On Saturday the Hugo Awards were presented at DisCon III, the 2021 iteration of the international science fiction and fantasy convention Worldcon. A new set of winners were selected for genre immortality by a voting base of Worldcon members — and another round of debate raged on social media. Martha Wells’ much-loved Murderbot Diaries series,…
2021 Hugo Award Review: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Young necromancer Harrowhark, the secondary lead in Tamsyn Muir’s earlier novel Gideon the Ninth, now has the rank of Lyctor. This role involves travelling with an interplanetary God-Emperor between worlds and using her abilities as a necromancer to navigate the various hazards thrown in her way. After all, this is a universe where vast monsters…
2021 Hugo Award Review: Network Effect by Martha Wells
Martha Wells’ Murderbot series must surely be counted among the biggest hits of contemporary science fiction. The story of an artificial being – half-machine and half-clone – who became a freelance bodyguard was originally told over the course of four novellas: All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, and Exit Strategy; with Network Effect, it…
2021 Hugo Award Review: The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal
“Clearly, the Space Age is over” declared J. G. Ballard in the ’70s. He had a point: the past few decades have done little to revive the old assumption, made by so many science fiction writers, that a smooth and steady line would stretch from Sputnik to the moon and then to Mars and beyond….
2021 Hugo Award Review: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
A man inhabits a vast building containing reams of hallways and innumerable statues depicting various mythological figures. His sole companion is a man he refers to as the Other; in return, the Other refers to him as Piranesi. This bewilders him, as he does not identify with that name — at least, not until he…
2021 Hugo Award Review: Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Black Sun’s prologue introduces us to Serapio, a boy who is groomed by his mother to become the avatar of a Crow God — a process that entails being ritually blinded. All of this is to prepare him for a specific date in the future: the day of Convergence, when the sun shall turn black…
2021 Hugo Award Review: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
In her 2016 short story “The City Born Great” N. K. Jemisin introduced us to a homeless youth who was actually the avatar of New York City. The City We Became is a novel that takes the original short story as its prologue and proceeds to expand on the premise: the city’s avatar has gone…
2021 Hugo Award Reviews: The Empress of Salt and Fortune/Riot Baby
WWAC’s coverage of the 2021 Hugo Award finalists continues with a look at the final two contenders for Best Novella: Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby and Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune…
Bang in the Coffin: Looking Back at Gatiss and Moffat’s Dracula
The BBC’s three-part adaptation of Dracula, written by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, did not air very long ago at all — just last year, in fact. However, it aired in the January of last year. This places it in the slice of 2020 termed pre-pandemic: an already antediluvian era that must surely be due…
2021 Hugo Award Reviews: Ring Shout/FINNA
Welcome back to another instalment of WWAC’s trip through the Best Novella category at the 2021 Hugo Awards. This time, we shall be covering P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout and Nino Cipri’s FINNA…
[Patreon Exclusive] Gangland Dreamland: Batman in 2020
Our monthly Patron-exclusive essay series continues. You can read all of these incredible analyses for as little as a dollar a month on our Patreon. 2020 was not a good year to be Batman. In the pages of the comics, he had his own company and all of the gadgets that come with it swiped from…
2021 Hugo Award Reviews: Upright Women Wanted/Come Tumbling Down
Welcome back to another installment of WWAC’s series discussing the prose finalists for the 2021 Hugo Awards. Having covered the Best Short Story and Best Novelette category, it is now time to start on Best Novella with a look at Sarah Gailey’s Upright Women Wanted and Seanan McGuire’s Come Tumbling Down…