Hugos 2022: Far Sector by N. K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell

Far Sector

Collection published: 2021
Contents published: 2019-21
Acquired: April 2022
Read: June 2022

Writer: N. K. Jemisin

Artist, Colors: Jamal Campbell
Letterer: Deron Bennett

This Green Lantern spin-off comic focuses on Sojourner "Jo" Mullein, a new Green Lantern from Earth (how many are there now?) sent to the most distant sector in the universe, home to the City Enduring, a massive Dyson swarm for three species whose two home planets were destroyed. Aside from a single Green Lantern and a single Guardian of the Universe, there's no preexisting DC elements here; the whole thing takes place in a new setting with new characters.

There's some neat worldbuilding and some good thematic and character elements, though I felt the latter weren't foregrounded quite as much as I'd like; this is very much an action/adventure/mystery/thriller comic first, and a political and philosophical one second, though it has elements of that. That said, it's very much a success as an action/adventure/mystery/thriller comic. Nice art, good design sense, neat covers, fun dialogue, decent twists, some nice narrative devices. I don't think you would guess that Jemisin was a first-time (I think?) comics writer. Not the kind of work that will stick with you forever, but solid-tier superhero comics that's worth spending time on.

Hugos 2021: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: August 2021

The Great Cities Trilogy, Book One: The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

I enjoyed Jemisin's previous fantasy trilogy, The Broken Earth, a lot, particularly its first volume. Despite being fantasy, I felt it had the doubling effect that for me makes the best science fiction: it had a rigorously extrapolated secondary world, but it was also a metaphor for our world. This new novel is, as far as I know, the first book by Jemisin that falls into the Mendlesohn category of "intrusion fantasy" rather than "immersive fantasy," and perhaps for that reason, I found the commentary much less interesting. The basic premise is that when they reach certain levels of complexity, cities are "born" and acquire living avatars, but there are dark forces out there willing to destroy cities to stop this from happening. New York City is undergoing that process during the course of this novel, but because it has multiple boroughs, it has multiple avatars, who must find each other and learn to work together.

I had a number of problems with the book. It drags. As a friend of mine also pointed out, the reader understands what its going on by the end of the prologue, but it takes the characters over four hundred pages to figure it out for themselves, and to undertake the pretty mundane task of finding one another. And while the orogenes in The Broken Earth were potent metaphors for various aspects of chattel slavery, I felt like The City We Became didn't really engage with the potential complexities of its premise. The city avatars are basically all good, and the city is coming to life is a good thing, and they are a charming team of ethnically diverse heroes; the bad guys are all evil racists. But surely cities—and here my thoughts are influenced by James Scott's Seeing Like a State—are born of the push and pull between complexity and simplification. Cities are diverse places, but they are also always trying to contain and stamp out and systematize their own diversity in order to make it legible and therefore controllable. Without this, I would argue, you have no city. A city planner wants things in neat grids, and is willing to smash those who gets in their way; an American city in particular, is born of stolen land. I feel like some of this is touched on vaguely, but not really dealt with. I feel like there's another version of this book that's about cities coming to life in all their mess just being a thing that is, rather than a thing that's good, and I think that book is probably more interesting than this one.

This is made worse by the fact that the social commentary in The City We Became ranges from the obvious to the banal. It felt to me like it was written by Twitter: the villain is clearly a Karen, and there are definite echoes of the Chris Cooper birdwatching incident (though that actually happened after the book was written). Jemisin's book doesn't have anything new or interesting to say about those topics; it's pretty much all the exact same way you would get people snarkily commenting on it online. There's a particularly risible subplot about evil bro fascist racist progressive artists which completely failed to convince me that its villains were real people; again, it felt like an online stereotype of a category of person I'm not completely convinced actually exists. On top of that, this subplot is resolved stupidly easy; basically someone tweets "help out our art gallery," and it's all taken care of in a couple paragraphs.

Anyway, overall I found this pretty disappointing considering the strength of Jemisin's other work, and I imagine I will only read future installments if "forced" to do so by them being Hugo finalists in future years.

My 2020 Hugo Awards Ballot: Short Fiction Categories

Today, I'm ranking the finalists in the various short fiction categories of the 2020 Hugo Awards. Here are my ballots (from lowest-ranked to highest) in each short fiction category, with quotations and commentary. Links are to where you can freely read the stories on-line (when possible) or to full reviews (if I did one).

Best Short Story

7. "As the Last I May Know" by S. L. Huang

Didn’t she deserve to be her own person, for whatever time she did have?

This is a take on the so-called "Fisher protocol," the idea that the president should have to kill someone to gain access to the nuclear codes. (This is also the basis for the Star Trek novel Dwellers in the Crucible, fact fans.) In this story's secondary world, they are implanted in children, and this story follows one such child as she is attached to a new president. It has some occasional moments, but it is overall banal and obvious and unaffecting, and I am surprised it was published, much less nominated for a Hugo.

