Hugos 2023: Ballots for Novella, Novelette, and Short Story

Over the past couple months, I've been reviewing some standalone Hugo finalists; here is my first set of ranked Hugo votes, in this case in the short fiction categories.

If you follow Worldcon and the Hugos much, you'll know that this year is an unusual year. Worldcon is being hosted by a group of Chinese fans. It does end up in non-Anglo countries every now and again, but for what I think is the first time, there was enough of a critical mass of nominators from that country to actually land some non-English works on the ballot. This mostly happened in the short fiction categories: there was one Chinese novelette and four Chinese short stories. This is great in terms of making Worldcon actually be Worldcon, but posed some hurdles in that some of the stories actually have not been professionally translated into English!

(As always, my links below are to where you can read a full review of the story if I did one, or to where the story is freely available on the Internet.)

Things I Nominated

Normally I list what I nominated in these posts... but I don't remember, and if I got a confirmation e-mail from Chengdu Worldcon about it, I can't find it. That said, I suspect I didn't nominate anything this year; I doubt I read any published-in-2022 short fiction in 2022. Other than the Hugos, my main way of finding contemporary short fiction is Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies, but the 2022 one only came out in September, far too late to be useful!

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Best Novella

[UNRANKED] Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire

This year, I adopted a new policy, which was to not read things I was strongly certain I would not enjoy. Life is too short, you know? Every book you know you won't like but read anyway is a book you might have liked you could have read instead. Where the Drowned Girls Go is the seventh Wayward Children novella, and also the seventh one to be a finalist. I have ranked the previous ones 2nd, 4th, 4th, 6th, 7th (below No Award), and 5th (below No Award). The trend isn't very promising; though I enjoyed the first well enough, I found later installments didn't make good use of the central premise and McGuire's writing overly precious and twee. It seemed unlikely to me that this one would turn it around.

5. Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

—if death or betrayal have not torn them apart, why, they must be together still.

A monk travels their country with their talking bird, collecting stories, in this case (this is the third novella in this "cycle") mostly about women who practice martial arts. Well written and with some neat moments of observation, but even though it's a story about a journey and it ends with a big fight, I didn't think it really went anywhere.

4. Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk

“And all I have to do for my soul and a thousand dollars is find the White City Vampire.”
     She lifted her half-filled coupe of champagne. “Correct.”
     “That’s quite the offer,” I mused. “Plus expenses?”

A noir story about a lesbian detective with supernatural powers who takes a case where her soul lies in the balance. Well told, but like a lot of supernatural mysteries (I find, anyway), it didn't totally hang together. Why did anyone even need the detective wasn't really clear. Everyone else seemed to know so much more than she did! But more focused and interesting to me than Into the Riverlands.

3. A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow

“All I wanted was power.” Her lips make a bitter shape. “I know how I must sound, what you must think of me, but I only mean power over myself. Power to make my own choices, and arrive at my own ends.”
     “It's called agency.” And they said my humanities degree would never come in handy. “It's like, the power you exert over your own narrative.”

This is a sequel to A Spindle Splintered, which was a finalist last year. In the first book, the main character discovers she can travel into story worlds, and ends up rewriting Sleeping Beauty. In this book, she jumps into iterations of Snow White. I found the first one solid, but enjoyed this one a lot. There's some clever postmodern stuff, it plays with the multiverse well (it's certainly having a moment, isn't it), and it really thinks through Snow White in a very interesting way. Not quite at the core of what I think of as a Hugo winner to the extent of Ogres, but it would be a worthy winner, and it easily slotted above everything else on the ballot.

2. Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Histories,” Minith says, as though it’s a dirty word. “Apparently we have recruited a humanities student.”

Starts like a fantasy story about a world where ogres dominate humans... but over time, something different and more complicated slowly unspools. Good twists and turns, interesting ideas, and closer to what I find interesting about the genre of sf&f than A Spindle Splintered.

1. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

It's less galling to be mistaken for a man than a woman, for some reason. Probably because no one tries to kiss your hand or bar you from the Royal Mycology Society.

I bought this and reviewed it on its own (see above) because it's by T. Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon), and I always like her stuff. I was not surprised that it turned out to be my favorite novella this year by some margin. Like Ogres, it seems to be a fantasy story but turns out to be sf; like all of Kingfisher's stuff, it's expertly leavened by humor.

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Best Novelette 

[UNRANKED] "The Space-Time Painter" by Hai Ya

In the words of your time, the reason why consciousness and soul are beyond prying eyes is precisely because it is not only limited to the three-dimensional world. [machine translation of Chinese original]

I saved this story for last because I was holding out hope that an official English translation would be issued, but in the end, none was forthcoming. So I took the Chinese Word doc included in the packet, bunged it into an AI translator, and gave it a read. The results were less than stellar, but that's not the writer's fault, so I just left it off my ballot. (Though, functionally, that's the same as ranking it sixth.) It's about a detective investigating a haunting who finds a spirit of an artist... I think? It has some potentially creepy moments at the beginning (though they are undermined by the awkward prose and shifting tenses and weird word choice), but I soon got lost, and it was pretty long for a novelette.

5. "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente

It got in a lot trouble for drawing or carving or scratching its initial in desks all over the place, this funky S that kinda also looks like a pointy figure 8. But not lying on its side like the infinity symbol. Infinity standing up.

I’ve seen them everywhere. Still do. The space/time continuum gets around.

You’ve probably seen it, too.

A woman narrates her love affair with the space-time continuum across the course of her life, which appears to her in a variety of guises. But what does that actually mean, metaphorically or literally? I never figured that out, and like too much by Valente, it came across as a series of weird but ultimately pointless images; by the halfway point, I was dead bored and struggled to maintain focus enough to get all the way to the end.

