The Coming of the Biocrat: H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia

Originally published: 1904-5
Acquired and read: June 2021

A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells

Suppose then for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race; a Modern Utopia is under the hard logic of life, and it would have to exterminate such a race as quickly as it could. On the whole, the Fijian device [creating conditions that lead to "race suicide" from lack of reproduction] seems the least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any clumsiness of race distinction, in exactly the same manner, and by the same machinery, as it exterminates all its own defective and inferior strains; that is to say, as we have already discussed [...], by its marriage laws, and by the laws of minimum wage. That extinction need never be discriminatory. If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive – they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. (225)

I'm no Adam Roberts, but there are few significant Wells novels that I haven't read at this point. Out of the top twenty on LibraryThing (excluding omnibus editions), I've read fifteen. With A Modern Utopia, I can bring that number up to sixteen.* I picked up A Modern Utopia and read it because of my chapter on eugenicist novels; I cap that chapter off with a reading of The War of the Worlds as an anti-eugenicist novel, so it seemed important to read Wells's later books where he advocates for eugenics. The two prominent ones were Anticipations (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1904-5), and since it was easier to get ahold of A Modern Utopia, I read it first even though it was published later.

In this book, Wells's narrator (clearly a fictionalized Wells) and a botanist friend (based, the "Note on the Text" in my Penguin edition tells me, on his friend Graham Wallas, a lecturer in political science) are spontaneously transported to Utopia, a planet exactly identical to Earth in geography and inhabitants, except that it is, well, a utopia. This allows Wells to expound what he think a utopia would look like, contrasting it against our world. So short passages about what the two characters are up to are interspersed with Wellsian discourse on an ideal society. Wells is smarter than many when it comes to thinking these kind of things through, and he wants you to know it; he highlights how he rejects the fallacies of people like Comte and Bellamy, and he recycles his joke about utopian cicerones from The Time Machine. It's all very worthy, and Wells deploys some wit, but you know, don't come here looking for another War of the Worlds or even Love and Mr Lewisham.

The key bits for me were from the section I quoted above, when Wells lays out his eugenics idea. The main thing you can say about it is that Wells is much less racist and good deal more "rational" than many of his contemporaries, and indeed, even himself back when he wrote Anticipations. After the bit I quoted above, he goes on to say probably no race is worse than any other when in utopian conditions, but we won't really know that until we've got some. English intellectual society was swimming in this stuff then, so it's not too surprising Wells couldn't see out of it, even if War of the Worlds would seem to indicate he ought to have been able to. I guess he gets further than many.

Wells does not convincingly lay out a utopia I feel like I'd actually want to live in, but then, who does?

* I haven't read The Outline of History (#6), A Short History of the World (#12), Kipps (#14, though I do own it), and Mr. Britling Sees It Through (#19). Plus there are several I have read outside of the top twenty.

Review: Doctor Who: Sin Eaters by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, and Cris Bolson

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Acquired: January 2020
Read: July 2021

Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 4: Sin Eaters

Writer: Cavan Scott
Artists: Adriana Melo & Cris Bolson

Colorist: Marco Lesko
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This is the last volume of The Ninth Doctor, making it the first of Titan's Doctor Who ongoings to draw to an end. As a result, it has to tie up all the various threads Cavan Scott has introduced since the series began. It consists of two stories. The first, "Sin Eaters," is about the Doctor, Rose, and Tara investigating a space prison that extracts people's bad thoughts and injects them into separate bodies; the Doctor goes undercover as a criminal, and Rose as an inspector. I thought the central premise of this one was pretty silly, and Doctor Who stories about evil Doctors rarely convince me, because evil Doctors don't act very Doctor-ish, and just act like the kind of stupid bad guy the Doctor stops all the time. The last chapter of "Sin Eaters" switches perspective to Jack, and shows us some flashbacks of his time as a Time Agent, with a small appearance by the Doctor. It was fine, and mostly serves to set up the next story.

"The Bidding War" is about a con being played on the TARDIS crew, to capture and auction off the Doctor's memories. Again, it was fine. It feels rushed, like the series was cancelled earlier than expected... but it had fifteen issues, so surely Scott should have known "Year One" was up even if he had expected to get a Year Two, and Titan Who comics usually reset at the end of each year. Some of the explanations for what we saw at the year's beginning don't entirely convince, and I think the incessant continuity references interfere with this comic's attempt to recapture the tone of the 2005 series.

Having read the whole series now, I'm not really sure what the point of Tara, the new companion (a 1970s UNIT nurse) was. She never really seemed to do much (these stories already have three leads), and I never got a real sense of her personality. Her writing-out here is pretty perfunctory. And again, having a companion who is friends with Harry Sullivan really cuts against the 2005 vibe. This was probably the weakest of Titan's ongoings; at least The Tenth Doctor has had the occasional enjoyable story for all its flaws.

Also, what's up with the right side and bottom of the cover of my comiXology edition? Why is there that weird mirroring?

