Hugo Nominees 2015
Jun. 7th, 2015 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseI have cracked the Hugo Nominations packet! It's an exercise in suffering! No, really, I see writers I've "noped" out of in the past! For example, I have been hating on Kevin J. Anderson's mediocrity as a writer since the Jedi Academy trilogy was published in 1994! (Sorry, KJA. I am glad other people like your writing enough to support you as a professional writer, but I am profoundly unmoved by the overwhelming "meh" of your fiction.) I will be doing my best to apply my usual questions to what I read:
Are the ideas compelling?
Does the plot interest me?
Do the spelling and grammar conform to a contemporary style guide?
Have the spelling and grammar been mangled for good reasons that support the idea or plot?
Based on previous experience with Hugo nominees in general and some cursory perusal of the nominees so far, I have serious doubts about some of the nominees doing well when judged by these questions. To keep my head from exploding, there will be a very special guideline for this reading project:
Do I have serious reservations about the writer's grip on her or his prose? Stop reading.
Usually I am a die-hard finisher. Sometimes this is justified: Possession was a slog for hundreds of pages and came together in a dead brilliant fashion at the end. However, from the very first page it was clear Possession was in the hands of a writer who had a very clear grasp of what she was trying to do and the impact of each word and sentence, plus the cumulative effect of each little building block as the story unspooled into paragraphs and chapters and a complete novel.
I do not have faith each and all of the Hugo nominees will demonstrate such subtlety or control over their tools. So watch this space as I suss out the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Are the ideas compelling?
Does the plot interest me?
Do the spelling and grammar conform to a contemporary style guide?
Have the spelling and grammar been mangled for good reasons that support the idea or plot?
Based on previous experience with Hugo nominees in general and some cursory perusal of the nominees so far, I have serious doubts about some of the nominees doing well when judged by these questions. To keep my head from exploding, there will be a very special guideline for this reading project:
Do I have serious reservations about the writer's grip on her or his prose? Stop reading.
Usually I am a die-hard finisher. Sometimes this is justified: Possession was a slog for hundreds of pages and came together in a dead brilliant fashion at the end. However, from the very first page it was clear Possession was in the hands of a writer who had a very clear grasp of what she was trying to do and the impact of each word and sentence, plus the cumulative effect of each little building block as the story unspooled into paragraphs and chapters and a complete novel.
I do not have faith each and all of the Hugo nominees will demonstrate such subtlety or control over their tools. So watch this space as I suss out the good, the bad, and the ugly.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-06-08 11:13 am (UTC)...wow. Are some of these self-edited?
I used to be a die-hard finisher as well, but have lost that quality in recent years, and I must say it has made my life better :)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-06-08 02:20 pm (UTC)In the fiction categories, I think not. Everything has, in theory, been looked at by an editor. The SPAG questions come out of stories where I have to think long and hard about the writer's choice to, say, write in dialect (see "mangled for good reasons") or where the editor seems to be falling down on the "it's/its" job.
However, just because an editor was theoretically involved does not mean the outcome is good. At the 100 and 16 chapter page mark, I am tossing aside KJA's The Dark Between the Stars for being so lackluster it's almost not worth listing the many, many ways it fails to rise to even memorable badness. For example, the novel is structured so that chapters are devoted to a PoV character. You can tell because the chapter titles use the PoV character name, ie "Chapter 1: Garrison Reeves" and "Chapter 16: Arita".
In sixteen chapters there have been thirteen PoV characters.
Traditionally I find the short fiction categories to be less compelling than the novels. We'll see if that holds true this year.