2025 Hugo Ballot

 

I meant to post a bunch of reviews along the way as I did this year's Hugo reading, but the summer sort of got in the way. Oh, well. I still may write longer reviews for some of these and post them here (I did get to some of the novels in June), but since Hugo voting was due last night, I figured I'd just post my full ballot with a few general explanations while it's fresh in my mind. You can find short reviews for most of these on my 2025 Hugo Goodreads shelf.

Note that I didn't vote in all the categories. It's just too much (it's like taking on a part-time job!), and I don't feel all that qualified to judge some of the categories. Still, I managed to vote in most of the categories this year. See the Hugo website for the full list of categories and nominees.

As usual, I'm loosely following my principles of Hugo voting that I'm most interested in works that somehow break new ground in the genre, have some philosophical element, and/or are just plain enjoyable. Maybe other Hugo voters go on vibes, which are impossible to entirely eliminate, but I try reward things that are on the whole doing something new and interesting.

I'm thrilled to be attending Worldcon this year where I'll be on a panel and doing an academic track presentation as part of the Science Fiction and Philosophy Society. Maybe I will see you in Seattle at this year's Hugo ceremony on August 16!

Random Thoughts, Part 27: Trump 2.0, Sci-Fi AI vs. Real AI, Black Cats, Satanic Panic, Musical Time-Slippage, Conceptual Constructions of Politics, Sinners, etc.

 

My random thoughts continue, now with 27 parts with 801 total thoughts! With the second Trump administration driving us full-bore into making America less great several times every single goddamn day, I've had a lot of politics on my mind lately. And there are continuing issues about AI. I worry my random thoughts are not so random these days. But randomness doesn't rule out clusters of similar ideas. And you'll still find a few other things in there about my dental habits, listening to Nirvana, the Satanic Panic, the film Sinners, cats, and more. And of course, there are memes! Enjoy!

New Little Kings: You Like It Darker by Stephen King

 

Stephen King has been publishing short story collections since the 1970's, and they often include some of his best work (my favorite is "The Jaunt" from Skeleton Crew). I don't know if any of the stories in You Like It Darker are destined to rank among my favorites, but I really loved a few of these stories and I think they're all at least pretty good. I'm happy to report that Uncle Stevie has not lost his Shine when it comes to short stories. 

Pandemic Journal Reboot: The Rumors of COVID's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

 

My recent positive COVID test

During 2020-2022 I was posting a lot of my Pandemic Journal here on the blog. I got up to Part 25 in 2022. I didn't stop writing in that journal, and I even occasionally posted an entry on a specific topic, like this one on the Fourth Pandemiversary.

I guess just as most of the world lost interest in COVID, I lost interest in posting all of my entries here on the blog. I've also been journaling a lot less in the last year or two, often only once every couple of months.

I had a good reason, however, to start the Pandemic Journal again in earnest when I tested positive for COVID in late June! So, as both an exercise in self-indulgence and a public service announcement to get a COVID test if you have symptoms, here is a ... "sequel" doesn't sound right, so let's call it a "reboot" of my Pandemic Journal. And there are still memes, of course!

Splendidly Scalzian Felines: Starter Villain by John Scalzi

 

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!"

Zones of Dogs: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

 

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.

Academic Cats and Dogs: Does Academia Need to Get Weirder to Survive?

I’ve never been entirely comfortable in academia. Don’t get me wrong. I love reading and writing. I enjoy teaching and interacting with students. I’m fond of conversation about subjects most people don’t understand or care to understand. 

But in recent years—especially with the convergence of the pandemic, my tenure, and feeling middle age—I find myself caring less and less about academia as an abstract system of disciplines. I care about my friends, my colleagues, and my students. I care about philosophy as a global human endeavor. But I don’t care about being a Very Serious Academic. I’m not sure how much I ever really did. 

Random Thoughts, Part 23: Cats, Conflict, Categories, Conservatism, Commercials, etc.

