31 July 2024

HAWK-AAA! (Blackhawk #151–95)

My reading of DC Comics's Blackhawk left off with August 1958's issue #127, the last issue collected in the black-and-white Showcase Presents Blackhawk collection (see item #3 below). I thought about collecting the uncollected single issues picking up right from there, but I couldn't find them for what I considered to be reasonable prices on the secondary market. I ended up starting with #151 (Aug. 1960), leaving a two-year gap. For this post, I'll cover the span up to issue #195 (May 1964), because #196 saw the first of a number of periodic relaunches of the team. 

As far as I can tell, the only development of significance in the issues I missed was the introduction of Zinda Blake, "Lady Blackhawk," in #133 (Feb. 1959). She is a part-time female member of the team, who doesn't live on Blackhawk Island with the others, but periodically drops in and goes on adventures with them.

Most issues feature three eight-page stories, but in some there's a two-part story; occasionally you get two twelve-page stories. There's one story that spans two issues. If the adventures collected in Showcase Presents Blackhawk were bad, these are worse. The stories continue to drift further and further away from the core appeal of the Blackhawks as a concept; there was a lot of generic crime-fighting in those early DC issues, but by this point, it's all low-grade sci-fi crap: space aliens, time travel, hopping dimensions, all the kind of things you'd see in any mediocre superhero comic of the period. There's very little aviation or anything else that plays to the strengths of the characters or the concept.

This was a slog. Every now and again there'd be something interesting. "Blackhawk's Secret Furlough" (writer unknown, art by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera) in #184 was a fun story, where Blackhawk tries to take some time off but keeps bumping into trouble anyway. I also enjoyed "The Tales of the Blackhawk Emblem" (writer unknown, art by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera) in #191, where the whole team except Lady Blackhawk vanishes. She goes to Blackhawk Island and picks up a book they were reading when they vanished, The Tales of the Blackhawk Emblem, and we get some neat flashbacks to the Blackhawks being inspirational that end up feeding into a present-day mystery.

Occasionally there'd be one so goofy it was enjoyable, such as "The Jailer's Revenge" (script by Dave Wood, art by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera) in #193. In this one, a previously unmentioned enemy of the Blackhawks called the Jailer returns for revenge; he locks up all them except Chop-Chop, who had stayed at base with a cold. What does he do to save them? Travel into another dimension where the Blackhawks to borrow some super-technology from friends they made on a previous adventure, of course! In that dimension, people from ours have superpowers, so first he uses his powers to help them out, and then they loan him a time-travel device he uses to save his comrades. As you do! (I am pretty sure this dimension actually appeared in a previous issue I read, but was too lazy to check.)

Things of note from this period:

  • There is still no hint that the Blackhawks' adventures take place in what we would now call the "DC universe."
  • At some point, they acquire a "mainland barracks" in an unnamed city.
  • The only recurring nemesis is Killer Shark, though even he doesn't appear very much. Most notably in a story in issue #170, "Lady Blackhawk vs. Killer Shark" / "The Mermaid Lady Blackhawk" (script by Jack Miller, art by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera), where Lady Blackhawk defeats him thanks to a fortuitous transformation into a mermaid. 
  • There are occasionally other recurring characters, like a circus midget who is made into the honorary "Tom Thumb Blackhawk"! They also get a second mascot, a monkey.
  • Whenever an alien turns up, the story is careful to note that they speak English because of a "translator disc" or somesuch. Sure, because that's the one implausible thing that needs a clear scientific explanation in these stories.
  • Near the end of this run, the upgrade their planes to ones with helicopter rotors in the wings, allowing for vertical takeoff and landing.
  • All of the issues in this one feature at least one one-page humor comic from Henry Boltinoff. They are occasionally funny.
  • There are one-page text stories in every issue. Early in the run, these are fiction; later, they become fact-based (supposedly, anyway), usually with some vague tie into aviation.

Of course, these comics weren't designed for a thirty-nine-year-old adult reader. My five-year-old will often join me while I read them over breakfast, asking me "what's the issue?" (i.e., confusing the idea of the comic issue with the idea of a problem). I'll then summarize the stories as I go. And to them, the Blackhawks fighting a miner transformed into a radioactive monster out for revenge is quite exciting! Alas, these copies are too fragile to ever loan them, but maybe someday they can read my Showcase volume.

Probably the most interesting thing to happen in the whole run was when my kid asked me why, if Chop-Chop was a Blackhawk, he didn't wear a uniform like the others. "Well, that's down to racism," I explained, pointing out that even good people such as the Blackhawks can exhibit racist behaviors that they don't realize are bad, such as valuing a team member less because he is Asian. A nice little teaching moment.

This is the fourth post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers issues #196-227 of Blackhawk vol. 1. Previous installments are listed below:

  1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
  2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
  3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 

Usually I do my own cover scans for these posts, but most of these issues were too fragile for me to want to go digging around in them again for scanning purposes, so thanks to the Grand Comics Database for the images.

30 July 2024

Hugos 2024: Witch King by Martha Wells

Witch King by Martha Wells

People sometimes ask me if I like fantasy as much as I like science fiction. My usual answer is that I like both—but if you had two stories, one sf and one fantasy, and all else was equal between the two of them, I am more likely to enjoy the sf one than the fantasy one. I think what this comes back to is the definition of science fiction by China MiĆ©ville that I am always citing around here: "rationalized alienation." Science fiction worlds are different from our world, but on rational lines. (Darko Suvin calls this "cognitive estrangement.") Part of the pleasure of reading is figuring out the world; as Jo Walton has said, "SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting."

Originally published: 2023
Acquired and read: July 2024

But a murder mystery needs to provide logical clues in order to be pleasurable, otherwise the reader has no chance of figuring out the solution. The same is true, I would argue, of sf&f. Thus, I can often (though not always) struggle with fantasy fiction; if the alienation is not rationalized, if the estrangement is not cognitive, then what chance do I have to understand the world? In fantasy, which is based on magic, anything can go—and what fun is a mystery where anything can go? Now, you might argue this is all in my head: certainly fantasy stories follow their own internal logic (sometimes too much), and most science fiction (as MiĆ©ville also admits) isn't really based on science. But my head is where the experience of reading takes place, so if it's all in my head, it's still going to affect my reading.

