2015 Not A Hugo Award Nominees

So here I am, cranking up the handle on the long-disused blog. The 2015 Hugo Awards are freshly awarded (and, frequently, not awarded). That means the nominating stats are available. And that means we can reconstruct what the ballot would have looked like* if the two Puppies slates had not been involved. Tobias Buckell has already done the hard work there; you should check out his blog post.

All of that means it's time for the 2015 Not A Hugo Awards.

This is my plan: I'm going to read the works that would have been nominated in the four fiction categories. I'm going to pick my favourites. If anyone else wants to read along with me, I'm happy to collate votes**, and award the winners completely-unofficial, in-no-way-affiliated Not A Hugo Awards. So, on with the nominees:

Best Novel

Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US/Orbit UK)
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) (Tor Books)
The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator (Tor Books)
Lock In, John Scalzi (Tor Books)
City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennet (Broadway Books/Jo Fletcher Books)

Three of the five Not A Hugo novels were also nominated for Hugo Awards, so hopefully this one should be easy for Hugo voters.

Best Novella

The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss (DAW)
The Regular, Ken Liu (Upgraded, Wyrm Publishing)
Yesterday's Kin, Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
Grand Jete, Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Press)
The Mothers of Voorheesville, Mary Rickert (Tor.com)

Two of the nominated works are available to read free online at the links provided: Grand Jete by Rachel Swirsky, and The Mothers of Voorheesville by Mary Rickert. In the remaining three cases, I've linked to the publisher's websites, where you can find lots of places to buy. None of these stories were nominated for Hugo Awards.

Best Novelette

The Day the World Turned Upside Down, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed)
Each to Each, Seanan McGuire (Lightspeed)
The Devil in America, Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com)
The Litany of Earth, Ruthann Emrys (Tor.com)
The Magician and Laplace's Demon, Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld)

Happily, all five of these stories can be read online for free, at the links provided. Only one--The Day the World Turned Upside Down by Thomas Olde Heuvelt--was also nominated for a Hugo Award.

Best Short Story

The Jackalope Wives, Ursula Vernon (Apex)
The Breath of War, Aliette de Bodard (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
The Truth About Owls, Amal el-Mohtar (Kaleidoscope, Twelfth Planet Press/Strange Horizons)
When it Ends, He Catches Her, Eugie Foster (Daily Science Fiction)
A Kiss with Teeth, Max Gladstone (Tor.com)

Again, all five nominees can be read for free at the links provided. None of these stories were nominated for Hugo Awards.

At some point I'll come back and set a deadline for the 2015 Not A Hugo votes. In the meantime, suggestions welcome!



* There are caveats, of course. Tobias Buckell points out that two of the short stories--the Eugie Foster and the Max Gladstone--may not have received enough votes to climb above the 5% threshold required for nomination. Like him, I'm including them anyway. Also, without digging carefully through the numbers I can't say with 100% confidence that none of the Puppies' nominees would've made it under their own steam. I'm excluding them anyway.

** If I do receive any votes, I'm totally using the official Hugo Awards voting system.

A quick note on 2013 Hugo nominations

Nominating ballots for the 2013 Hugo Awards are due on March 10, so I'm starting to think about which books I'm going to put forward. I've managed (largely by accident) to read seven eligible works so far:

• Railsea by China Mieville
• Dinocalypse Now by Chuck Wendig
• A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix
• The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan
• Redshirts by John Scalzi
• Jack Glass by Adam Roberts
• The Games by Ted Kosmatka

The Drowning Girl and Jack Glass are definitely on my ballot, and Railsea is highly likely. I absolutely adored Dinocalypse Now, but like Leviathan Wakes last year, I just don't think I can bring myself to nominate it.

So what am I missing? I've probably got time to squeeze in another two or three books before the deadline. What should they be?

I'm currently reading Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds, so I've got that one covered. I'm going to skip 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson for now -- I expect it'll appear on the final ballot without my help. I'm also expecting Empty Space by M. John Harrison to be a contender, but I'm not sure if I should hold off on that one until I've (re-)read the other books in the Kefahuchi Tract series. vN by Madeline Ashby? Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed? Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear? Hannu Rajaniemi's Fractal Prince?

Anyone have any suggestions?

Hugos 2012: the novellas

Even as I sit down to write this, I have no idea how I'm going to choose between Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente, and "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson. I may just have to toss a coin. In fact, I really enjoyed most of this year's Best Novella Hugo ballot. There was only one story I actively disliked, and three of them were outstanding. Here's the part of my vote that I'm sure about:

3. "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" by Ken Liu
4. "The Ice Owl" by Carolyn Ives Gilman
5. "Kiss Me Twice" by Mary Robinette Kowal
6. No Award
7. Countdown by Mira Grant

Countdown is a prequel to Mira Grant's Feed. It suffers from a failing all too common in prequels: everything happens simply because it must. That made for a boring -- and occasionally silly -- story.

