How Often Do I Agree with the Hugo Electorate?

In my recent post comparing my final ballot to the winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards, I noted that my first place choice and the actual final winner were the same in four of the nine categories in which I vote. I then speculated, "I think this is a record."

But was it a record? Good question! I trawled backward through my old posts to see how often the broader Hugo electorate had made the right choice (i.e., my choice).

Here's how many categories my first-place choice and the voters' has coincided in each year:

• 2017: 4 (Novelette / Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Long)
• 2018: 1 (Short Story)
• 2019: 1 (Dramatic Long)
• 2020: 1 (Novel)
• 2021: 4 (Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Short / Lodestar)
• 2022: 1 (Lodestar)
• 2023: 4 (Novel / Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Long)

Far from being a record, four matches is my second most common result! I had not realized that my distribution was so sharply bimodal; either I agree in one category or four. Never zero, two, or three!

I then wondered how I did more broadly. To figure this out, I looked at whatever I ranked first and then averaged where it ranked in the final results. That is to say, if my picks for first came in fifth, sixth, first, first, sixth, first, first, and second, that would average out to 2.9. A lower score is better; thus on this graph, I've flipped things around.

You'll see that 2023 actually is a record at 2.3; I've never been so consistently in agreement with the other voters. My low point was 2019; I don't know what was wrong with everyone else. 

I am not sure what we can infer from this: it may be that in years where I match up well, there's a weak finalist pool and thus only one obvious winner for me and everyone else.

Having compiled this data, it was then easy to also figure out what was the category where my tastes are most often aligned with the broader electorate's:

I didn't find anything too surprising here. Dramatic Long usually has one very good choice and a bunch of Marvel movies, so I am not surprised to see I usually line up well here. I have picked the eventual first-place winner three out of seven times.

Two categories do much worse on a regular basis. I have never picked a first-place winner in Graphic Story; indeed, one time my first-place pick finished in second, and all other times fourth or sixth. But it is a category usually made up of a bad set of finalists (in my opinion), and one where my tastes clearly do not line up with others' at all. Novella fares even worse, with my first-place pick coming in fifth on average. I have never picked the winner, and my pick for the winner has come in sixth three times and in seventh once! (In 2019, I liked the set of finalists so little that I voted No Award in first.) Though apparently me and the voters do pretty well for Short Story,* when it comes to novella-length fiction, we just do not get on.

Which is to say, the electorate loves Tordotcom novellas and I do not.

* My first-place choice has come in first four out of seven times, actually, which is my best result for any category, but this is counterbalanced by my first-place choices coming in fourth, seventh, and fifth in the three other years.

The 2018 Hugo Awards: Results and Final Thoughts

Unlike last year, I was able to watch the livestream of the Hugo ceremony on YouTube as it went out. The ceremony was 8 to 10pm on a Sunday night... California time! Which meant I was watching it from 11pm to 1am. Thankfully I had a week to go before the semester started. I really enjoyed getting to watch the livestream. The ceremony isn't super-elaborate (at least this year, most of the finalists were read out by the MC himself), but it is really charming to watch the people come up and accept these awards. It's so obvious that most of them are but fellow fans, and receiving a Hugo is a mind-blowing experience for them... even if they've done it before! Lynne M. Thomas was bawling as she came up to receive the Hugo Award for Best Editor (Short Form), even though she had already received the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine earlier that night with composure.

Also it was pretty awesome that they got Felicia Day in to present the first-ever Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. I also really enjoyed Professor Palmer's speech about the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

I guess because of how excited some people are to win, it does make me a little grumpy when finalists not only don't show up, but don't even send a proxy to accept the award for them. Like, I guess it doesn't surprise me that Major Hollywood Directors don't show up, but the lack of turnout in some less A-list categories is grumble inducing.

So what did I think of the results? Just some brief thoughts here:

