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.)

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

Hugos 2020: Paper Girls 6 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2019 (contents: 2019)
Acquired and read October 2019

Paper Girls 6

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan

Artist: Cliff Chiang
Colors: Matt Wilson
Letters: Jared K. Fletcher

I enjoyed Paper Girls through to the end, though I kind of suspect I would have liked volume 6 more if I had read it in quick succession with the rest: the time shenanigans get complicated, and I read the thirty issues stretched out over twenty-nine months; volume 6 came ten months after volume 5! But I enjoyed the character beats here and the triple-bluff ending and the glimpse at the paper girls' future, even if it probably doesn't happen that way. Someday I'll sit down and read it all in quick succession. (Who am I kidding? I never have the time to reread anything.)

Hugos 2019: Saga, Book Three by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Comic hardcover, 464 pages
Published 2019 (contents: 2016-18)
Acquired and read June 2019

Saga, Book Three

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Writer: Brian K. Vaughan

Artist: Fiona Staples
Lettering+Design: Fonografiks

Book Three of Saga continues the space epic, as Marko, Alana, Hazel, and their companions spend time on a doomed comet, on an abortion planet, and a water world. As always, Vaughan and Staples's work is propulsive, never immobile. One issue leads into the next into the next; one situation's resolution sets up the next problem. I found that this one was brought down mildly by some commentary on current events that was a little too direct and obvious for good sf (apparently in a magical space universe, people discuss trans identities and abortion rights the exact same way as in the 2010s U.S.), but the twists and turns of the characters are good. The themes that came to the fore in this volume were the appropriate use of force-- something Marko has really struggled with all along, and is brought to a beautiful climax here-- and the responsibilities of family-- there's some good contrast between Alana and Marko's approach to their child(ren?) and Prince Robot's. There are some real sad moments, and some real uplifting ones, and some disturbing moments. I'm sad that the series is going on an extended hiatus after this, because I want it to keep going now!

This deluxe edition has some nice stuff from Vaughan and Staples about the genesis of the series, which goes back to a universe he imagined in math class as a kid. And of course I loved Fonografiks's discussion of what typeface to use for the logo!

Review: Paper Girls 4 and Paper Girls 5 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

Comic trade paperback, 125 pages
Published 2018 (contents: 2017-18)
Acquired April 2018
Read December 2018

Paper Girls 4
Paper Girls 5

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan

Artist: Cliff Chiang
Colors: Matt Wilson
Letters: Jared K. Fletcher

I'm getting the hang of how Paper Girls works now; each volume takes the girls to a different time period, and brings a different one of the girls to the fore. In the case of volume 4, it's to New Year's Eve 1999, and the girl in question is Tiffany, who discovers that her 1999 self is not quite the person she'd imagined she'd be. There are some good jokes about Y2K; in this story the apocalypse some imagined kinda does come to pass. I admire the way this story slowly unspools its answers and questions, and the way it integrates action into story (as opposed to feeling like, as in many other comics, the story pauses for the action), but this volume felt a little less complex than volume 3 in terms of character and theme.

Comic trade paperback, 125 pages
Published 2018 (contents: 2018)
Acquired and read December 2018

Volume 5 was an uptick. This takes the paper girls into one of the futures they've been fighting, an oppressive dystopian Cleveland. Y2K Tiffany is still with them, but this volume focuses on Mac and to a lesser extent KJ; while Tiffany and Tiffany and Erin seek answers, Mac must contend with her own fatality and her homophobic feelings toward KJ. It's good stuff, though I do find it difficult to remember the characters and details outside of the paper girls themselves. (Probably I would benefit from reading this one in the big hardcover volumes, like I do Saga, but I started collecting in trade paperback, so it's too late now.) It's a little bit touching at times, and the cliffhanger shows that the formula I'd figured out will actually not apply in volume 6. Bring it on!

Hugos 2018: Paper Girls 3 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

Comic trade paperback, 125 pages
Published 2017 (contents: 2017)
Acquired October 2017 
Read June 2018

Paper Girls 3

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan

Artist: Cliff Chiang
Colors: Matt Wilson
Letters: Jared K. Fletcher

The third volume of Paper Girls is the best yet, as Vaughan and Chiang continue to deepen these characters and broaden the scope-- yet also this one feels more focused, and as though it tells a discrete story of its own. Clearly each volume of Paper Girls will place the paper girls in a different time period; in this one they materialize in the Pleistocene, and 1) must hunt down a time machine, 2) encounter a cave woman and her child, 3) encounter a future woman born in 2016, 4) discover still more time portals and the strange objects that have come through them, 5) see the future, and 6) deal with the complicated feelings of, um, blossoming womanhood. While volume 2 focused on Erin, volume 3 places more emphasis on KJ.

