Tag: Nebula Awards

A Word About Awards

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

What is it about awards and the striving for prizes? We humans get a big thrill out of the drama of it all. My recent posts have covered some of the biggest speculative fiction awards. I’ve been reading the nominated novels and making my own decisions, then seeing how they measure against the judges’. It’s fun. It’s the love of the horse-race.

But is that a good way to read, and to get reading recommendations? Speaking for myself, the short-lists for these awards have given me a marvelous TBR of science fiction and fantasy. These are not, of course, the only good books. They may not even be the best books. The lists are subject to flawed systems of judgment, for one thing. For the most part, the books on the lists are so-called “trad published” books. (They’re all pretty great books.)

What about the indie-published books out there? Some of the awards lists do include them, and I tip my hat to that decision process. As an indie-published author myself, I can tell you that with a few lucky exceptions, many readers don’t even know most indie-published books exist. Indie authors may or may not be good marketers of their works, and they sure don’t have the marketing resources of a publishing company to draw upon. Increasingly, though, that kind of marketing support is hard to come by, even for the authors these companies publish. They might reserve their big marketing bucks for proven best-sellers or books by celebrities (and those may or may not be good books, may or may not actually be written by those celebrities–it’s the name recognition that sells the books). Still, one function of a publishing company is to serve as a gate-keeper, weeding out the trash from the treasure and presenting readers with only the treasure. With indie-published books, the authors are on their own to make their case to the readers, and the readers are on their own to wade through the ocean of stuff on offer to find the treasure and sift it from the trash. And then, of course, one reader’s trash is another reader’s treasure! In spite of the odds, I’m happy to see that some indie-published novels do make it onto these awards lists. In a coming post, I hope to give a guide to finding good indie-published SF and fantasy.

THE LOCUS AWARDS

Last year, I spent several posts on the Locus Awards, and I haven’t done that this year. The Locus list is just too massive. I only review books I’ve read myself. Also, some items on that list aren’t the type of work or genre I read (horror, for example). I wouldn’t be able to offer anything interesting to say about those. But this year’s Locus Awards winners and short-listed novels do offer one more wonderful resource for readers. Subscribers to Locus Magazine vote on these awards, and they are all readers who know and love SF and fantasy. Others can vote as well, although their votes aren’t weighted as heavily. Here are the winners and short-listed novels in the two categories I do read, SF and fantasy, as well as the First Novel list. I haven’t read all of these books, but I can see I need to work on that!

SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

  • WINNER: The Man Who Saw Seconds, Alexander Boldizar (Clash)
  • Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom; Solaris) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula Awards short list HERE.
  • The Mercy of Gods, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor; Ad Astra UK)
  • The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Malka Older (Tordotcom)
  • Kinning, Nisi Shawl (Tor)
  • Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Hugo Awards short list HERE.
  • Service Model, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom; Tor UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Arthur C. Clarke Awards HERE, and mentioned in one of my posts about the Hugo Awards short list HERE.
  • Space Oddity, Catherynne M. Valente (Saga; Corsair UK)
  • Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer (MCD; Fourth Estate UK)

FANTASY NOVEL

  • WINNER: A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula short list HERE, and mentioned in one of my posts about the Hugo short list HERE.
  • I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, Peter S. Beagle (Saga)
  • The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Hugo Awards short list HERE. It is also short-listed for the 2025 World Fantasy Awards in the best novel category. See my upcoming post this fall.
  • The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom)
  • The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman (Viking; Del Rey UK)–I am reading this right now as I plow through all of the World Fantasy Awards nominees. Look for my post about that this fall.
  • Asunder, Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula short list HERE.
  • Somewhere Beyond the Sea, TJ Klune (Tor; Tor UK)
  • The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed (Solaris UK)
  • Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • The City in Glass, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

FIRST NOVEL

  • WINNER: Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula short list/award HERE, and HERE, and mentioned in one of my posts about the Hugo short list HERE.
  • The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader; Sceptre UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Arthur C. Clarke short list HERE, and mentioned in one of my posts about the Hugo short list HERE.
  • The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron; Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
  • Sargassa, Sophie Burnham (DAW)
  • Lady Eve’s Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow (Solaris UK)
  • The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra UK) Reviewed in one of my posts about the Nebula short list HERE.
  • The West Passage, Jared Pechaček (Tordotcom)
  • The Spice Gate, Prashanth Srivatsa (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
  • Womb City, Tlotlo Tsamaase (Erewhon)
  • Hammajang Luck, Makana Yamamoto (Gollancz; Harper Voyager US 2025)

OTHER AWARDS

I could spend my entire life reading books nominated for awards! HERE is a handy list of major awards. If you are looking for great SF and fantasy to read, the nominees for these awards are a great starting point. For example, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay got a special mention by the Philip K. Dick Awards this year. Other great reads are listed among the nominees for the British Fantasy Awards, the British SF Association Awards (Alien Clay was nominated for best novel there, too), and more–and that’s not even mentioning awards for short fiction, young adult fiction, films, and other categories I don’t often deal with in this blog.