Category	What Won	Where I Ranked It	What I Ranked #1	Where It Placed
Best Related Work	No Time to Spare	2nd	Iain M. Banks	4th
This marks Ursula Le Guin's second year in a row winning Best Related Work, and it is obviously as bittersweet as reading the book itself was. I'm glad to see it win, and I'm not surprised that the very academic Iain M. Banks landed down in fourth. I also predicted Le Guin would win, so I'm smug that I'm right. I am pretty surprised that Zoë Quinn's Gamergate book, Crash Override, placed in second (she actually got more first-place votes than Le Guin, but Le Guin won thanks to the instant run-off voting), though; I just didn't see it as being that relevant to sf or that good. I did see the Worldcon 75 restaurant guide in the longlist, down in 10th. Thank God it didn't make the ballot. Do try to be serious, people.
Best Graphic Story	Monstress: The Blood	7th	Black Bolt: Hard Time	4th
This seems to be a category, judging by last year and this, where I and the typical Hugo voter are not much in accord. I placed Monstress at the bottom of my ballot, below No Award, but it won first place, and according to the vote breakdown, had a pretty strong lead throughout all rounds of voting. I did, however, predict this, claiming either Monstress or Saga (which placed second) would win, and I knew that I would be in a minority for ranking Black Bolt first.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)	Wonder Woman	5th	Get Out	2nd
Again, very much not my choice, but also not a very surprising win; I said this category would be won by Wonder Woman or The Shape of Water. The latter placed fifth, though, which perhaps shows how much I actually know! In this category, I'm more interested in the longlist; The Expanse Season Two, which I nominated, came in twelfth in nominations, so it was pretty far from landing on the ballot. Other items of interest to me on the longlist include Logan (7th),  Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (9th), The Good Place Season One (10th), The Handmaid's Tale (11th), and Spider-Man: Homecoming (15th). I am pretty baffled that Blade Runner 2049 beat all of them onto the ballot, to be honest, but it was not beloved by voters, and landed pretty decisively in last place.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)	The Good Place: "The Trolley Problem"	4th	Star Trek: Discovery: "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad"	5th
Wow, I did not see this coming! Who knew The Good Place had so many fans among Hugo voters? I knew Discovery wouldn't fare well (too divisive), but I also said, "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." It turns out I should have said "before that," because "USS Callister" ended up in second, not first. Again, the longlist is interesting. I nominated two Expanse episodes myself, one of which was in eighth, the other of which didn't land in the top fifteen, while another Expanse episode was just off the ballot in seventh. Serialized shows lead to diffused nominations when it comes to single episodes. I am still surprised "Twice Upon a Time" was the Doctor Who story to make the ballot (I nominated "Extremis," and also "Thin Ice" was in 13th). Also, a Star Trek fanfilm somehow garnered enough nominations to land in tenth. Bah.
Best Short Story	"Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™"	1st	"Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™"	1st
This is the only category this year where my first place choice accorded with that of the Hugo voters. And my last place choice did, too! But I did not see this coming. So obviously I'm happy. Rebecca Roanhorse also took away the Campbell Award for Best New Writer; as she came up to the podium, I predicted that she would do a land acknowledgement before her acceptance speech, and I was correct.
Best Novelette	"The Secret Life of Bots"	6th	"Extracurricular Activities"	4th
So, I didn't rate this story very much (I briefly considered placing it below No Award!), but I found Suzanne Palmer's acceptance speech utterly charming. She recounted a dream that she would topple off the stage and accidentally impale an sf luminary with her Hugo rocket! So after watching her speech, I was quite pleased she won, as it obviously meant so much to her. This was kind of a weak category in my opinion, so I can't really get worked up over the placement of "Extracurricular Activities."
Best Novella	All Systems Red	2nd	"And Then There Were (N-One)"	2nd
I know this outcome accords pretty well with my own choices, but it's probably the one I'm the most disappointed about, because I so wanted "(N-One)" to win! At least River of Teeth, which was the worst thing I read this year, ranked last.
Best Young Adult Book	Akata Warrior	4th	In Other Lands	3rd
This was a strong category, so I was still pleased with this outcome. My main surprise is that La Belle Sauvage placed dead last-- I thought mediocre comebacks by once great authors were the kind of things Hugo voters ate up! Even I ranked La Belle Sauvage above The Art of Starving, but the electorate as a whole did the opposite.
Best Novel	The Stone Sky	5th	New York 2140	6th
Wow, ouch, I was totally out of sync on this one too. At least Scalzi didn't win it! (He did come in second, though.) Still, the first two Broken Earth books are achievements even if I didn't much like the third, and Jemisin is now the first person to ever win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row (and one of only three people ever to win it three times). I was glad she made it to the ceremony (I don't think she did when she won the last two years), because she gave an excellent speech about what was at stake for her and for the way people argue over what the genre ought to be.

Like last year, I No Awarded Best Series because I don't believe the category should exist,* and like last year, it was won by Lois McMaster Bujold, this time for her "World of the Five Gods" series. I thought she would win again. But who will win next year now that she's out of the picture? I was surprised by how much File 770 won Best Fanzine; it had the most decisive victory in the entire competition, all this for a site where some guy aggregates news and purposefully incites fan drama. But I guess I do read it pretty regularly, and I don't most of the other finalists, so there you go, I'm part of the problem.

Each year's Hugo competition is organized by a different group, as each one is done by whoever wins the bid to host that year's Worldcon. With that in mind, I did, on a mechanical level, find voting in this year's awards much less better than last year's. Worldcon 75 had a terrific piece of voting software; Worldcon 76's was less user-friendly (I found re-ranking cumbersome). The information on the website was often slow to update, if at all; I'm not sure if the Hugos page was ever updated to reveal the location of the ceremony livestream, for example. The real difference in quality was the "voter's packet"-- Worldcon 75's packet was a thing of beauty, so well-organized and clear and transparent. Jo Van Ekeren, who assembled 75's packet, left behind a list of suggestions for subsequent packets. A huge of number of her innovations were not implemented again this year: file properties were not set properly on the e-copies, files were not named consistently, separate packets were not created for different file types, and so on. I know Nicholas Whyte, who administered the 2017 Hugos, will administer the 2019 ones as well; hopefully he brings Jo back on board, because she was sorely missed.

I again enjoyed the experience of reading to vote in the Hugos, though I wish the quality of the works read had been a bit better, like last year. That Lodestar Award, though! Fatherhood might eat up my free time, but I really hope I can do it again next year. Once you do something three times, it becomes a tradition, and then you have to keep doing it.

* Other categories I No Awarded out of principle were both Best Editor categories (because editing is too invisible to be successfully rewarded in a popular fan award), Best Semiprozine (because what the hell is a semiprozine), and both Best Artist categories (because the difference between fan and professional artists is poorly delineated). I support efforts to reform or remove these categories, though I cannot vote as I am not an attending member of WSFS. Specifically, I think Best Editor (Short Form), and Best Semiprozine should be replaced by Best Anthology/Collection and Best Magazine.

Hugos 2018: A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

Trade paperback, 415 pages
Published 2017
Acquired May 2018
Read July 2018

A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

For my Hugo reading, I automatically purchase all the Best Novel finalists in hard copy, and then pick and choose in the other categories. (Anything I don't purchase myself, I can get from the voter packet and/or the library.) A Skinful of Shadows, finalist for Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo), was an automatic buy for me, based on how much I liked Hardinge's last novel, The Lie Tree, and I sat down to read it literally knowing nothing about it, not even reading the back cover.

