Reading and watching roundup, with Deadpool 2
44. Ursula Vernon, Knight-Napped (Dragonbreath #10) -- This was really cute! I enjoyed it more than #11, possibly because so much of the focus was on Christiana, or maybe just because knights vs dragons as an endangered species thing (they're both endangered) is amusing. I actually laughed out loud in one spot, and had to read it to L:
Danny: "I can't believe after all the times you've been like Nooo Danny, you can't interfere with the natural order! that you want me to go pester some knights."
Wendell: "You wanted to cross my goldfish with a potato!"
Danny: "I was going to start a mutant fish-and-chip farm."
Wendell: "You were using masking tape."
And another quote from Christiana that I enjoyed a lot: "Don't look at me. I don't do Spirit Week. It's like brainwashing without the fun bits."
And that's it. I'm done with the series, which is a bit bittersweet, as I've been reading these along with the rodents since they were in the target audience... Fortunately, there's still Hamster Princess to keep us going :)
45. Ursula Vernon, Of Mice and Magic (Hamster Princess 2) -- these just keep getting more adorable. Having dealt with her own curse, Harriet is now basically a questing curse-breaker hero, and in this one she takes on the story of the Twelve Dancing (mouse) Princesses. Spoilers The mice are even more adorable than the hamsters, especially when covered in paint. Also adorable are the mole princes, and the old lady by the side of the road who is (*gasp*) sekritly a fairy is a shrew, which is an inspired choice. I liked that the anal mouse king and the mole witch (Molezelda XD) got their anal happily ever after, sorting books by color, and that Harriet defeats the guards by exploiting the royal decree about clashing with the color-coded rooms (and that even before she needs to defeat anyone, Harriet is tempted to wear a rainbow hat in the palace to clash with EVERYTHING). I also approve of Harriet's love of fractions being an enduring character trait, and that August the mouse princess says "I don't want to marry you, no offense" in exactly the same way to Harriet and to Wilbur the prince (now working as a stableboy to help make some extra cash to fix his castle's basement). L asked me if I ship Wilbur/Harriet; I do not. I ship Harriet/fractions. (L was reading the Hamster Princess books in between Kafka for school, and periodically making cuted-out AWWW noises. At the hamsters, not at the Kafka, or at least so I assume.)
48. Ursula Vernon, Ratpunzel (Hamster Princess #3) -- as you may be able to guess, it's "Rapunzel" with a rat as the magical princess to be rescued this time -- and it's her tail she lets down to let Mother Gothel (a gerbil) and other visitors climb up to the tower. Also, there's a baby hydra, who is super-adorable, and a drawing of "ancestral gerbil" and "ancestral hamster" which is one of the cutest things I've ever seen Ursula Vernon draw. This story is less coherent/natural than the Twelve Dancing Princesses one -- like, the quirks of the people involved are less organic to the story and resolution, like Ratpunzel's penchant for adding fish to desserts, and all the jokes about the Kingdom of Sunshine, which makes Harriet want to go Bond Villain Crazy, but it was still a fun story, and Harriet continues to be a delightful action protagonist.
43. Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts -- this is a really ambitious first book. It's also an impressively written first book, or at least the first part of it is, anyway -- I don't think it sticks the landing, or at least the second half worked for me considerably less than the first, sort of dissolving into a bunch of different things, none of which were satisfying to me. So, not as good as it is ambitious, IMO, but my guess is Solomon will be the Campbell winner, and I don't mind, although I won't be voting for them as my first pick.
What I heard about this book going in was "antebellum South on a generation space ship" -- and, yeah. That's basically the setting, and how we GOT there was never explained to my satisfaction, and kept niggling at me throughout the book. Or, rather, it started out niggling, and the farther we got, the more the question bugged me. Now, it's possible that this is actually intentional -- you read about the way the society works in this completely unexpected setting, and you go, "but this is crazy, why would you try to run anything via a social order like that, it makes no practical sense!" -- and quite possibly that's what you're supposed to take away, and use that to reflect on how the actual antebellum South was also a terrible and unsustainable way of running things, and we don't tend to reflect on that because it's history and not fiction transplanted into space. Which is a neat choice if so! But even then, I still wanted to know how, in-universe, they actually got there. Was this an antebellum South-like society that persisted until it evolved to the point of advanced spaceflight? Did these guys start out as future (current timeline) Earth and just, like, devolved to something very much like antebellum South once they were already journeying? How/as a result of what? Are these people from current-timeline future Earth but a fringe group yearning for the days of the Confederacy (that somehow managed to convince a Black majority to join them on this journey)? The other thing is, as unsustainable as a slave-based society is in general, I'm betting it's way more unsustainable in a perfectly closed system like a generation ship, where you don't have a renewable source of slaves (the US managed to chug along from 1808, when importation of slaves was abolished, until the 1860s, but it was still possible to trade illegally, and even then, it's only 50 years, not 300, as in the book, plus a much larger initial population). And it seems like a lot of the ship's slave population is not capable of reproducing (because of radiation exposure?), which makes it even less sustainable. It is also presumably less attractive to the people in power, given that a society which has attained advanced spaceflight has presumably also figured out basic automation, and while slavery may be more cost-effective for grueling work than paying workers a living wage, it is way less cost effective than just replacing everyone with robots. Yes there's a large initial investment cost, but guess what? If you're already building a giant spaceship, the cost of robots to harvest your fields is probably incremental. Actually, you probably don't want fields anyway, although the rotating field setup around the Baby Sun was a kind of neat idea I've not seen before. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I was dutifully horrified by the conditions the lowdeckers were living in. But I've read actual slave narratives, so the thing that this particular book, with its chosen setting, made me wonder about were the science fictional aspects.) What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that this was a bold and interesting choice, but ultimately it didn't work for me, because "but HOW/WHY did we get here?!" kept bubbling up as I was reading, during scenes that would otherwise have been poignant or rage-inducing. My sense it, Solomon doesn't actually care about those questions, and their point was to explore a sci-fi antebellum South on a generation ship, not make it plausible that such a society would appear on one, but that's not enough for me.
And I kept mentally comparing this book to The Fifth Season a lot, because I think that's a much more successful SFF treatment of slavery in an advanced society, because it makes sense by in-universe conditions. And, I mean, I don't expect a debut novel to pull off something like The Fifth Season -- heck, N.K.Jemisin's actual debut novel impressed me considerably less than An Unkindness of Ghosts -- so I don't really hold that against this book, but at the same time, I do feel that I've read a similar thing done much more masterfully, and I can't help but compare. I also kept comparing this book to the other generation ship thing I just read, Pinsker's "Wind Will Rove". These are obviously very different stories, setting out to do VERY different things, but coming from the quiet short story where the presence of dwarf goats on a ship was a hotly debated issue to a story where overseers ride horses (horses on a spaceship seems like a terrible idea) -- which I think are mostly there for this admittedly amazing line: "how she looked ugly, like a horse, with her black skin and moon-fat eyes and flaring nose, and because of this, he was going to have her; or how she looked beautiful, like a horse, and because of this, he was going to have her" -- and people have dogs, and there are ducks apparently, and... lightning bugs? Or at least there are stories about lightning bugs, and swamps, and the ocean is used in metaphors, more on which below. Oh, and the other reason I kept thinking about the Pinsker story was memory. Now, the ship in "Wind Will Rove" is much closer to the beginning of its journey than Matilda in this book -- there, they still have people aboard who remember Earth and made the choice to leave, though the majority are ship-born, and the whole point of the story is that the society has tried very hard to hold on to Earth things. Here, it's been over 300 years and while some things from Earth are still floating around -- the occasional photograph, some comic books -- they're more like relics. (Though I do feel like this part is also not entirely coherent -- I'm not sure people would really still say "beautiful as the ocean" when they haven't seen an ocean for 300 years and also haven't really been exposed to ocean-ness in any other form. I mean, yes, fixed phrases linger, but not, I think, like that?) Anyway, so, ocean is still used in metaphors, but children have to be explained what summer is, since the ship doesn't have seasons. The thing is, I felt like what Earth things the Matildans knew about and which they didn't was not consistent at all -- not knowing certain things was just there for the 'alien' flavor, but whenever knowing them was needed for a good line, people knew. It made for a shaky POV, I think, and bothered me.