All of this is to say that Witch King embodies everything that makes me bounce off (some) fantasy novels. Lots of weird names, lots of backstories, lots of characters, lots of relationships, lots of places, lots of powers and gods and magic and stuff. Now, if this was science fiction, I might have felt like I had a chance of figuring it all out, of working out the mystery that makes the world operate. But since it's fantasy, it just felt like an onslaught of obscurity. I was never able to figure out who most of these people were, or what they were doing, or why I should care. It has two parallel narratives, one of which fills in relevant history for the other, but I found this obscured rather than clarified; it has a chart of characters in the front, but this made me struggle even more to remember who everyone was as it overwhelmed me with details.

It's possible this is a good novel. Certainly, some people think it's a great novel; I did, after all, read it because it received enough nominations to make it onto the Hugo ballot. It is, however, the very specific kind of novel that I find it difficult to engage with. Be this Martha Wells's fault or not, I got nothing out of this novel at all.

29 July 2024

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 6: Ethan of Athos

Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold

Ethan of Athos may be part of the "Vorkosigan saga" in that it connects to other books in the same milieu but it is not a "Vorkosigan novel" in that Miles Vorkosigan does not actually appear in it—and nor does any other member of the Vorkosigan family. The biggest link to the other novels is that Elli Quinn, a member of the Dendarii Free Mercenaries from The Warrior's Apprentice, is a central character; otherwise, the novel draws on some of the same broad background as the other Vorkosigan novels, especially the influence of the planet Cetaganda, which we saw in the novel of the same name.

In some ways, I think Ethan of Athos is a victim of Bujold's success. In chronological order, this is the seventh Vorkosigan novel; in my hybrid order, it's the sixth. Either way, as a reader, you are probably hoping for more Vorkosigan. That's why you are reading these books, but you'll get none of it here. My friend who has pushed the Vorkosigan novels on me has never actually read this one!

Originally published: 1986
Acquired: May 2024
Read: July 2024

But this is a problem you're having as a modern reader, and it's not the novel's fault. Ethan of Athos was just the third Vorkosigan novel published, one of three to appear in 1986, after Shards of Honor (June) and The Warrior's Apprentice (August); Ethan was published in December. The first three books thus don't share any central characters: Shards features Cordelia, while Warrior's Apprentice her son Miles. The next "Vorkosigan" book would be 1988's Falling Free, which does not feature any Vorkosigans and in fact takes place centuries prior to the other books. Bujold wouldn't write a book that featured the same central character as a previous book until the fifth, 1989's Brothers in Arms—it's not until then that this series, I would argue, meaningfully becomes the "Vorkosigan saga."

Prior to 1989, you just have four novels set in the same general cosmic background. Like a lot of science fiction writers, Bujold prefers to not have to reinvent a universe everytime she writes a new book; see for example Ursula K. Le Guin, Iain M. Banks, and Becky Chambers. Ethan of Athos feels like an outlier now, but in 1986, she clearly wasn't thinking of this as a series of books about one person or family. Imagine if, in the mid-1970s, Le Guin had decided to write a bunch more Genly Ai novels following on from The Left Hand of Darkness, and then someone handed you 1974's The Dispossessed telling you it was part of the "Genly Ai saga." Even though it takes place in the same universe, and even fills in an important piece of backstory, you would probably feel alienated when it turned out to be about some guy named Shevek, not Genly Ai at all. Thinking of Ethan as a Vorkosigan novel does it a disservice—but unlike the Hainish novels, or the Culture novels, or the Galactic Commons novels, Bujold's science fiction milieu doesn't have a designation derived from the setting, just one derived from the characters... and they are totally absent here. (Miles is actually mentioned a lot, but by Elli, who doesn't know is real name, and thus not even called "Vorkosigan.")

Okay, so if we're not taking Ethan of Athos as a Vorkosigan novel, how should we take it? Well, there are two ways we can take it, I think. The first is as a novel about gender. The Athos of the title is something I don't remember seeing very much in science fiction before: an all-male society. (Just Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape. Wait, isn't there a Cordwainer Smith story with a premise like this? But certainly, it's much less common than the all-female society.) The people of Athos reproduce by combining their DNA with ova acquired from off-planet. Everyone is a man, homosexual relationships are completely normal, the people of Athos have a deep fear of women inculcated by generations of misogynistic stories about a kind of human being they've never actually met. What reproduction might be like in the future is something Bujold has been interested in throughout her novels in this setting; see also the uterine replicator that's central to Barrayar.

The book has some fun stuff that derives from this premise, and I appreciate that it doesn't do what might have seemed an obvious thing in the 1980s, end with Ethan realizing women aren't so bad after all and that he's actually a heterosexual; it ends with him affirming his homosexuality, actually. But while Barrayar leveraged the uterine replicator as part of a complex exploration of various aspects of motherhood, I don't think Ethan has much to say about masculinity. Imagine if (to bring up Le Guin again) Left Hand of Darkness had been about someone from Gethen going to another Hainish world, and that they just spent most of the book going, "Wow, two genders!" Like, you might have gotten some interesting worldbuilding, but it also would have been a novel with much less to say. I wish we'd gotten to see more of Athos, and I wish we'd gotten more of a sense of why this planet is like this. Sure, I get misogyny... but it's a weird breed of misogyny that would reach the conclusion of having a planet with no women. Misogyny is usually about putting women in a particular societal place, not about getting rid of them altogether!

What all the gender stuff ultimately is, is a background to an espionage thriller. When the new egg cultures sent to Athos are sabotaged, one of their physicians, Ethan, has to travel into the outside universe to acquire some new ones—one of the first Athosians to do that in generations. In classic Bujold fashion, he quickly finds himself ensnared in a complex plot he doesn't totally understand; the fact that he comes from a planet with literally no women mostly serves to heighten his confusion. Without doing the book too much of a disservice, I would say that ultimately it's fun and well done, but that's about it. Like most Vorkosigan books, you're swept up in it and you have a good time.