6. "And Now His Lordship is Laughing" by Shiv Ramdas

She often wonders how the English have come by their belief that the inability to emote is a virtue. It seems so unnatural.

I very much struggled to rank this versus "Do Not Look Back, My Lion," in that I felt both were well-written from a prose perspective, but neither seemed particularly interesting beyond that. This is set in colonial Bengal during World War II; a British ruler asks for a doll from a Bengali woman who has lost her whole family to colonial rule. She seeks revenge. It's pretty predictable on a number of levels.

5. "Do Not Look Back, My Lion" by Alix E. Harrow

Eefa wonders how long it will be until their own slaves slaughter them in their sleep. When they do, she thinks, we will deserve it.

Okay, this one bothered me because of the worldbuilding. It's set in a world where things like fighting in wars are coded feminine, and nurturing children are coded masculine. The main character is a woman, but a husband because she takes care of kids, married to a great woman warrior. But once you figure out the gender stuff, I felt like the story never did anything interesting. This could be any story about a person who is a terrible spouse and parent because they care about war and glory more... except that they just happen to be a woman, and their spouse is called a "husband." But also I'm meant to believe that a pregnant woman goes into battle! I guess it must be possible, but it doesn't track with my experiences observing pregnant women. Anyway, the worldbuilding consequently feels shallow, but I did think it was well told, so there's that.

4. "A Catalog of Storms" by Fran Wilde

A Glare: a storm of silence and retribution, with no forgiveness, a terror of it, that takes over a whole community until the person causing it is removed. It looks like a dry wind, but it’s always some person that’s behind it.

This is a fantasy story (so many on the ballot this year!) about an island where people transform into "weathermen," who leave their homes to rail against devastating storms, protecting the island, but in the long run becoming part of them. I thought it had a decent central idea and some good prose, but it just never really grabbed me. Definitely stronger than the shallow worldbuilding of the Harrow story, though.

3. "Blood Is Another Word for Hunger" by Rivers Solomon

What bothered Sully most about Ziza’s relentless happiness was that it was not the result of obliviousness, naivete, or ignorance. It was a happiness that knew pain and had overcome it.

This story is set during the Civil War: a young slave murders the family that has enslaved her, and the universe balances itself out by her giving birth to a being from the etherworld. It's weird, and I'm not entirely sure I got what it was going for, to be honest, but I enjoyed the journey, and was actually invested in the main character, which is more than you can say for anything I've ranked lower on the list.

2. "Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island" by Nibedita Sen

“[L]et's be real, ladies, who among us hasn't sometimes had a craving to eat the whole damn world?”

As you can infer, this story is in the form of an annotated bibliography (though one that consists entirely of excerpts from sources, not summary/commentary on them). The form is probably the best thing about it, but it does make the form work quite well, a tantalizing glimpse at a story and culture and a civilization, and raising issues of empire, race, gender, and sexuality in an evocative way (as opposed to the heavy-handed way of "And Now His Lordship"). I do kind of feel I've placed it here by default, but it does get bonus points for having flawless MLA style in the citations.

1. No Award

I don't think I can give my top vote to something that ends up where it is "by default," so I am actually giving my top vote to No Award. I know it won't make any difference, but this is a mostly uninspired bunch of short stories in my estimation. I don't think I've ever before encountered a set of them in my Hugo voting where I can't imagine myself recommending a single one of them to someone else. Not sure what happened here.

Best Novelette

6. "The Archronology of Love" by Caroline M. Yoachim

He was gone, why should it matter what happened to the Chronicle of his life? But it felt like deleting his letters, or erasing him from the list of contacts on her tablet.

This one never really grabbed me, maybe because I never really grokked the central technological idea. Something about looking at the past? But it's not a recording, you're actually there? An archronologist has to figure out what killed her husband. As a portrayal of grief, it didn't really ring true, either, especially in the protagonist's relationship with her son, and I didn't buy that no one would make her recuse herself from such a personal inquiry when there were other qualified personnel.

5. "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye" by Sarah Pinsker

“You found him. You write detective books. Isn’t the person who found a dead body usually one of the people who has to be ruled out? You had opportunity.”

“But no motive. Well, except lack of coffee, but that hardly seems worth killing someone over.”

Sarah Pinsker is the modern master of short sf, in my opinion, but this isn't one of her best. It has a good horror premise, but it takes an awful long time for that to become clear, and then it's related in a long infodump that feels on the contrived side. The set-up is pretty mundane, and the story drags it out way too long. For over half the story, there's no indication that something sfnal has even happened. I'd probably like it fine if I encountered it in the wild, but it didn't convince as one of the best six novelettes of the year.

4. Emergency Skin by N. K. Jemisin

Nothing's changed with these people. They still build societies around their least and worst instead of the best and brightest.