4. "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi

“My daughter, even if I can do what you assume I can, surely you must know that it is not truly your mother here with us? None of her essence, her ori, is here, only her memories and her knowledge and a record of the neurochemical pathways that primarily drove her emotions.”

This is set in a future Yoruba nation, where leaders consult the ancestors in a very literal way, accessing a supercomputer programmed with all the memories of the dead. Interesting concept, but I felt it went on a bit too long compared to the complexity of the point it was making, and I'm not sure I really bought the ending twist.

3. "We Built This City" by Marie Vibbert

“A city without people is only a ruin.”

This is about a city on Venus under a dome, focusing on the contingent labor that keeps the dome clean, and their rights under increasing pressure from a corporate hierarchy. I like the idea of the story, and it hits all the right beats, but I never felt that emotional connection that I think it was really going for. But I am interested in looking out for more from Vibbert.

2. "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" by S. L. Huang

After all, Sylvie plays by rules we’ve already decided are acceptable.

Told in the form of tech journalism (very well, I might add), this is about an AI named Sylvie that goes after rich corrupt people, stalking them to terrible effect. I have a feeling it might date itself a bit quickly (the story came out the day after ChatGPT debuted), but for the moment, it does a great job speaking to some of the ethical issues around AI and algorithms, that responsibility for actions are displaced and diminished.

1. "If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You" by John Chu

I know. He knows I know. I know he knows I know. And, now, in a thrilling anti-climax, we finally both know that we both know. I swear a big chunk of the experience of being closeted is the bookkeeping.

This is a sort of superhero story, about two Asian-American gay bodybuilders, where one of them has superpowers. It is slow but in a good way: well-observed moments between the two characters as they come to know one another. Good application of an sfnal idea in a meaningful way. I liked this one a lot, and would happily see it win.

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Best Short Story

6. "On the Razor's Edge" by Jiang Bo

There are no real borders in space; all those who walk in space are true human heroes.

The copy of this Chinese story provided in the packet was translated by AI, and is consequently fairly rough. I found it pretty old-fashioned for prose sf: there's a disaster in space, people do some clever and dangerous stuff. It was hard to get very interested.

5. "The White Cliff" by Lu Ban

“They should not be treated like this. No one in the world is good at death, and no one can impart any experience about death. Even doctors have never really died.”

I found this very slow to start, but eventually it got a bit interesting. It's about a technology to access the minds of the dying, and about coming to terms with one's mortality. Not great, but more to my taste than "On the Razor's Edge."

4. "D.I.Y." by John Wiswell

He wouldn’t let anyone shit-talk my pronouns. My favorite was, How’re you going to memorize spells in dead languages if you can’t even remember ze/zir? 

This story is about a potential magic user who wants to go what is clearly a Hogwarts analogue—but in the story's apocalyptic future, magic might be the only thing that can solve the global water crisis, and instead of helping others, the magic school uses its powers for profit. I think the idea of it is better than the execution; there's interesting room for a critique of that aspect of the Harry Potter series, and the director of the magic school is clearly a satire of Muskesque figures, but the satire doesn't say much that is surprising or interesting or funny or biting, and the ending feels too easy, like a cop out. Succeeds as a story better than "The White Cliff" (I was never bored), but not as convincing as "Zhurong on Mars."

3. "Zhurong on Mars" by Regina Kanyu Wang

Like the humans who had left, e discovered freedom.

This is (the translator's note at the end helpfully explains) a rewriting of Chinese myth, transposed to Mars, with the main characters being a distributed AI intelligence in charge of a manufacturing plant and a robotic probe, instead of two gods. Well told (certainly the best translated of all the Chinese stories on the ballot this year), and with some interesting stuff to say about what counts as intelligence. I think it's probably trying to do less than "D.I.Y." was, but I also think it accomplishes what it set out to do much better.

2. "Resurrection" by Channing Ren

“What are you hungry for?” the old woman asked.
     “Stir fried pork with garlic shoots,” said the synthetic.
     “He really is my son!” The old woman burst into tears.

Originally published in 2020, this was made reeligible under Hugo rules by the publication of an English translation in 2022. It's about a soldier who dies in a war, and his consciousness is put into a new body and sent home to his grieving mother as part of an experimental program. Of the five Chinese-original finalists, this one was the most successful for me, and worked through the most interesting ideas, about life and death and grieving and memory. I'm even thinking of teaching it.

1. "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills

It is 2091, and Grace is praying that someone might have the means, the interest, and the entrepreneurial spirit to help her out.

This is a story about reproductive rights, mostly focused on a girl in the 2090s who gets pregnant in a world where abortion is illegal and implants in your body can even tell your parents when you're pregnant. But it jumps through time, taking in the deployment of contraceptives and abortion rights all across human history. A really powerfully written appeal about a really powerful issue. An easy first place.

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Overall Thoughts

The Tordotcom vibe is again a bit too strong in Best Novella, but it was good to see one from Solaris Books (Ogres) and one from a different Tor imprint at least (What Moves the Dead). I think every author in this category is a repeat finalist in this category, which is always a bit disappointing, but it is nice to see Tchaikovsky finally getting some notice from Hugo nominators. My vibe is that Kingfisher will win, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. (Obviously all right-thinking people think like me!)

On the other hand, I found this a good, diverse set of novelettes and short stories. Lots of different approaches to sf, lots of different sources. I don't think I can hazard a guess what will win Best Novelette (every blogger I've seen discuss them has had a very different ranking), but I think "Rabbit Test" will win Best Short Story unless there's more Chinese voters than not.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Sacraments of Fire

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Sacraments of Fire
by David R. George III

September–December 2385 (plus time travel to December 2377)
The Ascendants storyline was first introduced in Rising Son in January 2003; its last appearance prior to now was in August 2009's The Soul Key, to which this book makes a number of references. Then, with the Destiny time jump, it seemed to vanish entirely, with some vague references to it having happened during the missing years. Finally with July 2015's Sacraments of Fire it returns for an explanation at long last—six years since its previous appearance, over twelve since it first began. And here am I reading it eight years after that. It's been two decades since Rising Son!

