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 2023 Hugo Awards: Thoughts on the Final Results

Normally I make this post pretty shortly after the results are announced. But one of the things I like to do in it is go over the nominating statistics for each category, commenting just not on what won, but also what was on the longlist.

If you follow the Hugo Awards, you'll know that this year the voting statistics came out pretty shortly after the award ceremony, as normal... but the release of the nominating statistics were dragged out on and on and on.

Well, they finally came out last week, and it was a shitshow. Charlie Stross has a fairly good summary at his blog, but the short short version is that a number of works were eliminated for "eligibility" issues... with absolutely no explanation of what those eligibility issues might actually be. It is pretty hard to infer any explanation other than political censorship, though as Ada Palmer points out at her blog, this was almost certainly preemptive self-censorship rather than any kind of official ruling from the Communist Party of China.

But anyway, at last I am here to tell you what I think of the results, and how they compared to my own votes.

Category	What Won	Where I Ranked It	What I Ranked #1	Where It Placed
Best Novel	Nettle and Bone	1st	Nettle and Bone	1st
Well, thank God sanity prevailed. Legends & Lattes, to the detriment of literature everywhere, made it to second place, but it could have been worst. Famously, this is the category where R. F. Kuang's Babel clearly had enough nominations to make the ballot (it's third on the official report) and was ruled "not eligible" for no reason. A lot of people had been surprised it didn't make the ballot (it had won the Nebula after all) and it turned out there was very much a reason for this. Without this spurious action, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (which placed fifth) would not have made the ballot. Interesting to note that sixth-place finalist Nona the Ninth actually got the third most nominations (ignoring Babel).
Best Novella	Where the Drowned Girls Go	[UNRANKED]	What Moves the Dead	4th
What Moves the Dead in fourth!??! What the fungus?!!?!! A Wayward Children novella in first!??!??!! Is there something wrong with people?!!?!!??!!! I found this very dispiriting. Note that Drowned Girls actually came in seventh on nominations, only making it onto the ballot because Becky Chambers declined nomination for the second "Monk and Robot" novella. Well, I think anyway. Who knows what the hell is up with these fudged nominating statistics.
Best Novelette	"The Space-Time Painter"	[UNRANKED]	"If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You"	2nd
I know the con was held in China, but it still seems pretty improbable that the winning story was the one with no official English translation! At least "Speaking to God" came in second and "Difference Between Love and Time" last. (The Chinese novella "Colour the World" by Congyun "Mu Ming" Gu received the second-most nominations but was ruled ineligible for no given reason. I have read this and thought it was very good, and it probably would have received my second-place vote if it had been listed.)
Best Short Story	"Rabbit Test"	1st	"Rabbit Test"	1st
Not only did this story justly win first, it's also one of the most decisive victories in Hugo history, getting a majority of first-round votes with no need for instant-runoff voting.
Best Graphic Story or Comic	Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams	5th	Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow	4th
I wrote, "I am going to go out on a limb and claim this will be Tom King's year to finally win it... but he came in sixth last year, so what do I know?" Well, Tom King came in fourth, so I did not know much, and the story that won isn't one I could have predicted at all. At least it wasn't Dune: The Novel: The Film: The Graphic Novel?
Best Related Work	Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes	1st	Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes	1st
I (and everyone else) saw this one coming. I can't argue. The longlist, as usual, looks goofy but the actual final ballot was decent.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)	Everything Everywhere All at Once	1st	Everything Everywhere All at Once	1st
Four categories where the voters and I agreed? I think this is a record. Thanks to two ineligibility rulings and one declined nomination, only a couple more nominations would have put ninth-place Ms. Marvel season one on the ballot.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)	The Expanse: "Babylon's Ashes"	5th	Stranger Things: "Dear Billy"	3rd
The Expanse always wins, so not too surprising. I would have thought Stranger Things would come in second, but I guess Andor (which did) is more to the core sensibility of the Hugo voter. Last year, I wrote that I was sure a Strange New Worlds episode would make the ballot, but "A Quality of Mercy" was down in tenth, and "Spock Amok" (which I nominated) in twelfth. But surely "Those Old Scientists" will make it next year?
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book	Akata Woman	3rd	In the Serpent's Wake	4th
A weak ballot this year, so I find it hard to be fussed.

As I am often am, I enjoy the short fiction I get exposed to via the Hugos; doubt I would have come across, say, "Rabbit Test" or "Resurrection" (which I am teaching the morning this posts!) otherwise. But some of the long-form works made this year tough. Hopefully next year the Best Novel, Best Graphic Story, and Best Young Adult Book ballots are stronger.

Oh, and hopefully the concom doesn't preemptively censor the ballot.