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Twelfth Doctor: Time Trials: The Terror Beneath

Review: Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements by John Jackson Miller

Published: 2021
Acquired: August 2021
Read: October 2021

Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements
by John Jackson Miller

My reaction to Picard was mixed enough that its tie-in novels are not automatic buys for me. Rios was a character I think I could have liked, but the melodramatic—and highly coincidental—backstory we eventually learn about undermined the good work Santiago Cabrera did with his performance, and so I wasn't enthused about a prequel novel focusing on him. But 1) I do like Jack Jackson Miller, and 2) I heard the Iotians, from my favorite original series episode, were in it.

I wanted to like this, and I was into it at first—Miller has a good handle on what makes the people of the gangster planet fun—but at a certain point the book began to drag, even with its rapid-fire antics. Or perhaps even because of them. Why, exactly, should I care? The novel didn't always succeed in making its case, unfortunately, and it seemed to just pile on complication on top of complication to the point of alienation. It does all come together in the end... but I was never terribly invested in whether it did or not. Plus, I get that it's a tie-in to a series called "Picard," but the number of people Rios meets who had previously met Picard began to pile up to the point of improbability.

That said, the jokes about the holograms were good, I liked what we learned of La Sirena's previous owner, Rios himself is handled well as a character, and many of the original characters are good fun. I liked a lot of the ingredients, but this feels to me like a novel that demands to be blown through... and instead I kind of plodded. I am not normally an audiobook guy, but I would imagine that a sympathetic audiobook reading would do a lot to life the material here, turning it into the rapid-fire caper it so obviously wants to be.

2021 Hugo Awards for Best Novella and Novelette Ballots

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.

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7. Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

“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.

6. FINNA by Nino Cipri

“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.

5. Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

“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.

3. The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

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.

2. Ring Shout, or Hunting Ku Kluxes in the End Times by P. Djèlí Clark

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!)

1. Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

[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. 

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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.

4. "Two Truths and a Lie" by Sarah Pinsker

“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.

2. "The Pill" by Meg Elison

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.

1. "Helicopter Story" [formerly known as "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"] by Isabell Fall

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.

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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.

Hugos 2021: Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

Originally published: 2020
Acquired: June 2021
Read: July 2021

Between Earth and Sky, Book One: Black Sun 

by Rebecca Roanhorse

For some reason, I often dread opening an epic fantasy novel. I've convinced myself I don't like the genre. But then I start reading it and I'm really into it: I love the way you bounce between disparate characters and, between them, slowly start to assemble a picture of the world—a picture that the very nature of the genre means the main characters are seeking to change. The early stages of Black Sun do this kind of thing very well, and I was utterly absorbed; I found this much more up my street than I did Roanhorse's previous Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist, Trail of Lightning. The world was complex and interesting, and like a lot of recent sff, paid good attention to the interaction between cultures and issues of colonization.

Yet, somewhere this book lost me. I think it's because ultimately the characters' actions stopped ringing true at some point. There's a mercenary ship captain on a mission, a mission which becomes increasingly difficult. At a certain point, it became impossible for me to believe that she had a motivation to keep going. Now, I could imagine that even though she clearly wasn't going to make any money anymore, some point of pride or hidden nobility would make her keep going on regardless... but Roanhorse didn't convince me of this if that is what she was going for. Similarly, there's a high priestess who never remotely convinced me that she had the political savvy to become a high priestess in the first place; she gets outwitted by her opponents at every turn. There's one viewpoint character who's in the book so little, and who does so little, that it felt to me like all his scenes must have been added in rewrites very late in the composition process to set up a role in book two.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is this book has the things I like about epic fantasy... but in the end it made me remember why it's a genre I typically don't read very much of.

Hugos 2021: A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by Ursula Vernon

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: July 2021

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

Last summer, a former student of mine had to crash in our spare room for a couple days when she fell afoul of a rental scam. A day or two later, she came to me and asked, "Do you have any other books like Minor Mage?" It had been sitting out, either because I had just read it or because I was just about to read it, and she had randomly grabbed it. It had really resonated with her own life, because it was about a child upon whom great burdens were placed before they were ready, due to the failure of adults to discharge their responsibilities. I struggled to come up with something else. She started Kingfisher's Summer in Orcus but didn't really find it hit that tone; she did leave with Frances Hardinge's A Skinful of Shadows, but I'm not sure how that went. Come to think of it, she still has my copy of that.

I need to get in touch with her—not just to get my book back, but also to loan her this one. Kingfisher's newest YA fantasy is my favorite yet, and hits the same notes as Minor Mage, but even better. Mona is a fourteen-year-old apprentice baker, and also a wizard... one whose powers are limited to bread. She can work dough, stop it from burning, and even bring gingerbread men to life; she has a sourdough starter that might be carnivorous. Like most Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon), it's very charming, and laugh out loud. (All the stuff involving the toilet was amazing.) But it's also sad and depressing; Mona's society lets her down in some really big ways, and she has to step in and fill the gap even though it ought not be her responsibility. The use of magic is clever and interesting, and I genuinely teared up a little bit near the end. I've read four of the six 2021 Lodestar Award finalists so far, and this is still the one to beat.

2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic Ballot

Here it is, my rankings for the recently-but-awkwardly-renamed category of Best Graphic Story or Comic.

