sophia_sol | Entries tagged with fandom: the hugos

Here's my thoughts on the six short story finalists for this year's Hugos! None of my fave stories for the year ended up on the list, despite me nominating them and everything, but so it goes. I at least like this list better than the short story list from last year! There's even a story I like well enough to be voting it #1 without complaint!

I'm putting these down in the order in which I will vote for them.

1. Open House on Haunted Hill, by John Wiswell
Aww, I'm charmed by this! I love the pov of the haunted house, and the decisions it makes as it tries to bond with people. This is the only story on the list of finalists I hadn't already read before, since it's not published in one of the venues I regularly keep on top of, so it was a pleasant surprise.

2. Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer
I like it for what it is, but it's pretty lightweight and short, and feels more like an introduction to an idea/world than like a story that's complete in itself.

3. Metal Like Blood in the Dark, by T Kingfisher
It's interesting and I found it compelling, but I don't like it.

4. A Guide for Working Breeds, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Okay so I like the idea of robots rebelling against the capitalist framework they're trapped in, through the power of FRIENDSHIP, but the focus on cute dogs is not working for me, and the voices of the main characters feel pretty one-note, so the story didn't really resonate for me.

5. Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse, by Rae Carson
A decent story, but it's about a) zombies and b) giving birth, so I'm just not that interested.

6. The Mermaid Astronaut, by Yoon Ha Lee
The prose style feels so distancing to me that I just glaze over when I try to read this story. I think it's going for a fairy-tale feel, given that it is clearly inspired by The Little Mermaid, but it doesn't land for me. Sometimes when I push through to keep reading a story that is boring me at the start, it picks up eventually, but I skimmed my way all the way to the end of this one and never got pulled in. Which is too bad because I think the things it's trying to do are probably interesting.

Well, today is the Hugo voting deadline, and I didn't QUITE make it through the last category I was wanting to. But I mostly did! Enough to feel capable of voting the category, at least.

So here's my Astounding Award For Best New Science Fiction Writer voting decisions.

1. Tasha Suri
I read her first book, Empire of Sand, and ADORED it. A delightful historical romantic fantasy, that's most of my fave genres all at once, and wonderfully put together! I was torn between voting for Suri and Tesh for #1, but because Suri's already in her second year of eligibility I decided to rank her first. Tesh will have another chance next year.

2. Emily Tesh
Tesh's first book, Silver in the Wood, is lovely and perfect and I loved it. Queer people and forest magic and folklore and history! Very good and I hope to be voting Tesh #1 next year!

3. Jenn Lyons
Look her book is like a zillion pages long, it's a lot and I just didn't have time to get through it what with all the other Hugos reading I had to do (and all the other reading I couldn't stop myself from doing). I read the first little bit of The Ruin of Kings and it was really promising though, I liked what I read, so I think she's worth ranking this high even if I haven't gotten a full picture of all her skills as a writer.

4. RF Kuang
I started reading The Poppy War and found it compelling but I was nervous about where it was going based on vague memories of things I'd heard about it before, so I googled it and then went NOPE THIS IS NOT FOR ME. Sorry Kuang, you're a very good writer but a book about a person becoming angrily and violently vengeful is not something I want to put in my eyeballs.

5. Nibedita Sen
Sen's Hugo packet had 3 short stories in it, and you know, they were fine, but that's about as much interest as I can muster.

6. Sam Hawke
I started reading the book that was included in the Hugo packet and just....did not care at all. So I gave up. Possibly if I'd given it more of a chance it would have perked up, it might just have a slow start, but oh well, my caprice was apparently in charge when I read this one.

Alrighty, next up on the Hugos ranking docket for me is the YA category. Technically speaking not a Hugo (it's the Lodestar Award) but voted for on the same ballot, so hey.

This was a strong category! A good proportion of the books in this one are worthy and admirable, even if not all of them are perfectly to my taste.

Here's my final ranking, with links in the titles to full reviews for the books I finished:

1. Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge
Amazingly inventive and captivating and just great all around and I love it.

2. Riverland, by Fran Wilde
Superbly written and effectively emotional.

3. Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer
A fun, quick, easy read.

4. Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher
Good and grounded and kind of upsetting (in an appropriate way).

5. Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee
Doesn't take the dangers faced by its preteen protagonist seriously enough, but an interesting setting/worldbuilding.

6. The Wicked King, by Holly Black
I read the first couple chapters and the last couple chapters and it's just not up my alley. It's about a mortal girl in Faerie and being involved in the various complicated backstabbing politics of that realm; so far so promising. But: a) as I feared there don't seem to be any characters I actually like, AND b) the mortal girl doesn't actually appear to be....very good....at the kinds of necessary machinations and manipulations. Which means that I don't have any reason to want to hang out in her head, if I don't like her and can't even get pleasure from watching her be really good at being bad. So I didn't bother reading the rest.

OKAY I've read all the Hugo novella nominees now! Time to rank them! And oh dear this was hard. My top three are honestly all so good that I want all of them to win first place, and it was a real trial to rank them. I kept being like, NOOOO this one deserves first, but if I rank THAT one first then the other two have to be LOWER and I can't bear to rank any of them second or third!!!! And they're all good in such DIFFERENT ways that it's hard to compare them.