Hugos 2023: Galaxy Awards 1: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology

Galaxy Awards 1: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology
edited by Latssep and Francesco Verso

Before the Hugo voter's packet comes out, I do what I can to track down the works myself, so that I'm not dependent on the timing of the packet to do my reading. This year, I discovered that one of the Chinese finalists for Best Short Story, Channing Ren's "Resurrection," had been published in an anthology of sf translated from Chinese into English, so I picked it up. (Or, rather, I got my local library to buy a copy for its collection, and then borrowed it.) I liked "Resurrection" enough that when I finished my Hugo reading, I turned back to the anthology to read the other stories collected in it.

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2018-22
Read: October 2023

Galaxy Awards 1 collects eight pieces of short fiction published in the last five years; it isn't clearly indicated, but I believe they were all winners of the Chinese Galaxy Award for science fiction. Each story is included in both Chinese and English, and each is preceded by an illustration and a short note about the author.

Between this book and the stories that were Hugo finalists, my impression is that Chinese sf is a bit what an Anglophone sf reader might consider old-fashioned. Lots of scientists doing science things. Lots of what I think of as "invention stories"—stories that are set at the moment of the invention of a new technology, and so don't really explore the implications of it. The occasional twist ending that annoys more than delights. Other than "Resurrection" itself, which I enjoyed for its focus on a particular person confronting a strange new technology, the first five stories in this volume did little for me.

I think in theory both Lu Hang's "Tongji Bridge" and Hai Ya's "Fongon Temple Pagoda" could have been more interesting, as both are about how technology gets incorporated into a traditional Chinese institution, but in practice the stories were just not doing much: character decides to do this, they do it, the end. (I did think Hang's more interesting and character driven than Ya's, which I quickly began reading aggressively fast. Ya was also the author of the Hugo finalist "The Space-Time Painter," which I ended up not really evaluating because of translation issues.)

I found Jiang Bo's "Final Diagnosis" annoying—it has a super obvious twist at the end, but also does not lay the groundwork for its worldbuilding to convince, and its character work with the female lead is pretty poor. (Bo was the author of the Hugo finalist "On the Razor's Edge," which I also didn't care for.) "Turing Food Court" by Wang Nuonuo was interesting and well told, but again, the story is too much dependent on a final twist, and the details of the setting's technology seemed a bit too arbitrary. Why do robots need to be developed in pairs? Why does one need to destroy the other?

So five stories in, I was worried. But then I started Ben Lu's "Upstart" (this is the same author called "Lu Ban" on the Hugo ballot; he wrote "The White Cliff") and I ended up really enjoying it. This story was about a future where, in order to reduce overpopulation, people can voluntarily agree to have their lifespans shortened in exchange for a payout. The story focuses on one such "upstart," alternating between his original decision to undergo the procedure and his attempts decades later to have it undone. Neat worldbuilding, strong characterization, and a good twist at the end. Lu does a great job of thinking through how a world would be changed by a new technology, focusing not just on that initial moment of transition, but how it would look decades later. What kind of resistance to such an initiative would spring up? And then he goes ever further than that.

From the cheeseball title, I was dreading A Que's "2039: Era of Brain-Computer Interface" (and it really is a terrible title), but I ended up liking the story a lot. A man ends up in a car accident and needs an experimental brain-computer interface to escape paralysis; the story explores how it affects his relationship with his girlfriend, and most of the story is told from her perspective. Neat use of a new technology, good worldbuilding, and again, a good twist at the end. Not as strong as the story on either side of it, but still an enjoyable read.

Finally came what was my favorite story in the book, "Colour the World" by Congyun "Mu Ming" Gu. This is set in a future world where people can have their eyes enhanced to be more perceptive, seeing more gradations of color, and also interface with computers; the story focuses on a girl, who gets the new technology later than her peers but grows up to be a programmer for it, and her relationship with her mother, who never gets it at all. Great character focus, some beautiful writing that comes through in translation, neat exploration of how technology can literally give us new ways of seeing. Highly recommended, and it would be great story if you are interesting in explorations of the cyborg.

So, with four strong stories and four weak ones, it's certainly worth it as an anthology. That said, the book was for some reason released by an Italian press, and there are some irregularities in the proofing and layout; a character's name fluctuates in "Final Diagnosis," there are formatting errors in almost every author bio, the story titles are often inconsistent in different parts of the book, "2039" has random line breaks in the middle of paragraphs. Definitely the work of a small press.

Hugos 2023: Ballots for Novel, Related Work, and Lodestar

Here is my last set of Hugo ballots: these are all the book-based categories, including the biggie, Best Novel. I don't think I nominated in any of these categories, but I'm not sure. I really should have made a note somewhere.

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Best Novel 

[UNRANKED] The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi / Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

In previous years, I have made it a rule to read every single novel finalist, no matter what I think I will think of them. In some years this has worked out well for me; despite finding the first book of the Machineries of Empire just okay, for example, I ended up really enjoying the second. However, I have read enough John Scalzi to know that I am very much not a fan of what he generally does, and everything I heard about The Kaiju Preservation Society lead me to believe it was the Scalzi I dislike at his most Scalzi. Similarly, having ranked both books one and two of the "Locked Tomb" trilogy (now four books long) in sixth place and finding both unremitting, confusing slogs, it seemed unlikely to me that I would get much out of the third book, nor that I would want to spend a week reading its five hundred pages. So, for the first time, I have foregone reading two finalists. Maybe it will turn out I have missed out on some brilliant work... but I doubt it. (If one of them wins, I will eventually get to it as part of my project to read all Hugo-winning novels I have not previously read... in 2055.)

4. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

I did not like this at all, a mediocre novel with no interesting characters and no stakes and bleh prose. See my review linked above for more.

3. No Award

I try not to be an overdramatic hater, but really, if Legends & Lattes wins, it will be one of those books that makes me question the judgement of my fellow Worldcon members so much that I will wonder why I am even participating in this process.

3. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Up until the last third or so, I thought this was going to slot in above The Spare Man. I wasn't in love with it, but it was doing some kind of interesting stuff. But the revelations near the end and the overly neat ending brought it down for me. Ultimately it came across as an unambitious novel that ought to have been ambitious. Spare Man, I think, largely does what it says it will do, but this does not.

2. The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Sometimes ranking almost feels too easy, you know? Like, you want ranking to be a challenge because that means you have a lot of very good books. (Or, well, a lot of very bad ones.) But The Spare Man has a very obvious slot to take. It was not incompetent or annoying, so it clearly goes above No Award, but I also didn't think it came across as one of the best books of the year, or even a great one, so clearly below Nettle and Bone.

1. Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher

Interestingly, I think Legends & Lattes and Nettle and Bone have a bit in common—even beyond the use of the "[NOUN] & [NOUN]" title format. (I think the Kingfisher was actually Nettle & Bone in the US, but I read the UK edition.) They're both fantasy novels that aim to provide reassurance to the reader in the face of darkness of the world: but while Legends & Lattes does this by having no stakes and mediocre humor, aiming for "heart," Nettle and Bone really does have heart because Kingfisher knows that in fiction, you can only get reassurance by having darkness to be reassured about. Nettle and Bone was an easy favorite for me as soon as I read it.

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Best Related Work

6. Buffalito World Outreach Project: 30 Translations of "Buffalo Dogs" by Lawrence M. Schoen

 

This book is made up of the English-language science fiction short story "Buffalo Dogs" and its translation into thirty different languages, including French, Italian, Hindi, Tamil, two varieties of Spanish, and Klingon. (Author Schoen is the founder of the Klingon Language Institute, and seems to have done that translation himself.) "Related works" are usually nonfiction, but according to the Hugo guidelines, works must be either "non-fiction or, if fictional... noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text..." So we're not being asked to assess the story here, but the project. (Along similar lines, a new translation of Beowulf was a finalist in 2021, and ended up winning.) For this to work, I think the paratext would have  to make the case that this was a worthy project... but in his introduction, Schoen devotes only about a paragraph to the book itself, and it pretty much just says, "I thought it would be fun, so I did it." Any sense of why this might have been a noteworthy idea, much less an award-winning one, is absent.

On top of that, I found the story in question pretty bad. I know we're not supposed to judge this category on the basis of its fictional aspects, but it's about a hypnotist who abuses his powers to violate people's consent in order to carry out illegal acts for not really any reason at all other than that he is greedy. Wow, what a hero! I also found the worldbuilding pretty unconvincing; it's clearly there to make the story work, but doesn't make sense on its own merits. The cover blurb for the book says, "Maybe, just maybe, the power of the buffalitos will bring us all together and we’ll begin treating one another better," but it's about a guy who goes around treating other people quite horribly! If you want to pick a story to bring the world together, there had to have been a better one. Anyway, I wouldn't give this an award, and I certainly wouldn't give it this one, which is much better aimed at nonfiction in my opinion, if not that of the other nominators.

5. Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, Volume 1 by Yang Feng

 

The Hugo voter packet contains this 402-page book in its entirety... in Chinese. There's also a 24-page PDF in English, but all that has been translated is the table of contents and introductions to each section. The book has seven sections, each interviewing one key figure in Chinese sf. There's not really much for me to judge here as a result, other than the general intentions of the book. In other circumstances I probably would have just left it off my ballot, but it seemed a much worthier winner than Buffalito World despite my lack of access to it.

 

4. Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir by Wil Wheaton

Back in 2004, Wil Wheaton published an edited collection of some of his blog posts with additional linking material to turn it into a coherent narrative under the title Just a Geek. Last year, Just a Geek was republished with extra blog posts, but more importantly, footnotes. These footnotes clarify some stuff from the original book, apologize for bad writing or insensitive jokes, and expand on stuff he didn't say back then, about how his father emotionally abused him and how his mother deprived him of a childhood in her drive to turn him into a child star. I found it a bit of a mixed bag: the "comedy" footnotes were generally not funny and soon got wearying, the ones apologizing for misogynist early 2000s Internet discourse were necessary at first but not at the one hundredth iteration. 

