![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
auroracloudHugo voting closed about two hours ago; I got in most of my notes well over a day in advance (which is well done for me, I guess, considering how few of the nominees I'd read when I decided on an impulse to get a supporting membership). But I kept waffling about the John W. Campbell nominees (Best New Writer) until almost the last minute, because gosh darnit they're all so good and all deserve to win. Anyway, I naturally ended up reading fewer of the nominees than I wanted to, but still read quite a few things I might not otherwise have read, or would have taken much longer to. I thought I'd ramble a little about my reading experience and my thoughts, favourites etc. I ended up going for so long that I'm only covering the first two fiction categories in this post.
The most prestigious category, the Best Novel, was the one category among those I voted in that I read the least in. There were two sequels on the ballot, N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky and Yoon Ha Lee's The Raven Stratagem, and I hadn't read the previous volumes. I planned to read them and to vote on these as well. But when I was reading the first book of Jemisin's trilogy, The Fifth Season, it turned out I couldn't finish it and couldn't continue. It's a brilliant book, amazingly well and evocatively written, with fascinating worldbuilding and lots of meaningful content, and marginalized people getting a voice, and all those things that make me understand why everyone praises it and the series has won so many awards already. But it's just too dark and brutal for me to read. I know it's dark and brutal for a reason, but I have mental health issues that I simply have to put first, and dark stuff and violence in fiction can sometimes hurt me quite badly. Reading the first 100+ pages of the first book triggered an episode that I don't want to repeat. I'm not going into details, and I've had worse, but I don't need to deal with these just for a book, no matter how good it objectively is. If her book wins the Hugo for the third year in a row, I'll think it well deserved based on what I could read of the first book, but I'm still going to leave this series for people who can handle it better. This is the sort of mental health care that's not optional for me, so please don't try convincing me otherwise no matter how brilliant you find her books - trust me, I know what I'm doing.
After that experience, I decided to not read Yoon Ha Lee's books either, because I've heard from many sources that they're quite violent, and I figured I don't want to risk it. Mind you, I really enjoyed his novelette from the same universe that was nominated in the novelette category, so I might give the series a chance later on. Because it otherwise seems like something I would enjoy. But that left out The Raven Stratagem for now, too.
That left me with the remaining four nominees: John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire, Ann Leckie's Provenance, Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes, and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. I was able to read Scalzi's and Leckie's books in full, and enjoyed them both greatly. Scalzi's book was especially exciting, a space opera with worldbuilding that makes sense and so many fun characters and absurdly named spaceships and hilarious, compelling narrative. It ended up taking my top spot in the votes, and I can't wait for the next volume.
Leckie's standalone novel wasn't as mind-blowing as her Imperial Radch trilogy has been, but it was a good fun romp in one corner of her Radch universe, great comfort-reading material, and characters I just loved. I can't tell you how happy I am to have a heroine who actually gets to be emotional and have weak moments and freak-outs and tear-bursted breakdowns but still be clever, resourceful, and strong and brave where it counts. So often you just get these "strong female characters" who are basically the traditional male hero, just with boobs and long hair; crying, fears or weak moments just aren't allowed. It makes me happy to see a heroine who's real and relatable like this, and is allowed to have emotions and weaknesses but still be awesome. Also, kudos for a gender system that doesn't stop at the binary and that is just there, a part of the world that doesn't need to be explained. Also kudos for lovely incidental f/f romance that also just is there without being a big deal. So, while I thought Scalzi's book was a more brilliant novel on a whole, I was very happy to give this book the #2 spot.
I wasn't able to get a hold of Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes in time for the voting, and the Hugo package only had an excerpt. However, I enjoyed the excerpt enough that I ranked it anyway, and I hope it won't take too much longer before the library delivers it to me. I got 2140 out of the library, but I read maybe 25 pages before I decided I wasn't going to bother with any more of it. It was just so dull. A typical example of the sort of doorstopper scifi which has plenty of research and probably many good, commendable ideas, but no heart or soul. At least none became evident in those pages I read, in which we already went through quite a list of POV characters - surely even one should have been able to interest me enough to go on. So I didn't keep on reading, and didn't rank it.
In the shorter prose categories I managed to read all. The novellas category was particularly awesome - we're living in a new golden age of the novella, aren't we? I've found I've grown really fond of novellas, though I used to be mainly a fan of longer books and series. But there are stories which work the best in a compact format like the novella, or a series of novellas, rather than being arbitrarily stretched to novel length just because of industry standards. I love that the Hugo categories are varied enough to allow for the fact that different stories need different lengths to tell.
So with that preamble, novellas were one of the categories where I had such a hard time deciding what to vote for. Well, I did know one not to vote for - I really didn't care for Sarah Gailey's The River of Teeth and couldn't even bother finishing it. It's one of these things where the idea is interesting but it didn't have enough content to sustain it, and I was indifferent about the writing and the characters. But everything else was great. I had such a trouble ordering my top three, especially - All Systems Red, Seanan McGuire's Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Nnedi Okorafor's Binti: Home were all so great I wanted to put all of of them first.
