Friday 27 July 2012

Hugo Month 2012 - Short Stories

I had previously listened to almost all of the Hugo nominated short stories as part of Escape Pod and PodCastle. These podcasts are great ways to get to listen to short stories, they release new episodes weekly and are my primary exposure to Sci Fi and Fantasy short stories. As such I am including links to the relevant episode of each podcast for the short stories here, so that you can listen to them for yourself.

The Homecoming - Mike Resnick

A son visits his parents in order to see his sick mother, his father is angry with him, feeling that his son abandoned them when he made choices earlier in life. The dilemma of pleasing your parents and achieving your personal goals and ambitions.

The Paper Menagerie - Ken Liu

A touching story about a relationship between a mother and son. A child who wants to fit in can be very cruel and make pretty poor choices. Especially since they often don't take the time to understand why others make the choices they do.

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees - E. Lily Yu

I loved the imagery in this fantasy story, the different cultures of the wasps and bees and the way that wasps feel completely superior to the bees, they don't even consider trying to coexist as equals.

Movement - Nancy Fulda

This was an interesting story, it is written from the perspective of a child with a flavour of autism. Who should make choices regarding achieving normality, especially when steps have to taken early in life. It is the child's life that you are irreversibly altering, but they are too young to be trusted with making an appropriately considered decision on their own.

The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One - The Dead City - John Scalzi

This is actually the prologue to a fantasy trilogy, the tone of it is very light hearted, but it does not shy away from implied blood and violence. An impossible threat against a fantasy kingdom. But the reason why it is impossible cannot be publicly acknowledged.

2 comments:

  1. Too much reading i want to hear about your coding!

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    1. Want to get all of these done before the voting deadline (end of the month). Coding posts will appear afterwards. Just got one more post in this series.

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