awards
2013-2014 Year in Review
We’re capping year two of Novel Ideas with our Year in Review episode. In this episode we list our Top and Bottom 5 books of the year, as well as handing out various awards for books we read this year. Subjects include the typical, such as: classics, YA, science fiction, bestsellers, characters, and social issues. We also get into some of our usual silliness like the importance of staying alive versus finding a boyfriend, weird sex, Gabs ships, and terrible ad copy. For those of you playing at home, see if you can guess which twenty minutes were punched in after the fact.
The music bump is “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.
At the end of this episode, we will tell you that our next episode will be a “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, but I think it will actually be The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman.
This entry was posted in Episodes and tagged awards, best/worst characters, best/worst relationships, boredom, bottom 5, criteria for lists, disappointment, dishonorable mentions, finding a boyfriend, Gabs ships, honorable mentions, importance of classics, listener questions, lists, Maurice and modernity, neverending sucky, Neville takes a level in badass, parental guidance, representations of women, slavery?, social issues, surprises, terrible ad copy, top 5, weird sex.
Novel Ideas 
2017 Hugo Noms
Posted on
We interrupt this irregularly scheduled podcast with a special, albeit belated, episode. We decided to sit down and discuss the 2017 Hugo Award Nominees for Best Novel. Extra heavy spoiler alert on this episode, as every book we talk about was published in 2016 at the earliest. In addition to touching on every nominated book, we also discuss diversity, writing styles, identity, and the proliferation of series in the SF/Fantasy world. We also talk about scenes that make you feel, writers who have never met a woman before, the future corporate age of exploration, and the cool factor of space wizards wielding laser swords.
The music bump is “Robots” by Flight of the Conchords because, as discussed in this episode of the podcast, all science fiction is about robots.
113 – 2017 Hugo Noms – Diversity of Ideas
This entry was posted in Episodes and tagged A Closed and Common Orbit, Ada Palmer, All the Birds in the Sky, Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie, awards, Becky Chambers, bullying, character drive story, Charlie Jane Anders, Cixin Liu, Claire S., colonialism, corporate age of exploration, cultural differences, Death's End, diversity, diversity of ideas, emotions, Enlightenment Era, friendless loners, genres, Hella spoilers, identity, manners and civility, math magic, meta, N.K. Jemisin, Ninefox Gambit, posting schedule, pretentious, series, social commentary, space wizards, spoilers, strangeness, style shifts, The Obelisk Gate, This American Life, Too Like the Lightning, trans allegory, writers who have never met a woman, Yoon Ha Lee.