Published: 2015
Acquired: June 2021
Read: June 2023

Little wonder, then, that this book is filled with exposition and reminders. Who is Iliana Ghemor, what happened to Taran'atar, what did the Ascendants do, who were the Eav'oq, what was the Even Odds? So many threads from the first eight years of the relaunch get woven together here. Yet even though there's a lot of reminding, I often found myself slightly confused anyway, unable to discern what was significant new information and what was mere reminding of old information. What had happened to Taran'atar? He died? Was this during the Destiny time jump, or was this something that happened in The Soul Key but I forgot about in the past fourteen years?

Probably some of this was my fault. Probably also some of it was unavoidable. If George was going to finally wrap this storyline up, then how could he not interact with the details of twelve-year-old novels?

Yet like many of George's recent Star Trek novel's, it has a fundamental flaw. I said of his last one, Revelation and Dust, that it was "a book where almost nothing happens for the first 250 pages," adding "[n]o one is trying to accomplish anything and encountering obstacles." Exactly what bugs me about George's recent novels crystallized while reading Sacraments of Fire; to build on my line about Revelation, this is not a book where anyone has a goal. Rather things happen, then people react; more things happen, then people react; still more things happen, then people react. No one is trying to do anything. There's a whole multi-chapter escapade where Sisko is sent on the Robinson to intimidate the Tzenkethi and has to figure out what happened to a Starfleet ship—it has nothing to do with the plot of the novel, but worse, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything. It just takes up pages. Things keep happening involving a Bajoran moon and some religious fundamentalists, but our characters don't do anything, they just witness it. Odo spends the entire book looking at a Changeling artifact and thinking about it. The characters are never proactive... not even in their own heads, where they mostly just think about things that have happened to them in other books or between books. There's no drive or energy here. Blanks are being filled in, but no story is being told. Who are these people? I couldn't tell you. What is this book actually about?

Yet, you know, it's fairly clever. Following her utterly tedious (and still of no clear relevance) wormhole experience in Revelation, Kira is deposited in, it turns out, 2377, just prior to the Ascendant attack on Bajor. This means that what happened in the Destiny time jump isn't just a flashback, but it happens in the "present" for her. This takes what has been a "bug" of the DS9 novels and turns it into a feature.

Yet, Kira's dilemma about how to act in the past is too abstract; since we as readers don't really know what happened to the Even Odds, it's hard to perceive the issues in changing its history. It's hard to feel any suspense when all that Kira does in the past is continually be introduced to characters from Rising Son. I remember loving the Even Odds crew in Rising Son, eager for more adventures with them. Well, I finally got my wish... and it's so boring?

To add to all this, the book is often a plod in its prose and in its plotting. Prose-wise, I know we need some recapping, but there's often too much of it; the book indiscriminately recaps stuff we don't actually need to know. Many scenes would have benefited from a slash of the red pen. For example, when Ro and Cenn Desca discuss whether Altek Dans reminds them of Akorem Laam, Ro says she doesn't rememeber him because, "Thirteen years ago, I was living on Galion." The narrator then says:

Cenn knew that, at that time, the planet Galion had fallen within the Demilitarized Zone established by a treaty between the Federation and the Cardassians. If he recalled correctly, many of the Maquis leadership—and apparently Ro Laren—had settled there. He also remembered that, during the Dominion War, Jem'Hadar forces had wiped out most of Galion's population. All of which suggested why Ro might not have learned about the lightship that traveled out of both the wormhole and Bajor's past.​

You probably don't need most of that paragraph, which provides way more detail than is needed to communicate the fact that Ro wasn't in Starfleet thirteen years ago. You certainly don't need the last sentence, which makes obvious an inference that anyone who had read the rest of the paragraph could have made. But it's typical of the book. In fact, in part II, there are these little recaps of part I, written as though it's recapping a previous book. Quark, I know who Altek Dans is and how he got onto the station because I read about it in this book earlier today!

The plot also plods. The conversation above is one that about happens about fifteen times. Is Altek Dans from the past like Akorem Lans? People wonder about this again and again. This is annoying because 1) everyone who read Revelation and Dust knows the answer is "yes" and 2) the characters make no progress in this question, and eventually decide the answer is probably "yes." Why did we have to spend all this time debating it? Isn't there some kind of Star Trek science test that could tell us he's from the past? On p. 190, this is still being debated!? Why are there interminable scenes about Ro trying to decide if Altek should be extradited or not extradited?

This book leads right into Ascendance, but the station present-day plotline doesn't even have a cliffhanger; it just stops. The cliffhanger is about what is happening eight years in the past!

Continuity Notes:

• When Nog tries to access the Vic Fontaine holoprogram, he notices someone else accessed it. I initially thought this was a reference to The Light Fantastic, but that happens after this part of Sacraments, so I am not sure.
  
• Blackmer offers his resignation to Ro again, but there's no acknowledgement he already did this in The Missing.

Other Notes:

• You can write paragraph upon paragraph about how Cenn Desca and Kira were friends, David R. George III, but you can't make me feel it.
• Speaking of which, Cenn Desca is boring, like all of the other new station characters. I don't think they've really been designed as main characters; they're names and species and jobs and that's it. They don't have hooks or desires. The original relaunch characters, Vaughn, Shar, Taran'atar, and so on, had things they wanted to do, and other things in conflict with them. What does Jefferson Blackmer want? Gregory Desjardins?* Wheeler Stinson? It's okay for side characters not to have this level of development... but they're too often the new ones are focused on like they are main characters. Indeed, I actually forgot Cenn Desca even existed, because I don't think he's even mentioned in The Missing or Rules of Accusation. Probably those authors forgot about him too!
  