That was another thing the book did that didn't quite work for me -- the worldbuilding which is really SF worldbuilding never felt quite right. The idea of each deck having its own language works nicely thematically, and it's the sort of thing I like in SFF, but why? The ones we see appear to all be rooted in English (although Giselle's people speak something called "Ifrek" which may be some form of Berber maybe?), and, OK, they're segregated societies and language does drift, but generally distinct creoles arise when multiple languages are rubbing shoulders, and that doesn't seem to be the case here... so I find it hard to believe that, with English (or whatever, the language of the upperdeck people who seem to interact with all decks) as the lingua franca, and English as the root language for the distinct deck languages, things would drift into mutual unintelligibility of both speech (?) and writing in 300 years. Different slang, for sure, different pronunciation of words, yes, but the rest seemed weird to me. Unless they had to come up with writing from scratch -- but then, if they have access to comic books in English... It just seems weird. I also wondered about the gender conventions on the different decks, how that came about, though I did find it a neat convention. I'm just not sure I believe such a convention would arise on a generation ship, at least not without a lot more explanation/justification than we got. This is the basic problem of the book with regard to worldbuilding -- there are enough hints of cool worldbuilding that I kept thinking about the things they introduce, but none of it goes deeply enough to really convince me, or, hmmm, feels fundamental enough to the feel of the society that I don't wonder about it?
Similar to shaky POV and shaky worldbuilding, I found the plot rather hand-wavy and reliant on things I didn't really buy. Spoilers from here! I definitely get the feeling that the plot was kind of an afterthought for this book, and so stuff just kind of happens whenever convenient. Aster's mother's and the Sovereign's suspiciously similar illness symptoms apparently have nothing to do with each other... Aster, with no prior training in astrophysics, can learn some advanced things in a matter of, IDK, weeks or something, from some old textbooks. The astrophysics itself seems fairly dodgy, too, as does the whole "the poisonous liquid metal started being poisonous again as soon as relativistic effects of near-light-speed travel went away". Whatever the reason Matildans abandoned Earth 300 years ago, it's apparently all better now (1000 years on). Most egregiously, the Sovereign just stands there while Theo shoots him, the guards only reacting afterwards. The whole riot was kind of like that, actually -- I didn't believe anything unfolding at that point, although I do like the line that ""Like any tidal matter, a mutiny only had a middle"
So far this write-up has been a list of things that haven't quite worked for me, to a greater or lesser extent, so here's something I really liked: Aster as a protagonist. Aster is really great! She's a very unusual protagonist -- she's non-neurotypical, and while I can't vouch for how accurately she represents someone on the spectrum, she was really interesting in that she is both really gifted in her chosen area of expertise AND genuinely hampered by being non-NT in day-to-day interaction and when dealing with something like the coded document, and has moments when she is much more severely incapacitated (the temporary deafness, e.g.), and non-standard development (like not being able to speak when she was seven). It's just a really good balance, and while I've read several books with non-NT protagonists/narrators, I don't think I've ever read something that was this dedicated to showing and exploring such a character. And this also turned out to be a really great choice for a main POV character, because on the one hand Aster's very matter-of-fact perception of things makes her narration of the omnipresent brutality particularly horrifying (the scene that stood out to me especially was the one where she lubricates herself in the morning just in case to be prepared for rape, and the thing she is focusing on is that she is trying to figure out how to predict, based on various initial conditions like her cycle and what's going on in general, whether or not guards would assault her), but it also adds humour to what would otherwise be an unremittingly dark narrative. So, yeah, this was a really inspired choice. (Aster is also POC and non-gender-typical although she was born biologically female, but that's true of a lot of the characters, not just her.)
Speaking of this last part, the book makes a good attempt to represent various LGBT things -- besides Aster being some type of genderqueer, Theo seems to be trans (though he doesn't have the vocabulary for it), there's an established f/f couple among the secondary characters and a number of other non-straight characters, and Aster's Aint Melusine is asexual. But unfortunately most of the scenes that touched on this did not feel organic to the story to me, and so felt like making a point rather than a naturally diverse cast. Not a big deal, but not a positive, either.
The writing was sometimes impressive and sometimes just felt overdone for my taste, with the latter cropping up more in the second half of the book -- part of the reason I liked it less as I read on. The stories which added flavor were things I enjoyed, but I didn't feel they were particularly well integrated into the main narrative. And I felt the same way about the non-Aster POV chapters from Theo, Aint Melusine, and Giselle, although I did like the voices of the latter two, especially Melusine not being a motherly person. And while I found the relationship between Aster and Theo interesting, I felt like it never really went anywhere coherent or satisfactory, though it touched on a lot of interesting things, and I didn't always believe the ways they were behaving, individually or with each other.
And there's a lot of stuff that isn't inconsistent per se but feels very contrived -- like how few people know the Surgeon's face, for example, given how famous he is on the ship (apparently his likeness is only ever published with one photograph from when he was a boy, for some reason), what things are easy vs hard to get away with (assumed identity, sneaking into the Archives or to the deck with the shuttles), what materials are available to the lowdeckers. I think overall this book would've benefitted from a pass by a careful editor invested in other things than the author themself.
Quotes (mostly of things Aster says and her POV):
"Aster nodded as she digested this new information [that the unpleasant girl patient had been abused], wondering if she should allocate some sympathy to that little child, ultimately deciding against it."
"Why guards quoted this nonsense to justify themselves was beyond her. The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations."
Aster: "And to clarify, by ignoring you, I'd wished to convey I had no desire to speak with you, an overture my compatriots would've universally understood. In your language, a gesture of prolonged silence obviously means something else. However, now that I've elucidated, there's no further room for misunderstanding."
"'I am not a witch,' said Aster. 'I am a scientist.' The freak part she could not contest and let stand."
Aster to Giselle: "Is this one of your tests of my loyalty? I have told you before, I find those upsetting and an inaccurate measure of my regard for you."
"Aster put away some of her anger and sadness to make way for curiosity."
Overall, an impressive effort, although at a sub-genre I'm not really interested in -- too much allegory, not enough interest in the worldbuilding. I will be curious to keep an eye out for this author -- there's definitely a lot of talent here, and I'll be interested to see how it develops.
47. Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale -- When I first heard about this book from
isis, I was both somewhat intrigued and DEEPLY skeptical. Fantasy set in Russia by Western authors -- even well-meaning, research-doing Western authors -- tends to be not great, and I read it mostly for nitpicky purposes. Also, the thing I knew about the book was that the female protagonist was mostly referred to as Vasya -- which is a very common MASCULINE nickname, so, like having your female protagonist be "Mike" for most of a book. But I was curious to check it out anyway, for actual enjoyment or nitpicking, and then I 1) spotted the book on the library shelves when browsing and 2) suddenly realized Arden was one of the Campbell nominees, and this happened sooner rather than later. By the time I was two thirds in, I went and bought a copy when it was on sale, so the experience definitely ended up being one of more enjoyment than nitpicking -- the writing is really lovely, the setting and the characters are very well done -- although the Vasya thing never actually stopped bothering me.
So, let's talk about that. First of all, it's pretty clear that, to my pleasant surprise, Arden actually knows what she's doing with the Russian names and nicknames. She navigates the full names, patronymics, use names, and nicknames really nicely throughout the book, with a large cast of all-Russian characters, to the point where I wondered if she was actually Russian herself and writing under pen name or married name or something. But nope, she seems to be an actual American, albeit one who majored in Russian and lived in Moscow for two years in her late teens/early 20s. There were a couple of times where the use of patronymics, especially to address children, struck me as odd/an Americanism of the "full name when your parents are mad" variety, but this was infrequent, and also what do I know about the use of patronymics in 14th century Russia? Not much. There are a few other times when the choice of nicknam is odd or unexpected -- e.g. Vasilisa's mother, Marina, is called "Marushka" as diminutive, whereas all the Marinas I know (and I know a LOT of Marinas -- my aunt M and my friend M are both Marinas, as are several old schoolmates and what seems like half my parents' friends) go by things like Marisha, Marinka/Marinochka, or Marusya. And Vasilisa's younger sister Irina is called "Irinka" in the diminutive, which is an OK diminutive, but less common than something like Irochka or even Irishka, in my experience (though, again, with the caveat that my experience does not encompass 14th century fantasy boonies :P) But other stuff is really great, like Vasilisa's brother Aleksei, who is called Alyosha by everyone and Lyoshka by Vasilisa -- that's all very nicely authentic, and in general the situational use of diminutives -- teasing and tender, name-based and not -- was spot on throughout. And there's even a nice distinction with Irina, who is a little lady, almost always being called Irina (i.e. her full name), except by her next-older siblings, while Pyotr's boys all get called by nicknames. So, it's good stuff, and either Arden really understands how Russian names work and/or she had a very thorough and well-heeded Russian-picker, and I was on the whole very impressed. None of the minor quibbles would've made me blink particularly, but the protagonist's name is the most jarring of the lot, and it's, understandably, EVERYWHERE.
