The title says it all. I’m working on my nomination ballot for the Hugo Awards, and I need more suggestions for the shorter-than-a-novel categories so I can get a proper survey. If you have a suggestion, please leave it in the magic comment box (links to online stories are appreciated).
By the way, I had nearly 1,000 pages of reading last year thanks to everyone’s suggestions. It was totally worth it.
Alright, off to work!
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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12 Responses
Not online:
Sofia Samatar's "Ogres of East Africa" in Long Hidden
any and all of the (linked) stories in Sarah Tolmie's NoFood
Robert Reed's "The Principles" (in Asimov's, April/May).
Online:
Margaret Ronald's "The Innocence of a Place" http://www.strangehorizons.com/2014/20140113/innocence-f.shtml
Thanks for the suggestions, Ethan!
I'm in the middle of my reading, but so far:
Novella
Yesterday’s Kin, by Nancy Kress
Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome, by John Scalzi
Short Story
-*”The Color of Paradox”, by A. M. Dellamonica (Tor.com)
–“Mrs Sorensen and the Sasquatch”, by Kelly Barnhill (Tor.com)
–“A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barricade”, by John Chu (Tor.com)
–“As Good as New”, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com)
-“Spores”, by Seanan McGuire (The End is Nigh)
-“This Chance Planet”, by Elizabeth Bear (Tor.com)
I plan to read Daryl Gregory's novella We Are All Completely Fine and Rachel Swirsky's novella "Grand Jete" (Subterranean). I'm working my way through Some of the Best from Tor.com 2014, will follow that with as much of the Locus recommended as I can get to before it's time to turn in my ballot. Possibly will read The End is Now before then, but not positive.
I'll make it easier on myself for next year.
Thanks, Joe!
I'm always a year behind in reading, but I like seeing these lists since I discover some reads I hadn't yet heard about. I'm hoping you might be willing to consider artist Stephan Martiniere for Best Pro Artist. I've posted his two best pieces for 2014 on this blog post (or you can check the cover art for Shield and Crocus or The Immortality Game): http://tedacross.blogspot.com/2015/01/suggestions-for-hugo-award-2015.html
Thanks for the link!
I posted a list of recommendations on my blog:
http://blog.johnchu.net/2014-writing-year-in-review
As I say in that blog post, if you read just one story, please make it "The Devil in America" by Kai Ashante Wilson, edited by Ann VanderMeer, published by Tor.com.
Thanks for the rec 🙂
My favorite novella of the year was The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard. Sixth of the Dusk by Brandon Sanderson is also good.
Thanks for the rec!
Have you read anything from the Hieroglyph Project?
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hieroglyph-ed-finn/1118959282
That's an anthology of short stories stemming from the project: http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/
Some of the stories are "enh," but some of them are AMAZING.
I've been posting my partial ballot (such as it is, so far) here:
http://ciaracatscifi.blogspot.com/
Thanks for sharing yours!
Thanks for the links, Kat!