Awards
Recently a buddy of mine commented that until he started hanging out with me he never knew that there were literary awards. He's not sheltered, nor was he raised in a barn, nor on Mars and only recently been returned to teach us the Martian ways of peace and "grokking."
Anyway, it got me thinking that maybe the world of genre awards are kind of like Employee of the Month awards. They're great, and they acknowledge your good works but the only people who see them are fellow employees. Normally they're tucked away somewhere near the bathrooms, or by the employee break area.
Sciencefictionworld.com has a great guide to previous years genre award winners, be they fantasy or sci-fi, and I encourage you to go take a look.
Let me know what your fave sci-fi or fantasy is in the comments.
I heartily enjoy the classics from the first half of the 20th century, like so many others, like Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Howard. But Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" stories are special for telling more personal tales of the minor adventures of two wandering everymen, just talented enough to not die.
ReplyDelete"Ender's Game" proved to me the sheer power of having a tightly focused, character driven story, since I just kept turning the pages because I *had* to find out what happened to the protagonist.
"Speaker for the Dead" is a book that I feel like I'm doing a disservice to when I say I love it. It's more accurate to say that that book and I crossed paths and I left a man changed for the better, it so affected me.
"Sabriel" is a young adult fantasy novel that I took a chance on and won. When I finished it, I actually admired how tightly woven the events in the plot had all been while still flowing naturally (I went nuts when I realized how the hero was going to triumph over the villain, a page before she did, and how the author had set it up). It also does a great job using sensory description. It shows what using magic feels like (for example, what a spoken spell tastes like) and gives a true sense of disgust at the presence of the undead.
I love a constant interplay of compelling characters and neat ideas. I recently completed "Old Man's War" and that is a book that has a good combination of both. I enjoyed the tech and alien cultures described, and the love story had not an ounce of melodrama in it, yet almost had me in tears by the end.
These are personal favorites of mine that I both enjoyed and appreciated, which are slightly different things. They're hardly underdogs that no one's heard of but, still... I like 'em.
I know exactly what you mean about "Speaker for the Dead." I came away a different person and that's not something you can say about a lot of books. I may, in fact, be the highest form of praise.
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