 

I found myself wishing that the material about his parents had been worked in as extra essays; what's frustrating is that the most important one (about the abuse he and his sister went through on the set of the film The Curse) doesn't appear until very late in the book, but it provides important context for a lot of what you've been reading. Aside from this, the best material in the book was generally the original contents of Just a Geek: I liked the discussion of his cameo in Star Trek Nemesis a lot, as well as his interactions with his TNG castmates, which were very sweet. There's a good "found family" vibe to it. But given the best stuff is from 2004, and the new 2022 material—which is what makes this Hugo eligible—is not so great, I find it hard to rank it highly even though I did enjoy it.

3. "The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing" by S. L. Huang

This is an essay published on Tor.com, about the history of the so-called "Milford model" of creative writing workshop—people from outside the sf&f field would know it as the Iowa model. It alternates between exploring the history of that model and exploring its repercussions, especially for attendees of the prestigious Clarion workshop from marginalized groups. It's a good piece of writing, but I always find it tricky to rate essays against books in this category. It's probably as long as it needs to be, to be honest, but I think it is beat out by Blood, Sweat & Chrome because that has the depth of being a book. Still, certainly more of interest to say about sf&f than in Wheaton's memoir.

2. Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan

This is an oral history of the long production of Mad Max: Fury Road, mostly from interviews by the author, with some archival material mixed in. I have actually never seen Fury Road, but found this pretty interesting nonetheless. The long genesis of the film was interesting in particular; I felt that the filming process needed more details on what exactly Tom Hardy's issue was (the book seemed to dance around this), but was still neat, as was the postproduction stuff. Probably I would get more out of the book if I—like the writer and many participants—was convinced of George Miller's genius, but I do like a good making-of book, and this is a decent one.

1. Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins

This is a biography of the Discworld author by his longtime assistant, based on notes Pratchett made toward an autobiography that he never got around to writing. Lots of good details on Pratchett's youth and early career especially; I liked hearing about his working as a journalist and as a press officer for a nuclear power plant in particular. There's also great but devastating insight into his later years, as the cognitive decline of Alzheimer's began to take hold. I did think that at times Wilkins is (for perhaps natural reasons) a bit too into Pratchett's finances and contracts, and I felt like Pratchett's wife totally disappeared from the book, but if you're even a mild Pratchett fan (which is where I would categorize myself) there's a lot to get out of this book. This is a strong work about a key figure in the sf&f field, exactly the kind of thing the Hugo Award for Best Related Work ought to be rewarding.

(Abigail Nussbaum has a very good negative review of the book that I largely agree with... but I still think it's the best thing in the category!)

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Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

[UNRANKED] Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn / Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak by Charlie Jane Anders

Both of these are sequels to previous Lodestar Award finalists. Bloodmarked is a follow-up to 2021's Legendborn, where students at a North Carolina college turn out to be Arthurian knights reborn to fight monsters from another dimension... or something. It did not work for me, and I ranked it fifth. Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak is a sequel to 2022's Victories Greater than Death, a book I almost abandoned halfway through and ended up ranking sixth and one of the very reasons I instituted my "you are allowed to skip a book" rule this year. It seemed very unlikely that the sequels were likely to be serious contenders for me, and so in the interests of time, I skipped them.

5. Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods by Catherynne M. Valente

This is a fantasy novel about a kid who goes into a magical forest in order to fulfill his role in an ancient treaty between humans and the creatures of the forest. Though I have enjoyed some of Valente's work (she had three works on the Hugo short fiction ballots last year, and they were all strong), too often I am left feeling that if it had been half as long, it would have been twice as good. Most of her books are overnarrated; perhaps in deference to the younger audience, this mostly manages to avoid that (though the narrator is still twee and condescending), but instead fills up the pages with voluminous "funny" dialogue that goes nowhere. At one point the main character gets horns on his head but doesn't know it, and somehow there is a full ten pages of back-and-forth between Osmo being confused at another character saying "what's up with your head?" and someone finally saying "you've got horns!" By about page one hundred, this book had squandered all of its goodwill and I did not care about what anyone was trying to do, but there were another three hundred pages I had to read.

I did like the pangolin character a bit.

4. No Award

Look, other people must like it, but I feel like Osmo Unknown is bad. And it's a kind of bad that annoys me: like Seanan McGuire's, Valente's YA is self-consciously nostalgic in a way I find forced and annoying. Rather than capture what the fantasy of our childhood was actually like, it very archly tries to capture our nostalgia for reading fantasy in childhood—which isn't the same thing at all. Oz may be a fairly whimsical place, but the book doesn't smash your face into this fact, it just gets on with taking the world seriously. I don't believe actual young adults (or middle-graders, which is what Osmo Unknown skews toward in my opinion) would actually like this book. It's for adults nostalgic for when they were supposed to be reading young adult fiction. And this is, you know, a YA award.

3. Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor

As noted in my review, I did not find this as successful as the second book in this series. But, you know, it is fundamentally an actual young adult book in my opinion, so it's better than Osmo Unknown and better than No Award.

2. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

I had actually read this before voting because I enjoyed the previous book in the series so much. Like Akata Woman, it's the third book in a series where it turns out I liked the second book best. But though it was a bit of a letdown, I still enjoyed it well enough. In another year, though, it's hard for me to imagine this taking second on my ballot.

1. In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

Like every other book on the ballot this year bar Osmo Unknown, this is a sequel to a previous finalist, and like every one of those sequels (that I read, anyway), this is not as strong as the book that preceded it. But I think I liked this best of all; honestly, I could go either way between it and The Golden Enclaves, both of which didn't totally deliver on the potential of where the previous installment had left off. I'll give the edge to this because I suspect Novik has the edge with the majority of the electorate, but again, it's hard for me to imagine this being my top choice in any previous year.

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Final Thoughts

Last year, I said that Best Novel was the weakest set I'd seen since I began voting in 2017. Well, it got worse! Very frustrating. I don't keep up with current sf&f much beyond reading for the Hugos, so I don't know what those books might be, but Nettle and Bone aside I believe there has to have been five books better than this. I don't have a strong sense of what will win this category; perhaps Nettle and Bone? Kingfisher has done pretty well on the ballot the past few years. Kowal is always popular, but I don't feel like Spare Man is going to be it. It was a bit surprising to see the Scalzi, and I think he has enough detractors I don't think it will be him. Oh god, it's going to be Legends & Lattes, isn't it?

On the other hand, this was a great set of Related Works finalists. I always grumble a bit when they skew away from nonfiction, but here we have five works of nonfiction; I also grumble when they're not books, but here we have five actual books. I think the Pratchett biography will win.

As I indicated above, this was also a weak set of YA finalists. Five of the six were sequels to previous nominees! C'mon, give me something new. I don't have a good sense at all of what might win here. Novik won last year, though some people grumbled about that. (I am not sure why; I think her books are much more clearly YA than whatever Osmo Unknown was supposed to be.)

Hugos 2023: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Of all of this year's Best Novel finalists, this is the one that I was the most curious about. I love H. G. Wells in general, of course, and The Island of Doctor Moreau is one of his most interesting novels; I've heard good things about Silvia Moreno-Garcia (particularly her Mexican Gothic), and I was curious to see what someone could do by mixing Doctor Moreau up with colonialism and empire in late nineteenth-century Mexico.

Originally published: 2022
Acquired: July 2023
Read: September 2023

In this version, Doctor Moreau is conducting his experiments at a hacienda in Mexico, given shelter by a local man of wealth; he gives Moreau resources so that Moreau can create him a workforce. Montgomery is an Englishman who ends up managing Moreau's estate when he runs out of other options. As the title indicates, Moreau has a daughter, one who has been raised in a sheltered existence alongside Moreau's creations. Montgomery is sexually attracted to her, but knows it cannot be. In the meantime, a Maya uprising is getting ever closer, and Moreau's patron is growing impatient with his progress.

There are the ingredients to do something incredibly interesting... unfortunately, the novel is considerably less interesting than the one it comments on. The original novel delved into concepts of humanity and animality, what our capacity to feel pain means, what religion means for our morality. It's sensational in the Victorian sense of the word.

Daughter takes this cocktail of ingredients, adds gender and imperialism, but they dilute the mix rather than enhance it. The book is languidly paced, the uprising and race play surprisingly little role in the story. There's a twist, but I saw it coming miles away, and the novel doesn't really do anything interesting with that twist. I expected more to be made of Moreau's constructs and their rationalization, of the way that science is used to extend and justify the vision of empire and colonization, of the way the male gaze resonates with the scientific one, but none of that happens. 

I guess that's not Moreno-Garcia's fault, in that maybe none of that was what she intended to do. But what she did do wasn't very interesting instead.

(Also why does a book with two strictly alternating third-person perspectives feel the need to put the name of the viewpoint character at the top of each chapter? I felt condescended to.)

Hugos 2023: Ballots for Dramatic Presentation and Graphic Story

Next, we have my nominations and votes in the "visual" categories: comics, tv, and film. (I have linked the titles if I have written a review elsewhere, or if the work is freely available on the Internet.)

Things I Nominated

As I said in my last post, I lost my nominating ballot (if I ever had it), but I am pretty sure I nominated an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season one, "Spock Amok," for the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category.

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) 

6. Star Wars: Andor 1x12: "Rix Road", written by Tony Gilroy, directed by Benjamin Caron

Andor is a Disney Plus show that's a prequel to Rogue One, a film I found overrated—and I have to admit, I don't really remember the character of Andor at all. (Plus, as a Star Trek fan, I find his name confusing.) Normally with shows I don't watch that are Hugo finalists, I just watch the relevant episodes, not any other ones. Sometimes this works (I think both For All Mankind episodes I've seen work great on their own), sometimes it does not (my friend Christiana is always criticizing the scattershot way I viewed The Good Place). This year I acceded to Christiana's advice, which was to not watch all twelve episodes of Andor, but to at least watch the first and sixth before moving onto the two that were Hugo finalists.

