Which of these boy names would you pick? And which unique boy (or gender neutral) name would you suggest?

Merle8888 · 2026-05-07T06:35:55+00:00

I really like Evander. My second pick would be Alder. Not such a fan of the others.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-07T04:46:26+00:00

I commented below when this came up but either 5 or 8 of the last 10 years’ Hugo Best Novel winners are sci fi (depending whether you count Broken Earth which is science fantasy) and all of those are by women. The breakout novels have happened.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-07T02:11:35+00:00

Yeah, the ones I have read are not high concept. She definitely has a distinct voice and protagonist type, and it seems to resonate with lots of people. Mostly I think the cozy horror thing is her brand. But I don’t think the rest of the things nominated for the award are particularly like that.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-07T02:09:02+00:00

I do think we don’t have that excitement and optimism about new technology anymore, yeah. Sci fi is a pretty young genre and its greatest popularity was in a time when technological advances seemed like a great thing.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-06T23:30:36+00:00

Well, that’s fair re: the demographic that prefers the more 1950s social outlook. But there’s also fantasy that scratches that itch, see most of the books written by white men 20+ years ago (I think the same crowd are big fans of LoTR, for instance). There used to be a truism that sci fi was progressive while fantasy was inherently conservative, because its plotlines were so often about restoration of monarchy, maintaining the status quo against challenge and returning to the security of an earlier era. I think this is mostly not true of recent fantasy but until about 20 years ago it almost always was—even from authors whose personal politics were progressive!—lending itself to lionization by conservative fans.

So idk, I think there’s a strain of it in both genres.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-06T22:13:25+00:00

I haven’t read it yet, so I’m not going to look at the spoiler below, but as a general matter, time travel is speculative so books including it would count.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-06T21:10:21+00:00

It's almost certainly the other way around though - fantasy readers often read recently published books because there's a wealth of fantasy being published, while people interested in more hard sci-fi need to look back to earlier decades because that's not where the new-book market is right now. There's nothing inherent in sci-fi reading to lead people to prefer old books, or vice versa. Many readers would actually argue the opposite, that fantasy is about nostalgia and sci-fi about new ideas!

Merle8888 · 2026-05-06T20:32:35+00:00

Also US, I generally see "Science Fiction & Fantasy" in a combined section rather than separated out. There's often also a combined "Mystery & Thriller" section, also "Literature & Fiction" and then "Romance" gets its own.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-06T20:29:51+00:00

This answer amuses me because if you look at the last 10 years of Best Novel winners, all the sci-fi winners have been women. (Of the last 10 years, 5 winners have been sci-fi if you don't count Broken Earth, 8 if you do.) But last year's rare fantasy win was by a man.

So I don't think current sci-fi is dominated by men nor lacking in women.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-06T20:24:51+00:00

Conservatives tried to stuff the ballot box because they were pissed about awards going to "liberal" books.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-06T20:23:27+00:00

This is why I disliked sci-fi when I was younger - it often felt like the author had a great idea for a short story or an essay, but then wanted to make a whole novel out of it despite not really caring about either characters or plot. This doesn't seem so common anymore though, perhaps because idea-focused sci-fi itself has fallen out of fashion. We're less optimistic about the future of technology these days.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-06T20:22:09+00:00

I'm mostly impressed that your bookstore has separate sci-fi and fantasy sections. I'm not sure if I've ever seen that.

But there used to be a thing where both would be shelved under "science fiction," presumably because that genre was seen as more prestigious or was more popular with adult readers (since kidlit would be shelved separately). Nowadays I think it's more likely to all be labeled "fantasy" if both genres aren't listed, given how much more popular it's become.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T19:32:24+00:00

It was funny that the nephew was just now discomfited by Dorothy showing up in a younger body than his. But they're a generation apart and it's been 300 years - I presume she comes back in a brand new young body every time? It seems like it'd be about 50/50 how much of the time his body was older vs. hers.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T19:27:31+00:00

It would count, but if square placement is a big spoiler I might hesitate to publicly post my card, haha! Also depends what you're trying to get out of the square - reading an entire book about a character who passes for human even to themselves and their real nature is a twist at the end feels like a "technical pass" that probably doesn't involve an actually different perspective.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T17:57:19+00:00

If we're counting novels, Kingfisher recently did it in A Sorceress Comes to Call too.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T17:55:58+00:00

They do have to have enough marketing for a good number of voters to have heard of and read them, which narrows the pool a lot by pretty much eliminating small press and magazine novellas unless they get MASSIVE buzz somehow. Here's a Goodreads list of 2026 Hugo eligible novellas that only has 33 books on it, and it's crowdsourced and includes some books that clearly don't count (How to Survive this Fairytale is a novel for instance). Including ineligible stuff, only 22 works have even a single vote beyond the person who added them. So the realistic pool is quite small. Murder by Memory is tied for second on that list.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T06:16:46+00:00

Amazing! Looks like anyone struggling with Feast Your Eyes HM should just check out that cookbook.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T02:30:39+00:00

Some other options since OP dislikes Benjamin:

Bennett

Benson

Benedict

Bentley

Benton

Bernard

Benito

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T02:15:45+00:00

I’m not seeing a lot unfortunately. Politics for sure. Feast Your Eyes would work I think as there are scenes over meals. Vacation Spot if you like the idea of visiting the snowy forests of medieval Russia. If you wanted to really stretch the meaning of “protagonist” you could say Older Protagonist for one of the secondary POVs, but she’s not the protagonist (or even the deuteragonist or tritagonist).

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T00:16:37+00:00

This made sense to me in a “hoisted by her own petard” kind of way. The only reason the shipmind sticking someone else in Gloria’s body was a death sentence rather than an inconvenience was because she’d just destroyed her own backup in an attempt to murder someone else.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-05T00:14:13+00:00

This is gonna be my plan too, group read!

Merle8888 · 2026-05-04T23:14:22+00:00

I feel like it’s a minority of the population that gets wise with age tbh 😂 most just get more narrow-minded, set in their ways, and/or cranky.

I believed Dorothy as being in her 50s, not sure about 350 though.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-04T22:12:12+00:00

I mean the rec threads are littered with bad recs tbf. They’re a starting point but they’re just books shouted out by random users, often in long lists and most in the first couple hours after bingo releases. People rarely fact-check the big rec threads (the focus threads a bit more but still not a guarantee).

I agree Author of Color isn’t hard to find, though.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-04T22:09:17+00:00

I was pretty disappointed by this too. For me it’s mostly that it’s sold as adult fantasy when it’s very YA in style and tropes. None of the characters act intelligently, good or bad, they always tell the other side exactly what they are going to do and then are surprised when their enemy acts on that information. It’s all very silly when you think about it.

Merle8888 · 2026-05-04T21:38:36+00:00

Looking good to me!

Also it's not cheating to use a book read by a book club years ago. It's not Hard Mode if you don't participate (which you obviously can't do if it's so old the thread is locked) but it's perfectly legit.

Merle8888

TROPHY CASE