A Fan's Playground

I've been working on my Hugos homework some more, and I realised that doing my Hugos homework no longer brings me joy. The way I feel so meh about a lot of what ends up on the ballot each year, and irritated about what wins.... it's wearing. I am losing my fannish obsessive dedication to the process of engaging with the award.

It's cool that the hugos are a fan award that anyone can participate in, but its scope is in practice much smaller than the "world" it promises. It's honestly a pretty niche little group! And the priorities of the majority contingent of voters are different than mine.

I'm still going to continue voting and nominating, I think. But this is the year I move to letting the books on the hugo list be a suggestion rather than a mandate in my life, and let it take up less of my time and energy.

Okay I have read the things I have time to read, I have considered what things I haven't yet read but seem worthy regardless, and I have put my nominations into the ballot! Any last-minute addenda you think I should make, let me know before it's too late!

Best Novel
Nghi Vo, Siren Queen
Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth
Everina Maxwell, Ocean's Echo
Sacha Lamb, When the Angels Left the Old Country
Simon Jimenez, The Spear Cuts Through Water

Best Novella
Sarah Tolmie, All the Horses of Iceland
Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver, Uncommon Charm
Nghi Vo, Into the Riverlands
Carrie Vaughn, Polly and (Not) Charles Conquer the Solar System
Miyuki Jane Pinckard, Radcliffe Hall

Best Novelette
Iona Datt Sharma, To Embody A Wildfire Starting
SB Divya, Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold
John Chu, If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You

Best Short Story
Kylie Lee Baker Lily, the Immortal
MH Cheung, Sestu Hunts the Last Deer in Heaven
Nadine Aurora Tabing, Obsolesce
Anneke Schwob, Spirochete
Rebecca Fraimow, A Farce to Suit the New Girl

Best Series
Tamsyn Muir, The Locked Tomb

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3
Turning Red
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Prehistoric Planet

Best Fan Writer
skygiants

Lodestar Award of Best Young Adult Book
Frances Hardinge, Unraveller
Sacha Lamb, When the Angels Left the Old Country

The Astounding Award for Best New Writer
Isabel J Kim
Everina Maxwell
Sacha Lamb

Rules: If you'd like your own questions, let me know in the comments! I'll ask the first five commenters five questions each. Answer them in your own journal, offer to give the first five commenters their own sets of questions, and let the cycle continue! (Meme originally from ursula.)

I got the following questions from chestnut_pod!

1. What are the birds that signify the seasons for you?

I've finally gone through an entire year of seasons of being a birder, so I can make a stab at answering this question! This might change in future years as I become more intimately familiar with the local bird populations, but here's what I currently have.

I have long associated the fall to early winter season with crows. In this season, crows gather in enormous flocks to roost together for nights, and this can be hundreds or even thousands of birds all together! I love watching them flocking as evening comes on.

Late winter is cardinal season to me - this is when male cardinals will regularly perch on a high branch and sing loudly to proclaim their territory. On my bicycle commute to work last winter I got to be very familiar with the specific territories belonging to different cardinals, and where I could expect to see and hear them!

Spring is the season of the proliferation of migrating birds in fresh breeding plumage who are all singing their distinctive songs, so it's less a season of a specific bird and more a season of "holy shit so many birds to pay attention to, where do I turn first."

Summer is harder for me to answer, since for a variety of reasons I wasn't able to do much in the way of birding this summer, and it doesn't have an obvious answer. Maybe next summer I'll have an answer though!

2. Of all the book formats to ever be, which is your favourite format of book, and why?

There are many wonderful things about many formats books have had over the years/centuries/millennia, mostly the fun aesthetics! But mass market paperbacks are just so very practical that I have to go with that. Lightweight, easy to carry around, comfortable to hold one-handed when reading, a consistent small size to make it easy to shelve lots of them without taking up too much space, they're basically the perfect format. (okay yes ebooks are even more small and convenient, and I value them for certain circumstances, but I really like a physical, tangible book whenever possible.)

3. What do you enjoy about voting in the Hugos? What does it add to your experience as a reader and fan?

...that's a great question. Um. I think paying attention to the Hugos more generally allows me to be in touch with the current zeitgeist of the sff world, especially when I pay attention to more than just the novel category. Which is interesting to do because it allows me to see to what degree I am or am not in a bubble of my own making with respect to the works and creators that get talked about! And introduces me to things that may not have previously ended up on my radar but that have value.