The resident of a dystopian space colony returns to what they think is an abandoned Earth only to discover it's inhabited and thriving. The story is narrated by an AI speaking to the explorer in the second person, telling them what they think of the society on Earth. It's kind of interesting, kind of preachy, kind of too straightforward. I think it works better if you think of it as less a piece of science fiction and more a piece of utopian fiction (in the classic nineteenth-century mold): the narrator being a skeptic of the society is a good twist on the old utopian cicerone. It has some fun moments, but I still felt like there was a much better story that could have been told with the same basic set-up. (If the explorer was more skeptical of Earth society, for example, and needed winning over, as opposed to falling for it right away.) However, I felt like this was trying to do something more interesting than "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye," even if it's not the thing I wanted it to be doing, and I was more consistently entertained by it.

3. "Away With the Wolves" by Sarah Gailey

She tells people that she’s three hundred years old, and I believe her, if only because I don’t know for sure that spite can’t pickle a person into immortality.

I thought this was a solid story, told from the perspective of a werewolf who is disabled in human form coming to realize that maybe they ought to prioritize their wolf self. The trajectory of it is a bit obvious once you know what's going on, but it's well done and focused. Not as strong as Gailey's "STET" from last year, but definitely better than the weak bottom half of this category.

2. "Omphalos" by Ted Chiang

And, I said, this is why I am a scientist: because I wish to discover your purpose for us, Lord.

This is set a world where young-Earth creationism is true, and is clearly demonstrable because you can find evidence of the point where things just snapped into being: primordial humans without navels, tree fossils without rings, and so on. As a Victorianist who slogged through Philip Henry Gosse's Omphalos, I was predisopsed to like this (since Gosse was stuck in our world, he had to argue that God would create humans with navels, but that doing so wasn't a deception on His part), and I loved the details of the world Chiang constructed, how science and scientists would work in such a world. However, I did not find the story that Chiang told with the premise as absorbing as the premise itself, nor the story of "For He Can Creep," so it nicely slots into second place.

1. "For He Can Creep" by Siobhan Carroll

“Exactly. Let us face facts, Jeoffry. The Poem your human labors over—the thing to which he has devoted his last years of labor, burning away his health, destroying his human relationships—even setting aside my feelings on its subject matter, Jeoffry, the fact is this: The poem he writes is not very good.”

This was the fourth novelette finalist I read, but the first where upon finishing it, I thought, I really enjoyed that. It's told from the point of view of Jeoffry, the cat of Christopher Smart, a real eighteenth-century poet committed to an asylum. Smart is trying to write the Divine Poem, but when the Devil comes to bargain with Smart, Jeoffrey (being a cat) impulsively signs away the soul of his owner in exchange for a bowl of cream, and must get it back. Carroll does a great job capturing the perspective of a cat in an utterly believable way, and the story is epic and charming all at once.

Best Novella

6. In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

"I have to go home soon," she said, and her words were hollow, obligations spoken where the wind could hear them, and not things that lingered in the chambers of her heart.

This is my fourth year voting in the Hugos, and the fourth year that one of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children books has been a finalist. I liked the first one a lot, but have found the later ones less interesting, the compelling premise being stretched thin, or abandoned altogether. The School for Wayward Children is where protagonists of portal fantasies end up after their portals close; but like book 2, this one abandons the idea of riffing on portal fantasies in favor of just doing a portal fantasy. Katherine is a girl who occasionally finds portals to the Goblin Market, a world where everything that passes between people is an exchange that must be exactly accounted for with "fair value." I think there's a good idea here, but the story is much too long for the point it comes to make, and I find McGuire's affected narrative voice annoyingly twee, especially when describing real-world events. Plus I found the rules of "fair value" too murky and inconsistent to hang a story on. I would not be excited for this to win. (McGuire won for the first installment in 2017, but hasn't won since.)

5. To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

It ended up being far easier, once the science matured, to engineer our bodies instead.

To put this in creative writing critique terms, I think this was probably one draft away from being very good. It definitely wasn't in the same bracket as the Ted Chiang or the Rivers Solomon. But it rarely actively annoyed me as the Wayward Children novellas have come to.

4. The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

"No woman would ever think up something so ridiculous."

This is set in an alternate 1910s Cairo, where the flooding of djinn and other magical creatures from a portal has made Egypt into a dominant world power. The book follows two detectives from the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities as they investigate a haunted tram car. It's a bit plodding at first-- too much clunky exposition-- and like many Tor.com novellas it feels more like the pilot for a tv show than a novella. I also found the leads thinly characterized. (One's a serious detective who's good at his job, the other is an eager rookie, and that's about it.) But as it goes it picks up steam and becomes a fun supernatural take on the police procedural. Though I think it's less ambitious than To Be Taught, If Fortunate, I think it basically succeeds in its ambitions, so I'm ranking it higher.

3. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

Perhaps someday they'll assign us side by side, in some village far upthread, deep cover, each watching each, and we can make tea together, trade books, report home sanitized accounts of each other's doings. I think I'd still write letters, even then.

I enjoyed this a lot. That it's down in third is a testament to the strength of the top half of the finalist list in novella this year. Though I enjoyed its cleverness and its prose, it's one of those love stories where you understand it more intellectually than emotionally. Similar to Chiang, I guess, but I think they wanted it to achieve an emotional effect more than he probably did. I'd happily see it win, but the Chiang feels like it more fully carried out its ambitions than this did. This sounds like damning with faint praise, but the top three were all quite good, so placement is pretty arbitrary.

2. "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang

"You know there's some timeline where I shoot you right now."
     "Yeah, but I don't think this is the one."

This is a hard sf story about a world with prisms, devices that let people communicate across diverging timelines-- but the premise here is that the timelines only diverge once the devices are activated, so the people you can communicate are often all too similar to yourself. Chiang does a good job simultaneously exploring the ways such a device would be used, and using them to highlight a human dilemma about free will, one that I actually think about a lot. (Is it even possible for someone to choose to do something differently than they do?) I really enjoyed it, and it's probably my preferred form of sf, so I struggled to rank it against The Deep, which as a vague fantasy is less the kind of thing that I read. But The Deep gave me an emotional little twinge whereas "Anxiety Is"'s emotional work ultimately felt more abstract. I'd happily see either win, but I know that, based on "Story of Your Life," Chiang is capable of hitting the emotional and the scientific better than he did here.

1. The Deep by Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes

[S]he didn't mind the unknowing because it came with such calm, such a freedom from the pain.

This is a novella based on a Clipping. song that was a finalist for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) in 2018. The song was (to quote myself) "about an underwater race made up of the children of pregnant African women thrown off slave ships." I expected the novella to be about the original founding of the underwater species; to my surprise, it was about one of their descendants, an historian who carries her civilization's traumatic memories so everyone else can be spared them. (Some of the founding is filled in in flashback, but it's not the focus.) I expected the novella to be a mediocre Tor.comesque thing; to my surprise, it was a really powerful meditation on the pain of history versus the bliss of ignorance, and the need to reach out and embrace the unfamiliar. I will have to look out for more by Rivers Solomon.

Overall Thoughts

Every year that I've voted in the Hugos thus far, I've found Best Short Story a weak category, but this is the first year I've been moved to rank No Award above any (non-Puppy) finalist, much less all of them. It's clear that my tastes and those of the Hugo nominators don't really align in this area. Partially, I think, the problem is the lack of science fiction. Every finalist this year is fantasy, and not the kind of fantasy that interests me. When I read Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year last year, I found a number of stories I thought would have been better finalists than what was on the ballot. Clarke, of course, only picks sf, and he also reads the print magazines, which Hugo nominators entirely ignored this year, so there are some systemic biases that result in a weak (to me) category.

Best Novelette was basically fine this year, but this was Best Novella's best showing in a while, I think; I'd gladly see any of my top three win. Probably not a coincidence that there are only two Tor.com novellas on the ballot this year. I suppose the Wayward Children novellas will continue until moral improves. (Though the only novella I nominated myself was from Tor.com, Una McCormack's The Undefeated.) Saga Press (who published both The Deep and This Is How You Lose) seems to be doing good work.

I find it hard to guess what will win in most of these categories. I have no guess at all for Best Short Story, where nothing sticks out to me as being to the taste of the Hugo electorate. For Best Novelette, I have a slight suspicion it will be Ted Chiang, but who knows, it could be another win for N. K. Jemisin. I feel most confident in Best Novella, where I feel certain it will be either Ted Chiang or This Is How You Lose.

Hugos 2018: The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin

Trade paperback, 416 pages
Published 2017
Acquired October 2017
Read November 2017

The Broken Earth, Book Three: The Stone Sky
by N. K. Jemisin

I found the conclusion to the Broken Earth trilogy way less satisfying than the two books that preceded it. Maybe I was in the wrong mood, but it just felt like the first two-thirds or so was a lot of wandering around without clear narrative purpose. Neither Essun nor Nassun's stories were as captivating as they were in the previous volume; how much of Essun trying to integrate into a community and not doing too well at it do we have to see? I don't think a point was made in this part that wasn't better made in a previous part. Plus the interstitial parts about the history of the world I found disruptive, with a lot of what we might call thaumababble: I found it difficult to follow or care about the minutiae of how orogeny worked, especially once a second system of magic was introduced. The first two books were very strong, and the conclusion to this one was decent, but I was nowhere near as into it as I was its predecessors.