It's great work. The characters feel more real with each passing chapter, and Vaughan and Chiang do some neat stuff with the comics form. Loved how the vision of the future was rendered, loved the two-page spread when KJ is on the run from the cavemen. A good combination of art, character, and story in each case. This book is strong, and it promises more strength to come. The Hugos forced me to catch up to volume 3 of Paper Girls, and I look forward to reading volumes 4 and 5 soon.

Hugos 2018 [Prelude]: Paper Girls 2 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

Comic trade paperback, 125 pages
Published 2016 (contents: 2016)
Acquired October 2017 
Read June 2018

Paper Girls 2

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan

Artist: Cliff Chiang
Colors: Matt Wilson
Letters: Jared K. Fletcher

Some comics read quickly because nothing happens in them. Paper Girls moves quickly, but because Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang construct the whole thing as non-stop action, each scene efficiently moving you into the next. Nothing feels wasted or padded; this comic just propels you along. You have no desire to linger because you always have to see what's next.

Paper Girls is clever and well put together. I wish I remembered the characters better (it's been a year since I read volume 1) as they'd kind of blended in my mind, but this volume does have a nice focus on Erin, as the girls travel from 1988 to 2016 and meet Erin's older self, now forty years old. It's an interesting balance of being able to follow what's happening to the girls, but the wider context of what's happening still being pretty obscure. I wish it felt like the girls were learning something; right now it seems like there's a simple action story and a big time travel story, but they don't quite go together.

There are some good jokes and some great character moments. Some bits will make you go all soft inside. I've like Cliff Chiang since his Green Arrow and Black Canary days, and this is some of his best work, slick and stylish and full of character. But as well put together as it is, I wish it lasted longer.

My 2018 Hugo Awards Ballot: Visual Categories

I recently finished going through all the materials for the 2018 Hugo Awards; here are the ballots I submitted to Worldcon 76 San Jose, with commentary, in the two Hugo categories for "Dramatic Presentations" and the "Best Graphic Story" category (i.e., comic books). I'll start with the story I ranked the lowest and move upwards. Links are to longer reviews when I have written such a thing, or where the story is freely and legally available on the Internet. (Note that if you're reading this before August 22, not all of those reviews will actually be live yet.)

Best Graphic Story

7. Monstress: The Blood, script by Marjorie M. Liu, art by Sana Takeda

There are definitely things to like and love about Monstress, but I find the mythological backstory largely impenetrable. Or maybe I just don't want to put the work into penetrating it, but that seems almost as damning. The book is utterly gorgeous though, and it's populated by amazing characters, fascinatingly dark concepts, and a deep sense of history and culture. I just wished I cared about the overarching story Liu and Takeda are telling more than I do; based on the first volume, Monstress could be amazing, but based on the second it isn't quite.

6. Bitch Planet: President Bitch, script by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Valentine De Landro with Taki Soma

Sometimes you can jump into the middle of an ongoing comic series; sometimes you're clearly not meant to. This was one of the latter times. President Bitch collects issues #6-10 of Bitch Planet, a series about a prison planet for women in a dystopian future where women can be jailed for "noncompliance" at the drop of a hat. The book makes no attempt to introduce characters and concepts for people who haven't read book one, and I found myself struggling to follow along, but enjoying it when I could figure it out. There's some sharp satire here, and Valentine De Landro (who I knew from a poor fill-in on Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane) is an excellent artist, with a good sense of page design. Ranking this versus Monstress was tough. Both seem like series that aren't quite delivering on their potential, but I gave Bitch Planet the benefit of the doubt since it's more likely the problem was mine in not reading the first volume.

5. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book One by Emil Ferris

This is an excellent book, a really absorbing masterwork, so good it's hard to believe it's Emil Ferris's first graphic novel. Karen is a pre-teen girl growing up in 1960s Chicago, and as the title indicates, her favorite thing is monsters-- she's obsessed with schlocky horror comics and movies. At the same time she has to navigate being a pariah at her Catholic school, she also must survive racism, deal with her mother's cancer, and investigate the murder of her glamorous German neighbor. The book is amazingly drawn, all done in ballpoint pen on looseleaf; you're reading Karen's journal's account of the events of the story. There's a lot of collage/montage, with Ferris's artwork blending the realistic with the fantastic, and the use of color is astonishing at times. Who knew pen could be so beautiful? A prolonged series of flashbacks to the Holocaust are captivating. I have little idea where this honking enormous book is going (the second half is due this fall, I believe), but I really want to know. My main issue with it is that I'm 99% certain it's not actually science fiction or fantasy! All of the fantastic elements thus far are pretty clearly Karen's imagination. How much should that influence my rankings? But I definitely enjoyed it more than Monstress or Bitch Planet, and that's enough for me to give it the edge over them for now, despite its lack of clear sfnal content.

4. No Award

I really struggle with when to deploy "No Award"; however it seems pretty clear that a work that's not actually science fiction or fantasy shouldn't win a Hugo Award (at least not in this category). That said, I'd still rather My Favorite Thing Is Monsters win than Monstress or Bitch Planet, so that bumps them down below No Award as well, which feels a bit mean, but oh well.