• The back cover blurb is a very detailed description of the first scene and it gives little sense of most of what the novel is about. I would not be at all surprised to learn it was lifted almost verbatim from the first paragraph of George's outline.

* Why put a JAG office on the station if you never use it to tell a story, anyway?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Ascendance by David R. George III

Hugos 2023: Monstress: Devourer by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Monstress, Volume Seven: Devourer

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2022
Acquired: July 2023
Read: September 2023

Writer: Marjorie Liu

Artist: Sana Takeda

Lettering & Design: Rus Wooton

Every year, I read the latest volume of Monstress for the Hugo Awards, and every year, I think to myself, "This series is baffling and you're not enjoying it; you should stop picking it up." But then the next year rolls around and I think to myself, "You own all the previous volumes, why would you stop now? How bad can it be?" Then I read the newest volume... and I am baffled and don't enjoy it. Too many characters, too many plot threads, too much backstory. Maybe this would read better straight through, but that's not how it was released; it was released over seven years with absolutely no concession to that fact. Maybe when it's done I'll take a stab at it again, and maybe volume seven will make more sense if it hasn't been a year since volume six.

Chiller by Sterling Blake

Chiller: A Scientific Suspense Novel by Gregory Benford

I read this as part of my ongoing investigation into science fiction about life extension technology. It's a thriller about an Alcor-like cryonics facility originally published in 1993 under the pen name "Sterling Blake," republished in 2011 under the real name of Gregory Benford, hard sf writer.

Originally published: 1993
Read: July 2023

It's cleverly put together. The novel rotates between four perspectives: a scientist who helps out at Immortality Incorporated (I²), a technician and cryonicist who works there, that cryonicist's girlfriend, and a deranged religious killer who sees cryonics as an affront against God. At first it seems like a fairly standard thriller with cryonics as the maguffin: the killer stalks the other characters, his attacks gradually increasing in ferocity and impact.

I don't normally do this, but it seems warranted in this case: DON'T READ IF YOU EVER INTEND TO READ THIS BOOK! Both the back cover and the review blurbs in front give away what I think is a pretty clever twist. The killer succeeds in killing one of the other protagonists... then another... then another! At that point cryonics is reviewed to not just be a maguffin, because all the dead characters suddenly wake up thirty years in the future, revived by the advancements of medical science. Their killer had gone to ground, but now that they're back, he emerges from hiding to finish the job. It's a clever spin on the typical technothiller formula, where usually the specifics of the technological advance don't matter, and any changes to society don't actually transpire. This is also enhanced by how meticulous the story's details about cryonics are. Benford is a paid-up member of the real Alcor, and we get a lot of good detail and defenses of the movement.

That said, at six hundred pages it feels a bit bloated; you could cut at least a hundred, if not more, and accelerate things quite a bit. Around the midpoint I started to get bored waiting for things to pick up. Conversely, I wish we'd gotten to see a bit more of the future and cryonics' impact on society; it seemed like there was only time to quickly finish off the killer plotline once we were there, though maybe 1990s technothrillers aren't a place to expect a lot of interesting futurism.

Also, the small press 2011 reprint is a bit rough: "straight quotes" instead of proper “curly quotes” look amateurish, and lots of paragraphs are missing their indentations. Whole thing read like it was printed from the file Benford sent to his publisher back in 1993, not the properly copy-edited version they would have prepared.

(I won't be teaching it; at six hundred pages, the amount of what is interesting is not proportionate to its length. But it was an interesting insight into cryonics from a true believer.)

Reading The Silver Princess in Oz Aloud to My Son

The Silver Princess in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

My son and I have come to Thompson's penultimate Oz novel in the "Famous Forty"; like many of her late novels, you get the sense that she's just doing whatever interests her. This, like Captain Salt in Oz, features no Baum characters. Sometimes fans complain about this, but I don't really buy the grounds for complaint. At this point, Thompson has written seventeen previous Oz novels—three more than Baum. Why should her characters be seen as less valid than his?

Originally published: 1938
Acquired: ~1996?
Read aloud: August 2023

The preexisting characters here are Kabumpo and Prince Randy. This is Kabumpo's fourth major appearance I think, and he's definitely a favorite in this household. Randy recurs from Purple Prince, though my son didn't seem to remember him very much even though it was only six months ago. I guess he is a fairly generic character. The two head out to visit their friend Jinnicky the Red Jinn of Ev and get into various escapades on the way, most notably encountering and befriending Princess Planetty, from Anuther Planet, and her Thunder Colt, Thun. That's right—the co-protagonist (and Randy's eventual love interest) is an alien! Fairly topical in the era of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, I suppose. The four make a good team; my son was in particular tickled by the various powers and peculiarities of Thun. Thompson always does well by horse characters (well, except for the OG Oz horse character). (To make it clear that "Anuther" was a proper noun and not just "another," I gave it a long u: "uh-NOO-ther." This seems unlikely to have been Thompson's intention, but I liked it better.)

