Anyway, here's what I thought. As usual, I did a full review post of anything I either bought or borrowed from Hayley, and in those cases, I've linked to that blog entry. My usual rule of thumb is to buy all Best Novel finalists, as well as any other books by authors I already like and collect. Anything I borrowed from the library or got from the voter packet, I just did a capsule review as part of this post. (If a work is freely available on the Internet, I linked to it.)
Best Novel
I didn't enjoy this much at all: mediocre worldbuilding and mediocre characterization add up to poor sf.
This book never grabbed me and kept hold of me... but it did sometimes grab me and let me go. That's more than you can say for Gideon the Ninth, so it slots in pretty easily between Gideon and Middlegame.
I was into this at first, but somewhere around the two-thirds mark it went in a direction that I didn't care for, and which seemed to me inconsistent with the tone of the previous part of the book, and not as interesting as where I had imagined it was going. So this was an easy placement: nowhere near as good as The Light Brigade or even The City in the Middle, but definitely better than Gideon.
I didn't think this book nailed what I like in sf as well as The City in the Middle or A Memory Called Empire did, but despite a somewhat (intentionally, I think) generic start for a piece of military sf, I quickly felt myself pulled in by the writing, the complicated story, and the themes of this book. It was a very enjoyable piece of work that I would be glad to see win.
This is exactly the kind of sf I do like, and the kind I want the Hugos to lead me to: interesting worldbuilding, great characterization, strong sense of voice. Like in the best sf, the characterization resonates with lived experiences from our world and arises from the complexity of an alien one. The set-ups that Anders explores work both metaphorically and literally (to draw on China Mieville's definition of sf), and even if I didn't find the last third or so of the book 100% satisfying, Anders is doing what I want sf to do, and deserving of an award for doing it well. I enjoyed All the Birds in the Sky, but this was on another level.
When I finished The City in the Middle of the Night, I said it was "the one to beat"... and then Memory came along! Up until the last quarter of Memory or so, even though I was really enjoying it, I was still mentally placing City above it, because Memory Called Empire felt less innovative. It's very much working in an sf subgenre that Ancillary Justice carved out, even though (like all good genre works), it innovates within that genre and doesn't become generic. City, for all its seeming indebtedness to Le Guin, felt more original. But the end of City didn't entirely satisfy me, whereas the end of Memory made me go oomph. So here's the eternal dilemma of a genre award (for me, anyway): do we privilege originality when we say "best"? Or just that ineffable experience of reading something good? I think I go different ways on this question at different times. At this time, though I decided to go with Memory. I guess when I get sad about a character death, I know a book worked, and I know I need to put it at the top!
Best Related Work
7. 2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech by Jeanette NgLast year at Worldcon, Ng decried John W. Campbell as a fascist when accepting the award given in his honor. I don't think Campbell can meaningfully be called a fascist, but he was a racist whose tastes shaped the genre is some negative ways as Alec Nevala-Lee documented well in last year's Best Related Work finalist Astounding. It was a startling and powerful moment. However...
6. No Award
...one of my Hugo Award pet peeves is when they get too self-referential, and Worldcon rewarding acceptance speeches given at Worldcon makes me roll my eyes. That said, this is arguably more deserving than many, as it did lead to real change. The award is now called the Astounding Award, named after the magazine Campbell edited rather than the man himself. So maybe I am being overly peevish in ranking the speech below No Award? But, here it goes.
The most recent installment in University of Illinois Press's Modern Masters of Science Fiction series is not as successful as the one that was a finalist in 2018. Unfortunately for a scholarly monograph, Jones's book doesn't have a clear narrative, making it feel more like a catalog: Russ wrote this story, and here's what I think of it; Russ wrote this story, and here's what I think of it; Russ wrote this story, and here's what I think of it. The novels are over-summarized, and I'm not convinced we needed to hear about literally every book review Russ ever wrote. A good single-author monograph gives you a lens to focus on a writer's trajectory, but here I feel like I have a lot of interesting parts, but no coherent whole. (It is possible this is because I've read very little Russ, just a couple short stories. It did make me want to read more of her, at least.)