3. Saga, Volume Seven, art by Fiona Staples, script by Brian K. Vaughan

Last year I read the first six volumes of Saga basically in one go, so it's a little weird to just read one volume by itself; I had to do a lot of mental re-orienting on its expansive cast of characters. Anyway, I don't think this is the best volume of Saga, but it's still good. (Volume six had more thematic depth, for example.) Sometimes I think Brian K. Vaughan is over-reliant on shock deaths to the extent that they cease to shock, but then at other times I am genuinely shocked, so there you go. It's good stuff with some nice twists outside of the deaths: surprising things are done to/by Marko, Alana, and Sir Robot here. I do wonder what kind of long-term plan there could possible be-- how can our heroes find peace if the galaxy cannot?-- but I'm here for the ride as long as it lasts. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and this are probably about equally ranked, so I'm giving the edge to Saga since it's actually sf.

2. Paper Girls 3, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang

Last year, I resolved a mental tie between two Vaughan comics by going with the familiar and choosing Saga, but this year I'm going the other way around. Like I said above, volume seven wasn't the best volume of Saga (even though it was still good), but volume 3 very much is the best volume of Paper Girls, and that seems worth rewarding as the comic hits its stride.

1. Black Bolt: Hard Time, script by Saldin Ahmed, art by Christian Ward with Frazer Irving

I was dreading reading this, because Marvel's push of the Inhumans is the least interesting thing about Marvel by a long shot, and Black Bolt is the King of the Inhumans. But it turns out that if you take the King of the Inhumans and put him into space prison, allow him to speak, and team him up with the Absorbing Man, a hood from Brooklyn who used to fight Thor, he suddenly becomes enormously interesting! Well, interesting enough to hang an enjoyable story off, anyway. This is fun and well-done, a prison break narrative featuring superheroes and -villains; in addition to Blackagar Boltagon and Carl "Crusher" Creel the Absorbing Man, there's an old alien man (apparently a Hulk villain), a kid with many eyes, and a Skrull pirate who refuses to shapeshift because she likes herself the way she is. Christian Ward's art is sometimes a little difficult to follow, but usually incredible, handling conversation and surreal space torture with equal aplomb. The best issue is the one where Black Bolt and Creel are trapped in a room together as the air runs out, and Creel reveals that amidst his superpowers, he has an all-too-human tragic backstory-- but also hopes and dreams. Funny and touching. All this plus Lockjaw! My Favorite Things Is Monsters is probably actually the better comic, but this one is clearly sf, giving it the edge for me. Who knew I could be made to care about an Inhuman? I think this is one of those ongoings that gets cancelled after twelve issues, so one more collection will see the series off; I'll have to check it out from the library.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

7. Blade Runner 2049, screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, directed by Denis Villeneuve

I rewatched Blade Runner in the afternoon one day (on the big screen at the Tampa Theatre!) and then watched 2049 the same evening (at home). I'm not a Blade Runner fanboy, but 2049 doesn't really hold up by comparison. Some beautiful shots, but I was surprised that the sequel left LA... three different times! And the shots of LA itself felt too expansive compared to Ridley Scott's crowded original. The original is so urban and so confined. The actual plot of the film was too straightforward, too long, too societal, and too unambiguous. Deckard is a rapist stone-cold killer in the original who ends up being saved by the "villain" at the climax; there's little like that here. A sequel doesn't have to be like the original, of course, but it ought to be enough like it to justify making it a sequel to begin with, and based on my wife's reaction, I don't think you'd get much out of it on its own, either. Villeneuve did a way better job with Arrival last year.

6. No Award

It's just like, c'mon man, I'd be embarrassed if Blade Runner 2049 won. It's not a very good movie, and I'm surprised it's on the ballot. 

5. Wonder Woman, screenplay by Allan Heinberg, directed by Patty Jenkins

I gave this one a miss in theatres after Man of Steel and the promotion for Batman v Superman convinced me that DC's attempt at a "cinematic universe" was not for me, but finally watched it once it was nominated for the Hugos. I found it a pretty typical 2010s superhero film, with the occasional flash of brilliance, such as Diana's charge across No Man's Land, or the gas attack on the Belgian village. On the other hand, I didn't find the "romance" particularly convincing, even by the standards of this genre. The action sometimes felt weightless, and having watched Superman: The Movie (1978) just a week prior, I found myself wishing modern blockbusters were less visually grim. Gal Gadot was excellent.

4. Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson

This is one of two films on this list I saw in theatres, before it became a Hugo finalist. I came out uncertain as to what I thought, and given I haven't rewatched it, that means I still don't know what I think. It seemed to me that The Last Jedi was trying to be three different movies that weren't integrated with one another in a coherent fashion, and often important things happened abruptly. I liked Rey's story, and what was done with Snoke and Kylo Ren, and there were some cool battles, but Finn's emotional throughline was poorly handled, I think. I don't know, rating this versus Wonder Woman is tough-- I feel like Wonder Woman is generic, whereas The Last Jedi tried to play with the genre but didn't have good enough handle on it to pull that off. So which is more worthy? I guess I'll give the edge to ambition.

3. Thor: Ragnarok, written by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher Yost, directed by Taika Waititi

I have been a devoted fan of the Thor films since seeing the first one in theatres; I know it's popular to hate on Thor: The Dark World, but I dig it too-- surely its ending battle is the best one in any Marvel film, because it understands the silliness of it all. Well, I enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok as well, which has silliness in spades. It does kind of have that vibe of when a new writer takes over an ongoing comic series and suddenly everything from the previous run is disposed of without ceremony, and when it gets away with that, it works, but there are parts where it jars. (I didn't like seeing the Warriors Three go down like mooks, for example.) But I always enjoy Thor's love-hate relationship with Loki, which this handles well, and there's a lot of fun to be had, especially when Thor takes up with a band of ineffectual revolutionaries. Also it might be the only Marvel movie with a good score?

2. The Shape of Water, screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor, directed by Guillermo del Toro

I'm really torn between this and Get Out; as things in award categories so often are, they're hard to compare-- a horror film with sf elements vs. a dark historical fantasy. One wants you to be afraid, the other wants you to feel something; one is very much naturalistic, one is lush and vivid and colorful. I ended up giving the edge to Get Out because sometimes Shape of Water was a bit too simplistic. Like, one guy is racist and homophobic in the space of fifteen seconds. He's bad. I get it. But on the whole, it's a great film, with excellent performances and some real beautiful imagery; del Toro really relishes the early 1960s setting. Ask me again after the deadline and I might be wishing I'd ranked this first.

1. Get Out, written and directed by Jordan Peele

Get Out pretty much consumed the humanities academic facebooksphere when it came out, but despite having some sense of what it was about, I was off base enough that the film was still quite enjoyable. A lot of people I've talked to have been surprised that it's a Hugo nominee, given that it's horror. But of course, texts can belong to many genres at once, and in the case of Get Out, the sf element is integral to the horror: I was really impressed with how once you realize what's going on, almost every oddity throughout the film, big and small, suddenly makes a great deal of sense. Also Jordan Peele understands that there's nothing so serious it won't be improved by jokes.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

6. The Good Place, Chapter 13: "Michael's Gambit," written and directed by Michael Schur

I can intuit that this episode is significant, possibly even mind-blowing, to the ongoing story of The Good Place if you've been watching it all along. However, I have not been, and so I was like, "Oh, interesting." Outside of that, I'm not sure this episode had a lot going for it, though; the idea that four friends in heaven have to decide which two of them have to go to hell ought to have been more funny or more dramatic. Or both.

5. Doctor Who 11x00: "Twice Upon a Time," written by Steven Moffat, directed by Rachel Talalay

I am, to be honest, somewhat baffled that the 2017 Christmas special was the only Doctor Who episode to make it onto the ballot this year; I can think of several episodes from series 10 that were better than this, including "Extremis" (which I myself nominated) and "The Pilot" and "Thin Ice" and "Oxygen" and the series finale. "Twice Upon a Time" is mildly diverting, but squanders a potentially interesting premise (a meeting between the first and twelfth Doctors as each is on the verge of regeneration). The final speech shows that not even Peter Capaldi and Rachel Talalay can save yet another long speech from the pen of Steven Moffat; I wish the regenerations could be less of spectacles than they have become.

4. The Good Place, Chapter 19: "The Trolley Problem," written by Josh Siegel & Dylan Morgan, directed by Dean Holland

This episode was more comprehensible as a standalone story, but more importantly, it had better jokes than chapter 13 of The Good Place, mostly those revolving around the ways Ted Danson's character makes two others continuously reenact the famous philosophical quandary of the trolley problem in a real-seeming simulation, complete with fake people who have real feelings, in real time. On the other hand, there were a surprising number of comic bits that fell flat for me, given the talent involved (series co-creator Michael Schur is also the co-creator of Parks and Recreation, which you all know I have been enjoying watching). Anyway, this was okay, and so was "Twice Upon a Time," and I feel like my inclination to rank it fourth is more about sticking it to "Twice Upon a Time" than appreciating "The Trolley Problem" on its own merits.

3. "The Deep" by Clipping.

I don't listen to hip-hop, but between this song and last year's album Splendor & Misery, I appreciate the artistry of Clipping. when I hear it. This song is about an underwater race made up of the children of pregnant African women thrown off slave ships; in the near future, they discover the surface world when corporations come looking for oil. (The underwater civilization is apparently from the work of a 1990s electronica duo.) Only five minutes long, which makes it hard to rank high, but it packs a punch.

