Best Novel
Based on what I've read of both authors, I don't think even the best John Scalzi novel could surpass the worst N. K. Jemisin novel. Scalzi's character work, world building, and prose style are all basically nonexistent-- whereas Jemisin's are astounding. So even though I didn't like The Stone Sky a whole lot, I'm quite comfortable placing The Collapsing Empire below it, as it's clearly not the best John Scalzi novel.
6. No Award
If The Stone Sky won, I would chalk it up to differing tastes and move on, even if I don't particularly think it should win. But if John Scalzi wins another Hugo, and wins it for this, I will be deeply embarrassed at the taste of the Hugo voters, so below No Award it is.
I was nowhere near as into this as I was the first book of the Broken Earth trilogy; it did not have The Fifth Season's emotional power. And I still really liked The Obelisk Gate. But I found this installment more tedious than anything else, alas, with too much focus on aspects of the story that the book wasn't able to make me care for. I suspect Jemisin will win again, but if so, it will be in spite of my vote.
This book has an excellent elevator pitch-- locked-room murder mystery with clones in space!-- and whenever I describe it to someone, they get pretty excited. The actual book, though, isn't as good as its premise. The Stone Sky might be a better book, to be honest, but I am legitimately worried that Jemisin will be the first person to score three Hugo Awards for Best Novel in a row for a book I don't think really deserves it, so I'm ranking Six Wakes higher. Is that unnecessarily negative reasoning?
I thought this book was basically fine. Ancillary Justice was a thrill; Leckie's first novel outside the Ancillary trilogy isn't bad, but isn't anything special either. It's probably pretty comparable to Six Wakes in that it starts strong, but doesn't maintain that, but it holds together to a greater degree than Six Wakes, and I was pretty uninterested in Six Wakes by the time it wound down, but this maintained my interest.
I was surprised how much I ended up enjoying Raven Stratagem, given I ranked the book to which it is a sequel sixth on my 2017 Hugo ballot! But whether the book was better or I just adapted to the wacky math-based space opera antics of the Machineries of Empire series, I ended up enjoying this a lot. If the ending had felt less anticlimatic, I'd've ranked it above New York 2140, but I still would be happy to see this win.
This isn't a great novel, I don't think, but I did really enjoy it, and though near-future isn't my usual kind of sf, the book does do the kind of things I like my sf to do, which is to say it's full of neat ideas about "another world" while revealing truths about the world we live in. It's clearly the best of the finalists this year.
Best Related Work
The first half of this book is a memoir: Zoë Quinn was the woman at the heart of the so-called Gamergate controversy, who for the crime of cheating on her boyfriend was subjected to an Internet harassment campaign supposedly concerned with ethics in games journalism. There's some background on Quinn, on her relationship, on the actual incident, and on the follow-up-- it basically destroyed her life and relationships for years. At times, it's surprisingly light on detail, because Quinn has little desire to relive it, and because she doesn't want to feed the trolls. The second half is a more general discussion of Internet harassment and her efforts to combat it; I had known the outline of Gamergate itself, but I did not know about Crash Override, Quinn's anti-harassment support organization. The book is mildly interesting, but not great. Quinn's treatment of events in which she herself was involved lacks emotional weight, and there are times I found the insights banal. The real deciding factor in my ranking, though, is that it's just not that relevant to science fiction and fantasy, and so ends up at the bottom of by ballot. (I think this might be inconsistent with the position I adopt toward No Time to Spare below, but oh well.)
This book is a collection of essays about Octavia Butler, mostly in the form of letters to her. It's okay. I'm sure the letters were all deeply, individually meaningful to write, but reading a number of them becomes a bit samey, as not many of them are imbued with lots of specifics. I also have a suspicion that the number of them that revolve so much around the election of President Trump will age badly. Or maybe that's more of a hope, though it does indicate to me that I need to read Butler's Parables books. Anyway, I did enjoy several of the essays (I had a slight bias toward the academic ones, perhaps unsurprisingly), but on the whole I didn't find this book essential, and don't feel I learned a whole lot about Butler from it.