This is a biography of a little-known woman named Milicent Patrick, who worked as one of the first woman animator at Disney (on Fantasia), then became a model and background actress, then a costume designer, famously designing the eponymous Creature from the Black Lagoon. O'Meara's thorough biography is entertaining and tragic, the vibrancy of its central figure bleeding through on the page despite the many enigmas surrounding her. There are lots of interesting facts her to annoy your friends with! O'Meara also details her own history of interest in Patrick, which was sometimes interesting; I liked her explanations of the research she did. On the other hand, her personal stories sometimes seemed to boil down to, "I too have experienced sexism," to which my reaction was that I was here to read about Milicent Patrick, not Mallory O'Meara.
This is the autobiography of J. Michael Straczynski, who, among other things, (co-)created She-Ra, Babylon 5, and Sense8, wrote for Murder, She Wrote and The Real Ghostbusters, penned heralded runs on Spider-Man and Superman, scripted the Clint Eastwood film Changeling, and more. JMS turns out to have had a rather awful childhood. His father was abusive and violent, his mother suicidal (and once attempted to kill him), they moved constantly, his father would kill JMS's pet cats, JMS was sexually abused by his grandmother. It goes on and on, and is definitely compelling if horrific reading. JMS chronicles his childhood, and how it shaped him, then into his time living in an evangelical Christian group home, his adventures in college (there's a great story about how he faked having a master's degree), and then into the entertainment industry. There's lots of good stories here about things like She-Ra, The Real Ghostbusters (JMS walked off the show when asked to dumb it down, and later returned to it and retconned out the character changes made while he was gone), Murder, She Wrote, and Jake and the Fatman (who knew?). I got some new insight into the poor pilot of Babylon 5 and the reason Commander Sinclair was written out. (JMS had no showrunning experience before making B5, and was in way over his head.) It's almost funny how he keeps pissing people off and having to switch trajectories, but he also keeps making it work. I don't think it's the best written thing, but I downed it super-quickly. The Lady from the Black Lagoon might have a worthier subject in a sense, but I thought this was better written, and about someone more central to science fiction.
This short (70 minutes) documentary film covers the influence on and of Ursula K. Le Guin, mostly focusing on the first couple Earthsea books and a couple of the Hainish novels. I liked it a lot; if I've heard Le Guin speak before, it was just in little snatches, whereas much of the documentary is given over to her own thoughts on what she was doing, as well her reading excerpts of key passages. Le Guin is always great to hear from, and this was no exception; there's also some good archival footage. I liked her discussion of the Indian genocide and The Disposssesed and of the feminist shift in Tehanu in particular. It's also a well put together documentary: the animations accompanying the Earthsea excerpts were gorgeous. The talking heads were a mixed bag, some with only banal insights, but I was really surprised by David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas), whose descriptions and interpretations I found very interesting. It does at times overly simplify the history of sf in order to highlight Le Guin's greatness; we don't need to misrepresent (for example) Heinlein to glorify Le Guin; we don't need to associate pre-Le Guin written sf with cheesy sf films of the 1950s; and we don't need to act as though Le Guin was the first woman sf writer to show how she changed the genre! But I'd be quite happy if this won, and perhaps it's just my natural affinity for scholarly monographs that makes me put Pleasant Profession above it.
Though I liked many of the finalists, this is the kind of thing that (for me anyway) epitomizes what the Best Related Work category should be rewarding. A thorough critical study of a major figure in sf, brimming with insightful analysis.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
As I said in my review, I thought this was a solid and interesting book, but ultimately a little shallow. It's a good adventure yarn, but not without its weaknesses, and I doubt it's the best of sf&f YA.
I didn't much enjoy the book to which this was a sequel, The Cruel Prince, ranking it fifth out of sixth for the 2019 Lodestar. Sexy forbidden romance elements aside, though, I was surprised to find myself interested in this one. Jude, the human-raised-by-elves protagonist, ended the first book by placing an elf prince on the throne of Faerie as her puppet, suddenly in charge of the realm where she has struggled to fit in her entire life. She wants to protect her younger half-brother by helping him ascend to the throne, and her long-term goal is to manipulate now-King Cardan into letting this happen. Only this turns out to be quite difficult, as she has to navigate the complexities of fairy politics without weakening her position. There's actually some pretty emotional and harrowing stuff in here, which I didn't expect; I feel like the first book was really all about lining everything up so that this book could soar, and Black makes it work. Plus the final twist is excellent, something I did not see coming but also that makes perfect sense. And I found myself thinking I'd willingly pick up book three!? Anyway, I was definitely more emotionally drawn into this than Dragon Pearl, so here it goes.