2. Black Mirror 4x01: "USS Callister," written by Charlie Brooker & William Bridges, directed by Toby Haynes

This is the second episode I've seen of Black Mirror, after last year's Hugo finalist "San Junipero." This wasn't as good as that, but I still really enjoyed it. It seems like it's going one way, but then there's a clever swerve about twenty minutes in, and it suddenly becomes a different story. It seems at first like it's going to critique Star Trek tropes, but it actually almost reaffirms them. Horrifying at times, good jokes at others, with some neat details and twists I didn't anticipate.

1. Star Trek: Discovery 1x07: "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," written by Aron Eli Coleite & Jesse Alexander, directed by David M. Barrett

I actually nominated this, my favorite episode of Discovery's first season, and a poster child for what the series does at its best: rework the tropes of Star Trek for people who have seen them plenty, plus throw in some heartwarming emotional moments. (Read my review of the whole first season linked above if you want more details.) I couldn't decide if I liked this or "USS Callister" more, but it would be really nice for Star Trek to win a Hugo again, so I used that as my arbitrary tiebreaker; it last won in 1995 for the Next Generation finale "All Good Things..."

Overall Thoughts

Best Graphic Story continues to be a strong category; my placement of "No Award" is a bit misleading. Any of my top three I'd happily see win. I also understand why people like Monstress and Bitch Planet even if these particular volumes didn't do it for me, and it wouldn't bother me if they won either, despite where I ranked them! I suspect my ranking of Black Bolt first will be in a definite minority (I mean, I'm as surprised as anyone); my guess is either Saga or Monstress for the win.

I also found the long-form Dramatic Presentations better than last year's. Thankfully there's a lot less 1980s nostalgia this year. A whole two non-franchise films! Three legitimately strong films, and I know Last Jedi and Wonder Woman have their fans, too. Last year it was pretty obvious to me that Arrival would crush it, but this year things are less clear. A sizeable minority love Get Out, but I suspect it's not to everyone's taste; it definitely won't be The Last Jedi; Ragnarok is not particularly serious. That leaves Wonder Woman or Shape of Water, I suspect. (But who knows. Maybe with the way instant preference voting works, Ragnarok will be everyone's second choice and thus win it?)

Short form was kind of weird: the Discovery episode and "USS Callister" seem kind of obvious as finalists, but two episodes of a sitcom? A (admittedly good) hip-hop track? A mediocre Doctor Who episode? Given the wealth of quality science fiction and fantasy on tv today, these are really the best six? No The Expanse or Legion or The Handmaid's Tale? (I suspect the issue is that with serialized shows, there's no one episode that draws a lot of nominations.) This category will definitely be won by "USS Callister," but I couldn't even begin to guess how the ranking will break down after that.

Hugos 2017: Saga, Book Two by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan

The past couple weeks have seen a few Doctor Who reviews of mine appear at USF, all of Big Finish's recent trilogy featuring the Season Nineteen TARDIS team of the Fifth Doctor, Adric, Tegan, and Nyssa: The Star Men, The Contingency Club, and Zaltys. Read 'em!

Comic hardcover, 464 pages
Published 2017 (contents: 2014-16)
Acquired May 2017
Read July 2017

Saga, Book Two

​

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan

Artist: Fiona Staples
Lettering+Design: Fonografiks

My Hugo blogging comes to a belated end with the second Saga compilation-- appropriately enough, I guess, as I started this whole adventure with the first one. Saga, Book Two is "more of the same" in a way that makes it hard to say anything about it that you don't say about the first one. Like: more weird space creatures, more romance, more sex, more grossness, more occasional heart-warming moments, more senseless brutality. If anything's changed, it's that Fiona Staples has got even better at what she does. The visuals of this series are just splendid, communicating character and story seemingly effortlessly while also being quite nice to look at. (And she does her own coloring! And she handwrites the captions!)

In this set of adventures, Marko, Alana, Hazel, and family/company live on one planet for a while while Alana tries out an acting career (and Marko flirts with a dance teacher), terrorists kidnap the characters, and Hazel spends some time in a prison camp while her parents search for her. Big jumps of time are covered here, more than in Book One, but Saga effortlessly mixes the crude and the cosmic in a way like nothing else... though maybe at times Staples and Brian Vaughan could go a little less crude. If there's anything not to like, it's that interesting side characters are brutally killed off with such regularity that at a certain point you stop caring about new characters because you don't expect them to make it, and you're more often right than not (though they do mislead you a couple times based on this expectation). I really enjoy the weird melange of characters here, as well as Vaughan and Staples's continual resistance to imposing a status quo. Though at times I'll admit I want it to slow down, so both I and the characters can process things. But that's clearly not going to happen! This phase of Vaughan's career is all about the speed. And let's be fair, he (and Staples) are good at it.

Next Week: Back to the "deboot" version of the Legion of Super-Heroes, in Superman and the Legion!

