I read Dark Matter this summer and was initially very impressed by it, by how well thought out the plot seemed mostly… And half a year later I have no idea what the main character was called or what he was like.

It was a fun read, I enjoyed it - but I can barely recall anything.

Nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t something that will stay with you.

Trope: ‘Always the one we didn’t suspect.’ (Thrillers/Crime/Mystery)

I’ve read quite a few crime and thriller novels this year, and I absolutely hate the way of going back and forth between three or so suspects and then most last minute twists always end up with “oh it was the protagonist’s father” who was the killer. It’s always someone close to them, and who aren’t actively involved in the story until the end. Then BAM! You didn’t see that coming, did you?

Can we please start playing it more straight, having it make sense? It’s so unbelievably stupid to have these last chapter twists all the time, turning pretty decent plots into cheap shock value only. And after reading a few books you know what to look for.

I love twists, but it’s formulaic as hell most of the time even when the stories were great up until that last twist they just had to put in there.

As a literature teacher, this. Lots of kids hates maths, but no one is going out of their way to tell the maths teacher to make it more fun… Meanwhile, everyone has an opinion on something I spent years of my degree studying - what’s the best way to teach kids to analyze and understand literature?

Parents, other teachers and principals… Every single one has an opinion.

The way things are going though, we’ll be reading picture books with ninth graders in a decade.

The craziest thing is that System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries #7) by Martha Wells is nominated for best Science Fiction, and it was literally published 3 days ago - on the 13th November. Come on! I haven’t even received my preordered copy yet.

Most people who vote for that aren’t likely to have had time to read it even, it’s what - 11 days left to vote in the first round? Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if it won, just by of how popular the series is and the author is…

No one will have time to even read through a couple of the books they haven’t read for even one single category, so the whole thing just seems pointless.

This needs to be higher up. A new smash-hit would need to deal with current day issues a bit more overtly. Give kids a way to understand their world and handle their worries.

I think the SF genre definitely has room for that. But magic and fantasy like Harry Potter has way more ability to be timeless than science fiction, where current technology catches up faster. (Would anything really change if HP was set in the 1800’s? Not much, right?)

And I think the publishing industry has changed a lot, so I’m betting the next hit will be a longer series of novellas rather than 700 pages novel length.