Hugos 2011: ettes and las

I have now devoured the Best Novelette and Best Novella Hugo nominees, and so I thought I might talk a bit about them. I'm not going to go through all ten of them in detail. That would probably be boring for you, and then I'd feel guilty for boring you and I'd apologise too much and you'd get angry at me for all the apologising, and that's not a situation from which I'm particularly good at recovering. So I'll try to avoid it by sticking to some more general comments.

Novelettes

It's probably true that I've read less classic science fiction than I should. Nevertheless, hang around long enough and you'll pick up a few things, and so even I spotted just how nostalgic this year's Best Novelette nominees are. Both "Eight Miles" by Sean McMullen and "The Emperor of Mars" by Allen M. Steele pay obvious homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels*, and "Plus or Minus" by James Patrick Kelly is clearly a response to Tom Godwin's classic "The Cold Equations". Nostalgia isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not particularly exciting. And that's pretty much sums up how I feel about this year's Best Novelette nominees.

I wanted "The Jaguar House in Shadow" by Aliette de Bodard to be my favourite, because it seemed the newest. It is set in a future where a powerful Mexican empire dominates Central (and South?) America. Unfortunately, it felt like a fragment of a larger story. I think a lot of the interesting aspects of the setting were unexplored for no other reason than de Bodard had done it somewhere else.

In the end, I think I'm going to pick "Plus or Minus" for the award -- it's a fairly interesting story, and I think it works as a modern response to a classic. "The Cold Equations" (and, arguably, classical physics) is all about absolutes, whereas things get fuzzier in "Plus or Minus" (and, I suppose, modern physics). My second choice would be "The Emperor of Mars". Sure, it's just a love letter to classic sci-fi, but it's whimsical enough to make me smile.

Novellas

Two of my favourite authors appeared among the Best Novella nominees this year, writing in two of my favourite sub-genres: Ted Chiang, with the hard SF "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", and Alastair Reynolds with the space opera "Troika". Imagine my surprise, then, to find myself falling instead for "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window", a high fantasy story by Rachel Swirsky.

I have an idea that Rachel Swirsky is a writer of sort of romantic sci-fi and fantasy. If I were being uncharitable, I'd call it faeries and unicorns sort of stuff. I think maybe that's an inaccurate assessment -- my sense of her writing may have been coloured by her tenure as editor of the fantasy fiction podcast PodCastle. The premise of "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window" seems to fit the bill, though: a sorceress from a matriarchal society, where only women can perform magic, is bound to linger after death, conjured up through the ages by all manner of people seeking wisdom and power.

Thing is, the characters in this one (especially Naeva, the narrator) are so well drawn I got quite swept up in it. The writing is really lovely, and I'm a fan of stories told in snippets across generations. I think Swirsky was writing about prejudice, amongst other things, but I really appreciated that the story wasn't heavy-handed with its themes. So many of the shorter works on this year's Hugo ballot seem kind of obvious, but Swirsky's story was much better than that.

As it happens, I really enjoyed reading through the Best Novella list this year. I do think it's a great length for sci-fi. It's particularly interesting to me that the two novellas I had the most fun reading -- "Troika" by Alastair Reynolds and "The Sultan of the Clouds" by Geoffrey A. Landis -- were the ones I ended up ranking fourth and fifth (second-last and last), but I think I'll ponder that a little more and maybe talk about it later.

So there you have it. I'm confident I have now read enough to submit informed votes in all of the (non-visual) fiction categories. Nevertheless, I'm still planning to tackle Lois McMaster Bujold's Cryoburn, and hopefully some of the Best Graphic Story entries. I'll let you know how it goes!

* It's right there in their titles: "… of Mars" was the pattern for the titles of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom stories, and the word "Barsoom" means "Eight[h] Planet" in Burroughs' fictional Martian language.