Like most Thompson books the characters make their way through various weird enclaves, and then have to put a rightful ruler back on the throne. I felt the weird enclaves were a cut above average here, not like the forgettable ones of Purple Prince. I loved the idea of the Gapers, who concenrate all their sleeping into half the year, and then spend the other half of the year stretching out three long meals. I particularly enjoyed the Box Wood of Ix (the only appearance of Ix in a Famous Forty novel, fact fans), whose inhabitants live in boxes: after all, when you take something out of a box, it wears out or goes bad or breaks down, so if you never want to wear out or go bad or break down, stay in a box! It has a wonderful weird logic to it, like the best of the weird creatures of Oz. (If you are playing the "what Baum novel was Thompson slightly recycling" game, the answer this time is Patchwork Girl: like in that book, the main characters must burn their way through a tall fence which has a boxy creature inside it.)

When the characters actually get to Ev, it all goes a bit downhill. It turns out that Jinnicky has been usurped by one Gludwig the Glubrious... and so our heroes have to put down a slave rebellion! It's been a recurrent thing since Jinnicky was introduced back in Jack Pumpkinhead that he has "blacks" who work for him, who are sometimes called slaves. Following a suggestion I read somewhere online, I have been turning them into rock creatures who are Jinnicky's servants. As is so often the case, Thompson's racial politics are disturbingly regressive. Like how can someone in the 1930s think it's okay to write a book where the heroes put down a slave rebellion of black people? The slaves who rose up are in the wrong, Jinnicky the supposedly kind-hearted master is in the right. So I did a lot of amending here; I made them into servants formed of rock, like I said, and then when Jinnicky is restored, he agrees to better pay and working conditions for his servants.

Like in too many Thompson novels, it's a dull climax anyway. Randy just happens to free Ginger, the servant of Jinnicky's magic dinner bell; at the exact same time, Jinnicky just happens to be fished up from where Gludwig dumped him in the ocean; at the moment Jinnicky rings the bell, Randy, Ginger, Kabumpo, and Planetty just happen to be touching so they all get carried to where he is. Jinnicky then just magics them all back to Ev and defeats Gludwig in a second. It doesn't require our protagonists to do anything interesting or clever. (As is too often the case, Randy just happens to have picked up a magic tool earlier that protects him from harm.) I feel like almost every Thompson novel could go from good to great with a rewritten climax, though this one would need a pretty substantial rewrite.

I did like Nonagon Isle, the nine-sided island of misanthropic fishermen where Jinnicky washes up, that was fun. (And the existence of it and Octagon Isle taken together thus implies a whole set of polyhedral island in the Nonestic.)

In her introductory note, Thompson says of Gludwig, "With a name like that, we'd know he was a villain, wouldn't we?" And indeed (maybe because of that) my five-year-old insisted he didn't like it when anyone said "Gludwig the Glubrious." He was okay with it in the story, but if I would go "Gludwig the Glubrious" in any other context (and it's a fun name to say), he would scream, "I don't like that name! Stop!" He Who Must Not Be Named! The two-year-old is usually there when we read Oz these days, though he doesn't really follow it yet, and he was thus happy to start going "Gludwig the Glubrious Gludwig the Glubrious Gludwig the Glubrious" again and again much to the consternation of his brother.

Next up in sequence: Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Rules of Accusation

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Rules of Accusation
by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann

2385

Published: 2016
Acquired: March 2021
Read: June 2023

I pretty much bounced off Block & Erdmann's previous DS9 novella, which had little of substance to say about Quark and also not terribly funny jokes. This, of course, makes it of a piece with the Quark/Ferengi television episodes it sought to emulate, which were hit-and-miss at best.* For me, the Ferengi episodes were at their worst when they totally took place within the Ferengi sphere (e.g., "Ferengi Love Songs," "Profit and Lace") and at their best when they involved some element of cultural clash, the intrusion of something from outside Ferengi society (e.g., "The Magnificent Ferengi," "Body Parts," "Little Green Men"). Quark can be a great character, but he is rarely so in the purely Ferengi episodes; the better Quark episodes are ones like "House of Quark" and "Profit and Loss" and "Business as Usual" where Quark is put into unusual situations that test who he is.

At first, Rules of Accusation is a lot like one of the worse Ferengi episodes. Quark has a new wacky scheme to get business; Rom will dedicate the new station bar as the Ferengi embassy to Bajor, and the big attraction will be the first showing of the original handwritten manuscript of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition in decades. There's lots of stuff about Quark planning his scheme, and "funny" Ferengi names and customs and such; basically every Ferengi you ever saw on the show pops up.

This is all set up, but it goes on a bit too long before things finally go wrong, which is when the book kicks into gear; you will not be surprised to learn that the manuscript disappears. But, technically the bar is Ferengi soil so Starfleet's worst security chief, Jefferson Blackmer, has no authority to investigate... so Quark is forced to call upon Odo. Then things get fun, with a series of interviews and investigations and twists. It's fun to have Odo and Quark interacting, and I think I genuinely laughed a couple times.

This is good, enjoyable stuff... but then the novel fizzles out. Neither Odo nor Quark actually solve their own problems. Worst of all, the book doesn't really tell us anything about Quark: the best Quark episodes showed us something about his values. As happened too often in the early seasons of the show, this is just another wacky Quark scheme that goes horribly wrong and leaves everything exactly as it was before. What's disappointing is that I really enjoyed the second half of the book up until that ending; I feel like it wouldn't have required much rewriting to give this overly frothy novella the exact right amount of oomph.

Continuity Notes:

• The "Historian's Note" places this novel after The Missing and before Sacraments of Fire. The Missing takes place in late November 2385, but Sacraments of Fire actually takes place September through December 2385. Presumably this really means before part II of Sacraments, which is when the action jumps to December. The details kind of, but don't totally, line up. On the one hand, Odo is chilling on the station—he came aboard in The Missing and decided to stick around, so that fits. Additionally, Nog is away on assignment; he left in The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice, and doesn't come back until part II of Sacraments. (This is a bit of shame, because it makes Nog basically the only Ferengi character not to appear in the book; no reunion with his father.)
  