"Kiss Me Twice" by Mary Robinette Kowal is a noirish sci-fi mystery. I generally find that sort of thing quite enjoyable, and for most of its duration this story was no different. Unfortunately it stumbled at the end, with a dully conventional culprit. That left me less able to forgive earlier plot contrivances that I might otherwise have overlooked.

I really enjoyed "The Ice Owl" by Carolyn Ives Gilman while I was reading it, but now that I come to write about it I find that little of it has stayed with me. It's a coming of age story for a young refugee girl in an interesting space-operatic future, but I felt that the ending was too convenient. The snap, immature choice made by the main character was without consequences, and so had little impact.

My third choice is "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" by Ken Liu, but on a slightly weaker ballot I would have been very happy to put it first. Written in the format of a documentary, it uses a remote-viewing time travel device to explore a range of complex issues: cultural appropriation; post-WWII relations between China, Japan and America; political and societal responses to ethical and scientific issues; the immigrant experience, and a bunch more besides.

Like "Paper Menagerie", Ken Liu's other 2012 Hugo nominee, I think that "The Man Who Ended History" is a bit blunt. This may be deliberate -- Liu certainly doesn't pull any emotional punches -- but my feeling is that the story could have benefit from a touch more subtlety. Although it is extremely well executed, I'm also not a huge fan of the documentary-style format.

That brings me to my two favourite stories on the ballot: "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson, and Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente. There are a whole bunch of reasons why it feels unfair to have to choose between them. They are both excellent, sure, but they're also quite unlike each other. It's hard to know how to compare them. I wish they could both win.

Kij Johnson had short stories on the Best Short Story Hugo ballots in 2011 ("Ponies") and 2010 ("Spar"). Both were sharp, angry stories. See was also nominated in 2009 for "26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss". My memory of that story is hazy, but I think I found it sad. In contrast to all of this, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" is a gentle story. It's about a man who comes to a pair of small towns to build a bridge. 

In some ways, it feels like a fantasy story, with the mysterious Mist and the strange creatures that dwell in it. And yet it also reads like a science fictions story, in which engineers bring progress that changes everything. It's deeply immersive, with richly drawn characters. It's both resigned and hopeful. I really loved it.

If the Kij Johnson story was a joy to read, Catherynne Valente's Silently and Very Fast was much harder. Valente writes rich, folkloric prose that I am quite unable to read quickly. Make no mistake, though -- this is a science fiction story through and through. It's probably even fair to call it hard science fiction, although I suspect few lovers of traditional hard SF would agree.

Silently and Very Fast is a story about the birth and nurturing of artificial intelligence, told from the point of view of the first AI. I think it's about identity, and mythology, the way that we understand ourselves, and the way that an artificial intelligence may come to understand itself. It's also about prejudice and fear and even, amusingly, a brutal dismissal of the common 'robots will kill us all!' plot. But it's so dense, I'm willing to admit that I might only be scratching the surface. Or even missing the point entirely.

Last year's Hugo Award for Best Novella went to Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which was also about the creation of artificial intelligence. The two stories are really interesting companion pieces, because Chiang and Valente are quite unlike each other as writers. Strangely enough, despite Chiang's talent for rigorous scientific SF, there's something about Silently and Very Fast that feels more true to me.

Alright, I think I've finally figured out how I'm going to vote:

1. Silently and Very Fast, by Catherynne M. Valente
2. "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson

Oh, but I wish I could vote for both!

My prediction: Countdown by Mira Grant, because the Hugo voters seem to love that series.

Hugos 2012: the novelettes

The Best Novelette category of the Hugo awards is a bit of a funny one for me. I really love novella-length fiction, and a good short story is a beautiful thing, but I find it hard to get excited about the novelette. It just sort of hangs around in the middle there. Sometimes good ones come along*, but more often I struggle to muster any enthusiasm.

That's largely the case this year. I didn't hate any of the stories, but I only really liked one of them. Here's the way I'm intending to vote**:

1. "Six Months, Three Days" by Charlie Jane Anders
2. "What We Found" by Geoff Ryman
3. "The Copenhagen Interpretation" by Paul Cornell
4. "Fields of Gold" by Rachel Swirsky
5. "Ray of Light" by Brad R Torgersen.

If I were feeling less charitable, I might consider voting No Award ahead of "Ray of Light" by Brad Torgersen and "Fields of Gold" by Rachel Swirsky. Neither left much of an impression on me. I was particularly disappointed not to like the Swirsky story, given how much I enjoyed her novella on last year's Hugo ballot. I just couldn't figure out what "Fields of Gold" was supposed to be about. If it was intended to be funny, it didn't really succeed, and I felt it lacked any emotional punch.

