Today I read the Hugo Award nominations. Blade Runner, by virtue of it starting with the letter B, was the first film listed in the category “Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.” I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but I admit that I was.

I was looking forward to this movie. I posted back in May 2017 that I wanted to see it. In fact, I was really disappointed when I couldn’t see it on release day. I was terrified that it would no longer be in theaters when I finally got to see it on October 28th. And honestly, that fear was justified. It should not have lasted that long.

Sleepers by Megg Jensen One of the things I like best about my iPad is reading books on it. And with the proliferation of ebooks there are so many more available to read. I check a lot of books out of the library using Overdrive, but I also like to check out authors I’m not familiar with, especially if they offer inexpensive or free copies of their books. Sleepers was on my list of recommendations from Amazon, and it has the wonderful price of free — hard to beat that. So, I downloaded it, and read it. And honestly, I wish I could get that time back. I realized when I was around 81% through the book that the only reason I was continuing to read it was because I was so close to the end, I wanted to get it finished. Ironically, at that point I decided to go to Amazon.com and write a review of it there. I figured, with only 19-20% of the book left, how much could I be missing? Famous last words. When I wrote the review on Amazon, I disliked it because it was clichéd, boring, the world is fairly undeveloped, and things happen unbelievably quickly (e.g. the main character is in love with one person one day and someone completely different the next). In my Amazon review, I wrote “All I really know is that two countries warred, her country lost, and she was made hostage to the winning country with two child compatriots.” After that review went live, I finished reading the entire book, and realized that that statement is wrong! Oh, it’s correct for the first 80-85% of the book, but at the end the author pops some surprises, and one of the major ones in this story [spoiler alert] is that the “losing” side of the battle was really the winning side. They had used their magic to basically enslave the entire country to prepare it for their invasion. And one of the bits of that magic was to have them all believe that they were the winners in a war. If you are asking yourself, “why would they do that?” Believe me, you’re not alone. This twist seemed somewhat pointless. But there are many other twists that come along in the last 20% of the book, including:

A Legend of Earthsea SciFi Channel

Let me first say that I haven’t read A Wizard of Earthsea or The Tombs of Atuan since I was 10 years old or so. So, bearing that in mind, I watched A Legend of Earthsea on the SciFi Channel without a lot of expectations. I’d watched them mess with their original series Farscape until it was just a bunch of loose ends and then tie it back together again when the fan-base screamed bloody murder. So, I wasn’t expecting a lot from this movie.