Best Novel
I just totally and completely bounced off this book, taking what felt like weeks to crawl through its low page count; I felt it squandered a great premise, though as I said in my review, I suspect it was a premise for a short story, not a novel.
I read the first two Galactic Commons novels for the 2017 Hugo Awards; the first left me largely cold, but the second brought tears to my eyes, so I bought the third right when it came out (making it one of two novels on the shortlist I'd read before it was announced). But this was more like the unfocused, low-stakes storytelling of the first novel, and it did little for me. I've seen a lot of praise for these books for how they eschew the usual trappings of space opera for personal stories-- and I'm all for that, I read contemporary literary fiction! But something needs to be at stake for that approach to work, and outside of A Closed and Common Orbit, I never feel like it is in Chambers's work.
5. No Award
I have a couple different personal "No Award" tests. One is: do I understand why someone else likes something, even if I myself do not? Versus, do I find it inexplicable that someone else would like a thing, even if intellectually I know it must be the case? I have no idea what people see in Space Opera and Record of a Spaceborn Few (outside of the premises themselves), and so I have no desire to see them win a Hugo Award. On the other hand, even though I wasn't much into it myself, I can see why someone would like Trail of Lightning.
This was fine. As essentially urban fantasy, very much Not My Thing, but I suspect a well-executed example of Not My Thing. I wouldn't be embarrassed if it won, but I wouldn't exactly be excited either, so here it sits.
Revenant Gun is the other Best Novel finalist I'd read in advance, and with a similar reason for Record: it's the third book in a series where I largely bounced off the first installment, but then enjoyed the second enough to pick up the third. I definitely liked it more than Record or Trail, but I don't think it quite delivered on its own potential. A version of this book with more energy could have easily blew me away; as it was, the book kind of fizzles instead of climaxing, and I wouldn't be super-excited if it won. (I suspect it won't, though; the previous two Machineries of Empire books finished in third and fifth.)
This is the second-last novel finalist I read, and thank God for it, because after my first four books, I was wondering if this was really the best we could do. But Calculating Stars nailed it-- a great alternate history story with some intense writing and emotional scenes. One of the best of these finalists.
Even though I liked Calculating Stars a lot, I wasn't entirely satisfied with the idea of it as a Best Novel winner; I think I probably would have ranked it fourth or fifth in 2017 if it had been on the ballot then, which was a much stronger year for Best Novel. It does what it want to do very well, but I feel like a winner of the Hugo Award needs to do more than be very good. Spinning Silver is more than very good; it manages to be unique, and timeless, and of its moment all at once. I like Calculating Stars, but it feels very 2018, and I wonder how much people will care about what it's trying to do in 2083 except as an historical document. Spinning Silver also feels very 2018, but I can imagine someone reading it in 2083 and learning something about their own time. This is a great book. It's the clear best on this weak shortlist, but it would be a contender in any year (I'd've ranked it second in 2017, or above any of 2018's finalists.)
Best Related Work
7. Archive of Our Own by the Organization for Transformative WorksI could be mistaken, but I don't think a website has ever been a Hugo finalist before, at least not as a website. The WSFS Constiution specifies that finalists for Related Work must be "either non-fiction or, if fictional, [...] noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text." So, despite containing 4.7 million fanfictions, Archive of Our Own isn't nominated for them per se, but for the project of archiving and maintaining them. This, I think, is an astoundingly good project, and AO3 is a really well put together website, but I feel like Hugos are for works, not projects, and I find it hard to justify rating a project particularly high in a category with "work" in the title. AO3 deserves all the awards it can get, but this particular one doesn't feel like a good fit.
6. The Mexicanx Initiative Experience at Worldcon 76, founded by John PicacioThis website chronicles the Mexicanx Initiative, where people could pledge money to fund Mexicanx creators to attend Worldcon 76; it funded 50 people, 42 of which ultimately attended. The site contains interviews with key participants, a photo gallery, and A Larger Reality, an anthology of Mexicanx speculative fiction. (Note that I didn't read the anthology because of the stipulation about non-fiction quoted above.) It's a really cool project, decently chronicled (though one kind of wishes for more participant narratives, and the photo gallery is poorly designed) and you can tell how much it meant to its participants but...
5. No Award
...but one of my Hugo Award pet peeves is when they get too self-referential. Is one of the best sf-related things from 2018 that WSFS can find something that WSFS itself did? This isn't as bad as when one of the 2012 Dramatic Presentation finalists was the acceptance speech a Hugo Award winner gave at the 2011 ceremony, but it still smacks of fannishness, and so I am compelled to rank both websites beneath No Award for various reasons.
Ultimately, I just felt like there wasn't much to this book; it doesn't compare favorably to Le Guin's Best Related Work finalists from 2017 or 2018, both of which were much more interesting and insightful collections of writing, but I would feel okay about it if it won.
