Here is my second set of Hugo ballots: these are all the book-based categories, including the biggie, Best Novel. (Go back here for my short fiction ballots.)
Things I Nominated
I usually don't nominate in Best Novel, because I'm just not up-to-date enough, but I actually did read a 2021-published sf book in time to nominate it, We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker, a really good family drama about people who get their brains modified to increase focus and productivity. It did not make the ballot.
I also nominated one thing in Best Related Work, the Vox article, "How Twitter can ruin a life" by Emily St. James, about the disturbing reaction by trans activists and allies to a debut sf story by a trans woman. It made the ballot! I thought I had nominated "Log off? Can't be done" by Sophie from Mars, which uses the same controversy as a jumping-off point for discussing online identity, but apparently I forgot to. Hopefully I don't discover that it failed to make the ballot by a single vote, or something.
Best Related Work
5. Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane AndersThis is a how-to-write-sf book, with a particular focus on doing it in times of societal crisis. It's fine for what it is, but I found it undermined by its vagueness: the book works really well when it uses concrete examples from Anders's own work (especially as I've read three of her novels), but most of the time it uses goofy hypothetical ones. It's easy to give general writing advice; it's harder to say what need to be done in a specific project. A quick easy read, but there are stronger works in this category.
4. Debarkle (the complete edition): 1880 to 2020 by Camestros FelaptonThis is a sizeable book that chronicles the attempts by the "Sad Puppies" and "Rabid Puppies" to slate the Hugo Awards from 2015 to 2017, though as you can tell from the subtitle, it provides a lot of historical context. The book is very thorough, and its main strength is in tracking down the words of those involved at the time, digging up archived blog posts and tweets and so on. It's a very useful and necessary work, and will be a valuable resource for anyone doing fan history. I found the statements of the so-called "Sad Puppies" the most interesting; I knew a lot about Vox Day already, but learned much I hadn't know about Larry Correia and Sarah A. Hoyt and Brad Torgersen and John C. Wright, among others. Correia comes across a bit thin-skinned, and Hoyt's descent from bog-standard right-winger to "if-Biden-wins-the-left-will-be-putting-people-like-me-into-camps" is almost tragic. Wright is just a shit. It would be a worthy winner, but I placed it slightly further down on my ballot because it's self-published... and reads like it. Lots of typos, has a tendency to get lost in the weeds sometimes, sourcing and cross-referencing is often wonky.
3. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyreThis anthology of essays covers "radical science fiction" from 1950 to 1985. The definition of "radical" is seemingly broad: it takes in sf radical in form, in content, and in politics. Some essays thematically cover certain ideas (e.g., apocalypse, sex, nuclear war, homosexuality, animals), others focus on specific authors or even texts (e.g., Judith Merril, R. A. Lafferty, the Strugatsky brothers, Philip K. Dick). Despite its seemingly broad mandate, it actually feels very coherent: one gets an impression of sf responding in a variety of way to a time of social change, and that it was a time when almost anything was possible in the genre. It does a great job of creating a coherent portrait without feeling repetitive; I never would have thought of putting some of this stuff together, but it really does fit. The essays are also generally of a very high quality, in-depth and analytical without feeling too academic. There were really just two I didn't like (one felt too much like a journal article, another a summary), and there were some obvious errors occasionally. I have some new works to seek out, and I think it would be fun to teach a course using this to organize. Though it didn't strike me as important as some of the stuff I've ranked higher, in general this is the kind of work I'm happy to see this category rewarding.
2. "How Twitter can ruin a life" by Emily St. JamesAs I said above, I nominated this; it's a thorough examination of the controversy surrounding the Isabel Fall short story "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter," published in Clarkesworld. The story was accused of being transphobic and the writer a Nazi, despite being a trans woman, and the story was pulled. St. James explores the details around the reaction, moving beyond hearsay, and interviews Fall herself. Great stuff; again, I would gladly see it win. Last year, the story itself was a finalist in Best Novelette, and despite obtaining move first-preference votes than any other finalist, came in fifth. Clearly sentiment against the story continues to persist, so I will be curious to see how this essay does.
