Hugo nominations are open

The CoNZealand email that popped into my mailbox last week
mentioned that Hugo nominations were open.

I can only nominate stories I have read and liked. Here are
some novels I am thinking of nominating.

The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons. This is one of those
books I picked up, read a bit, flicked to the end, read the end, went back to
read the middle, moved on to read a bit more that I hadn’t read, and so on. I
didn’t read it in sequential order, but despite that, enjoyed it.

Kihrin is an orphan who grew up on storybook tales of long-lost princes and grand quests, but when he is claimed against his will as the long-lost son of a treasonous prince, Kihrin finds that being a long-lost prince isn’t what the storybooks promised.

Finder by Suzanne Palmer. We were interviewed
recently by Paul
Semel and he asked us to recommend some space opera that we’d read recently
and liked. This was one of them.

Fergus Ferguson goes to out into the far reaches of human-inhabited space to repossess a spaceship and gets caught up in a civil war.

Another story we recommended in the interview was Michael
Mammay’s Spaceside, book two in his stories about Carl Butler.

Former colonel Carl Butler is now a civilian and he’s asked by his company to investigate a breach in a competitor’s computer network.

I also read and enjoyed Jackson Ford’s The Girl Who Could
Move Sh*t With Her Mind. It’s set in modern-day LA. I suppose you’d call it
an urban fantasy. Or would that be science fiction set in today’s world?

Tegan Frost can move things with her mind. So far as she knows, she’s the only person who can, so when a body turns up murdered using powers like hers, she’s the logical suspect. She has 22 hours to clear her name.

Looking through Goodreads’
list of 2020 Hugo-eligible novels, I see that T. Kingfisher’s Minor Mage
is nominated. This is a story about a 12 year-old boy, and I know Ursula
Vernon, who writes as T. Kingfisher, said editors considered it too black for a
children’s novel, but technically it is a middle grade story. To me, anyway. If
it is eligible, in any category, I will nominate it. This is definitely a book
worth reading.

Oliver is twelve, and a very minor mage (he knows three spells), but while his mother is away the villagers ‘encourage’ him to take a journey to bring back the rain.