I have voted for the 2026 Hugo awards! I'll post my full ballot soon, but before that, here's what I thought about the six novels nominated this year. You can find these and other reviews on my Goodreads Hugo Finalists bookshelf. An overall takeaway this year is that one thing I love about reading the Hugo nominees is that it encourages me to read things I may not have otherwise picked up. And sometimes I end up loving those things. Thanks, Hugos, for keeping me an open-minded reader!
As has become tradition, I've waited way too long to get started, but the good news is that I'm halfway through the novels. So, here's what I thought so far about The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. I will review the other three novels soon in Part 2, and, of course, there are novellas and many more categories as well. Stay tuned!
John Scalzi's Starter Villain is a delight! Scalzi is as entertaining as ever. I love the cats and the dolphins.
Charlie is down on his luck when he discovers that his mysterious and recently deceased uncle left him a profitable parking ramp business. Or so he thinks. Turns out, as the dust jacket tells us, his uncle was actually a super villain, like something right out of James Bond (or really more Austin Powers). Hilarity and hijinks ensue with plenty of that patented Scalzi snark. I laughed out loud several times while reading this one.
Two points I wanted to discuss here: let's call them "evil is actually dumb" and "animals can talk, and boy, are they hilarious!"
My initial reaction to Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep: a lot of really cool ideas, but something in the execution failed to grab me.
The cool ideas:
The zones of thought are really interesting, although I'm not quite sure I completely understood the concept. In certain zones of the galaxy, some types of consciousness and technology are possible, while in other zones they are not. And "possible" in the sense of physically or scientifically possible. Logical possibility remains the terrain of science fiction, after all! And the borders between the zones can and have shifted, and nobody knows if they are natural or artificially created by mysterious aliens eons ago (perhaps as a way to keep the riff-raff in line?).
The main aliens, the Tines, are dog-like creatures who form "packs" of several individuals to form something like hive minds, which is a cool way to think about intelligence. Is this personal fusion? Or is each pack an individual person in some sense? You'd think this would give them an ability to work together in a way lonely individually-minded humans cannot, but the conglomerations can't get close to each other due to interference of the (maybe sonic?) methods they use to bind together.
There are some cool ideas there about how we individuate minds, maybe even somewhat along the lines of the Buddhist philosopher Ratnakīrti's exploration of the coherence (or lack thereof) of the very concept of a single discrete mind separate from the rest of existence.
There are also some plant-like aliens who get around with technological assistance from a shadowy group of other aliens in the distant past. Very cool!
There's also something like a galactic internet discussion board that shows how such a system is vulnerable to misinformation, which is especially prescient for a book published in 1992.
What didn't work as well for me:
The plot starts with children being stranded on an alien planet. We learn about their struggles to survive among the Tines and the adults who embark upon a rescue mission. This is all cool.
But then we spend A LOT of time in something approaching a Game of Thrones level of political intrigue among the Tine societies, which is interesting to a point. It also suffers from the science fiction writer's Eurocentric fallacy of assuming that the particular history of one small part of Earth (Western Europe) somehow determines the parameters of technological and social development for the entire galaxy (you also see this frequently on Star Trek, for example).
Anyway, all this intrigue became a bit too much for me, and I wanted more time exploring the cool ideas and less on all the quasi-Medieval European drama. In general, I feel like more could have been done with the cool ideas (like at one point an alien on the message board wonders whether the zones of thought have a moral meaning... and then this idea is dropped). Maybe more was done with the ideas in the other books in the series that I haven't read yet.
But your zone of thought may vary!
See also my Goodreads review.
The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts has been on my list for years, and a cold snap in January seemed like the best time to read it. As a philosopher and science fiction fan, I was already on board for science fiction with a Kant angle, but the obvious links to Lovecraft and John Carpenter's The Thing made it so much MY THING (itself?) that I'm shocked it took me so long to get to it. I'm sure I would have read it sooner if I realized it was so funny (not quite as outright zany as Douglas Adams or The Illuminatus Trilogy and not quite on an Iain M. Banks wavelength, either, but in some category of hilarity nearby).
I loved Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which is some of the most interesting science fiction I've read in recent years. I found this sequel, Children of Ruin, a bit harder to follow, but it's mainly because there's just so much going on it was easy for me to forget who's who and what was happening (maybe this one is written too much in octopus mode for my mere human intellect!). Still, I loved this book. I only rate it slightly lower in comparison to the first.
Today happens to be Stephen King's birthday, so my present for Uncle Stevie is a review of his latest novel!
I was eagerly awaiting King's return to fantasy, and Fairy Tale did not disappoint. It's not a mere retelling of any particular fairy tale, but it's more like the answer to the question, "What if Stephen King wrote a fairy tale?" And there are depths to it that may surprise King newbies, but won't surprise Constant Readers.
Good job, Uncle Stevie!
I've loved King's previous novella collections, especially Different Seasons, although Full Dark, No Stars is really good, too (Four Past Midnight, which I somehow missed, is next on my list). If It Bleeds is the only one of these to have a title story, but you have to admit it's a pretty good title for a Stephen King book.
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| Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica in Dune (2021) |
I've already written about my initial impressions the new Dune movie, and before that about why the Dune series is one of my favorites. Just to round out this little series of Dune content, at last I'm writing a full spoilery review of Dune (2021).
I've been excited for this movie for years, so it may be no surprise that I've seen it five times already: twice in the theater and three times on HBO. Obviously I loved it. I've noticed new things every time, and my love for the film has only grown.
I was thinking of a cute title for this post, and my first idea was that a Stephen King short story could be called a "little King." A collection of them should have a catchy collective name, and "murder" (as a "murder" of crows) was too good to pass up. Anyway, here's the review....
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| The Frankenstein Chronicles |