This biography of Stan Lee is exhaustive, gripping, and thorough. Stan Lee made Marvel Comics, but more than that, he made himself... and then, in the long run, unmade himself. The portrait that emerges from this book is of a smart man and a hard worker who was unafraid to exploit others for his own gain, and always felt that he was due more than he had gotten, and willing to do almost anything to get it. I knew a lot of this in broad strokes, especially Lee's days as a Marvel editor co-creating a lot of iconic characters—ones that really owe more to his co-creators than him—but Riesman provides a lot of detail and supporting evidence, and crafts an engaging tale. I knew less about Lee's post-Marvel career, and Riesman offers a pretty damning portrait of financial malfeasance and empty promises at Stan Lee Media. Later in Lee's life, he was surrounded by vicious people willing to exploit them, and it's a tragedy... but a tragedy of Lee's own making in some ways, as he would invite into his circle anyone willing to tell him how he could make it big. It's moving, in the sense that you really feel like you're watching something genuinely horrible happen. This was the first Best Related Work finalist I read, and immediately felt like the one to beat; Riesman really provided something of service to the genre in writing this book.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
6. Victories Greater than Death by Charlie Jane AndersI don't know that I believe squeecore exists... but if it does, this is definitely it. A teenage girl discovers she's really the reincarnation of a legendary alien space captain; with a group of brilliant human teenage underdogs, she joins a Starfleetesque space navy to fight an evil alien overlord. Anders has written some great books, so it surprised me how utterly I failed to connect with this. Boring characters, humdrum action, tedious relationships, generic prose, clichéd villain. Feels like it was written to be turned into a Marvel movie. After reading The City in the Middle of the Night I felt like I kind of could see the idea that Anders was "this generation's Le Guin," but Le Guin's YA fiction stands alongside her adult stuff. This is generic YA to the extreme. I almost gave up on it halfway through; I ought to have done so.
5. Redemptor by Jordan IfuekoThis is the sequel to last year's Lodestar finalist, Raybearer. I found this kind of all over the place. Like a Brandon Sanderson novel, it felt like the characters had a stated urgent goal (prevent the spirits of children from being carried off) and a goal they were working on (assembling a ruling council) and though technically the two were linked, one felt like a distraction from the other. I also think the whole hook of "I have to convince a group of people to love me" is just... weird and not really something I actually want to read a book about? A strange hodgepodge of parts that don't come together with too many characters. Which is a shame, because though I didn't love Raybearer, I felt it had more potential than this.
4. A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little BadgerI really enjoyed this author's Elatsoe, which I read last year. This one follows to parallel narratives, animal people in a spirit realm and a human girl in ours, which over time converge. Some neat ideas, but the main (human) character never engaged me like Elatsoe did; she has some specific problems she is trying to solve, but for a YA novel, there was little sense of how she was supposed to be growing or developing as a character. (Also I had a hard time believing that in the 2020s a popular teen app would be called "st0ryte11er.")
3. Chaos on CatNet by Naomi KritzerThis is also a follow-up to a previous finalist, 2020's Catfishing on CatNet. Like that book, it's a cute, clever, sometimes tense near-future sf novel. This time Steph makes a new friend who's been raised by a Christian doomsday cult, and it seems like someone is using the Internet to manipulate them both. I really enjoyed it, and it even did one thing I thought was going to happen in Catfishing that that novel didn't do. My main complaint is that one of the funnest parts of Catfishing was Steph's fellow CatNet users, and they are much less prominent in this novel. Anyway, not as striking as Iron Widow, but a strong novel.
2. Iron Widow by Xiran Jay ZhaoThis starts strong. It's set in a world where mecha need a male and female pilot, but in using the girl's qi, the male usually kills her in the process because of his higher spirit pressure; it's a sacrifice families are willing to make because of the ideal of feminine service... and you know, they get money. The main character's sister went into service, but was killed by her co-pilot before she even piloted; now she's out for vengeance. Only it turns out that she has the higher spirit pressure! The narrative voice is distinct and clear, the turns of the plot are gripping, the exploration of gender roles is interesting and critical without being obvious, the worldbuilding is excellent. It did flag for me around the two-thirds mark, though; it got a bit aimless before it built up to the finale, losing the momentum it had built up, and a couple things I didn't quite buy. But overall this is a very good book (and in the hands of the right reader, probably a great one).
1. The Last Graduate by Naomi NovikI really enjoyed Iron Widow, but The Last Graduate knocked my socks off; it needs A Deadly Education to work, but it really does work. It has one of those moments where your understanding of the world as you know it just shifts from beneath you, and in doing so, reveals itself to be a novel about what the best people do. As soon as I got to that bit, I was like, "this is an easy top placement," and I was right. I am curious to see how Novik wraps the series up with The Golden Enclaves, but even if she fails to stick the landing, this is a strong novel on its own.