I ended up with Murderbot first because I just love it that damn much (I fell in love with it already months ago, but reread it before the voting just for the fun of it), McGuire's book a close second, and Binti in the third place because I felt it wasn't quite as strong as a novella as the other two, though I love the worldbuilding and the main character. I'm totally in awe of all of these novella series and these authors, who have been among the best literary discoveries I've made this year. We're living in a golden age of science fiction and fantasy, we are.
Sarah Pinsker's And Then There Were N-One was a great, clever, meta story about multiverse versions of the same person having a huge convention together, and I enjoyed it very much. I placed it fourth because I felt less emotional connection to it than the first three, but I'm still very impressed by Pinsker as a writer. I feel JY Yang's The Black Tides of Heaven had lots of wonderful elements, especially in the world-building, and it was beautifully written, but it didn't fare as well in the novella format as the others. The narrative felt a bit too jumpy, and I would have needed to spend more time in the world and with the characters. I know there are sequels, but I do want each novella to also stand on its own, and here I felt too strongly that we only got half of the story. It's still quite good, don't get me wrong, and it says something about the level of the nominees that this one ended up only #5 for me.
Also, while I loved the gender system, where people are considered genderless as a child and choose their gender when they become adults, I found the use of the "they" pronoun difficult to read in a book that revolves around twins who spend all their time together (in the part of the story where they are referred to with the neutral pronoun, anyway). I had a hard time following when the narrative was talking about both of them and when just one of them. Not saying the singular they pronoun can't work in fiction, because it can, but in my reading experience it didn't quite succeed here, because I was confused a lot of the time.
I know it's hard to find a perfect solution in English, and this makes me so damn glad my own language doesn't have gendered pronouns at all and we don't need to deal with that particular mess, at least! Doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of other issues for non-binary or trans people, but at least the pronouns don't cause problems. (Of course, when translating books from languages like English, this lead into awkward constructions when the original makes a big gender revelation through a pronoun - I've read so many variants of the phrase "that woman said" which nobody would ever say in normal Finnish usage, but it's the only way to get the point of the original across. But it's worth it for the awesomeness of not having your goddamn pronouns gendered, let alone adjectives and stuff.)
Okay, this is getting really long. I'll get back to the remaining categories in another post (hopefully).
The most prestigious category, the Best Novel, was the one category among those I voted in that I read the least in. There were two sequels on the ballot, N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky and Yoon Ha Lee's The Raven Stratagem, and I hadn't read the previous volumes. I planned to read them and to vote on these as well. But when I was reading the first book of Jemisin's trilogy, The Fifth Season, it turned out I couldn't finish it and couldn't continue. It's a brilliant book, amazingly well and evocatively written, with fascinating worldbuilding and lots of meaningful content, and marginalized people getting a voice, and all those things that make me understand why everyone praises it and the series has won so many awards already. But it's just too dark and brutal for me to read. I know it's dark and brutal for a reason, but I have mental health issues that I simply have to put first, and dark stuff and violence in fiction can sometimes hurt me quite badly. Reading the first 100+ pages of the first book triggered an episode that I don't want to repeat. I'm not going into details, and I've had worse, but I don't need to deal with these just for a book, no matter how good it objectively is. If her book wins the Hugo for the third year in a row, I'll think it well deserved based on what I could read of the first book, but I'm still going to leave this series for people who can handle it better. This is the sort of mental health care that's not optional for me, so please don't try convincing me otherwise no matter how brilliant you find her books - trust me, I know what I'm doing.
After that experience, I decided to not read Yoon Ha Lee's books either, because I've heard from many sources that they're quite violent, and I figured I don't want to risk it. Mind you, I really enjoyed his novelette from the same universe that was nominated in the novelette category, so I might give the series a chance later on. Because it otherwise seems like something I would enjoy. But that left out The Raven Stratagem for now, too.
That left me with the remaining four nominees: John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire, Ann Leckie's Provenance, Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes, and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. I was able to read Scalzi's and Leckie's books in full, and enjoyed them both greatly. Scalzi's book was especially exciting, a space opera with worldbuilding that makes sense and so many fun characters and absurdly named spaceships and hilarious, compelling narrative. It ended up taking my top spot in the votes, and I can't wait for the next volume.
Leckie's standalone novel wasn't as mind-blowing as her Imperial Radch trilogy has been, but it was a good fun romp in one corner of her Radch universe, great comfort-reading material, and characters I just loved. I can't tell you how happy I am to have a heroine who actually gets to be emotional and have weak moments and freak-outs and tear-bursted breakdowns but still be clever, resourceful, and strong and brave where it counts. So often you just get these "strong female characters" who are basically the traditional male hero, just with boobs and long hair; crying, fears or weak moments just aren't allowed. It makes me happy to see a heroine who's real and relatable like this, and is allowed to have emotions and weaknesses but still be awesome. Also, kudos for a gender system that doesn't stop at the binary and that is just there, a part of the world that doesn't need to be explained. Also kudos for lovely incidental f/f romance that also just is there without being a big deal. So, while I thought Scalzi's book was a more brilliant novel on a whole, I was very happy to give this book the #2 spot.