This was good advice, in that I had some helpful context, but also bad advice in that I thought the sixth episode, "The Eye," was much better than the two that were actually finalists; had "The Eye" been a finalist, I probably would have ranked it first. "Rix Road"—like most of the Andor episodes I saw—does a great job of building to a dramatic climax, as the inhabitants of an Empire-occupied planet take to the titular road to hold an illegal funeral procession for Andor's mother. But unlike "The Eye" and "One Way Out," I felt like the energy of this dramatic confrontation fizzled rather than exploded; the speech by Andor's mother is good, but then it just kind of ends. So I would put it roughly on a par with "Babylon's Ashes"; I gave a slight edge to The Expanse based on my long-term loyalty to that show.

 

5. The Expanse 6x6: "Babylon's Ashes", written by Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck and Naren Shankar, directed by Breck Eisner

As I say every year, I stopped watching The Expanse back during season 3, but it's not the show's fault, it's my own. However, I have enough context to follow what's happening because I read all the books, and the show is fairly faithful. That said, I suspect the emotions of the pay-offs of a season finale (series finale?) would come across much more strongly had I watched the preceding episodes. So, yeah, this was fine and had its moments, but if I ever catch up on The Expanse, I think I will like it more. (Bits of it were very sudden, though; it seems pretty crazy that they did the first book in fifteen episodes, but the sixth one in six!)

4. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, ep. 9: "Whose Show Is This?", written by Jessica Gao, directed by Kat Coiro

As always, it is perhaps silly for my only episode of a show to be the season finale, but that's how I (usually) roll. This was okay, I guess, but it more fizzled out than climaxed. Which maybe was on purpose, given the meta gags, but I didn't think those worked terribly well (though I did like how she broke out of her show); my favorite jokes were the ones about Charlie Cox's Daredevil, who put in a completely unexpected appearance. But I was moderately entertained, so fourth place it is.

3. Star Wars: Andor 1x10: "One Way Out", written by Beau Willimon, directed by Toby Haynes

"One Way Out" is a solid prison break story, but perhaps one that would have benefited more from seeing the prison set up in previous episodes. Christiana told me that Andor has a lot of wheel-spinning episodes, but if you jump around like I did it has an admirable tendency to be completely different each time out. Episodes one, six, and ten have almost nothing in common in terms of character or setting except for Andor himself.

2. For All Mankind 3x10: "Stranger in a Strange Land", written by Matt Wolpert & Ben Nedivi, directed by Craig Zisk

 

Even though I have only seen one previous episode of For All Mankind (the season two finale, a Hugo finalist last year), I found the pay-offs in this much more effective. In this episode (of a show about an alternate history of the space race), while terrorists attack NASA on Earth, a group of astronauts on Mars must figure out how to get a pregnant woman to a waiting orbiter where she can safely give birth even though they're almost out of fuel. Groups of smart people working together to come up with bizarre plans is basically my favorite genre of television, and this is a strong example of it. If I can ever stomach paying regularly for Apple TV+, I will have to go back and watch the rest of this show.

1. Stranger Things 4, ch. 4: "Dear Billy", written by Paul Dichter, directed by Shawn Levy

 

As I've been saying, I normally watch only whatever episode of a show is specifically nominated... but I had seen seasons one and two of Stranger Things, before I fell behind on my tv watching, so I resolved this would be my impetus to catch up. I saved Stranger Things for last in my schedule just in case I couldn't make it through everything, but I was indeed able to view twelve episodes in the month of September, getting me up to "Dear Billy." I can see why this episode was a finalist; Sadie Sink is excellent as Max throughout, and in particular the famous ending with its use of Kate Bush is harrowing and triumphant, a great depiction of depression and the ways we can sometimes escape from it. I really struggled to place this against For All Mankind, but ultimately decided to go with the show I actually watch otherwise. (Now that I've fulfilled my Hugo obligations, I can stop watching again, right?)

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

6. Avatar: The Way of Water; directed by James Cameron; script by James Cameron, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver

I successfully went fourteen years of my life never having seen Avatar; alas, I was not so lucky with the sequel, which I suffered through in all its inexplicably-three-hour entirety. It seems to me that the entire movie suffers from—among other things—a nonsensical and morally abhorrent premise. That is to say, the main guy, Jake, is a human living as a Na'vi on the planet Pandora, leading its people in a war of resistance against occupying human forces. But early on in the film, he goes on the run because his family is threatened. The problems are: 1) he flees to a place where he has no ability to blend in, among a different race of Na'vi; 2) this is an awful thing for him to do, he's depicted as the only hope they have; 3) the movie then just totally ignores the plight of the Na'vi he abandoned, either because they are okay (which makes no sense) or they are all being slaughtered offscreen (which makes him even worse).

