Mokka mit Schlag » Pop Culture

The Novella category has some good nominees and one probable example of ballot-box stuffing. My first place vote goes to “The Chaplain’s Legacy” by Brad Torgersen. This was the only one of the group I’d read before the nominees came out. It’s solid, post-Vietnam, military SF. It’s a really good story and worth the nomination. Usually I don’t remember 90% of what’s published in the magazines two months after I’ve read them, but I remembered this one.
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There’s a weird effect in Hugo voting where the longer the work is the more popular and less literary the nominees get. In the shortest category, short stories, all the nominees are very literary and tend toward magical realism. There isn’t a hard or even soft SF story in the bunch:
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Given the thousands of comics and graphics novels published every year, not to mention web comics, it’s really surprising the nominees weren’t better. I suspect there’s a strong aversion to including any superhero comics in the group. There’s no other way to explain their complete absence from the nominees, especially given that any midlist mainstream Marvel/DC title is the equal of all but one of the nominees.
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The Best Related Work category was really weak this year. I voted for Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer, with Jeremy Zerfoss. It’s the only one of the nominees that’s truly ambitious, and represents serious effort and thought. It’s not the best How to write book I’ve read, but it’s at least something.
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This year for the first time I’m making a real effort to read all the Hugo nominees. First up: the novels.
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Third Flatiron has published my short story, The Right Books in their summer anthology Master Minds. You can read it on Kindle, DRM-free Pub, or just plain paper.

After 20-some-odd nonfiction books, and probably hundreds of articles, this is my first published work of fiction so I’m pretty psyched about it. More to come!