My Hugo Awards 2017 Votes: Book Categories

This final post covers my votes in the three Hugo categories for book-length works: novels, graphic stories, and nonfiction. If I did a full review of a work, I'll link to that here. (Note that if you're reading this before 22 August, not all of those full reviews will have gone live yet.) I only did that if I owned the book: I didn't do it for anything I read an e-version of from the Hugo voters packet, or borrowed from the library (as in the case of Princess Diarist). If the work is freely available on-line, I'll link to that. (Thankfully there is no work of which both of those things is true.)

Best Graphic Story

6. Black Panther: A Nation under Our Feet, Book One, script by Ta-Nehisi Coates, art by Brian Stelfreeze

I wanted to like this, and possibly I will like this. The four issues collected here are clearly just the opening act of a larger story; A Nation under Our Feet is apparently slated to run across three volumes of Black Panther. But what's here is alienating, assuming the reader knows more about Blank Panther backstory than I did. What happened to Black Panther's sister, and why doesn't he have any control over his own country? Or, if this stuff isn't preexisting backstory, it's just alienating. There are definitely some neat things going on here. I liked the sense of Wakanda as a real place with factions and tensions and multiple competing histories, and I liked the two lesbian warriors who go rogue (though no one properly explains what is the organization they went rogue from), and Stelfreeze occasionally does some really arresting stuff with his visuals, and the idea that a superhero whose core identity is being a superking has to confront a popular revolution is cool, and leads to good quotations about power and leadership. But at times this book felt like epigrams strung together with imagery, not a story.

5. Monstress: Awakening, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda

In the discrete story stakes, Monstress is somewhere above Paper Girls and below Ms. Marvel. Events come to a climax, but there's clearly a much bigger story we're only beginning to see. But what a story. Sana Takeda's art is absolutely gorgeous, a pointed contrast to the often horrific events it depicts. In a fantasy world inhabited by five races-- humans, gods, Ancients, Arcanics (human/Ancient hybrids), and talking cats-- a seventeen-year-old Arcanic girl goes into the dark heart of humanity to root out the secret of her own existence, something relating to the Old Gods. There's sometimes too much to keep track of, but the core characters are pretty great; I particularly enjoy Maika's friend the world-weary cat Ren, and also I have a lot of affection for the improbably cute fox Arcanic, Kippa. Lush stuff, and a series I will definitely continue to read. If it loses out to Paper Girls, it's only because Paper Girls just hits my buttons in a way this does not, as I tend more toward sf than fantasy.

4. Paper Girls 1, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang

A group of bicycle-riding children living in the Midwest in the 1980s encounter something out of this world. I guess 2016 was a bit of a moment for this-- it's like Stranger Things but with preteen girls. Anyway, this was good: funny at times, horrifying at others, inventive in the way that Brian K. Vaughan often is of late (I mean, I liked Y: The Last Man a lot, but this and Saga show that he's upped his game since), and Cliff Chiang is one of my favorite comics artists, so I'm happy to see him show his stuff on something creator-owned instead of being relegated to Green Arrow and Black Canary or whatever. This is clearly the first chapter in a larger story, not a story complete in itself, which partially motivates my placement of it here. Stands on its own more than a volume of Black Panther but less than one of Ms. Marvel. I don't have a problem with that in a general sense, it's one of the things that attracts me to the whole serial comic book medium, but will Vaughan and Chiang stick the landing? I want to know that before I praise it too effusively. I guess this is a limitation of the Best Graphic Story category I don't know of a way to overcome, except maybe in renominating the entirety of Paper Girls as complete work whenever it comes to a conclusion.

3. Saga, Volume Six, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples

I ended up being very torn about the relative rankings of the two Brian K. Vaughan comics, and torn about potential tie-breakers: do I break the tie by going with a return to a world I enjoy? Or do I count inventing something new as superior? In the end I decided that I could appreciate Saga, Volume Six more than Paper Girls 1 because there's a coherent story and thematic unity about prisons (the ones we're put in and the ones we put ourselves in) in volume 6 of Saga, while Paper Girls feels more like it just stops without resolving story or theme. Plus it might just be the familiarity that makes me like the Saga characters more, but that's still something, and I'm going with it. There are no cute walrus farmers* or exiled robot princes in Paper Girls.

2. Ms. Marvel: Super Famous; script by G. Willow Wilson; art by Takeshi Miyazawa, Adrian Alphona, and Nico Leon

Ms. Marvel is one of two comics I buy on a monthly basis, so this was actually the only finalist in this category I'd read already; I brushed back through the issues (vol. 4, #1-6) instead of rereading the whole thing. In the two story arcs collected here, Kamala fights gentrification in Jersey City (it turns out to be a HYDRA plot) and accidentally creates an army of duplicates of herself. There's a lot of good teen stuff here: learning how to deal with friends in romantic relationships, learning how to find your limits, learning how to deal with family members in romantic relationships. The second story is in particular just brilliantly hilarious; Nico Leon draws an amazing army of Ms. Marvel duplicates, and the bit where Kamala's friend Bruno summons Loki is delightful. Ms. Marvel is one of the best things going right now in superhero comics. The only bad thing about this volume is that Adrian Alphona, who drew most of G. Willow Wilson's original run, only draws ten pages of it. I have actually liked Takeshi Miyazawa since Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, but Alphona defined Kamala and her world, and I'm sad that as it's gone on, he's drawn less and less of it for whatever reasons.