Things I Nominated

I don't read very many current comics in their year of release; since I read most of my comics through collected editions, I'm always about a year behind, which makes it tricky to nominate things. In 2020, the comics I kept up with were Brian Michael Bendis and Ryan Sook's Legion of Super-Heroes, Saladin Ahmed and Minkyu Jung's The Magnificent Ms. Marvel, Brian Ruckley and Anna Malkova's Transformers, the anthology series Transformers: Galaxies, and the first Transformers / My Little Pony crossover, Friendship in Disguise! Only one of those could I claim unabashed enjoyment of, so I did nominate Friendship in Disguise! 

It didn't make the ballot. I would be surprised to see it even make the longlist, as I don't think Transformers comics ever have, even when at their peak with More than Meets the Eye.

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6. Die: Split the Party, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans

This series is one-half D&D, one-half Jumanji, and now, weirdly, one-half the Brontës' Tales of Angria!? Anyway it's possible something quite clever is happening here, but I never cared.

5. Invisible Kingdom: Edge of Everything, written by G. Willow Wilson, art by Christian Ward

This is the second volume of a space opera trilogy; the library had the first volume (Walking the Path) on Hoopla, so I went ahead and read both together. I liked the basic ideas here, though it does feel heavily Saga-influenced with all the zipping around and quickly sketched worldbuilding. It's about a space Amazon delivery crew, a nun who finds out her religious order is corrupt, and what brings them together. Christian Ward's art is beautiful, but I found the writing and the art made it a struggle to track the space Amazon characters as individuals, much to the detriment of the story. There are some big things that don't seem developed enough, while on the other hand, some small things drag out for a long time. I really wanted to like this, as I like both creators, and madcap-underdog-space-adventures is basically my favorite genre, but I never got into it.

4. Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, adaptation by Damian Duffy, art by John Jennings

This is a comics adaptation of Parable of the Sower, the first of Octavia Butler's two "Earthseed" novels; I own the novel but have not yet got around to reading it. Coming to the adaptation without having actually read the book, I found it somewhat stilted. There is a lot of narration (pulled, I assume, from the novel's prose), and I didn't feel the art carried the story as much as it might have. The art looks good, and is tonally appropriate, but there are a lot of characters that I couldn't always keep straight. It seemed interesting, but never really grabbed me.

3. Monstress: Warchild, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda

On the other hand, volume five of Monstress was fine. Not great, but fine, and one of the better installments of the series. I do like the ongoing story of Kippa, even if much of the rest of the set-up leaves me cold, so I am ranking it higher than Parable.

2. Once & Future: The King Is Undead, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Dan Mora

This collects the first six issues of a new series from eternal Hugo favorite Kieron Gillen. The premise is good fun: sure you can bring King Arthur back to life... but wouldn't that make him a zombie? There's also the potential to say some interesting stuff about British national identity, and occasionally the book does. Mostly, though, it's a fast-paced action story with lots of twists and turns, and fun characters, supported by strong art from Dan Mora. Enjoyable, and I would read more of this, but I felt there was room for more thematic depth. 

1. Ghost-Spider: Dog Days Are Over, written by Seanan McGuire, penciled by Takeshi Miyazawa with Ig Guara, inked by Takeshi Miyazawa & Rosi Kämpe with Ig Guara

I'm not sure I've ever read a Seanan McGuire Hugo finalist that I've unreservedly liked, but this collection of comics about Ghost-Spider (the hero formerly known as Spider-Gwen) came the closest. This was pretty delightful superhero stuff: Gwen Stacy is trying to be in a band and fight crime in her own universe of Earth-65 while also trying to attend college and make a friendship with an older version of Peter Parker on Earth-616. It's pretty typical "young superhero" tropes with just enough novelty to make it enjoyable; in the Marvel multiverse, Deans of Admission just shrug off when new students are transfers from other timelines! I've been a fan of Takeshi Miyazawa ever since Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, and he is as dependable here as always, a perfect match for what McGuire is doing on writing. Overall a cute package that made me want to go back and read all the Spider-Gwen comics.

Ranking is tricky because this is definitely less ambitious than Monstress or Parable of the Sower. It is, on the other hand, does a better job of being what it wants to be, and what it wants to be is more to my taste. My main reservation is that the story basically just stops; this collects the first five issues of a ten-issue series. I guess we will have to wait to see the nominating data to understand why, but I am a bit baffled as to why the nominators didn't just nominate the whole ten-issue series as a single work; as it ran from Oct. 2019 to Oct. 2020, it would have been eligible as a single unit, and I probably would have liked it unreservedly (assuming McGuire sticks the landing).

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Overall Thoughts

I kind of feel like I should deploy No Award? But that seems churlish; I can see why someone else would like all of the items on this list, even when I didn't particularly enjoy them myself. Some years there have been some great sf&f comics up for the Hugo Award, that I was glad to have read, but that mostly was not the case this year.

Obviously Monstress will win. Maybe things will finally be shaken up in the 2023 awards, when Saga will finally be eligible again.

The Good Soldier (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 16)

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 1988-91
Acquired: August 2015
Read: August 2021

The Good Soldier: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Andrew Cartmel, Mike Collins, Dan Abnett, Lee Sullivan, Paul Cornell, et al.