I guess for this reason it's hard for me to want to tell you anything about it here. Like The Lie Tree, Skinful of Shadows is a dark historical fantasy novel, with a unique magical conceit at its heart, that Hardinge explores all the permutations of. The novel twists and turns a lot, in a good way; I think a lesser author would have extracted two hundred pages out of any one of the things that makes up this novel, but Hardinge keeps things going, with lots of revelations and upheavals of the kind that make you say something aloud. Beautifully written, neat ideas, intriguing plot, and sharp character work. At the time I write this, I have two more finalists for Best Young Adult Book to read, but if either of them surpass this, I'll be quite amazed. (And happy, I guess, to read so many quality novels.)

Addendum: One of them did! And it was indeed amazing.

Hugos 2018: Summer in Orcus by Ursula Vernon

Trade paperback, 261 pages
Published 2017 (originally 2016)
Acquired May 2018
Read June 2018

Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher

Summer in Orcus was technically a finalist for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, but I'm not sure it's YA per se, for two reasons. One, the protagonist Summer is 11, which skews a bit more middle-grade, and two, T. Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon) actually wrote the story for an adult audience, namely herself and her Patreon backers.

But anyway, it's the story of Summer, who's sent into a fantasy world called Orcus by Baba Yaga and ends up going on a quest, meeting a number of distinct and vivid characters on the way. I grew up reading portal-quest fantasy, and I love the stuff. This isn't quite my flavor: Orcus feels more like a mythology and less like a place, if that makes any sense. Like, I like those fantasy lands where one draws maps of kingdoms and continents, like Oz and Middle-earth, or at least could do so, like Narnia. Orcus is more a collection of mythologies, which I don't like quite as much.

Still, that's picking too much at something that's basically a whim of preference. I really enjoyed this. Summer is a good protagonist, the daughter of a single mother who sometimes feels oppressed by her mother who ends up travelling to another world and meeting a variety of travelling companions, including a werehouse (a wolf that transforms into a house) and, my favorite, Reginald, a bird who is a bit of a fop; if you imagine him being voiced by Hugh Laurie in his Wooster mode, it works perfectly.

The book is filled with a lot of charm, a lot of clever concepts, some metafiction, and a lot of jokes. I really liked how things resolved. Summer, like a lot of child portal-quest protagonists, succeeds through being nice and attentive (I'm thinking of Baum's characters here), and I enjoyed her attempts to decode what her role in events was, and respond to the needs of those around her without being duped. Like I said, I liked Reginald, and I also enjoyed the entire visit to his family's estate and the associated civilization. Kingfisher does some nice extrapolation: Baba Yaga's walking house becomes the basis for a land filled with walking houses, where houses you have to build yourself are inferior. The villains are well-drawn and interesting and have relatable motives. Summer herself has read Narnia, and those books are occasionally invoked as she tries to work out what's going on, and often the narrator will deliberately subvert your expectations of the genre. And as things like "werehouse" indicate, there's a good line in puns (one of the things the narrator makes fun of, actually), but there's also some gentle character humor in the way the members of Summer's weird little group interacts.

The end promises a sequel; I would definitely read it if it was written, and I think the deepening of the land by coming back years later would even rectify my primary objection.

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: Book Categories

This final post covers my votes in the three of the Hugo categories for book-length works: novels, YA fiction, and nonfiction. If I did a full review of a work, I'll link to that here. 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.

Best Novel 

7. The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

Based on what I've read of both authors, I don't think even the best John Scalzi novel could surpass the worst N. K. Jemisin novel. Scalzi's character work, world building, and prose style are all basically nonexistent-- whereas Jemisin's are astounding. So even though I didn't like The Stone Sky a whole lot, I'm quite comfortable placing The Collapsing Empire below it, as it's clearly not the best John Scalzi novel.

6. No Award

If The Stone Sky won, I would chalk it up to differing tastes and move on, even if I don't particularly think it should win. But if John Scalzi wins another Hugo, and wins it for this, I will be deeply embarrassed at the taste of the Hugo voters, so below No Award it is.

5. The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin

I was nowhere near as into this as I was the first book of the Broken Earth trilogy; it did not have The Fifth Season's emotional power. And I still really liked The Obelisk Gate. But I found this installment more tedious than anything else, alas, with too much focus on aspects of the story that the book wasn't able to make me care for. I suspect Jemisin will win again, but if so, it will be in spite of my vote.

4. Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

This book has an excellent elevator pitch-- locked-room murder mystery with clones in space!-- and whenever I describe it to someone, they get pretty excited. The actual book, though, isn't as good as its premise. The Stone Sky might be a better book, to be honest, but I am legitimately worried that Jemisin will be the first person to score three Hugo Awards for Best Novel in a row for a book I don't think really deserves it, so I'm ranking Six Wakes higher. Is that unnecessarily negative reasoning?

3. Provenance by Ann Leckie

I thought this book was basically fine. Ancillary Justice was a thrill; Leckie's first novel outside the Ancillary trilogy isn't bad, but isn't anything special either. It's probably pretty comparable to Six Wakes in that it starts strong, but doesn't maintain that, but it holds together to a greater degree than Six Wakes, and I was pretty uninterested in Six Wakes by the time it wound down, but this maintained my interest.

2. Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee

I was surprised how much I ended up enjoying Raven Stratagem, given I ranked the book to which it is a sequel sixth on my 2017 Hugo ballot! But whether the book was better or I just adapted to the wacky math-based space opera antics of the Machineries of Empire series, I ended up enjoying this a lot. If the ending had felt less anticlimatic, I'd've ranked it above New York 2140, but I still would be happy to see this win.

1. New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

This isn't a great novel, I don't think, but I did really enjoy it, and though near-future isn't my usual kind of sf, the book does do the kind of things I like my sf to do, which is to say it's full of neat ideas about "another world" while revealing truths about the world we live in. It's clearly the best of the finalists this year.

Best Related Work

6. Crash Override: How GamerGate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight against Online Hate by Zoë Quinn

The first half of this book is a memoir: Zoë Quinn was the woman at the heart of the so-called Gamergate controversy, who for the crime of cheating on her boyfriend was subjected to an Internet harassment campaign supposedly concerned with ethics in games journalism. There's some background on Quinn, on her relationship, on the actual incident, and on the follow-up-- it basically destroyed her life and relationships for years. At times, it's surprisingly light on detail, because Quinn has little desire to relive it, and because she doesn't want to feed the trolls. The second half is a more general discussion of Internet harassment and her efforts to combat it; I had known the outline of Gamergate itself, but I did not know about Crash Override, Quinn's anti-harassment support organization. The book is mildly interesting, but not great. Quinn's treatment of events in which she herself was involved lacks emotional weight, and there are times I found the insights banal. The real deciding factor in my ranking, though, is that it's just not that relevant to science fiction and fantasy, and so ends up at the bottom of by ballot. (I think this might be inconsistent with the position I adopt toward No Time to Spare below, but oh well.)

5. Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal

This book is a collection of essays about Octavia Butler, mostly in the form of letters to her. It's okay. I'm sure the letters were all deeply, individually meaningful to write, but reading a number of them becomes a bit samey, as not many of them are imbued with lots of specifics. I also have a suspicion that the number of them that revolve so much around the election of President Trump will age badly. Or maybe that's more of a hope, though it does indicate to me that I need to read Butler's Parables books. Anyway, I did enjoy several of the essays (I had a slight bias toward the academic ones, perhaps unsurprisingly), but on the whole I didn't find this book essential, and don't feel I learned a whole lot about Butler from it.

4. A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison: An Exploration with Extensive Interviews by Nat Segaloff

Two coincidences influenced my reading of this book. The first is that Harlan Ellison died about three weeks before I began reading it, making me aware of how little I'd read of his work (the only complete book being the I, Robot screenplay). The second is that a week before I began it, I was perusing the archives of the Science Fiction Research Association Newsletter, where I found this comment by Bob Collins in a 1988 issue: "In the case of especially prickly authors like Harlan, the price of an 'authorized' critical biography may well be the total compromise of the critic's integrity." Now, A Lit Fuse specifically disavows being critical or a biography; it's more like an autobiography, as Segaloff primarily strings together a number of interviews he's done with Ellison into a narrative of sorts, and doesn't really do a lot to render other perspectives on Ellison, or have any kind of objective stance. Segaloff is clearly a big admirer of Ellison, and his faults are usually rendered in an admiring way, too. Which is fine, I guess, but this book as a result, this is definitely more a book for the Ellison devotee than the general sf fan. All that said (and there's many more quibbles one could make; I thought the depiction of the incident where Ellison allegedly grabbed Connie Willis's breast was particularly poor), even though I had more interest in the Octavia Butler book going in than this book, I was still pretty much entertained throughout. Ellison knows how to tell a story, and even if many of them aren't true, or put him in an inaccurately flattering light, I enjoyed reading the book. It's not a great book, and possibly not even a good one, but it is interesting enough.

3. Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy by Liz Bourke

This volume collects short pieces by Liz Bourke, (mostly) book reviews that were (mostly) previously published on-line, (mostly) at Tor.com. They're very short, usually 2-3 pages long. Bourke is an okay reviewer. Several were really interesting and made me want to read the books in question, and I scribbled down some titles on my "To buy" list. Sometimes, though, I finished the review without a strong sense of why she had liked or disliked it. I think there were only two reviews of books that I had read already: Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice (2013) and Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant (2015). The latter of these was one of my favorite pieces in the book; a strongly worded negative review that made me reevaluate my take on the book, even though I really liked it myself.* (It's also the only book by a male author she reviews.) On the other hand, there's a long section where Bourke mostly reviews epic fantasy and/or sword-and-sorcery, genres that hold little appeal for me. It's clearly in the middle tier of this year's related works, but I struggled to rank it versus A Lit Fuse. There are things I definitely found more enjoyable about Lit Fuse, but I ended up deciding that Lit Fuse is not the best Ellison biography that could be written, but this is inherently the best collection of Bourke's reviews that could exist, so it succeeds at what it aims to do more.

2. No Time to Spare by Ursula K. Le Guin

In a sense, this book's connection to science fiction is tenuous-- Le Guin talks about it very little-- but I enjoyed almost every minute of it, and we'll never see Le Guin's like again. So even if this book isn't about sf, sf brought me to Le Guin, and that's a related enough "Related Work" for me.

1. Iain M. Banks by Paul Kincaid

Related works can be trickier to compare to each other than works in, say, the prose fiction categories; what No Time to Spare and Iain M. Banks are trying to do is very different. This book is an academic monograph covering the entire sf corpus of Iain Banks-- a man whose work I have read distressingly little of (just The Bridge, The Wasp Factory, and The State of the Art). Despite that, I could tell that this was a strong piece of literary criticism, providing a couple threads that pull you across Banks's work; Kincaid emphasizes the Culture as a society, Banks's experiments with form, and Banks's anti-great man reworking of the space opera genre, among other things. It made me even more distressed at how little Banks I have read. I might have enjoyed No Time to Spare more, but I feel like this is more what this category should be about, and the kind of thing I would like to encourage. Though maybe I'm just biased as a monograph-writing academic myself. (Also, there was a citation of Bill Hardesty, an undergraduate professor of mine partially responsible for my graduate school career, so that was nice.)

Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo)

6. The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller

This isn't a bad book (none of these are bad books), it's just very much not my thing. All the other YA finalists take place in magical worlds of sort, whereas this book is very much grounded in our world with a single, somewhat small, fantasy element. The main character is anorexic, but the more he starves himself, the more superpowers he gains. Most of the story is about teen love and self-image, and it's well done, but it's just not want I want out of YA fiction. (Incidentally, it is one of two books on the YA ballot to feature queer, nerdy, culturally Jewish redheads falling in love with their school's biggest jock.)

5. The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

Fundamentally, I enjoyed this book, but am not sure I would rank it highly in the stakes for an award. Which is to say, I enjoyed it as a cozy return to a familiar world, but am not sure we should be handing out awards to cozy returns to familiar worlds.

4. Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor

I struggled ranking this versus La Belle Sauvage. Both were good, even very good, but neither quite knocked my socks off. In the end, I decided to reward innovation over familiarity. Okorafor might be working with familiar tropes, but she has done interesting things by placing them in a (to me) unfamiliar world, while Pullman has really done no such thing, as charming as a return to Lyra's Oxford is.

3. Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher

This isn't a perfect book, but it is a really charming, well executed portal-quest fantasy. I can imagine reading this aloud to my child someday, and I'd happily see it win, even though I feel like the author's short prose fiction is stronger-- but maybe being as good as "The Tomato Thief" is an impossibly high standard.

2. A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge

What one wants out of award-winners is always tricky, of course. I feel like in a genre-based award, one wants some level of innovation in the genre, or at least perfection of it. Though I enjoyed all the books ranked lower than this one, I can't claim any of them did that. Like, I liked them, and they did do interesting things, but they're all familiar in their own ways. A Skinful of Shadows, on the other hand, is captivating and clever, and the kind of thing that I feel ought to be winning awards.

1. In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

Of course, one of the best YA books turns out to be one of the ones I didn't buy. In Other Lands starts out funny, with a snotty kid moving into a fantasy land. Like Summer in Orcus, the book consciously riffs on the genre's conventions, with the main character one who has read portal fantasies and thus having some ideas of what he's in for, only he doesn't want to be a "child soldier" or to solve conflicts with battle; he wants to be a diplomat. Elliot, age 13, falls in love with a beautiful elf woman from a matriarchal society, and also ends up falling in with Luke, who Elliot thinks of as a jock; Luke is the scion of a noble family in the Borderlands, and basically the coolest kid in school, the antithesis to everything Elliot stands for, but Elliot needs his help to woo Serene. All three of them are students at a training camp dedicated to defending the Borderlands from real-world incursion, where students can train as soldiers or diplomats, who are in theory of equal status, but really it's all about the soldiers. There are a lot of jokes (an early sequence where Serene can't understand why humans find topless women scandalous is a particular highlight). The book also critiques many of the conventions of the YA fantasy genre, through Elliot's determination to find another way. At one point, he also self-identifies with Eustace in Narnia, which of course won him over to me. If the book was like this all the way through, I'd probably be ranking it second or third here, on par with Summer in Orcus, which does (as I said) similar work. But it's also deeply emotional, especially in a sequence about halfway through. The book covers five years, with a different over-arching issue each year; in one, the Borderlands actually go to war! One summer, Elliot is at a party at Luke's family's house, and the emotions are painfully real depictions of what it's like to be fifteen and lonely and uncertain about your place in the world. As soon as I read that bit, I knew the book would get my top spot as long as it stuck the landing. It did. The whole novel is apparently a prequel to a short story in Kelly Link's anthology Monstrous Affections (I was telling my wife about the book and she went, "This all sounds familiar!"), so I'll have to seek that out once I've made it through all my Hugo reading.

Overall Thoughts

Last year, I wrote, "I'd be pleased if anything in my top four won in Best Novel." I could not write such a sentence this year. Indeed, if my top choice for this year, New York 2140, had been on last year's ballot, it would not have even cracked that top four! A good book, but not a great one-- as a top six of the year in science fiction and fantasy, this set left something to be desired, alas. Oh well, I suppose these things happen.

On the other hand, the very first WSFS Award for Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo), soon to be the Lodestar Award probably, is a smashing success, with two excellent books and four good ones. In Other Lands was certainly the best work I read for the Hugos in any category, and A Skinful of Shadows was probably the second book. Either one, I would give Best Novel to over what I did give it to. A diverse array of interesting reads, the only thing I didn't like is that none of them were science fiction, they were all fantasy. I like fantasy, of course, but I read very little YASF, I think because there is very little YASF, and it would have been nice to see the genre get a look in. (I nominated an sf book myself, M. T. Anderson's Landscape with Invisible Hand.)

I struggle to know what will win in any of these categories. I suspect it will be Jemisin for the threepeat in Best Novel, but only because no other finalist sticks out that much. I bet Le Guin gets it two years in a row for No Time to Spare; fandom does love Le Guin. (Iain M. Banks is too academic, I suspect.) I have no sense of what Worldcon fandom's YA preferences are, so I find that category very hard to judge. Maybe nostalgia will give it to Pullman, but Okorafor and Kingfisher are very popular in fandom as well, and perhaps the obvious quality of In Other Lands will clinch it. My only real guess here is that it won't be Art of Starving.