It would be possible to understate the importance of that; there are many sf novels out there where that never happens! There are good characters and good comedy and good twists. I was happy to see Elli again (and I gather she will pop up in future Vorkosigan books), and I liked getting to know Ethan (and am sorry to gather he never pops up again). But other than Cetaganda, this is the least enjoyable Vorkosigan novel I've read thus far. Admittedly, this is damning with faint praise, because other than Cetaganda, I've enjoyed them all!

Every five months I read a book in the Vorkosigan saga. Next up in sequence: Brothers in Arms

26 July 2024

Hugos 2024: Ballots for Dramatic Presentation and Graphic Story

Finally, we have my nominations and votes in the "visual" categories: comics, tv, and film. (I have linked the titles if I have written a review elsewhere.)


Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

6. Doctor Who, special #3: "The Giggle", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Chanya Button

Of the four episodes of Doctor Who to air in 2023, this is the one I would be least likely to submit for the Hugo Awards. It certainly had some strong moments, and I am not as against the "bigeneration" as some, but it did not come together for me.

5. Loki 2x6: "Glorious Purpose", written by Eric Martin, directed by Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson
 
Longtime readers of my Hugo rankings will know of my absolute dedication to my bizarre tendency of refusing to watch any episodes of serialized streaming shows other than the ones that are the actual finalists, which means that I watched this, the twelfth and final episode of Loki, having seen only one previous episode, the fourth, back in 2022. As a result, there were a lot of character beats that totally went over my head, but I was able to (mostly) work out what was going on, and it seemed pretty interesting. I can imagine myself watching more of the show, which is more than I can say for most Marvel stuff on Disney Plus. I struggled to rank this versus "The Giggle" but decided that if this didn't land for me, it wasn't its fault I don't think.
 
4. The Last of Us 1x3: "Long, Long Time", written by Craig Mazin, directed by Peter Hoar
 
I gather The Last of Us is a postapocalyptic show about fungus zombies (I did copyedit an essay about it earlier this summer), and that it's pretty serialized, but this one stands on its own fairly well, as most of it is an extended flashback about two side characters, one of them a doomsday prepper played by Nick Offerman, following them from the early days of the apocalypse in 2003 up to the present in 2023. I thought it was a very well done depiction of a lonely man who finally found a situation in which he might thrive—I've only really seen Offerman in Parks and Rec, so this was my first experience of his (considerable) dramatic chops. Since it stood alone much better, I was happy to place it above Loki, but I wasn't about to place it above the very good episodes of any of the shows that I actually watch!

(When I uploaded the above screenshot I was reminded of my consistent objection throughout the episode that it was very clearly not filmed in Massachusetts.)
 
3. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2x07: "Those Old Scientists", written by Kathryn Lyn & Bill Wolkoff, directed by Jonathan Frakes
 
I was not surprised to see this as a finalist: a crossover between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks is exactly the kind of fan-pleasing thing that Hugo nominators love. But it was indeed a worthy finalist; lots of great jokes of course but also some surprisingly dramatic moments. I liked the way Boimler's future knowledge played into the season character arc of Nurse Chapel's attempt to have a relationship with Mister Spock.
 
2. Doctor Who, special #2: "Wild Blue Yonder", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Tom Kingsley
 
In one sense, this is a weird anniversary special. The Doctor Who specials on either side of it are celebratory, in the sense that they bring back beloved characters and old concepts from Doctor Who's long history. But I really like that on getting David Tennant and Catherine Tate to come back to Doctor Who, Russell T Davies's instinct was to do a low-key episode that required them to act the shit out of it. This is Doctor Who at its best, and the kind of thing I'd happily see win.

1. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2x09: "Subspace Rhapsody", written by Dana Horgan & Bill Wolkoff, directed by Dermott Downs 
 
If ever something was destined to win me over, surely it was a musical episode of Star Trek. But this was a particularly good execution of that premise; its placement as the second-last episode of the season means it isn't a fun interlude, but the culmination of several key character throughlines. Christina Chong is a powerhouse singer, and her character of La'an cemented herself as my favorite with this episode; Celia Rose Gooding excels in Uhura's big musical number, which also brought their character into focus for me; Ethan Peck's song as Spock was surprisingly clever and good. Lots of good jokes too, of course, and the final musical number is excellent.


Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

6. The Wandering Earth II; directed by Frant Gwo; script by Yang Zhixue, Frant Gwo, Gong Geer, and Ye Ruchang
 
This is a Chinese movie; it's actually a prequel to the first Wandering Earth movie (2019), which is itself based on a Liu Cixin short story. The premise of the movie is that the sun is expanding, so they have to stick giant engines on the Earth and fly it out of the solar system. It's long on spectacle; its 160 minutes revolve around three big crises across decades: a terrorist attack on a space elevator, a solar storm on the moon, and the explosion of the moon. Various characters' stories weave through these crises, most prominently a heroic astronaut (and his family) and a computer scientist (whose dead daughter has been uploaded into a computer). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this latter subplot was the most interesting part of the movie, which was long on (admittedly well rendered) spectacle but short on anything else. I am glad this is a finalist, because it's the kind of thing the Hugos should be recognizing, but it's not the kind of thing I feel inclined to vote for. Very obviously inferior to Barbie and everything else on the list this year.
 
5. Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, script by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach

I feel a bit weird ranking this where I ranked it, and I wonder if I was set up by the buzz around this film—or maybe as a man I am just doomed to not get very much out of it. I mean, I did like it a lot. Amazing visual design, good jokes, and fun songs, plus I particularly enjoyed the performance of America Ferrera. I thought the movie had a lot of great moments when it came to being a woman but I did find the message of the movie kind of muddled in that I didn't really understand what it was trying to say using the Kens. Obviously they were wrong to try to impose patriarchy... but it wasn't very obvious to me that they were wrong to rebel to begin with. Anyway, it was good fun and I enjoyed it but not as much as I wanted to.

4. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor among Thieves; directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein; script by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Michael Gilio

As opposed to Barbie, which wasn't as good as I expected, this was way better than I expected it to be! I thought it was going to be bad, but it was way better than it had any right to be. My favorite movie trope is probably "group of disparate people come together to accomplish something against impossible odds" and this is an excellently executed example of it. Excellent jokes, charming acting (a friend said that Chris Pine is the best Chris and I think she is probably right, but the rest of the cast is also great), good character moments, fun twists and hijinks, and (surprisingly for a modern action movie) no long tedious action sequences. I really enjoyed this movie.

3. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson; script by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham

The first Spider-Verse film was an unexpected pleasure for me. This one is still excellent in some ways... but not quite as good in others. Utterly beautiful, doing amazing stuff with the medium of animation I've never seen anywhere else. Great score. Good jokes (if not as many as I remember from the first one). Neat character work with Miles and also Gwen, really getting a lot out of both visual and voice performances. I was a little skeptical of marrying up Miles's personal plot with a threat-to-the-multiverse plot, but the movie actually did a good job of that. This would easily rank above Nimona... except it's half a story! I had known it would end on a cliffhanger, but I had expected more of a Empire Strikes Back here's-a-hook-to-the-next-one cliffhanger, not a you-need-to-watch-the-next-one-to-get-anything-out-of-it cliffhanger. (That said, it's a very good cliffhanger with a very good twist!) But anyway, I feel compelled to ding it one spot. The next one doesn't even have a schedule release date yet!

2. Nimona, directed by Nick Bruno & Troy Quaye, script by Robert L. Baird & Lloyd Taylor

This is one of those cases where I begin to doubt my ability to rank things. I definitely think Nimona is better than D&D, and I definitely enjoyed D&D more than Barbie. But is Nimona better than Barbie? That doesn't seem right! But I guess that's the reason I try to think of these things as a series of one-on-one matches (I build the rankings as I watch things, rather than wait until the end), so I just have to make a series of small judgment calls. Anyway, this took me a bit to get into, but once I figured out what vibe it was going for, I found that it was both funny and had some good stuff to say about what we count as "monsters." Good reveal at the end.

1. Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, script by Tony McNamara

I think for certain people this is going to be a bit of a "hot take" but I really enjoyed this move. You have an inkling of what is going on from the beginning but only figure out the precise details as you go, so I will avoid too many spoilers, but basically a mad scientist in the 1890s (though, pleasingly to this pedantic Victorianist, no one ever uses the word "scientist") reanimates a woman's dead body. She has the mind of a child in the body of an adult. The film uses this concept to explore ideas about sex and gender. I (of course) kept thinking about John Berger, who tells us that, "To be born a woman is to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women is developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space." Poor Things explores these concepts by giving us an adult woman who has not had the tutelage necessary to understanding. How do others see her and how does she come to see herself?

The whole thing has this veneer of unreality laid on top of it, too; excellent use of visuals that call attention to themselves as visuals, which is of course what you would want in a film about how men see women, and how women come to see themselves. I think what I was most unprepared for, though, was how funny the movie was. I wouldn't categorize it as a comedy, but all the reviews and discourse I'd heard led me to expect it to be fairly po-faced, but it had several excellent laugh-out-loud jokes. The film has a ridiculous premise, but it totally leans into that and manages to use it to posit some serious things. I think this movie probably has a smaller circle of people who would enjoy it than D&D, but for me it was more of an achievement, so I gave it the edge easily.


Best Graphic Story or Comic

6. The Three-Body Problem, #01–14; script by Cai Jin and Kaishu; art by Caojijiuridong and Shuixiongchon

This is the first fourteen installments of an adaptation of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, and has since been transformed into a Netflix show. Based on my seven-year-old memory of the novel, it seems to be fairly straightforward and faithful, but I don't know that it ever rises above the level of competence. The art is fine, but I found myself wishing the part focusing on the "Three-Body" game had been weirder. The best part, like in the novel, is the cynical cigarette-smoking cop who thinks the whole thing is bullshit.
 
5. Saga, Volume Eleven, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples
 
Saga itself is great, of course, but this doesn't feel like one of its greater installments, though it has a lot of nice moments. The world of Saga is pretty complicated at this point—which is one of its strengths—but that means it does not benefit from the fact that my reading has been stretched out across over seven years! Who are all these side characters? I look forward to my inevitable reread when it's completed, but for now I mostly grok the story of Alana and Hazel, which I enjoy but is continually being interrupted. Anyway, all that is to say, I am glad I am continuing to read this, and I can see why it keeps getting nominated, but I wouldn't give it an award.

4. Bea Wolf, script by Zach Weinersmith, art by Boulet
 
This is a retelling of the first part of Beowulf in comics form, in modernized English with vaguely Anglo-Saxon alliteration—except it's all about kids. The mead hall is awesome treehouse, Grendel is a mean teacher who hates fun, the warriors are all kids playing outside. It's very well done in the sense you have to admire the cleverness of it all... but I feel like my admiration is entirely technical; I was never swept up in this. Like, wow what a good job they did... but why? But still, neat stuff. So, I place it above Saga in that I can see why to someone else it's award-worthy, but below Witches of World War II in that it's not something that grabbed me.
 
3. The Witches of World War II, script by Paul Cornell, art by Valeria Burzo

This is a very solid comic, the exact kind of thing that you would want to be a finalist in Best Graphic Story, but it seems to me so rarely is. A nice original graphic novel, with solid writing and good art, and an interesting sf&fnal premise. I enjoyed reading this a lot, and I would happily see it win.
2. Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons; script by Kelly Sue DeConnick; art by Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott

This was the first Hugo finalist I read this year, and as soon as I read it, I felt like it was the one to beat in Best Graphic Story. In my experience, the franchise comics in this category are either excellent (last year's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow) or excruciating (last year's Dune), with little middle ground. This is definitely in the former category; absolutely beautiful art, with something interesting to say to boot. Transcends its origins easily.

1. Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed

This is an Egyptian graphic novel originally published in Arabic, now translated into English; the title means "your wish is my command." It's set in a version of our world where people can make, sell, and buy wishes (they come in bottles or cans). The wishes are of varying quality: first-class wishes always come true as you want and are very powerful; third-class wishes can backfire on you if the wish takes you literally but doesn't adhere to what you actually want. The book begins with a stall owner trying to sell three first-class wishes he wants to get rid of (he's a devout Muslim, and using wishes is against Islamic precepts), and follows three overlapping stories of the people who come into possession of each of the three. Clever, inventive worldbuilding, good comedy, but also some real pathos and emotion; I particularly liked the middle story, about how wishes might fit in with depression and talk therapy, but was also a good metaphor for how we handle depression in our world. I said Wonder Woman Historia was the one to beat... and this one beat it! While Historia is magisterial, this really resonated with me in a lot of ways. But I'd be happy for either to win!


