My 2016 Planetary Award Nominations

As much as I of course want to nominate myself for such an award, with so few categories and as a “book blog”, I’m going to recuse my own work from this vote, which I may not do for other awards later so do stay tuned, friends and readers!

Without further ado, here’s my Planetary Award nominations:

1. Shorter Story. I had a few thoughts for this but the story that sticks out in my mind the most as most memorable because of its cool characters, high stakes conflict and interesting concept all alike is Brad Torgersen’s novella, “Purytans” which appeared in Analog’s July/August 2016 issue. This was science fiction at its best as it provided a perspective that actually felt alien as genetics of this world had been so mucked with in the future, and also provided a look into truly alien social structures. It takes some current social thoughts to extremes that really shows the absurdity of accusing others of wrongthink.
2. Longer Story.  This is something that didn’t get a lot of press, doesn’t have a lot of attention and it’s a crying shame and speaks to the sorry state of the publishing industry that someone hasn’t scooped this series up. I’m talking about Hel’s Bet by Doug Sharp which came out in December of 2016 and is available at https://www.amazon.com/Hels-Bet-Book-II-ebook/dp/B01N0QSYRN/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1484507847&sr=1-1&keywords=hel%27s+bet. Doug’s writing can only be described as Robert Heinlein on acid. It’s so incredibly well-written, so cool conceptually sound and so laden with Spider Robinson style word humor that you really cannot go without this book. Doug’s personal story is one that’s so inspirational it drives me to work harder on my own writing as well, which you can read about here: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/09/10/the-big-idea-doug-sharp/

Please look into these works and read them and consider for the Planetary Awards.

Cheers!