Here's the thing: Vasilisa is an absolutely STELLAR name for a heroine in fantasy Russia, especially a clever, independent one like this Vasilisa is. Vasilisa (the Beautiful and/or the Wise, depending on the story) is a folktale heroine who holds her own against supernatural powers and defends her father's holdings with guile). Now, I don't actually know any Vasilisas in real life -- it is an extremely old-fashioned and "storybook" sort of name -- think Guinevere (but without even a modern form of it being common, as with Jennifer). And Wikipedia claims that "Vasya" is a nickname form of Vasilisa, and hell, maybe it even was seven hundred years ago when the name was more common. But to the modern year, "Vasya" is the default nickname form of the very common male name Vasiliy -- like, joke-common, Tom-Dick-and-Harry common -- and it is impossible for me to see the name "Vasya" in a Russian context and associate it with a female character. On top of that, while Vasya is used as the common use-name diminutive, there's also a tender diminutive form used, which does not exist at all (I'm pretty sure) -- "Vasochka". That's not even how such a diminutive would be formed -- you could say "Vasechka", I guess, though it actually goes "Vasen'ka" -- but on top of that, "Vasochka" just sounds like "vazochka", little vase/bowl, like one of those things old ladies keep their hard candy in, on top of a lacy doily. And this was really unnecessary, because Vasilisa does actually have a canonical tender diminutive which shows up in stories -- Vasilisushka. That one clearly should've been used in place of "Vasochka". What I would've done about the "Vasya" problem, in the author's place, I'm less sure. I think, honestly, the easiest thing to do would've been just to stick with Vasilisa throughout. It's not that long a name, and if it sets her somewhat apart from the other children, with their use names, I don't think that would be a problem -- she is apart from them. And affection can be shown with other, non-name-based nicknames, which the book does a really good job with, e.g. Olga calling her "little frog" (which cuted me out a lot, as that's what my father calls my kids), or Sasha and Alyosha calling her "little sister". The other option would've been to pick some nickname form that isn't Vasya -- Russian wiki entry offers Vasil'ka, Vasa, and a few others, none of which I particularly like, but none of which at least have the problem of being a male name in my head. The third option I would've considered would be picking a normal-sounding nickname form that could conceivably have com from Vasilisa -- something like Lisa/Liza, which diminutivizes further very handily; but I suppose that has the issues of both being not visibly Russian enough (i.e. insufficiently foreign to the English reader) and different enough from Vasilisa as to make it harder to link the two together. I mean, Arden did that with Alyosha/Leshka (and to a lesser extent with the other brothers, Nikolai/Kolya, and Aleksandr/Sasha), but I realize it's a different matter when it's your protagonist. And I know that Vasilisa goes full-on Polly Oliver in book 2 and dresses up as a guy, where the Vasya nickname I'm sure comes handy, but there was no need for her to go by tht for the sixteen years prior. Anyway, I doubt very much this would bother anyone who is not Russian -- it doesn't seem to have bothered anyone I know who's read this book -- but it irritated me because everything else about Russia was so well done, and everything had been clearly well researched, so this was a choice made not out of ignorance or a lack of caring -- which made it both better and worse, paradoxically.
There is also extensive, and clever and lovely, and almost everywhere correct, use of Russian words interspersed with English translations and explanation. This is a really delicate balance, IMO, and here it's handled really well. There's an extensive glossary in the back of the book (which I, of course, didn't need), and I'm not sure how intrusive or befuddling the Russian code-mixing is to a reader who doesn't speak it, but I really liked the way it was done, and the overall effect. Household things like "pech" and "dvor", and forms of address, as well as various supernatural critters (e.g. you get both "vampire" and "upyr" (which is more like 'ghoul', but close enough, along with the creature's description). I just thought this whole thing was masterful, and the only bits of Russian that were off to me were only two: 1) "matyushka" instead of "matushka" as a tender form of address to one's mother (an easy mistake to make, since the male form, "batyushka", does have that form) and 2) using "the Rus'" to refer to the people and not just the country once, which makes no sense with the indicated soft sign and could've been very easily avoided by just dropping the soft sign/apostrophy everywhere, since it was, by Arden's admission, the only word where she tried to preserve that apostrophe at all. That's really not bad for a book set in Russia.
Contrary to what you may have surmised from the previous three paragraphs, there are things other than Russian code-mixing going on in this book, like it has characters and plot and everything. And they're all quite good, too. The "Vasya" thing was particularly frustrating because I actually really liked Vasilisa as a character, and so wished I could stop twitching every time I saw her name. She is wild and brave and clever and self-sacrificing -- but also often headstrong to her own detriment, lazy at things that bore her, disobedient in small petty things as well as large important ones, and this is well depicted over the sixteen years of her life we get to see here. She felt like a very coherent character, and a sympathetic one, with flaws which were rooted in her strengths and vice versa, which is always nice to see. Spoilers from here! She is also believably young, and I liked very much, for example, that she rushes off into the deadly winter forest to fetch snowdrops for her step mother so as to avoid being sent off to a convent, because she's going to Take A Stand -- and then realizes that, no, she wouldn't rather die than go to a convent, actually, she is scared and wants to turn back home, injured pride and lack of choices and all. You don't see that in fairy tale OR fantasy heroines very much, but it was a very human moment which made me like her more. (And then Morozko also called her out on the ridiculousness of what she did.) I actually liked/appreciated all the characters we got to know at all here -- Vasilisa's brother Alyosha, who loves her and teases her; there's a nice subtle thread there showing his privilege as a son over hers as a daughter, but a lot of very believable sibling love, and I was so happy that Vasilisa brought him in on the upyr-slaying and asked him to come with her the face the Big Bad at the end. I also liked Pyotr, the gruff father, who tries to do right by his witchy last-born daughter, whom his beloved wife died giving birth to, even when he doesn't actually know what is best for her or how to deal with her at all. I found it both unexpected and fitting that it was his sacrifice which bound the Bear again, when the supernatural folks could do nothing -- that scene put me in mind of a subversion of an Alenki Tsvetochek kind of tale, Pyotr explicitly refusing to hand over his daughter to save his own life, which worked for me very well. Dunya the old nurse felt very appropriately nurse-y, and it was a moment of eucatastrophe that Vasilisa was able to reach her in her undeath and "rescue" her to a clean afterlife with a willing and courageous gift of blood.
Even the human characters who act as antagonists, Anna Ivanovna and Father Konstantin, were sympathetic and compelling. Anna is the "wicked stepmother", but we meet her first as someone who is quite literally haunted by visions she thinks are demons -- she is a god-fearing woman who has the second sight and sees all the household spirits which she believes to be devils -- and driven mad by this when she is denied the peace of the convent, because, like all the other women, she is a pawn and chattel to be used by her father for political maneuvering or gain, and eventually is led to slaughter by a man she worships. And Konstantin is even more complex -- less a victim of circumstance (although it should be noted he is also not there by choice), more a victim of his own pride, but I found the development of his feelings -- about his surroundings, about Vasilisa (to whom he is grateful for saving his life and whom he sinfully lusts for and whom he feels it is his duty to save), about the voice that speaks to him which he at first thinks is God and then learns to be a demon. This was a lot more nuance than I'd been expecting in a fairy tale retelling. Of course, Medved, the supernatural Big Bad is ALL evil, feeds on fear and despair, raises the dead, but, well, what do you expect. Morozko, on the other hand, is interesting -- I liked his blend of cruelty and kindness, brusqueness and generosity -- he felt quite right for an ancient spirit of winter. (I'm not sure how authentic the Morozka / Karachun linkage is...) Actually, I'll blaspheme and say that I enjoyed this mortal witch/personification of winter interaction better than PTerry's Wintersmith... (maybe because it really needs to be a Morozko figure for me, given the fairy tales I grew up with). Anyway, I thought the interaction between him and Vasilisa was interestingly done.
