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.

Sequels and awards

A couple of weeks back, I started reading Deadline [2011] by Mira Grant. It's the sequel to Feed [2010], which I read when it was on the Hugo ballot last year, and liked well enough. Deadline is on the Hugo ballot this year; that's why I picked it up.

A quarter of the way through, roughly 130 pages, I made the difficult decision to stop reading. As far as I can remember, this is the first time I've ever given up on a book part way through. I didn't stop because Deadline was bad. I stopped because I felt like I'd read it before, when I read Feed. 

The plot was somewhat different (a logical extension of the first novel, as befits a proper sequel), and the characters had been shuffled around, but for all intents and purposes it was the same thing again: a gritty zombie conspiracy thriller. Which is fine if that sort of thing really excites you, or if you developed a particular attachment to the characters from the first novel. I didn't particularly, and so it ultimately didn't seem worth my while to keep reading.

That got me thinking about sequels in general, and specifically sequels on award ballots. Honestly, sequels on award ballots annoy me. For a start, they're rarely readable in isolation -- you couldn't possibly read A Dance With Dragons [2011] by George R. R. Martin without having read the previous four books in the series. Even if you could you probably wouldn't want to; much of the enjoyment of a sequel is in seeing how the story continues, or what happens to characters you love.

My second issue with sequels on awards ballots is more a matter of personal taste. I think a big part of my enjoyment reading science fiction and fantasy comes from a sense of discovery. I want to be surprised by an author's ideas, and I have lots of fun figuring new things out. I feel like a lot of that creative heavy lifting, with setting and concept and often character, occurs in the first novel in a series.

Which isn't to say that I dislike sequels. This last year I've read two series that I've really enjoyed: Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder series, and N. K. Jemisin's The Inheritance Trilogy. But I think I can honestly say that in each case, the first book in the series was the best.

There's one exception to this rule, and that's the sequel that utilises a familiar setting, but a completely new set of characters and situations. China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels fit the bill (I liked the second, The Scar [2002], best). So do (most of) Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels (Chasm City [2001] is my pick, the second in the series). Also Iain M. Banks' Culture novels (I'd probably go with Use of Weapons [1990], the third Culture novel).

I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that no sequel (of the continuing-story kind) should ever be eligible for an award. But I am going to contend that there has to be something really special going on for it to appear on a ballot. For me, sequels have an extra hurdle to overcome before I consider them worthy of award nominations. It's not enough that I love the series, or that I enjoyed the previous novels in it. It has to truly, honestly stand on its own.

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!