Anyway I can't actually rate all three of them first place, so I gritted my teeth and put them in some kind of order. I may yet change my mind, I've still got nearly 2 weeks before I have to commit on a voting form.....

(links to my full reviews for each book are in the titles)

1. The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P Djèlí Clark
This book is a total delight! I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of reading it.

2. To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers
It's so lovely and I love it a lot and I had a lot of feelings and I cried.

3. The Deep, by Rivers Solomon
Just so impressive and powerful and transportative!

4. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, by Ted Chiang
Very interesting but the pacing and engagement felt thrown off to me by all the infodumping.

5. In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire
Good but also frustrating.

6. This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Boring, unfortunately.

Well, time for me to talk about the Hugo novel nominees as a group. You may notice I have not posted reviews for all of them. This is because I did not even finish most of them! The novel options this year contain a lot of books that are just not to my personal taste.

The bottom two books in my ranking are ones I never would have bothered even picking up and trying if they weren't on the Hugo list, and the middle two probably would have languished on my tbr list forever due to there being so many other books that sound more appealing to me to prioritise. On the other hand we also have one of my favorite sci-fi novels ever written on the list this year, so hey, can't complain too hard!

My voting order is as follows. I've linked the book titles to my full review for the ones where I did read the whole book.

1. A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine
Absolutely brilliant in so many ways and I completely adored it.

2. Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Mostly very compelling and I really liked it, but given that I'm too much of a wuss for horror, it was rather much for me.

3. The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
I read about a quarter of it and got the distinct impression that it's very like the other Anders novel I've read: very well written, interesting, and unusual, but I can't quite actually LIKE it. So I didn't really feel inspired to continue.

4. The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E Harrow
I read the 100 page sample provided to voters. The ideas had potential but I bounced off of the narrative voice. Having a distinctive voice can be a gamble because either it really works for the reader or it really doesn't, and I admire the attempt, but this one's not for me.

5. The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley
Read more than a third in the hope that maybe at some point it would stop being boring but that was as far as my patience could take me, and honestly I'm impressed I made it that far. I'm told it does get more interesting once you get more into the meat of the plot, but if it takes that long to get there then you've lost me. Which is too bad because the time travel element at least sounded kind of interesting.

6. Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire
Read about a quarter of it and just.....did not care. Evil people manipulating children in order to take over the world is just not a plot I am interested in. And the child characters themselves were also not particularly compelling to me, even if I could have otherwise been interested in hearing about psychic friendship.

Time for the Hugo nominated novelettes! As a whole, I ended up liking the options in this category much more than what was in the short stories this year.

Here's my thoughts on each of the 6 novelettes. I'm listing them in the order for which I will vote for them, top to bottom choices.

Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin

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Omphalos, by Ted Chiang

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The Archronology of Love, by Caroline M. Yoachim

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Away With the Wolves, by Sarah Gailey

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The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, by Sarah Pinsker

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For He Can Creep, by Siobhan Carroll

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The Hugo voters packet arrived last night so I've been busy putting together a spreadsheet to organize my thoughts about the various candidates for all the awards, what I do and don't have access to and through where, and my voting decisions for the things I've already read/seen/whatever. Exciting! I love spreadsheets.

Anyway I thought I'd post my thoughts for how I'm planning to vote in a few categories which were quick to get through once I had my lists together.

(then maybe it'll be less intimidating to face down everything else when I have so little time to read it all!)

Best Professional Artist

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Best Fan Artist

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Best Fan Writer

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Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

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Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

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I've started working on reading through the things on the Hugo nominations list, in preparation for voting this summer! I'm hampered right now in many categories by not all nominees being available either for free online or from my library as an e-resource, but I'm hoping that when the Hugo Voters Packet comes that'll help.

But I can do the short stories no problem.

I'd already read all but one of the short stories on the nominee list, because for the last number of years I have make it a regular practice to give a try to everything published by the major SFF magazines that provide their stories for free online. The one I hadn't read is is published by a horror magazine, and horror is really not my thing so I don't frequent horror venues.

I bookmark on my pinboard all the stories that I like well enough to want to be able to find again in the future. And none of this year's nominees are on my pinboard. Which means that none of them spoke to me when I first read them, which is disappointing when I think of how many stories I read in the last year which I loved and which are not a Hugo nominee. At least the nominees are all stories I found compelling enough that I actually read them all to the end when I first encountered them!

I've now given a reread to all the short stories I'd read before, and a first read to the one I hadn't. And looking at the stories together, I think that Hugo nominators as a group must be more interested in bleak or angry or violent stories than I am. Ah well.

Here's my (occasionally spoilery) thoughts about all the nominated stories, organized from my first choice vote to my last. None of these will go below No Award, because I do see admirable things in all of them, even if none are really to my taste.

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I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts if you've read any of these stories! (Except the cannibalism one. Please do not talk to me about cannibalism. Thank you.)