I also wanted to like "The Copenhagen Interpretation" by Paul Cornell, an alternate reality tale of spies and embassies and delicate relations between Great Nations in a universe where spacetime can be folded for all sorts of interesting purposes. Unfortunately, I found it a bit confusing. I thought the terminology used to describe the science-fictional element was a little hard to parse, and I'm fairly unfamiliar with the historical period that the story is altering. Those two things in combination left me a bit lost.

It was also the science-fictional element in "What We Found" by Geoff Ryman that tripped me up. It's a well written story about a Nigerian scientist and his family, told in a very realist mode. The SF element concerns the decline effect, wherein the statistical significance of a scientific result is seen to decline with repeat experiments. There are lots of good reasons why this might be happening, but Ryman takes the idea that the act of observation is causing the laws of nature to unravel.

Under ordinary circumstances, I think I'd find that an interesting artifice. It's clearly not hard sci-fi, but that's no problem. The thing is, I felt the fantastical SF element clashed with the realist mode of the rest of the story. The main character's family life was compelling and believable, and that just made his science seem ridiculous to me.

I thought "Six Months, Three Days" by Charlie Jane Anders was the real standout of these five stories. It's about a relationship between a couple, both of whom can see the future. He sees a single path, fixed and unchangeable. She sees a wealth of possible futures from which she can choose. It's a beautifully told story about predestination and choice and the way in which we are changed (or not) by our experiences. The protagonists are utterly believable, and the fantastical element handled so delicately that despite being central to the story, you barely notice it's there.

My prediction: anyone's guess, but I'll say "What We Found" by Geoff Ryman.
Dark horse: "Fields of Gold" by Rachel Swirsky, because I've got a feeling it's a very American story.


* I seem to remember enjoying a few in 2010: "The Island" by Peter Watts and  "It Takes Two" by Nicola Griffith were both excellent.

** Huh. Turns out I've put the stories in exactly the same order as Nicholas Whyte, although I've been a touch more forgiving on "Ray of Light".

Hugos 2012: the short stories

I thought last year's Best Short Story Hugo ballot was pretty thin. I'm pleased to say that this year, three very good stories have been nominated. Here's the way I'm going to vote:

1. "Movement" by Nancy Fulda
2. "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu
3. "Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu
4. No Award
5. "The Homecoming" by Mike Resnick
6. "The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City" by John Scalzi

I've revised this list three times since I started writing this blog post. I'm having a genuinely difficult time separating the top three stories, and that's a good place to be. Let's get the ones I didn't enjoy out of the way, before moving on to the rest:

"The Homecoming" is a terribly predictable story about Alzheimer's. Honestly, I don't think I've ever met a Mike Resnick story I particularly liked, and this one is no different. His writing always seems so mechanical. The science fiction element here -- a xenobiologist son transformed into an alien -- seemed to serve no purpose beyond establishing that this story should be called science fiction.

The John Scalzi was a joke story, taking aim (as I'm sure you can guess from the title) at a particular type of epic fantasy. I didn't seem much going on here beyond the joke, which was itself only mildly amusing.

I think I first heard "The Paper Menagerie" on the fantasy podcast Podcastle, and I really loved it then. It was aided by an excellent reading from Rajan Khanna. On re-reading it for this ballot, I felt it was a bit blatantly emotionally manipulative, hence it's third place. Still well worth a read, though.

I'm very, very tempted to put "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" at the top of my list. I really loved this story, in which a nest of sophisticated wasps conquer a nest of provincial bees, and in doing so grant them the keys to revolution. It's about the clash of societies, and the power of education, and it's lovely.

In the end, I think Nancy Fulda's "Movement" is my favourite. It's the story of a girl with an invented condition called temporal autism. She feels the flow of time differently to everyone else -- the second batter her as they roar past, and yet to the people around her she seems to move and to think so slowly.

I have no direct experience with autism, and the condition here is somewhat fictional, but I thought Fulda explored it beautifully. I also got a thrill at seeing a story on the often-conservative Hugo ballot that admits we, grown-up readers, might just misunderstand youth. Like "The Paper Menagerie", it's a sentimental story, but I felt it was less overtly manipulative.

Really, though, I'd be quite content if any of the top three in my list won the award. If I had to guess at the winner, I'd probably pick "The Paper Menagerie", but I wouldn't feel particularly confident about it.

(If you have access to the Hugo voters packet, take a look at the PDF of E. Lily Yu's Campbell works. The cover, drawn specifically for the Campbell ballot, is adorable.)

