Self praise is no recommendation!

Absolutely loved this. I ran a poetry press for years and this brought all the good bits back to me.

Astronomy???

It’s a cynical ploy to blow smoke up his orange arse!

30 inside, who are you kidding? More like 12!

I have often found this to be very true. It also works for poems (first lines or verses) and novels (sometimes the whole first chapter isn’t as good as the second).

Chandler stated that whenever he wrote a story he would go back to the first paragraph and cut it. Because once you’ve made a start, always an effort, you then relax and that’s when the real writing begins.

These six novels have been an absolute joy and I’ve only got one more to go and then his collected stories. I’ll be sorry to finish them in a strange kind of bookish mourning.

64. I have included a few I tried very hard to get through but just couldn’t (Atlas Shrugged for instance).

There’s definitely something fishy about this post?

Well then the rules need to be changed or a new award made to make good the inadequacy of the rules in these areas.

They didn’t appear on the final award ballot! That means they could be nominated next year. Though that isn’t what I meant by ghost awards. Simply it could be a retroactive award given to those who were excluded for reasons at the time, corruption, censorship etc., that are now unacceptable

Excellent summation. On the asterisk notion; couldn’t there be some kind of ghost Hugo award given to Kuang, Gaiman et al., at the next or later convention?