My Hugo Awards 2017 Votes: Short Fiction Categories

My votes for the 2017 Hugo Awards were due last week; over the next few weeks, I'll be going over what I voted in all the various categories (at least, those ones where I did vote). First up is the various short fiction categories. In each category, I'll start with the story I placed the lowest and move up to the highest. I'll provide links when the stories are freely and legally available on-line.

Best Short Story

7. "An Unimaginable Light" by John C. Wright

“To utter certain types of truth is a micro-aggression. It creates a hostile environment we humans find uncomfortable.”

I thought I had a bead on what this story was at first: using Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to explore how difficult the concept of "harm" actual is to parse in human reactions, even if (as the above quotation shows) it's being written by someone who cares more about agenda than storytelling, and who doesn't try to understand the viewpoints of his opponents. But then in the last few pages it piled on some bizarre, meaningless, incomprehensible twist, and I was like, "Nope, not even misguidedly interesting, just poorly written."

6. "Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies" by Brooke Bolander

This is my story, not his. It belongs to me and is mine alone. I will sing it from the last withered tree on the last star–blasted planet when entropy has wound down all the worlds and all the wheres, and nothing is left but faded candy wrappers.

This isn't really a story, it's a revenge fantasy: a man kills a woman, but it turns out the woman is some kind of immortal angelic cosmic force, and so she destroys him utterly. I find it weird that the beginning of the story sets itself as rectifying some kind of literary injustice, where heroes and  villains (usually male) get names everyone knows, and victims (usually women) get loving descriptions of their suffering and no names or stories anyone remembers, because our narrator has no name and no story, and is clearly just a fantasy, leaving real victims as anonymous as ever. The story doesn't really fulfill its own mandate.

5. No Award

One criterion I've been using for No Award is considering even if I don't like a thing, to what extent does it make sense to me that someone else would like a thing? So, for example, I didn't get much out of "A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers," but I can see how someone else would, so it goes above No Award. But the two worst short stories on the ballot were both things I feel like I would be hard-pressed to understand why someone else likes it. (Even though, intellectually, I know they must, or they wouldn't be on the ballot.) 

4. "A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers" by Alyssa Wong

In my grief, I’d nearly forgotten about my sister, and in my absence, my apocalypse had shifted course without me.

The second of the two finalists by Alyssa Wong I read (see "You'll Surely Drown Here If You Stay" below, under Best Novelette), this didn't do much for me, either. A pair of sisters have the power to manipulate the weather and the timelines; when one (who is trans) dies, the other works to change things to save her, but can never get it to work out. Better than the other Wong story, but mostly unmoving. Nice moments here and there in detailing the relationships, and once again, good imagery but it didn't touch me, and the affect of this was clearly supposed to be emotional.

3. "The City Born Great" by N. K. Jemisin

And just to add insult to injury? I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God. Port Authority makes it honorary New York, motherfucker; you just got Jerseyed.

I didn't love this story itself, which was a little too straightforward plotwise, but I loved the concepts it played with. The narrator discovers he's going to be the living embodiment of a city: when cities reach a certain level of complexity, they come to life. The narrator compares it to increasing mass-- a weight on the world, like how a black hole works-- but it made me think of ant colonies and brain cells and flocks of birds and other systems where irreducible complexity emerges from individually simple interactions. The narrator's enemy at one point is a monster made of policemen, which was a potent metaphor for how we try to impose order on complexity we don't like, so that control becomes easier, all James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State-style. (The way the police monster is dispatched is thus particularly apt.) I wish I liked this story more, because I loved Jemisin's concepts.

2. "That Game We Played During the War" by Carrie Vaughn

“The point,” Valk said [...], “is to fight little wars without hurting anyone.”

And there was silence then, because yes, they all had stories.

At first I found it difficult to decide between this and the next story, because they were both pretty good executions of potentially fascinating premises, both of which I just wanted something a little bit more. This story is set after the conclusion of a war between two nations, one where everyone is telepathic and one where everyone is not. A man and a woman who were on opposite sides of the war but forged a friendship in two different prisons (each had a turn as prisoner and as warder) resume a chess game-- a chess game complicated by the fact that the one always know what the other is planning. There are a lot of neat moments, particularly as the chess game draws the attention of those in the hospital where the telepath is recuperating. The last couple scenes is where it really sings.

1. "Seasons of Glass and Iron" by Amal El-Mohtar

“Falling’s easy—it's keeping still that’s hard.”

Two women, both seeming riffs on fairy tale protagonists, meet. One is cursed to keep moving, wearing out magic iron boots to rid her abusive husband of a curse. The other is cursed to immobility, staying on top of a glass mountain because she's so attractive men can't control themselves around her, awaiting the suitor who climbs to the top and wins her hand. The women are both damaged and private, and slowly open up to each other across the course of the story. A little inevitable in what happens (you can probably guess it just from my description), but I like how it shows we can internalize that which oppresses us, and it's beautifully written. At first I though it and "The Game We Played" were pretty much on par, but this story lingered with me in a way the others did not, so the more time I passed, the more certain I was of its placing.

