Other Worlds

Category: Talking about fiction

  • Hugo Awards: My Pick for Best Short Story

    I’ve decided which of the five stories I hope will win. It’s “Movement” by Nancy Fulda, for its beautifully unified character, voice, and story. The protagonist is convincing, and the author’s hand is sure but not too heavy.

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (5)

    Fifth and last, E. Lily Yu’s “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” from Clarkesworld Magazine. Read it here. A race of wasps common around the village of Yiwei is discovered to construct nests that unfold into beautiful colored maps of the surrounding country. Once this discovery is made, the nests are taken by the villagers…

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (4)

    Fourth on the ballot for Best Short Story: “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu. You can read it here. Jack is the son of an American father and a Chinese mother, who was a mail-order bride. The marriage is a successful one, but at age 10 Jack becomes aware of the ethnic differences between himself…

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (3)

    Hannah, a teenage girl with “temporal autism,” is the narrator. Hannah is highly intelligent and is a talented dancer, but she speaks rarely and is disinclined to make human connection with others. Her parents are considering a new treatment, synaptic grafting, as a cure for her condition.

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (2)

    In Mike Resnick’s “The Homecoming,” on the Hugo ballot for best short story, a young man has been transformed into insectoid alien creature, to his father’s horror. Philip, we learn, is an exobiologist who undertook the transformation in order to study an alien world. The story follows what happens when Philip returns home to visit…

  • Hugo Awards: Best Short Story Contenders (1)

    The voting deadline for the Hugos is 6 days away, so I am taking a look at the five finalists on the ballot for Best Short Story. First is John Scalzi’s “The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City: Prologue” (whew). This story is a lot of fun. It is somewhat…