Newsgroup post, August 23, 2006:<\/i><\/p>\n
A while back I agreed to be an award judge again. This is a stupid thing I keep doing — I don’t really think awards are a good thing, I can’t really afford the time, but somehow it’s so flattering to be asked that I keep agreeing.<\/p>\n
In this case, I’m one of a panel of judges reading five nominees and choosing one as the winner. They’re all supposed to be science fiction.<\/p>\n
So I read them. Well, some of them; I admit to not finishing all five, which I excuse by saying that if I don’t want<\/i> to finish a book, it hardly deserves to win an award, does it?<\/p>\n
Of the five, only two were actually fun to read. <\/p>\n
The others were a slog, all of them over-long, with long, slow stretches and not much in the way of excitement. One’s more or less a near-future thriller that alas, isn’t thrilling. The other two are solidly SF, with all the stefnal accoutrements, but just didn’t appeal to me at all.<\/p>\n
Of the two I enjoyed, one’s only SF by courtesy; it takes a standard dark fantasy trope and treats it as a scientifically-explainable secret history, rather than as supernatural.<\/p>\n
Of the two I enjoyed, one is slickly written, nicely crafted, but didn’t really engage me emotionally very much. The other’s prose is charming, but a bit clunky at times, and some of the science and setting stuff is pretty absurd.<\/p>\n
Both have fairly weak story structure, with oddly flat and predictable endings.<\/p>\n
None of the five have vivid characters or genuinely exciting action or wonderful, mind-bending ideas.<\/p>\n
If this is the best the genre has to show these days, no wonder SF sales are down and fantasy is eating its lunch.<\/p>\n
Addendum, May 2, 2017: I don’t know whether this would describe the state of SF now<\/b>, but it did seem to in 2006. I have no idea what’s happening in SF right now; I’m years behind on my reading.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Newsgroup post, August 23, 2006: A while back I agreed to be an award judge again. This is a stupid thing I keep doing — I don’t really think awards are a good thing, I can’t really afford the time, but somehow it’s so flattering to be asked that I keep agreeing. In this case,… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":965,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions\/965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}