Overall Thoughts

As someone who watches both Strange New Worlds and Doctor Who, I of course appreciated the finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). These are Star Trek's third and fourth nominations since the beginning of the Paramount+ era... will it finally win? I feel like it might have a good shot. "The Giggle" is a bit of a goofy choice, to be honest, but I can't quibble with "Wild Blue Yonder." I liked both Loki and Last of Us well enough. I also thought Long Form was a strong category—an interesting, diverse set of finalists... only one of which was a superhero film! And that is one of the most distinctive superhero films of our time. All stuff I had not seen and was glad to be exposed to.

I also feel like this was probably the best, most interesting Graphic Story ballot probably ever. Again, neat stuff, none of it too similar to each other or to past finalists.

What will win? Well, I think Star Trek for Short Form, Barbie for Long Form, and god knows what for Graphic Story—the voters always manage to baffle me on that one even when the nominations are good.

24 July 2024

The First Doctor Novelisations: The Zarbi (1965)

Doctor Who and the Zarbi by Bill Strutton
illustrated by John Wood

The interesting thing about reading these first Doctor novelisations in publication order is that it encourages you not to think about them as installments in a series of books designed to novelise every Doctor Who story—this wouldn't be the case, of course, until they were reissued in 1973. Instead, just as Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964) was the only Doctor Who book, Doctor Who and the Zarbi (the novelisation of 1965's The Web Planet) is the second one.

Originally published: 1965
Acquired and read: July 2024

If you think of it that way, you spend your time reading it not thinking of it as "yet another tie-in" but "the second book"—and thus you spend your time comparing it to The Daleks. I had never really thought of The Web Planet is comparison to The Daleks before, but they're actually quite similar. This makes sense, because as I understand it, the production team was trying to recapture the success of the earlier serial. The Web Planet isn't really anything like what we now think of as a "Dalek story," though, so this might be hard for a modern viewer to notice.

But it is like The Daleks, and reading it right after the previous novel brings that out in a way that wasn't true when I watched The Web Planet on VHS. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi begins with a long extended sequence of the TARDIS crew (or, rather, Tardis crew) exploring a seemingly deserted planet. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi features dangerous bodies of water! Like The Daleks, The Zarbi features two opposing forces on this planet that have been in conflict a long time. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi is interested in evolution and devolution; just as The Daleks focused on how the Daleks and Thals has changed over time, a key part of The Zarbi is the discovery of how the Menoptera left behind in subterranean Vortis have devolved into a different species. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi is often at its best when focusing on the alienness of the planet and the titular species. Like the Daleks, the Zarbi are dependent on some kind of centralized force that gets neutralized by the TARDIS crew. Like The Daleks, The Zarbi ends with a promise of a new age on its planet, as the planet is reclaimed by the "proper" species.

Now, the Zarbi did not take off like the Daleks did, clearly, but I hadn't realized how much work they were definitely putting into recreating the previous story—but also amplifying it. The Zarbi are weirder than the Daleks in some ways, and unlike the Thals, the friendly alien species is also obviously inhuman.

Though while The Daleks tried to pretend there were no other Doctor Who stories than it, to the extent of ignoring the entire television programme, The Zarbi does retain explicit references to tv serials, including The Rescue and The Romans; it may be the second book but not the second story. I haven't seen the tv story in two decades, so I can't comment much on specific changes, but I did notice that while on tv the "astral map" is a little device on wheels the Doctor pulls out of the TARDIS to show the Zarbi, Strutton actually renders it here as one-sixth of the TARDIS console, which can be detached! And, infamously, the narrative pretty consistently calls its main character "Doctor Who" (and it's also used at least once in dialogue that I noticed).

All that said, while the alien element comes through fairly well, I found The Zarbi otherwise an inferior experience to The Daleks. Bill Strutton doesn't have David Whitaker's interest in characterization; The Daleks gave us a strong sense of Ian's voice, and subplots about Ian's relationships with the Doctor and Barbara, but here we mostly just have dialogue that you have to imagine being brought to life by the actors. The characters do clever things (even Vicki, who at first I thought Strutton was neglecting), but we don't get that novelistic access to their thoughts. And my guess is (I don't remember my VHS copy of The Web Planet very well) that the alien Voice controlling the Zarbi probably comes through as more interesting on screen than in prose.

I've been reading the modern reprints of the Targets when available... unfortunately the Amazon seller I bought this from sent me a 1981 printing of the 1973 edition, rather than the 2016 reprint I actually ordered. (They did refund my money when I complained.) I did really like the pictures by John Wood, though; simple stuff, perhaps, but he takes the visuals of the television version and amplifies them by drawing them as they ought to have been, not as they were. Unlike Schwartzman's illustrations for The Daleks, he picks visually striking moments that capture the weirdness of the text.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Crusaders

23 July 2024

Hugos 2024: Translation State by Ann Leckie

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie immediately won me over with the masterful Ancillary Justice, which kicked off a movement in sf that continues to this day, as evidenced by the 2024 Hugo Award finalist Some Desperate Glory: action-focused space opera that critiques empire and colonialism with careful attention to cultural difference but also explores its allure.

Originally published: 2023
Acquired: May 2024
Read: July 2024

After the conclusion of her original trilogy, Leckie's returns to the world of the Imperial Radch have been in a slightly different mode. Like Provenance (2017), this takes place in that realm but while it has intrigue, it doesn't have space opera–style action. Translation State has three protagonists that it rotates between: Enae, the scion of a powerful family whose grandmother dies, leaving eir on their own but with nothing to call eir own; Reet, a maintenance worker on a space station who finds out he might be the heir to a ruling family thought extinct; and Qven, one of the mysterious, strange Presger Translators, humans put into the service of the most dangerous of the alien species. Over time, their three stories intersect.

