I’m running out of time to post the last part of the recommendations, so here they go – I might add some more later to fill in the gaps.

Previous recommendations: Best Novel, Campbell award for Best New Writer, Best Short Story & Fan Writer & Semiprozine

Links point to my recommendation threads on Twitter, where available. If you click on them, you can read my spoiler-free opinion of each story alongside a link to it for your reading pleasure, where available. My recommendations are listed in alphabetic order by the first letter.

If you enjoy these recommendations, you can surprise me with gifts from my Amazon wishlist. Food is especially appreciated!

Best Novella

* What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear by Bao Shu (trans. Ken Liu, Anatoly Belilovsky) in F&SF

Best Novelette

* And Never Mind the Watching Ones by Keffy R. M. Kehrli in Uncanny

* Invisible City by A.C. Buchanan, self-published

Conflict-of-interest-y (I beta read these):

* Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds by Rose Lemberg in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

* Geometries of Belonging by Rose Lemberg in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Best Related Work

Frankly not sure what is eligible and what isn’t, but I know you can nominate Letters to Tiptree ed. Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce, published by 12th Planet Press – I have a letter in this book alongside many, many people.

Best Graphic Story

* Ms. Marvel volume 2: Generation Why, by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, published by Marvel

* Ms. Marvel volume 4: Last Days, by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona, published by Marvel

* The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 1: Squirrel Power by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, published by Marvel

* MFK by Nilah Magruder, self-published

I talked a bit about some of these comics at SF Signal in February.

Best Professional Editor (Short Form)

* Lynne and Michael Thomas (Uncanny) + I think Michi Trota is also eligible now?

* Scott Andrews (BCS)

* The Strange Horizons editorial team

* Colin Sullivan (Nature Futures)

* A.C. Wise and Bernie Mojzes (Unlikely Story)

You will probably want to list one person per line, though I am not sure. I could nominate a lot more people in this category! I also wish there was a separate category for editors of semi-pro venues.

Best Professional Artist

* Julie Dillon

* Goñi Montes

* Jillian Tamaki

* Galen Dara

* Kirk Benshoff (cover artist of the Ancillary series)

Best Fan Artist

* M Sereno – Likhain

Likhain is my !!!!YES!!!! nominee. I think next year she will be eligible as Best Pro Artist, but this year she is still in this category.

Best Fancast

* Glittership

Several fancasts seem to have turned pro this year, so I don’t think they are eligible any more…?

Further recommendations are very welcome!

I am not nominating in the dramatic categories because while I enjoy watching movies, I don’t like going to the movies and don’t have a TV subscription. (That’s an understatement – I’m not really able to go to the movies. But even if I were able, I wouldn’t like doing so.) So the things I watch tend to be less recent.

More Hugo nomination recommendations: Short Story, Fan Writer, Semiprozine.

Previous recommendations: Best Novel, Campbell award for Best New Writer

Links point to my recommendation threads on Twitter! If you click on them, you can read my spoiler-free opinion of each story alongside a link to it for your reading pleasure, where available. I have more than five nominees in some of the categories and it was still hard to pick. My recommendations are listed in alphabetic order by the first letter.

If you want to vote for me, or for work I was involved with, those are listed separately at the end of each section. If you enjoy these recommendations, you can surprise me with gifts from my Amazon wishlist.

Best Short Story

* Bilingual by Henry Lien in F&SF

* By Degrees and Dilatory Time by SL Huang in Strange Horizons

* Documentary by Vajra Chandrasekera in Lightspeed

* Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong in Nightmare

* Pockets by Amal El-Mohtar in Uncanny

* The Noble Torturer by Sofia Samatar in Bluestockings Magazine

* The Shape of My Name by Nino Cipri on Tor.com

Flash favorites:

* A Revolution in Four Courses by Naru Sundar in Daily SF

* Rubbing is Racing by Charles Payseur in Lightspeed – QDSF

* Sometimes Heron by Mari Ness in Lackington’s

* The Egg by S. B. Divya in Nature Futures

On Twitter I have even more 2015 recommendations! And if you want to vote for me, I recommend Forestspirit, Forestspirit in Clarkesworld.

