Hugo

I won't get round to doing a proper fanfare post to my nomination ruminations, but here's a sequence of rapid parps. Maybe I'll lard the parps with grace notes (grace nodes?) over the next couple days. Aargh. You know what I'm saying: haven't-got-time-to-do-a-proper-nominations-post-so-here's-a-slapdash-one.

NOVEL: Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star. Jeff Vandermeer, Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy.

SHORT FICTION / NOVELLA / NOVELETTE: Here's a list of some shorter fiction I liked.

CAMPBELL AWARD

Have you read Alyssa Wong's "The Fisher Queen" and "Santos de Sampaguitas"?

I don't know Carmen Maria Machado's work very well, but I liked "Help Me Follow my Sister into the Land of the Dead" in its brutal fidelity to the crowdfundfic form, and I really liked "The Husband Stitch," which is fucky, twee and violent all at once. The "quilt-work of tales and fragments" form can be a bit of a turn-off for me these days -- I've written elsewhere how I feel about these "stories" you guys all love -- but the spermy leg and the dirty fingers were a huge turn-on so that more than evens out, and the instructions on how to read the story aloud were very helpful. But also, it's serious: a drab reductive summary (in so 2014 diction) might be: a sex positive allegory of the co-implication of flourishing sexuality with intimate partner violence, within a wider setting of patriarchal values, which poses uncomfortable questions for some of the standard emancipatory narratives of liberal feminism. 

In his reviews and criticism, Paul Graham Raven has a way of making science fiction actually do what it so often prides itself on doing: tell us about the world we live in, with special focus on science, technology and engineering, and on everything that is latent and still emerging within social relations and social performance. I'm 99% sure he'd be eligible for a Campbell following the publication of "Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (Pirates of the Plastic Ocean)" in Twelve Tomorrows. Also, whereas many nominees would probably be pleased to have been nominated, he might well be a bit cross.

Or ... there anything that actually definitely says you can't win it twice? Vote for Sofia Samatar again!

Also check out: J.Y. Yang, S.L. Huang, Joseph Tomaras, Isabel Yap, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Vajra Chandrasekera, Alix E. Harrow, who I think are all eligible.

*

I was right about what Machado's ribbon q.v. was BTW.

Orthography riddle time, preciousssfuckers! Nobody has yet got my "you-know-it-or-you-don't" riddle about why ",,,e" fills me with humbling dismay, although there were some good goat-based etc. guesses. Here's another. In what sense is the word "Hugo" redundant?