Hugos 2012: the novels

The 2012 Hugo Voter Packet, containing all the written fiction nominees, has been released. I thought I'd celebrate by writing a post about how I intend to vote in the Best Novel category. If you've been following along, my choices won't be much of a surprise:

1. Embassytown by China Mieville
2. Among Others by Jo Walton
3. Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey
4. No Award
5. Deadline by Mira Grant
6. A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin

In the past, I've always considered this category the Big Award; I was reading all the Hugo nominated novels long before I started chasing up the shorter fiction. But this year, I confess, I'm not all that interested.

Partly that's because I read the majority of the books before the ballot was announced. Partly, I suspect, it's because the result seems a foregone conclusion to me (and it's not a result I can get behind). And partly, it's because other Best Novel ballots have excited me much more -- particularly the Nebulas and the BSFA Awards. Which isn't to say that the books on the Hugo ballot aren't worth reading; three of them are great.

I could very easily have put Among Others at number one; that I chose Embassytown instead probably just reflects my preference for science fiction. I think Christopher Priest has convinced me that Embassytown is more flawed than Among Others, but I also think it is reaching further. Trying for something a bit more complex. I'm going to tell myself that's why I'm voting for it. 

I've already spoken about my reluctance to nominate space operas like Leviathan Wakes for big awards. I'm still not comfortable with that, but there it is.

Voting for No Award ahead of both Deadline and A Dance With Dragons may be an overreaction. They (probably) aren't terrible books. But here's the thing: I can imagine recommending Embassytown to anyone who might like idea-rich SF, Among Others to anyone who'd enjoy beautifully-written fantasy, Leviathan Wakes to anyone who likes rollicking space opera. But I could only give Deadline or A Dance With Dragons to someone who read and enjoyed their prequels.

So those are my votes. I'm looking forward to the shorter fiction categories -- the two stories I've read already have been great, and that makes me hopeful.

My prediction: A Dance With Dragons, in a landslide.
Dark horse: Among Others, thanks to a nostalgic streak in Hugo voters.

Best Novel Hugo 2012 nominations

I've just submitted my nominations for the 2012 Best Novel Hugo. They are:

• The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Tor Books)
• Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor Books)
• Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)
• Embassytown by China Mieville (Del Rey)
• Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh (Night Shade Books)

It's probably not a very surprising list, given what I've said here previously, but I'm quite pleased with it. If these were the five books that appeared on the final ballot, I'd have real difficulty choosing a winner. That may seem like a statement of the obvious, but it isn't; in a different year, I would have been very happy to nominate Grail by Elizabeth Bear or Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, knowing full well that I wouldn't vote for them to win.

It's also a list that makes clear many of my preferences, and I suppose that's as it should be. There's more science fiction than fantasy, and the fantasy I did include -- Among Others and Mechanique -- isn't very traditional. Mechanique in particular is pretty genre-bendy (io9 called it "a steampunk/post-apocalyptic/magical-realist/paranormal adventure"). If I were hell-bent on classifying it, I'd probably rather call it weird fiction than fantasy.

Four of the five novels on my list are stand-alone, and the only one that isn't (The Quantum Thief) is the first book in a series; none of its sequels have appeared yet. I've also veered towards the literary end of the genre(s). That doesn't surprise me, but I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

If these were the five novels on the final ballot, I have some guesses about how the voting would go. Interestingly, at least to me, they're pretty much all based on my perception of the Hugo voting community, and not the novels themselves. 

I'd pick Embassytown to win -- I think Hugo voters like China Mieville, and they tend to prefer science fiction over fantasy. Among Others would have to be in with a chance, though, thanks to its loving nostalgia for the science fiction genre. Nostalgia was a prominent feature on last year's Hugo ballot, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Hugo voters have reading histories quite similar to the protagonist in Among Others.

I don't see any way that Soft Apocalypse could win, mainly because it's quite confronting. My feeling is that books like that, no matter how good, don't win popularity contests. Probably Mechanique faces similar difficulties. The Quantum Thief could be a bit of a dark horse. Normally I'd call it unlikely, because it's a demanding read. But it is rich with science fictional ideas, and that is something that I suspect the Hugo readership likes.

Anyway, enough speculating about a list that may correlate only weakly with the actual final ballot. The official announcement of the nominees is a month from today, on April 7th. What do you reckon the odds are that George R. R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons will make an appearance? And that it'll go on to win? And that I'll be grumpy about it?

I (plan to) nominate...

