Worlds Without End Blog

Only two I’m interested in: Ancillary and Goblin. Might give Butcher a read, though. The remainder came out of the blue.

I miss VanDerMeer, Cixin Liu, Robert Jackson Bennett and Emily St. John Mandel. My reading choices for the 2014 Reading Challenge is a much better “Hugo list.”

As for the other categories, I’m afraid Hugo 2015 will go down in history as pretty insignificant.

Have to agree with Emil…I would’ve liked seeing at least on the list…Jeff Vandermeer and Emily St John Mandel.

These nominations seem to be even more a victim of the culture wars than last years. I hadn’t realized but Correia and Torgersen have been mounting what they call the Sad Puppy campaign and echoed by Vox Day’s Rabid Puppy campaign. They plan (and seem to have succeeded) in seeping the board with what they call anti-SJW candidates (Social Justice Warriors).

I nearly nominated the Marko Kloos. I enjoyed it a lot, but ultimately decided I liked the first book better and this one didn’t add enough. Now it’s probably damaged by association, which is a shame.
I have only two nominees on the entire ballot: Guardians of the Galaxy and the Lego Movie.
I don’t think I’m going to be voting this year.

I find the campaigns over the last two years by the politicised Right to be particularly troubling. It’s sad to see such a prestigious award degraded like this.

The concerns of the ‘Right’ that SF is too egalitarian and inclusive are personally offensive but also damage what speculative fiction is. At it’s core speculative fiction asks the question ‘What if?’ and campaigns to restrict the range of thought and ideas damage fiction.

I loved Ancillary Sword (as I did Ancillary Justice). I enjoyed The Goblin Emperor but didn’t get nearly as excited about it as a lot of other people seem to be. I’m 40% into The Three-Body Problem, and wondering whether you have to be a physics major or a videogamer to truly enjoy it, because I just can’t understand all the raves about it (and bear in mind that I’m an engineer with several high school and university Physics courses under my belt).

Things which have been said about the remaining two books — by people who are actually fans of those authors — do not give me much hope that they’ll be an improvement on what I’ve already read.

It’s a bit discouraging. When the nomination totals are handed out after the ceremony, I will be interested to see if there were works for which I had more enthusiasm which were knocked off the ballot by the bloc-voting.
.