In terms of actually participating in the nominating and the voting, though, I suppose it's partly that having a Goal and a Deadline means I actually engage with the things I'm learning about the current zeitgeist and the other corners of sffdom, instead of just being like, "I'm sure I'll get round to this eventually" and then never quite prioritizing it. Partly, too, it allows me to participate in conversations with fellow sff fans, because there's more likelihood we're reading and having reactions to the same works at the same time. (hi, cahn!) And partly I just really, really like creating ordered lists and completing surveys. Officially submitting my opinion about the quality of a book or story or what-have-you to an organizational body is weirdly satisfying to me! Also then it allows me to get personally mad when the hugo voters make objectively incorrect decisions about what to award :P because at least I did my part!

4. If you had to choose a Memory Called Empire Teixcalaanli name, what would it be?

Ooh I love that! I seem to recall it being against the norms for the noun part to be a living being so I can't go too directly birdy. I suppose the question is whether I want a noun that signifies a more abstract value, or a noun that is straightforwardly a thing I like. The number would definitely be Six though. Perhaps I'd be Six Binocular. Or Six Rectrix? idk!!! a hard choice! If anyone has suggestions of nouns I should consider, please let me know!

5. What's the meal you make when you have absolutely no energy left but want something tasty?

Ramen, with an egg and some frozen spinach tossed in, and the soup base replaced with something tastier (a better quality chicken bouillon, plus rice vinegar and soy sauce and sriracha). Or, cheese on toast, put in the toaster oven to broil the cheese, eaten with pickles or salsa. Or, boil some frozen dumplings and mix up a quick dipping sauce for them. But most of the time I have already done a bunch of batch cooking on the weekend, so I don't need to make things throughout the week - I just pull out a container of already-prepared food and microwave it, which is truly peak no-energy-required.

Whew, coming in just under the wire, here's my voting plans for the Hugo best novel! Obviously She Who Became The Sun is required to win, but in any other year both my #2 and #3 choices would be strong contenders for first place in my mind, and it's just too bad they can't all three get awards! Links to my full reviews in the titles of the books.

1. She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

I cannot vote anything but this for first place because it's perfect in every way.

2. A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine

It may not reach the same degree of delighting-me-on-every-level that A Memory Called Empire did, but it's still a fascinating and compelling book and very well done.

3. Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

A book that's doing its own thing, haven't really seen anything else like it, and I am HERE for it.

4. A Master of Djinn, by P Djélí Clark

Not as strong as his novella in the same world (The Haunting of Tram Car 015), especially in terms of development of character for the protagonist, so I was disappointed -- but it was still good, and I do love the worldbuilding.

5. The Galaxy and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers

Usually I love Chambers' approach of writing plotless novels about disparate characters interacting and being generally hopeful, but this one focuses on themes of children and parenthood and reproductive choices, and those are just not themes that inherently speak to me, so instead of finding it cozily enjoyable I was just bored.

6. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir

Andy Weir doesn't understand how humans work, doesn't understand how the soft sciences work, doesn't understand how communication works, is a little too into leaders being autocratic, and mostly just cares about expositing at length about science things he thinks are cool. I'm glad he has found his niche, and I am charmed by how much he loves science, but I did not like this book.

I sure have a wide range of opinions on the nominees for the Astounding award this year!

1. Shelley Parker-Chan

Parker-Chan's debut novel, She Who Became The Sun, is one of the most brilliant books I've read in years, and there is no doubt in my mind that I think both book and author deserve ALL the awards. And I can't wait to see where Parker-Chan goes from here as an author, if this is the level they're starting at!!

2. Everina Maxwell

I thoroughly enjoyed Maxwell's debut novel, Winter's Orbit. It's a delightful queer romance space opera and fully lives into the things it's doing and I'm here for it.

3. Micaiah Johnson

Johnson's only book so far is The Space Between Worlds, which, though it didn't land perfectly for me, was still a thought-provoking and powerful read.

4. Xiran Jay Zhao

I found Zhao's novel, Iron Widow, too dark for me to love it unreservedly, but I found the story and the characters very compelling!

5. Tracy Deonn

Deonn's only book so far is Legendborn, and it's good at being the kind of book it is, and it explores some important themes, but I found all the monster-fighting to be kinda boring, personally.

6. A.K. Larkwood

Larkwood now has two books out, but when I tried reading her debut, The Unspoken Name, I was just so unutterably bored that I couldn't make myself finish reading it. I know many people loved this book and I'm very happy for them but WOW I could not read it.