As part of my Worldcon membership last year, I'm entitled to nominate for the 2012 Hugo Awards. In past years I haven't bothered, mostly because I didn't really feel qualified. This year, though, I actually read a few books that were published in 2011, and are therefore eligible for 2012 Hugo Awards:

The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi*
Mechanique, by Genevieve Valentine
Planesrunner, by Ian McDonald
Grail, by Elizabeth Bear

What's more, I've got some sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read:

Soft Apocalypse, by Will McIntosh

The Highest Frontier, by Joan Slonczewski
Among Others, by Jo Walton

Embassytown, by China Mieville
The Islanders, by Christopher Priest

The deadline for nominating is Sunday March 11 -- I'm going to try to get through as many of the 2011 books as I can before then, to see if I think any of them are deserving of nomination. 

I'm going to be strategic about the order in which I read them. The Islanders will be last because, honestly, I don't think it has a hope of making the final ballot. My vote won't make much of a difference there. Neither will it make much of a difference for Among Others or Embassytown, both of which I expect to see on the final ballot. That makes Soft Apocalypse and The Highest Frontier the most interesting ones, and so I'll tackle them first.

The Quantum Thief (my favourite science fiction book of 2010) and Mechanique (my favourite fantasy book of 2011) are already on my nominations list. I may yet nominate Grail, which I enjoyed very much. I don't think I'm ever going to be truly comfortable nominating the third book in a series, though. I'm just not sure how well it stands on its own. Besides, I'm only allowed to nominate five books.

I'll let you know how I go!

* This one is in on a technicality -- it was first published in 2010, but it was first published in the US in 2011.

Hugos 2011: the shouting

The winners of the 2011 Hugo Awards have been announced, and just for future reference, I'm bad at picking them.

Actually, that's not really fair. Obviously when I was voting I went for the entries that I thought should win. If you'd asked me instead to pick the entries I thought would win, I think I would have guessed right in three of the four fiction categories (and I would have had no idea what to pick from the Best Short Story list). I really must remember to make predictions alongside my votes next year.

So here are my rapid-fire thoughts on the Hugo results, which I've had roughly an hour to digest. Let me get the facetiousness out of the way first: the Best Doctor Who Episode Hugo went to a Doctor Who episode, and the Best Girl Genius Story Hugo went to a Girl Genius story. To their credit, I understand the Foglios announced that they would be withdrawing Girl Genius from contention for the Best Graphic Story Hugo next year. It remains to be seen if that will turn it into an interesting category. My guess is if there's a Fables book eligible in 2012, it will win. Unless Neil Gaiman writes another comic book. 

Best Novel
Winner: Blackout / All Clear by Connie Willis
Where I ranked it: didn't read it
My pick: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
Where it came: fifth

I'm trying pretty hard to resist the temptation to comment on this result, since I didn't actually read Blackout / All Clear. I liked the one Connie Willis novel I've read, a whole lot, but 1100 pages just seemed excessive. I kind of feel like I should give it a shot now, though, so I can have an informed opinion.

It's somewhat disappointing to see my pick -- The Dervish House -- come in last, particularly since I think it was overwhelmingly the best science fiction novel (that I read) on the ballot. That last place result is a little misleading, though, since the official stats show The Dervish House came third after the first redistribution of preferences, and was actually only three votes behind Blackout / All Clear after the first count. I think The Dervish House was the most challenging book on the ballot (that I read), so perhaps it's unsurprising that it got killed on preferences.

Best Novella
Winner: The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang
Where I ranked it: second
My pick: "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window" by Rachel Swirsky
Where it came: third

Okay, so honestly, I don't think I ever expected Rachel Swirsky's story to win. It's a fantasy story, for a start, and my feeling is that Hugo voters generally prefer the science fiction. There's also a bit of feminism about it, which is another thing that I think Hugo voters don't typically like. And to top it off, Ted Chiang is beloved of the Hugo voters: this is his eighth Hugo nomination, and his fourth win. I'm okay with this result. I don't think it's Chiang's best work, but it is an interesting story, for sure. 

It is also interesting to me that "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerephon" by Elizabeth Hand came in last, fairly convincingly. I thought it was a pretty strong story, but it was (almost?) completely devoid of science fictional or fantastical elements, which seems to have ruled it right out of contention.

Best Novelette
Winner: "The Emperor of Mars" by Allen M. Steele
Where I ranked it: second
My pick: "Plus or Minus" by James Patrick Kelly
Where it came: third

I think the obvious love for the history of science fiction on display in "The Emperor of Mars" was a huge factor in its win, and you know, I can get behind that. It wasn't a challenging story, and to be frank I'd be surprised if it went down in history as one of the greats, but it did make me smile. I'm not sad to see it win.

The second place went to "Eight Miles" by Sean McMullen, which means the two stories paying direct homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs took out the first two places. Bodes well for the forthcoming John Carter movie, eh? I know I'll be going to see it, although I refuse to comment on whether that's because Taylor Kitsch is in it!