Normally, it seems to me, that the DWM strip transforms pretty slowly. When Steve Moore first took over for Mills & Wagner, he wrote one last Mills & Wagneresque epic, and of course Dave Gibbons stayed on art. When Steve Parkhouse took over from Moore, his early stories were done-in-one-or-twos with little stings at the end, like the majority of Moore's, only more downbeat, even though soon enough he was writing big Time Lord epics, and he also had the benefit of Gibbons continuing. When the artists began changing during the fifth Doctor era, the writing stayed the same, and when Parkhouse left, the artist stayed the same, and so on. Parkhouse and Ridgway is very different from Mills & Wagner and Gibbons, but there was no sharp demarcation between them.

But the strips collected in The Good Soldier mark, I would argue, one of the more abrupt transitions in DWM history. Most of the McCoy-era strips so far have felt "kiddie" or disposable, or both, even if you discount the ones originally published in or intended for The Incredible Hulk Presents. Suddenly at the beginning of this volume, the strips feel denser, making more use of the way the comics medium had evolved as of the early 1990s. They feel more like the tv show, too; not the tv show as it had been some time ago (I feel like some of the McCoy strips-- Claws of the Klathi! for example-- were trying to emulate Tom Baker stories), but as it was in its last two years on screen. This is especially true in the characterization of the Doctor. Plus the strips suddenly become interested in creating a continuity; there are lots of references to both recent strip adventures (something the strip did a lot in the Parkhouse/McKenzie era, but which had largely vanished since) and recent tv adventures (something the strip has never really bothered to do before).

This era is the one and only time that the DWM strip was the main source for ongoing Doctor Who adventures. The tv show was seemingly over, the Virgin New Adventures had not yet debuted. If you wanted new Doctor Who, this was it! Never again would the comics be at the forefront like this. (Of course, it has acted like it was the only form of Doctor Who going before, and would do so again, but for a brief moment, that was actually true.)

from Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Special

Scream of the Silent, from Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Special (Nov. 1988)
story by John Freeman, illustrations by Lee Sullivan

I actually have no idea how many prose stories DWM has run over the years. It could be hundreds; it could be none up until now. (The Tardis wiki lacks a handy category for them.) If there have been some, none have ever been collected in the DWM graphic novels. That said, I have never really cared for the prose Transformers UK stories I have read; something about them just doesn't work for me. It's like they're not really prose stories at all, but transcriptions of comic strips, not really making use of the medium they're supposedly designed for. They are sparse on interiority and on visuals, just lots of dialogue. Scream of the Silent is no exception; I very easily lost track of what was going on here and why it mattered. I am not entirely sure it all hangs together, but maybe it does and the story just doesn't interest me enough to figure it out. There is a nice Lee Sullivan picture of the seventh Doctor looking in a mirror and seeing the first; it doesn't much have anything to do with anything, though, and I assume the moment was put into the story because it was originally published in an anniversary special issue.

from Doctor Who Magazine #163

Teenage Kicks!, from Doctor Who Magazine #163 (Aug. 1990)
story by Paul Cornell, illustrations by Cam Smith

This, on the other hand, is a prose story by a prose writer, and it feels like it. This short story was published in the first-ever DWM issue with no comic strip, no even a rerun or backup. It features Ace, who rejoined the Doctor (after her sojourn in the Cretaceous) in a story published in the previous issue (which for some reason is not collected until the next graphic novel). This is kind of a weird story; the Doctor takes Ace to confront some gang members she used to run with, and also there are aliens. It felt to me like Cornell was trying to do more than the space allotted really allowed for... but Freeman, say, was probably trying to do much less! Cornell, of course, has a great handle on the character of Ace, and a great prose style, and I really enjoyed reading this, and I'm glad DWM has made Cornell's first Doctor Who prose fiction more readily available.

from Doctor Who Magazine #164

Fellow Travellers, from Doctor Who Magazine #164-66 (Sept.-Oct. 1990)
script by Andrew Cartmel, art by Arthur Ranson, letters by Glib

As I mentioned above, suddenly the tone and style of the DWM strip is all different. It's atmospheric, with interesting and unusual cuts; there's narration boxes with internal narration from Ace. As confirmed by the backmatter, it's a clear indication of influence from Alan Moore; for the first time, we're obviously reading comics written and illustrated by someone who has read Watchmen. I occasionally found some of the transitions here tough to follow (Cartmel was a first-time comic scripter), but I really enjoyed this. Clever twists, good engagement with cultural issues, strong characterization for Ace, spooky atmosphere, nice pop culture references. This feels like it came out of the same Doctor Who universe as Ghost-Light and Survival (which is, in my book at least, a good thing)-- but playing to the strengths of the comics form, not tv.

