My Hugo Nominations list

As an attendee of this year's Worldcon, I got to nominate for the Hugo Awards. My nominations were as follows:

Best Novel
The Adjacent - Christopher Priest - Gollancz
Ancillary Justice - Anne Leckie - Orbit
River of Stars - Guy Gavriel Kay - Roc
Shattered Pillars - Elizabeth Bear - Tor
The Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson - Tor*

Best Novella
The Princess and the Queen - George R.R. Martin - Tor
Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Above - Ian Sales - Whippleshield Books

Best Related Work
Adventures with the Wife in Space - Neil Perryman - Faber and Faber

Best Graphic Story
The First Law - Joe Abercrombie, Chuck Dixon, Andie Tong - Blind Ferret Books
Meathouse Man - George R.R. Martin, Raya Golden - Jet City Comics

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
Orphan Black (Season 1) - Graeme Manson, John Fawcett - BBC America, Temple Street Productions
Les Revenants (The Returned) (Season 1) - Fabrice Gobert - Canal+, Haut et Court
Game of Thrones (Season 3) - George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss - HBO
Pacific Rim - Guillermo Del Toro - Legendary Pictures, Warner Brothers
Gravity - Alfonso Cuaron - Warner Brothers**

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
Orphan Black: Natural Selection - Graeme Manson, John Fawcett - BBC America, Temple Street Productions
Game of Thrones: The Rains of Castamere - George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, David Nutter - HBO
An Adventure in Space and Time - Mark Gatiss, Terry McDonough - BBC

Best Editor (Short Form)
Gardner Dozois

Best Edtior (Long Form)
Simon Spanton

Best Professional Artist
Benjamin Carre
Stephen Martiniere
Alan Lee

Best Fanzine
A Dribble of Ink - Aidan Moher
The Speculative Scotsman - Niall Alexander
Pornokitsch - Jared Shurin, Anne C. Perry

Best Fan Writer
Aidan Moher
Niall Alexander
Jared Shurin

The John W. Campbell Award
Leigh Bardugo - First novel published in 2012
Helene Wecker - First novel published in 2013


And for the 1939 Retro Hugos:

Best Novel
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien - George Allen and Unwin***
The Sword in the Stone - T.H. White - Collins
Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis - John Lane

Best Short Story
How We Went to Mars - Arthur C. Clarke - Amateur Science Stories

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
The War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells, Orson Welles - Mercury Theatre on the Air
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Walt Disney, Disney Studios - Disney Studios****

Best Editor (Short Form)
John W. Campbell

* Because no previous Wheel of Time book has ever been nominated, and because the entire series is one extremely large story, the entire series is eligible for nomination in 2014 as well as A Memory of Light by itself. Whether The Wheel of Time as a whole or A Memory of Light by itself makes the final ballot will be determined by which gets the most votes.

** Gravity is 91 minutes long, so falls within the 20% rule for determining length of eligible works, which means it can be put in either the Long-form or Short-form categories. As a movie, I think most people would put it in Long-form.

*** Though first published in Britain in 1937, The Hobbit had its first American publication in 1938, so is eligible for the award.

**** Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was first screened in 1937 in a very limited run, but was not put on American nationwide release (or any kind of international release) until 1938. A final ruling on Snow White's eligibility hasn't been made, but I suspect it will be allowed if enough people nominate it.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Breq is an ancillary, an animated corpse possessed by the controlling intelligence of a vast starship, the Justice of Toren. The Justice was destroyed more than twenty years ago, with Breq as the sole survivor and the only person to hold a secret that could tear the interstellar empire known as the Radch apart. Breq, now driven by grief and vengeance, goes in search of the only weapon that can accomplish her goal.

Ancillary Justice is the debut novel by American author Ann Leckie, who has already established herself as a writer of short stories. It's an interesting SF novel which riffs on a whole load of ideas. The most striking is the one of identity. Breq is a tiny, splintered part of a much vaster, destroyed intelligence and has difficulties in relating to other people and the world around her. She's also effectively possessing a dead body and suffers from a cultural bias. The Radchaai do not believe in gender differentiation and go to some lengths to keep their gender unclear. The culture defaults to describing everyone in the feminine, resulting in odd moments when a character you've spent a dozen pages mentally picturing as female actually turns out to be male. This playing around with gender roles is not new - Ursula Le Guin did it rather more literally in The Left Hand of Darkness more than forty years ago - but it's something that relatively few SF authors have dealt with before and forces the reader to confront their own biases.

Those looking for in-depth worldbuilding and explanations for this SF universe will be left disappointed. There's little information on the amazingly powerful armour that protects the Radchaai, nor much on how their ships work. FTL travel gets relatively short shrift, and the only hint as to the fate of Earth is a single line about how it's a remote backwater. There is a slight inconsistency in that the Radch's tech level, though impressive, appears to be reasonably believable until someone casually throws it out there that they've also built a Dyson sphere, which seems beyond their capabilities. I daresay that the inevitable future books in the series (yes, there will be at least two more) will reveal more, but in this volume the author is focusing more on the immediate story at hand.

Structurally the book adopts a tried-and-tested technique of alternating between flashback chapters showing what happened to the Justice of Toren and why (and doing a good job of showing how massive events can unfold from the tiniest of causes), and events in the present day. Characterisation is reasonably strong, with Leckie showing how citizens of the Radch differ from one another whilst retaining the same cultural and religious traits. Breq herself is well-drawn, as the ship AIs in Leckie's setting are perfectly capable of having emotions and development (and indeed, Breq's actions are catalysed by what happens to one of her favourite crewmembers).

Whilst a lot of reviews are drawing comparisons with Le Guin, I was also reminded of the works of Iain Banks, particularly in the idea of living ships with their own goals and motivations and how they work when placed in humanoid bodies. What Leckie shares with both authors is more of a fascination with the social sciences than the hard ones, and also a belief in storytelling that also challenges the reader.

Ancillary Justice (****) is one of the most striking SF debuts of recent years. It's not perfect - the restrained prose sometimes risks stodginess and the opening chapters risk an almost Eriksonian level of confusion due to a lack of context for what the hell is going on (though this is still well-handled) - but ultimately the novel evolves into an intelligent take on gender roles and identity issues against a fascinating (if only hinted-at) SF backdrop. More please.

The novel is available now in the UK and USA.