 

My Random Thoughts series continues. Randomly, we are now at Part 23, which is an extra large helping of random thoughts and even better: it comes with an extra large helping of random memes (although I should warn you, dear reader, that the Dune memes have been flowing more strongly with the release of Dune Part Two). Enjoy!

Stirring the Past Into the Future: The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

My 2023 Hugo reading continues with The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal. What did I think?

I like the concept of this book, which you might call stirring the past into the future: pour a bit of the old Thin Man movies from the 1930's and 40's (married couple travels with their dog, drinking cocktails), but in space with a healthy splash of hard SF engineering--all served in a large glass of murder mystery. 

Digging New Wells: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Slivia Moreno-Garcia

 

I've enjoyed Moreno-Garcia's other work, like Mexican Gothic. I really loved Certain Dark Things, which I'd describe as an excellent vampire novel for people who usually don't like vampires. So how is The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, which has been nominated for a Hugo award this year?

Movie and TV Mini-Reviews: The Boogeyman, Yellowjackets, Star Trek: Picard, Beavis & Butt-Head, and More

As the prophecy of a recent post foretold, I'm back with some short reviews of movies and TV I've been watching lately. I'm including The Boogeyman, Yellowjackets, Star Trek: Picard, Beavis & Butt-Head, John Wick 4, Sinister, Insidious, and X. These reviews get weirdly impressionistic, so if you're looking for elaborate plot summaries and the like, you may be disappointed. Just the mood I'm in these days, I guess. Enjoy!

Review of Reviews: February 2023

 

Although I still occasionally write a longer review, most of my book reviews have been shorter as of late. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm just appreciating brevity these days, so on that note, on to the reviews of books I've read in the last month or so!

Mini-Reviews of Spooky Stuff for Spooky Season, Part Two

 

Here at Examined Worlds, er, we don't say stuff like, "here at Examined Worlds." But if we did, and if there was a "we" beyond you and me, dear reader, I'd say something like, "Here at Examined Worlds, we consider spooky season to be a state of mind, not a month on the calendar."

And that's why I'm posting Part Two of my "Mini-Reviews of Spooky Stuff for Spooky Season" in the middle of November, a week before US Thanksgiving (although I may revisit some of my Thanksgiving horror favorites soon!). Enjoy!

Two Short Kings: The Colorado Kid and Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King

 

In my perhaps ill-advised and loosely-resolved quest to read all of Stephen King's books, I have come to two shorter ones published over 20 years apart (2005 and 1983). I figured I would review them together on the blog. So here are The Colorado Kid and Cycle of the Werewolf!

The Colorado Kid

I don't know how Stephen King does it, but he took a story of two folksy small town newspaper reporters telling a 25-year-old story to a 22-year-old reporter and turned it into a probing thought experiment on two kinds of stories: those that recount events loose threads and all and stories that wrap things up with a nice beginning, middle, and end. If you think about it, the first kind of story is what really happens in life. And if you think about it some more, you'll see that the "complete" stories where everything is wrapped up are entirely artificial: they always leave some things out or take liberties for the sake of narrative unity. 

In The Colorado Kid, our folksy reporters call these news stories versus features stories. I'm also thinking about a distinction used by Noam Chomsky between mysteries and problems. A problem has a solution, or at least a resolution. But a mystery may not. It may go far beyond our cognitive capacity as human beings to understand. It may remain open-ended. Like life itself. 

A lot of the so-called "mystery" genre really consists of stories of problems in this sense, or features stories to use the terminology of this book. And if I'm being honest, this is probably why I usually don't care for the mystery genre (and why I have only recently delved into King's forays into more mystery-tinted fiction, but I should have known that King's mysteries would still be, well, Stephen King). 

While I understand the appeal of wrapping up a mystery or solving a problem with a nice little bow (maybe precisely because we are usually denied such things in real life), my experience in my decades of existence has taught me that reality is rarely like that. It's simply not true to my basic sense of this universe. Our universe is full of mysteries that we may never solve. This could in some cases be horrifying or disappointing (and King explores those Lovecraftian depths elsewhere), but I prefer the answer that King hints at in this novel and seems to confirm in his Afterword: it is precisely these unresolved mysteries, these loose threads of reality, that make our lives more interesting, perhaps even more meaningful.