Best Novelette

7. Alien Stripper Boned from Behind by the T-Rex by Stix Hiscock

     A last shriek of pleasure, and my glowing nipples suddenly began to discharge, shooting hot beams of light out from between my fingers and tongue. Blast after blast of energy went bouncing around the room, the crowd roaring even as they scrambled to dodge my sizzling nipple ejaculations.

This is neither a good piece of erotica, nor a good piece of parody erotica (there are times it seems to want to be funny, such as the above, but it doesn't land often enough to be interesting), nor even so bad that it becomes amusing. I do know why this novelette was nominated, but I don't know why it exists to begin with.

6. No Award

I feel pretty comfortable saying that if Alien Stripper won a Hugo, I'd be embarrassed as a voter, which seems like a good criterion for which to rank something below No Award.

5. The Jewel and Her Lapidary by Fran Wilde

     The kingdom is your setting. You are its light.

I could never really figure out how the magic system in this story worked, which is based around magical gems, royalty called Jewels, and faithful servants called lapidaries. The way the magic flowed between these two types of people and the gems remained obscure, which meant the whole story remained obscure, as it meant I could never fully comprehend the relationship of the two principal characters.

4. "You'll Surely Drown Here If You Stay" by Alyssa Wong

This town is just a field of bodies to use as he pleases.

An okay fantasy story about a boy with the power to reanimate dead objects, set in an alternate version of the Old West. The description of the desert is evocative, as is the occasional encounter with the living dead, but this story never really came to life for me (heh heh) for reasons I can't really pin my fingers on. Things seemed to tie up a little too neatly at the end, in ways I found a little too cliché. The emotional relationships the story hinges on never really mattered.

3. "The Art of Space Travel" by Nina Allan

Sometimes I believe it’s the airport itself, and Sipson, both the kind of non-places that keep you addicted to transience, the restless half-life of the perpetual traveller who never goes anywhere.

The idea of settling for anything too concrete begins to seem like death, so you settle for nothing.

An employee at the hotel where the crew of the second manned Mars mission is staying before they head off into space has the opportunity to reflect on her life, especially her relationship with her mother (who is having health problems) and her father (who she never knew). The sfnal elements are pretty minor: the Mars mission is just a backdrop for her story, and I didn't find a very compelling thematic or metaphorical resonance either. Okay for what it is, but it's not trying to do very much within the genre of science fiction.

2. "Touring with the Alien" by Carolyn Ives Gilman

“Your unconscious . . . it’s unreliable. You can’t control it. It can lead you wrong.”

“That’s absurd,” he said. “It’s not some outside entity; it’s you. It’s your conscious mind that’s the slave master, always worrying about control. Your unconscious only wants to preserve you.”

A women with a commercial driver's license and security clearance ends up taking an unusual cargo from Washington, D.C. to points west: an alien visitor to Earth and its human interpreter. The aliens in question lack conscious thought but are still immensely intelligent. It's a little slow to start, but it's in the complications of consciousness that the story really comes to life: Gilman has constructed genuinely alien aliens here, but ones that feel entirely plausible at the same time, and she links them adroitly into the dilemmas that all us humans face, while resisting easy answers. Cool concepts, competently executed.

1. "The Tomato Thief" by Ursula Vernon

(Grandma Harken thought of herself as an old lady, because she was one. That she was tougher than tree roots and barbed wire did not matter. You did not steal an old lady's tomatoes. It was rude, and also, she would destroy you.)

This was the very last thing I read for the Hugos, and as I hadn't enjoyed the last few prose works before it ("An Unimaginable Light," Penric and the Shaman, Death's End, Ninefox Gambit), I was beginning to worry I'd burnt out on Hugo reading. Well it wasn't me, it was them, because I loved this. An old lady in a magical version of the American West aims to catch whoever is stealing her prize tomatoes, and ends up discovering more than she expects. A tale with a strong sense of both voice and place, meticulously told down to the smallest detail, both real and imagined. Far and away the best of the novelettes.

Best Novella

6. Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold

“He is very patient. Well, he would have to be, wouldn’t he, to work his art in a medium that takes more than a man's lifetime to complete.”

I never got into this story. Partially, there's a lot of backstory to absorb at the beginning, as this is the second is a series, and Bujold isn't very new reader friendly; it took a lot of (confusing) time for me to work out the relationship between Penric and his demon. Partially, the mechanics of magic in this world are very complicated, which might be useful if you're writing a series, but I felt like I was drowning in technical detail sometimes. Unfortunately, the plot is really based in such magical minutiae more than anything else. And partially, the characters just didn't ever grab me. I'm not sure why I am supposed to care about Penric based on this story in itself. He didn't really face any interesting challenges or do anything particularly noteworthy.