Best Short Story
Winner: "For Want of a Nail" by Mary Robinette Kowal 
Where I ranked it: second
My pick: "The Things" by Peter Watts
Where it came: third

I really don't have much to say about this one -- I've already commented that I thought the Short Story nominees weren't particularly strong this year. In general, I like Mary Robinette Kowal's stuff, so I'm happy for her that she's taking home her first Hugo.

So that's it for another year. I think if I have a closing comment, it's to encourage you to look beyond the winners to the list of nominees. Blackout / All Clear won both the Hugo and the Nebula this year, but if you read only that one you'll be missing out on some really great novels.

Oh, and congratulations to all the winners!

Hugos 2011: Cryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold

I feel like I've been a bit negative around here recently, and I'm about to do it again, so I'm going to keep this one short. I've spent quite a bit of time in the last week queuing for movies at the Sydney Film Festival, and I used that time to knock over Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is (I think) the thirteenth Miles Vorkosigan novel. I haven't read any of the other books in the series.

I'm guessing Vorkosigan has a large fan base, because I can think of no other reason why this book would make it on to the Hugo ballot. I suppose it is an okay airport novel, and I probably wouldn't have thought too badly of it -- or thought about it much at all -- were I not comparing it to The Dervish House and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

Miles Vorkosigan, Imperial Auditor, is so supremely talented that it is obvious from the very first chapter he will prevail. There is no tension at all, and in fact the plot twists -- if you could even call them twists -- are telegraphed well in advance. My overwhelming impression is of comfort reading. Characters we are assumed to know, being as Good and Strong and Clever as always, succeeding as we know they must.

If you're a Vorkosigan fan, I'm sure you loved it. And no doubt you were pleased by the dramatic epilogue, which set the stage for book fourteen. For the rest of us, there's really not much here.

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.

Hugos 2011: the short stories

I just got through reading the nominees for this year's Best Short Story Hugo. I don't like sounding negative, but I'm just going to say it: I wasn't particularly impressed.

I'm unfamiliar with Carrie Vaughn, and "Amaryllis" doesn't really make me want to rush out and read any of her other work. It's a story about the captain of a fishing boat in a resource-scarce community. She's had a tough life, we're told, but I didn't see any sign of hardship. There was a conflict with a bullying official that was resolved so quickly and simply it barely seemed like a conflict at all. I'm not sure how this one ended up on the ballot.

I am familiar with Kij Johnson's short stories. She was nominated in this category last year for "Spar", which I enjoyed very much. Well, not so much enjoyed as found compelling. Anyway, this year's nominee, "Ponies" seems so obvious that I really don't know what to say about it. It's a very short piece, about using girl's toys as a tool for enforcing conformity. Not much here, and none of it very interesting.

Mary Robinette Kowal's "For Want of a Nail" is a bit better than the previous two. It's about a young woman on a generation ship who is in charge of maintaining her family's AI. When she accidentally breaks its wireless connection, she stumbles on to a startling secret. Which is actually a pretty good setup, and I like the way Kowal writes, but the problem is the story gets a bit jumbled. The world building feels like it doesn't make sense, and the story manages to undermine its own message about the choice between senility or death. The result is a bit frustrating.

The pick of the list is "The Things", by Peter Watts. It is, I gather, a re-telling of the 1982 John Carpenter film The Thing from the point of view of, umm, the Thing. I haven't seen that film, so I had to take the story on its own merits. What I saw was a story about a very alien alien struggling to understand a group of humans who were reacting very badly to it. Watts' writing is kind of punchy, while I quite like. I do think "The Things" is held back a little by over-reliance on its source material, though. There were bits I struggled to follow, since I know nothing about the film's chronology. And honestly, I don't think those bits added much to the story.

So there you have it. My vote on a fairly average shortlist is for "The Things", with "For Want of a Nail" a fairly distant second. A quick google pops up tables of contents for three 2010 Year's Best anthologies, edited by Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, and Gardner Dozois. I am unsurprised to see that the only story from this shortlist which appears in all three is "The Things". Apart from "Amaryllis" in Dozois' Year's Best, none of the others appear at all. I'm okay with that.

Hugos 2011: The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald

Only twice in my life have I had any desire to visit Istanbul. The first time was during a Roman history course at University. The second time was just now, as I finished The Dervish House.

The Dervish House is about lots and lots of things. It's about economics, terrorism, religion, nano-technology, Istanbul, revolution, migrant communities, and history. It's about patterns, and choices. And most importantly, it's about a boy imprisoned by his heart condition, an ambitious young commodities trader, a Greek economics professor long since driven from academia, the owner of a gallery of religious artefacts and curios, a lost and broken young man, and a young woman trying to both escape from, and prove herself to, her family. 

