Podcast #4- The Hugo Novels

Our new podcast is live, just in time for us to load our bikes up and head to Wiscon! This episode, we talk about some more science fiction & fantasy theater in Chicago, then launch into a brief discussion of all 6 Hugo novels on the 2017 shortlist.

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• 0- Introduction & What We've Been Reading (Hugo Nominations & C.J. Cherryh's Rimrunners)
• 4:00- Upcoming Events
• 6:18- What we're looking forward to at Wiscon & BikeCon
• 10:55- Theatrical Discussion: Lifeline's A Wrinkle in Time, Edge of Orion's Illyria, and a bit more discussion of New Millennium's The Incredible Hank and Otherworld's The Rogue Aviator
• 16:27- Hugo overview & voting mechanics
• 20:51- Novel discussion!
• Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning
• N.K. Jemisin's The Obelisk Gate
• Cixin Liu's Death's End
• Charlie Jane Ander's All the Birds in the Sky
• Becky Chamber's A Closed and Common Orbit
• Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit
• 43:51- Overall Hugo thoughts
• 53:52- Credits

(Extended show notes after we return from Wiscon!)

Thanks to our events reader this episode, Chelsea Fiddyment from Unreal.

Our music is provided by Pelafina. Check them out on Facebook and Bandcamp!

Hope you like the show! Questions, comments? Sound off in the comments, or drop us a line at positronchicago@gmail.com.

Chicago Nerds- Ninefox Gambit

For the May meeting of the Chicago Nerds' book-club, we discussed Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. This was also our first meeting at our new spot—Volumes Bookcafe, just up the road from our old digs.

Ninefox Gambit is a weirdly inventive space opera, and in fact a lot of our discussion revolved around whether to think of it as science fiction or "fantasy in space". A fairly ruthless interstellar civilization, the Hexarchate, maintains its control through the use of "exotic" technologies, which in turn rely on the "calendar", a kind of consensus reality. When a group of heretics make a particularly daring secession, the Hexarchate pairs a low-ranking soldier with genius mathematical abilities—Kel Cheris—with the imprisoned immortal spirit of one of their greatest and most treacherous generals: Shuos Jedao.

This is a weird, surreal book, setting up a very bizarre world and then not explaining it very much. This is one of the things I like most about it, as I said in my review last year. At club, we had good debates about both how and whether different aspects of this novel work. Brief notes below:

Overclocking Clarke's Third: Yoon Ha Lee's "Ninefox Gambit"

An unusually inventive military SF novel, I found Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit very enjoyable in a very science-fictional way: I spent almost the entire novel building and revising this world in my head, and I'm still not entirely sure I've got it right. Like my last two reviews, I recommend it highly, with audience-specific caveats. Possible spoilers below.