To anyone who doesn't already care deeply about the workings of the Hugo award and sff fandom history, this would be an enormously tedious book and also probably a bit baffling. But that's not the audience it's aimed at. It wants to meticulously document the whole situation around the Sad/Rabid Puppies' involvement in the Hugo Awards, including what led up to it and what happened after, to allow the people who already care to fully understand the scope and details. It is the most insider of insider baseball.

And you know what, I am that audience, and I did read all 269,000 or so words of the Complete Debarkle with rapt attention, though also more than one twitter complaint about just how endless the dang thing is.

It's not perfect (as an example, it trends too much in the direction of wanting to present both sides equally when it comes to discussing the Mixon report and the harassment perpetrated by Winterfox/Requires Hate/Benjanun Sriduangkaew), but by gum it achieves what it set out to do and it is a truly impressive achievement.

And despite my previous familiarity, I learned things. There were entire swathes of involved parties I never even heard of previous to this! I do feel like I have a much better grasp on exactly what happened, now, despite having fascinatedly read plenty of blog posts on the topic back in the mid-twenty-teens as it went down.

I also learned some things about older fandom history, and was fascinated to learn more, for example, about Baen Books, which I remember having a vague understanding of as a teen as being the only publisher of REAL science fiction, and now that I have the further context I am SO CURIOUS where I picked up that idea!

(I also learned that sff authors Elizabeth Moon and Elizabeth Bear are not in fact the same person. In my defence, Elizabeth Single-Syllable-Nature-Related-Noun feels like the kind of name that there would unlikely be more than one of within a small category of people! But this does explain why I could never quite remember what that Elizabeth's name was, lol.)

But overall the Complete Debarkle reads like a blog round-up post (well, because it is one, or an extensive series of ones), which is a very specific genre and style of writing. It's collecting information and putting it in front of you to observe the facts of what was said, making use of extensive quotes, rather than synthesising research to present in a more traditional nonfiction book style. There is some commentary, but the point of this kind of writing is less trying to explicitly construct an argument, and more trying to pile together vast quantities of primary source information to allow the readers to draw specific conclusions from the information presented.

I do wish that this book had been a lot shorter, but given that the approach the book was taking was "here's a whole lot of direct quotes from involved participants so you can see exactly what was said," I can see why it couldn't be any shorter within the framework of its intentions.

So the book is very successful, I think, at being exactly the thing it is trying to be, and I can appreciate it and what it's doing. And also dear god I'm grateful I am DONE it now and can STOP READING IT, it was starting to feel like I could literally never reach the end because it would go on forever.

Hugo finalists are out, and alas I'm not hugely excited about the results in a lot of the categories. BUT She Who Became the Sun is a finalist for best novel, and that's the most important thing!!! I was also very pleased to see "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" and "Unknown Number" in the short story list.

I've now set up my spreadsheet of all finalists in the categories I am able to engage with cogently, to keep track of what I've read and what my opinions are! So get ready for posts to trickle out over the next months with hugo opinions.

Let's start with going through all the short story nominees, since those are quick reads that are all available to read for free online.

1. Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather - Sarah Pinsker
I may agonize a bit longer about which order to place my top two stories in this category, as both this one and the next one are SO brilliant, but they're doing such different things that it's hard to actually compare them head-on. I love the way it engages with the folk tradition, and internet message boards, and also how it plays with how to communicate information to a reader beyond what is explicitly stated in the text.

2. Unknown Number - Blue Neustifter
The other story that's tied for first place! I love the premise of two versions of the same person from alternate universes communicating with each other by text message, and it's full of so much of both compassion and radical honesty about accepting who you are, it's incredible.

3. Proof by Induction - Jose Pablo Iriarte
Over the years I've read a number of short stories on the topic of a recorded copy of a person remaining after they're dead, and the living loved ones of that person interacting with the copy, and although this one's fine, I just don't feel like it's top-of-the-line in its particular subgenre.

4. Mr Death - Alix E Harrow
I can see and appreciate what this one's doing, but it just doesn't work for me personally. Plus the ending really irritates me, it feels far too facile that in the end it's actually TOTALLY fine what he did and it just means he gets a different job, even though he was gearing up to make a real sacrifice for something he thought was worth it.

5. Tangles - Seanan McGuire
This appears to be Magic: The Gathering fanfic, so I come at it with a disadvantage of knowing nothing about Magic other than that it's a deck-building card game, but not knowing canon has never actually a barrier for me in reading fanfic, lol. But I just found this story so uncompelling! I think there was a kernel of something mildly interesting in it, but the way it was expressed didn't work for me at all.

