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2025 Hugo Award Novel nominees: My thoughts!

The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the novels! (Short version: I would give the award to either A Sorceress Comes to Call or Service Model, if I was making the decision :-) Best Novel Nominees 1. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky: 7/10 This is good, if grim, dystopian writing. As always, Tchaikovsky nails the voice - Professor Arton Daghdev, the prisoner ecologist protagonist-narrator, is vividly real on the page, and the fact that not all the other characters are fully built is actually a consistent representation of the POV we are given (very few of the other prisoner-exile characters become all that real to the narrator either).  The concept - thought enemies being exiled to a remote barely-habitable planet to end their lives in forced labour, in this c...
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June Month of Poetry Days #12-16

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Well, as expected, I did not have time for poetry on my long weekend away in the Yarra Valley (which was awesome - a couple of photos provided for evidence!) Today, I used my work lunchbreak to compose two poems that together represent 5 days.  The first poem for today is based on the mystery of the Mary Celeste . The Mary Celeste was a Canadian-built, American-registered merchant brigantine ship that was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores on December 4, 1872. She was discovered in a haphazard but seaworthy condition under partial sail and with her lifeboat missing (the assumption has always been that the people left on the lifeboat). The last entry in her log was dated ten days earlier. She had left New York City for Genoa on November 7 and was still amply provisioned when found. Her cargo of alcohol was intact, and the captain's and crew's personal belongings were undisturbed. None of those who had been on board were ever seen or heard from ag...
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June Month of Poetry Days #10 and #11

I did actually write the day 10 poem yesterday, but wanted more time to work on it, so I've held it back til today. I think these two make a good pair, anyway! One assumes an extra-terrestrial explanation and one does not, which is intentional counterpointing. I'll be trying to poem again tomorrow, but I'm away for a long weekend with friends Fri-Sun, so I've decided to pause operations for those three days. I'll resume on Monday. Day 10's poem is inspired by the Roswell incident. Most people know the outlines of this one, but the bare bones: in 1947, debris from a crashed aerial craft or object was recovered from the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. It later became the basis for conspiracy theories alleging that the United States military recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. The military released statements and papers in 1990 asserting that the object was a downed military balloon, intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests in the atmosphere, as part o...
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Agatha Christie Re-Reading Project #4: Books 11-13

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I've slowed right down on my Christie re-read project, being busy with work, reading new books on prizelists, and my self-imposed June Month of Poetry commitment. That said, I have now made it through books 11-13, so time to post them! I don't expect 14-17 to be up in the next month though; I did think this was going to be a project extending over more than a year, and it looks like that is correct! This set is where the streams cross, and Poirot really hits stride while Marple has a less great one. Because I'm in a Hercule state of mind now, I'm going to change up my methodology and do the next four Poirots as the next set (The Big Four, The Mystery of the Blue Train, Peril at End House, and Lord Edgware Dies). After that, I'll do a Marple / Tommy and Tuppence set. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written in 1926, is really the first Christie novel where she did something ground-breaking in terms of the way she used the form and the reveal. It's quite a difficult o...
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June Month of Poetry Combined Days 7-9: Mysterious creatures

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I missed Saturday and Sunday for poems as I was fully engaged at OzComicCon - both working at a stall and also enjoying the panellists, shopping, and most of all the rich variety of cosplays in evidence.  One of the parts I liked the best was the display set up to promote a Ren Fair being planned for next autumn (May) in Victoria, featuring a large green dragon as well as suitably faux-medieval dressed attendants. It got me thinking about the mysterious beasts of history, not so much cryptids (although there may be another post to come on the Yeti, still thinking about it) but more the array of dinosaur-like flying or swimming mythic creatures that almost certainly didn't exist, but maybe (maybe?) reference distorted folk memories or attempts to rationalise something else.  Historians disagree about what gave rise to dragon stories (which are found all over the world). Some have argued that that humans (like our distant cousins, the monkeys) have inherited instinctive rea...
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June Month of Poetry #6: The Voynich manuscipt

Today in mysteries of history: the Voynich manuscript. The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex, hand-written in an unknown script referred to as Voynichese. We know it dates from the early 15th century (thanks carbon dating!) but know little else definitive about it.  Who wrote it, what it means, why it was written, what it's about, are all still mysteries: as Wikipedia puts it, "currently scholars lack the translation(s) and context needed to both properly entertain or eliminate any of the possibilities". The manuscript consists of around 240 pages, but there is evidence that some pages are missing. The text is written from left to right, and some pages are foldable sheets of varying sizes.  Some of the main theories for what it is include: a script for a made-up language a code that hasn't been broken yet (maybe used for espionage) a cypher or cryptogram a hoax a work of fiction As to what it is about , there's no really plausible guesses on that either. ...
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2025 Hugo Award Novella nominees: My thoughts!

The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the novellas - another post to come on the novels!  If I was giving the prize? It would go to either The Butcher of the Forest or What Feasts at Night. This is a little surprising, as fantasy-horror is not one of my favoured subgenres usually, but these are two very good works. Best Novella Nominees 1. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo: 7.5/10 This is the fifth in a series of novellas. The Singing Hills novellas are set in a fantasy world that is closest in analogue to Imperial China, with shades of both Mongolian and Inuit influence. The central conceit and driving device of the series is the journeys of Chih, a travelling archivist and cleric, who gets themselves into a range of problems and adventures as they record ...
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