Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

For anyone who is nominating for the 2016 Hugos: I got another “here’s your latest ballot” email from MidAmericon II this morning, even though I hadn't made any chances since the previous email about it. (Yes, there have been a lot of those emails lately.) When I looked at the ballot, it turned out that the system had pasted in duplicates of some of my nominations, overwriting some other works I am nominating. I suspect I’m not the only person this has happened to, and I would advise everyone to look at their ballots.

Unfortunately, this isn't something the sysadmins can fix by rolling back the database, because doing that would risk losing changes people meant to make.

ETA: Have heard back from MidAmericon assuring me about normalization, but that won't fix the problem. The problem isn't that the system thought I was nominating some things twice, it's that it dropped some of my nominations.

On Wednesday again, hooray!

Recent reading:

Nemesis, by Agatha Christie. This Miss Marple mystery is I think set later than usual in Miss Marple's life. The set-up is that she learns of the death of a rich man she met on holiday the previous year, and then discovers that he has left her a significant inheritance on condition that she investigates…something. The instructions are deliberately vague, but start with a letter saying he has paid for her to go on a coach tour of famous houses and gardens. Events unfold from there, and Marple in the end lives up to her deceased acquaintance's idea of her as "nemesis," one of the Kindly Ones. A couple of stereotypes are explicitly knocked down, and justice is eventually done. (Warning: there's a mostly-abstract discussion among some of the characters that is full of rape culture assumptions.)

The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. This drew me in, in a way that relatively few books have in the last few years. (I don't know if that's becaues it's that good, or a hopeful sign about the future.) Maia is a lonely 18 year old who suddenly finds himself Emperor of the Elflands after his father and older half-brothers are murdered. He has a lot to learn, because it never occurred to his guardian that Maia would need to know much about politics, or much else. He has a realistic amount of trouble finding his footing, and a lot happens in a year. Part of what I liked about this book is that it's not a story about an obscure person who is the only hope for his people, or the world. He does want to be a good emperor, and not just because he's stuck with the job, and his definition of "good" isn't the same as the last few emperors', but it's one a lot of us could agree with, from concern for the well-being of his subjects to taking an interest in even dull-sounding legal issues. Also, there's a good scene with a steam-powered model bridge. (As a side note, if you find yourself lost in the sea of names and foreign terminology, there are glossaries and lists of characters at the back, which I wish I'd noticed before I finished the book.

This is on the Hugo ballot for best novel; if I don't vote straight "no award" in every category, I would be happy to vote for this, and think Monette deserved the award. (I need to give the Liu another try and see if I can get past the gory first chapter about the Cultural Revolution; I liked Leckie's Ancillary Sword but right now would rank this higher.) [If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry about it: it has nothing to do with the quality of this novel.]


(Nothing in progress)

What I plan to read next:

Past Forgetting, by Jill Robinson, a memoir about amnesia.