hugo Voter Packet including the following:
The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

I also finished all the short stories and novelettes (except for one that I abandoned after a few pages), and most of the graphic novels.

I'm finishing up Throne of Jade from the Temeraire series and Two Serpents Rise from the Craft series at the moment.

>27 DeltaQueen50: My review is up for Half the World which I finished off over the weekend. Not sure if I'll finish off the trilogy as my next read as I have The Hanging Tree waiting on the tbr shelves now as well.

I ended up reading parts of Too Like the Lightning and All the Birds in the Sky and then putting them aside to finish reading the novellas and novelettes. I'll go back to both of them because I enjoyed what I read, but I was never going to finish either before the deadline and I wanted to cover other categories.

I loved The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe and found The Ballad of Black Tom fell very flat for me, which is a shame because the first half was great.

And I unexpectedly loved Three Parts Dead after bouncing hard off one of the others a couple of years ago.

All told, I was surprised to discover that I covered all the fiction categories, possibly for the first time ever. Usually there are a couple of works in a couple of cats that I don't even sample, but this year that didn't happen. (Well, as long as I pretend the John C Wright stuff and the bad dinosaur porn didn't exist.)

I got my vote in, which was hard in some categories because the works were so good, and now I can settle back and explore some other things for a while. Did The Watchmaker of Filigree Street ever get onto any nominations lists? :-D

>30 AHS-Wolfy: I've not read any Joe Abercrombie yet but I've got The Blade Itself waiting for me on my shelves. The Shattered Sea trilogy sounds appealing too.

>31 archerygirl: I couldn't finish all the novellas in time but will have to get to The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe eventually. I actually liked The Ballad of Black Tom a lot, though I agree that the second half didn't live up to the promise of the first half. I managed the Wright story as it was mercifully short, but the bad dinosaur porn was the same one that I abandoned.

I really enjoyed the graphic novels on the Hugo ballot this year. I finished all of them except Saga, Volume 6, only because I didn't want to read it before reading volumes 4 and 5, and I didn't have enough time to read all three. I especially liked Monstress, Volume 1, which has incredibly gorgeous artwork, and Vision Volume 1: Little Worse Than a Man.

>32 mathgirl40: I found the graphic novels one of the hardest categories to decide on! Vision was amazing (the second volume is sitting on my coffee table right now) and so was Monstress. I did the same with Saga - I'd got horribly behind and I didn't have time to completely catch up, but it's reliably great so I didn't feel too bad about that.

You really should get to The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe because it was amazing. If the dinosaur porn had been Chuck Tingle's, I might have bothered with it, but I really couldn't make myself do it for this one. And I've tried to read John C. Wright's work in previous years and regretted it, so I decided that I didn't need to do that. It would have been half an hour of my life I'll never get back, and there were better things to read.

I think the fact that the second half of The Ballad of Black Tom was so different (and really not as good) as the first made me judge it more harshly than I would have if it had all been on the standard of the second half. It's like getting a beautifully wrapped present and getting so excited...only to discover the toy spaceship inside has been smashed to pieces. You're even more disappointed because the promise was so high. If the wrapping had been shabby and torn, then the broken spaceship wouldn't have been such a let down.

I finished my second award nominee choice for this month.


Book #88 The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin (410 pp.)

I bought this last fall (so yes, it is another BOMB) after very much enjoying the first book. This one was not quite as amazing in the way it wove the different threads together, but while very much a middle book in the series, it was a good read that advanced the story.

I took the easy way out and read Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, a novella that won both the Hugo and the Nebula in that category. Very nice read.

I gave Half A King by Joe Abercrombie a solid 4 stars for this 2015 Locus YA Award winner. I am happy that this is the first book of the trilogy and that I have two more to look forward to!

I read the graphic novel adaptation of Coraline, which won the 2009 Locus Award for art/nonfiction.

And finally did it properly: Leviathan Wakes was a very fast paced roller coaster of a trip into space. It was nominated for both Hugo and Locus SF. Looking forward to more of this.

I read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky which was terrific. What an imaginative and surprising novel!

I only follow a few awards avidly. One is the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which Colson Whitehead has won this year for The Underground Railroad. Another is the Shirley Jackson Award, which goes to dark fiction (but not necessarily horror or fantasy). This year, Emma Cline won for The Girls, which is not genre but is still a good read.

I read The Underground Railroad by Coleson Whitehead which was short listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

My final book of the month is Patient Zero a 2009 Bram Stoker Award Nominee. I wasn't overly impressed with this book although I have enjoyed this author in the past.

>42 DeltaQueen50:. Oh drat. I picked up that book awhile back and planned it for my first Jonathan Maberry book. Is there another of his you might recommend for a first read?

Currently reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, which was a Sunburst Award Nominee in 2004.

Still reading The three-body problem, a Hugo Winner.

I ended up reading A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire. It's part of the October Daye series, which was nominated for the 2017 "Best Series" Hugo Award. A fun read for fans of the series!

Sorry to be so late with this, but here is the link for August's thread:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/266412#

>43 bluebird_: I loved the first two books in the Benny Imura series entitled Rot and Ruin and Dust and Decay. These books have lots of action and characters that you really root for.

>48 DeltaQueen50:. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give Rot and Ruin a try. I've never been a fan of blood and guts/zombie movies or book. However a friend convinced me to watch a few episodes of the TV series: The Walking Dead. I love it and am hooked! It's opened me to move a bit out of my reading comfort zone and dip a toe into a new genre. The premise of Patient Zero seemed more to my liking but I would prefer to start a new author with a strong book. The only other person I know who read Patient Zero was also lukewarm on it.

>49 bluebird_: I took those books home with me, thinking that my brother would enjoy the series, but my 96 year old Mom picked them up and she loved them! I hope you enjoy them as well.

And I have finished The three-body problem. Such a great story.

>51 MissWatson:, glad to see you liked this. I would like to get to it, not sure when that can happen tho

Apart from all the Hugo Awards reading, I also started reading from my Aurora Awards voter packet. I finished Spook Country, the second book in William Gibson's Blue Ant Trilogy, nominated for the Best of Decade award and Angel Catbird, Volume 1 by Margaret Atwood, nominated for the Best Graphic Novel award. I also started reading Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson, nominated for the Best of Decade award.