5. A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

     Aqib felt now as he had all throughout childhood: that everyone was moving deftly within norms long established, confidently speaking in terms already defined, but that no one had remembered to clue in poor little Aqib.

This started very strongly, with a romance between two men, one a minor royal from a homophobic vaguely Arabic culture, the other a legionnaire in a somewhat more open vaguely Roman visiting society. Wilson's writing is evocative, both culturally and characterfully, and the romance is very sweet, very convincing, and very real. After the first third, though, I started to lose the thread of it all and got confused as it became very jumpy. I think I worked it all out by the end, but my emotional investment had been damaged too much to recover. It's possible this is my fault, not the story's (I was a little distracted while reading parts of it), but that's the reaction I had and it's too late to change it.

4. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaVelle

What was indifference compared to malice?

Like the next story on this list, The Ballad of Black Tom is a rewriting of an H. P. Lovecraft story from the perspective of an Other, in this case a black man from Harlem. I guess there's a bit of a Moment right now? I enjoyed the first half of the story a lot, despite that a number of the details remained frustratingly obscure (and I don't think they were meant to, though maybe I wasn't reading carefully enough, as I did read most of it on a plane). Tommy himself, the world he comes from, and the world he enters into are all sketched out very compellingly, and I liked the contrast of Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the horror of being black in a racist world. The second half of the book I found less interesting, though the climax was pretty strong. Perhaps, like Dream-Quest, if I'd read Lovecraft's original I'd've been more into it, but I still enjoyed it.

3. The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson

     “Our world has no sweep, no scale,” Carter said. “No dark poetry. We can't get to the stars, and even the moon is hundreds of thousands of miles away. There is no meaning to any of it.”
     “Do stars have to mean anything?”

In an alternate world, a world that is a dream of our world, a middle-aged professor at a women's college goes on a quest to find a runaway student, one who's run off with a man with the intention of getting into our world, and whose flight endangers the stability of the college. There are some bits of this that are quite good, as Johnson is an evocative writer, and I really liked how the end came together, but even for a journey narrative, there's a big chunk of the middle that is very free of incident. I may have gotten more out of it if I'd read the Lovecraft which it is reworking, but I still enjoyed it and got a lot out of it, just not enough to rank it highest.

2. Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

     “Going back” had two distinct meanings at the school, depending on how it was said. [...] The duality of the phrase was like the duality of the doors: they changed lives, and they destroyed them, all with the same, simple invitation. Come through, and see.

If this book had been as good as its premise, it would have been amazing; it might have got the top spot. The book is about a boarding school for kids who have traveled to fantasy worlds through portals (think Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy in Oz, the Pevensies in Narnia) and returned home and are having trouble adjusting. The first third of the novel is just a delight, as Nancy (our protagonist) settles into the school and meets the other characters, and we as readers learn how this milieu work. There are a lot of nice touches, such as what happens when fairies abduct a girl to fairly land, but that "girl" turns out to be a trans boy assigned female at birth. But one-third of the way through, the plot turns up, and it's a murder mystery, and the book turns a bit wobbly: some details didn't quite line up, some information is belabored, and I didn't buy the actions of the headmaster. (It felt like the book needed another edit.) It was still enjoyable, and I zipped through it because I couldn't put it down, but I wanted the whole book to be as good as the bit before the plot began. A somewhat mundane story with a compelling premise. I'd read more books with this premise, though (and they are coming).

1. This Census-Taker by China Miéville

“This”–he tapped the broad gauge tube–“a shotgun. It spreads possibilities.”

This inscrutable novella is about the son of a man who makes magic keys, and whose father may have killed his mother, but no one knows for sure-- not the authorities, who only have his word for it, and not the narrator, who thought he may have seen his father dying or someone else entirely. The novella chronicles the time before and after the murder, with occasional glimpses of the present day, where the narrator is writing the whole incident up in the second of three books he owns. The first is facts, which everyone can read but few will. The second is stories, written for readers even though they might not come. The third is secrets, which only he is supposed to read but others might. As maybe you can tell from what I've said so far, the book is partially about truths and how we capture them-- the kid is fascinated by creatures in bottles as a kid, because it makes him imagine an entirely contained world, and of course the census-taker who comes to the village is all about the capturing of (a form of) truth. Anyway, there are significant aspects of this book I did not comprehend, and I did not expect it to end where it did, but I greatly enjoyed reading it.

Overall Thoughts

I was probably more frustrated with Short Story and Novelette than any other Hugo categories (of those I voted in; I skipped many). There was one great short story, and everything else ranged from pretty good to No Award-- contrast that with there being four great novels, or three great graphic stories. There was one great novelette, too, but two I really bounced off of (plus the one I No Awarded). I don't know what the deal here is exactly. Just that people's tastes differ from mine? I note that almost all the finalists come from free-to-read web magazines (or "emags" as the L.A. Times crossword calls them), which makes me feel like availability might give these otherwise mediocre stories boosts.

