The Murverse Mothership

It’s that special time of year again, where we try to remember what the heck we spent the last 12 months doing. I’ve been quiet, head-down on the writing front, but I have still been podcasting and editing. So here is my eligibility post for 2020.

• Escape Pod – eligible for any semi-prozine category
• S.B. Divya and Mur Lafferty – eligible for any short form editor category
• Ditch Diggers – eligible for any podcast/fancast category
• I Should Be Writing – eligible for any podcast/fancast category

As for my endorsements, I am not endorsing much adult fiction, partly because I’m on the jury for the Philip K. Dick award and am keeping my opinions of original paperbacks to myself, but here are some of the other categories I feel strongly about.

Fan Writer: Alasdair Stuart continues to do amazing work from his newsletter to his in depth host spots on various Escape Artists podcasts. Jason Sanford is also doing a great job at keeping track of the news in SF.

Dramatic Work (short): I love seeing clipping. on the Hugo ballot because it shows how much we as a genre are willing to stretch ourselves. This year they did a full EP release alongside Rivers Solomon’s (Hugo-eligible!) novella The Deep, on which they share writing credit. (The EP is different from their Hugo-nominated single “The Deep.” But it contains that single, so I don’t know if that messes with eligibility or not.)

Dramatic Work (long): I find it amusing that The Witcher is so polarizing. I am firmly on the “loved it” side. It wasn’t perfect, and the disability representation seems to go from empowering to stereotypical (I am not a disability critic/scholar, so I invite you to read this criticism) but I really enjoyed it regardless. I also loved The Umbrella Academy as a whole season as well, and it looks like it’s not going to go the same direction as the comic did, which I really hated.

Graphic Story: I really enjoyed Die by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans. It shows that some stories we think of as tired cliches are masterful stories in the hands of an excellent storyteller. Kids get sucked into their own RPG game, but it’s so much more than that. (The title can give you a hint what the genre of this comic is.)

Lodestar (YA- not a Hugo): Neal Shusterman has written his YA trilogy masterpiece Arc of the Scythe underneath the radar of SF circles, but the final book, The Toll, came out last year, and it was as good as the first two. The series follows people who live in a government-free, eternal-life utopia ruled by a benevolent AI and Scythes, people who legally kill in order to a) control the population and b) remind people that life has meaning when it has a chance to end. All of the fascinating plotlines come to head including the introduction of a non-binary salvage captain.

I’m sure there’s more, but I will blog them as time goes on.