Tag Archives: National Book Award

First Monday Book Day

Book Day: Award Season

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Before I get to the somewhat traditional recap of the science fiction and fantasy awards from this year, I wanted to take a moment to recognize a book on the longlist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.  I was furnished a copy of this by the editor (someone we probably all would recognize if she didn't go around in a trench coat and sunglasses all the time).  It's a really affecting story and a gorgeous book (as much as any book about the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki can be gorgeous).  If you don't believe me, you can read the review in the New York Times.

This year, all the sci-fi and fantasy awards actually got handed out, so there was improvement from last year.  Some of my favorites, and lots of links, below.

SHORT STORY WINNERS:

Nebula and World Fantasy Winner - Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers - by Alyssa Wong - (link)

Just read it.  The title kind of sums it up. This was a really good and deserving winner.

Hugo and Locus Winner - Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer - (link)

Finally, an explanation for the internet's fascination with the feline.

SHORT STORY NOMINEES:

The Dowager of Bees - by China Mieville - I have Mieville's story collection (Three Moments of an Explosion) sitting on my bedside table, and I'm very excited to get into it. The title story and this one are both really really good.  This one involves the presence of secret cards that can appear in any regular deck.

The Game of Smash and Recovery - by Kelly Link - Link is such a master of revealing just one more thing as you get further and further into the story.

Madeleine - by Amal El-Mohtar - The narrator remembers being someone else.  And it keeps happening more and more often.

The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill - by Kelly Robson - Tiny aliens trying to keep their host alive.

NOVELLETE WINNERS:

Hugo Winner – Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang – (link)

A very cool idea, Beijing is three cities, each only active while the other two sleep, and travelling between them has dangers.

Nebula Winner – And You Shall Know Her By the Trail of Dead by Brooke Bolander – (link)

A kind of tech crime/virtual reality/love story?  I don't know the best way to describe it except that it moves fast and is a lot of fun.  Definitely worth checking out.

Locus Winner – Black Dog by Neil Gaiman –

Can I tell you a secret?  I don’t like Neil Gaiman’s novels.  On the other hand, I have consistently enjoyed his short fiction.  “Black Dog” is a good ghost story where a traveler stumbles upon a town with more to it than meets the eye.

NOVELLETTE NOMINEES:

Our Lady of the Open Road - by Sarah Pinsker - A band on the road in a slightly more post-apocalyptic world than our own.

Another Word for World - by Ann Leckie - A recently anointed ruler is shipwrecked on an unfriendly planet.  (scroll to the end of the linked post for a download link)

NOVELLA WINNERS:

Hugo & Nebula Novella – Binti by Nnedi Okorafor –

Standalone book. Very good.  The main character is the first of her family/community to attend a university on another planet.  The trip there is hijacked by an alien menace.  An exploration of what is alien.

World Fantasy Novella – The Unlicensed Magician by Kelly Barnhill –

Standalone book.  A 1984-like state has been rounding up magic children.  Written in a very particular style (an affected, self-aware childlike tone) that made the world interesting, this still told an engrossing story.

Locus Novella – Slow Bullets by Alistair Reynolds –

Standalone book. A generational starship of war criminals, soldiers and settlers from the recently concluded space war begins to wake up. Reynolds is a pretty good sci-fi author, and he delivers some pretty good sci-fi here.

NOVELLA NOMINEES:

Penric’s Demon – by Lois McMaster Bujold – A country boy is unwittingly tapped as a vessel for a demon and the magic that comes with that.  This might have been my favorite of the novella nominees.  The audiobook is a brisk 4 hours and it tells a good story.  Bujold has published two more in the series this year, which I keep meaning to check out.

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn – by Usman Malik – A story of multiple cultures and generations.

The Citadel of Weeping Pearls – by Aliette de Bodard – A space station disappeared years ago, and now it seems it might be possible to find it, visit it, or maybe bring it back. I'm just going to keep recommending de Bodard's short fiction every time I write one of these. This is in Asimov's SF magazine, whose stories sometimes appear and disappear online if you search them.  I couldn't find it right now, but keep an eye out.

Guignol – by Kim Newman – Horror story revolving around a theater of the grotesque in Paris.  This was terribly gory, but still did a great job of creating suspense and payoff.

The New Mother – Eugene Fisher – Genetic mutation and what it means to be human and to tolerate those on the other side of that line.

Honestly, this year there wasn't one story that I was over-the-moon excited about, which is kind of rare.  Hungry Daughters and Folding Beijing were both really good, but I don't know that either rises to that level where I will remember them when I write a recap like this next year.

As far as novels go, I'm still working my way through the nominees there a little bit, but N. K. Jemisen's The Fifth Season is probably my current favorite.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik was also really good.  A good old magic story.

I'm currently reading The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi and I'm not too impressed.  It's like a re-setting of The Wind-up Girl.  Which I don't mean as a compliment.

The thing I'm most excited to read from the nominee lists is K. J. Parker's Savages.  I really liked some of Parker's novellas (A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong and Let Maps to Others), so I'm looking forward to reading this longer effort.

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Blowin’ in the Wind

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Tomorrow is election day. Go vote if you have not voted already. Else, it's all your fault.

This month's selection is Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, "The untold story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl."

Wow. What a depressing book. Chapter after chapter of personal stories of misery and deprivation and environmental disaster. This is social history at its most relentless. Egan's National Book Award-winning book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding his parents' (or, for you punk kids, grandparents') generation. Here's a little taste:

On May 9, 1934, a flock of whirlwinds started up in the northern prairie, in the Dakotas and eastern Montana, where people had fled the homesteads two decades earlier. The sun at midmorning turned orange and looked swollen. The sky seemed as if if were matted by a window screen. The next day, a mass of dust-filled clouds marched east, picking up strength as they found the jet stream winds, moving toward the population centers. By the time this black front hit Illinois and Ohio, the formations had merged into what looked to pilots like a solid block of airborne dirt. Planes had to fly fifteen thousand feet to get above it, and when they finally topped out at their ceiling, the pilots described the storm in apocalyptic terms. Carrying three tons of dust for every American alive, the formation moved over the Midwest. It covered Chicago at night, dumping an estimated six thousand tons, the dust slinking down walls as if every home and every office had sprung a leak. By morning, the dust fell like snow over Boston and Scranton, and then New York slipped under partial darkness. Now the storm was measured at 1,800 miles wide, a great rectangle of dust from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, weighing 350 million tons. In Manhattan, the streetlights came on at midday and cars used their headlights to drive.
....
New York was a dirty city in 1934.... On a typical day, the dust measured 227 particles per square millimeter -- not a good reading for someone with health problems. But on May 11, the dust measured 619 particles per square millimeter. ... A professor from New York University...calculated that on the seventeenth floor of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, the thickness of the dust was about forty tons per cubic mile, which meant all of New York City was under the weight of 1,320 tons. [pp. 150-152]

Thousands of residents of the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, and Kansas developed "dust pneumonia". During dusters, drivers would drag chains from their cars in order to dissipate static electricity. On "Black Sunday," April 14, 1935, an even worse storm struck. "The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal" (p. 8).

John Steinbeck wrote famously of the Joads and others who escaped the Dust Bowl. This book is the story of those who stayed behind. It is riveting, shocking, numbing reading.

So. Now that I've cheered you up, who wants to go watch some political commercials?