Which non-mainstream SF works should I nominate for Hugos?

January 12, 2010 2:16 PM

Since I went to worldcon in Montreal last year, I'm eligible to nominate SF works for the Hugo awards this year. I'd like to try to stretch out from the more mainstream authors, can you help me diversify the 2010 Hugo award nominations?

Charlie Stross has a really good point here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/2009-hugo-nominations.html

What would really help me, is if people could recommend short stories, Novelettes and such (so I could try to read more of them in the time I have left) by more non-mainstream authors that could be nominated for the Hugo awards (which means that they were published for the first time in 2009.)

Please tell me a little bit about the recommendations too if you can, especially why *you* liked it, or thought it worth recommending.

Thanks!

posted by Envoy to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

A) I want to let you know about the LiveJournal community Hugo_Recommend, which might be helpful.

B) I liked N.K. Jemisin's short story Non-Zero Probabilities quite a bit; I thought the evocation of city life was strong, and the play of ideas around prayer and chaos theory were interesting.
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:22 PM on January 12, 2010

Some short fiction that caught my eye in 2009: "True Names" by Stephanie Burgis (intense mindgame fantasy with a very strong woman narrator), "The Regime of Austerity" by Veronica Schanoes (vivid fable, short & sweet), "The Second Conquest of Earth" by L. J. Daly (epic-feeling in a short space, mindgame again), "Origin" by Ari Goelman (somehow a fresh take on superheroes, & emotional too), "Élan Vital" by K. Tempest Bradford (heart-squeezingly moving, & clear-eyed about economics of medical advances), "Second-Hand Information" by Jennifer Linnaea (eerie, compelling aliens), "The Very Difficult Diwali of Sub-Inspector Gurushankar Rajaram" by Jeff Soesbe (joyful, Indian without only focusing on poverty), & "The Most Dangerous Profession" by Sergey Gerasimov (very Russian, intensely interior & focused on the power of words).

Tooting my own horn: I edited an anthology last year, Thoughtcrime Experiments, of original short speculative fiction and art. You might especially be interested in Ken Liu's heartbreaking, eminently logical "Single-Bit Error" and Mary Anne Mohanraj's family-scale space opera "Jump Space", Andrew Willett's charming and melancholy "Daisy", and Carole Lanham's evocative, gorgeous "Friar Garden, Mister Samuel, and the Jilly Jally Butter Mints".

"Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" by Leonard Richardson (my spouse) got some MeFi love when it got published in July - it's hilarious, infernokrusher, and even moody.

If you can figure out how to nominate the 2009 installments of Tales of MU by Alexandra Erin then that would indeed bring some breadth to the ballot.
posted by brainwane at 11:05 PM on January 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Psst! If you want to cheat you might want to check out the BSFA Longlist and see if anything meets your criterea. At a glance Minya's Astral Angels by Jennifer Pelland in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume Three is certainly a very neat little story, so you might want to check that one out.

Also I'd be very curious to know what results you come up with as a result of your research.
posted by Artw at 12:41 PM on January 19, 2010

Another list of suggestions.
posted by brainwane at 6:19 AM on February 12, 2010