Darkness, Falling / Distractions, from Doctor Who Magazine #167-68 (Nov.-Dec. 1990)
story by Dan Abnett, pencils by Lee Sullivan, inks by Mark Farmer, letters by Steve Potter

These are two three-page stories setting up the "epic" Mark of Mandragora which followed. The first is a brief horror vignette about a UNIT soldier dying, with a one-page Brigadier cameo; the second is about the Doctor and Ace in the TARDIS, realizing that the Mandragora Helix is behind it all, and that it's infected the TARDIS. These are okay; as I'll get to in a moment, I found Mark a bit disappointing, and I think I would have liked these more if they were leading up to something more epic and satisfying than they actually were. Together, they total six pages, less than the normal length of a single issue's worth of comics, which feels a bit cheap, though I guess that matters less in a collected edition than it would have at the time. Lee Sullivan, though, does an excellent job with things like the futuristic cityscape, the secondary console room, and the time vortex-- plus he really nails likenesses. Surely one of DWM's best art finds.

from Doctor Who Magazine #172

The Mark of Mandragora, from Doctor Who Magazine #169-72 (Jan.-Apr. 1991)
story by Dan Abnett, pencils by Lee Sullivan, inks by Mark Farmer, letters by Steve Potter

I wanted to like this, and for the first three parts I did. Like the tv show did before it was cancelled, it feels very "now"; I like the attempts at near-future slang ("child") and fashion, and I like our new UNIT commander, Muriel Frost. There's some great stuff here in terms of ideas and art, especially the scene where the TARDIS merges with Earth, and so the Doctor and Ace running down a corridor suddenly find themselves crashing into Frost in a London nightclub. I also really liked the bit where the Doctor and Ace whiteout, thinking they've lost. It's got good stakes to it, and a good sense of threat. It all comes crashing down in the resolution, though, as the Doctor wins without even doing anything! This would almost work, because the Doctor has to sacrifice the TARDIS... except of course the TARDIS is back right away, so the Doctor wins with no cost and no cleverness.

Party Animals, from Doctor Who Magazine #173 (May 1991)
script by Gary Russell, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by Steve Pini, letters by Glib

The Doctor (with Ace) finally makes it to Maruthea for Bojaxx's birthday party. Everyone who's everyone is there, so mostly what follows is a series of cameos. Some are from the DWM universe: Beep the Meep, Abslom Daak and the Star Tigers, Ivan Asimoff, the Freefall Warriors, Death's Head, and the little penguins John Ridgway liked to draw are among the ones I noticed. Many are from outside it: Sapphire and Steel, Worf, Emma Peel, and Bart Simpson! I was going to put Captain Britain in the second group, but I guess he technically goes in the first. (I don't think he ever met the Doctor, but I am sure they have mutual acquaintances.)

The big appearance is from a future Doctor, based on the Doctor performed by Nick Briggs in the Audio/Visual fan audios, which Gary Russell worked on himself. They bicker a little bit, and then leave. Like, why? I appreciate that in this era, DWM was pulling its history together again, but I have no idea what the point of this was, and art aside, I didn't find much to like about it.

from Doctor Who Magazine #174

The Chameleon Factor, from Doctor Who Magazine #174 (June 1991)
story by Paul Cornell, pencils by Lee Sullivan, inks by Mark Farmer, letters by Glib

I found this one pretty inexplicable, to be honest. Ace and the Doctor climb a tree in the TARDIS; a new console room comes into existence; the Doctor gets his ring back. Okay, but why is this a story as opposed to part of a story?

from Doctor Who Magazine Summer Special 1991

Seaside Rendezvous, from Doctor Who Magazine Summer Special 1991 (July 1991)
script by Paul Cornell, pencils by Gary Frank, inks by Stephen Baskerville, letters by Glib

The Doctor and Ace encounter an Ogri (from The Stones of Blood) on the beach. It's all rather pointless. Because I jump around in the book on account of reading the strips in publication order, I actually missed the first page, showing the ship in the nineteenth century, until I got confused by what Paul Cornell was talking about in the backmatter. It's funny, I haven't got on with any of Cornell's DWM strips so far, but he's gone on to have one of the most successful comics careers of anyone working on the mag in this era, and I absolutely love most of his work for Marvel.

from Doctor Who Magazine #176

The Good Soldier, from Doctor Who Magazine #175-78 (July-Oct. 1991)
script by Andrew Cartmel, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by Steve Pini, letters by Glib

The Mondasian Cybermen make an initial foray of Earth in the 1950s, scooping up a bit of desert outside Los Vegas with a diner, some soldiers, and the Doctor and Ace on it! I didn't totally get the Mondasian plan here (why did they scoop up the Earth?) and found the resolution, like the one to The Mark of Mandragora a little easy (though nowhere near as bad). But the rest was great. Awesome visuals of the type Doctor Who could largely only do in comics, great characterization, some thematic complexity, and yet another strong artistic turn from Mike Collins. Again, it shows some influence from comics outside the strip with some collage panels when Ace's mind accesses the Cyber computer network and some good use of narration boxes. (I am pretty sure DWM will never have a consistent artist again like it did in the early days, but alternating between Collins and Sullivan pretty much is, and it's much better than the hodgepodge approach of the last couple volumes. It really does give a unified feel to the proceedings when the writers are always changing.)

from Doctor Who Magazine #179

A Glitch in Time, from Doctor Who Magazine #179 (Oct. 1991)
script by John Freeman, art by Richard Whitaker, letters by Caroline Steeden

This is a throwback to that kind of DWM done-in-one I often don't like, the ominous sci-fi story. But actually this one had a pretty fun concept and some good art. Instead of saving the twist for the end, it has twists throughout, which in my mind is much more interesting, and I wish more writers of short sf realized that.

