SFFreader

Don’t forget your Hugo ballots! They are due on Tuesday (July 31).

In the universe depicted in this 1993 Hugo winning novelette by Janet Kagan, there are lots of alien races. Humans were one day alone, and the next were members of a large galactic community. They established embassies as quick as they could, and trade, both economic and cultural, started.
The story starts with a […]

“Allamagoosa” is a short story by Eric Frank Russell that holds the distinction of winning the first Hugo ever awarded for Short Story (1955). The story is an enjoyable satire of military bureaucracy. The captain and crew of the spaceship Bustler have to account for every single item they had been provided when […]

I’m a big Roger Zelazny fan, but I hadn’t read “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai” before now. No one writes quite like him, but if I had to compare him to a current author, I’d pick Neil Gaiman, since gods and myth find major roles in writings by both of them. […]

Ah, Tor Doubles. Gotta love ‘em.
In the future, things have changed a bit. Wars have occurred, resulting in a fragmented America. “No Truce With Kings” starts in a military compound in the Pacific Northwest, where skirmishes still happen. In fact, the compound has been attacked in the past from every direction […]

Escape Pod continues what it started last year - they are offering audio versions of some of this year’s Hugo nominees. Available right now are these nominees for Best Short Story:
Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt
The House Beyond Your Sky by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Eight Episodes by Robert Reed
Kin by Bruce McAllister
And over on Neil Gaiman’s site, […]

“None So Blind” is a joy to read. It’s very short, and the central SF idea in it (that unlocking the brain’s real power triggers the next step in human evolution) is something we’ve seen before. But this story’s charm is in its presentation. It is like a poem - a kind […]

The Kirinyaga series consists of ten stories which were originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Fantasy and Science Fiction magazines between 1988 and 1996. Nearly every story garnered a Hugo nomination, with two of them winning the award: “Kirinyaga” (Short Story, 1989) and “The Manamouki” (Novelette, 1991). “The Manamouki” is on the […]

Vernor Vinge is one of the best active practitioners of true Hard SF. He’s won four Hugo Awards, for the novels Marooned in Realtime (2003) and A Deepness in the Sky, and for the novellas “Fast Times at Fairmont High” (2002) and “The Cookie Monster” (2004).
“The Cookie Monster” is one of many modern SF […]

Through SFSignal, I saw that Jeff Vehige started a blog in which he is going through all the Hugo and Nebula winning novels. He’s currently three novels in (Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, Camouflage by Joe Haldeman, and Dune by Frank Herbert) - I’ll definitely be reading! His site is called […]