Back to: Brief commercial interlude | Forward to: Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!

Obligatory Hugo eligibility post

Because the novella publication date slipped into 2022, I have just one Hugo-eligible publication this year.

Obviously Invisible Sun is a no-hoper in the best novel category—it's book nine of a series in a deeply unfashionable subgenre—but it's also the last Merchant Princes book, which means the Merchant Princes series is eligible for nomination in the "best series" category.

(It's also eligible for the Sidewise Award for alternate history, but it already won that once, back in 2007.)

Anyway: if you enjoyed the Merchant Princes series this is the last opportunity to recognize it with an award.

So: what, if anything, have you published in 2021?

55 Comments

1:
So: what, if anything, have you published in 2021?

A Keller-Segel model for C elegans L1 aggregation

Not eligible for a Hugo, alas.

2:

50+ episodes of the #osspodcast Open Source Security Podcast https://opensourcesecurity.io/category/podcast/

We're definitely not going to get any awards though. More likely we'll be forced to send out apology letters.

3:

My first novel, of course, 11,000 Years, from Ring of Fire Press. Real science fiction.

5:

Just some boring source code. https://github.com/blgl/s3bd

6:

If you're interested in Aotearoa New Zealand's climate and energy policy, then:

Puncturing the waterbed – climate policy needs more than the Emissions Trading Scheme

Tricksy emissions accounting is not the outrage. Carbon offsetting is.

The Emissions Trading Scheme just broke. This is how to fix it.

Storage is key to preventing blackouts

Despite containing a theme of impending doom worthy of a Stross novel, these are not eligible for a Hugo.

7:

Five articles in the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers newsletter. Should have been more, but I got lazy…

http://newsletter.oapt.ca

Also won an Outstanding Canadian Award, which still feels a bit unreal…

http://www.outcan.ca

8:

It actually shows on other sites as "1632 Press", not "Ring of File Press"?

9:

6 patents

And I'll probably read the FULL Merchant Princes serie, but since I started with the only 4 volumes translated in French, I guess I have to start again with the serie in English.

Thanks for all the fun Mr Stross!

Christian Néel

10:

Not sure why, but nope. The official name is Ring of Fire Press. Started because Baen couldn't publish more than 2 1632-related novels a year, now it's a very serious small press - they publish a new novel by someone every week. They're doing sf&f, and most are not 1632-related.

11:

Is there a Hugo category for "Comments made on a Science-Fiction Author's Blog"?

12:

Finished a serialized series of 4 books in the niche genre of LitRPG (a subset of scifi/fantasy where the world obeys for various reasons the rules of some kind of computer RPG), with a dash of alternate history.

(The Infinite Labyrinth, on the Royal Road web-series site)

A big learning experience as an amateur writer (characters still lack a voice, too much tell vs show, dropped elements between books, and a story that deprives a bit too much the main characters of agency, which was inevitable considering the setting).

13:

"Not eligible for a Hugo, alas."

I would be deeply worried if a scientific paper was eligible for fiction, unless you want to get a "retraction watch" award.

14:

Actually, a hell of a lot of 'scientific' papers are at least as speculative as some science fiction. They are generally rather turgid, though, and wouldn't get a Hugo on those grounds.

15:

"Turgid" is putting it kindly. Part of the problem - in the social sciences, at least - is that reviewers often seem to treat clear and accessible writing as a sign of incompetence/low quality.

16:

That's what I thought. Cheers.

17:
I would be deeply worried if a scientific paper was eligible for fiction, unless you want to get a "retraction watch" award.

That occurred to me, too. However, the paper is mostly about numerical simulations of a mathematical model of animal behavior, so it is fiction, strictly speaking. That is, much of it concerns behavior that never happened in the Real World.

18:
"Turgid" is putting it kindly. Part of the problem - in the social sciences, at least - is that reviewers often seem to treat clear and accessible writing as a sign of incompetence/low quality.

In fact, among my publications is a Letter to Nature, "Write to Reply", on this very problem.

19:

Actually one of my supervisors was seriously keen that I target my first paper, a scoping review, at the (quite new) Lancet Digital Heath (an open access journal). Would have blown my "research support" budget and required a contribution from the university, but apparently this was all very possible. I bugged out for the dugout long before it came up and thank dog.

