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Originally posted April 29 2007 at 21:04 under General. 0 Comments. Trackbacks Disabled. Last modified: 02 October 2007 at 12:47

My Hugo 2007 (Short Formats) Winners

Location:
This Universe
Music:
Random play

As Neil Gaiman points out: There’s a worthy tradition (a recent tradition, but a tradition) of getting Hugo nominated short stories up on the web to help level the playing field and allow the voters to read as much as possible. Fortunately that means we, the general readership, get to read them too (well, the short categories—Short Story, Novelette and Novella—anyway). So these are my choice of winners in those categories (I haven’t read/seen everything in the other categories so can’t really choose; though if you’re going to pick one of the three Doctor Who nominations in the Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form category it has to be Girl In The Fireplace).

There’s not much of this left but I’m going to put my winners after the cut on the blog front page, just to build the tension ;-)

So, short story: I just have to go with Gaiman’s How To Talk To Girls At Parties. In the end I just love Gaiman’s writing too much. Bruce McAllister’s Kin ran it close, and I quite enjoyed the strange idea of Robert Reed’s Eight Episodes.

Novelette (a strange word!): I think Michael F Flynn’s Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth. I also liked Mike Resnick’s All The Things You Are and Geoff Ryman’s Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy) [PDF]. To be honest I’ve always found Novelette an awkward length—too long for the cleverness and impact of the short story, too short to really get into developing ideas.

Having said that, Novella length risks reading something which feels like a working draft of a novel. Anyway, I’m not here to talk about what lengths of fiction writing I feel work best but I think that did make this the hardest category for me to chose. In the end I’d go with Paul Melko’s The Walls Of The Universe, perhaps because it felt the most self contained and despite dismissing quantum mechanics as simply a statistical way of modelling particles (though maybe that’s just the character’s understanding). Of the others I enjoyed Robert Reed’s A Billion Eves the most and William Shunn’s Inclination seems a bit stuck in my head.

So there we are; my choices. Have to wait and see how well they match the eventual winners!

Update: I’m a bit late with the update but the winners are out (and have been for a while; tardy blogger!). Looks like the judges didn’t particularly agree with me!

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This Crazy Fool

Who:
Dr Ian Scott
Where:
Croydon (and Gateshead), United Kingdom
Contact:
ian@norcimo.com
What:
Bullding Services Engineer (EngDesign), PhD in Physics (University of York), football fanatic (Newcastle United), open source enthusiast (mainly Mozilla)

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