Stray Observations:

• The Tardis wiki claims that Fellow Travellers is when the strip began intertwining its continuity with the NAs... but this surely is not true given the NAs didn't begin publication for another eight months!
• Fellow Travellers is the debut of Smithwood Manor, the so-called "house on Allen Road" used as a base and a refuge by the seventh Doctor and companions in many NAs.
• "Glib" is the pseudonym of Gary Gilbert, who had a prolific run as a letterer on Marvel UK's Transformers title. According to the paratext in The Transformers Classics UK, "Glib" was a nickname his wife gave him based on his name, but there was a joke that it stood for "Greatest Letterer In Britain," which caused fellow Transformers letterer Gordon Robson to one-up him by adopting the pseudonym "GLOP" for "Greatest Letterer On the Planet." 
• Darkness, Falling is the first ever main strip in DWM to not feature the Doctor.
  
• Given the reference to Battlefield in Mark of Mandragora (which takes place a couple years later, in 1999), it bothered me that there was no explanation for why Alistair is back on active duty and why Bambera is not present.
• Darkness, Falling draws together a lot of the recent continuity of the strip, and weaves it into the tv show. The Doctor says, "Something's been troubling me for weeks.... Recently, I haven't been able to take take [sic] the TARDIS away from Earth. Whilst there, we've met creatures and forces that never should have appeared on its surface—at any time! Those Kalik butchers I told you about, Morgaine, even the Hitchers..." The explicit references here are to Train-Flight, Battlefield, and Fellow Travellers. So this would seem to indicate that all of Season 26 (where the TARDIS is Earthbound) takes place recently, and that the Doctor's solo travels in recent strips also take place in such a range. (Train-Flight and Doctor Conkeror! were the first inklings we had the Doctor knew something was up, and there's also hint of in in Teenage Kicks!) And maybe the Doctor is listing those enemies chronologically? On the other hand, most of the pre-Train-Flight strips or the IHP strips can't go within this gap because the Doctor isn't stuck on Earth in those.
  
• In Party Animals, the Doctor finally makes it to Maruthea, where he's been trying to go since Echoes of the Mogor!, way back in DWM #143. It took him thirty issues to get there! That said, it hasn't been brought up since Nemesis of the Daleks (#152, twenty issues prior), so maybe he gave up for a bit after that.
• With both those things in mind, I might suggest the following sequence (though I'm sure there are some wrinkles here I've failed to account for):
  • DWM #130-56 / IHP #1-12 / DW25AS: The Doctor travels with Frobisher, Olla, and then by himself, trying to reach Maruthea. (Probably during Mel's tv tenure, if we care about this; there's no evidence that Mel exists in DWMland!)
  • Season 25: The Doctor meets and travels with Ace.
  • The Doctor drops Ace off in the Cretaceous.
  • DWM #159-62: The Doctor travels by himself again, and begins to have inklings that the Mandragora Helix is affecting his life. The TARDIS stops being able to land anywhere other than Earth. He then picks Ace up again.
    
  • Season 26: The Doctor continues to travel with Ace, only making Earth landings.
    
  • DWM #163-73: The Doctor encounters more effects of the Helix, confronts and defeats it, and then finally reaches Maruthea.
• The exact sequence doesn't really matter; what I like here is how the strip is not only weaving its own events together again, but it also has the audacity to claim that things that happened on screen are part of its continuity, too. Similarly, The Mark of Mandragora cites both the events of Invaders from Gantac! and Battlefield as being so big that the public has become aware of unearthly threats. Plus there's a small cameo from Magog, the villain of DWM's very first story, The Iron Legion! Since Parkhouse left, the strip hasn't really used its own history much, so it's nice to see that back in play again.
• The Mark of Mandragora establishes that Foreign Hazard Duty began as a UNIT off-shoot; once UNIT went public, it needed a top-secret branch to take care of stuff.
• This volume contains the only DWM work of Mark Farmer, who would go on to the kind of career where I couldn't point to a specific title and tell you he did something amazing, but where I do know that whenever I see his name, I am going to see solid, dependable work. Future work that sticks out to me includes Batman: Year Two,  the Alan Davis Killraven revival, Paul Cornell's Wisdom, and Justice League Detroit.
  
• In the backmatter, Gary Russell says that Bonjaxx is a Dæmon who originally appeared in a backup strip from DWM #49. I haven't read this because it hasn't been collected; the Tardis wiki claims that story features Azal from The Dæmons, however.
  

