Hugo Nominee Suggestion Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) 2018 – Badwater (Alice Isn’t Dead)

I haven’t read enough new books or short works to tell anyone what to nominate, and I’m behind on movies, but I have been a voracious consumer of TV. The Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category is generally dominated by tv episodes, so of course, what I would like to do is instead suggest you nominate a podcast episode.

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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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Review – Rivers of London Series by Ben Aaronovitch

A member of the filth finds his calling as the police’s newest, and nearly only, wizard.

Peter Grant is not your typical urban fantasy protagonist. For starters he’s a cop, and an extremely junior one at that. More importantly, at the beginning of the series, not a very good cop: better than a hanger, but lacking in the instincts and discipline that would make him stand out. He’s also black, which matter less then it might have in the past, but certainly carries varying degrees of baggage in the Police, London, and England respectively.

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Review – Borderline by Mishell Baker

Borderline is an absolutely brilliant book about mental illness. Millie, our protagonist, suffers from borderline personality disorder, and Baker finds a delicate balance between showing and telling. This draws the reader into a character who knows why they do the things they do, but are only sometimes able to stop themselves. The details and the asides are so real, from mindfulness lessons to therapy, that I was unsurprised to see the author had personal familiarity with such conditions.

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Review – The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross

I did not like the last laundry book, the Annihilation Score. The previous laundry files entries were an ungodly hybrid of espionage, Cthulhu, and bureaucracy; a series where a character was as likely to save the world from tentacled horrors as be disciplined for not filling out leave forms correctly. The last book was a logical continuation, but swapped the espionage for super-heroics, and in doing so, lost some of its scrappy charm.

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