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The 2014 Hugo Awards
Dave Knott writes: WorldCon 2014 wrapped up in London this last weekend and this year's Hugo Award winners were announced. Notable award winners include:
Best Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Best Novelette: "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal
Best Novella: "Equoid" by Charles Stross
Best Short Story: "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu
Best Graphic Story: "Time" by Randall Munroe
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Gravity written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Game of Thrones: "The Rains of Castamere" written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, directed by David Nutter
The results of this year's awards were awaited with some some trepidation in the SF community, due to well-documented attempts by some controversial authors to game the voting system. These tactics appear to have been largely unsuccessful, as this is the fourth major award for the Leckie novel, which had already won the 2013 BSFA, 2013 Nebula and 2014 Clarke awards.
Best Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Best Novelette: "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal
Best Novella: "Equoid" by Charles Stross
Best Short Story: "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu
Best Graphic Story: "Time" by Randall Munroe
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Gravity written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Game of Thrones: "The Rains of Castamere" written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, directed by David Nutter
The results of this year's awards were awaited with some some trepidation in the SF community, due to well-documented attempts by some controversial authors to game the voting system. These tactics appear to have been largely unsuccessful, as this is the fourth major award for the Leckie novel, which had already won the 2013 BSFA, 2013 Nebula and 2014 Clarke awards.
It's soft sci-fi pretending to be hard sci-fi.
It's perfectly fine to have non-realistic physics in science fiction. It just needs some justification or explanation. Future super-tech that hasn't been invented, or a revolution in our understanding of the universe. This is a good thing: It lets you introduce a 'magic box' like a perfect lie detector or an artificial intelligence and then examine the impact it would have. Or it can just serve as the backdrop to a more conventional story, like a space opera - just throw in some vague mumbling about the hyperdrive, it doesn't matter how the thing is supposed to work so long as it gets the characters where they need to go.
But Gravity doesn't have that excuse. It's supposed to be realistic. It's supposed to be near-future. That sets certain constraints. For a layperson it might be acceptable for an astronaut to jump out the ISS and achieve an orbital intersection and velocity match by eye with a distant station - but for anyone who knows the slightest thing about space travel, or has played Kerbal Space Program, this as as glaring a violation of the established rules of the setting as if she'd cobbled together a teleporter from the wreckage.