Series Review – October Daye by Seanan McGuire

October Daye is an urban fantasy series starring a PI who bridges the gap between fairy and humans.  On its face, there is nothing to distinguish it from any of the other long running series like Dresden/The Hollows (PI), True Blood/Mary Gentry (fairies), etc, except it is a perennial best series nominee for the Hugos.  Indeed, I’ve read and briefly reviewed the October Daye series not once, but twice before, putting them in the middle of my Hugo Series ballot in both 2017 and 2019.  After the last round I praised them as “weapons grade escapism”, but given I enjoyed them enough this year to reread the series, they deserve a bit more than that.  In particular, it misses what is the key strength of the series – a family of characters that I want to hang out with each instalment, the lexical equivalent of a great sitcom or procedural.

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Capsule Review – Storm of Locusts

She imprisoned a god, but her work’s not done…I liked Trail of Lightning, quite a bit, but Storm of Locusts feels like the full realisation of Roanhorse’s vision.  By taking us out of Navajo territory, we gain perspective on both the safety and austerity afforded by the four walls, and the translocation of Diné gods into more conventional settings makes the world bigger by quelling any idea that they might be genius loci, rather than world spanning deities.  Indeed,  while fundamentally built on the monster of the week format, Storm of Locusts puts meat on it, with both interesting tangents and a strong plot, expanding upon Trail of Lighting in almost every aspect.A stronger sequel to an already good book.

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Series Review – October Daye Books 8-12

In for a penny, in for a pound. I reread an October Daye book and posted old reviews for the first seven books, and I’ve ended up rereading the series and figured I would fill out the rest.  Obviously once you get to book 8 of a series, the only people reading are the hard core fans, so assume that you should go back and read the earlier books before getting to these ones, and that later reviews might contain spoilers for earlier books.  Thanks to The Unkindest Tide being overdue, this completes the current run of novels, and just leaves the short fiction to review…

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Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2019 – Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Obviously the companion category to Long Form, Short form here means shorter than 90 minutes.  Unlike its longer cousin, this category often has a diverse range of media beyond tv and short film, and as such is the more interesting non textural category.  Unfortunately this is also the category that, as I predicted at the beginning of the Hugo season, I couldn’t get to all of the entries in.

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Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2019 – Novel

The marquee category, prima inter pares, what people mean when they refer to “The Hugo Award”, the novel category is open to works greater than 40,000 words (~80 pages plus).  It is also the category I dread the most; no matter how bad a short story is, it will be gone in a moment, while even a good story can drag at novel length.  This year I’ve read two going in, Trail of Lightning and Revenant Gun.

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