All three storylines are about belonging; the characters are all ones who have not had it for various reasons, but are in search of it. Enae was hated by all members of eir family, including the only one sie was close to; Reet was an orphan raised in foster care and thus has always felt a bit estranged, even from his loving foster parents; and Qven has always felt a bit strange even among the Presger Translators. Leckie does a great job bringing us into the minds of all three characters, and the opening chapters for Enae are particularly strong, as we see eir struggle when sie is cast adrift. The Presger chapters are also strong, Leckie displaying (as in her novels Ancillary Justice and Raven Tower, in particular) for off-kilter, thoughtful worldbuilding.

In the end, though, the whole thing ends up feeling a bit sedate. In Ancillary Justice, Leckie starts with a moment of high drama (the flashback to the Justice of Toren's last mission), continues though some desperate actions in the present day (Breq and Seivarden's ice trip), and ends with an explosive but character-driven action sequence. For most of its run, though, there's little like any of that in Translation State. I feel like all the ingredients are all there, but the characters are very rarely making interesting, dramatic choices; in the end, it feels like they kind of all did exactly what you might have expected them to do. There are a few too many sequences where it seems like the characters are waiting around for other characters to decide important things. The climax is pretty creepy, but it doesn't have the tension of any of those sequences from Ancillary Justice.

Enae, in particular, ends up feeling a bit superfluous to requirements, even though sie was the character I was most interested in at the beginning. (The end hints at future adventures for eir, so I hope those come to pass in future novels because I would be on board with seeing Enae do something more.) I think the thing that worked against the novel's success the most is that the three protagonists are all nƤive people who feel very young even though they are all actually middle-aged. It's a type I wouldn't mind seeing once but three times—why? As a middle-aged reader myself, I think you can depict someone uncertain of their own position in the world but not make them come across as a twenty-something YA protagonist. Obviously Breq in the Ancillary books is nƤive in some ways, too, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that they are very powerful and knowledgeable in others. That's true of Qven here, and I ended up liking the end of their storyline a lot, but less true of Enae and Reet, who both kind of grated in the end.

All this makes it seem like I really didn't like it. I don't think that's true; I always enjoyed reading it. Leckie writes compelling characters and neat worlds. Unlike Provenance, this one feels like its asks for more, too; in addition to the bit about Enae I mentioned earlier, both Qven and Reet are left in places that seem to imply interesting complications to come, and the political situation left in place at the end of Ancillary Mercy continues to develop. This is solid work, but it's solid work from a writer I know is capable of great work.

22 July 2024

The Wizards on Walnut Street by Sam Swicegood

The Wizards on Walnut Street by Sam Swicegood

This is a fantasy novel set in Cincinnati, which I read as part of my project to read books set in my hometown. It's about a young person who, when their dad passes away, discovers that instead of having a boring corporate job, their dad was actually a wizard—and in order to find out why their dad died, they join the same wizarding firm.

Published: 2018
Acquired: December 2023
Read: July 2024

As a book, it is most assuredly okay. The book is self-published, and in need of a good editor in two different ways. The book has a fun premise, and Swicegood does a good job of merging wizardry with humdrum corporate life. At first I was suspicious of the book's seemingly sub-Pratchett footnotes, but I soon came to look forward to the funny and situationally appropriate excerpts from the employee handbook. The world Swicegood builds up is interesting; the three principal characters are fun. The climax is clever, one of those ones that uses previously set up rules of the magic world to good advantage. My favorite joke in the whole book is one that plays with perspective very well, when you are following a group of dark wizards in a meeting but then find out where they actually are.

But I found that the main character, Andy, often made decisions for reasons that needed to be spelled out more; in particular, their joining the wizarding firm seemed pretty arbitrary. The investigation of the conspiracy was pretty sloppily done. Basically, Andy bumbled along for over a hundred pages, not really learning anything, and then a minor character comes to him, conveniently tells him everything that's going on, and promptly vanishes from the narrative. I found Andy's relationship to their dead father pretty unclear; mostly it seemed like they hadn't really known their father, but every now and then there'd be a reference that indicated otherwise, like it was a relic from an earlier draft or something. I think a good developmental editor could have pushed Swicegood to do a strong revision that would have brought all this out more.

It also desperately needed a copyeditor. Lots of bad punctuation, missing words, poor formatting. I can't remember the last book I read that had so many typographical errors.

I read these books for the local color; Wizards on Walnut Street has more than some but less than others. There are a couple good jokes about Cincinnati chili, some of which I hadn't seen before. But if Swicegood really wanted to sell that Andy was an awkward out-of-towner in Cincinnati, he should have had all the other characters constantly asking them where they went to high school!

19 July 2024

Hugos 2024: Ballots for Novel, Related Work, and Lodestar

Here is my second set of Hugo rankings for this year, covering everyone's most favorite categories: the book-based ones. Best Novel, Best Related Work (usually but not always a book), and Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo).


Best Novel 

[UNRANKED] Starter Villain by John Scalzi
 
Another year, another glib-sounding John Scalzi novel for a Hugo finalist. This one is, I think, about a sarcastic cat who becomes a supervillain? It is impossible for me to imagine liking a John Scalzi take on this concept, based on all previous John Scalzi that I have read, so like last year's Kaiju Preservation Society, I have given it a pass. If it somehow wins, I guess I will read it in 2054 when my project to catch up on unread Hugo winners reaches 2024. Maybe by then I will be nostalgic for John Scalzi!
 
5. Witch King by Martha Wells
 
I totally bounced off this book. Though I slogged all the way to the end, I could not tell you who the characters were or what they were trying to do. Such is, in general, my reaction to epic fantasy. Lots of goofy names and obscure terms. I don't think it was bad, probably, but it was very much not for me; an easy placement at the bottom of my ballot.

4. Translation State by Ann Leckie
 
I enjoyed this novel but did not love it. It's solid and serviceable, but I feel like a better novel with the same ingredients was in reach of Leckie. I think my placement of this versus Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is ultimately pretty arbitrary; both books have interesting set-ups they don't quite deliver on. In the end, I gave Chakraborty the edge because Leckie previously won a Best Novel Hugo, whereas Chakraborty hasn't even been a finalist before.
3. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

This book was fun, and did some great stuff, but though I enjoyed it a lot, the ending prevented me from finding the book as a whole great. (As always, read the full review linked above for the details.)