Many Other Ways to Choose Good Reading

Getting bored with the horse-race approach? Consider these–also consider I’m recommending them via a U.S. base, so all of them may not work for you if you live elsewhere in the world:

  • Best-seller lists: New York Times, other major media.
  • Book review sections of newspapers and magazines, such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and major newspapers, as well as in specialized publications such as Locus Magazine.
  • Recommendations by bookseller platforms like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and the like–and my new favorite source for e-books, bookshop.org, which allows you to give an indie bookstore credit for each ebook you purchase (available in the U.S. and U.K.). You can also order print books through Bookshop. If you use these platforms, they may recommend other books you’ll like, based on your purchase patterns and also what their algorithms tell them about you. I distrust these algorithms myself, having seen too much of the pay-to-play inside of one of these platforms, which shall be nameless, but they may work for you.
  • Websites and blogs. (Like this one!)
  • Newsletters with curated reading lists. I publish one myself. It’s a lot about me, but I do include lists of other authors to read. If you’d like to subscribe, send a message to shrikepublications@outlook.com.
  • Clubs and societies of SF and fantasy fans, from the huge to the local.
  • Social media groups of like-minded readers. I’m partial to Bluesky, which has great conversations about books. Follow me at jmcfwiseman@bsky.social and other book-lovers you’ll find there. Search for the BookSky posts especially. There are other groups and posts at Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram, Goodreads, and on and on.
  • A fantastic resource: your public library! ASK A LIBRARIAN! Even better, check out books there for free. (I’m U.S-based, so I’m referring to the system here–yours may differ.)
  • And of course, if you’re anything like me, you and your reader friends have a lot of opinions to share. Word of mouth, baby!

Thanks for the royalty-free illustration at the top of this post: Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Nebula Awards Coming Up Soon

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

The Nebula Awards are soon to be announced, but you have a little over a month to do some reading if you still want to make up your mind before the results are in. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association will announce the winners on June 7, 2025, at the SFWA’s 60th Annual Awards Conference in Kansas City, Missouri (June 5-8 2025). You can actually attend if you want to–in person or online.

The SFWA gives awards to different types of speculative fiction in various categories–novels, short fiction, novellas, and so on, with the awards going to the best of the best published in 2024, as judged by their membership. I set myself the task of reading all the novels short-listed for this year’s awards. Then I reviewed them all in this series of posts. Now that I’ve read them all and thought about them all, which novel would I choose if I were choosing the winner? Full disclosure: I’m not! But if I were?

Here are the short-listed books nominated for best novel:

For various reasons (see my reviews here), I would not choose Barsukov’s or Chandrasekera’s novels, and that’s in spite of my enthusiastic review last year for Chandraskera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which went on to win–deservedly–both a Nebula and a Locus award.

The other four novels are all wonderful books. Do read them! (Well–read Chandrasekera’s if you have a lot of patience and/or a lot of political/cultural knowledge of Sri Lanka. It’s certainly the most serious book on the list.) Asunder has an amazing system of magic, amazing world-building, and a really interesting relationship between the two main characters. A Sorceress Comes to Call is incredibly good fun, and if you are a Bridgerton or Jane Austen fan, and if you love English country house murder mysteries, you will probably love this book. See my reviews here.

The two I love most, though, are Kelly Link’s The Book of Love and John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In. Both are very ingenious. Both are heart-warming but not in a sappy way. I think the writing and character motivations of Link’s novel are maybe slightly better, so I guess I’d go for that one. But Wiswell’s is just great, too. See my reviews here.

A reminder: ALL of these novels have their ardent fans, or they wouldn’t be on the short list. You may love even the ones I don’t love, or don’t love as much as the one I chose. You may love them–or not love them–for reasons I don’t share. And that’s just fine. De gustibus non est disputandem. Or as my old mother would put it, “Everyone to her own taste, said the old woman who kissed the cow.”

The last two novels short-listed for the 2025 Nebula Awards

On By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy4 Comments

The Nebula Awards, sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, have announced their short-list of nominated speculative fiction published in 2024. The short-listed books nominated for best novel are:

REVIEWED IN MY LAST TWO POSTS:

REVIEWED IN THIS POST:

I’m reading the short-listed books in alphabetical order by author, which means I’m coming at them randomly. The two books I’m reviewing in this post, Kelly Link’s The Book of Love and John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In, are two of the most clever and engaging novels I’ve read in some time. Another great pairing–both books are about love in unexpected forms, both are sweet-natured but not Lifetime/Hallmark movie sweet, and both have an interesting and subtle political underside.

