Want to read some intimidatingly good fiction? Go to WorldCon!

For those in the UK: Happy National Writing Day! You should really be writing instead of reading on… For the rest of you:

As you can tell by the dearth of posts over the last few months, my non-work-related writing mojo has been lacking of late. To try and get it back – and because it sounds like fun – I signed on to attend the 77th World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon for short) in Dublin this August. For those of you who don’t know, an important part of WorldCon for established writers and editors is the Hugo ceremony, where awards are handed out to (hopefully) worthy winners in a variety of sci-fi related categories.

Who votes for these awards? Attendees! This means that, in order to sway voters, many publishers/nominees provide electronic versions of the novel/novelette/short story/series to eligible voters for free! It’s like the Oscars voting process but less elitist, classist and morally corrupt, hurrah! Also a lot cheaper for everyone involved probably, double hurrah!

So this happened before the Hugos were announced in Japan and if that’s not enough reason to want to be nominated for one, I don’t know what is

Reading time

I’ve started my ‘judging’, naturally, with the best novel category. Since voting closes near the end of July and there’s a lot of categories to get through – plus the books were just mostly cool to read – I read four out of the six books in the space of a week. One of the other ones, I own, but when it came to the last book in the category, I simply got stuck.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book and worthy of its nomination. It’s not the book, it’s partly the format (PDF and eReader does not mix) but mostly it’s me. Two of the four other books, I instantly want to read the sequel of. That’s a lot of investment in a lot of different characters, and I guess you could say it burnt me out.

However, there’s a silver lining to this. Because the whole mush of wonderful words unlocked a new story idea in my brain! It’s tough going for me, writing words when the rest of my life is extremely uncertain and I’m dealing with a lot of work-based rejection (otherwise known as looming unemployment), but it’s new and I’m trying not to think of how bad it is. So thank you, Hugos! Now I just have to read the works in all your other categories and also finish this one more book and, and, and…

Worthy winners of the past

I’m by no means an expert in science fiction, but here are some past Hugo winners whose work I really dig:

• N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (yes, she won three years in a row!). I’ll be doing a ‘Reading inspiration’ post about this one at some point, but just trust me it’s good. Very, extremely, amazingly, terrifyingly good.
• The Ditch Diggers! I’ve talked about this podcast before, but they definitely deserved to finally win it last year and also how cool is it that there’s a podcast category?!
• Seanan McGuire. Her books are always enjoyable and I really hope she wins this year for the highly addictive October Daye series. Every Heart a Doorway, for which she won in the past, is a YA book/novella that talks about what happens after the magic quest, after Alice has been to wonderland and she’s back home unable to readjust. Except it’s not Alice, but a whole new character with a whole new story among other kids with stories of their own. Also there’s murder.
• Any of the nominated zines, as those precious babies deserve lots of love and attention (plus you might be able to submit your work to them!).

I’ll leave you with these suggestions, even though there are many other worthy winners to mention. Feel free to tell me which past Hugo winner/nominee really rocks your world in the comments. You’ll hopefully hear from me again in less than four months this time as at the very least I’ll write a blog post about my trip to WorldCon. Adios again for now, and maybe I’ll meet some of you in Dublin!