Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2017

Nebula Nominees-Novella

Uh-oh! It's getting down to the wire and I have two and a half books to go. Yipe! I'm really struggling with Ninefox Gambit, my loves. It's so intense and it's so hard to read something to read text that is a block of words you recognize, but some of those words do not mean what you think they mean. Really, all of scifi has bits like that. It's just that after awhile, the reader adjusts and it lets up. This one is NOT letting up. Novellas Confession, this section was completely rigged because Every Heart a Doorway was one of my favorite books from last year. I did not know then that it was a novella, nor did I care. To be fair, I read all of the nominees and, I could cry, because some of them are SO GOOD. Runtime was everything for me. If you say science fiction story, Runtime is exactly what I think of. It's perfect. It's awesome, it  was soooooo good. I loved The Dream-Quest of Villett Boe because it featured a middle-aged woman on a quest wi

Nebula Nominees Novellette

The Nebula nominees keep coming and I keep knocking them down! So far, I haven't really run into anything I have found so undesireable that I have been unable to finish it. I realize that some things are not going to be to my taste, and I am not going to beat myself up for not finishing them. The novellettes were not a problem. Also, how cute is the word "novellette"? I read some really great stories in this category. "The Long Fall Up" is simply mind-blowing with the idea that a woman so wants to give birth under her own terms that should would steal a spaceship and take off-knowing that she would be alone for delivery. Wow. "Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea" is another modern fairy tale that I just loved. Seriously, Sarah Pinsker just made the LIST (the list of new authors I have discovered while doing this project). "Blood Grains Speak Through Memories" is unlike anything I have every read in my entire life, it freaked m

Nebula Award Nominees 2017- Short Stories

This post is my progress report on my self-challenge to read all of the 2017  Nebula nominees! So far, I have completed the short story category and most of the the novelettes. I have 3 novellas and 3 novels to go. Nebula Award Nominees 2017- Short Stories What fun! I would never have read any of these stories on my own, although I expect some of these will show up in some future anthologies. I have one personal gripe, and this will come up again in another category, and that is the death of the horror genre. Because they have just killed "horror" and lumped scary stories in with science fiction and fantasy, we get stories like Sabbath Wine trying to compete with Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies and it's not fair. It really is apples and oranges. Don't believe me about horror? Go find the horror section in the Barnes and Noble. Go ahead, I'll wait.       Griping over, this selection of stories was AWESOME and heavy on the fantasy stories. Seasons and Ward

Reading Challenge: Read all of the Nebula Nominees

I am on a mission to read all of the Nebula Award Nominees before the awards are presented on May 20th. This was prompted by the fact that I see these awards all of the time and I have only recently gotten hooked on science fiction so I think it is important to understand what the community thinks is the best of the best. I plan to do the exact same thing for the Hugos, but I have time. Unlike childrens' book awards, in which awards do not in any way equal popularity, readers seem to like to award favorites. It's no secret I am just crazy about N.K. Jemisin and her writing. Honestly it is because of she and Kameron Hurley and Becky Chambers and Jacqueline Koyanagi and Charlie Jane Anders and John Scalzi and James S.A. Corey (both of them) that I find myself absolutely loving this genre. I have NO desire to go back and read early science fiction with dorky cartoon covers featuring sexy aliens and white dudes holding Jetson-esque blasters. I want to read forward. I like wher