Hugo Awards 2020
Discussing the 2020 Hugo Awards
Posts for this club should be tagged: hugoawards2020_club.
July 31
Book: The Light Brigade
The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on. Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? [more inside]
July 24
Book: In an Absent Dream
Lundy is a very serious young girl who would rather study and dream than become a respectable housewife and live up to the expectations of the world around her. As well she should. When she finds a doorway to a world founded on logic and reason, riddles and lies, she thinks she's found her paradise. Alas, everything costs at the goblin market, and when her time there is drawing to a close, she makes the kind of bargain that never plays out well.
July 18
Book: The City in the Middle of the Night
Humanity clings to life on January--a colonized planet divided between permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Two cities, built long ago in the meager temperate zone, serve as the last bastions of civilization--but life inside them is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.
Sophie, a young student from the wrong side of Xiosphant city, is exiled into the dark after being part of a failed revolution. But she survives--with the help of a mysterious savior from beneath the ice.
July 3
Book: Middlegame
Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story. Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math. Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet. Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained.
June 28
Book: The Haunting of Tram Car 015
Cairo, 1912: The case started as a simple one for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities ― handling a possessed tram car.
Soon, however, Agent Hamed Nasr and his new partner Agent Onsi Youssef are exposed to a new side of Cairo stirring with suffragettes, secret societies, and sentient automatons in a race against time to protect the city from an encroaching danger that crosses the line between the magical and the mundane. [more inside]
June 12
Book: The Deep
Based off of the song with the same title by Clipping. The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society—and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future.
May 23
Book: Hugo Nominated Novelettes 2020
The 2020 Hugo Award Winning Novellettes - works between 7,500 and 17,500 words, or roughly 30 - 70 pages. This is including works by NK Jemisin, Sarah Gailey, Sarah Pinsker, Caroline M. Yoachim, Siobhan Carroll, and Ted Chiang (full texts as they are available in the post) [more inside]
May 1
Book: Hugo Nominated Short Stories 2020
Hugo nominated short stories from Shiv Ramdas, SL Huang, Rivers Solomon, Fran Wilde, Alix E Harrow, and Nibedita Sen (links to the complete stories inside) [more inside]
April 29
Hugo Awards 2020
I'm planning on going ahead with doing the Hugo Awards club again, doing one post a week between May 1st and July 31st. [more inside]
December 3
Book: A Memory Called Empire
Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn't an accident. Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, to save herself and her way of life. Arkady Martine, scholar of Byzantine, history brings all her knowledge of intricate political maneuvering to bear in her debut space opera. [more inside]
November 15
Book: The Ten Thousand Doors of January
In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place. Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.
September 11
Book: Gideon the Ninth
The Emperor needs necromancers. The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman. Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit. [more inside]
September 8
Book: To Be Taught, If Fortunate
A stand-alone science fiction novella from Becky Chambers, the author of the Wayfarers series. Like her other books, it's an intimate, character based story. No concrete antagonists, some tech, a simpld, quiet and thoughtful space opera.
July 24
Book: This Is How You Lose the Time War
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange letters—and fall in love in this thrilling and romantic book from award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
May 20
Book: Exhalation
In these nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories, Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.