2026 Hugo Awards

A couple thoughts here...

Palmer's handling of the different groups in Terra Ignota takes both sides, in every case. The case for why people join the imperial group has to be made, and made honestly. But problems with that approach are also pretty clear, and well explored: at the very least, elites get weird if they aren't responsive to the people, and the elites in Terra Ignota get very, very weird. I think she takes a bit more time setting up the positive case for the imperials exactly because it's pretty alien to us. Or, at least it was before our current global swing towards authoritarianism.

Europeans were also once pretty obsessed with religion, as you might recall. They may be less so now, but who's to say the pendulum won't swing? This is one of the things I loved about the series -- the future or build is very different because the pendulum has swung in ways that aren't obvious to us, from our modern perspective. Just as the people of Florence would find some of our obsessions pretty strange and unexpected.

When did people start thinking it was ok to assume that the viewpoints of characters in a work of fantasy are what the author actually believes? Why is this so common in modern literature criticism? what is going on?

> and the overt assumption that emperors are a good thing was unsettling

God forbid a piece of literature explores a concept you find unsettling.

Old books... are a "find a copy in used book stores." They're fairly out of print now. The problem being "reasonably priced". If you're driving through the midwest, divert to Forsyth, IL and stop at the Old Book Barn.

I've also converted a lot of my book archive to ebooks. Sometimes I've been disappointed that the old books aren't ebook... but Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are all on Kindle and for better or worse... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09C23YVND?binding=kindle_edition

Otherwise, it's https://www.abebooks.com/author/b000apw3ua/fritz-leiber?ref_... because good used book stores with a appreciable science fiction collection are few and far between. I bought a lot of books at Book Buyers on Castro in Mountain View back in the day. There are some that are in the lower price bands.

Also, his works prior to 1978 are starting to fall out of copyright. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/25421 - for example, The Green Millennium was published in 1954 and fell into the 28+28 and so that became public domain in 2010. The first six of the "Swords" series were published between 1970 and 1977... and should be entering public domain... this year?

I'm surprised you're willing to look into the sequel. After reading Old Man's War I've been unwilling to read any more of John Scalzi's work in the decade+ since then. It read like a teenage boy's wish-fulfillment fantasy, and since I've never been a part of that demographic, it was extremely frustrating to get through that book. With my youthful energy at the time, I slogged through to the end of the book somehow.

The first one was very much written in an homage to Starship Troopers and it was an early work of his. His very first one was Agent to the Stars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_to_the_Stars#Publication... - available online at https://scalzi.com/agent/ ) which was a book that he didn't want to write in that he wanted to make sure he could write as a career before writing the book he'd been thinking about for a long time... it's ok, maybe better than ok, but not great. He didn't want to find out that he didn't have the stuff to be a professional writer with the book that he really wanted to write.

That book that he really wanted to write was Old Man's War. I would put it as a good one, but not a great one. A young man inspired by Heinlein and Haldeman writing military science fiction as his first real book.

His later books get better as he became a more mature writer writing new ideas rather than the story he had in the back of his mind for the past decade. The Ghost Brigades (I believe) is better than the previous (it deals with the special forces). The Human Division and The End of All Things were written as serialized chapters that kind of stand on their own and I believe that format worked quite well with him.

I will note that... he likes snark. I don't recall much in his later Old Man's War books... I think he got it out in The Interdependency (a fun series but you have to be ok with snark and casual vulgarity - the Audible is read by Wil Wheaton (some may be turned off by that alone) who is able to read and handle the snark and casual vulgarity quite well). I will recommend it if one is ok with a very snarky character - it's a political intrigue series.

  ..the Audible is read by Wil Wheaton (some may be turned off by that alone) 

On YouTube, I stumbled across the channel "Daddy rolled a 1" which does long form (often an hour long and sometimes closing in on two hours long) deep dives into the early D&D "why was it done that way?"

I forget which one it was that reminded me first of it... Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser was brought up recently in "Was Early D&D Really as Dark as We Remember?" pointing out that while the world was grim, people in Lankhmar were often enjoying life and it wasn't and the grimdark of some modern fantasy.

From the intro to the Audible version of The Swords of Lankhmar (and the text version of Return to Lankhmar)

https://www.blackgate.com/2013/06/24/art-of-the-genre-lookin...

While it doesn't have the full essay in there, it continues with that Lankmar is a place you can return to. (I think https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Swords-of-Lankhmar-Audiobook/... will link into that essay with the preview in the opening credits).

The Audible version is my evening wind down listening.

The Expanse was my favorite tv show! However with the latest season finale of season 3 of SILO, it may have become my favorite now.

Any other tv show recommendations? We seem to have similar taste.

Clair Obscur was a far, far more memorable game for me and it's not even close. One actually has a story and characters to care about. The other is a masochism simulation.

I am "only" a dozen+ hours into Clair Obscur, and I am similarly not understanding the hype. Combat is too gimmicky and annoying. The story is tonally all over the place. It starts out very dark, and then the characters seemingly have no problems going on stupid side quests because they want to see some cute elves or something. Are you saving the world or not?

The joke side quests work in your standard RPG because they take themselves less seriously. Your character is wielding an eight foot sword, the mage companion is a talking cat, and your boots are haunted by a long-dead Egyptian prince. Sure, go nuts if you want to play the mini-game at the circus belly-dancing competition to win the golden hat.

Clair Obscur starts in such a bleak, breathing world that the characters not treating the situation deadly serious breaks my connection to the world, so I start to focus more on the mechanical annoyances.

> worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.

That sounds more like a part time job than a game. I'm curious if you play it for the mental challenge? I feel challenged enough at $dayjob that all I want from games is mindless relaxation.

I liked Clair Obscur a lot, but I doubt very much if I will ever replay it. The necessity of being able to dodge to survive encounters really killed the fun of the gameplay for me.

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Fantasys felt so lazy to me. Although sometimes I do enjoy the descriptions. But there is always an escape hatch out of a trouble and one that was not foreshadowed. It is constraints that makes things interesting and especially the higher order consequences of constraints and new tech.

A Song of Ice and Fire (contemporary writing I assume), it lost to Harry Potter book against one of GRRM’s best books/chance for win in novel category one year and Spin in another year(Accelerando was another nominee that year)

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

I think by definition any vampire story is a fantasy story yes. Since vampires are not real and thus a fantasy creature.

I'm comfortable considering horror as a subgenre of fantasy. Vampires and folklore and magic are staples of fantasy after all.

Culture is fluid, it must be to continue. Categories like this will evolve, expand, and shrink over time.