• On the other hand, Sisko is on the station (though he leaves with the Robinson partway through the story), and part II of Sacraments indicates he's been gone from DS9 for three months. Also, we're told Odo is waiting for Sisko to be free to take him to see the Changeling, but in fact Sisko doesn't say he'll be taking Odo until part II of Sacraments; at the time this is set, Odo knows the Federation found a Changeling-like life-form but doesn't know where it is or have an indication of how he'll get there.
  

Other Notes:

• When the characters need to check something on Ferenginar, it's decided Odo will do it because it's quicker for him to shapeshift into a spacegoing life-form than to take a shuttle... though then we're told Odo's form can "move at a rapid clip, just shy of warp speed"! So just a few decades to Ferenginar and back? One might infer the writers of this book don't know much about the Star Trek universe.
  
• Morn is in this... quite a lot actually. He technically doesn't speak, because the book uses indirect speech to describe what he says, but this goes on quite a bit, to the extent of whole conversations. I didn't like it; might follow the letter of law, but it breaks the spirit. When it comes to Morn, less is more. All of the Morn scenes could have been substantially trimmed.

* All Ferengi episodes are Quark episodes, but not all Quark episodes are Ferengi episodes, if you take my meaning.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Sacraments of Fire by David R. George III

Discworld: I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

This book is the third of a trilogy about Tiffany Aching growing into the responsibilities of being a witch, and this book engages with the downsides of it: when you're willing to do the things no one else is willing to do, but society needs done to keep going, then you might find yourself under a bit of suspicious from the rest of the community.

Originally published: 2010
Read: May 2023

I really liked this. I enjoyed the second through fourth Tiffany books a lot, but this one was my favorite of all of them. It's the darkest, opening with a posse coming for a man, and Tiffany being the one who protects him even though he kind of deserves what he gets; when there are neglected children, only Tiffany stands up to protect them. As the old lord dies, Tiffany comes under suspicion, and suddenly finds herself at odds with her old boyfriend, the old lord's son.

Pratchett is at his best when he uses the Discworld to shine a light on the issues of our world, the dimensions of power and prejudice, and this book is as strong an example of it as I've seen. While the City Watch novels let him explore state power, this explores the issues of social prejudice on a personal level; the Watch novels looked at those who directed the power, but Tiffany—for all her magical powers—is the person that power is directed against.

And yet, Tiffany keeps on going, because there are jobs to do, and is she doesn't do them, who will?

Marvelous stuff, if not perfect; the big bad, in particular, seems taken care of a bit too easily. But this book is the kind of magic ones goes to the Discworld for. Probably my favorite of the thirteen I've read, other than Jingo.

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 1: Media Tie-Ins

I first started logging my reading in September 2003, when I left home for college. Twenty years later, I am still doing it; the reading log takes up the first 92 pages of a Word document I have maintained since then. (Pages 93-113 are my "To be read" list.) In that time I have read 2,932 books, for an average of 146.6 per year, 12.2 per month, and one book every 2.5 days. Of course, this has had its ups and downs; as long-term readers of my "year in review" roundups know, in 2016-17 (the year I read for my Ph.D. exams) I peaked at 200 books, whereas in 2019-20 (the year of the global pandemic) I fell to 79.

Something that interests me is how my reading habits have changed over the past twenty years, so I am going to divide my log up into five four-year chunks as a way of peering into that. In this first post, I want to look at media tie-ins, perennially a very large part of my reading diet.

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
Doctor Who	86	51	89½	57	115½	399	13.6%
Star Trek	166	74	10	44	34	328	11.2%
Star Wars	67	50	44	16	0	177	6.0%
Stargate	9	1	0	0	0	10	0.3%
Andromeda	4	0	0	0	0	4	0.1%
Babylon 5	2	0	0	0	0	2	0.1%
Prisoner	2	1	0	0	0	3	0.1%
Sapphire & Steel	0	1	2	0	0	3	0.1%
Planet of the Apes	0	2	1	1	0	4	0.1%
Ghost in the Shell	1	0	0	1	0	2	0.1%
TOTAL	337	180	146½	119	149½	932	31.8%
PCT	61.3%	29.6%	21.8%	19.3%	30.9%	31.8%

2003-07 is my college years; as you can see, media tie-ins then consumed almost two-thirds of my reading! Once I began grad school, that fell off pretty sharply, down to about 20%, with a slight rebound in my last four-year period. College was key for me diversifying my reading: I was exposed to a lot of new stuff, which I then began reading, especially non-genre literature. Grad school of course forced me to read a variety of stuff.

Another factor is that many tie-in lines contracted around that era: Star Trek has gone from publishing twenty-four books per year to twelve to eight to, now, seemingly two. Star Wars and Doctor Who didn't fall off as drastically, but they did. Plus, my interest in tie-ins has gone down a lot: while in college, I would happily buy a Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda novel, I cannot imagine doing such a thing now, and actually, typing this up is making me wonder if I should get rid of the ones I do have. Will I ever reread my Andromeda or Stargate novels? Seems pretty doubtful.

Some notes on individual lines:

• Doctor Who has remained pretty steady, but it definitely got a boost from my 2020-23 project to read all my Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels. That's over with now, though, so I anticipate this will decline to earlier levels.
• Star Trek: It is honestly pretty flabbergasting to me that there was a four-year period where I read only ten Star Trek books! I don't think eighteen-year-old me could have dreamed of such a thing.
• Star Wars books have seen a pretty sharp fall off. Again, I don't think eighteen-year-old me would have dreamed of a four-year period where I read none! You might infer that I say, hated the sequel movies or something, but this predated that. Even before the "Expanded Universe" became "Legends" I was already becoming more choosy about my Star Wars book purchases, having not enjoyed Legacy of the Force. I do have 85 Star Wars books in my "To read" collection on LibraryThing (many of them Dark Horse comics I bought before they lost the license), I just haven't got to them on my reading list yet. I haven't bought any Disney-era tie-ins yet, though—there are still a few old EU books I want that I haven't picked up!