Two coincidences influenced my reading of this book. The first is that Harlan Ellison died about three weeks before I began reading it, making me aware of how little I'd read of his work (the only complete book being the I, Robot screenplay). The second is that a week before I began it, I was perusing the archives of the Science Fiction Research Association Newsletter, where I found this comment by Bob Collins in a 1988 issue: "In the case of especially prickly authors like Harlan, the price of an 'authorized' critical biography may well be the total compromise of the critic's integrity." Now, A Lit Fuse specifically disavows being critical or a biography; it's more like an autobiography, as Segaloff primarily strings together a number of interviews he's done with Ellison into a narrative of sorts, and doesn't really do a lot to render other perspectives on Ellison, or have any kind of objective stance. Segaloff is clearly a big admirer of Ellison, and his faults are usually rendered in an admiring way, too. Which is fine, I guess, but this book as a result, this is definitely more a book for the Ellison devotee than the general sf fan. All that said (and there's many more quibbles one could make; I thought the depiction of the incident where Ellison allegedly grabbed Connie Willis's breast was particularly poor), even though I had more interest in the Octavia Butler book going in than this book, I was still pretty much entertained throughout. Ellison knows how to tell a story, and even if many of them aren't true, or put him in an inaccurately flattering light, I enjoyed reading the book. It's not a great book, and possibly not even a good one, but it is interesting enough.
This volume collects short pieces by Liz Bourke, (mostly) book reviews that were (mostly) previously published on-line, (mostly) at Tor.com. They're very short, usually 2-3 pages long. Bourke is an okay reviewer. Several were really interesting and made me want to read the books in question, and I scribbled down some titles on my "To buy" list. Sometimes, though, I finished the review without a strong sense of why she had liked or disliked it. I think there were only two reviews of books that I had read already: Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice (2013) and Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant (2015). The latter of these was one of my favorite pieces in the book; a strongly worded negative review that made me reevaluate my take on the book, even though I really liked it myself.* (It's also the only book by a male author she reviews.) On the other hand, there's a long section where Bourke mostly reviews epic fantasy and/or sword-and-sorcery, genres that hold little appeal for me. It's clearly in the middle tier of this year's related works, but I struggled to rank it versus A Lit Fuse. There are things I definitely found more enjoyable about Lit Fuse, but I ended up deciding that Lit Fuse is not the best Ellison biography that could be written, but this is inherently the best collection of Bourke's reviews that could exist, so it succeeds at what it aims to do more.
In a sense, this book's connection to science fiction is tenuous-- Le Guin talks about it very little-- but I enjoyed almost every minute of it, and we'll never see Le Guin's like again. So even if this book isn't about sf, sf brought me to Le Guin, and that's a related enough "Related Work" for me.
Related works can be trickier to compare to each other than works in, say, the prose fiction categories; what No Time to Spare and Iain M. Banks are trying to do is very different. This book is an academic monograph covering the entire sf corpus of Iain Banks-- a man whose work I have read distressingly little of (just The Bridge, The Wasp Factory, and The State of the Art). Despite that, I could tell that this was a strong piece of literary criticism, providing a couple threads that pull you across Banks's work; Kincaid emphasizes the Culture as a society, Banks's experiments with form, and Banks's anti-great man reworking of the space opera genre, among other things. It made me even more distressed at how little Banks I have read. I might have enjoyed No Time to Spare more, but I feel like this is more what this category should be about, and the kind of thing I would like to encourage. Though maybe I'm just biased as a monograph-writing academic myself. (Also, there was a citation of Bill Hardesty, an undergraduate professor of mine partially responsible for my graduate school career, so that was nice.)
Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo)
This isn't a bad book (none of these are bad books), it's just very much not my thing. All the other YA finalists take place in magical worlds of sort, whereas this book is very much grounded in our world with a single, somewhat small, fantasy element. The main character is anorexic, but the more he starves himself, the more superpowers he gains. Most of the story is about teen love and self-image, and it's well done, but it's just not want I want out of YA fiction. (Incidentally, it is one of two books on the YA ballot to feature queer, nerdy, culturally Jewish redheads falling in love with their school's biggest jock.)
Fundamentally, I enjoyed this book, but am not sure I would rank it highly in the stakes for an award. Which is to say, I enjoyed it as a cozy return to a familiar world, but am not sure we should be handing out awards to cozy returns to familiar worlds.
I struggled ranking this versus La Belle Sauvage. Both were good, even very good, but neither quite knocked my socks off. In the end, I decided to reward innovation over familiarity. Okorafor might be working with familiar tropes, but she has done interesting things by placing them in a (to me) unfamiliar world, while Pullman has really done no such thing, as charming as a return to Lyra's Oxford is.
This isn't a perfect book, but it is a really charming, well executed portal-quest fantasy. I can imagine reading this aloud to my child someday, and I'd happily see it win, even though I feel like the author's short prose fiction is stronger-- but maybe being as good as "The Tomato Thief" is an impossibly high standard.
