Other Hugo Recommendations

I have to admit, I have a soft spot for the Haxan world by Kenneth Mark Hoover. I love a good weird west tale and Haxan is it. Someday, the worlds of Mowry, AZ and Haxan, AZ will collide and it will be epic. — HOW I CREATED HAXAN I fell into writing westerns, and dark fantasy westerns, entirely by accident. About five years ago I started listening to the Old Time Radio Gunsmoke series. These were created and written by John Meston, a writer who wanted to bring adult sensibilities to the western. He hated what Hollywood had done to the Old West, relying on crude mythology and cliches. He wanted to write adult stories about the men and women of that time in a responsible way, leaving behind more cartoonish aspects which had taken root in the collective mind. The OTR portrayal of Matt Dillon is very different...

I know Cat from conventions and the local coffeshop. I also know her writing and love it. I’m completely biased and I really enjoyed the Near + Far collection. — My favorite thing about Near + Far is that I was worried at one point that I couldn’t write SF. I’ve never been a sciencey person. I like reading about it, but when it comes to numbers and metals and periodic weights, a little part of my head goes wandering off into the forest, gathering daisies, until the numbers have gone away. But one of the cool things about science fiction is that it’s social science too, and that’s an area that interests me greatly. Some of my favorite books fall into this view, like Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean, Kay Kenyon’s The Braided World, or Louise Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan. That’s where I went when I wrote...