The book did feel a little slow to get going. I didn't mind, because the writing and the descriptions of everyday life and interactions between the family are lovely, but it did feel rather slow at first, and then rather fast at the climax. Partly it might be because what the book has to establish as worldbuilding for the reader not familiar with the Russian folklore was just description of things I was already used to? At any rate, I didn't mind, because like I said, the prose was really, really lovely, and the dialogue felt right for the kind of tale it was -- I'm really impressed the find such accomplished writing in a first published work.
A final quibble: Can anyone explain to me why this book is called The Bear and the Nightingale? The Bear part I get, sure. The nightingale presumably refers to Vasilisa's new magical horse, Solovey, who is a shape-shifted magical bird or something? But he doesn't actually DO anything much, though he participates in the final battle, of course, along with everyone else. I found it especially confusing because there is one "nightingale" in Russian folklore, Solovei-Razbojnik, and was expecting him to show up, or for Morozko to turn out to be him or something (I mean, the more the merrier? since he's already Death apparently). It's a lovely and memorable title, which I guess is why it was chosen, but a very puzzling one for this book, at least to me...
I'm definitely planning to read the rest of the trilogy (probably after the Hugos, though we'll see... I probably won't be able to resist if I see book 2 on the shelf at the library...)
I've given up on (Campbell nominee) Sarah Kuhn's Heroine Complex. I got to about 30%, then got distracted by other books, and every time I tried to go back, better books were calling to me. Well, I've read enough to form an opinion of the Campbell-worthiness, anyway, and it's firmly at the heels of the pack (with the rider that I haven't read anything by Jeannette Ng yet, because my library doesn't have her book, so I'm hoping the voter packet (soon! they promised!) will have a sample. Anyway, since I did get 30% in, and for my own recollection come voting time,
So the idea is that a demon excursion into San Francisco 8 years ago granted exposed people limited super powers. One of those people is the protagonist (who was so bland, I could legit not recall her name until I just looked it up), Evie Tanaka, who has (spoiler? probably not, since it's kind of on the cover...) (emotionally triggered?) fire powers but is afraid of them after one time people almost got hurt, so she hides them. She is PR assistant to her childhood best friend, Annie Chang, a superhero who calls herself Aveda Jupiter, and for a lot of contrived reasons enabled by more magic from their other high school friend, Scott, Evie ends up impersonating Aveda while Aveda is convalescing, blah blah blah. There's also a burly scientist with whom Evie bickers a lot, and who I assume is her intended love interest, because this is most definitely chick lit under the veneer of superhero action and (attempts at?) social criticism. The superhero premise and Asian lead made me think of Not Your Sidekick, but honestly, NYS is way more charming, whatever its flaws. This was just... bland, and while the fact that the blandness had a high percentage of active female characters (Aveda and Evie, Aveda's weapons expert/trainer, a reporter and her sidekick, the head of the SFPD demon squad) and the protagonists are Asian makes it somewhat unusual, it doesn't actually make it any less bland.
I was also puzzled by the decision to set the book in the Bay Area, because, the idea is that Annie and Evie were the only Asian kids in their kindergarten class, and everybody thought the food they brought from home (dumplings and spam musubi) was weird and gross, and that was the foundation of their childhood friendship. Which is possible but not very plausible. I realize not all of the Bay Area is like SF (33% Asian), and my area of SF in particular (~85% Asian, where my kid was not-infrequently the only NON-Asian child in their class), and Annie and Evie grew up in the East Bay, which has towns with as low as 10-15% Asian population. But, like. Even kids who grow up in the East Bay probably do go to other parts of the Bay Area, and I doubt there's any town without a Chinese restaurant. And, sure, the diversity has increased over time, but triangulating from things like the characters use of iPads and Skype and what movies they watched at what age, Evie and Annie have to be somewhere between my age and my brother's age. So, Bay Area in the late 80s/early 90s when they were kids, 21st century when they're adults (and one of them says something about how just the fact that both of them are Asian is enough for some people to think they look alike... in San Francisco...). That's not exactly Kansas in the 50s or something. According to her bio, the author grew up in Oregon, in a small mostly-white town. So these may even be her own experiences. And, I mean, this is a totally valid narrative! It's just a weird place to set it, considering that absolutely nothing else (that I've reached, anyway) makes the Bay Area setting necessary.
On a totally random but related note: I think rarely have a read a book which name-dropped a place so much while having so little actual feel of it other than the name. This book takes place in San Francisco, which is mentioned roughly once per page, and a "sourdough bread factory by the waterfront" is namechecked (presumably Boudin at the Wharf) but... Like, there's a popular blog called "Bay Bridge Kiss" -- WTF does that even mean? Unlike Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge is not open to pedestrian traffic on the SF part of the span (although it could be in the universe where there are demons and superheroes, I guess). You could kiss in front of the Bay Bridge at the Embarcadero, I guess, but it's not a particularly pretty bridge, so, IDK... Worst of all, one of the blog posts actually calls San Francisco "Frisco", which I have never, EVER heard anyone living in the Bay Area do (actually, the urban dictionary entry for it is pretty delightful, especially the cops-and-robbers one with Frisco as shibboleth XP) It looks like Kuhn lives around LA, which may explain all that :P
Campbell tally: 5/6. I'm still debating at this point but I think Katherine Arden has edged ahead of my other favorite, Rebecca Roanhorse (who has a novel coming out soon). I like them both a lot, and it's a decision between a short work I have no quibbles with and a longer debut I do have some issues with but still was pretty impressed by. Rivers Solomon in third place (also impressive, but more issues), then Vina Jie-Min Prasad (worthy, but less ambitious and more uneven). And Sarah Kuhn last, but I'm still deciding whether above of below No Award. She's just nowhere near the same caliber as the other nomineess I've read this year, or past winners I'm familiar with (Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Lev Grossman, Novik with Temeraire). Still to be sampled: Jeannette Ng, whose book the library does not have.
46. Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters -- the only "related work" I plan to read for the Hugos, unless something in the voter packet really changes my mind. I probably would've wanted to read it anyway, In Memoriam, kind of. This is a collection of ~blog entries from her 80s, mostly about things other than writing/literature/genre (which is what I'd read her essays on before). I don't think I walked away with anything profound, but it was like getting to sit and listen to someone whose words I've loved for almost three decades, and whatever she had to say was perceptive and vividly expressed and down-to-earth, a joy to read even in those cases where I didn't agree with her or when she was writing about something I'm not myself interested in, like music. (The introduction, on the other hand, I couldn't get through.)
It's a short book of short essays/blogs posts -- sections on aging, on lit/writing (my favorite), on sociology, I guess, and on... I'm not sure what went into the last section, actually -- art more generally? nature? -- interspersed with blog posts about her new cat, Pard, which were very enjoyable even to not-cat-person me.
I'm not sure how to talk about these best -- probably remarking on individual pieces when I have something to say / calling out quotes?
"In Your Spare Time" -- about the Harvard alumni questionnaire she received: Question 14: "Are you living your secret desires?" [...] I finally didn't check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in "I have none, my desires are flagrant."
"Catching Up, Ha Ha" -- "Considering that I am on the eve of my eighty-fifth birthday, and that anyone over seventy-five who isn't continuously and conspicuously active is liable to be considered dead"
"Would You Please Fucking Stop" -- about swearing in literature. "Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead was forced to use the euphemistic invention fugging, giving Dorothy Parker the chance, which naturally she didn't miss, of cooing at him, 'Oh, are you the young man who doesn't know how to spell fuck?'"
"Readers' Questions" -- "Or they ask large, general questions about how Taoism or feminism or Jungian pschology or infomation theory has influenced me -- questions answerable in some cases only with a long PhD thesis, in others only with 'Not much.'" And: "The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn't changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is."
"Papa H", on Homer, was my favorite piece, and not just because Le Guin sides with the Trojans an calls Hector "a mensch" :). "I think Homwer outwits most writers who have writte on the War, by not taking sides. The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs Evil. It's just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal [...] His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it's unprejudiced. It isn't Satan vs Angels. It isn't Holy Warriors vs Infidels. It isn't hobbits vs orcs. It's just people vs. people. Of course you can tae sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to but it's no use, I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn't take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic." "Milton, a Christian, had to take sides [...] He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, geroic, and even sympathetic -- which is faking it. He faked it very well." "I don't know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy." "Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalized such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though these generalities can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. 'Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!' we cry, feeling that we have understood something important -- but we've merely recognized it."
"TGAN Again" -- on who wants the Great American Novel to exist: "Tired teachers, timid teachers, lazy students who'd like one text to read instead of the many, many great and greatly complex books that make up literature."
