Best Novella has become sort of a pain point for me; my first couple years, I was impressed by the Tor.com novella program, but as it has taken over the ballot (all six finalists are from it this year), it seems to me that it's mostly ossified in ways I don't like. We always get a "Wayward Children" story, a Murderbot story (thankfully, we got a reprieve this year), and then a bunch of set-ups for other ongoing series.
Things I Nominated
Time to be excited, because I nominated something that actually made the ballot, Isabel Fall's "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" under Best Novelette. I wonder if I would have thought to do so without the controversy? But in any case, it's a great story.
“Have you noticed that the doors come for us when we’re young enough to believe we know everything, and toss us out again as soon as we’re old enough to have doubts?”This is the fifth "Wayward Children" novella, and the fifth to make the Best Novella ballot... I think I could pretty charitably describe myself as being over them. This one isn't as twee and affected as some of the others, but I never cared about any of these people and what they did. I didn't have a strong opinion about whether it was better or worse than FINNA, so I broke my tie by deciding that Come Tumbling Down was more likely to win, and thus it would make more use of an anti-vote.
“You don’t need written instructions, the diagrams are made to be universally understandable.”
The premise of this book is fun: an assemble-it-yourself-furniture-chain-store-that-is-clearly-IKEA is so confusing and twisty to navigate that occasionally you can wander into a different universe; as a result, the staff have a device they can put together to follow, find, and retrieve customers who get lost. But once the basic premise is communicated, the corporate satire vanishes and it becomes a pretty dull adventure story; plus it contained several leaps that I found pretty unlikely.
“People like us, we draw the bad in. There’s no good end, not for us. We knew better, we read all the stories—read them too much, probably.”
This is the fifth Sarah Gailey Hugo finalist I have read, and the third I have ranked below No Award. I am starting to think that I just do not get on with what they are doing. (I did really like "STET," though.) In this one, it's after the apocalypse, and women librarians travel the West, enforcing moral hygiene. A young lesbian seeks refuge with them—only it turns out the librarians are the locus of the resistance. A good idea here that failed in execution, I think. The protagonist's desire to "fix" herself vs. her fascination with the librarians wasn't very well handled (I didn't really have a good sense of what she was after), and the book never really reckoned with how the librarians reconciled distributing homophobic and misogynistic material with being in the resistance. Like a lot of Tor.com novellas, it feels more like the pilot for a streaming television show than a piece of prose fiction. But I didn't skim it as aggressively as I did the lower ranked items on this list.
4. No Award
You could best, as you might have worked out, describe my take on the Tor.com dominance of the Best Novella category as grumpy. They clearly do good work, but I don't think the approach of their work is sufficiently diverse to justify them claiming the top six spots. If some of the finalists came from other publishers, I probably wouldn't feel compelled to put No Award here. But I felt there was a pretty sharp demarcation between Tor.com novellas that were doing things I found interesting, and ones that were not; between ones that actually felt like prose novellas and ones that did not.
Chih tilted their head to one side.
“Are you going to ask me if I understand? I am still not sure if I do.”
“Well, something like this, you understand or you won't.”
This was the last novella finalist I read, and I probably read it faster than it deserved, because I was bit surprised when it ended, and not certain I followed it completely. But it was an interesting story: a young cleric hears the testimony of a former servant of an empress, so we get a series of vignettes about the empress. But they were good vignettes, and there were some good lines. I see it has a sequel, but it doesn't feel like a set-up for a series, so I won't hold that against it. I would gladly reread it someday, and gladly see it win.
In the Shout, you got to move the way the spirit tell you and can't stop until it let you go. And don't call it no dance! Not unless you want Uncle Will to set you down and learn your proper. See, the Shout ain't really the song, it's the movement. He says the Shouts like this one got the most power: about surviving slavery times, praying for freedom, and calling on God to end that wickedness.
At least there is one good novella finalist this year. This is set in an alternate 1910s in Georgia, where there are both human Klansmen and alien "Ku Kluxes," horrific creatures that stoke human racism; the narrator is a black woman who hunts them down. A strong sense of voice is what carried me through it, playing to the strengths of the genre more than most Tor.com novellas. I didn't think it quite stuck the landing, though; the motivations of the aliens felt a bit too Doctor Who, and undercut the book's engagement with themes of racial hate. (Why did I not learn that Clark was a history professor at UConn until now? I could have met him!)
[A] dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity “because,” says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, “you can't indict an algorithm.”