Walton's book collects a series of blog posts she made on Tor.com from 2010 to 2011, where in each post she examines what the short list of Hugo Award finalists was for that year, and considers how well the award did at picking out the "best" books, through some combination of 1) has she read them, 2) did she like them, 3) and do they represent the state of sf at that time. I had read some of the blogs, though not systematically; usually, I have just dipped in to get a take on a year I am interested in. Walton's thoughts are interesting, but the book is somewhat overrun by lists: lists of finalists, many of which she doesn't say much about (she mostly comments on Best Novel, with a little commentary on the short fiction categories), as well as lists of books that did not make the finalists, usually culled from other award nominees. I like her comments, and thus I wanted more of them. Thank goodness the book has some extra essays stuck in where she rereads and reviews finalists in depth. I'm currently reading all the Best Novel winners, but she's made me want to read the other finalists, too. (I'll keep my undertaking to a manageable size, though.) The book also includes some of the comments from the blog posts, usually those by Rich Horton and the late Gardner Dozois. Dozois's are insightful, particularly once the book gets to the point where he is editing Asimov's. Horton's started out as more lists (of eligible short fiction), but as the book goes on, he gets better about providing commentary, which is usually interesting. Sometimes Dozois and Horton get more interesting than Walton. Anyway, I liked it well enough, but 500+ pages when so much of it is lists you can get on the Internet is too much, and I got to read it for free in the Hugo voter packet; I probably would have been less into it if I'd shelled out the inane $32 list price for a collection of free-to-read blog posts where much of the best content isn't always by the author.
Best Related Work is always hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons in, as nonfiction books alone can be very different to each other; this year is worse than normal because I am meant to compare websites to books to... a YouTube video. But Lindsay Ellis's critique of The Hobbit has a depth to it that's missing from both Conversations on Writing and An Informal History of the Hugos. Running over ninety minutes, it explores the narrative and artistic choices that all too often just do not work, as well as delving into the backstory of how the films came to exist as they are. Ellis even travels to New Zealand and talks to one of the dwarf actors, which turned out to be kind of touching; as he and she both point out, the dwarves are the core of the film at the beginning, but not by the end. She also delves into the labor dispute that rose up around the films' production in New Zealand, which was resolved by the New Zealand government passing a law to restrict labor rights in order to ensure that production remained in the country, which continues to affect it today. Essentially it's a documentary that delves into the transformation between something we loved in childhood but cannot love as adults. Not as impressive an achievement as Astounding, but imagine a big gap between it and everything below it.
This is essentially a biography of John W. Campbell, who as editor of Astounding/Analog from 1937 to 1971 reshaped the genre of science fiction, cultivating many great talents, and publishing many classics of the genre. But because editors do their work through their authors, it also weaves into Campbell's story the stories of three key writers, as indicated in the subtitle. It's a great, fascinating book; I knew a little about Campbell from reading Asimov's autobiographies, but Nevala-Lee dives deeps, showing his transformation to mediocre writer to sterling editor to hateful crackpot across the course of a long life. I didn't know that, for example, he helped Hubbard write Dianetics, or that it was first published in the pages of Astounding (because, surprise, no medical journal would take it). It's well-researched, well-written, and the kind of thing I would expect this category to be rewarding.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
If you read my review of this one, you'll know I largely bounced off it, for being derivative and poorly written. Only partway through, and I was already certain it would be near the bottom of my ballot, if not at it.
This book was weirdly similar to Tess of the Road (see below): in both, the main character, who shares her name with the protagonist of a famous Thomas Hardy novel, is one of a pair of twin sisters, and the one more prone to acting out, while her twin does everything right. While they are human, they have an older half-sibling who is half magic, from the previous marriage of one of their parents. That all seems very specific, but they're very different books. Jude of The Cruel Prince was abducted from the human world along with her siblings and raised in Faerie by her older sister's father, a warrior fairy. She struggles to fit in, since her fairy classmates taunt her, and eventually finds herself roped into politics of the fairy courts, serving as spy for one of the princes. It's all fine, I'm sure but it's Very Much Not For Me. Ever since The Sandman, I've struggled to care about fairies, and this book did not change my mind. Parts of the book are very obvious and cliched, even though it has some effective twists as well. I didn't care for the narrative voice, which was a bit too much like Children of Blood and Bone's, though not as bad; is that how YA is written now? I did like that I actually kept on forgetting the narrator was a girl at first; Black writes her a plot and a characterization that I feel would usually be the province of a male character (except for the romances, which were the weakest parts anyway). On the other hand, that Jude and her twin wouldn't just move back to Earth didn't seem believable given how awful Faerie is for them, so I don't get why Black established that they could have if they wanted to. So yeah, fine enough, but it doesn't strike me as award-winning.
