The Hugo awards are coming up. The ballot deadline is in March. Everybody is promoting their eligible works, making their picks, turning in their votes. But in the interest of not taxing your attentions, precious reader, rather than bombarding you with stories I loved and stories I wrote I’d love you to love, I’m going to keep this simple.
If I may convince you to read just one story in advance of the Hugos (and I really hope I can, because I’m only giving you one), let it be Erin Hoffman’s short story “Precise and Invariable Laws”. It’s a story both brilliant and fun, with a satisfyingly plucky young heroine, an amazing setting and a shocking amount of intricate, fascinating worldbuilding somehow made to fit into an eminently portable form factor. It also has a really cool ending twist. And tragically, not all that many people have read it—many fewer than it deserves—because it appeared not in any of ye fancy big name magazines, but our humble chapbook, The Homeless Moon 3. Which is available for free in the ebook format of your choice from both homelessmoon.com and Weightless Books.
Erin’s is a name you should watch out for. The first novel in her Chaos Knight series is due out this summer from Pyr, and a new short story, “A Single Small Globe Against the Stars”, is forthcoming from Tor.com.