I thought yesterday’s story was the final nominee, but I was wrong, there’s another short story, As the Last I May Know by S. L. Huang, and it has to be a sign of the times that the story I almost forgot to review is… good?
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) As the Last I May Know”Category: Reviews
Reading the Hugos (2020) Blood is Another Word for Hunger
This is the fifth of the Hugo finalists and, probably, the most important one. If you could distill the Hugo short fiction category into a platonic form, it would look very similar to this piece, Blood is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon. And now I have to review it.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) Blood is Another Word for Hunger”Reading the Hugos (2020) Ten Excerpts from an Annotated… oh God that’s a long title.
Some particular trends in genre literature have become obvious during the past few years. One of them is the use of Brobdingnagian titles, a compulsion to write paragraph-long titles, some of whom even give away the plot. I suspect this may have started as a quirky, ironic thing to do, but I don’t think it’s funny unless you are lampooning or referencing some stuffy style like academic papers or writing comedy. And, to be fair, that’s to some extent what this story is doing—referencing, not the comedy.
The complete title of this very short piece by Nibedita Sen is Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island, which is way less interesting than my alternative title: The lesbian cannibal she-devils of Ratnabar Island. It’s mating season… and they want your blood!
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) Ten Excerpts from an Annotated… oh God that’s a long title.”Reading the Hugos (2018) Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™
I’ll use this story as an example of the dilemma any prospective writer who aspires to a reputation among the Noble People will encounter. You can write a good story, one that will stand on its own merits, capable of being read by people from all around the world, but at the cost of (probably) being ignored, or you can add a layer of fashionable dogma that will impoverish your story, restrict its appeal, and reduce its longevity, but with the possible reward of social approval or a nomination.
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Reading the Hugos (2018) Sun, Moon, Dust
Ursula Vernon has been nominated a few times for the Hugos, and I have read some of her stories (Jackalope’s Wife and The Tomato Thief.) I didn’t dislike or like them. I know I’m not their audience but, unlike what happens when I read other Hugo finalists, I didn’t get the feeling someone was trying to insult me. They had a personal touch and a bit of humor here and there, plus some of the elements that any Hugo finalists needs, but aside from that, I found them generally unexciting. Tepid.
Reading the Hugos (2018) Fandom for Robots
Fandom for Robots, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, is a 3530-word short story. It’s about fan fiction and fandoms, but I’m not sure it’s trully about robots. Some things happen, the robot-protagonist watches anime, fan fictions is described and ¿satirized? and the story ends with the (human) protagonist becoming Internet-popular.
These preceding sentences stood alone, in the draft version of this post, for a few days before I managed to write the rest (800 words,) which I have just deleted. Reading this short story was like a sort of reverse writer’s block, for although I had thousands of things to say about it, there’s was no point in doing so. This short story is harmless, annoyingly so. Even if you shaped it like a knife and tried to stab someone in the eyes with it, not even the UK government would consider it a dangerous weapon. Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2018) Fandom for Robots”
These foking fockers focking focked language again: on swearing and fiction.
Today is the Lord’s Day so I won’t engage in any posting of wicked and evil news [edit: that was from when I used to post crazy daily news as part of my DISUM] for it is known that all journalists are servants of one devil or another, and reading their shrieking incantations for too long is a sure path to damnation and mental retardation. Instead, I’ll write about swearing in writing and the use of the word fuck.
Continue reading “These foking fockers focking focked language again: on swearing and fiction.”Reading the Hugos: That Game We Played During the War, by Carrie Vaughn
That game we played during the war is one of the finalists for the Best Short Story category for this year Hugo Awards.
Recently after the war between the nations of Enith and Gaant ended —the Gaanthians being telepaths—, Calla, an Enithian nurse, goes to the nation of Gaant to see the wounded Major Vaark Lan, a Ganthian she had met during the war. Their relationship is slowly revealed, but the crux of it is that both had been each others’ prisoners during the war. Calla had been Lan’s nurse when he had been captured and, later, she had been a Gaantian prisoner under Lan’s supervision. During those two imprisonments, a peculiar bond between them was born, including the pastime of playing an odd version of chess.
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My posts about C. L. Moore (Shambleau)
These are the posts I wrote at the Puppy of the Month Book Club about Catherine L. Moore’s Shambleau and her other stories:
–Gender Bending with the Dark Gods
–A comment concerning Shambleau and drunken Indians [sanity check required]
Book review: “The Intellectuals” by Paul Johnson
Published in 1988, “The Intellectuals” by Paul Johnson (born 1928) is a unique book. Not only for its quality but because there aren’t many like it. There is “The Betrayal of the Intellectuals” (1927) by Julien Benda, “The intellectuals and the masses (1990)” by John Carey, “Intellectuals and Society” (2010) by Thoma Sowell, and I guess “Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith” (1980) by James H. Billington, which also deals with a somewhat similar subject. But, acknowledging these exceptions, one has to admit that there aren’t many books about the “intellectual class”, its origins, impact, and so on. That seems to be changing, but studying the intellectuals is still taboo. Not surprising if one realizes they have become a new kind of priesthood.
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Emperor's Notepad 