The Hugo-Nominated Novels

Among Others - Enjoyable and well enough written, but not really for me. I imagine fans who discovered SF in the 70s could become quite intoxicated on waves of nostalgia. Also an excellent book to give to a young girl just starting to read fantasy and science fiction. If the only book she had was this one, she could extrapolate a reading list of the very best of classic science fiction and fantasy, along with some idea of how to read it critically. The really clever thing this book does is tell a story by showing its aftermath. Oh, yes, this ordinary British teenage girl was involved in a battle between good and evil, with faerie magic and all. She is still wounded from it. But that was then, and this is now, when she is trying to make her way at a new boarding school, and defend herself, and recover from her losses, and incidentally read quite a lot of fantastic science fiction books.



Dance with Dragons - It feels a bit like cheating to have the umpteenth book in an ongoing high fantasy saga be nominated, and no, it doesn't stand alone, not one little bit. My attempt to read A Game of Thrones already taught me that this series isn't for me, and Dance with Dragons was unable to change my mind in the fifty pages or so that I gave it.



Deadline - I loved this, but that's because I love Mira Grant's Newsflesh series. I am glad that I read it before, though, because the copy in the Hugo voting packet crashed my Nook every time I tried to read it. So my memories of it are not fresh. It hits all the right notes with the societal analysis and the politics and the cover up and the advanced post-apocalyptic civilization. It deals differently than you might expect with the way the previous book ended. The third in the series is also good (just read it while road-tripping!).



Leviathan Wakes - Or, as a friend of mine calls it, The Book With the Vomit Zombies. If that doesn’t immediately make you want to hurl it across the room, this book may be for you! It’s a bit of a misnomer, actually. They aren’t zombies, and vomit as such isn’t featured prominently. I rather wish the term wasn’t used in the book, as it may change how it is read. It’s a novel of the “potentially apocalyptic plaguelike thing affecting a group of humans in space” type. If that description piques your interest and you liked Peter F. Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction et al., you will probably enjoy this heartily. I did. I will note that it did not feel like a Daniel Abraham book, and if you go in expecting another Long Price Quartet, you may be unhappy with it.



Embassytown - I’ve had mixed reactions to China Miéville’s writing. I loved Perdido Street Station but then got repeatedly stuck on The Scar and Iron Council and was sufficiently irritated with them that I didn’t care enough to finish. After reading Embassytown, I went and got The City & The City and Railsea. I read Embassytown a while ago, before I knew it was nominated, so my recollections are somewhat fuzzed. I liked it quite a bit. The alien culture was interesting and convincingly alien. The plot thing I thought the author was setting up was not actually the thing he was really setting up, but it was handled in a way that made me say, “Ha!” in a pleased way. (I do not remember what it was; I only remember the “ha!”) So he gets bonus marks for technical proficiency and creativity.