* That said, I do find it weird that the original blog post has been updated to acknowledge that Dickinson is not a straight cis man, but the review as reprinted in Sleeping with Monsters still calls him that.

Hugos 2018: Provenance by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 441 pages
Published 2017
Acquired April 2018
Read June 2018

Provenance by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie won the Hugo, the Nebula, and basically the everything for Ancillary Justice-- her very first novel. Provenance is her first book since the Ancillary trilogy concluded. The first was amazing, an excellent, gripping, clever novel. The second was low-energy and disappointing. I haven't yet got around to the third. Provenance takes place in the same universe as the Ancillary books, but is entirely unrelated.

In terms of quality, Provenance is somewhere between the first and second Ancillary books. It's about a young woman who comes up with a desperate plan to curry favor with her mother, breaking someone out of jail to get him to help her locate artifacts he stole. It feels a little generic YA at times: I liked Ingray, but she is brave and clever and nice and resourceful, and is on the verge of tears a little too often. (The back cover calls her "power-driven" but this is completely untrue.) The beginning is quite good, as you figure out what Ingray is up to, and she keeps being thwarted in her desires; no sooner do you figure out her plan than it is completely upset by a new revelation, one that made me actually say "uh oh" aloud.

But after that I felt the book tapered off. About halfway through, Ingray's original goal just kind of dissolves and the books feels like it's treading water for a while with incidental details before it finally gets going again... but then it's moving in a completely different direction, and a new plotline with only tenuous links to the first. This is exciting, but not as interesting as what the book's beginning promised, I think. It's never bad, but it feels generic in a way that Ancillary Justice did not, which had strong attention to cultural detail and a cool sf hook with the ancillaries. Provenance doesn't have a cool sf hook; the technologies here are all pretty bog-standard stuff you've seen in other sf. A good adventure book, but I had hoped for more from the author of Ancillary Justice.

My 2018 Hugo Awards Ballot: Short Fiction Categories

My write-ups for the Hugos continue with the ballots I submitted to Worldcon 76 San Jose in the three short fiction categories, with commentary. 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, or to longer reviews when I wrote them.

Best Short Story

6. "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" by Fran Wilde

Open the drawers of Items We've Let You Touch Because Someone Just Like You Said It Would Make Us Well. The hooks and saws, the foul tastes and that stuff that made us gag and didn't make us any better. You all wrote neat words down about each experiment anyway and that made you better.

This story is about someone going to a strange exhibit, with rooms like "A Hallway of Things People Have Swallowed," "A Radium Room," "A Room of Objects That Are Really People," "A Room of Objects That Are Very Sharp," and so on, narrated by the exhibitor. I didn't really get what the exhibit was or what the visitor to the exhibit was, or really what was going on at all. Googling reveals that I'm not alone in this standpoint, which is kind of reassuring. But it was really well written from a prose standpoint, and occasionally really insightful. But ultimately I found it unsuccessful as a story.

5. "The Martian Obelisk" by Linda Nagata

[T]he obelisk would still be standing a hundred thousand years hence and likely far longer. It would outlast all buildings on Earth. It would outlast her bloodline, and all bloodlines. It would still be standing long after the last human had gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the right whale, the dire wolf. In time, the restless Earth would swallow up all evidence of human existence, but the Martian Obelisk would remain—a last monument marking the existence of humankind[...]

This story had a great concept-- humanity is dying off, not with a massive apocalypse, but in a slow yet inevitable fading away. An architect is remotely building a monument to humanity on Mars, using the materials sent there for a colony that was never settled. It's an arresting idea, but I didn't think the story told about it quite lived up to it. The end took a swerve into optimism that felt unearned and dissonant.

4. "Fandom for Robots" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

Pyro: Okay, is it just me, or is Cyro starting to get REALLY attractive? I swear I’m not gay (is it gay if it’s a robot) but when he slung Ellison over his shoulder and used his claw to block the Sixth Saber at the same time

This story is about a sentient robot from the 1950s named Computron that spends his time in a museum exhibit finding community when he joins anime fandom after learning there's a new anime that features a robot of similar design named Cyro. He writes fanfic and soon becomes a collaborator on a fan comic for a show called Hyperdimension Warp Record. The story is pretty slight, but it was cute and funny, though sometimes too cute. I'm glad I read it, though I would never have nominated it for a Hugo myself. I waffled on how to rank it versus "Martian Obelisk," but even though I think "Martian Obelisk" is trying to do more, "Fandom for Robots" unequivocally succeeds more at what it attempts.

3. "Carnival Nine" by Caroline M. Yoachim

My spring is on the verge of breaking, I can feel it. The maker gave my son and me the same number of turns today. Ten turns. Fewer than I’ve ever had, and the most my son has ever been given.

This was an enjoyable, captivating story, about clockwork robots whose daily actions are limited by how many turns their spring can sustain in a day, and whose lives are limited by how many times their springs can be wound. Most live for a thousand days at most. The society Caroline Yoachim describes here is fascinating, and like a lot of the best sf, it has the double effect of telling us about an alien world and telling us about ourselves. The main character has a son who is essentially disabled or maybe has a terminal illness-- his spring can sustain many fewer turns than most. A sad-but-poignant tale, well told.

2. "Sun, Moon, Dust" by Ursula Vernon

“I mean, we could conquer the neighbors, but that seems a little unkind. I trade seeds with them every spring. Their goat covered mine last month, and they didn’t ask for payment because I’m just getting started here. Well, and you can’t really keep goats from doing that, but…” He trailed off. Something about the angle of Dust’s head made him think that the warrior was not interested in the details of goat husbandry.