See also my Goodreads review.

Cycle of the Werewolf

This is a fun little story (maybe a novella, maybe really just a long-ish short story) that was originally based on an idea for a calendar (no, really). It's vintage 80's Stephen King: mysterious murders are taking place in the small Maine down of Tarker's Mills (no relation). And of course the murders take place when there is a full moon each month for a year (so this is a kind of calendar, after all!). 

And you get all of this with cool artwork from Berni Wrightson. Honestly the artwork is probably what sells this for me. The werewolf story is solid enough, but nothing all that great within King's larger oeuvre. The movie Silver Bullet is a bonkers expansion of the story in the tradition of the best schlocky 80's Stephen King adaptations.

Like other monsters, werewolves are, from the outside, a reminder of our mortality. Be they werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein monsters, mummies, creatures from the Black Lagoon, etc., monsters are there waiting for us all. You don't know when. But they will get you eventually. In particular, werewolves are a reminder of the duality within us all and a reminder that the more brutal, base side of our nature can sometimes come out unexpectedly. 

I hesitate to say "animalistic," because I like animals just fine and think they get a bad wrap. As a werewolf in wolf form, you're just trying to eat, which is little comfort to the victims, I suppose, and a horror all its own. 

Still, the real evil in this story is the conscious decision made by the human side of the werewolf character. I won't spoil it, but that, I think, is a common theme for King: the real evil isn't the monsters, it's the people. And what they do with their inner turmoil. That's a far more terrifying idea, ultimately much harder to escape, which is probably the key to King's enduring popularity. (Along with the schlocky adaptations, of course!)

See also my Goodreads review.

Random Thoughts, Part 18: Random is the New Order

 

My Random Thoughts series continues with Part 18! Still with random memes for exponential randomness! In fact, my inventory of memes is at an all-time high. These memes have to go! Enjoy!

Women's Future Month 2022: Finishing Series by Butler and Le Guin

Reading the Patternist series with a beer on a nice afternoon

March is Women's History Month, so echoing my "Black Future Month" post, this seemed like a good chance to finish two series by two of my favorite authors: Octavia E. Butler's Patternist series and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series. Okay, so the Earthsea books aren't about the future, at least not our future. 

But Le Guin's fantasy may be about my future: I hope to do some serious academic work on both Butler and Le Guin in the future (building on the article on Le Guin I've already published), so maybe this will be a seed of some future project. Echoing a phrase from Le Guin, I might even call it something like Realists of a Larger Reality.

 

Shifting Realities: Four Past Midnight by Stephen King

In my long-term quest to read all of Stephen King's books (a quest that feels about as attainable as Roland's Tower), I finally arrived at this classic. Four Past Midnight isn't up there with The Stand or Different Seasons, but it's solid middle-tier King, which is still good stuff. These are technically novellas, but I think The Langoliers and The Library Policeman might really be short novels for King (what would be average length novels for other writers).

Initial Non-Spoilery Thoughts about The Matrix Resurrections

I just finished watching The Matrix Resurrections, one my most anticipated movies of the year (after Dune, of course). The best spoiler-free review is the shortest: Whoa.

Me, watching The Matrix Resurrections

2020 Hugo Ballot, Part One: Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story

I started voting for the Hugos in 2016 for two main reasons. I wanted to take more part in science fiction fandom, and I found the Sad and Rabid Puppies to be really obnoxious. Luckily the Puppies have since taken their pack elsewhere, but I'm still excited about taking part in fandom and being part of science fiction history and all that.

Hugo Reading 2020: Novelettes

Let's start with your first question: What is a novelette? Is that like Smurfette?

The short answer: It's a long-ish short story. Not much like Smurfette, except maybe in being short but not as short as some others. According to The Hugo Awards for purposes of their Best Novelette category, a novelette is a story between 7,500 and 17,500 words. You can see what I thought about the Novella category here (novellas are between 17,500 and 40,000 words).