6. No Award

7. The Sin of America - Catherynne M Valente
When this first came out I think I gave up on it PRETTY early on. I have now tried reading it again, to give it its proper chance against the rest of the slate, but I found it SO boring that my eyes glazed over enough while reading and I definitely missed things. So like. I tried to read it again but I don't know if that really counts! But no thanks, this one's not for me.

Just realized that with the number of DNFs I have for the category, I can actually post about my final voting decisions for the Astounding Award even though I haven't read any Astounding books for quite a while!

1. Emily Tesh

Tesh's published works are two novellas: Silver in the Wood, and Drowned Country. Both books are really excellent and I love them without reservation! I particularly admire how good Tesh is at using her prose to evoke a specific mood in the reader, though there's also lots of other things to admire in these books.

2. Micaiah Johnson

Johnson's only book so far is The Space Between Worlds, which, though it didn't land perfectly for me, was still a thought-provoking and powerful read.

3. Simon Jimenez

Jimenez's novel offering is The Vanished Birds, which I found deeply upsetting, though it's very good at doing the things it's doing.

4. No Award

The other three in the category (AK Larkwood with The Unspoken Name, Lindsay Ellis with Axiom's End, and Jenn Lyons with The Ruin of Kings).....I tried reading all three of them and for all three of them I just found myself so very bored I couldn't find it within myself to bother continuing to read, though I did my best to get as far as I could. Are there worthwhile things in these books? There might well be, and probably are, given the amount of praise I've heard for them! But it just doesn't feel right for me to vote for any of them to win an award when I personally found them so utterly uncompelling, you know?

(relatedly: I only had the realization partway through this year that I can actually mark things below "No Award" if I really don't feel I can personally endorse it as one of the best things the genre has to offer in its category, so I have now gone back through and added in a "No Award" to previous Hugo posts where that's relevant!)

Hoorah, I have now read all of the finalists for the Hugo Best Novel this year! Let's go through my ranking of them.

For the books I finished and wrote a proper review, I've linked the review from the title of the book.

1. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

Fascinating and lovely and odd and touching, and hugely immersive for such a (relatively) short novel.

2. Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Interesting and enjoyable, loved the worldbuilding and the author's style, but frustrated by the cliffhanger ending.

3. Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

I struggled to be invested for the first half but once I was there I was THERE. Very weird in a very compelling way.

4. Network Effect, by Martha Wells

I adore Murderbot and everyone Murderbot cares about, but I had trouble following what was going on for a lot of this book. Possibly I was hampered by having a bad day when I was reading it. Possibly I should try rereading it before casting my final votes, because I may not be doing it justice here. We'll see if I get round to that...

5. The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal

I mostly enjoy the series, but this book didn't work for me as well as previous entries in the series did. Too stressful for my tastes, and the ending didn't work for me.

6. The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin

I've really enjoyed the other novels by Jemisin I've read, but this was a DNF for me. It felt overly invested in New York City being special, and also just overly invested in New York City, a city that I don't have any reason to care about at all, having no personal connection to it. I think there were other things that weren't working for me as well, but I no longer remember what they were! And I didn't write down my thoughts at the time of reading it. But the book just didn't work for me.

I've now made a go at all the things in the Best Related Work category for the hugos this year! It's always a real grab-bag of a category, since it's where you put anything that doesn't fit the other categories, and sometimes this means you are comparing things that have no business being compared to each other, I must say. This year's mix includes: a translation of a historic document, a biography of an sf writer, a youtube video/documentary type thing, a blog post, a convention, and a sort-of-convention held in reaction to a convention.

Anyway, I did my best, and here's how I'll be voting for this category. When relevant, a link to my full review is in the title of the entry.

1. Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley

Delightful and amazing!

2. The Last Bronycon: A Fandom Autopsy, by Jenny Nicholson

When the list of hugo finalists was released and I went through it, pretty much my first reaction was a baffled turn to youtube to watch this immediately, and uh, it turns out it's INCREDIBLE. Fascinating deep-dive documentary video into My Little Pony, bronies, and brony fandom, by someone who was there but who was at the same time a bit of an outsider due to gender.

3. A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E Butler, by Lynell George

Not my thing but I super respect it for the thing it is.

4. No Award

5. & 6. FIYAHCON and CoNZealand Fringe

Look, I just don't know how to rank conventions I wasn't at? I'm sure there was much to be admired about both of these but......even with the hugo packets I don't feel personally qualified.

7. George RR Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, by Natalie Luhrs

This is all perfectly fine and true, George RR Martin CAN indeed fuck off into the sun for how he behaved at last year's hugo award ceremony, but this brief blog entry just doesn't have enough to it to make it specifically feel worthy of winning an award, you know?