Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels discussion

Seeing as we kicked March off with a couple of sci-fi books, April's theme will be Fantasy and Steampunk. We have a bookshelf for each of the categories, feel free to browse through those lists and post the title of the book you are nominating in this thread.

The shelves where you can find the list of books that fall under those two genres are here:

Fantasy https://www.goodreads.com/group/books...

and

Steampunk https://www.goodreads.com/group/books...

As per usual, everyone may put forward two books (or a single one) either from different lists or from the same one.

*Important* You may want to avoid picking a title belonging to a long series but if you do, we will find a way to organise around it should that nomination win. In future, a separate event for series reading will be planned and an according list will be put together.

I am nominating Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

This book is part of the series that has three titles total, all of which either won or were nominated for the award. So in lieu of my other nomination I suggest this title count as all three books Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council.

Think Perdido Street Station is still on sale for another 4 or 5 days, in case anyone else is interested.

Wow. I was looking at the books to choose from and I have my suggestion! But first, I just want to thank Art for all the hard work he put in to organize this massive list into smaller sub-genres. I get in moods for a type of book, such as dystopian or time travel, and what Art has done is made that so much easier for me to find a book in the sub-genre I'm in the mood for.

Thank you Art!

My nomination will be The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak. After reading the summary, I am very interested in this book.

I have Perdito, just bought it. I tried to read something by this guy before and couldn't slog through it, but I will try.

I nominate DragonQuest for fantasy. I think it is fantasy. It has dragons in it.

Kateblue wrote: "I nominate DragonQuest for fantasy. I think it is fantasy. It has dragons in it."

You can't really get more fantasy than dragons!

I don't think Stranger in a Strange Land is Fantasy, I think it's SF. But I don't really care. I've repeatedly read it, so I'm good with it in whatever category.

On the other hand, Glory Road is on this list and it IS fantasy. Personally, I think it is one of Heinlein's lesser works; at least, it is not one of the books I want to re-read all the time.

Actually, I'm surprised it rated a nomination.

But I DO have a copy of it, so I am good with that . . . so I nominate Glory Road and I second Perdido Street Station. (Sorry, no hyperlinks, I have to learn to insert them on a Mac.)

It's not on the fantasy page that Art made. :-)

BTW, Great job, Art. I could never do it!

Sorry for the confusion, Kate. The reason Dragonquest is not on either of those lists is not because it is not a fantasy, it is only due to the fact that it belongs to a "long series" shelf. I set aside all the books in series of 5+ books in order to avoid them getting nominated without us having a clear picture on how to tackle each and every series.

Thanks to you we have some idea how to deal with the award winning books by Bujold, Dune series are also more or less covered, but we are still missing any info on Pern, Wheel of Time, etc.

Me and Bry spoke about it briefly and I was going to make a poll regarding May and ask members to decide what it is everyone wants to read. I will include both miniseries and long series as options.

Nominations so far:

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, New Crobuzon Series 1-3

The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak

Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein

Kateblue wrote: "I don't think Stranger in a Strange Land is Fantasy, I think it's SF. But I don't really care. I've repeatedly read it, so I'm good with it in whatever category."

Thanks Kate, I will update the list. Many of books in fantasy section share the shelf due to their science-fantasy tags, but I will go with your suggestion and remove it from the list. I haven't read it myself so I had nothing to go by, except for what people tagged it with. But I can absolutely relate to this, Goodread users have some of Zelazny's work tagged under 'fantasy' which is utter nonsense in my not so humble opinion.

Keep throwing feedback regarding those lists at me, I will keep updating it as we move along.

I retract Dragonquest. See my post about order of McCaffery books in another post.

You are an absolute star, Kate! Looked briefly through your post, will make sure to read it thoroughly when I get two minutes of free time.

Hey, these are books I have read and loved. But I will run out soon! There are so many of these that I started and didn't finish, or never heard of.

Also, I know nothing about steampunk, so whatever you guys think.

There's still time to nominate your pick for April, the month's theme is Fantasy and Steampunk!

I say
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, steampunk, right?
and Glory Road by Heinlein, fantasy

I don't think that Glory Road is fantasy, the protagonist sees physics behind a dragon's fire etc., it's SF masquarading as fantasy

Hey Oleksandr, long time no see!

Since both of the awards are dominated by sci-fi, when assigning sub-genre shelves I opted for including "science fantasy" to the hardcore fantasy in order to level the playing field, so the lines are somewhat blurred on some of the titles there. Since are going to read all of them eventually there's little harm in getting a title or two wrong, after all I used Goodreads tags as reference and we all know how accurate those are ^_^

By the way, got a nomination or two for us?

"By the way, got a nomination or two for us?"

Yes, I'm thinking about it. I was off-limits down with a flu...

Definitely there are a few books worth mentioning
The Difference Engine - a proto-steampunk, published even before the word steampunk was introduced. Clear references to cyberpunk, much more than later books of the genre
Borderline - nominated for Hugo last year, urban fantasy, with a very unusual protagonist - female amputee with borderline disorder, witty writing while the story per se is nothing special.
The Fifth Season - the first volume of maybe the strongest fantasy trilogy of the last decade. 1st and 2nd volumes won Hugo, 3rd nominated this year and can win too

The Fifth Season was amazing. I really liked that book, the first of the trilogy, just for her style of writing alone. I thought it was pretty amazing that she was able to write 3 different points of view and differentiated the 3 with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person writing.

I've not read the other two, but Borderline sounds interesting.

Just a couple of days left before the nomination thread is closed and we move on to voting.