award recs

It’s award nomination season for the big genre awards!  Everyone’s posting about all kinds of stuff from last year!  I posted my own 2013 bibliography a week or so ago.  But now I’m going to talk about other stuff that I’m likely to nominate.

I didn’t read a whole lot of new stuff this year, unfortunately.  It’s just the way the cards fell.  Of what I did read and encounter, here’s what I’m likely to nominate.

Fiction:  My recommendations are heavily weighted to what’s online, because that’s what I read in the corners of my time.  But there are others.

• “The Last Dignity of Man,” Marjorie Liu’s novelette from The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination is on my list.
• Wild Cards stories “When We Were Heroes” by Daniel Abraham (novelette) and “The Button Man and the Murder Tree” by Cherie Priest (short story) weren’t just good Wild Cards stories, they were good stories.
• “Sing” by Karin Tidbeck (short story) also really good.
• YA novel The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater (the follow up to Raven Boys) was excellent, as was middle grade novel Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi.  Oh, that twist at the end…
• For the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, I think Max Gladstone is still eligible.  I still talk about his series, starting with Three Parts Dead, as demonstrating that genre boundaries are definitely made to be broken.

I was introduced to artist Aaron B. Miller’s work this year.  Kinuko Craft is an artist I nominate every year.  Galen Dara is up and coming and definitely someone to watch — she did the marvelous piece depicting Harry and Marlowe for Lightspeed.

Best related book:  Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook.  It’s such an astonishing accomplishment — a fully illustrated book on creativity.

I finally started reading webcomic Strong Female Protagonist this year, after many recommendations.  Like many of us these days, it’s picking apart superhero tropes and doing some pretty far-out things.  I described it to someone as Watchmen, but with a lawful good alignment instead of chaotic neutral.

Drama Short Form:

• I’m still on the quest to keep Doctor Who out of this category, but if you must nominate Doctor Who, consider “The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.”  Snark with love.
• There’s astronaut Chris Hadfield’s cover of Space Oddity.
• And then there’s the Marvel One Shot as found on the Iron Man 3 DVD:  “Agent Carter,” which broke my heart five different ways then built it back up again by the end.  I haven’t seen anyone talking about this, but I thought it was fantastic.  It’s a year after the war, and Carter is trying to make her way in a world that doesn’t want her anymore.

Drama Long Form: We have a plethora of movies to choose from this year.  Here are my choices (I only get 5 nominations on the Hugo ballot):

• Frozen
• Iron Man 3
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
• The World’s End
• Pacific Rim

The movie category is going to be way interesting this year, given I left off Gravity (which I don’t think is really science fiction), Europa Report, Ender’s Game, and all those other movies I just didn’t go see.  Oh, and Hansel and Gretel: Witchhunters came out last year too!  Oh, for one more nominating slot. . .  Also the short form, what with Almost Human, Sleepy Hollow, Agents of SHIELD, and Orphan Black all starting up this year.  I don’t know where to start with those episodes.

Whew!  Meanwhile, I have a couple of weeks to catch up on some more reading.  We’ll see if anything else squeaks on to my list.

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