Conflict-of-interest-y, but I would also like you to read it:

* How to Forget to Remember to Forget the Old War by Rose Lemberg in Lightspeed – QDSF

This story was dedicated to me and I was also one of the beta readers for it.

Best Fan Writer

* Charles Payseur – Wide-ranging and sensitive SFF short story reviews, his work fills a great need

* Natalie Luhrs – SFF news, essays, clueful feminism!

* Polenth Blake – Observant and thorough reviews of SFF media for all ages!

* Sandstone – She gathers a list of SFF back in print and has wonderful, obscure queer recommendations on Twitter and Goodreads.

* Shira Glassman – Reviewing intersections of queer SFF, romantic and erotic work, I find many new books this way

I am also eligible in this category. In addition to my Twitter recommendations series, I suggest some of my nonfiction: Gender, Sex and Sexuality in Speculative Fiction – A Discussion with Polenth Blake, in Strange Horizons; and Alien of Extraordinary Ability? Migration in SFF and in My Life  from Invisible 2, edited by Jim C. Hines and also available on his blog.

Best Semiprozine

* Beneath Ceaseless Skies

* GigaNotoSaurus

* Lackington’s

* Strange Horizons

* Uncanny

* Unlikely Story

And something I worked on: Stone Telling is also eligible!

Previous recommendation posts for your Hugo needs: Best Novel

These are my recommendations for the Campbell award. As usual, I only recommend people in their second year of eligibility, because this is their last chance.

Authors are presented in alphabetic order:

* S. B. Divya – Biblio, My recommendation

* SL Huang – Biblio, My recommendation

* Darcie Little Badger – Biblio, My recommendation

* Natalia Theodoridou – Biblio, My recommendation

* Alyssa Wong – Biblio, My recommendation

* JY Yang – Biblio, My recommendation

* Isabel Yap – Biblio, My recommendation

Every year it is harder and harder to pick – I couldn’t narrow it down to just five this year either, though I’ll have to do so for my ballot! There’s even more people whose work is in my TBR, I just haven’t gotten to it yet. I read less short fiction this year than I would’ve liked to…

Some of my current favorite writers are in their first year of eligibility, so next year this exercise will be even harder. 😀 Just at first glance I see over ten people I will want to nominate next year!

Note that I am not eligible for the Campbell award, please don’t nominate me 😀 Instead, you can nominate my story Forestspirit, Forestspirit for Best Short Story in the Hugos, or you can vote for my poem The Iterative Nature of the Magical Discovery Process on the Rhysling.

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In the meanwhile, I won an award and a book I’m in won three. O.o Update probably soon? IY”H. I’d like to link all the announcements, and some are not online yet.

I have been struggling with health so I did not get around to posting this update.

My story Shovelware has been published in the science fiction column of Nature (yes, that Nature), Nature Futures. My customary bonus notes are posted on Nature‘s website too.

If you are in Iowa this weekend, I will be reading the story and more at a reading on the Jakobsen conference at the Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City on Saturday. I will also be presenting a poster!

My poster is 2:30-4:45 on the IMU main lounge 1st floor. Title: “A Systematic Review of Connectionist Modeling Approaches in Autism Spectrum Conditions”

My fiction and poetry reading is in the 12:30-1:45 block of presentations, IMU Room 341 (Purdue). Title: “The Iterative Nature of the Magical Discovery Process / Shovelware”

My annual award recommendation series starts here.

This year, for the first time ever, I can do recommendations of novels too. Thank yous go to the Iowa City Public Library and everyone who bought me books through my Amazon wishlist or sent me reviewer copies!