I wasn't able to get a hold of Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes in time for the voting, and the Hugo package only had an excerpt. However, I enjoyed the excerpt enough that I ranked it anyway, and I hope it won't take too much longer before the library delivers it to me. I got 2140 out of the library, but I read maybe 25 pages before I decided I wasn't going to bother with any more of it. It was just so dull. A typical example of the sort of doorstopper scifi which has plenty of research and probably many good, commendable ideas, but no heart or soul. At least none became evident in those pages I read, in which we already went through quite a list of POV characters - surely even one should have been able to interest me enough to go on. So I didn't keep on reading, and didn't rank it.
In the shorter prose categories I managed to read all. The novellas category was particularly awesome - we're living in a new golden age of the novella, aren't we? I've found I've grown really fond of novellas, though I used to be mainly a fan of longer books and series. But there are stories which work the best in a compact format like the novella, or a series of novellas, rather than being arbitrarily stretched to novel length just because of industry standards. I love that the Hugo categories are varied enough to allow for the fact that different stories need different lengths to tell.
So with that preamble, novellas were one of the categories where I had such a hard time deciding what to vote for. Well, I did know one not to vote for - I really didn't care for Sarah Gailey's The River of Teeth and couldn't even bother finishing it. It's one of these things where the idea is interesting but it didn't have enough content to sustain it, and I was indifferent about the writing and the characters. But everything else was great. I had such a trouble ordering my top three, especially - All Systems Red, Seanan McGuire's Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Nnedi Okorafor's Binti: Home were all so great I wanted to put all of of them first.
I ended up with Murderbot first because I just love it that damn much (I fell in love with it already months ago, but reread it before the voting just for the fun of it), McGuire's book a close second, and Binti in the third place because I felt it wasn't quite as strong as a novella as the other two, though I love the worldbuilding and the main character. I'm totally in awe of all of these novella series and these authors, who have been among the best literary discoveries I've made this year. We're living in a golden age of science fiction and fantasy, we are.
Sarah Pinsker's And Then There Were N-One was a great, clever, meta story about multiverse versions of the same person having a huge convention together, and I enjoyed it very much. I placed it fourth because I felt less emotional connection to it than the first three, but I'm still very impressed by Pinsker as a writer. I feel JY Yang's The Black Tides of Heaven had lots of wonderful elements, especially in the world-building, and it was beautifully written, but it didn't fare as well in the novella format as the others. The narrative felt a bit too jumpy, and I would have needed to spend more time in the world and with the characters. I know there are sequels, but I do want each novella to also stand on its own, and here I felt too strongly that we only got half of the story. It's still quite good, don't get me wrong, and it says something about the level of the nominees that this one ended up only #5 for me.
Also, while I loved the gender system, where people are considered genderless as a child and choose their gender when they become adults, I found the use of the "they" pronoun difficult to read in a book that revolves around twins who spend all their time together (in the part of the story where they are referred to with the neutral pronoun, anyway). I had a hard time following when the narrative was talking about both of them and when just one of them. Not saying the singular they pronoun can't work in fiction, because it can, but in my reading experience it didn't quite succeed here, because I was confused a lot of the time.
I know it's hard to find a perfect solution in English, and this makes me so damn glad my own language doesn't have gendered pronouns at all and we don't need to deal with that particular mess, at least! Doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of other issues for non-binary or trans people, but at least the pronouns don't cause problems. (Of course, when translating books from languages like English, this lead into awkward constructions when the original makes a big gender revelation through a pronoun - I've read so many variants of the phrase "that woman said" which nobody would ever say in normal Finnish usage, but it's the only way to get the point of the original across. But it's worth it for the awesomeness of not having your goddamn pronouns gendered, let alone adjectives and stuff.)
Okay, this is getting really long. I'll get back to the remaining categories in another post (hopefully).
no subject
Date: 2018-08-01 05:02 pm (UTC)I'm glad you're taking care of yourself and putting that ahead of what other people might think.
no subject
Date: 2018-08-01 05:20 pm (UTC)But yeah, I totally get anyone choosing not to read those books who thinks they can handle it. I really wish I'd encountered the trigger warnings before I started reading. Of course the beginning clued me on pretty fast to the fact that it wasn't going to be a fluffy beach read, but if I'd had trigger warnings for it the way you get them in fan fiction and responsible websites and so on, I would have known not to read it. Oh well, at least I had the sense to stop when I did.
no subject
Date: 2018-08-02 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-08-16 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-08-16 08:01 pm (UTC)Oh, I totally agree! Tastes vary. : )