It's past the voting deadline, and I didn't vote in the dramatic presentation long form category, but I'm still trying to watch the shortlisted films.

I'd not seen Dune part one, so watched that and then part two (which was on the shortlist this year). It's one book turned into two lengthy films, and part two has a rubbish ending - we get no sense of Paul becoming Emperor as any kind of triumph before it's undermined by the immediate start of the next war. They are both grand spectacles, but their pacing is odd - at times it seems to be dragging and then key events are rather rushed over (so you're left not really quite understanding what happened without resorting to plot summaries after the fact). And the racial politics have dated poorly, shall we say? And I don't think the whole sandworm ecosystem is even vaguely plausible. But there's some great scheming and some interesting characters (albeit that a lot of the villains are entirely 2-dimensional).

The Wild Robot is an altogether different film, very heavy-handed with its messaging and happy to tug on the heart-strings. The plot doesn't really stand up to scrutiny (robot has access to all human knowledge, but doesn't know how geese swim? etc.), but it's well-animated and has lots of fun moments. And despite being the film of the first book of a trilogy, it actually has a decent ending! But I really struggled to suspend my disbelief because the plot is so full of holes.

This is a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, and provides the backstory for Imperator Furiosa in that film. So here we see her life from a child in one of the remaining green places to the Imperator we meet in Fury Road.

Aside from the opening, this film is very much in the orange-and-black dieselpunk post-apocalyptic vein of Fury Road. There's a lot of high-speed chase-come-fight sequences, which are quite the spectacle, a fair amount of bloody violence, and some quirky funny moments (especially from Chris Hemsworth as Dementus), which provide a little comic relief.

Furiosa doesn't let off full throttle very often, so this is not one to watch for interesting ideas or a nuanced plot. But if you can avoid thinking too hard about how plausible it all is (or isn't), it is pretty entertaining.

I've consumed two things from the 2025 Hugo Award shortlist recently. They're Quite Different.

The first was The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. I loved this; it's a crime thriller set in a fantasy world, where The Empire exists to keep its people safe from Leviathans. It has a lot of what you'd expect from the crime genre; whilst a couple of times that meant that I spotted the plot twist or reveal coming, there was still plenty here to keep me guessing (and turning the pages). It also talks about power and money (and how those with both can often keep clear of the law), and perhaps something about how we treat those who aren't the same as ourselves. There are some quite gruesome bits. I have a suspicion that there may be a sequel or two, which I look forward to reading :)

Flow is an animated film without any dialogue. After some apocalypse that has removed all of humanity, a flood comes, and a little cat (our point-of-view character) is nearly swept away. Over time it meets and befriends some other animals, and they have adventures together. This is not a plot-driven film, and I think works better if thought of as a poem in cinematic form. There are moments of very authentical animal behaviour, and also some rather less plausible ones (like animals being able to operate a tiller). I would have liked to have seen this on a big screen, I think.

I've recently been watching Shetland on iPlayer. It's a pretty good crime series set on Shetland. After a bit of a wait, I got Raven Black, the first of the books on which the series is based, from the library.

It's not the first novel to be adapted (they did Red Bones, the third book, first), so it's possible some of the changes relate to events that will happen later in book-canon, but I was quite surprised at how different the book and TV were. The main plot is quite similar (in terms of who killed whom and why), but there are changes even then (Magnus Bain's involvement in historic events, particularly), but there are number of quite significant changes to characters - Tosh doesn't appear at all, and book-Cassie is a young girl still living with her mother, whilst Perez is significantly less sympathetic (in particular around his opinions on Sandy). And the solution in the book seems quite rabbit-from-a-hat, even when I knew who the killer was in advance.

I am undecided if I want to try and read more of the books by Ann Cleeves, but it was certainly interesting to read Raven Black (and unusual for me to be coming to the book-canon second rather than first).

ETA: There's a short film Alison O'Donnell Remembers: Shetland where the actor who plays Tosh talks about how and why the character was developed for the TV adaptation.

Again, in reading order:

美食三品 (Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times), 宝树 / Baoshu. What if you could experience food as another eats it? Quite a nice story, but I found the biology hard to swallow...

The Sound of Children Screaming, Rachael K. Jones. An angry story about gun violence in schools.

