The 2017 Hugo Award nominees have been out for a little while, and I have never read more of the nominees ahead of the awards than this year. As much as I love speculative fiction, my reading habits are so varied, and my shelves of unread books so extensive, that most years I’ve only managed to read one, maybe two of the nominees by the time they are announced. I’m not sure how much of the difference this year is that I’ve been intentionally reading more current science fiction as a part of my research for this press, and how much more the Hugo Awards have bent to my interest. Because there is certainly some bending going on.
While I do intend to try to catch up on some of the nominees I haven’t read yet, the only one I am currently unabashedly rooting for is The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin. It is perhaps true that this is more about my love for Jemisin as an author than my love for this particular volume, which is almost too dark for me, but at the same time it was so deeply fascinating that I couldn’t look away, and have already gone back and re-read several sections of the novel again.
Obviously I at least need to seek out the rest of the novellas that I haven’t read, but out of the ones I have, there weren’t any that I felt passionately about enough to champion so far.
What about you? What are you rooting for?
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