20:

There's a (licensed, above-board) crowdsourced translation of the remaining Merchant Princes books in progress. Can't remember the name to search on, dammit ...

21:

Not a thing... (unless Git pushes count as "publishing")

I tried a 1500-word entry for the first Cymera fiction competition (unsurprisingly didn't even cause a ripple) and other than that, can only compete with David L and JBS in the "short military-related comments on an SF author's blog" category ;)

22:

Related Work is very flexible

23:

There's a discussion on our email list about the work someone did on this past year's Balticon program book.

24:

I published my fourth novel, Turun valtias (The Lord of Turku). It's urban fantasy, and only out in Finnish. But what the hey, you asked!

25:

I'll finish rewrites on what I hope to be my first published work within the week. It's a novel about a young human male who travels through Orcish country, where he meets an Orcish woman named Face-Cleave, and they have an adventure together.

26:

Its not going to see publication for a year or two, but I am currently writing a chapter of a book on what it was like to work at a Royal Ordnance Factory in the 1980s. We made the best bangs since the big one and, as I recall, staff on the same site were responsible for the rocket's red glare.....

27:

The 2021 publication I'm most proud of appeared at the start of the year. It's on vocational calling and its impact on families. Thanks to my co-author's institution it's available in open-access format. DOI: 10.1177/0950017020980986

I also wrote a chapter (for the German context) on racism in police work that was accepted last year, but it won't be published until sometime this year.

28:

peteratjet @ 21: Related Work is very flexible

I gave up any fantasy I had of being a writer after the third rejection from the Bulwer-Lytton contest because my proposed entry was too prolix.

29:

Part of a county bird report. I'm a species subeditor.

30:

Nothing, I'm afraid.

My first book was published late 2020 (thanks, Covid) and the next one in the series has been drastically delayed (as in, I haven't started) by other life events.

http://www.davros.org/books/

(Not fiction, though there's some drama in it.)

31:

The Merchant Princes series will get my vote...!

My short story "In the Land of Broken Things" was published by SLATE in 2021. It's my first professional sale, which was quite cool.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/05/in-the-land-of-broken-things-josh-bales-short-story.html

32:

We need to get our nominations in.

33:

I published two fantasy novels, one each for each series I'm running.

IN THE SHADE for the continuing saga of Ravin Gambrell (with Bob Eggleton doing the cover because he likes seascapes). Falling in love with an older woman can be fun. Especially when you can see the ghost of the woman she used to be.

THE DRAGON'S CHILD for the continuing saga of Tameron and why raising a baby dragon is...interesting.

Author link https://www.amazon.com/Jean-Lamb/e/B00IR0YO20

Everything but these two books is only 99 cents!

34:

20+ articles....was a mad year, a lots of stuff coming from the lockdown finally coming to fruition https://www.linkedin.com/posts/blucey_research-students-academicresearch-activity-6881975017404469248-fjme

35:

No publications for me! Maybe someday - I've written a few things here and there. Perhaps I'll pull a Charlie Stross someday and unleash a novel a year from compiled prior work. (Very unlikely).

Just wanted to say that, while I am not quite through reading it, I think Invisible Sun is the best of the series. So, good on ya for that.

36:

You should post this under the "Oh 2022" thread - there's a big discussion on renewables and storage

37:

A dozen SF/F stories, plus 8 more due out in 2022, including my first sale to Analog and my second to Darrell Schweitzer.

Bunch of nonfiction too (17 articles): http://geoff-hart.com/articles/2021/index.html

And "Write Faster With Your Word Processor" (http://geoff-hart.com/books/write-faster/write.htm). Four reviews due in shortly, and will publish them via the book's Web page once I receive permission from the publishers.

38:

Congrats on selling to Analog!

39:

Thanks, Whitroth! I was chuffed over the Analog sale all week. Can't wait to see it in print!

40:

Is any of your fiction available online? Searching on Geoff Hart get a lot of hits ....

41:

Elderly Cynic: Yes, you can find my fiction at my Web site: http://geoff-hart.com/fiction/index.htm

Trying to find time to upload all the latest stuff. The "juvenilia" is all there, plus some better recent stuff.