The Mausoleum’s Children, Aliette de Bodard. A strange and well-sketched world, with some good twists.

How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub, P. Djèlí Clark. What could possibly go wrong? I'm afraid I found the plot here a bit too obvious.

Better Living Through Algorithms, Naomi Kritzer. I was expecting this to head for one of two obvious cliché endings (and thus to be annoying), but actually it went elsewhere and I thought it was pretty good.

Answerless Journey, Han Song (tr. Alex Woodend). Two people wake up on a spaceship without their memories; an interesting idea, but it needed some answers to actually be engaging.

In order-of-reading:

The Year Without Sunshine, Naomi Kritzer. A story of a neighbourhood coming together to deal with the eponymous calamity; more optimistic than a lot of the things I've read recently, almost too much so.

One Man’s Treasure, Sarah Pinsker. Another story about exploitation; I liked the world-building and the plot.

On the Fox Roads, Nghi Vo. The Fox Roads may appear for you if you really need to run away from something. Here we have people running away from home, and maybe finding new ones.

Ivy, Angelica, Bay, C. L. Polk. Witchcraft, and other ways to protect your neighbourhood. A twisty tale, with plenty of heart. I think my favourite of these.

Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition, Gu Shi (tr. Emily Jin). A slightly confusingly-told story about the societal impact of being able to "cryosleep" for a few decades. I'm not sure the framing story actually helped here, and I found the writing a bit clunky, but there are interesting ideas.

I AM AI, Ai Jiang. Another corporate dystopia; unfortunately, I didn't really find the point of view character particularly compelling, so this fell rather flat for me.

Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher. A telling of Sleeping Beauty that wonders if there was good reason for the sleeper to be enchanted thus. I enjoyed the narrative voice (and unusual choice of narrator), and the sense of the otherness of fairy; and the shape of the story and its twists.

Rose/House, Arkady Martine. A nice mash-up of locked-room, haunted house, and noir, even if a little too self-referential in calling out its own genre clichés. I loved the setting and the growing sense of menace, but what is going to keep it off the top spot for me is the ending, which felt a little too ill-defined. Rather like this week's Dr Who episode, if you're going to build up a great mystery, then just leaving the viewer/reader guessing at the end can feel very unsatisfactory.

I've now read all of these (although I didn't write a review of Some Desperate Glory when I read it some time back), so time to vote.

1. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty
2. Witch King, Martha Wells
3. Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
4. Translation State, Ann Leckie
5. The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera
6. Starter Villain, John Scalzi

I'm hoping the voter packet will be out soon, as otherwise tracking down all the short fiction will become tedious...

There's a lot of interesting ideas in this book, some plot twists that sneak up on you, and a strange yet believable setting. But somehow it didn't quite work for me. I like that it's not a typical hero's journey sort of book, but the effect of this is that it feels like the point of view character has very little agency; things happen to them for reasons which are often unclear (and for reasons that often don't even become clear later on). And I'm afraid that left me feeling rather disengaged from the narrative, too.

That's a shame, because the start is arresting, there are a number of nicely-drawn characters, and a very twisty plot that doesn't feel contrived. And there is a lot being said about violence, racism, empire, and trying to grow up as yourself rather than what your parents want you to be; I can see why this book has had a lot of rave reviews.

I think this is the first non-Murderbot book by Martha Wells that I've read. Kai, the main character, wakes up in a sticky situation, and there are two narratives through the book: one in the present where he tries to work out how and why he ended up in that sticky situation, and one in The Past where we find out about Kai's back-story and the recent history of the world.

I found this really hard to put down; granted some of that was because the book tends to shift between the two narratives at cliff-hangers, but also because I wanted to learn more about the world and to see what would happen next. I've seen criticism online that few of the characters other than Kai are particularly fleshed out, and I think that's fair, but then Kai is a very interesting character. It's not a book that holds your hand in terms of the world-building, but I didn't find that a problem.

There is quite a bit of violence (and the sort of large-scale death attendant on warfare), and I think some of what Wells wants to talk about is the impact of that sort of large-scale trauma on people and societies, but I think there is also hope here, and examples of people trying hard to do better and work together.

It feels like space has been left for a sequel (though one is not currently planned, I gather), which I would very much enjoy reading, but this is a good stand-alone story.