"Utopiyin, Utopiyang" and "A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters" were interesting to me less for the quotes and more because the concept of the yin utopia/dystopia (the feminine one) and the idea that "a fellowship of women [...] tends to be casual, unformulated, unhierarchical" made me think of the Cousins Hive in Terra Ignota (and also made me wish I knew what Le Guin thought of Palmer's book, if she read it...)
"Exorcists" -- "The church updated the rite in 1999, advising that 'all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.' This seems rather like issuing directions for driving a car while cautioning that all must be done to avoid the perception that a moving vehicle is being guided."
"Belief in Belief" -- "Darwin's theory vastly enlarges our perception of reality -- our always tentative knowledge [...] -- a great, rich, beautiful insight. Not a revealed truth, but an earned one."
"About Anger" -- "As my great-aunt Betsy said of a woman who snubbed her, 'I pity her poort taste.'" "I'd like to kick Ernest Hemingway for faking and posturing when he had the talent to succeed without faking."
"Rehearsal" -- "Sitting in on a rehearsal is a strange experience for the author of the book the play is based on. [...] People you thought you'd made up, invented, imagined, are there, not imaginary at all. And they speak to each other. Not to you. Not anymore."
"Without Egg" -- I apparently had no idea that an American egg cup has two "bowls", the bigger one for pouring the cracked egg into it. Then... what's the point? O.o "Like all good tools, it gives pleasure by its pure aptness. It does one thing only, but does it perfectly, and nothing else can do it." "My current egg spoon is stainless steel; on the handle are the letters K L M. I will not go into how we came to own this spoon." (As the owner of a similar one, I applaud such discretions :D)
"The Horsies Upstairs" -- on people being sad upon finding out Santa isn't real: "Is what people grieve over the pain not of losing a belief but of realizing that somebody you trusted expected you to believe something they didn't believe?"
"The Lynx" -- "If piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano." "Some children who came by squaled, 'Eeeyew! He's eating the insides!' and some other children who came by murmured with satisfaction, 'Oh look, he's eating the guts.'"
"Notes from a Week at a Ranch" -- "A peacock pulls his poor, slattern tail along through molting August, pride reduced to sapphire head and rajah's crest and the brassy, meowing, melancholy jungle cry." "The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability."
Some general remarks -- I found it neat to read the autobiographical bits, because LeGuin grew up and lived in Berkeley and thereabouts, and was living in Oregon when she was writing these essays, and both Berkeley and Portland (and environs) are cities I know, even if I didn't know all the places she mentioned (like, she wrote about Sunriver, and half my Oregon coworkers have vacation homes there). I also enjoyed learning stuff I'd never known about LeGuin, like her refusing a Nebula for a novelette in protest over SFWA revoking Lem's honorary membership, or the fact that she knew Steinbeck, who was the uncle of her best friend.
Hugos tally (best related work): The Ursula Le Guin essays by default, even though they're mostly not *about* SFF. I don't think I'm going to be reading any other related work nominees for this -- there are three things about SFF authors I've not read (Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, and Iain M. Banks) and a Gamergate thing, none of which I have any interest in. Sleeping with Monsters is theoretically interesting, but I can't say I've enjoyed Liz Bourke's essays on Tor.com all that much. I'll read whatever's in the voter packet, I guess, but it's going to be hard for it to beat Le Guin even in blog posts.
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And then we ended up watching Deadpool 2, which is a bit of a story in itself (the plan was for L to go see it with her friends, but O and I ended up joining them at the last minute). It was pretty great! But also cements my impression that it's a movie I would've been even happier watching on DVD, where I could have the subtitles on, and could pause stuff to make sure they'd said what I thought they'd said, or to have O explain comics references to me. We laughed a lot, especially at the potshots at the other superhero movies, Spoilers from here! like Wade's quip about "fighting a caped badass, only to discover that his mom was named Martha too." and "I'm Batman", and “Give me a bow and arrow, I'm basically Hawkeye!” (when he's de-powered), and the Hulk reference when he's fighting Juggernaut, calling Cable "Thanos" -- I think the superhero movie snark was my favorite, followed by general fourth-wall snark, like, "That's just lazy writing" and "Big CGI fight scene coming up" and so on. But pretty much everything in the movie was funny -- the stealth cameo from the X-Men team, Deadpool and Yukio giving each other little waves, the Deadpool/Colossus vibes (Colossus in general was pretty great, and neither L nor I were sure, based on the movie, if the actor was actually Russian or not -- the brief Russian was pretty good, as was the accent; turns out the actor is Serbian).
My favorite new thing about this movie was Domino, who was awesome and whose powers were so much fun to see, especially against the background of Deadpool's rant about how luck is not a superpower. Definitely looking forward to more of her in the sequels. My other favorite thing were the after-redit scenes. I'd actually spent the bulk of the movie wondering if Vanessa was going to stay fridged (and hoping the answer was No, because I love the relationship between her and Wade -- and her giving him her IUD for their anniversary, and him having no idea WTF it was, that was such a perfect next step for them), and then really frowning at the screen when Cable went back in time to the beginning of the battle and not farther enough back to save Vanessa and remove Deadpool's suicidal impulses. I mean, it was a very self-aware and respectful fridging -- I appreciated the continued scenes with Vanessa, and the brief "happy ending" in Heaven or wherever, complete with the "Don't fuck Elvis"/"Don't fuck Colossus" farewells. And then the Wolverine scene, which O had to explain to me, since I've not watched Wolverine: Origins and had no idea what was going on, and finally the Ryan Reynolds signing on for Green Lantern, which I did know about and had been waiting for.
Anyway, it was a good time, glad I got to see it, and O was really happy, too.
I'm also continuing to watch through the "dramatic presentation long form" nominees, and have now seen all of them.
Get Out: This... was an interesting one. So first of all, it is SO not my genre -- I don't watch horror movies, like, at all -- it's my least favorite genre in general, and especially in visual form -- and so all the conventions of the genre -- the creepy humming and small noises, the music -- was pretty much lost on me. I was spoiled for the central conceit, courtesy of Honest Trailer, which is for the better, as I doubt I would've watched it otherwise. The central conceit IS powerful, and there are some aspects that really worked for me -- the entirety of Chris's acting (the way he is unsurprised but not accepting, until the really weird shit starts), SPOILERS from here! the bingo/auction block scene. Rose and the family were very effective, and the way the "affluent white people" thing at the start -- the neurosurgeon father / psychiatrist mother / med school son, "we think of them as family", etc. -- turns out to be super explicitly sinister was really effective. Then there were things that worked less well for me -- I just didn't find Chris's TSA agent friend funny, or fitting to the tone of the the rest of the movie -- like, he didn't lighten the dark mood for me, he just felt out of place. And there were scenes where I was like, "Oh, I see what you're doing there", but they didn't land emotionally for me -- like when Chris gores the father with the mounted deer head, after the father's rant about how deer are vermin at the start. Other connections did land -- Chris going to check on Georgina after he hits her with the car, while muttering "No, no, no, just go" to himself -- was really effective for me as him basically getting to make a different choice than the one he is still traumatized by around his mother's death. And there's a ton of clever things going on in this movie... which unfortunately is still a genre I don't care about, so I wouldn't rewatch it to catch them all, but I enjoyed reading the explanations here for some connections I missed. So, I was pretty impressed with the movie, for all that it isn't my thing at all genre-wise, and then we got to the ending and I was like, huh? Really, that's it? But rewatching the Honest Trailer clued me in to the fact that there's an alternate ending which had been intended as the ending originally. It is really depressing but also way, WAY more powerful than what was actually released. After listening to the commentary, I understand what motivated the director to choose the happier ending, but I still think it's a much weaker one, and weakens the whole film considerably.
