The other thing
Jul. 4th, 2014 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeirdWas triggered by Loncon3's announcement that rates are going up soon.
In my Hugo nomination readings, I was so looking forward to one entry co-authored by a favorite person/YA author, Ellen Klages. Best Novella prospect by her and Andy Duncan is called Wakulla Springs, and after a few pages I realize I had read this before. And as I re-read it, I think it is misplaced and does not belong in a science fiction/fantasy competition. I'll wait until I am finished, because the teaser makes it sound like it is about the mysterious creatures in and around the springs, but so far, after a lot of reading, what we have here is a young adult work of historical fiction set in the Jim Crow south. And I'm not finding it as well-written as other Klages works. One more novella to go after this, Equoid, by Charles Stross, another Tor publishing work.
Edit add: Finished Wakulla Springs, and was flabbergasted that the next chapter is very short and skips 20 years. It inserts one of those "was it real or a sleep deprivation-induced hallucination" events. Next chapter, also short, skips a generation and ends with a paragraph which would qualify the story as science fiction had the rest of the story truly led up to it. In the interest of no spoilers, that last paragraph was about the same as ending a historical fiction about Joan of Arc with a soldier looking up at the sky and seeing a UFO. FAIL.
In my Hugo nomination readings, I was so looking forward to one entry co-authored by a favorite person/YA author, Ellen Klages. Best Novella prospect by her and Andy Duncan is called Wakulla Springs, and after a few pages I realize I had read this before. And as I re-read it, I think it is misplaced and does not belong in a science fiction/fantasy competition. I'll wait until I am finished, because the teaser makes it sound like it is about the mysterious creatures in and around the springs, but so far, after a lot of reading, what we have here is a young adult work of historical fiction set in the Jim Crow south. And I'm not finding it as well-written as other Klages works. One more novella to go after this, Equoid, by Charles Stross, another Tor publishing work.
Edit add: Finished Wakulla Springs, and was flabbergasted that the next chapter is very short and skips 20 years. It inserts one of those "was it real or a sleep deprivation-induced hallucination" events. Next chapter, also short, skips a generation and ends with a paragraph which would qualify the story as science fiction had the rest of the story truly led up to it. In the interest of no spoilers, that last paragraph was about the same as ending a historical fiction about Joan of Arc with a soldier looking up at the sky and seeing a UFO. FAIL.
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