I would have guessed, based on how much I liked previous Hardinge novels, that I was going to place this at the top of my ballot. (I voted for her in 2018.) But by the end, I found this book perfunctory, not captivating like A Skinful of Shadows or The Lie Tree. I'm finding most of the YA books difficult to rank, because they're all kind of middling-- nothing great or terrible. Deeplight I'm placing here because I was more emotionally engaged by Catfishing, especially at the climax, but I found the fantasy world more interesting than that of Wicked King.
This is a near-future science fiction novel, focusing on a high school junior who is a heavy user of a social media site called CatNet, where the primary currency is uploading cat pictures. She has a lot of on-line friends, but no real-life ones, because her mother relocates them every couple months to avoid an abusive ex-husband. But unbeknownst to her, one of her on-line friends is actually an AI called CheshireCat, who upon achieving sentience so loved cat pictures it created a site to amass them. (The backstory is derived from a short story Kritzer wrote.) It's a fun novel with some heavy parts, as Steph makes her first set of real-world friends as it also seems like her father is coming back into her life. I didn't think the book always reconciled those two tones well, but I enjoyed it. I'm not sure if I liked it more than The Wicked King or not: King I didn't like at first but came to be somewhat invested in, whereas I thought Catfishing was pretty levelly enjoyable the whole time. I ended up giving Catfishing the edge because I hate fairies.
This was a charming but also harrowing book, in the way that Kingfisher does so well: deep topics considered with gentle humor. I'd be happy to see it win, but I found Riverland more emotionally engaging and more innovative, so I'm giving it the edge. (Not that Minor Mage was unengaging: I'm talking the difference between very good and excellent here.)
This is the YA book I went into knowing the least about: most of the others were by authors I knew, or sequels to things I'd read, or I had read the blurb. I went into Riverland blind, not even remembering Fran Wilde had written a couple Hugo finalists from past years. So I went in not expecting much, especially since none of the YA books I'd read thus far really rose above the level of "pretty good." It took me a bit of time to orient myself in Riverland, and I wasn't sure what I thought because I wasn't exactly sure what was actually happening. (It's a tricky thing, fantasy books where something is magic and something else is only pretend magic.) But once I figured it out, I was hooked. Riverland is about two preteen sisters who use storytelling as a refuge from an awful home life; the older sister, Eleanor, is our viewpoint character as she works her hardest to protect her younger sister, and to keep herself out of the line of fire, too, by taking on responsibilities no child should have to. I found the book's depiction of her home life actually made me anxious, I was so worried about her. The way the fantasy elements are woven in is really effective, and though I struggled a tiny bit with the exposition, the fantasy world is evocative and the stakes high. It was an easy and obvious placement, far and away the best of these books.
Overall Thoughts
This is a stronger set of Best Novel finalists than last year, with three books in the "I would happily see them win" bucket. It was probably the easiest Best Novel ballot I've ever assembled, though: there was a clear excellent book, a very good one, a good one, an okay one, a meh one, and a terrible one. (I could arguably put Gideon the Ninth under No Award, but I don't see a reason to bother.) It's interesting to note that I ranked all three sf books over all three fantasy books. Science fiction really just is more interesting than fantasy to me, especially low fantasy, which both Ten Thousand Doors and Middlegame are. (Though the one fantasy novel that did create a fully realized secondary world was my least favorite novel of all of them! But that was because I actually didn't find its secondary world to make a lot of sense.) My guess is that Memory Called Empire will win; it has the slightly-literary-and-set-in-space-but-not-too-weird tone that I think appeals to Hugo voters. If it's not Memory, I don't know what it will be.
Related Work was a good bunch of finalists; I learned a lot from all five things that weren't a speech. I have no sense of what will win this category; last year I said AO3 would definitely not win, and it came in first.
The YA books are always very hit and miss for me, and this year was no exception. I think Hugo nominators just don't value what I value in YA fiction. As is often the case, though, I read my two favorite books near the end of the process, so I spent the first half of my reading thinking there was no good to be found in contemporary YA sf&f, and then realizing I just hadn't got to the good stuff yet. I'm not sure what will win this category, but I would be willing to say it won't be The Wicked King, Deeplight, or Riverland, which I don't think are quite to the taste of the Hugo electorate. I could see any of the other three winning, though. (Lee is a many-time Hugo finalist but has not won yet; Kritzer and Kingfisher have won before.)
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