Blade Runner 2049: Well, that was... long. I think that between when I watched and liked the original Blade Runner, as a college freshman, and now, I've lost my patience for artsy mindfuck movies, whatever limited patience I had for them to begin with. I mean, I enjoyed various things about this movie, but that enjoyment had worn off pretty much completely after two hours of it. I can totally see why it won all the cinematorgraphy awards and was nominated for a bunch of sound and music and effects stuff. It's a very stark movie, which is not the kind of thing I prefer to watch, visually speaking, but it does it future-noir thing really well. So, OK, it's a starkly gorgeous movie (all that sharp black and white, and various shades of orange and grey, and the geometric farm patterns at the opening, and industrial barriers and grates), but it's way too slow for my taste, and I don't see why it needed to be almost 3 hours long. I liked Gosling's Replicant K a lot, and Joi was just the right blend of sweet and creepy, and it was neat to see this much older Deckard. But overall I found the movie way too ponderous and self-important for what it actually had to say, and I'm not convinced it actually makes total sense, but damned if I'm going to try to pay enough attention to confirm one way or another. (On a random note, why did the California farm at the beginning have tents labeled "tselina" in Russian? O.o)
Hugos tally (dramatic long form): 6/6 (done! :) Thor 3, The Last Jedi, debating between Get Out and Shape of Water -- with the alternate ending, Get Out would be ahead, with the ending it was actually released with, I think Shape of Water wins, because at least it didn't feel half-finished, Blade Runner 2049, Wonder Woman.
Then there's the "dramatic presentation, short form" category. I learned from Wiki that the Black Mirror episodes are a) stand-alone and b) on Netflix, so I actually went ahead and watched USS Callister. It seems that I enjoy Star Trek parodies/subversions/commentary way more than actual classic Trek (which I can't stand on account of William Shatner's face). This was an enjoyable episode, although, wow, it had some dark bits. Spoilers from here! I did like the progression where the nebbishy Daly, brilliant programmer but awkward human being, turned out to be not a secret hero but a secret monster. He starts out sympathetic compared to Walton, and then is shown to be awful, and then sails way past awful when Walton explains what happened to his son. But I did like the fact that in-game Walton both acknowledged that putting Daly on this path was probably his fault for taking advantage of him in real life, and that the conclusion is still "fuck you" for the way Daly has acted, which, fair. I liked all of the actors, both as their in-game clones and real selves. The main thing that bugged me was actually the worldbuilding -- how does Daly's "gizmo" which constructs digital clones from DNA imbue the clones with the stuff that is NOT DNA-based, like skills and memories? I mean, I realize that's not the point, and it has to be like that for the episode to work, but I kept wondering about that.
And then I discovered that season 1 of The Good Place is on Netflix and kind of watched the whole thing... It's just as funny, adorable, and neatly conceived as everyone has been saying, and I had a great time with the first season and am now watching season 2. Spoilers, episode by episode
Episode 1: OK, yes, this was great. Eleanor is hugely entertaining in that "terrible person in an average sort of way" mode, and Chidi is just incredibly likeable, and Tahani and Michael round out the cast nicely. I keep being amused by the swearing euphemisms, and laughed out loud in the scene where drunk Eleanor is attempting to pronounce Chidi's last name.
Episode 2: "That's not a present, that's just common decency" (when Eleanor finally remembers and manages to say "Senegal"
Episode 3: OK, I can totally see why people are shipping Eleanor/Tahani XP And ooh, the twist with Jianyu is something I did not see coming at all and was awesome! :D
Episode 4: Ha, Jason is great fun! It's nice to so the actor playing "Jianyu"/Jason is actually Filipino.
Episode 5: Aww, poor Tahani, constantly upstaged by her sister (though I totally guessed that nothing after death would change the rankings). And, awww, Chidi continues to be the most adorable thing ever, with his theoretical fantasy of boat and French poetry and no actual idea of what to do with a boat. Eleanor and he trying to be soulmates for show was also really cute.
Episode 6: Michael on frozen yogurt: "There is something really human about taking something really great and ruining it a little so you can have more of it." Chidi and Tahani bonding was rather nice, but not as fun as Eleanor and Michael having human fun together (Michael is kind of Ariel from the Little Mermaid, isn't he XP)
Episode 7: I LOL'd at Chidi's advisor ditching him: "He said he was just going out for cigarettes, but then he left his tenured position at the Sorbonne." And oh wow, I didn't expect Eleanor to come clean so soon! Chidi's ethical dilemmas never stop being funny, though.
Episodes 8-9: The train announcements on the way to the Bad Place were brilliant, and the rest of the Bad Place crew was entertainingly despicable. I'm not so thrilled with baby-brained Janet, though.
Episode 10: I also wasn't expecting Eleanor to realize (or "realize", whichever it ends up being) she was in love with Chidi and definitely not to confess to him right away, though it's really refreshing that she did. And the "Her love confession was a lot better than mine, can I get a do-over?" was really fun, too. The best thing, though, was the way the Eleanor and Tahani thing played out when they thought Chidi was supposed to be both their soulmate. And the Eleanor/Tahani vibes are still hella strong. Also, Chidi's inability to make a decision is something I personally identify with pretty hard.
Episode 11: Not a lot to say about this one, but I do like the twist about stealing Shawn's train, and also Jason's bank robbery scheme was pretty funny.
Episode 12: Eleanor's parents are pretty awful... This was actually a thing that made me feel for her even the way she was originally.
Episode 13: OK, that's pretty brilliant as a twist! And I do love the way little things come back up, liked Jason calling it as a prank show from the start, or the random tidbit that Janets don't eat.
I also listened to "The Deep" song, which is definitely not my thing, but I do like the IDEA of a song being nominated for short form...
Hugos tally, short form: (3/6) "Michael's Gambit" (The Good Place), USS Callister, "The Deep". I should get to the other nominated episode from The Good Place, too, but that will be it, probably, since I don't see myself watching Star Trek Discovery, at least not in time.
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So, the Nebula winners are announced, and I was going through the list with an eye towards the Hugo shortlist. I'm not sure the Nebulas actually function as the Golden globes due relative to the Oscars, but I've never actually paid attention to it before, and was kind of curious to see what happens.
Novel: The Stone Sky is the winner, which at first I found unsuprising, but then I went back over the 2016 and 2017 winners, and neither of the previous books in the trilogy had won (it was Uprooted in 2016 and All the Birds in the Sky in 2017), so this was more like making sure something of the Broken Earth won, which is only right and proper. Hopefully the Hugos, in contrast, will give this one a rest and let something else win for a change. (I also found it interesting that only two novels, this and Six Wakes, showed up on both shortlists. And Six Wakes was a neat idea but not up to par on execution, I thought.)
Novella: All Systems Red! Which hopefully bodes well for it in the Hugos. It's no longer my top choice, but if And Then There Were (N-One) has to lose to someone, I hope it's to Murderbot. And I'm especially pleased River of Teeth (the disappointing-to-me bisexual hippo book) did not win. Hopefully that will carry over in the Hugos. (Four titles of overlap here -- these three, plus The black Tides of Heaven.)
Novelette: The only category where the winner is not something I've read -- "A Human Stain" by Kelly Robson (I may remedy that, once Hugo homework is done). Here there was an overlap of 3 titles with the Hugos -- my favorite "Wind Will Rove", "A Series of Steaks" (which I also liked), and "Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time" (which I DISliked, but am not surprised to see on both shortlists.) This category really doesn't let me predict much...
Short story: My Hugo favorite "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience" (from one of my two Campbell-favorite authors) won this, which makes me very happy. This is another category with 4 overlapping nominees -- "Fandom for Robots", "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand", and (the other one I liked, and nominated for Hugo myself) "Carnival Nine".
YA novel: For some reason, this category only had 4 on the shortlist, of which the only overlap, and the only one I've read, is the winner, The Art of Starving. Which increases my suspicion that it will win the not-a-Hugo too (which I won't be disappointed by, even though I'm rooting for two other titles above it).
Dramatic presentation: Get Out, which I liked less than several of the other movie nominees I've seen -- Logan, Thor 3, and as you see above, I'm waffling on Shape of Water. But it's the most overtly message-y movie -- although I actually do think the message is really well and cleverly done and not anvilicious at all. Overlap is a bit harder to judge here because Nebula doesn't split up long form and short form, but five of the six Nebula nominees appear somewhere on the Hugo short list, and the only one that does not is Logan, which I think was robbed as far as the Hugo long form nomination is concerned. The two movies absent from the Nebula ballot are Blade Runner 2049 and Thor 3 (which is currently my top pick for the Hugos). The one nominee that shows up on the "short form" of the Hugo but was judged against the movies here is "Michael's Gambit" from The Good Place, and I don't really know how to judge a TV show episode/season finale against a movie, but I think I'd rank that above Get Out too.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1081063.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
Danny: "I can't believe after all the times you've been like Nooo Danny, you can't interfere with the natural order! that you want me to go pester some knights."
Wendell: "You wanted to cross my goldfish with a potato!"