At about page 200, I would have told you I was ranking this at the bottom. This novel is set in a fantasy world where most people are born ugly; special people called "Belles" have the magical power to reshape the body to make people beautiful. The narrator (first-person present tense again; I guess this is the way YA is written now, and I hate it) wants to be "the favorite," the Belle at the Royal Court, but is passed over... then ends up with a second chance. I just did not care about her or her tribulations; the world here seems like it could be interesting, but never clicked for me either. But I did get interested as the plot finally emerged and events accelerated, and I'd say by the end I was more into it than I had been Cruel Prince. Another thing unites CBB, Cruel Prince, and this book, though, and it's that they all lack real resolution because they're all set ups for trilogies. I don't mind trilogies per se but these opening installments just don't stand alone in the way that the trilogy-derived Best Novel finalists of the past couple years have (e.g., Ninefox Gambit, Fifth Season), and I find that hard to reward.
I really liked the premise of this book. Ireland has been cut off from the outside world for a generation, a generation where every child is called by the Sidhe to the Grey Land during their teen years. At first, only three in a thousand survived, but now kids are enrolled in survival colleges to enable them to last the twenty-four hours you need to last to return to the real world. This book mostly follows two kids who survived such an ordeal in the previous book. I liked the sense of a changed world, but got bored by the actual story told, and neither of the main characters ever grabbed me (though I admit that may have been different if I'd read the first book). Plus, the ending wrapped a lot of stuff up out of basically nowhere, though it does seemingly leave room for a book 3. I'd say pretty comparable to Belles, but better worldbuilding and more interesting premise, and more self-containedness give it the edge. It doesn't really set me alight as a potential winner, though.
Beginning this book, I was worried; it was my fourth present-tense first-person YA narrative, and I was already sick of the style. But I soon warmed to it, because Dread Nation has a distinct narrative voice, and actually makes good use of its tense, shifting between present and past as it shifts back and forth in time. Dread Nation is an alternate history zombie novel, where after the Battle of Gettysburg, the dead ("shamblers") began to walk. The Civil War thus became a zombie war, and American society has restructured around defending against the undead, including taking African-Americans and training them to defend whites from attack. Our narrator is one of those, the daughter of a plantation owner's wife and a slave, who is good at killing shamblers but not good at taking direction. I enjoyed it a lot; Ireland packs in a lot of interesting ideas, and uses the zombie conceit to make some commentary to make some commentary on our own world. (Though it raises some issues I wish it had actually dealt with, like the role of Native Americans in all this.) The dialogue is good, the characters are interesting, and the plot goes in a lot of unexpected but interesting directions. I did have some quibbles with internal chronology, though, and the ending packs in one too many surprise reveals. There is a sequel forthcoming, which I would read, but it works as a standalone.
At first, I found this book plodding and a little obvious, but once Tess actually goes on the road, it steadily gets better and better until you're reading something quite special. It's kind of a fantasy riff on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, in big ways and small was, from the double standard of premarital sex for men and women to the solace of physical labor. Seventeen-year-old Tess, always the "bad twin," finally runs away from home shortly after her "good" sister gets married, escaping a negligent father and stringent mother. She teams up with a lizard creature, pretends to be a man, learns the joys of construction work, seeks out the Serpent that birthed the world, learns that sex can be more than she thought, and learns something about herself and the world. With the exception of one bit in the middle where I found the logistics wonky (how did she find time to work on farms while trailing the two ne'er-do-wells, and why did they tolerate her?), I really enjoyed Tess's trek; it's the best sort of travel narrative. My main reservation would be that I feel like it's the kind of YA novel that's not actually for young adults, but for the adults who read YA.
Overall Thoughts
Last year, I was grumpy at the Best Novel finalists. This year, I am slightly less grumpy, in that I think Spinning Silver is clearly better than any of last year's finalists, and is 100% a worthy winner that presents me with what I want in a Hugo finalist. But I found the ranking really easy to do, and I feel like the ideal set of finalists is the one you find difficult to rank. The YA Award, which last year I called a "smashing success"... well, you can see what a struggle it was for me this year. Again, I mourn the lack of any real sf in this category (though the only book I nominated myself, M. T. Anderson's The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, was fantasy). There are clearly a set of trends in YA fiction that are completely incompatible with my tastes.
Based on buzz and other awards, I reckon The Calculating Stars will win Best Novel. If not that, I could imagine Spinning Silver (Novik came in second with her previous fairy tale novel, Uprooted, in 2015); I don't think any of the other four have broad enough appeal to win it. I also reckon very strongly that Children of Blood and Bone will win the Lodestar, though I would love to read a convincing positive review of this book, as I just don't get it. I also suspect Dread Nation has a good shot. I doubt it will be Tess.
Related Work was just an odd duck. I don't think AO3 will get it; there were too many people grumbling about the weirdness of nominating a web site of fiction for not its fiction. Astounding is the most traditional finalist in this category, so I hope that's it, and I feel like it has the broadest appeal. Maybe Walton will appeal to Hugo voters' interest in themselves, though, or maybe the Le Guin streak will go on for a third year. (I miss her, too, but I really don't think she deserves to win it for this.) I've seen some grumbling about the oddness of Related Work, and some wondering if it should go back to "Related Book," but I like it, even AO3. Fandom is a broad church, and a reward like this lets us reward the interesting stuff about sf that is not itself sf. My life would be poorer for not having seen Lindsay Ellis's The Hobbit duology.
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