Archive for novella

Hugo Awards finalists 2026

Posted in Books, Kids with tags , , , , , , , on May 9, 2026 by xi'an

Here are the 2026 Hugo Awards finalists, with winners to be announced on 30 August at LAcon V. Since I registered for selecting the awards, I did get the Hugo Voter Packet (with full ebooks, some audiobooks, if not movies, or TV scripts) and hence be able to read at least some of them. Before or after the deadline in August.. Here are some categories:

Best Novel

  • A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape) [sequel to The Tainted Cup]
  • Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow; Gollancz)
  • Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US)
  • The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK)
  • The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Tor US; Orbit UK)
  • The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Orbit US; Hodderscape)

Best Novella

  • Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
  • Cinder House by Freya Marske (Tordotcom; Tor UK)
  • Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom)
  • The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK)
  • The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK)
  • What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire; Titan UK) [a constant in the nomination lists!]

Best Novelette

  • “Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62)
  • “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak (Clarkesworld, Issue 220)
  • “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells (Reactor, July 10, 2025)
  • “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed (Reactor, April 2, 2025)
  • “The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 67)
  • “When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 65)

Best Short Story

  • “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 63)
  • “In My Country” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, Issue 223)
  • “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots, May 16, 2025)
  • “Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro (Clarkesworld, Issue 226)
  • “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62)
  • “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld, Issue 229)

Best Series

  • Emily Wilde by Heather Fawcett (Del Rey US; Orbit UK)
  • October Daye by Seanan McGuire (Tor US; DAW)
  • Old Man’s War by John Scalzi (Tor US; Tor UK) [read some of these!]
  • The Chronicles of Osreth by Katherine Addison (Tor US; Solaris UK; Subterranean)
  • The Craft Wars by Max Gladstone (Tor; Tordotcom) [read the first one, did not like it that much]
  • White Space by Elizabeth Bear (Saga Press; Gollancz)

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Exhalation [book review]

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2024 by xi'an

Exhalation is a diverse and original collection of (more or less) short stories by Ted Chiang, published between 2007 and 2015 in different journals including Nature at the time Nature had a weekly one-page short story (of varying quality). This is science fiction in a sense, given that all stories involve impossible situations and a connection with science at a low technical level (no space opera). However, it is much closer to philosophy in my opinion in that the author builds upon an alternate reality to question ours, sometimes with remarkable prescience and a remarkable kindness towards his characters.

So, there is the time travel portal story that does not lead to paradoxes, even with temporal loops, but to a reflection on human nature. (Not my favourite but this first story got the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Seiun Award!) They are doomed universes, either because the pressure is slowly getting away, or because a lack of communication and awareness pushes one species towards extinction (with the side sad coïncidence of being associated with the soon to fall Arecibo dish!). There are social media killing free will but calling for resistance. And a novella on virtual entities (digients) turning more and more real, while the company that produced them goes bankrupt and their universe is no longer upgraded, which also brings a well-balanced discussion on whether or not they should become legal entities and be given freedom, resonating in opposition to the recent doomsaying warnings about AI taking over humanity. Plus reflecting on the hardships of parenting and teaching. There is a Victorian story of building a difference engine nanny, with terrible consequences on two successive generations. There is another story about the potential horror of having one’s entire life stored on line and accessible by sentient interfaces, negating the very notion of memory since both remembering and forgetting escape the individual. There is a pre-Copernician universe where everything literally fits the Bible creation, until it does not. And there is the case of a quantic collection of universes where alternate paths could be consulted, to the point of interacting with alternate selves, maybe a bit fuzzy in the scientific details, but again leading to deeper reflections on human nature. I read the book around my trip to Melbourne and back, which may explain for my highly positive reaction as I had plenty of free time and sunny days to enjoy reading in the planes, on the trams (where I nearly lost my wallet, rescued by the kindness of another passenger!), and in my St Kilda comfy rental, but I do very much recommend it. Especially for those with a scientific mind. Joyce Carol Oates wrote for The New Yorker a much longer and better argued analysis of Exhalation. when the book appeared.

[Disclaimer about potential self-plagiarism: this post or an edited version may eventually appear in my Books Review section in CHANCE.]

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haunting of tramcar 105 [book review]

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on April 20, 2019 by xi'an

A mix of steampunk and urban magic in a enlightened 1912 Cairo sounded like a good prolegomena and I bought P. Djèli Clark’s The haunting of tram car 015 on this basis. As it happens, this is actually a novella of 123 pages building on the same universe as a previous work of the author, A dead djinn in Cairo, which however is even shorter and only available as a Kindle book… I really enjoyed the short read and its description of an alternate Cairo that is competing with Paris and London, thanks to the advantage brought by the supernatural powers of djinns. (And apparently also gaining the independence Egypt could not secure under the British protectorate.) The English suffragettes have also their counterparts in Egypt and the country is about to decide about women right to vote. The story itself is nice if not stratospheric, with mostly well-drawn characters and good dialogues. (The core of the plot relies on smuggling sweets from Armenia, though, a rather weak link.) As in an earlier order, the book itself was not properly printed, with a vertical white band of erased characters on most odd pages, presumably another illustration of the shortcomings of the  print-on-demand principle. (Which means that I sent the book back to Amazon rather than leaving it in the common room.)

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