Carl is outside in his boxers trying to get his girlfriend’s cat out of a tree when everything with a roof on the planet is destroyed and the smaller number of survivors are made to compete in an intergalactic dungeon game similar to D&D. If this sounds kind of dumb, I described it correctly; it’s kind of dumb. It’s also fairly entertaining and has a good amount of heart. People who have played any sort of role playing game, like World Of Warcraft, will probably be extra amused.
I think there’s a spectrum, with overtly magic based fantasy at one end and hard SF (where the science is grounded in our current understanding) at the other. I don’t see there’s any way to draw a rigid line. I’d put this one somewhere around the center, maybe a bit towards fantasy on the spectrum.
There’s a reason that all of the major SF awards include fantasy. It’s just too hard to draw the line between them.
Yes I covered that in another comment, but it’s more on the fantasy side of the spectrum than science fiction.
The rewards are clumped together, because separate there isn’t enough to warrant the spectacle or the “celebration”. They did try separating them, didn’t last long before they combined them again. It’s why they are separate categories and don’t compete against each other in that sense. It’s not the best sci-fi and fantasy book. There’s one of each.
The Locus awards have separate categories, but the Hugo awards do not, just best novel.