Reading this book felt like learning. The good kind of learning, where you're exposed to interesting ideas and places, and pleasantly surprising little stories. The book is full of remembrances and flashbacks, which serve both to drive the plot forward and illuminate the characters. Each one feels like a lovely little story-package, enjoyable both for its role in the novel and as a fragment itself. The re-telling of the creation of the Mellified Man of Iskenderun, for example, is a piece of writing that will stay with me for a very long time. Just thinking about it makes me smile.

I think it is fair to say that this is a book that requires some work from the reader, and that may not be to everyone's taste. There's a lot of ideas to keep straight here. I said before that I think McDonald's writing is very information-dense, and The Dervish House is no different. It's important to add, though, that the book is about how the characters interact with those ideas -- this certainly is not the type of science fiction where ideas are more important than people.

If I had one criticism, it's that the ending felt a little too inevitable. Perhaps it was telegraphed a bit early. I didn't really have that wonderful moment, like in Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, when all the plot threads coalesced into a suddenly brilliant whole. But it's really a minor criticism -- once I got into it, I just wanted to keep reading and reading. It may not all have fit in my head, but I would have read this book in a weekend if I could.

The Dervish House is currently my vote for the Best Novel Hugo, absolutely. When I travel, I love to stay in a place long enough to get a feel for what it's like to live there. The Dervish House felt not only like travelling to Istanbul in 2027, but to the lives of six people quite unlike me. It made me feel smart, and engaged, and it made me happy.

Hugos 2011: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N. K. Jemisin

I'm not going to write a review of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I don't think I'm very good at reviews, and there are lots of them on the internet anyway. Like here, or here. Or here. Instead, I'm just going to say a few words about my impressions.

I liked The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms better than Feed. Mainly, I think that's because it feels like there's a lot more going on. More depth to the ideas, and to the prose. There are similarities in underlying themes -- both books seem to contain reactions to the prevailing sense that we need to be protected from some amorphous evil outsider, potentially at the cost of some of our freedoms. I think those themes are explored much more subtly in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

The stars of the book are Gods -- of night, war, wisdom, trickery -- jammed down into the bodies of mortals as punishment for losing the Gods' War. That's a difficult concept for an author to deal with, I think. On the one hand, you've got to make them alien enough that the reader believes they're immortal beings (at least one of whom existed before time), the embodiments of ideas. On the other, they have to be comprehensible enough to make interesting characters. Jemisin handled this balancing act really well.

The prose was pretty attractive, too. Certainly more than just functional. Jemisin played a few tricks with structure, which could have been confusing, but managed to resolve themselves at pretty much exactly the right time. Her narrator was believable, and although she was perhaps one of the least interesting characters, I was never bored with her.

Both Feed and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms have sequels. While the former -- Decline -- doesn't really interest me, I do intend to read The Broken Kingdoms. That's mostly because it sounds like it's going to be a completely different type of novel to the first. Almost entirely new characters, in a completely different situation (away from the halls of power). That the sequel isn't just more of the same bodes well for Jemisin's chances of becoming one of my new favourite fantasy authors.

Next Hugo nominee off the shelf is The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald. I'm a little nervous about starting it, actually. I adore McDonald's novella-length fiction, but I've got a much more fraught relationship with his novels.

Hugos 2011: Feed, by Mira Grant

So. Zombies.

Look, I love a good zombie movie. But honestly, they interest me in novels and short stories just about as much as vampires do. Which is to say generally not much, although I'm willing to make the occasional exception. Usually those exceptions are reserved for authors I already like, or a premise that seems genuinely different.

Mira Grant's* Feed definitely falls into the latter category. For a start, it isn't your standard zombie apocalypse novel -- it takes place decades after the Kellis-Amberlee virus caused the first zombie outbreak. And it didn't lead to the end of the world; American society goes on, albeit locked behind layers of security and in a perpetual state of fear.

And the main characters are bloggers. The first bloggers ever to officially follow a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. It's kind of like The West Wing with zombies. And a Republican instead of a Democrat, and bloggers instead of the President's staff, and… yeah, really nothing like The West Wing.  But American politics is kind of fascinating to me, and so it's a great hook to drag me into the story. Grant's premise is good.

And so is her execution (heh). The book is very, very readable. Grant writes well. I don't mean that I revelled in the beautiful way she rubbed words against each other. Rather, I think this book is an excellent example of invisible prose -- the words fly by as if you're hardly reading them, leaving you to race along with the plot (and with the entertainingly caustic narrator, the 'Newsie' Georgia Mason).

The plot itself is, I suppose, a fairly conventional conspiracy thriller. I find that sort of thing very readable, in much the same way as I find procedural cop shows on television very watchable. I didn't think it was a particularly surprising conspiracy -- it was fairly obvious who the bad guys were -- but that's okay when the execution is so good. I may not have been surprised, but I will say that I cared when bad things happened to the bloggers (and bad things certainly did happen to them).

