Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2018 – John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

This is the award for best new writer, regardless of output length (or quantity), and year after year it ends up my favourite category by delivering works that I think are better than any of the nominees in the main ballot. This year I will be thwarted however, as the three shorter pieces in this category are all in regular competition. On the upside, this makes this category an easy ask, as I’ve also already read Under the Pendulum Sun, leaving me with just three novels to cover.

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Review – Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

A young girl defies her tribal traditions and sneaks off-world to university. Binti has magical artifacts, powerful rituals, strange races, and arcane institutions – it’s not science fiction that is obsessed with, or even interested in technology.  Instead, Binti is about leaving home, encountering new cultures, and becoming part of the big scary world.  Two […]

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Review – Welcome to Nightvale: All Hail

Welcome to Nightvale is the 300lb gorilla of the sf narrative podcast scene – a community radio show from a simple town in the desert where the one world government helicopters are always circling, angels called Erika are on every corner, and the community calendar is as likely to contain temporal paradoxes as crocheting events. Nailing a tone that reminds me of the best of the comedic X-files episodes, and hosted by the mellifluous Cecil Baldwin, Welcome to Nightvale is a permanent fixture in my podcast rotation. None of which answers the current question – how does a radio show do live

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