When I wrote the first part of this post, I already knew there would be a second. I thought I would wait a few days, perhaps a couple of weeks, but new stuff kept happening.
Continue reading “Reality Strikes Back (II) but some of you could outrun the speed of light!”Reading the Hugos (2020) As the Last I May Know
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”Reading the Hugos (2020): A Catalog of Storms
This is the final nominee (Disregard that, I actually forgot not just to review another one, but actually to read it! There’s still one more story left) for this year’s short story Hugo Awards, A Catalog of Storms, by Fran Wilde. If you were expecting a roaring end to this review series, you are going to be disappointed.
Fran Wilde wrote years ago one of the few Hugo stories I actually liked, mostly due to its raw, angry energy and somewhat autobiographical content, but A Catalog of Storms has none of those things as far as I can see. To me, it feels like a by-the-book Hugo finalists: wandering, dreamy, with florid language, oozing with magic realism, and with barely any plot or real tension.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020): A Catalog of Storms”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 (2020) And Now His Lordship is Laughing
For this short story, you can play a little game. Thanks to the benevolence and foresight of the people at Strange Horizons, this story is preceded by a long list of Content Warnings. You can ignore those, of course, but who could resist the temptation of clicking on that button to see what awful sins it hides. It’s like a flashing red button saying DON’T TOUCH ME.
The game is this: Try to deduce the plot of this story just from those trigger warnings. So what sort of Gomorrah-style type of story do we have here for it to include all that stuff? A surprisingly meh one. Yes, a child dies, and that sets in motion this story of racial revenge, but I don’t even remember half of the things from the list.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) And Now His Lordship is Laughing”Reading the Hugos (2020) Do Not Look Back, My Lion
I wasn’t sure if this year I would bother writing these analyses of the Hugo short story finalists. Although my experience has usually been that close to 90% of them are bad, at least they are bad in an interesting way. This year they are mostly bad and boring. Besides, to be honest, I don’t care that much about writing anymore. But these reviews of mine are sort of a blog tradition, so here they are once more. I think, however, that this may be the last year I do these. It’s neither worth it nor funny.
If you have stumbled upon this without knowing what I’m talking about: The Hugo Awards is one of the most prestigious literary awards in science fiction and fantasy. Also, they nominate a lot of crap, but it’s from that fact that the hilarity ensues.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) Do Not Look Back, My Lion”Review: The Long Long Long Long rescue, by Robert Zoltan.
The Hugo season of science fiction & fantasy is on, so what better way to start than by reviewing something that isn’t a finalist, that I actually enjoyed, and that none of you have even heard about?
Continue reading “Review: The Long Long Long Long rescue, by Robert Zoltan.”On commas. This is a post about boring commas—like, with what kind of exciting title do you think I’m going to come up with?
I occasionally proofread texts, and adding missing commas probably takes up half of my time. Removing superfluous ones is a smaller issue, but it’s a close contender. The third, if anyone is interested, is surely missing hyphens in compound adjectives. So, this will be a post about commas and, since they are related, semi-colons. However, the goal is not to remember any list of 8, 10, or 17 seemingly arbitrary rules but to understand the underlying logic, which exists.
Continue reading “On commas. This is a post about boring commas—like, with what kind of exciting title do you think I’m going to come up with?”Reality strikes back.
If you are like most people, you are either isolated at home or forced to share your usually crowded public transport with even more people because some genius thought cutting down travel frequency is a good way to avoid crowds. And if you happen to live in real, non-joke countries like Taiwan, Singapore, or South Korea: You are one lucky bastard.
Some while in my country ice rinks are being repurposed as improvised morgues, let’s dedicate a few minutes to thing about what it all means. Hmmm… *thinking* Recently, I have had a lot of time for that *serious thinking*
Emperor's Notepad 