It's all a bit The Word for World Is Forest, isn't it? Yet even though that's one of my least favorite Le Guins, James Cameron could have done a much better job if he had ripped it off more: the thing Le Guin shows in her novels of conflict between colonizer and colonized is that the colonized have to avoid buying into the values of the colonizer. If the Na'vi really offer an alternative to the values of Earth, then why is the only way they can be defended with the values of Earth? That is to say, with overlong fight sequences that could have come straight out of a Marvel movie? At the end of the movie, Jake and his family haven't really accomplished anything at all! So anyway, this was an astounding technical achievement, I guess, but so what? I did like Jemaine Clement's character. If I have to suffer through another, he had better be in it.

5. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, directed by Ryan Coogler, script by Ryan Coogler and Jay Robert Cole

This second Black Panther film was basically fine. Some good moments and action and humor, good character work dealing with the death of Chadwick Boseman/T'Challa. Namor from the comics was reworked quite a lot here, but in a way I found really interesting and successful. I had totally forgotten Lupita Nyong'o's character from the first film, though, so some parts of the movie were a bit confusing, and as a friend pointed out, why is this sequel to a groundbreaking Afrofuturist text about two victims of imperialism fighting each other as opposed to, you know, the colonizer? The final battle was, thankfully, surprisingly short for a Marvel movie. But I look forward to seeing where they go with Shuri as Black Panther; I've been a fan of Letitia Wright since Cucumber and Banana. So, not a great film, but certainly doing more interesting things than The Way of Water, and doing them better.

4. Nope, written and directed by Jordan Peele

The nice-but-actually-mean thing to say about this movie is that at least it's better than Us, but it's no Get Out. This is about a horse farm that trains horses for films suddenly coming under attack by a strange force. It has some good comedy, and there's a nice sense of group-of-disparate-people-pull-off-a-crazy-plan, and the explanations are reasonably satisfying, but it's one of those cases where I read the Wikipedia article and ended up feeling that the movie the director said he was making was more interesting than the one I watched, if you see what I mean. But, you know, better this than another Marvel movie.

3. Severance Season One, created by Dan Erickson

I had never even heard of this before it became a Hugo finalist, but dutifully signed up for Apple TV+ for two months to work my way through it. It's about a corporation where people are "severed": your work self and your home self become different people, each with no memory of the other. For the "outie," it's a great deal: you get paid, but never remember going to work. But for the "innie," it's a slog, because you spend your whole life at work and know nothing better. It's a bit phildickian, in a good way; it captures that feeling I really liked in Ubik or Martian Time-Slip, of "new technologies, same old bullshit," the alienation from the world that is the postmodern condition. There are some great performances (Parks and Rec's Adam Scott, of course, but all four leads are strong), some excellent jokes, and some decent twists. That said, there are probably a bit too many twists; I would have been more interested in exploring some of the psychological and sociological consequences of the "severance" technology, but the series moves into the kind of conspiracy thriller territory that is a bit too standard in streaming shows. I might have ranked it higher except that the first season doesn't really tell a complete story, so it's not totally satisfying, and hard to judge as a whole.

2. Turning Red, directed by Domee Shi, script by Julia Cho and Domee Shi

I watched a lot of Pixar films as a child, but few in adulthood; in the past five years thanks to the double-whammy of parenthood and Hugo voting, that has changed. Of the several I have seen in the past few years (which include Inside Out, Onward, and Soul), this is a clear favorite, abandoning the usual Pixar formula (two disparate personalities work together to cross a strange landscape) in favor of a beautiful story of adolescence and the experience of immigration and assimilation. The main character is a Chinese-Canadian who turns into a red panda when embarrassed, and this is a potent fantasy metaphor for her relationship with her mother and with the culture of her classmates. Lots of good jokes, great character beats, and a beautiful climax that gave me goosebumps.

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, written and directed by Daniels

This squarely hits my interests in storytelling: big sf concept that is interesting on its own merits but also a powerful metaphor for real life, takes itself totally seriously but also not seriously at all at the exact same time, characters who are just regular people living regular lives turning out to be the moral linchpins. I thought this was excellent from top to bottom, hilarious and also touching. I don't think anyone talks about the "New Sincerity" anymore, but surely this is it at its best: all the techniques of postmodernism deployed to a heartwarming message. This year's top three were all excellent, but this was an easy winner.

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Best Graphic Story or Comic

7. Dune: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, script by Lilah Sturges, art by Drew Johnson

The comic of the movie of the novel? Really?? This seems spectacularly pointless. Sure, do a comic of the original novel and unleash the visual imagination of Frank Herbert in a way that can't be captured by another medium. (And I believe there are some comics directly based on the novel.) But why try to capture the visual imagination of a film of a novel on the page? It seems pointless—and once you read it, you realize it is pointless. This vastly accelerated set of highlights with art that essentially copies film stills gives you little sense of the grandeur of either film or novel.

6. No Award

I find the nomination of Dune fundamentally inexplicable. There is no way this is one of the six best sf&f comics of the year.

5. Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, script by Bartosz Sztybor, art by Alessio Fioriniello and Filipe Andrade

This is a tie-in to the game Cyberpunk 2077, and its nomination is also inexplicable. It's about two people in some kind of cyberpunk dystopia, one of whom wants to climb the criminal ranks, the other of whom just wants to fantasize about living an easy, meaningful life in the country. It's okay, but some of the art is hard to follow and much of what happens is pretty cliché. It has its moments, but there's nothing here to make you care.

4. Monstress: Devourer, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda

I've put Monstress—which I believe has never missed the Hugo ballot since 2017—in sixth several times. That I did not do so this year is more a testament to the low quality of the other nominees in this category than anything else. I didn't think it was very great this year, but I'd definitely prefer to see it win over a Dune or Cyberpunk 2077 tie-in.

3. Once & Future: Monarchies in the U.K., script by Kieron Gillen, art by Dan Mora

This is volume four of Gillen and Mora's sequence about King Arthur returning in modern Britain... only as a zombie. As is so often true of Kieron Gillen comics, I can't help but feel the premise has more potential than is used. There are a lot of clever spins on Arthurian legend here... but they mostly only justify exciting action sequences, rather than say something interesting about Britain. But it is exciting and I like the characters, so it is certainly better than Cyberpunk 2077 or Monstress.

2. Saga, Volume Ten, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples

Saga is back! It's been what, three years I think since volume nine? I usually read it in the form of the huge hardcover omnibus volumes, but I am glad to have this little taster of what is to come. It's been a while, so my memory on many story points is murky, but I still enjoyed this a lot. Good character work, decent twists, and as always amazing art from Fiona Staples. Not so sure about the villain who speaks like a Twitter conservative. It isn't quite as good as the self-contained Woman of Tomorrow... though even if it was, I'm don't think the Hugo Awards are really for rewarding tenth volumes in ongoing series! Give the award to something new and interesting. (Saga won for its first volume, and was a finalist for volumes two, three, six, seven, and nine; if I was king of the universe, it wouldn't be a finalist again until its final volume—assuming, of course, that it sticks the landing.) But given the weakness of the other finalists this year, it acquits itself fairly well regardless.

1. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, script by Tom King, art by Bilquis Evely

This was the first of the Best Graphic Story finalists I read, but as soon as I read it, it felt clearly like the one to beat. Beautiful art from Bilquis Evely, but also a really well put together story with a new-but-familiar spin on a classic character. In the end, I was right; nothing in this category came close.

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Overall Thoughts

I feel like Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) is unusually strong this year. Even though I don't care for, say, She-Hulk, I can see that it's interesting and why other people would like it. The top three finalists, in particular, are pretty strong. (Though it really is too bad "The Eye" wasn't a finalist.) I think it's probably going to be "Dear Billy," but if not, I think one of the episodes of Andor.

Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) was also interesting (Avatar aside), but in this case, there's a clear winner: I have little doubt that Everything Everywhere All at Once will not win. It won't be close as, say, Arrival, but it will win.

Best Graphic Story continues to slog along as a category. We have four repeat finalists... but alas, the two new series/creators are the worst ones! Move over, Monstress. I am going to go out on a limb and claim this will be Tom King's year to finally win it... but he came in sixth last year, so what do I know?

Hugos 2023: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Published: 2022
Acquired: July 2023
Read: September 2023

This retells Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"... only I've never read that. I imagine that's cleverly done (Vernon certainly makes it sound so in her afterword), but it also works totally on its own. I guess it's a piece of horror, but I didn't find it scary... that's not an indictment, though, because I did find it really interesting. When I began reading it, I assumed it was fantasy, but actually I think it's science fiction: it's about fungus, but it's all carefully done in terms of plausibility (as far as these things go, anyway).

The narrator is from a Ruritanian country, travelling to another one (but not the actual Ruritania of Prisoner of Zenda, despite what the back cover says); ka is from a country with a lot of pronouns, including specific ones for soldiers (God and priests/nuns each also get their own set). There's some interesting stuff with gender as a result, and I found ka a very fun narrator.

This is by Ursula Vernon, so the main thing to note is that it's all leavened perfectly by comedy. The narrator's Scottish batman is particularly excellent, but all the characters here are good fun. A quick, interesting read, well put together.

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

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

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

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

Things I Nominated

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

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Best Novella

[UNRANKED] Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire

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

5. Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

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

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

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

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

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

3. A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow

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

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

2. Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

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

1. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

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

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

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Best Novelette 

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ve probably seen it, too.

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

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

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

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

3. "We Built This City" by Marie Vibbert

“A city without people is only a ruin.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Best Short Story

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

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

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

5. "The White Cliff" by Lu Ban

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

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

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

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

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

3. "Zhurong on Mars" by Regina Kanyu Wang

Like the humans who had left, e discovered freedom.

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

2. "Resurrection" by Channing Ren

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

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

1. "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills

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

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

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Overall Thoughts

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

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