Best Novel
6. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
5. A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí ClarkI very much struggled to rank this versus The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, as I found both kind of dull but not, say, altogether awful, and don't really have an opinion on which one should win versus the other.
4. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky ChambersI eventually decided that Chambers always feels to me like she's trying to do something that could be interesting—I think if hopepunk exists, it's probably thanks to her—even if it never really works for me, whereas Clark's novel is kind of warmed-over police procedural tropes with a nice aesthetic.
3. She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-ChanThis feels like a weak year for Best Novel to me, because here's a book I thought was pretty interesting but not that great on the whole, and yet it seems to me it goes this high. I felt this was up to more that was interesting than a banal police procedural or the latest Becky Chambers paean to niceness... but it still didn't do a ton for me, and I was certainly more interested in Desolation than this.
2. A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady MartineWhile I really liked Martine's first novel, A Memory Called Empire (2019), which I felt deservedly won the Hugo, I was less taken by this follow-up. Still, it worked for me much much more as a novel than the Clark or the Chambers. This is damning with faint praise, but there you go: I would be fine with seeing this win even if I didn't think it was great, but that's a pretty unspirited thing to say about something that you're ranking in second.
1. Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka AokiIf you've been reading this list up until this point, you'll see that I have felt pretty unexcited about this year's shortlist. I read some stuff that made me think I wouldn't like this book, and indeed, a fifth of the way into it, I wasn't sure what was up. But by the halfway point, I was totally into it, and this was the best novel I read through the entire Hugo process. This was a great book, a neat combination of violin music, growing up trans, being an immigrant and/or a refugee, and doughnuts. More than any other book on the shortlist, I thought this was doing something new and interesting and pulling it off. The kind of thing that awards should go to, so I hope it wins.
Final Thoughts
The past few years, I've found Best Related Work very frustrating. My preference is for books about science fiction and fantasy, and over the past few years we've had finalists like angry blog posts, conventions, counter-conventions, YouTube videos, translations of medieval literature, award acceptance speeches, documentaries, and web sites. But this year... six books! On top that, six books all about the genre of science fiction and fantasy! And on top of that, six good books; this was certainly the most consistent of all the Hugo categories this year. I would be happy to see anything in it win. I don't have a good sense of what will actually win, though. I can tell you it won't be Dangerous Visions (too academic) or "How Twitter can ruin a life" (too controversial). Probably the Anders or the Sjunneson is my guess (both are popular with Hugo voters already), but I'd give an outside shot to Debarkle, since we do know that Hugo voters love to vote for finalists about voting for the Hugos.
Lodestar was fine, which is to say that about half of the books worked for me and half did not, which is pretty normal. Going into voting this year, I made a resolution that I didn't have to read in its entirety anything that clearly wasn't working for me. In previous years, I've slogged through books I wasn't enjoying out of some kind of vague hope that they would turn around, but of course a book you're not enjoying by the 50% mark never actually surprises you by getting better. So this year I promised myself that if I wasn't enjoying a Lodestar finalist, I would give up on it... and then I slogged all the way through Victories Greater than Death out of some kind of vague hope that it would turn around, and of course it didn't. Sequels don't normally clean up in the Hugos, but I kind of wonder if this is Novik's year to win it. If not her, I'd guess Anders.
Finally, Best Novel. This is probably the weakest year for Best Novel since I started voting in 2017. One great book, thank goodness, but beyond that just one very good one, one okay one, and a whopping three that just did not work for me, especially as award winners. Not sure what's happening with this category, because 2021 was similar. My rankings are somewhat different from hers, but despite that I find myself broadly in agreement with Elizabeth Sandifer's take on the category in this essay. This is what she said about her top pick: "I do not, generally speaking, want to
denigrate the state of the art in SF/F literature, which I broadly
think is in rude health, even if it has an increasingly evident dominant
mode. Lots of good stuff is being published, and 2021 was a better year
than its nominees. But of the six books on the list this year, this is
the only one that moves the state of the art—that tangibly reshapes the
boundaries of what is possible within the genre. If that is not what
awards are for, then what are they for?"
I have a guess that Becky Chambers will win, as sort of a belated consolation prize for not winning the Best Novel Hugo up until now, even if it is fourth in a series. But maybe I'm just being cynical. I don't think it will be Andy Weir.
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