These are some adult age range SFF books from 2015 that I enjoyed reading. (I will make a separate YA post soon IY”H.) I make no claim that they are “the best”, but I think they are all worth your time. There are still a lot of books I haven’t read or finished that came out this year and look interesting – for example Updraft by Fran Wilde, or The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard. But I’m working on catching up…

Links point to Goodreads.

Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Published by Solaris

Can I call it historical fantasy if it’s set in the 1980s? This short novel is set in 1980s Mexico and has awesome magic and great music alike, with well-rounded, believable characters. I was very happy to see a novel where a teenage girl main character is not sweet and innocent, but rather grumpy and moody. Bring it on!! Signal to Noise is also a smooth, fast read, and not a book I could easily put down. I am eagerly awaiting Certain Dark Things – Silvia’s second novel, out later this year.

Minor, but surprising point you should probably know before reading: Signal to Noise is also the first novel in a long while I see where someone fights off a sexual assault.

Where I got the book: Iowa City Public Library

Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii (translated by Jim Hubbert). Published by VIZ / Haikasoru.

Another quick read! Near-future hard SF with biotech and cyberpunk leanings, this book is also noteworthy for featuring a main-cast disabled character who is the opposite of one-dimensional. Sadly the rest of the cast are less memorable, and I’m frankly not sure the book passes the Bechdel test, but I still found it well worth a read. It was originally a runaway self-publishing hit in Japan, by the way.

This was a scary book for me because (spoiler ROT13) gur nhgube xrcg ba guebjvat erq ureevatf gung gur qvfnoyrq punenpgre jbhyq or gur nagntbavfg. Mercifully, the plot goes in a completely different direction; the author seems to deliberately subvert these tropes.

Where I got the book: Gift from my brother

The Mystic Marriage (Alpennia #2) by Heather Rose Jones. Published by Bella Books.

Historical fantasy set in Alpennia, an imaginary Western-Central European country. (Think Austria and Switzerland.) There is a lot of intrigue among ultra-rich nobles living a life of leisure, but a lot of the plot involves alchemy, where they actually work and make something with their own hands – yes, both the characters and the author reflects on this. One of the reasons I like this series is the believable, not ‘flashy’ but still effective magic.

There are four main characters, all women. Two of them are an established couple, whereas two others end up in a relationship during the course of the novel. I was very glad to see a book with queer characters in a long-term loving, happy relationship. The author also tackled some of the problems I had with Alpennia #1, for example this time the pacing was tighter, and the cast was also not all ethnic/racial majority (though I really wish there would’ve been someone in a major role…). For my part I am really looking forward to the upcoming third novel!

My tweet series: Alpennia #1, Alpennia #2

Where I got the book: Print reviewer copy from publisher Bella Press

A Harvest of Ripe Figs (Mangoverse #3) by Shira Glassman. Published by Torquere Press.

Another series where the latest book so far has also been the best! This fun, fluffy secondary-world fantasy novel is just over novella length – this year I am again very low on novella recommendations, so I wish it could fit in there. But it’s still worth a read regardless of any award nominations; as the third part of the Mangoverse series, it has a standalone mystery plot, but it does spoil some of the events in the first two books. (The print edition has some bonus short stories to make it a bit longer.)

If you want to read something that is basically ‘cheerful and very queer fantasy Jews running around solving problems’, this is your book! One of my pet peeves is that mystery plots are usually super-focused on murder investigations; this one is about a high-profile theft instead.

My tweet series about A Harvest of Ripe Figs

Where I got the book: Bought with my to-do list reward cents (yes, that’s a lot of cents)

+1 The But…

This year I read several books which were really good in some aspects, BUT utterly fell on their face in others. This was such a trend that I opted to give out a “Well, But” award 😀 and it goes to…

The Dark Forest (Three Body Problem #2) by Liu Cixin (translated by Joel Martinsen). Published by Tor.

