Re: Hugo Shortlist 2008

Butch Malahide <fred.galvin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> On Mar 21, 12:38 pm, David T. Bilek <davidbi...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > [. . .]
> > Best Related Book
> > The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in
> > Community by Diana Glyer; appendix by David Bratman (Kent State
> > University Press)
> > Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millennium by
> > Barry Malzberg (Baen)
> > Emshwiller: Infinity x Two by Luis Ortiz, intro. by Carol Emshwiller,
> > fwd. by Alex Eisenstien (Nonstop)
> > Brave New Words: the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction by Jeff
> > Prucher (Oxford University Press)
> > The Arrival by Shaun Tan (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic)
> 
> The only one of these I have is "Brave New Words". Would anyone care
> to comment on the others? (I'm not so much interested in handicapping
> the awards, as in finding out if I should buy any of them.)

_The Arrival_, as another Andrew has already mentioned, is a wonderful
wordless graphic novel about an immigrant's experience. It's visually
inventive, has amazing storytelling, and is universal in a way that only
a bare handful of books are.

_Breakfast in the Ruins_ is an expansion of Malzberg's 1982 non-fiction
collection _Engines of the Night_, which is one of the great books of SF
history and criticism to that date. The new stuff isn't quite as strong,
and isn't anywhere near as focused, but it's still a great depressive
book about SF. (I reviewed it on my blog:
http://antickmusings.blogspot.com/2007/04/just-read-breakfast-in-ruins-b
y-barry-n.html.)

I haven't seen the other two -- I haven't even *heard of* the Glyer book
previously.

-- 
Andrew Wheeler