The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra UK)

Find out more HERE.

This novel had me at the moment one of the characters knocks on the door of another character RIGHT in the middle of a song she is writing, and she says, “Sit wherever, Person from Porlock.” Oh, wait. As a member (former member? have they kicked me out?) of The Porlock Society, I have to tell you the novel had me far before that moment, because that one happens in roughly the middle of the novel, and there are many fun and clever moments before that. This amazing urban fantasy novel is the story of three high school friends who have died and then suddenly find themselves sucked through a portal back into their old lives. The three, and another one who sneaks through the portal into life with them, have to compete to see which ones get to stay and live their lives, and which ones must return to the land of Death–not to mention solving the mystery of what actually catapulted them into Death’s waiting room in the first place.

I really enjoyed this novel. Considering the age of the main characters, I suppose this is YA? I don’t really know. It uses none of the usual YA tropes, and I (much, MUCH too old for YA) enjoyed it immensely. As the title tells us, this is a book about love–love of all kinds. The characters are wonderful, funny, and real. As I mentioned, the novel is sweet-natured without being saccharine or sappy. That is a true feat of magic if ever I have seen one. Magic saturates this book–old and rotting magic, newly discovered magic, magic refused–and its magic system is very ingenious. Meanwhile, the setting is perfectly realistic small-town America, with a subtle political message. You’ll know it when you see it–the moment when the statues get off their plinths, and even before then. I suppose you could think of The Book of Love as that type of portal fantasy where the fantasy beings make an incursion into the real world, rather than the reverse Harry Potter kind.

The novel perhaps goes on a bit too long, but there are a lot of moving parts and narrative threads to knit up. Besides, who can possibly resist a novel with a character who slaps a sticker on her guitar reading “This Machine Kills Gods”? The writing is really wonderful, too. I’m a sucker for that.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia UK)

Find out more HERE.

Good lord. ANOTHER sweet-natured book about love that is neither saccharine nor sappy. What are the chances? This one has all the horror trappings you could possibly desire. The main character is a monster out of your worst nightmares. You know what “monster” really means, don’t you? It comes from a Latin word meaning “to show” or “demonstrate,” and another closely-related Latin word meaning “to warn.” Monsters are the uncanny, warning of the disapproval of the gods. They are the malformed, the nightmare Other. When the Roman poet Horace wrote about Cleopatra, he called her “fatale monstrum”–fatal monster, a warning of the unnatural (her unnatural power as a woman, I suppose) and how the unnatural can tear societal norms apart.

What happens when some creature labeled a “monster” encounters love? What happens if that act rebuilds and reshapes societal norms? This novel puts its unique stamp on a fairly common horror trope, the monster who falls in love with a human. It’s much more than that, though. The novel is about Othering and the cost to society for doing so. The toll it takes on empathy and love. The difficulties and joys of found family. Radical transformation.

Reaching that point is complicated for Shesheshen the monster, and in the telling, Wiswell–like Link–scores some very clever political points. Shesheshen thinks nothing of devouring others. It’s how she lives, and now that she is mature, she needs to find a partner she trusts enough to lay her eggs in, “someone to build a nest in.” The eggs will hatch, the young will eat the nourishing, trusted partner, and the life cycle of her kind will go on. So when circumstances bring her in contact with humans as something other than a food source, she finds them endlessly mysterious. There are the rich people, she sees, and then there are the laborers. The rich people live off the efforts of the laborers. “What the laborers got out of it that kept them from eating the rich, Shesheshen didn’t understand. She was a mere monster.” As torch-wielding villagers hunt Shesheshen through the hiding places of their town, she marvels at their lives, especially their “binary system of justice that mostly served the landed,” and how their walls, built to keep the Others out, only keep the villagers in, “trapped with politicians and monsters.” If Shesheshen ever gets a guitar, we know what sticker she will put on it.

I suppose my only real beef with this book is that Shesheshen’s arc of personal growth to overcome Othering, and the arc of her beloved to overcome familial abuse, is too full of the trauma-informed self-help language of contemporary pop psych articles and books. That stuff kind of interfered with my willing suspension of disbelief. But I can see how the novel requires a delicate balance if it is going to work. In spite of that particular misgiving, I enjoyed reading Someone To Build a Nest In very much. It is a wonderful novel.

NEXT UP: I try to pick a winner. Full disclosure: the book I think should win and the book the judges pick is frequently not the same book!