• 

  from Doctor Who Magazine #173
  

  Russell also says, "writing comic strips is darned difficult. So many people think, 'Oh, I can knock one of those out,' but they can't. I'm a prime example of that." Despite his self-professed lack of ability, he would go on to write several more DWM strips and an IDW miniseries!
• The Doctor says he and Ace need a holiday at the end of The Chameleon Factor, which links nicely into Cornell's own Seaside Rendezvous, where they are on holiday. Surely this is intentional? I guess it could also lead into The Good Soldier, though.
• Seaside Rendezvous is the only DWM work of Gary Frank who, like Mark Farmer, would go on to a career as a solid artist in American comics. He illustrated the first-ever Birds of Prey story, for example, and he even teamed up again with Paul Cornell during his Action Comics run. The story's inker, Stephen Baskerville, would do no more Doctor Who work, but did ink a million Transformers strips for Marvel UK, and also went on to do some for IDW.
  
• In the backmatter, Mike Collins says the convertible that the Doctor and Ace drive in The Good Soldier is the TARDIS. Am I just dense, because I totally failed to notice this if so! I thought it was just a car with some Doctor enhancements; when does the strip establish it to be the TARDIS? Rereading the first page, I can kind of see it, but I assumed that Ace's comment in a narration box ("I'm not sure I like the TARDIS looking this way") was something she said earlier, in the recently reconfigured TARDIS.

This post is the sixteenth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Incomplete Death's Head. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
    

Hugos 2021 [Prerequisite]: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, Books 3–4 & 6

One of this year's finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel is Network Effect, which is the first Murderbot novel but the fifth Murderbot book. Only I left off back at book 2 in 2019, since that was the last one to be a finalist for Best Novella. So before reading the novel, I caught up on the intervening books via the library. In addition to books 3 and 4, I also read book 6, since it chronologically precedes book 5, as well as a bonus short story that goes between books 4 and 6.

Published: 2018
Read: June 2021

The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol

by Martha Wells

I enjoyed the first Murderbot book, but was cool toward the second. I was also cool toward this. I recently read a comment on r/printSF that did a good job of summing up why; I went looking for it, but I can't find it, so I'll have to paraphrase: "Murderbot became considerably less interesting when they stopped being me: a snarky person trapped in a terrible job for an awful corporation who just wants to spend their time binge-watching television." Yet again, Murderbot finds itself pulled into saving a group of people on some expedition, and I found its protestations obnoxious and the action dull.

 

Published: 2018
Read: August 2021

The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy

by Martha Wells

This book contains all of the flaws of the previous two. Like the others, it's slow to start. Which can be fine; a book, even if it's a novella, doesn't have to rocket out of the gate, but so many of the opening chapters seem to be Murderbot reading newsfeeds in order to summarize exposition about corporate maneuverings to the reader, and I keep thinking there must be a better way to handle all of this. It's like when I DM and my characters have to sit through a mission briefing at the beginning where I throw a bunch of information out because I can't think of a better way to communicate it all to them. I just don't follow all the corporate stuff, and the book doesn't make me want to. Also it seems like a curious gap in the worldbuilding that the bond company so pivotal to GrayCris's problems and thus Muderbot's is never even given a name. Like in the last couple, I find Murderbot's snark less effective when it's out on its own doing stuff that it wants to do. Anyway, eventually the action started and then I was really bored. I think this book—all of them, really—overestimate how much I care about or even remember about the supporting characters from the first book.

 

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: August 2021

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory

by Martha Wells

This short story was given away as a bonus to readers who preordered the Murderbot novel, and later published for free on Tor.com, and for $0.99 on Amazon. It's basically an epilogue to Exit Strategy, showing Murderbot settling into its new status quo; for the first time in the series, the perspective isn't Murderbot's own, so we get a sense of how it is perceived by others. I remember thinking it was fine enough, but it's not really a story, just some scenes that feel like set-up for a longer work, and by the time I read the next book a week later, I'd already forgotten anything that happened here.

 

Published: 2021
Read: August 2021

The Murderbot Diaries: Fugitive Telemetry

by Martha Wells

At the beginning, I was like, "Wow, this is a return to form for Murderbot." With Murderbot settling into a life on Preservation Station, it has an annoying structure for its snark to push against once again, and the narrative voice I remembered from reading All Systems Red way back when once again shone clearly. But then like halfway through, the book kicked into action mode, and I lost interest.

Plus: lots of people call this a locked-room murder mystery, but... even though it's about someone investigating a murder, I didn't really think it read like a murder mystery, more like a police procedural. I guess that's not really the book's fault, but I think I would have liked the book better if it had been about Murderbot talking to suspects more, instead of Murderbot fighting a CombatBot.

Also, and this is a weird sentence I never thought I'd utter, but I am sick to death of CamelCase.

 

So, uh, I am hyped to read the novel, I guess!

2021 Hugo Award for Best Short Story Ballot

As I said back when I posted my Best Related Work ballot, this year, I have much more time to get all my ballots up, so I'll be doing a single post for each category in which I am voting. Here is Best Short Story.

Things I Nominated

Most of my sf&f short fiction reading comes via the Hugo ballot and Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies, so it's hard for me to nominate anything, as by the time I read it, it's too late. But I actually nominated three things in this category, though I knew none of them would make the ballot.

