Our heartfelt congratulations to this year's Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding award winners! The winners are listed here, along with links to this year's administrator's report and voting statistics.
seattlein2025.org
I have heard good things but have not read the best novel winner...
The only one I've actually "read" of this year's crop is
Caves of Qud, which my god is that a well-deserved win.
Cave of Qud is probably most surprisingly brilliant game I've come across, especially wild as I bought it years ago, though it was kind of pretentious and unfun after like fifteen minutes, came back last year after it reached 1.0, and it's now sitting at 125 hours played on my Steam!
I strongly recommend it to anyone who likes "weird" fantasy/sci-fi or just good games - you don't have to play it on roguelike mode (it's true roguelike, not the modern kind, i.e. nothing carries over, so there's no reason to unless you enjoy that) either, it's really good on the mode where you don't perma-die too. Indeed I'd recommend that as how to start out. Also strongly recommend using a controller, which might sound insane for a game as old-skool as this, but for whatever reason, the controller controls, whilst they take a few minutes to get used to, are incredibly good! The game is actually more fun like that than with a keyboard!
I did read the first novel in
Between Earth and Sky series, and thought it was cool and had a strong setting but was largely unmoved by the story and characters (unlike Roanhorse's other books, which were strong there), a lot of whom were quite strongly concepted but felt a bit like RPG characters with unique backstories and classes rather than people. Maybe it gets more compelling in the latter ones.
I guess I should read
The Tainted Cup, especially now that apparently "murder mystery" is the new genre to do SFF versions of! As predicted by one of my friends a few years ago after he saw Knives Out! and then read Gideon The Ninth (which I believe is probably to credit with starting this trend - a trend some other people already got in on - Rose/House by Arkady Martine, for example (I have it but haven't read it) - I mean there have always been a few SFF murder mysteries, I think we're going a bit more "Agatha Christie" with it though - certainly Gideon The Ninth invoked some of those tropes).