I think this will be a series of monthly or so posts until I get through all my books. We'll see how long I stay interested in it...

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prometheus: In the Heart of Chaos

Star Trek: Prometheus: In the Heart of Chaos
by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg
translated by Helga Parmiter

25 November–5 December 2385

Translation published: 2018
Originally published: 2016
Acquired: February 2021
Read: June 2023

In my review of the audiobook, I praised this installment. Well, I said it was the best one, which isn't the same thing. Indeed, it starts a bit excitingly for once, with some desperate actions by the crews of the Prometheus and Bortas to escape the chaos zone they entered into at the end of the previous book.

Unfortunately, the book is still fully capable of frittering away its narrative energy because then we're back into, buckle up, a meeting scene! A whole chapter is devoted to a meeting where the main takeaway is that Spock thinks they should look something up in Memory Alpha. This should have been two lines of dialogue, tops! No one wants to read a debate about whether or not someone should send an e-mail!

So then we pop over to Memory Alpha of course, and here's your final big cameo for Star Trek's fiftieth anniversary... freaking Kosinski from "Where No One Has Gone Before." Wow, how did they get him back? No, the question is why? Why in the middle of this novel do we have to squander a chapter on this guy updating us on his life story, watching the news, and looking at maps in a library!? (Okay, he's not really the last big cameo, that's Wesley Crusher... a moment that is totally gratuitous... but hey so is everything else in this book.)

The problem is (and here I disagree with my 2019 self when he reviewed the audiobook) that then the Prometheus and Bortas split up, and now all the Prometheus is doing is flying to the origin of the Ancient Reds, picking up one of them, and flying back to Lembatta. You might think, That's not enough content to fill up a 350-page novel, and well, you'd be right. It feels like the Prometheus crew is barely in this one... but maybe that's a blessing in disguise. It certainly feels like they barely do anything in it, basically just being a ferry service. At a time when things should be escalating, there's actually less going on.

So how can they fill up the book's pages? By suddenly giving us the adventures of a new set of boring characters, some Rigellian chelon admiral and the ship he's on. One whole chapter is about trying to figure out a guy's password. None of it is ever really relevant to anything.

Overall, this book reads like someone took all the least interesting aspects of Destiny-era fiction—mediocre original characters, tedious political plots, gratuitous continuity references—and amped them up as far as they would go. So I guess it fits in with its era... mission accomplished? But there's a base level of enjoyment in even this era's worst book that I just could not find in the Prometheus trilogy, with its stilted dialogue and tedious prose.

Continuity Notes:

• This book is clearly dated to overlapping with Takedown by a reference to the opening of the Far Embassy. Only here it's called the "Embassy of Distance"—I guess neither translator nor editor picked up on it being a reference, so the term got translated back into English out of German.
• So in my "continuity notes" on all these November 2385–set novels (of which there are a lot), I've been making snarky comments about their lack of mention of the Lembatta crisis. I hope it's clear that this isn't really a rag on those books, as the Prometheus trilogy was written much later. Rather, it's a rag on this trilogy for its totally nonsensical chronological placement. Overlapping with Takedown seals the deal: at no point in the middle of this trilogy do communications go out across the galaxy; when Takedown opens, clearly nothing like a galactic terrorism crisis is underway. Why did the writers pick such a packed month... a month where the events of this trilogy clearly cannot happen? It's an unforced error. Even if it was set one month later in December, that would be fine; the trilogy would only overlap with a couple Deep Space Nine stories that give no sense of the greater galactic situation. Or, though this would require more changes, what if the whole thing took place in the run-up to The Fall, thus neatly explaining why Ishan's more militaristic message might be appealing to the Federation? But placing it here makes no sense.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Rules of Accusation by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann

Return to Pern: All the Weyrs of Pern

All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

For my final Pern novel, I read All the Weyrs of Pern, which returns to the Ninth Pass of the original trilogy. It wasn't the last novel of the Ninth Pass ever written, but many people consider it the last good one, and the synopses of the later ones didn't appeal, so I was happy for it to be my last one too. I did skip The Renegades of Pern because it also sounded dull, but this created a bit of a discontinuity, as All the Weyrs picks up right from the end of Renegades, and it's at the end of Renegades where the Pernese rediscover the original landing site of colonists and make contact with AIVAS, the computer system who guided the original colonists, but I was able to figure out what was going on without much difficulty.

Published: 1991
Acquired and read: June 2023

So on the one hand, I'm glad I read this. It makes a fitting end to the story of the Ninth Pass: the Pernese don't just solve the problem of the Thread in terms of imminent Threadfalls, but also solve the problem of the Thread forevermore. Plus, an enormous number of changes begin working their way through Pernese society, thanks to the technological and scientific knowledge of AIVAS. There are some neat sequences of the dragons in space and on the Red Star itself, and the book has some satisfying tie-ins to Dragonsdawn and The Chronicles of Pern.

On the other hand, the characters don't really do anything. AIVAS gives them orders, and they obey, repeat, for hundreds of pages. It never really feels like anything is in jeopardy. Some characters are opposed to the changes to Pern society, but only bad, off-stage ones; wouldn't it have been more interesting if, say, F'lar and Lessa, had been more worried about the loss of status for dragonriders in a post-Thread society? But the book is a bit of plod as the characters all work together to executive AIVAS's plan with little conflict. The use of time travel drains even more suspense: you know things are going to work out before they happen because they have to work out based on the predestination paradoxes.