2. The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

As I said in my review of this book, it was complicated and strange, and a bit of a mishmash, but ambitious and highly intriguing. Thus, I feel like it slots in here—I probably enjoyed it about the same as Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, but it's aiming to do more than it, and thus seems to be the kind of thing the Hugos should reward. On the other hand, I think Some Desperate Glory is definitely more successful at doing what it's aiming to, and was more clearly enjoyable, so it gets the edge.

1. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

If your book make me gasp aloud from sheer delight at one point, then I think it is probably going to rank pretty highly. This felt like the one to unseat even though it was the first one I read. Building on previous winners like Ancillary Justice but going in new directions too, exactly the kind of thing the Hugos should go around awarding.


Best Related Work

[UNRANKED] Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History History, Volumes 2 and 3 by Yang Feng / é›ØꞜXč®æ谈 (Discover X), presented by Tina Wong
 
Last year, the first volume of Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History was a Hugo finalist; last year there was no English translation. The same is true of volumes 2 and 3 this year. I imagine this is a magisterial work, and it seems like exactly the kind of thing that ought to be a Hugo finalist, but I have no way of knowing if it's any good. If I were to rank it, however, I would give it a slight edge over Discover X, which is a podcast—but one that is not eligible in the usual category of Best Fancast because it is professionally produced. Discover X is Chinese but according to the Hugo voter packet, does do English-language episodes... but I have no desire to listen to a podcast, sorry not sorry.

4. The Culture by Iain M. Banks

There are probably people to whom this book is very exciting, but I am not one of them. The late Iain Banks was famously the author of the Culture novels, and this collects various meticulous drawings he made depicting spaceships, locations, vehicles, and weaponry from that series. The problem is that I have read just one Culture story, the novella "The State of the Art," and though I very much enjoyed it, and I have been meaning to get around to reading more Culture books, most of what was collected here utterly lacked significance. I spent less than an hour paging through it, and that was it. But if you know what these spaceships were, you would probably be very impressed!

3. A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller

This is a collection of reviews and criticism by the late Maureen Kincaid Speller (1959–2022), a British sf critic. I found it tough going at first, and I would have to fault the arrangement of the book and some of the editorial choices for that. The book begins with a number of essays by Speller on broad topics, but no context is given for them, not even dates of original publication, which makes them hard to digest. If Speller is commenting on the low quality of the Hugo Award shortlist, it makes a big difference if we are talking 2005 or 2015, but you have to look that up in the back of the book; many of the pieces are clearly intervening in early 2000s sf blog discourse... but how? There are then a number of reviews of anthologies, which I don't think show Speller (or any critic) off at her best; these kind of reviews can only skim the surface of an individual story and don't have a strong sense of argument. Finally, about halfway through the book we get to reviews of individual novels, movies, and television programs, and suddenly Speller snaps into focus as an incisive, thoughtful critic. There were no reviews of books I had actually read, but as a good reviewer ought, Speller gives you a sense of what these books were doing, how well they did it, and why you might want to read them; I have jotted several titles down on my always-increasing list of books to get from the library. I was more likely to have seen some of the films discussed (Arrival, The Force Awakens, The Hobbit), and these presented incisive takes even when I disagreed with them. I think if these reviews focused on single texts had come first, I would have had a better sense of Speller and her philosophy which would have let me better understand her takes in some of the sf conversations. So, worth reading if you like sf criticism (and I certainly do), but not as strong a showing for Speller's work as I think could have been made. I would be fine with it winning, but it was not as consistently interesting as City on Mars.

2. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

This is a nonfiction book that goes into meticulous detail about the challenges of space colonization, in Earth orbit, on the moon, and on Mars, from both a scientific and legal perspective. Lots of good details, lively writing. My main takeaway was that however hard you think space colonization might be, it's much much harder, way harder than it's commonly portrayed by science fiction stories, or by the tech billionaires currently trying to set up Ayn Randian utopias on Mars. Not about science fiction per se, but clearly "related" to it; I enjoyed it a lot and keep thinking about tidbits from it months after reading it.

1. All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays by Niall Harrison

This is a collection of (as the subtitle indicates) reviews and essays by the British sf critic Niall Harrison, whose work and even name was previously unknown to me. I found this much more successful than the Kincaid Speller book above, probably because it's both better focused and better organized. The reviews here are all of works published 2005-14, and are arranged in order of publication of the work reviewed. What quickly emerges is a sense of argument, as Harrison probes the changes the genre of sf&d was undergoing in what was in retrospect a pretty key period for how we now understand it. As he lays out in the introduction, 2005-14 roughly takes you from Racefail to the Sad Puppies, an era of increasing deliberation about diversity in sf&f; it's also an era where people started increasingly dealing with climate change in sf&f in meaningful ways. What I really like about Harrison as a critic is how he puts the individual works he reviews into conversation with the broader genre; you get a very clear sense of what these books are up to. His reviews of anthologies are strikingly strong, and there were a large number of books here I had not read—but now want to—so he's doing a good job of not sticking to the expected mass market US sf&f. The end of the book has a number of essays; two of these in particular were what tipped the book over into first-place status for me. One combines three different reviews into a meditation on how we articulate the history of sf&f, the other is an overview of several different anthologies of short Chinese sf, but instead of going through them book by book, he covers them in order of the stories' original publications, which gives a sort of partial history of the genre in China. Overall, this is exactly the kind of thing I want out of the Best Related Work Hugo.


Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

[UNRANKED] Promises Stronger than Heartbreak by Charlie Jane Anders

This is a sequel to two previous finalists; the first book in the series placed in 2022, and the second in 2023. Though I have liked some of Anders's other work, I found the first book in the series excruciatingly tedious, and thus have no incentive to read further books—I'm not that much of a completist. So I just left it off my ballot.