1. The Vision: Little Worse than a Man, script by Tom King, art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta

It was a tough choice for me between The Vision and Ms. Marvel, but I guess in a tie I give the pip to the first volume of something new over the fifth volume of something not quite as new. The Vision places the Avengers' best synthezoid in the D.C. suburbs with a newly constructed family (one wife, two kids) as he takes up a new job as the president's Avengers liaison. Things quickly get out of control, though, as the Visions are subject to prejudice from the locals and assault by supervillains in suburbia. King is a brutal, economic writer (if I'd been a supporting member of Worldcon earlier, I'd've nominated his excellent Omega Men run) who brings something really special to the way he tells this story (great captions!), and Gabriel Hernandez Walta matches his sensibilities, with a simple style that belies the brutality underneath this world (our world) and a great way with facial expressions. Walta's Visions hit the uncanny valley perfectly.

Best Novel 

6. Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

This was the only Best Novel finalist I just completely bounced off of-- I enjoyed everything ranked above it to varying degrees, but I just could not get into this book. That said, I wouldn't object if it won; it seemed like the kind of book that could be someone else's cup of tea (and it must have been many people's cup of tea to end up a finalist), but it very much was not mine. Too frustrating and inexplicable to be interesting or enjoyable.

5. Death's End by Cixin Liu

The top three books were hard to rank; the bottom three much more easy. Though Death's End probably has more of sfnal interest than A Closed and Common Orbit, sf is about more than neat ideas-- a good novel also needs a compelling story or stories, and Death's End did not, whereas as I got emotionally involved in A Closed and Common Orbit... despite not wanting to! And the ideas in Death's End just weren't as interesting as those in the first two Remembrance of Earth's Past novels in any case. If all three books had been as good as The Three-Body Problem, I could see this ending up higher on my ballot, but Death's End was not as good as the first two, so oh well.

4. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

Even if I did end up getting a bit misty-eyed while reading A Closed and Common Orbit, and even if it provides a complete adventure in a way that The Obelisk Gate and Too Like the Lightning it did, it's still hard for me to claim that it's better than those books. I mean, it's very good, but if science fiction should invent new realities for the purposes of thought experiment (and though that's just one thing it does, but it's an important one to me), A Closed and Common Orbit is just not as ambitious as the other two. It's a strong slate that could push a book this emotional this far down, I think.

3. The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin

I found this tough to rate versus Too Like the Lightning, I think partially because both are incomplete works-- The Obelisk Gate is reasonably satisfying on its own, but it is pretty clearly the middle chapters of a longer story, meaning that in some sense it will have to be judged retrospectively, once I have complete information on how that longer story succeeds. But I did really like it regardless.

2. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

I will note that this is, like, impossible. All the Birds and Obelisk Gate and Closed and Common and are all three very strong books that did not nail things 100%. Each book has elements that makes it award-worthy, and aspects that hold it back no matter how great it is. I ended up ranking All the Birds here because I felt like it satisfied me more than Obelisk Gate, yet lacked the ambition of Too Like the Lightning. On a different day I could probably totally rejuggle everything under my first-place choice and still be satisfied with the resultant list.

1. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Though this is no more a complete story than The Obelisk Gate, possibly even less so as the book doesn't really have an ending, kind of just coming to a stop that will be picked up in Seven Surrenders, Too Like the Lightning feels like the greater achievement to me, in that Jemisin is revisiting a world (even if she is fleshing it out in doing so) while Palmer is establishing a new one, and quite successfully at that.

Best Related Work

7. Women of Harry Potter by Sarah Gailey

Not actually a book (I guess a "related work" doesn't have to be but usually is), but a series of blog posts on Tor.com, five as of the end of 2016 (six now), discussing female Harry Potter characters. Gailey doesn't write academic-style criticism; these are very enthusiastic tributes more than anything else, which often felt like they reflected what fans want the characters to be like more than what they actually are like. Well written, I guess, but they left me cold.

6. No Award

I'm having a hard time justifying the idea that the Hugo Award would go to a series of five so-so blog posts. (Kameron Hurley won the category in 2014 for a single blog essay, but that essay was much better than any of these.) On the other hand, even though I didn't like Traveler of Worlds very much, I can see how someone might like it, so I ranked it higher than No Award.

5. Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

If you hang on to Robert Silverberg's every word, this might be the book for you. It's hard for me to imagine why you would, though, as I found the questions and answers here largely superficial. Zinos-Amaro rockets through scintillating questions such as, what kind of food does Silverberg like to eat? and how does he organize his day? But even when Zinos-Amaro asks interesting questions, Silverberg largely fails to answer them interestingly; a big deal is made about Silverberg's travel and how it broadened his mind, but when Zinos-Amaro asks for an example, the best Silverberg can do is to explain that he got lost once and his wife's iPhone's GPS saved them, so he learned smartphones aren't that bad. Whoa! It also would have been nice if Zinos-Amaro had edited out the bits where he asked Silverberg a question and Silverberg said he had no opinion on the topic. Plus Silverberg goes on rants about how people in their thirties have no manners when they eat out. Scintillating! I haven't read much of Silverberg's fiction (no novels, just a few short stories); possibly if you did, you would like this more than me. Silverberg rags on Thomas Hardy for a few pages and, well, I know who I think will endure in that contest.

4. The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

This book collects a diary Carrie Fisher kept during the filming of Star Wars in 1976, a mix of poetry and prose written about her relationship with Harrison Ford, framed by Fisher's take on that relationship now. Interesting enough for what it is, and I suppose it's nice to have story out there-- but there's actually not much of a story there. Ford was in his mid-thirties and married and away from home (Star Wars was filmed in the UK), while Fisher was nineteen and acting more worldly than she actually was, and they had sex on the weekends but little connection-- Fisher was kind of in love, but then they flew back to the United States and it was all over. There is the occasional real interesting moment, like an incident where she really connects with Ford when she flawlessly imitates his walk. Fisher's thoughts on the way Leia and the Star Wars phenomenon shaped her life are interesting, though it would have been nice to have heard more about her returning to the character for The Force Awakens, which she only alludes to. Like a lot of the book, though, this section feels padded, as if Fisher is vamping to fill up space to justify this being its own volume. It's quite short, but it's still too long.

3. The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman

This was a fun collection of various pieces of nonfiction Gaiman has written across his career, ranging from 1989 to 2016. It's a hodgepodge (or an olio as the LA Times crossword might say) of speeches, introductions, newspaper columns, and all sorts. There's a lot to like here: Gaiman is a lively, engaging writer, enthusiastic in his appreciations, and usually humorous. There are only so many introductions you can read in a row, though, especially as Gaiman comes across as vaguely skeptical of the whole concept of the introduction, but my main takeaway from reading this was how invested Gaiman is not just in the genre of speculative fiction, but its fandom and its fans. We could do a lot worse. (Also, his thoughts on genre contrast in interesting and productive ways with Le Guin's below.)

2. The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

A collection of essays on topics related to feminist geekdom, some previously published (mostly on the author's blog), some original to the book. The very best one is an analysis of masculinity in True Detective, which really effectively blends the critical, the personal, and the political in a way that illuminates both True Detective and general cultural trends. I also really liked the last essay, about llamas as a metaphor for how stories shape our perceptions of history. If they had all been as good as those two (and some others were), this would have got my top spot, I think, but Hurley has a tendency to wax in generalities that prevents her from being as insightful as she might.

1. Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin

I'd place this book almost on a par with Gaiman's collection, as they're pretty similar works. What gave Le Guin the edge for me was its focus (at over 500 pages I eventually got tired of Gaiman's ideas in a way I didn't with Le Guin's 300) and her book reviews, which are more critically successful than anything in Gaiman's book, as fun as it was to read.

Overall Thoughts

I feel like both Best Graphic Story and Best Novel were very strong categories this year. I remember looking at some shortlists a few years ago when Best Graphic Story was first being implemented and being flabbergasted at the abysmal quality of some of the stuff; though I didn't like Black Panther, I can see how someone else might, and the other five works ranged from very good to great in my estimation.

Similarly, I'd be pleased if anything in my top four won in Best Novel; I thought they were all great books in very different ways, and ranking the top tier especially was completely impossible. Space opera, epic fantasy, utopian sf, hybrid speculative fiction-- all very different breeds of genre fiction, but all doing what it ought to do best. I look forward to reading the follow-ups to A Closed and Common Orbit, The Obelisk Gate, and Too Like the Lightning. My guess is that Too Like the Lightning or All the Birds will win, but I think it will be tight.

Related Work I enjoyed the least of these categories. Le Guin is great, of course, but if the other two book categories are pushing the genre forward in new and interesting ways, there's something retrograde about a category dominated by authors who came to prominence in the 1950s (Silverberg), the 1970s (Le Guin), and the 1980s (Gaiman), and one who's famous for being in a movie. I mean, this category is always going to be backward-looking by nature, but I don't feel like it needs to be this backward looking.

In Two Weeks: I react to the actual award winners, and also sum up my thoughts on this whole Hugo process.

* A walrus who farms, not a farmer of walruses.