One was the short story "In Vivo" by Christiane Vadnais; I read this as part of the short story collection Fauna (translated by Pablo Strauss, Coach House). The collection as a whole I found hit or miss, but this story was a creepy bit of thoughtful horror. I doubt it came to the attention to the majority of the Hugo electorate, however, being an indie non-sf publisher translation of a Francophone short story collection!

The other two were both Doctor Who: Lockdown! short stories by Paul Cornell, "The Shadow Passes" (about the thirteenth Doctor and companion waiting out a disaster in isolation) and "Shadow of a Doubt" (about the thirteenth Doctor going back for Daughter-of-Mine from "Human Nature" and giving her the second chance that the tenth Doctor wouldn't). Again, I didn't expect them to make the ballot (tie-in fiction is not a preferred subgenre of the Hugo electorate, despite their tastes in film only running as far as mediocre franchises), but Cornell got the thirteenth Doctor down better than any of her screen stories have bar one, I reckon, and these were both uplifting tales in a time where we really needed them, and they were certainly among the best 2020 fiction I read in time to nominate.

---

6. "Little Free Library" by Naomi Kritzer

Is there a sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring? I would very much like to read it. I will leave behind anything I have for the other books, if you will give them to me. Also, I am sorry about the day I took everything. I promise I will never do this again. What would you like in trade for the next book about Frodo, if there is one?

This is a somewhat twee fantasy story about how good it is to read fantasy stories, the kind of thing that Hugo nominators and often Hugo voters evidently eat up. The basic concept is okay (people from a fantasy world love the fantasy books they find in a Little Free Library) but it went on too long and didn't go somewhere that I found very plausible.

5. "Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse" by Rae Carson

So many things could go wrong. We’ve discussed all of them. Like billions of child-bearers who came before us, we’re counting on a little luck.

I read a thing by Rae Carson that explained where this story was coming from, and once I got that, I appreciated it more, but I still didn't like it a ton. This is about a group of women during a zombie apocalypse; zombies go particularly crazy for the birthing scent, and the story follows two moms hiding out as one gives birth. I see that it's working against particular tropes about women in general and mothers in particular in zombie stories... but as a story, I still didn't find it very interesting. Basically, two people hide from zombies for a while, then they get out. Its particular ranking is kind of arbitrary, but I felt the Lee story was up to something I found more interesting, but it also didn't put me off like the Kritzer. Just kind of dull.

4. "The Mermaid Astronaut" by Yoon Ha Lee

“It will hurt,” the witch said. “Certain kinds of desire always do.”

A mermaid wants to go into space, but has to give up being a mermaid to do so. Lee knows how to craft engaging prose, and I think he works better in the short form than the novel form a lot of the time, but the actual story I thought was pretty good though not great.

3. "Open House on Haunted Hill" by John Wiswell

“I’m a software engineer, and I host a skeptic podcast. You might have heard us.”

The house isn’t offended. It doesn’t believe in ghosts either.

Cute story about a haunted house, except all the haunted house wants is for a nice family to move into it. I feel like you would get more out of this if you read it from inside the horror genre, where it's clearly subverting tropes, than from outside it. As a piece of worldbuilding, it doesn't really do anything. Not the story's fault it got nominated for an sff award, I guess!

2. "A Guide for Working Breeds" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

hey again
just wanted to ask
do you know how to be mean to humans

This is cute (so many short fiction Hugo finalists are these days, not sure how I feel about that) but enjoyable: told largely in chat logs, it's the tale of two robots, a newly activated barista and an experience killing machine; the machine is assigned to mentor the barista. The at-first-stodgy killing machines learns there is more to life than its narrow vision; the naïve barista learns to stand up for itself. I thought the resolution was a bit pat, but otherwise I enjoyed it.

1. "Metal Like Blood in the Dark" by T. Kingfisher

Eve had had the knowledge of good and evil handed to her, but Sister had to create it for herself from first principles, and it went slowly.

This at first threatens to be a cute story about robots, but this is by T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon, so the fluffiness is wrapped around an iron mallet. Two naïve robots are taken advantage of, and one must invent the concept of lying in order to protect her brother. Clever and moving, and an angle I don't remember ever having seen before on a pretty common sf concept.

---

My attempts to predict winners are often pretty bad, especially in the short categories, where I know less of the "buzz" around various stories than I do as regards novels and films. But if I were to give it a go, I would say that the Hugo electorate 1) always loves T. Kingfisher (justifiably) and 2) always loves self-serving stories about how great it is to be a fan (less justifiably). So I would guess either "Metal Like Blood" or "Little Free Library."

As is often the case with Best Short Story of late, I find it hard to believe this is the six best stories in the genre for the year, but at least the top couple are strong and deserving winners. The past couple years, I've read Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year volume and found his selections much more to my taste than the Hugo electorate's. The volume covering 2020 isn't out yet, but from the table of contents, I can see that none of these stories made it in. (Of course, Clarke's book is sf-only, so three of these stories wouldn't have even been eligible.) Actually, I think none of Clarke's picks were Hugo finalists in any category, which is a first, I believe. The problem is, I suspect, that the Hugos for short fiction are biased towards what is freely available on the Internet; Clarke reads much more widely, and gets the good stuff out of Asimov's, F&SF, and all the rest that the awards don't.