6. Abeni's Song by P. DjĆØlĆ­ Clark

This is an African-influenced fantasy novel about a young girl whose village is destroyed; she goes and lives with a witch and then assembles a group of friends to go take down her village. Though I have enjoyed some of Clark's short fiction, I haven't found his novels to be to my taste. I thought the main character's reactions to things weirdly absent, the chapters seemed long without going anywhere, the assembly of a group incredibly fast and convenient, and the climax unearned. I never cared about anything in this book, and it didn't seem to be working very hard to make me want to. Like other works of African-influenced fantasy I have read (e.g., Children of Blood and Bone), the cultural elements felt grafted on; it came across as a very generic work of YA fantasy.

5. No Award

I'm sorry, but I can muster up no enthusiasm for Abeni's Song, which seems to me to typify one of the problems the Hugo Awards often have: once a writer gets on the ballot for something actually quite good (Clark has written some good short sf), the nominators start reading everything that person produces, and thus they get on the ballot even for mediocre work. (See also: Asimov getting on the ballot and even winning for Foundation's Edge.)

4. The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix

My wife is a big fan of Nix's Sabriel books, but I had not read anything by him before. This is a sequel to another of his books (The Left-Handed Booksellers of London), but I found that it largely stood on its own, except that it never clearly delineated the difference between left- and right-handed booksellers. Anyway, it's about a secret order of "booksellers" that combat dangerous magical entities; here they have to prevent one particular one from rising up and obtaining great power through sacrificing innocent victims on the solstice. I found it cute and charming without being precious or twee—quite an accomplishment these days. A lot of fun ideas, and I would loop back and read the first book, but it didn't set my world on fire. Pretty easily slots into the middle of my rankings.

3. Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

If my review of Unraveller linked above reads like damning with faint praise, you'd be right. I often struggle to rank the middle of my ballots. It's clear to me that Abeni's Song is the worse of the five books that I read and To Shape a Dragon's Breath the best. But how do the others slot in? Though I enjoyed Liberty's Daughter, I feel like Unraveller was ultimately richer in that it was trying to do more—but I also feel like Unraveller didn't totally mine the rich vein of metaphor it had opened up. So I put Liberty's Daughter higher than Unraveller. On the other hand, Sinister Booksellers also had the vibe of being "more successful if less ambitious"... yet for some reason I wouldn't put it above Unraveller even if I did enjoy it. Anyway, take it all to say that my 2nd through 4th places are pretty arbitrary in one sense... but in another sense I would probably be fairly happy if Unraveller won but less so if Sinister Booksellers did, and maybe that's the ultimately tiebreaker.

2. Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer

This is a "fix-up" of six novellas originally published in F&SF, about a teenage girl living on a libertarian seastead in the near future. I do like Krtizer, but going in I was a bit skeptical, because I didn't see how that might capture what I like about her work, which is (as I said in my review of her Best Novelette finalist for this year) that "she tells stories about the hard work we do to maintain community." But Kritzer finds a place for that here, as what her protagonist discovers is that even in an every-man-for-himself environment, people still form community and help each other. I don't think it's a perfect book—the somewhat jerky movement of plot betrays its origins as six separate stories, the ending leaves perhaps slightly too many threads and ideas unexplored—but overall I enjoyed it a lot and found it very readable. Neat sense of a possible world, and I liked how that world was slowly unspooled. (Fun fact: I asked my local library to purchase this, and though they did, they reclassified it from "Teen" [where I put it since it was a Lodestar finalist] to "Adult.")

1. To Shape a Dragon's Breath: The First Book of Nampeshiweisit by Moniquill Blackgoose

One of the things I love about genre fiction is that sense of dialogue, the idea that later books are in conversation with earlier books. I don't know what author Moniquill Blackgoose was actually thinking, but it very much seemed to me that this book was in dialogue with Temeraire and Harry Potter, among others. The main character is a native American woman who finds a dragon egg, in a world where dragons are fairly common, but native dragons largely died out from a plague when European settlers came to America. Temeraire shows us dragons all around the world, of course, but from Laurence's perspective; here, we get a sense of how native culture would deal with them differently. The protagonist must enroll in a white dragon school in order to be allowed to keep her dragon, and here the book feels like a very interesting take on Harry Potter and its ilk, with Blackgoose exploring the dynamics of class and race that underlie privilege, but which authors like Rowling do not meaningfully engage with. It's a slow burn, no big action sequences or anything, but that's exactly what I wanted out of this. I often say (borrowing from, I think, Jo Walton) that sf stories are mystery stories where the world itself is the mystery, and I loved that aspect of this book, as we slowly figure out how this alternate world functions the exploring our protagonist's place in it. Exactly what I want out of my YA fantasy, and I would gladly read the sequel whenever it is published; I had to stop myself from evangelizing about this book to everyone I interacted with.


Final Thoughts

It's funny—a lot like Best Novella and Best Short Story, I am happy to see a more diverse array of finalists, but also like Best Novella and Best Short Story, I don't think this resulted in a much stronger set of finalists in the end. There were two authors I had never even heard of (Chandrasekera and Tesh), and a third I was only dimly aware of and who was a new finalist (Chakraborty). And yes, we had three returning finalists (Scalzi, Wells, and Leckie), but only in one of those cases was the novel a sequel to a previous finalist. On paper, it was a strong, interesting set of finalists. But though I enjoyed my top four, and was glad to read all of them, it was an easy ranking; only Some Desperate Glory feels remotely competitive, only Some Desperate Glory seemed to be doing something really interesting and, well, novel.

Related Work, on the other hand, was great. Four really interesting books, none of which I would ever have come across without the Hugo Awards. Some years this category can baffle me, but this year is exactly what I want out of it. The same goes for the Lodestar; sure, some stuff wasn't great, but I am very happy to have discovered both the Kritzer and the Blackgoose, and I'm always happy to have an excuse to read more Hardinge.

Prediction-wise, I feel pretty uncertain in all three categories. I think maybe Some Desperate Glory for Best Novel, but maybe that's just my own biases; it seems a bit polarizing. I doubt my personal favorite will win Related Work; I am kind of worried nostalgia will give it to Banks, but my suspicion is the Weinersmith will be everyone's second choice and thus it will win on transfers. As for the Lodestar, the Hugo voters continually baffle me in this category, so it could be literally anyone.