Hugo reading

[lizbee]

The Hugo packet dropped on Sunday, so I've started my reading. So far I've inhaled two novellas:

Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang

Parallel universes, therapy, crime: all things I'm into right now. If you could communicate with yourself in an alternate reality, what would happen? How would your choices change? Chiang gets into the nitty gritty of combining parallel universes with everyday lives. I really enjoyed this, and highly recommend it.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

Is it still steampunk if the gadgets are powered by magic? I'm not sure, but "what if the opening of a magical portal made Egypt a 19th/early 20th century powerhouse?" is a brilliant concept. I liked this a lot, but I'm not sure it's award-worthy -- there's some clumsy writing here and there, and a character whose dialogue seems far more contemporary and American than everyone else's. I liked it enough to buy the first novella in the series -- this is the second -- but I feel like Clark is a talented author let down by inadequate editing.

Comments

[nonelvis]

I'm finishing the novels before moving on to the novellas, but I've always enjoyed Chiang's work, and I loved P. Djèli Clark's novella last year, so I'm looking forward to these. (The novel category is incredibly strong so far, even if the Kameron Hurley book isn't quite to my taste.)

[lizbee]

I cannot imagine I will love anything more than A Memory Called Empire ... but what if there's something EVEN BETTER in there?

[nonelvis]

If I got lucky, a copy of A Memory Called Empire is arriving tomorrow via the latest Uncanny Kickstarter! I'm very much looking forward to reading it. But I also absolutely loved The City in the Middle of the Night and Middlegame, and I'm quite enjoying The Ten Thousand Doors of January, too.

[lizbee]

I can't believe I'm REGRETTING that I got a massive parcel of library books the other day!

[grav_ity]

Steampunk with magic is occasionally called GasLight, which never REALLY caught on for, you know, obvious reasons.

[lizbee]

They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

[jain]

I've mostly heard it called "gaslamp fantasy," which I think is a great term. Though I believe the term's evolved a bit from its original meaning of steampunk with magic, and now more often means Victorian and Edwardian era fantasy that doesn't have an emphasis on technological advances. Whereas steampunk with magic is now just called...steampunk; while it originally grew out of cyberpunk and was solidly science fictional, the genre's really embraced science fantasy in the past couple of decades.