A really simple story: a farmer inherits an enchanted sword from his grandmother. It carries the spirits of three ancient warriors within it (the Sun, Moon, and Dust of the title), who give him advice, but as the above excerpt shows, the kind of advice three ancient warriors give is not the kind of advice a farmer needs. It's beautifully told, both funny and touching, and it has something to say about how we find nobility in what we choose to do. It didn't feel quite as substantial as Ursula Vernon's novelette winning novelette was last year, but it was still excellent.

1. "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™" by Rebecca Roanhorse

“Our last name’s not Trueblood,” she complains when you tell her about your nom de rêve.

“Nobody wants to buy a Vision Quest from a Jesse Turnblatt,” you explain. “I need to sound more Indian.”

I waffled here. Sometimes the top story makes itself obvious; sometimes less so. I probably could have placed this anywhere in the top three. This second-person story is about an Indigenous man who guides tourists through VR "vision quests" or whatever other "Indian" experience they desire; as the quotation above alludes to, he's forced to perform his own self, to fake aspects of himself to be more "authentic." This had a little bit of a sting in the tale that gave it some added pizazz, and eventually caused me to elevate it above "Sun, Moon, Dust," which was good but maybe a little too... proper? I dunno.

Best Novelette

6. "The Secret Life of Bots" by Suzanne Palmer

“Your logics are intact?”

“I believe so. But if they were not, would I know? It is a conundrum,” 4340 said.

In this cute but predictable story, a maintenance robot chases down a malfunction on a warship and ends up proving its heroism. Like I said, it's cute, but like I said, it's predictable, and I do not find cute but predictable stories particularly award-worthy-- this doesn't really do anything noteworthy or unexpected with its premise, as well-executed as it is. There are a lot of cute robot stories on the ballot this year (cf. "Fandom for Robots" above and All Systems Red below) for some reason.

5. "Children of Thorns, Children of Water" by Aliette de Bodard

A child. The shape of a child. And—Thuan’s memory was unfortunately excellent on details like this—not something made of flesh and muscles and bones, but a construct of parquet wood, prickling with the thorns of brambles

If I've learned anything from reading Hugo finalists, it's that short fantasy fiction without much exposition is not for me. This reminded me a lot of last year's The Jewel and Her Lapidary, in that I never quite understood what was going on or what was at stake, and therefore it was impossible for me to get into the story. I ranked this above "Secret Life of Bots," though, because I felt like it was aiming for something interesting, even if I didn't understand what that was, although as a reading experience, I probably got more out of "Secret Life."

4. "Wind Will Rove" by Sarah Pinsker

People on Earth wrote about blue skies because they'd stood under grey ones. They wrote about night because there was such a thing as day. Songs about prison are poignant because the character knew something else beforehand and dreamed of other things ahead. Past and future are both abstractions now.

In contrast to many other stories on the ballot, this felt like very traditional sf in some ways. It's about a generation ship, which I feel like is a classic staple of the genre that people rarely write stories about anymore, perhaps because we ceased to believe in them. Pinsker's story explores the idea of cultural memory in an environment where people work really hard to remember the past, arguably at the expense of the present. Some good writing and good scenes and good details, but I felt like it was too long, in that I got the point long before the narrator did. Also I'm not convinced fiddling will really be this important in the space future.

3. "A Series of Steaks" by Vina Jae-Min Prasad

Forging beef is similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind.

I enjoyed this story, which has an intriguing premise: in a world where meat and other organic compounds can be printed, you get people devoted to "forging" meat, to making it seem like you're eating meat from a real animal when in fact it has been printed as well. It's an enjoyable story, but it didn't completely grab me; I kind of wanted more to be done with the premise, as it felt like there were sections of the story when the protagonist could have been forging basically anything. But I did really enjoy how it all came together in the end.

2. "Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time" by K. M. Szpara

“I’m old, Finley. Too old. I’ve followed human history for millennia. I’ve met believers and skeptics. Warm beds and pitchforks. Somehow, I never expected assimilation.” He relaxes onto his side, rests his head on his hand. “Never expected to go mainstream.”

This is a story of a man becoming a vampire, seduced by an elder vampire in a somewhat-in-the-future society where vampirism is a legally recognized condition. The other wrinkle here is that the man is trans, and the revitalizing effects of vampire blood begin to bring out his female sexual characteristics once more-- though some of his male ones are enhanced, too. It's well written, occasionally funny, often very dark with a streak of amorality, but that's a mark of its genre, I think. I didn't quite get the ending, otherwise I might have rated it higher.

1. "Extracurricular Activities" by Yoon Ha Lee

Since I expect your eating options will be dismal, I have sent you goose fat rendered from the great-great-great-etc.-grandgosling of your pet goose when you were a child. (She was delicious, by the way.) Let me know if you run out and I’ll send more.

This story is a prequel to Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series; Shuos Jedai goes on an undercover mission to rescue captured soldiers. Compared to the grim Machineries stories, it's surprisingly breezy and fun. It's a pretty straightforward action story, albeit with Lee's attention to cultural and character detail. (We don't learn much about the heptarchate or its calendar, except by implication, though, because Jedai spends most of his time outside of it. There's an implication the alien race has an unusual conception of reality, but not much is done with it.) Like in Raven Stratagem, flashbacks to training sessions are used to reveal much of this. I don't know how much the story would do for a novice reader, but if you've read the Machineries stories there's some real charm in seeing Jedai-- a notorious genocidal maniac by the time those stories are set-- being sent care packages by a doting mother.