What one wants out of award-winners is always tricky, of course. I feel like in a genre-based award, one wants some level of innovation in the genre, or at least perfection of it. Though I enjoyed all the books ranked lower than this one, I can't claim any of them did that. Like, I liked them, and they did do interesting things, but they're all familiar in their own ways. A Skinful of Shadows, on the other hand, is captivating and clever, and the kind of thing that I feel ought to be winning awards.
Of course, one of the best YA books turns out to be one of the ones I didn't buy. In Other Lands starts out funny, with a snotty kid moving into a fantasy land. Like Summer in Orcus, the book consciously riffs on the genre's conventions, with the main character one who has read portal fantasies and thus having some ideas of what he's in for, only he doesn't want to be a "child soldier" or to solve conflicts with battle; he wants to be a diplomat. Elliot, age 13, falls in love with a beautiful elf woman from a matriarchal society, and also ends up falling in with Luke, who Elliot thinks of as a jock; Luke is the scion of a noble family in the Borderlands, and basically the coolest kid in school, the antithesis to everything Elliot stands for, but Elliot needs his help to woo Serene. All three of them are students at a training camp dedicated to defending the Borderlands from real-world incursion, where students can train as soldiers or diplomats, who are in theory of equal status, but really it's all about the soldiers. There are a lot of jokes (an early sequence where Serene can't understand why humans find topless women scandalous is a particular highlight). The book also critiques many of the conventions of the YA fantasy genre, through Elliot's determination to find another way. At one point, he also self-identifies with Eustace in Narnia, which of course won him over to me. If the book was like this all the way through, I'd probably be ranking it second or third here, on par with Summer in Orcus, which does (as I said) similar work. But it's also deeply emotional, especially in a sequence about halfway through. The book covers five years, with a different over-arching issue each year; in one, the Borderlands actually go to war! One summer, Elliot is at a party at Luke's family's house, and the emotions are painfully real depictions of what it's like to be fifteen and lonely and uncertain about your place in the world. As soon as I read that bit, I knew the book would get my top spot as long as it stuck the landing. It did. The whole novel is apparently a prequel to a short story in Kelly Link's anthology Monstrous Affections (I was telling my wife about the book and she went, "This all sounds familiar!"), so I'll have to seek that out once I've made it through all my Hugo reading.
Overall Thoughts
Last year, I wrote, "I'd be pleased if anything in my top four won in Best Novel." I could not write such a sentence this year. Indeed, if my top choice for this year, New York 2140, had been on last year's ballot, it would not have even cracked that top four! A good book, but not a great one-- as a top six of the year in science fiction and fantasy, this set left something to be desired, alas. Oh well, I suppose these things happen.
On the other hand, the very first WSFS Award for Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo), soon to be the Lodestar Award probably, is a smashing success, with two excellent books and four good ones. In Other Lands was certainly the best work I read for the Hugos in any category, and A Skinful of Shadows was probably the second book. Either one, I would give Best Novel to over what I did give it to. A diverse array of interesting reads, the only thing I didn't like is that none of them were science fiction, they were all fantasy. I like fantasy, of course, but I read very little YASF, I think because there is very little YASF, and it would have been nice to see the genre get a look in. (I nominated an sf book myself, M. T. Anderson's Landscape with Invisible Hand.)
I struggle to know what will win in any of these categories. I suspect it will be Jemisin for the threepeat in Best Novel, but only because no other finalist sticks out that much. I bet Le Guin gets it two years in a row for No Time to Spare; fandom does love Le Guin. (Iain M. Banks is too academic, I suspect.) I have no sense of what Worldcon fandom's YA preferences are, so I find that category very hard to judge. Maybe nostalgia will give it to Pullman, but Okorafor and Kingfisher are very popular in fandom as well, and perhaps the obvious quality of In Other Lands will clinch it. My only real guess here is that it won't be Art of Starving.
* That said, I do find it weird that the original blog post has been updated to acknowledge that Dickinson is not a straight cis man, but the review as reprinted in Sleeping with Monsters still calls him that.
Oh gosh -- I hadn't heard about the Willis/Ellison incident, but I just googled it. YUCK. There's a video, though, so why "allegedly"?
ReplyDeleteSegaloff spends a lot of time explaining how what might LOOK like a breast-grab from the angle in the video wasn't actually one in reality. And I haven't seen that video since it happened, so I was hedging slightly. Which is to say, I believe Willis and the audience, but I haven't gone over the evidence myself. So, probably unnecessary hedging.
Delete