On the other hand, the novellas were a fascinating bunch. Though I had some kind of reservation about each one, I felt #1-3 were all really good stories, and really different from each other, and all very inventive. And #4-5 both had some great writing, too. I may not like everything it produces, but the Tor.com novellas program (responsible for Jewel and Her Lapidary, Taste of Honey, Ballad of Black Tom, Dream-Quest, and Every Heart) is clearly very strong. And most of them are just $2.99 on Kindle!

I have no sense what will win any of these categories, except I feel pretty confident in "Tomato Thief." And if push came to shove, I'd guess short story will be either "Seasons of Glass" or "The Game We Played." But all I can tell you about novella is that it won't be This Census-Taker.

Hugos 2017: The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin

Trade paperback, 410 pages
Published 2016
Acquired and read May 2017

The Broken Earth, Book Two: The Obelisk Gate
by N. K. Jemisin

While the first book of The Broken Earth trilogy, The Fifth Season, followed three parallel stories that turned out to be linked, The Obelisk Gate follows two. At first it seems like there's going to be three, but the third narrative only has two chapters. One plotline follows the protagonist of the first volume, Essun, while the other shows us what her daughter, Nassun, has been doing during the events of both The Fifth Season and this book. (The stories move at different rates, but each ends at the same time, I think.) Just as the multiple narratives of The Fifth Season recontextualized each other, Nassun's story provides extra detail on Essun as a mother, deepening her character in ways not exactly sympathetic, but always comprehensible.

I enjoyed this both more and less than The Fifth Season. The Fifth Season was marginally unsatisfying because its main narrative didn't really come to any kind of climax, it felt like it just stopped. The Obelisk Gate definitely has a climax, that delivers on the levels of emotion, plot, character, and backstory-- it's very satisfying. On the other hand, up until that climax, Essun's plotline felt very aimless, as she slowly integrated into her newly adopted comm, but didn't seem to have much of a driving motivation, and her old mentor very slowly doled out exposition. The climax, though, made a lot of this work for me retrospectively. I did very much enjoy Nassun's plotline, though, even if it was clearly subordinate to Essun's (the three plots in The Fifth Season felt more evenly balanced).

Still, on the whole this is an enjoyable read. Jemisin writes great prose, depicts nuanced characters, deals with complicated issues of power and violence, and continues to expand an interesting world. I'm glad Hugo voting led me to The Broken Earth, and I look forward to reading The Stone Sky later this year to see how it all comes to an end.

Next Week: Thoughts from Ursula K. Le Guin on matters of writing and life in Words Are My Matter!

Hugos 2017 [Prelude]: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin

Quick cross-link: my review of the Doctor Who spin-off The New Counter Measures: Series One was posted to USF today.

Trade paperback, 498 pages
Published 2015
Acquired and read May 2017

The Broken Earth, Book One: The Fifth Season
by N. K. Jemisin

Like last week's Saga, Book One, I'm reading this not because it's nominated for the 2017 Hugos (in fact, it won the 2016 Hugo for Best Novel), but because a follow-up volume in the same series is nominated. A lot of this year's Hugo nominees are later volumes in series, which leaves me with a lot to read!

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn coins a corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently immersive fantasy is indistinguishable from science fiction" (62). The Broken Earth is definitely an embodiment of that idea. Taking place on a world with a dangerously active geology (volcanic eruptions potent enough to cause a "fifth season," i.e., a winter of more than six months, occur every couple centuries, meaning no civilization lasts very long) and where orogenes (think earthbenders from Avatar) are both feared and needed for their power to manipulate Father Earth, Jemisin takes these seemingly fantastic premises and follows them through to their logical conclusions. The worldbuilding is the real strength of this novel-- from language to culture, the Stillness (the ironic name of the continent) feels like a real place, with a politics and history and racial dynamics all its own. There's so much packed in here, so many cool but also dark ideas about how orogenes would be perceived, and how society would evolve to protect itself from the threat of fifth seasons.

It's beautifully told, too, an elevated style that sometimes gets oddly casual, but Jemisin pulls it off. The book follows three parallel narratives, the journeys of three different orogenes, each reacting to titanic events. Jemisin's handling of language is her handling of character, and also her handling of cruelty: in many ways, the apocalyptic world of The Fifth Season is just our own, in all the worse ways. Sometimes, though I got a little lost in the style, having to reread significant passages for comprehension a little too much, and I was a little frustrated that The Fifth Season doesn't stand alone in any sense. The Broken Earth is definitely not multiple stories in a series, but one big story; the end of the book doesn't resolve anything, but introduces more complications. Still, I am excited to read book two, The Obelisk Gate, in a few weeks, and the end portends much.

Next Week: The most rational of futures discovers a miracle in Too Like the Lightning!