Best Novella

7. River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

The best part of this novella is the two-page foreword by the author that explains that there once was an idea to import hippopotamuses into the Louisiana bayou to relieve a meat shortage and also fight an invasive aquatic plant. This book takes place in an alternate timeline where that really happened. Alas, the actual book is not particularly good. For some reason Gailey transposes the hippo plan from 1910 to 1857, and introduces a number of anachronisms into the book's setting of 1889. The book's characters never grabbed me-- I feel like the characterization came from the this-will-be-good-as-a-movie school of writing-- and the plotting was murky to me.

6. No Award

Everything else on this list was engaging and interesting on some level even if I didn't like it as much as I wanted to, but stories I consider "not particularly good" don't seem like stories that ought to be winning Hugo Awards.

5. Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor

The Binti books, as I've alluded to in my reviews of them, are a little frustrating, as I feel like I'm reading the foundation of a great story, but in actuality a mediocre story, leaving me with something of an in-between tale. I like the milieu a lot, but Home is a kind-of-cliché the-estranged-child-returns-home story crossed with a lot of exposition about Binti's secret heritage, then it ends on a cliffhanger. I hoped for more out of this book and this series based on what I'd heard.

4. Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Last year, Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway came in first for Best Novella, and I myself ranked it second. It was one of those books that puts a clever spin on a genre, about a boarding school for children who had participated in portal fantasy stories and then returned to the real world and were having trouble adjusting. Down Among the Sticks and Bones is a prequel to Every Heart, about two of the characters and their adventures. As a result, I found it considerably less interesting-- Every Heart plays with the genre, but Down Among just is the genre, just is a portal fantasy. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean the story has to do something else interesting instead, and I didn't really see that here. (Plus a lot of what happens we were already told in Every Heart.) I think portal fantasies work well as tantalizing backstories for the characters in the "Wayward Children" series, but I'm not sure I'm interested in actually seeing those backstories play out. I hope future installments of this series return to the school itself as a setting. The very self-conscious narrative voice McGuire uses eventually began to grate on me, as well. A bit too precious.

3. The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang

I struggled to rank this versus All Systems Red. The Black Tides of Heaven is certainly more ambitious, providing an overview of the lives of a pair of identical twins in a fantasy world, both with magical powers, one with the gift of prophecy. I enjoyed it... but I never felt myself drawn into the characters or their world. So while I think on concept it's probably worthier than a pretty straightforward action thriller, on execution, All Systems Red is the more successful novella.

2. All Systems Red by Martha Wells

This was fun. Written from the first-person perspective of a security cyborg, it's a quick but well-done action story with a distinct narrative voice. The security cyborg calls itself a "Murderbot," but all it really wants to do is watch crappy television and avoid human contact. So basically it's an introvert millennial with super-strength. The voice of the main character is the basic selling point of the book-- I read it while waiting with my wife for an oil change and I kept reading her little bits of it-- but the action/conspiracy story is pretty good, too, and there's a genuine sense of suspense, struggle, and consequently perseverance at the climax. Perhaps nothing groundbreaking, but on the other hand, almost exactly what you might want out of Tor.com's novella program. (Martha Wells used to write Stargate Atlantis and Star Wars tie-in novels; as a former tie-in author myself, I always find it nice when one makes good.)

1. "And Then There Were (N-One)" by Sarah Pinsker

This was the only thing on this whole page I read before it became a Hugo nominee, thanks to a recommendation on the blog Rocket Stack Rank. I loved it, from the clever title onwards. Sarah Pinsker goes to a convention-- only all the participants are versions of her from various alternate universes. And then there's a murder, so she's the victim and all the suspects! It's clever, fun, funny (satire on conventions always goes over well for me), ruminative, and kind of deep. I was surprised to realize it was a novella, because I devoured it in one sitting and then immediately began recommending it to everyone I know. I even ended up doing a guest lecture on it to a colleague's class, when she asked if I could recommend a story that was 1) sf, 2) postmodern, 3) American, and 4) short, for her literature survey course.

Overall Thoughts

Last year I wrote, "I was probably more frustrated with Short Story and Novelette than any other Hugo categories." I wouldn't call myself "frustrated" per se, but I did find the short fiction categories kind of weak. Though I liked my top three in Short Story, I don't think any of them nailed it, and I think the hit rate in Novelette was slightly worse. "And Then There Were (N-One)" did nail it in Novella, but beneath that, I felt that this batch of novellas was of lower quality than last year's.

All of the finalists bar one came from either free Internet magazines or the Tor.com novellas program. I do have a suspicion that the advantages both have in the popularly-voted Hugos lead to the omission of other quality work from the ballot. "Wind Will Rove" is the only story on this page from a traditional print publication. Like, River of Teeth cannot be among the best six novellas of the year. Though, Uncanny is clearly doing something right, with six finalists across the eighteen stories here originating from their "pages." (Of course, I'm part of the problem here; the only contemporary short sf I read are Hugo finalists, so I'm sure not nominating stuff published in Asimov's or Analog!)

Even with Nicholas Whyte's strawpoll, I find it hard to gauge what will win in any of these categories. I don't quite buy that it will be "Fandom for Robots" in Short Story-- it's too cute-- but then I don't know what it will be instead. I will tentatively guess "Wind Will Rove" for Novelette based on Nicholas's strawpoll. It will certainly be All Systems Red (it's very popular) or "N-One" (it's very good) for Novella. I don't know which of those two it will be, but by God it ought be "N-One."

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.