I was beginning to despair. Yes, there was one good novella finalist, but was just one and just good the best we could do? Then, squeezed in at the end, I read my second-last one. And I was like, wow, it's actually a novella! It's not a pilot for a series filled with Buffy characters, it's a standalone sf story with incredible power. This follows a girl with fantastic powers and her younger brother, who was born during the Rodney King riots, as America grows worse and worse. Onyebuchi's writing is confusing, beautiful, and dark, and I was going to say that I liked the weaving in of commentary, except that it's less commentary and more a rant. There are some intense scenes, but also some weird ones. Clear and above one of the best, and I guess maybe the Tor.com novella program might be worth it after all.
6. "The Inaccessibility of Heaven" by Aliette de Bodard
“Will you come?” he asked, again, and it wasn’t an invitation after all—at least, not the kind you could refuse.
Sort of a mystery involving a bunch of
fallen angels. I was very surprised to learn this wasn't a tie-in to a
novel series or a sequel to another story, as it very much felt like a
story that was covering backstory very hurriedly because it had already
been told in some other stories. There were a lot of relationships that I
didn't care about because I felt like the story didn't make me care
about them; some turns in the plot upset things the narrator thought
they knew... but since I didn't know them, it was hard to care. There
also really aren't any suspects, or a meaningful motive.
5. "Monster" by Naomi Kritzer
Mao is a lot less popular in China than he once was, but he’s still on the money. I suppose this is also true of George Washington in the US.
I was a bit surprised this was nominated, to be honest; it was well told, but I didn't feel like much was going on, story-, character-, or theme-wise; a genetics professor goes in search of, and recounts her history with, a creepy guy she knew in high school who, like her, was bullied a lot. That's basically it. Kritzer has written better.
“And did he say ‘rhizome’? Who says ‘rhizome’ to seven-year-olds?”
I do like me some Sarah Pinsker, and I enjoyed this story, which is about someone who compulsively makes things up discovering that a local kids' tv she made it may have some reality to it after all. Like Pinsker's last piece of horror fiction to make the ballot, though, it wasn't quite to my taste as much as her work usually is.
3. "Burn or The Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super" by A. T. Greenblatt
Watch Sam burn and hate himself for it.
Neat
story about an accountant who gains superpowers he can't control; he
joins a super-team in the hopes that he can use his powers for good...
but they just need an accountant, too. Some of the beats will be
familiar if you've read a lot of superhero comics, but Greenblatt tells
the story engagingly; good structure and good prose. The repeated
refrain of "Watch Sam burn" hits very effectively. I will have to look
out for more by her. Didn't strike me as innovative or compelling as
"The Pill," but highly enjoyable.
It was a “trade secret,” they said on the news. They also said “miracle” and “breakthrough” and “historic.” The miracle of shitting out skin just looked like blood and collagen and rotten meat, it turns out.
A pill is released that allows people to become skinny easily... it's just that they have a ten percent chance of dying... and people rush to do it, because they'd rather be dead than fat. I had never even heard of Meg Elison before, but I found this very arresting and disturbing and tantalizing, about the lengths people will go to to remold their bodies, and what society will do to people with bodies that different from the norm.
The Apache is my body now, and like most bodies it is sensual. Fabric armor that stiffens beneath my probing fingers. Stub wings clustered with ordnance. Rotors so light and strong they do not even droop: as artificial-looking, to an older pilot, as breast implants.
This story was the center of some controversy, in that its trans author was harassed on Twitter for supposedly being transphobic to the point of the story being removed from the Internet; this Vox article lays it out pretty well. It's a shame, because I read the story when it was published (someone posted it on r/printSF, and I was intrigued by how the title was reclaiming a transphobic meme), and I thought it was brilliant. It has some fascinating stuff to say about gender identity; what I particularly liked was how it depicts the state co-opting people's identities for the purpose of violence. All that and great prose too. An easy top place for me.
Overall Thoughts
As alluded to many times above, I don't find the Tor.com dominance of Best Novella in recent years very compelling. They do good work, but surely so are others. Though many finalist come from Tor.com, usually other publishers sneak in a couple; this is the first year since 1996 where all six novella finalists come from one source. I don't have a solution for this, though; not even E Pluribus Hugo seems to be making a difference! (I will be curious to see the nomination stats.) On the other hand, I've said before that I kind of think of novelettes as not real (they're really either long short stories or short novellas) but that's belied by the quality of these stories. The past couple years, Best Novelette has had more strong stories than either Best Short Story or Best Novella. Any of the top four here are very solid pieces of work even when they're not to my taste.
A Wayward Children novella gets nominated every year for Best Novella, but has only actually won once. Among the other finalists, I don't have a strong sense of who will win; I haven't followed much short fiction discussion this year, to be honest, so I don't know who has "buzz." Eh, it probably will be McGuire, yeah? I have a suspicion it will be "Helicopter Story" for Best Novelette. Maybe Pinsker if not. None of the stories are twee tales about robots and/or fandom, so what will appeal to the electorate's taste isn't obvious.
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