Hugo Award 2018 Nominees Read

I am attending WorldCon and Hugo awards ceremony this year. Yay! This will be the first time and (might be) the last time that I will get a chance to visit. It is happening in San Jose this time and I am way too excited about the prospects of meeting some of my favorite science fiction and fantasy authors at the WorldCon convention. I recently met Brian McClellan(of Powder Mage series) at the Comic Con convention and got his autograph on one of his books. I am hoping that I will be able to meet many more authors like him in WorldCon this year.

Hugo awards nominations for 2018 were announced recently. I have read quite a few of these nominated books and have some of them on my TBR as well. I got a chance to nominate books for the Hugo this year since I am attending. I will also get a chance to vote for the winning book this time so I am planning to read as many of the nominations as possible. In this post, I am going to talk about all the books from the nominations that I have already read, along with the ratings I gave to these books.

Link for the nominations list is here – 2018 Hugo Award Finalists

I have only read one book from the Novel category –

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty – 3 Stars

The overall idea of this book was interesting but a lot of things did not make sense to me. This was a diverse book but the plot moved at a snail’s pace considering it is a murder mystery set in space. I did like the science elements but everything else was pretty meh.

From the Novella category, I have read 3 –

1. Down among the sticks and bones – 4 stars

   My vote might go to this book since it was great. It was even better than the first installment in this series which happened to win last year’s Hugo. It is a portal fantasy series about which I wrote an entire post earlier.

2. River of Teeth – 3 stars

   It was a pretty unrealistic story which did not make much sense to me. I did like the author’s imagination and hippos, but that was it. Every other book is trying to become diverse by throwing in LGBTQ characters and LGBTQ romance. This is yet another book which wants to get praised just for having diversity and for nothing else.

3. All Systems Red – 4 stars

   This was fun so my vote might go to this book too. The murderbot character was an interesting character but I didn’t like the way the ending felt rushed. But still it was good.

You can find mini reviews for all these books in my earlier wrap up posts.
I had read Binti (first book in the series) and I was not a fan of that so I am going to give Binti: Home a miss.

I have also read two more books from other categories.
Paper Girls vol.3 has been nominated under Graphic Novels section. I love this series and it is lot of fun. It reminds me of Stranger Things a lot which is why I love it. 1980s setting, geeky brave girls, aliens, spaceships, time travel and monsters! What is not there to like it?!
Katherine Arden has been nominated for the Campbell debut author award. I read her The Bear and the Nightingale earlier but wasn’t a huge fan of her writing. The Russian setting and world building was great, but her writing put me to sleep. The plot was all over the place. I had no clue what the book was all about until I was like approaching the end, by which time I had lost interest in the plot. So definitely not going to vote for this author.

My vote for best movie will go for Wonder Woman! (was anyone surprised?! :))

Have you read any of the nominations for Hugo awards?