The Hugo Awards

The 2020 Hugo Awards are fast approaching. A favourite annual literary award for the best SFF works and considered the premier award in science fiction. It has been operating since 1955. A good database to see all the winners of the Hugo’s, as well as all other major SFF awards, is at science fiction awards database

CoNZealand will hold the event in 2020, which due to the Coronavirus pandemic will only be viewed online from July 29 to August 2.

I’ve been reading some of the recent previous winners of the award in preparation for the upcoming event. The author, N K Jemisin has dominated the awards with her trilogy: The Fifth Season; The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, winning the last three Hugo’s in a row. Prior to that, Mary R Kowal’s novel, The Calculating Stars and Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem took the award. 

There’s an interesting bunch this year, so I hope to read all of the 2020 nominations before the award night. The nominations for the major award are:

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Sanders;

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow;

Middle Game by Seanan McGuire;

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley; and 

Gideon the Ninth by Tasman Muir.

Review: The Obelisk Gate

The key protagonist, Essun, remains the hero in The Obelisk Gate, as she settles into the underground community of Castrima. The surprise element of the previous book where all three POV characters are Essun at different stages of her life, is replaced with two main protagonists, Essun and her daughter Nassun, as they struggle to survive in a deteriorating world. 

Nassun flees her hometown of Tirimo with her dangerously unpredictable father to the community of Found Moon where she is ultimately guided by the Guardian, Schaffa, who once guided her mother. Essun, with the help of Alabaster, further develops her orogene skills to prepare for the increasingly violent battle, raged by Father Earth against reckless human activity that led to the loss of its Moon.

Somewhere along the way, I lost interest in both protagonist’s, not really caring for either of them. I’ll put it down to the excessive descriptions used, no doubt setting up for the final instalment, but it read like two separate stories. I’d have given up on this book all together if not for Jemisin’s undoubted writing skills and the fact I so enjoyed book one. I suspect the third instalment will be as enjoyable as book one, as Essun’s and Nassun’s lives finally come together for the story’s resolution. Despite the trilogy’s slow middle, it remains a truly unique fantasy world told by a talented writer. 

Review: The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season is an epic story of survival in an unstable planet, oppressed by nature - Father Earth, and human against human. Earth is the main antagonist where seasons are separated between simmering volcanic, seismic, atmospheric and geomagnetic disturbances and utter devastation. Human mutants, orogenes, are used to subdue the violent earth, delaying the inevitable tide of cataclysmic extinction. The controlled environment known as the stillness allows a temporary beleaguered civility for its citizens,  but still the orogene’s power is feared and hated by the humans they protect and exploited by an elite ruling group known as the guardians. 

The Fifth Season spans three seemingly disparate times on Earth. All three protagonists are orogene women: the child, Damaya, being trained to properly develop her orogene powers; Syenite, a 4 ring orogene, who is sent on a mission with the experienced 10 ring orogene, Alabaster; and Essun, the older mother who leaves home to find her husband who murdered her son and took her daughter. There’s a secret in this multiple point-of-view story that surprises and enhances this epic story. Told in the second-person narrative, Jemisin effectively submerges the reader into her imagined future Earth that sits atop our own civilisation, long ago buried. Life barely survives a genocidal Father Nature where memories of honouring the once revered Mother Nature are long forgotten.

This bleak, savage world is akin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where humanity is assaulting its own, even though life on Earth borders on extinction. However, unlike The Road, Jemisin offers a glimmer of hope for civilisation that nature can be changed.