It's funny to read this shortly after Dragonsdawn and Chronicles because AIVAS is so significant here, but only mentioned in a couple brief asides, not even by name, in Dragonsdawn and Chronicles. From this book it would seem indispensable to the colonists, but it doesn't do anything at all in the early books! Also I think the explanation of the Red Star and the Thread we get in this book and Dragonsdawn makes a lot more sense than what we were told about in the original trilogy. No longer do we have a planet somehow reaching through space, but a planetoid disturbing objects found in the Oort cloud. The problem, though, is this new explanation doesn't account for the fact that there is no nighttime Threadfall!

The last Pern book I want to read is the one that doesn't exist. I want to read the book where a vessel from the Federated Sentient Planets comes to the Pern system... and promptly finds itself overwhelmed by a force of teleporting firebreathing dragons tearing it apart from the inside! What would dragonriders be like as a spacegoing defense or exploration force? Where is Dragons in Space!?

This is the final installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
3. Dragondrums
4. The Masterharper of Pern
5. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern / Nerilka's Story 
6. Dragonsdawn / The Chronicles of Pern
7. Dragonseye
   

Reading Roundup Year in Review 2022/23

For historical reasons, my "reading year" ends in August, beginning anew in September along with the new school year. So that's the time (rather than at calendar year's end) that I do a full post on my reading for the previous year.

Despite being a very focused, very deliberate reader, this year was slightly below my historical average:

I read 134 books, but my average is 147. That said, my post-move/job/kids average is 125, so I did better than that! I think I probably read an above-average number of omnibus collections this year, which would have deflated my numbers (e.g., a three-novel Philip K. Dick omnibus counts as one "book" for my purposes).

SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR	# OF BOOKS	BOOKS/ MONTH	% OF ALL BOOKS
Doctor Who*	27	2.3	20.1%
Star Trek	18	1.5	13.4%
Media Tie-In Subtotal	45	3.8	33.6%
Oz	12	1.0	9.0%
Pern	10	0.8	7.5%
Discworld†	5	0.4	3.7%
Naomi Novik	2	0.2	1.5%
Lois McMaster Bujold	2	0.2	1.5%
Other Science Fiction & Fantasy	25	2.1	18.7%
General SF&F Subtotal	56	4.7	41.8%
The Transformers	6	0.5	4.5%
Kieron Gillen	4	0.3	3.0%
Legion of Super-Heroes	2	0.2	1.5%
Justice Society of America‡	2	0.2	1.5%
Other DC Universe Comics	5	0.4	3.7%
Marvel Universe Comics	3	0.3	2.2%
Harvey Pekar	1	0.1	0.7%
Comics Subtotal	23	1.9	17.2%
Victorian Literature	1	0.1	0.7%
Other Literature	5	0.4	3.7%
General Literature Subtotal	6	0.5	4.5%
Nonfiction Subtotal	4	0.3	3.0%

* Comic books relating to series or authors that are predominantly not comics I don't count under my "Comics" category, but under the main designation.
† Nonfiction about a particular author or series is included with that series, not the "Nonfiction" category.
‡ Prose fiction based on a comics series is included with that series's main designation.

Finishing the Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels brought Doctor Who from 24.1% of my total reading last year down to 20.1%. On the other hand, Star Trek books went from 0.7% up to 13.4%, and brought my overall tie-in rate from 24.8% to 33.6%! Son One and I read an Oz book a month, but that doesn't compete with last year's 2.2 per month. I continue to be bad at reading outside of genre, but was slightly better than last year.

Here's how those categories have changed over time:

General sf&f rules the roost these days.

Those are stats I crunch myself; here are one I used LibraryThing to generate. I make different choices between how I enter books on LibraryThing vs. in my personal files, so the total number of books will be slightly different. Here's how my books break down by original publication date:

As you can see, these are weighted toward recent books. It's definitely not perfectly correct, though; I read a Charles Dickens novel last year but it shows no pre-1900 books, so there's at least one book misplaced.

Here are their author breakdowns:

Note that these are weighted by author not by book. That is to say, 19% of the authors I read were dead, but 29% of the books I read were by dead authors, if that makes sense. (Mostly Ruth Plumly Thompson and Anne McCaffrey, I assume.)

My percentage of female authors is down from last year, but again compare female authors read (30%) with books by female authors read (38%).

Many fewer non-American authors this year than last.

One new statistic feature that LibraryThing introduced this year breaks down what you read by pages. Again, this is imperfect: I only enter page counts for paginated books, and many comics have no page numbers, and of course page numbers don't perfectly correspond to word counts. But still, I find it interesting. Here's my top authors by pages read:

Pretty unsurprising to see Ruth Plumly Thompson crush it; I read twelve of her books this past year with my son. What's even more interesting to me is to see which authors got on this list with relatively few books. For example, I read just two books by Madeleine L'Engle... but each was an omnibus that collected four full novels. Or just two books by Naomi Novik, but one collected three novels. Ada Palmer, Brandon Sanderson, Gregory Benford, Charles Dickens, Mary Doria Russell, Rachel Hartman, and Wil Wheaton are all authors in my top twenty-five with only a single (non-omnibus) book.

My tagging on book gives you a sense of genre and series and other attributes:

Science fiction dominates; I read more than twice as much sf than fantasy. My top series is Star Trek, but Doctor Who, Oz, Pern, Discworld, and the "Kairos" novels all fared well. I read more Pern than nonfiction, and more Deep Space Nine than literature!

And, finally, here's the number of books on my "To be read" list:

It's going down! It's really going down!! Made some good progress on it last year, and hopefully that continues this year.

You can compare this to previous years if you're interested: 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)