Hugos 2020: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

Trade paperback, 528 pages
Published 2020 (originally 2019)
Acquired May 2020
Read June 2020

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

I enjoyed the premise of this fantasy novel: an evil alchemist creates a pair of twins to embody the Doctrine of Ethos. One is the power of mathematics, the other language, and they're raised on opposite sides of the country. Only they discover than can talk to each other telepathically, and they begin a long-time, on-and-off sibling relationship that the book chronicles to good effect. There are times the cut each other off, times things get bloody, times they actually meet. Also, one has the power to roll back time, so periodically when things go horribly wrong, the book resets a few chapters and then goes off in a different direction.

I would say I was really enjoying it up until the point where they figure out what's going on, at which it kind of went off the rails. A lot of exposition has to be delivered very quickly, and it's very clunky. I felt like they accepted things too easily in some ways, and were weirdly resistant to them in others. And then the climax feels like the climax to an action movie, not a character novel, and is too dependent on what up until that point had been a pretty minor element of the novel (the novel within a novel, A. Deborah Baker's Over the Woodward Wall). Plus I didn't find the powers of the twins, once expressed, very compelling. "Math" seemed to boil down to "can do anything if the author can think of a number word to use"... but on the other hand, "language" was basically just "is very persuasive when speaking," which I kind of wanted more for. Like, wouldn't an understanding of stories be more interesting and apt? But in fact, the language twin feels like a dunderhead when it comes to comprehending stories.

I had a lot of nitpicks, too. In a great book you forgive nitpicks, but in a mediocre book, you tend to blow them up. Things that bothered me: Ohio is not in the Central Time Zone, I had no idea what the book meant by Roger's "New England accent, thick as pancake batter" (and I lived in New England nine years!), the details of graduate school and academia did not ring true (for example, no one would refer to their time in a graduate program as their time "in college"), and the excerpts from Over the Woodward Wall did not feel at all like something supposedly written in 1896 (for example, no one in 1896 would call a child "average" outside of a scientific context).