Next SFF Author: Douglas Hulick

Previous SFF Author: Matthew Hughes

Series: Hugo Award

Thoughtful Thursday: The 2021 Hugo Awards (GIVEAWAY!)

Winners of the 2021 Hugo Awards will be announced at the 79th World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) which will be held December 15-19 in Washington DC (DisCon III). (Usually WorldCon is held in August but it was delayed this year due to COVID). The award ceremony takes place on Saturday December 18. The Hugo Award finalists, listed below, are chosen by a poll of readers.

There are no Retrospective Hugo Awards being presented this year because the 1946 Retros were presented in 1996. We’re covering only the categories you see below but there are lots more that you can find on the 2021 Hugo Award page.

December 9th, 2021. FanLit | Hugo Award | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 14 comments |

Thoughtful Thursday: The 2020 Hugo Awards

Winners of the 2020 Hugo Awards will be announced at the 78th World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) which will be in New Zealand (CoNZealand) this year, though events are virtual due to COVID. The final award ceremony takes place on Saturday August 1 and George R.R. Martin will be the toastmaster. The Hugo Award finalists, listed below, are chosen by a poll of readers.

Click the title links below to read our reviews and on the author links to visit our page for the author. We’ve included the cover art for our favorites.

July 23rd, 2020. FanLit | Hugo Award | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 13 comments |

Stories of Your Life and Others: Eight carefully crafted stories

Stories of Your Life: And Others by Ted Chiang

In his review of Ted Chiang’s brilliant short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) in The Guardian, China Miéville mentions the “humane intelligence […] that makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang’s calm passion.” The oxymoron “calm passion” is an insightful and ingenious way to describe these stories because of the way it hints at their deft melding of the most solid of hard science fiction concepts with an often surprisingly gentle,

Blue Mars: A must-read work of science fiction

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Earth is powerful but overpopulated, and its many billions of people now look at the Martian frontier with desperate envy and resentment. Is war inevitable? Peace in the short term will require a delegation to co-opt the “feudal capitalist” Earth’s selfish politics, it will require history’s most ambitious Model United Nations committee to create a Martian government, and it might also require Mars First’s intelligence community to build an extra-terrestrial alliance against the home world. If that plot summary sounds sprawling, I’m afraid it doesn’t even approach a comprehensive list of what Kim Stanley Robinson explores in Blue Mars,

SHORTS: Cho, Stueart, Palmer, Kingfisher

Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few excellent stories, including two of the recently announced Hugo nominees, that we wanted you to know about.

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho (2018, free to read online or download at Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog). 2019 Hugo award winner (novelette).

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again, by Zen Cho, is a Hugo-nominated novelette about an imugi,

BINTI: The Complete Trilogy

Editor’s note: BINTI was originally published in three separate novellas but has recently been released in a complete trilogy. We’ve combined all of our new and previous BINTI reviews in this post.

BINTI: The Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor

As Binti, a mathematically brilliant, 16 year old member of the African Himba tribe, sneaks away from her home in the dead of night, I felt almost as much anticipation as Binti herself. Binti has decided, against massive family pressure, to accept a full-ride scholarship to the renowned Oomza University on a planet named ― wait for it ― Oomza Uni.

SAGA Volume 1: A brilliant series

SAGA Volume One, Issues 1-6 by Brian K. Vaughan (author) & Fiona Staples (illustrator)

Brian K. Vaughan‘s brilliant new series SAGA is a mixture of fantasy and science fiction, with wonderfully humorous and realistic dialogue between a newlywed couple. But the subject being addressed (and critiqued) is war. It’s also incredibly sexually explicit, so I must give my warning to those who either prefer not to have in their heads images of people with television heads having sex or want to keep such images from their kids.

Thoughtful Thursday: 2018 Hugo Awards: Novels & Novellas

Lots of our favorites are included among the finalists for this year’s Hugos for Best Novel and Best Novella. Will the “sure things” win? Will Ann Leckie or Yoon Ha Lee pull off an upset?

Not surprisingly, the novella category has the tried-and-true, like Nnedi Okorafor and Seanan McGuire, along with relative newcomers like Sarah Gailey. And the Tor.com novella imprint is well represented in that category!

Click the title links below to read our reviews and on the author links to visit our page for the author. We’ve displayed the covers of our favorites.

August 9th, 2018. Marion Deeds | Hugo Award | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 18 comments |

Thoughtful Thursday: 2018 Hugo Awards: Series, YA, Campbell

The 2018 Hugo Awards will be presented at Worldcon 76 in San Jose, California, on August 19. The Hugo Award finalists are chosen by readers who are voting members of Worldcon. This week we’ll talk about the awards for Best Series, Best Young Adult Novel, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author. We discussed the categories for short works a few weeks ago and we’ll discuss the novels and novellas in our August 9 column.

Best series (in its second year) has a bumper crop of great stories. This category points out,

July 26th, 2018. Marion Deeds | Hugo Award | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 12 comments |

Thoughtful Thursday: 2018 Hugo Awards: Novelettes & Short Stories

The 2018 Hugo Awards will be presented at Worldcon 76 in San Jose, California, on August 19. The Hugo Award finalists are chosen by readers who are voting members of Worldcon. This week we’ll talk about the shortest works, novelettes and short stories. We’ll discuss other categories in future columns.

Click the title links below to read our reviews and on the author links to visit our page for the author. We liked all of these stories and loved most of them. It’s not surprising that we saw many of these in the Locus and Nebula finalist lists.

July 12th, 2018. Marion Deeds | Hugo Award | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 33 comments |

Next SFF Author: Douglas Hulick

Previous SFF Author: Matthew Hughes

We have reviewed 8411 fantasy, science fiction, and horror books, audiobooks, magazines, comics, and films.

Subscribe to all posts:

Get notified about Giveaways:

Support FanLit

Want to help us defray the cost of domains, hosting, software, and postage for giveaways? Donate here:

You can support FanLit (for free) by using these links when you shop at Amazon:

US UK CANADA

Or, in the US, simply click the book covers we show. We receive referral fees for all purchases (not just books). This has no impact on the price and we can't see what you buy. This is how we pay for hosting and postage for our GIVEAWAYS. Thank you for your support!

SFF Deals

Recent Discussion:

Paul Connelly on Dark Feasts: Where’s the fun?January 16, 2025
I like the ambiguities when the story leading up to them has inserted various dreadful possibilities in the back of…
Sandy Ferber on Dark Feasts: Where’s the fun?January 16, 2025
COMMENT Marion, I expect that my half-hearted praise here (at best) will not exactly endear me to all of Ramsey…
Marion Deeds on Dark Feasts: Where’s the fun?January 16, 2025
Ramsay Campbell was all the rage in my circle of horror-reading/writing friends in the 1980s, and they extolled the ambiguity.…
E. J. Jones on WWWednesday: January 15, 2025January 16, 2025
Oh boy, I wish I could escape that Neil Gaiman article, too. I knew already he’d done reprehensible things but…
Marion Deeds on An Instruction in Shadow: Goes down smoothlyJanuary 12, 2025
These sound like they're worth picking up.