Hugo Nominees: 1986 tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (by Francesca Myman)
Our very strange year invited, among other things, mournful reflections on a past that felt abruptly truncated, and a number of non-fiction titles, though surely in production before the world’s temporary suspension, were eerily attuned to this backward gaze. Then again, SF/F/H have a tendency to steep themselves deeply in their own genre pasts and traditions, even as they often compost these into unexpected futures, so the apparent synchronicity may be illusory. At any rate, Jonathan R. Eller’s
Bradbury Beyond Apollo satisfyingly closed out a minutely researched and finely realized three-volume biography of Ray Bradbury. This concluding tome covers his life and work from the late 1960s through the end of his life in 2012. Collection
January was another lockdown month worse than ever, because now we have a curfew at 8 PM and huge fines for breaking it, which means it’s not just illegal but pretty much impossible to see anyone. Isolation is really getting to me. The numbers are going down, though, which is good, and people are starting to be vaccinated, though I am low on the list. In any case, I spent a lot of time in January on pure escapist reading, and I read twenty-eight books in a variety of genres, with a very high rate of excellence.
A delightful romance, recommended by a friend. Two men in London who haven’t been making relationships work pretend to be each other’s boyfriends and of course end up falling in love. Really well written, memorable, and really fun to read. As an attempt to read feel-good romances that are not set in Italy but are actually good, this was really successful.