A fairly busy news week for genre fiction. The award season is pretty much over. Seems like there are quite a number of authors who are between projects and are out in the blogosphere, so it wasn’t too difficult to find you a few things worth taking a look at. In the coming weeks, if you find something interesting you think everyone should read, drop me a line via the contact form and let me know, or just post it below. Let’s get started:
1) The Final NPR top 100 Science Fiction Fantasy Poll Results: Quite a few were expected, but there are some surprises on the list.
2) Game of Thrones Scripts Stolen: A couple of autographed scripts have gone missing.
3) Hugo Awards to be Streamed Live: I’m curious about how this will go. I will try to tune in if time allows for it. If anybody else manages to watch it, let us know what you thought about it.
4) The Best Presidential Portraits Ever: Lincoln riding a grizzly bear… nothing else needs to be said.
5) When Did Magic Become Elitist?: An interesting article over at Io9 dealing with class issues in magic. Wish I had thought of it for a Thoughtful Thursday column.
6) Lost in Translation : Ari Marmell over on the Pyr blog wrote an informative post about word choices in fiction. He particularly focuses on those words that readers complain “pull them out of the story.” As a reviewer I found this to be a helpful article, and I’ll keep his thoughts in mind the next time I come across an odd word choice.
The Lincoln painting is quite beautiful.
I really like the word-choice post, especially the thoughts on puns. I only remember one pun really “throwing me out of a story,” and that was when the author used both English and the imaginary language to make the pun–the joke was in English, and the words it was based on were in the other language. I can handwave English-to-English puns, but this one irked.
I really enjoyed watching the Huos. This was the first yime I’d seen that ceremony. My takeaway information to share is that there is definitely a lot of room for our nominations. It’s definitely an award worth participating in.
I plan to do so, and recommend to anyone with a sincere interet in watching Fantasy grow do so as well.
(I wrote a little thing on our lame blog.)