Danny: "I was going to start a mutant fish-and-chip farm."
Wendell: "You were using masking tape."
And another quote from Christiana that I enjoyed a lot: "Don't look at me. I don't do Spirit Week. It's like brainwashing without the fun bits."
And that's it. I'm done with the series, which is a bit bittersweet, as I've been reading these along with the rodents since they were in the target audience... Fortunately, there's still Hamster Princess to keep us going :)
45. Ursula Vernon, Of Mice and Magic (Hamster Princess 2) -- these just keep getting more adorable. Having dealt with her own curse, Harriet is now basically a questing curse-breaker hero, and in this one she takes on the story of the Twelve Dancing (mouse) Princesses. Spoilers The mice are even more adorable than the hamsters, especially when covered in paint. Also adorable are the mole princes, and the old lady by the side of the road who is (*gasp*) sekritly a fairy is a shrew, which is an inspired choice. I liked that the anal mouse king and the mole witch (Molezelda XD) got their anal happily ever after, sorting books by color, and that Harriet defeats the guards by exploiting the royal decree about clashing with the color-coded rooms (and that even before she needs to defeat anyone, Harriet is tempted to wear a rainbow hat in the palace to clash with EVERYTHING). I also approve of Harriet's love of fractions being an enduring character trait, and that August the mouse princess says "I don't want to marry you, no offense" in exactly the same way to Harriet and to Wilbur the prince (now working as a stableboy to help make some extra cash to fix his castle's basement). L asked me if I ship Wilbur/Harriet; I do not. I ship Harriet/fractions. (L was reading the Hamster Princess books in between Kafka for school, and periodically making cuted-out AWWW noises. At the hamsters, not at the Kafka, or at least so I assume.)
48. Ursula Vernon, Ratpunzel (Hamster Princess #3) -- as you may be able to guess, it's "Rapunzel" with a rat as the magical princess to be rescued this time -- and it's her tail she lets down to let Mother Gothel (a gerbil) and other visitors climb up to the tower. Also, there's a baby hydra, who is super-adorable, and a drawing of "ancestral gerbil" and "ancestral hamster" which is one of the cutest things I've ever seen Ursula Vernon draw. This story is less coherent/natural than the Twelve Dancing Princesses one -- like, the quirks of the people involved are less organic to the story and resolution, like Ratpunzel's penchant for adding fish to desserts, and all the jokes about the Kingdom of Sunshine, which makes Harriet want to go Bond Villain Crazy, but it was still a fun story, and Harriet continues to be a delightful action protagonist.
43. Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts -- this is a really ambitious first book. It's also an impressively written first book, or at least the first part of it is, anyway -- I don't think it sticks the landing, or at least the second half worked for me considerably less than the first, sort of dissolving into a bunch of different things, none of which were satisfying to me. So, not as good as it is ambitious, IMO, but my guess is Solomon will be the Campbell winner, and I don't mind, although I won't be voting for them as my first pick.
What I heard about this book going in was "antebellum South on a generation space ship" -- and, yeah. That's basically the setting, and how we GOT there was never explained to my satisfaction, and kept niggling at me throughout the book. Or, rather, it started out niggling, and the farther we got, the more the question bugged me. Now, it's possible that this is actually intentional -- you read about the way the society works in this completely unexpected setting, and you go, "but this is crazy, why would you try to run anything via a social order like that, it makes no practical sense!" -- and quite possibly that's what you're supposed to take away, and use that to reflect on how the actual antebellum South was also a terrible and unsustainable way of running things, and we don't tend to reflect on that because it's history and not fiction transplanted into space. Which is a neat choice if so! But even then, I still wanted to know how, in-universe, they actually got there. Was this an antebellum South-like society that persisted until it evolved to the point of advanced spaceflight? Did these guys start out as future (current timeline) Earth and just, like, devolved to something very much like antebellum South once they were already journeying? How/as a result of what? Are these people from current-timeline future Earth but a fringe group yearning for the days of the Confederacy (that somehow managed to convince a Black majority to join them on this journey)? The other thing is, as unsustainable as a slave-based society is in general, I'm betting it's way more unsustainable in a perfectly closed system like a generation ship, where you don't have a renewable source of slaves (the US managed to chug along from 1808, when importation of slaves was abolished, until the 1860s, but it was still possible to trade illegally, and even then, it's only 50 years, not 300, as in the book, plus a much larger initial population). And it seems like a lot of the ship's slave population is not capable of reproducing (because of radiation exposure?), which makes it even less sustainable. It is also presumably less attractive to the people in power, given that a society which has attained advanced spaceflight has presumably also figured out basic automation, and while slavery may be more cost-effective for grueling work than paying workers a living wage, it is way less cost effective than just replacing everyone with robots. Yes there's a large initial investment cost, but guess what? If you're already building a giant spaceship, the cost of robots to harvest your fields is probably incremental. Actually, you probably don't want fields anyway, although the rotating field setup around the Baby Sun was a kind of neat idea I've not seen before. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I was dutifully horrified by the conditions the lowdeckers were living in. But I've read actual slave narratives, so the thing that this particular book, with its chosen setting, made me wonder about were the science fictional aspects.) What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that this was a bold and interesting choice, but ultimately it didn't work for me, because "but HOW/WHY did we get here?!" kept bubbling up as I was reading, during scenes that would otherwise have been poignant or rage-inducing. My sense it, Solomon doesn't actually care about those questions, and their point was to explore a sci-fi antebellum South on a generation ship, not make it plausible that such a society would appear on one, but that's not enough for me.
And I kept mentally comparing this book to The Fifth Season a lot, because I think that's a much more successful SFF treatment of slavery in an advanced society, because it makes sense by in-universe conditions. And, I mean, I don't expect a debut novel to pull off something like The Fifth Season -- heck, N.K.Jemisin's actual debut novel impressed me considerably less than An Unkindness of Ghosts -- so I don't really hold that against this book, but at the same time, I do feel that I've read a similar thing done much more masterfully, and I can't help but compare. I also kept comparing this book to the other generation ship thing I just read, Pinsker's "Wind Will Rove". These are obviously very different stories, setting out to do VERY different things, but coming from the quiet short story where the presence of dwarf goats on a ship was a hotly debated issue to a story where overseers ride horses (horses on a spaceship seems like a terrible idea) -- which I think are mostly there for this admittedly amazing line: "how she looked ugly, like a horse, with her black skin and moon-fat eyes and flaring nose, and because of this, he was going to have her; or how she looked beautiful, like a horse, and because of this, he was going to have her" -- and people have dogs, and there are ducks apparently, and... lightning bugs? Or at least there are stories about lightning bugs, and swamps, and the ocean is used in metaphors, more on which below. Oh, and the other reason I kept thinking about the Pinsker story was memory. Now, the ship in "Wind Will Rove" is much closer to the beginning of its journey than Matilda in this book -- there, they still have people aboard who remember Earth and made the choice to leave, though the majority are ship-born, and the whole point of the story is that the society has tried very hard to hold on to Earth things. Here, it's been over 300 years and while some things from Earth are still floating around -- the occasional photograph, some comic books -- they're more like relics. (Though I do feel like this part is also not entirely coherent -- I'm not sure people would really still say "beautiful as the ocean" when they haven't seen an ocean for 300 years and also haven't really been exposed to ocean-ness in any other form. I mean, yes, fixed phrases linger, but not, I think, like that?) Anyway, so, ocean is still used in metaphors, but children have to be explained what summer is, since the ship doesn't have seasons. The thing is, I felt like what Earth things the Matildans knew about and which they didn't was not consistent at all -- not knowing certain things was just there for the 'alien' flavor, but whenever knowing them was needed for a good line, people knew. It made for a shaky POV, I think, and bothered me.
That was another thing the book did that didn't quite work for me -- the worldbuilding which is really SF worldbuilding never felt quite right. The idea of each deck having its own language works nicely thematically, and it's the sort of thing I like in SFF, but why? The ones we see appear to all be rooted in English (although Giselle's people speak something called "Ifrek" which may be some form of Berber maybe?), and, OK, they're segregated societies and language does drift, but generally distinct creoles arise when multiple languages are rubbing shoulders, and that doesn't seem to be the case here... so I find it hard to believe that, with English (or whatever, the language of the upperdeck people who seem to interact with all decks) as the lingua franca, and English as the root language for the distinct deck languages, things would drift into mutual unintelligibility of both speech (?) and writing in 300 years. Different slang, for sure, different pronunciation of words, yes, but the rest seemed weird to me. Unless they had to come up with writing from scratch -- but then, if they have access to comic books in English... It just seems weird. I also wondered about the gender conventions on the different decks, how that came about, though I did find it a neat convention. I'm just not sure I believe such a convention would arise on a generation ship, at least not without a lot more explanation/justification than we got. This is the basic problem of the book with regard to worldbuilding -- there are enough hints of cool worldbuilding that I kept thinking about the things they introduce, but none of it goes deeply enough to really convince me, or, hmmm, feels fundamental enough to the feel of the society that I don't wonder about it?