42:

Analog! Very nice!

43:

My GURPS Future History came out in August. It's a companion of sorts to GURPS Space, with advice on creating worlds of the future. (You got into the bibliography twice: for the Laundry files, as an example of near future settings and ontological transformations, and for "Palimpsest," as an example of extremely far future settings.)

I'm currently setting up a campaign set on Mars in 2240, so I'm making use of my own work.

44:

William Stoddard wrote: "My GURPS Future History came out in August."

FYI, John Scalzi offers ongoing "big idea" spot in his blog where authors can describe the big ideas behind their fiction and sometimes non-fiction (https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/06/the-big-idea-open-call-to-publicists-editors-and-authors/). But only for pro-published books (including small press, I believe). SFWA's blog runs an ongoing series of articles by writers, for writers. They're currently soliciting for "pitches" (https://www.sfwa.org/sfwa-publications/sfwa-blog-guidelines/). You could probably pitch something on worldbuilding that they'd like!

45:

Collaboration with the National Physics Laboratory, using my firmware to control a nanopositioning system with a fairly original control loop design, got me a couple of white papers, a conference presentation, and an article in Physics World.

For those who may be interested, the control loop does rather good simultaneous control of position, velocity and acceleration, which is important when you're trying to do a raster scan over an area at a constant speed and sample data at constant intervals. And more importantly, it does it using our standard off-the-shelf kit. Our "accurate-and-slow" scans got the same speeds as the next fastest lab in the world achieved with masses of expensive extra kit, and that was about 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than any commercial equivalent. We're talking minutes instead of days. Even NPL's best results with their full-fat expensive extra kit were still only 3x the speed of our "fast-but-less-accurate" scans.

Pretty chuffed with that.

46:

Yes, impressive. While things were simpler in my day, I can remember several cases where intelligence, ingenuity (and sometimes pragmatism) beat the daylights out of the throw-resources-at-it approach.

47:

Thanks. :) My control loop could actually have been done with op-amps and analogue electronics back in the day (and I did something similar when I was working at GEC Alsthom), but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be anything in the literature like this.

48:

A piece about some little known astronomy-related SF in an outreach and diversity conference proceeding:

Boosting the public engagement with astronomy through arts https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021arXiv211214702I/abstract

49:

Just got permission to publish the first review of "Write Faster With Your Word Processor" (mentioned above) for those who might be interested: http://geoff-hart.com/books/write-faster/write.htm#reviews

50:

can only compete with David L and JBS in the "short military-related comments on an SF author's blog" category

David L never served. So JBS only.

51:

By the way, folks, as of an hour or two ago, I made the new version of my website live MRW, and on it, among other things, is a complete short story - the origin story for a character who appears in 11,000 Years.

52:

Not eligible for a Hugo, alas.

Several categories do not specify fictional works. For example, the 1970 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation went to "TV Coverage of Apollo XI." (Who got the rocket trophy for that, anyway?) But I do suspect that C elegans is insufficiently dramatic.

53:

So: what, if anything, have you published in 2021?

Around September I rediscovered the open-source character Jenny Everywhere (Wikipedia, TV Tropes) and found that while she’d slipped my mind since 2009 or so there were still people remembering her and making fiction. Cool!

So that got me thinking and writing and I’ve turned out a few stories of my own. It's nice to be writing prose fiction again.

54:

David L @ 50:

can only compete with David L and JBS in the "short military-related comments on an SF author's blog" category

David L never served. So JBS only.

Most of my military "expertise" is just knowing there's something to look up. I never really write anything that anyone couldn't find with a decent search engine. My experience gives me a bit of help knowing the most productive search terms to use.

I google all that stuff before I post a comment just to make sure I'm not misremembering something or "speaking out of school" 1 about something that IS classified.

1 Plus looking up phrases like "speaking out of school" to make sure it actually means what I think it means so I don't make more of a fool of myself than is strictly necessary.

55:
"Not eligible for a Hugo, alas."

I would be deeply worried if a scientific paper was eligible for fiction

Various government policies on climate change, on the other hand...

Specials

Merchandise

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on January 17, 2022 4:52 PM.

Brief commercial interlude was the previous entry in this blog.

Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time! is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Search this blog

Propaganda