Easily the most inventive science fiction novel I read this year, breathtakingly intense at times, a true genre classic. It is also hilaribadly misogynist. I warn you. It is so bad it made me laugh out loud with “I can’t believe the author just did that“. If I say that its gender roles are stuck in the 1950s, I’d be ignoring a large amount of 1950s SFF that is considerably more progressive – even Asimov’s Foundation series had Arkady Darell, an important character who’s a teenage girl. (Let’s not get into how many other problems I had with Foundation.)

I have seen people defend the misogyny with “well, it is a translated novel” or “well, Chinese author” – please don’t do that. This argument ignores the many, many Chinese authors who are not misogynist at all, including many women authors. I recommend Xia Jia!

Where I got the book: Iowa City Public Library

Runner-up to the BUT award: Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Wonderful prose, great Eastern European setting, spellbinding magic system, the most awful abusive relationship presented as charming and romantic.

Where I got the book: Iowa City Public Library

I have a bunch of upcoming stories, as an amount of things I wrote last year sold in rapid succession. Also, I’ve been too sick to post about them So now that I’m doing somewhat better, this will be a quite lengthy post, as the announcements piled up. (My story/poem recommendations also piled up! I will do my best to get to those soon too. In the meanwhile, you can find them on Twitter.)

My near-future hard SF story Shovelware will appear in Nature. This one is based on a combination of neuroimaging, lucid dreaming and software development, only slightly extrapolated into the future. It also has a Hungarian gay man and an American mixed race woman as the protagonists.

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My alien-invasion story Given Sufficient Desperation will appear in Defying Doomsday, “an anthology of apocalypse-survival fiction with disabled protagonists” edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench and published by Twelfth Planet Press. This story is set in Northwestern Hungary (specifically in and near Pannonhalma) and has a protagonist who has motor dyspraxia (explicitly stated) and who also might or might not be on the autism spectrum – I wanted to show that there is a considerable overlap and you might end up diagnosed with one and have symptoms of the other, and vice versa. (I frankly have both, but not everyone is me. The protagonist is very clearly not me – she is a teenage girl into twitch.tv 😀 ) And there are also aliens. And actual hard SF inspired by neuroimaging… well. Yet again.

Defying Doomsday has an intriguing table of contents: I’m especially happy to share it with Corinne Duyvis, John Chu and Thoraiya Dyer.

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In yet further news, I write about things besides neuroimaging! My fantasy flash story All Talk of Common Sense will appear in Volume 3 of Polychrome Ink. This is a new-ish semipro venue with a focus on diversity, and it is really beautifully designed as a magazine, I invite you to check it out! My story is set in the same universe as Walking Along the Floodbanks (not final title), a novelette forthcoming in GigaNotoSaurus. All Talk of Common Sense has an autistic protagonist and it is my reflection on ‘there are no autistic people in history, it’s an all-new phenomenon,’ a really horrible and false trope promulgated by people who sell fake autism treatments. While this is not a historical fantasy story per se – it is set on an entirely fictional world, not Earth – the fictional world is basically quasi-medieval-Hungary, so I suppose it counts. By the way, that choice made for really fun worldbuilding and it also allowed me to reflect on present-day Hungarian politics 😀

Did I talk about Walking Along the Floodbanks? Maybe I should hype it up once it actually has a final title 😀 It is my second novelette, forthcoming in GigaNotoSaurus, and it features my convoluted thoughts about the unsavory aspects of magical-guild tropes. (TVTropes fantasy version / sci-fi version.) It is also a story about mentorship and kindness. And Hungarian politics, did I say Hungarian politics?? *ducks*

Travel-charm is a very short poem of mine that appeared in the Cascadia Subduction Zone in 2015. (I have a backlog of bonus notes, can you tell?) I wrote it for my friend Shweta Narayan upon their move to the US.

This poem was inspired by Mippo, even though Mippo is not an elephant. You can also read other poems inspired by Mippo!

For more elephants + Shweta, this is a drawing of Ganesha playing the trombone.

In this poem I tried