The zombies, and the world that the survivors live in, are a fairly obvious metaphor for the War on Terror and modern-day, fear-ridden America. I'm not going to say much about that -- it's there, it's not unexpected, it's not particularly ground-breaking, but it also isn't hammered to the point of irritation.

I do think the book is too long. The edition that I'm reading is 570 pages. It didn't ever lose me, but the thriller-shaped plot seems much better suited to something about half the length. The book is paced to keep you flipping the pages, and fortunately I had enough free time to consume it quite quickly. If I'd been forced to read it slower, it might have suffered. The danger of a reduced length, though, is that it might have come at the expense of the world building, and that's what initially drew me in.

As is often the case when I sit down to attempt a review, I feel like I'm focussing on the negatives at the expense of the positives. I would never have picked this book up were it not for the Hugo nomination, but I'm glad that I did. It was an enjoyable read from start to finish, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I cared about the characters when it all reached crisis point. Would I recommend it to everyone I met? Nope. But I would recommend it to anyone who liked zombies and at least one of politics, political journalism, or thrillers.

There's a sequel -- Deadline -- due out in the UK in a few weeks. I honestly can't tell you if I'll ever read it, but if somebody handed it to me I probably wouldn't have any objections.

* Mira Grant is a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, winner of last year's John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer**. It feels weird talking about Grant like she is a real person.

** Not a Hugo.

Hugos 2011: got to start somewhere

I have started my Hugo reading today, with Mira Grant's Feed. I'm doing my level best not to pre-judge, but I'm just saying: Ms. Grant (or Ms. McGuire, whatever), you're going to have to work hard to carry me happily through a 570-page zombie novel whose main characters are bloggers. I wish you luck!

Also paid for my supporting membership at Renovation, this year's Worldcon. I'm probably going to need that Hugo Voter Packet to get my hands on all the novellas and novelettes!

Added 5 May 2011: wait, it's a novel about a presidential campaign in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse? Your task just got easier, Ms. Grant!

Adding to the Hugo noise

Here I go again, complaining about lists on the internet...

So you may or may not have heard that this year's Hugo nominees have been announced. A couple of years back, I decided to read all of the nominated novels, to see if I agreed with the eventual winner (short answer: I did). Last year, I was lucky enough to attend Worldcon, so I made a point of reading all of the nominated fiction so I could make an informed vote on the Hugos. This year, I'm intending to do the same.

I can't really comment yet about the nominees in the Best Novella, Novelette or Short Story categories. To the best of my knowledge, I have only read one of them: Ted Chiang's novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects. I liked it well enough, but I don't think it was his best work. There are five nominees in various categories from Asimov's, so I'll have to go digging through my pile of (sadly) unread back-issues to find those ones.

I do want to say a few words about the Best Novel category, despite also having read none of them. First, it's pleasing to see that four of the five nominated books were written by women. The gender balance typically isn't great in that category. Only fifteen of sixty-two Best Novel nominees in the last decade were written by women (and a bit of foreshadowing here: four of them were Lois McMaster Bujold novels, and two Connie Willis novels). A nominee list dominated by women can only mean good things for the genre.

I have to admit, though, that the list isn't particularly exciting me. I'm unsurprised to see The Dervish House by Ian McDonald there, and I'm looking forward to reading it. I had also planned to read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin, so I'm happy to see it on the list. I haven't heard anything about Feed by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire), but I'm very willing to approach it with an open mind.

The last two nominations are the ones that leave me a little dismayed. Blackout/All Clear is actually two books by Connie Willis, adding up to a combined total of something like 1200 pages in the US hardcover editions. The books are set in the same universe as her earlier Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, both of which also won Best Novel Hugos. I'm a little confused how two books got nominated as one entry. Maybe they're both very worthy, but even given how much I enjoyed To Say Nothing of the Dog, the thought of reading a further 1200 pages in the same setting doesn't fill me with excitement.

And then there is Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold. A quick skim of her Wikipedia page suggests this is the thirteenth Miles Vorkosigan novel. I think it is the eighth in the series to be nominated for a Hugo (four of them won). Perhaps it's just my own ugly prejudices in action again, but I find it hard to believe that the thirteenth book (or nineteenth, or twenty-fifth, depending how you count it) in a series can really be that good.

I guess it feels like the last two entries -- Blackout/All Clear and Cryoburn -- are obvious nominations, given to beloved authors because they put out another book. Of course, I shouldn't judge before I've actually read them, so here is my promise to you: I'll report back as I work my way through each of the novels. Except possibly Blackout/All Clear. I just don't know if I can hack it.