Fiction

The Exchange Officers by Brad R. Torgersen

Starting reading for the Hugo Best Novelette award -- essentially, a long short story.

Not too impressed by this one. The dialogue is hilariously poor, loaded with clunky exposition, as is some of the prose. Otherwise, it's essentially about a space fight between The Right And Good US Of A, who are unnarmed because they're just in space for nice exploration, and The Evil Chinese, who are kinda armed because they're Evil gorrammit. The other nominees will have to be pretty poor for this to end up highly-ranked on my ballot.

Not available to read for free online, but apparently included in this podcast.



The Ink Readers of Doi Saket by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

The last nominee for the Best Short Story award... and my favourite, too. Interestingly, all the nominees are "magical realist"-type stories rather than obvious SF/F, which I wouldn't have expected (especially given the more 'obvious' style of the nominees in other categories).

This one is set in Thailand, apparently by a Dutch writer and then translated into English. Which doesn't really mean anything, it's just unusual.

Read it online for free at the above link.