Similar to shaky POV and shaky worldbuilding, I found the plot rather hand-wavy and reliant on things I didn't really buy. Spoilers from here! I definitely get the feeling that the plot was kind of an afterthought for this book, and so stuff just kind of happens whenever convenient. Aster's mother's and the Sovereign's suspiciously similar illness symptoms apparently have nothing to do with each other... Aster, with no prior training in astrophysics, can learn some advanced things in a matter of, IDK, weeks or something, from some old textbooks. The astrophysics itself seems fairly dodgy, too, as does the whole "the poisonous liquid metal started being poisonous again as soon as relativistic effects of near-light-speed travel went away". Whatever the reason Matildans abandoned Earth 300 years ago, it's apparently all better now (1000 years on). Most egregiously, the Sovereign just stands there while Theo shoots him, the guards only reacting afterwards. The whole riot was kind of like that, actually -- I didn't believe anything unfolding at that point, although I do like the line that ""Like any tidal matter, a mutiny only had a middle"
So far this write-up has been a list of things that haven't quite worked for me, to a greater or lesser extent, so here's something I really liked: Aster as a protagonist. Aster is really great! She's a very unusual protagonist -- she's non-neurotypical, and while I can't vouch for how accurately she represents someone on the spectrum, she was really interesting in that she is both really gifted in her chosen area of expertise AND genuinely hampered by being non-NT in day-to-day interaction and when dealing with something like the coded document, and has moments when she is much more severely incapacitated (the temporary deafness, e.g.), and non-standard development (like not being able to speak when she was seven). It's just a really good balance, and while I've read several books with non-NT protagonists/narrators, I don't think I've ever read something that was this dedicated to showing and exploring such a character. And this also turned out to be a really great choice for a main POV character, because on the one hand Aster's very matter-of-fact perception of things makes her narration of the omnipresent brutality particularly horrifying (the scene that stood out to me especially was the one where she lubricates herself in the morning just in case to be prepared for rape, and the thing she is focusing on is that she is trying to figure out how to predict, based on various initial conditions like her cycle and what's going on in general, whether or not guards would assault her), but it also adds humour to what would otherwise be an unremittingly dark narrative. So, yeah, this was a really inspired choice. (Aster is also POC and non-gender-typical although she was born biologically female, but that's true of a lot of the characters, not just her.)
Speaking of this last part, the book makes a good attempt to represent various LGBT things -- besides Aster being some type of genderqueer, Theo seems to be trans (though he doesn't have the vocabulary for it), there's an established f/f couple among the secondary characters and a number of other non-straight characters, and Aster's Aint Melusine is asexual. But unfortunately most of the scenes that touched on this did not feel organic to the story to me, and so felt like making a point rather than a naturally diverse cast. Not a big deal, but not a positive, either.
The writing was sometimes impressive and sometimes just felt overdone for my taste, with the latter cropping up more in the second half of the book -- part of the reason I liked it less as I read on. The stories which added flavor were things I enjoyed, but I didn't feel they were particularly well integrated into the main narrative. And I felt the same way about the non-Aster POV chapters from Theo, Aint Melusine, and Giselle, although I did like the voices of the latter two, especially Melusine not being a motherly person. And while I found the relationship between Aster and Theo interesting, I felt like it never really went anywhere coherent or satisfactory, though it touched on a lot of interesting things, and I didn't always believe the ways they were behaving, individually or with each other.
And there's a lot of stuff that isn't inconsistent per se but feels very contrived -- like how few people know the Surgeon's face, for example, given how famous he is on the ship (apparently his likeness is only ever published with one photograph from when he was a boy, for some reason), what things are easy vs hard to get away with (assumed identity, sneaking into the Archives or to the deck with the shuttles), what materials are available to the lowdeckers. I think overall this book would've benefitted from a pass by a careful editor invested in other things than the author themself.
Quotes (mostly of things Aster says and her POV):
"Aster nodded as she digested this new information [that the unpleasant girl patient had been abused], wondering if she should allocate some sympathy to that little child, ultimately deciding against it."
"Why guards quoted this nonsense to justify themselves was beyond her. The whole point of occupying a position of power was that you got to do what you wanted with impunity. It seemed a waste of time to bother with rationalizations."
Aster: "And to clarify, by ignoring you, I'd wished to convey I had no desire to speak with you, an overture my compatriots would've universally understood. In your language, a gesture of prolonged silence obviously means something else. However, now that I've elucidated, there's no further room for misunderstanding."
"'I am not a witch,' said Aster. 'I am a scientist.' The freak part she could not contest and let stand."
Aster to Giselle: "Is this one of your tests of my loyalty? I have told you before, I find those upsetting and an inaccurate measure of my regard for you."
"Aster put away some of her anger and sadness to make way for curiosity."
Overall, an impressive effort, although at a sub-genre I'm not really interested in -- too much allegory, not enough interest in the worldbuilding. I will be curious to keep an eye out for this author -- there's definitely a lot of talent here, and I'll be interested to see how it develops.
47. Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale -- When I first heard about this book from
isis, I was both somewhat intrigued and DEEPLY skeptical. Fantasy set in Russia by Western authors -- even well-meaning, research-doing Western authors -- tends to be not great, and I read it mostly for nitpicky purposes. Also, the thing I knew about the book was that the female protagonist was mostly referred to as Vasya -- which is a very common MASCULINE nickname, so, like having your female protagonist be "Mike" for most of a book. But I was curious to check it out anyway, for actual enjoyment or nitpicking, and then I 1) spotted the book on the library shelves when browsing and 2) suddenly realized Arden was one of the Campbell nominees, and this happened sooner rather than later. By the time I was two thirds in, I went and bought a copy when it was on sale, so the experience definitely ended up being one of more enjoyment than nitpicking -- the writing is really lovely, the setting and the characters are very well done -- although the Vasya thing never actually stopped bothering me.
So, let's talk about that. First of all, it's pretty clear that, to my pleasant surprise, Arden actually knows what she's doing with the Russian names and nicknames. She navigates the full names, patronymics, use names, and nicknames really nicely throughout the book, with a large cast of all-Russian characters, to the point where I wondered if she was actually Russian herself and writing under pen name or married name or something. But nope, she seems to be an actual American, albeit one who majored in Russian and lived in Moscow for two years in her late teens/early 20s. There were a couple of times where the use of patronymics, especially to address children, struck me as odd/an Americanism of the "full name when your parents are mad" variety, but this was infrequent, and also what do I know about the use of patronymics in 14th century Russia? Not much. There are a few other times when the choice of nicknam is odd or unexpected -- e.g. Vasilisa's mother, Marina, is called "Marushka" as diminutive, whereas all the Marinas I know (and I know a LOT of Marinas -- my aunt M and my friend M are both Marinas, as are several old schoolmates and what seems like half my parents' friends) go by things like Marisha, Marinka/Marinochka, or Marusya. And Vasilisa's younger sister Irina is called "Irinka" in the diminutive, which is an OK diminutive, but less common than something like Irochka or even Irishka, in my experience (though, again, with the caveat that my experience does not encompass 14th century fantasy boonies :P) But other stuff is really great, like Vasilisa's brother Aleksei, who is called Alyosha by everyone and Lyoshka by Vasilisa -- that's all very nicely authentic, and in general the situational use of diminutives -- teasing and tender, name-based and not -- was spot on throughout. And there's even a nice distinction with Irina, who is a little lady, almost always being called Irina (i.e. her full name), except by her next-older siblings, while Pyotr's boys all get called by nicknames. So, it's good stuff, and either Arden really understands how Russian names work and/or she had a very thorough and well-heeded Russian-picker, and I was on the whole very impressed. None of the minor quibbles would've made me blink particularly, but the protagonist's name is the most jarring of the lot, and it's, understandably, EVERYWHERE.
Here's the thing: Vasilisa is an absolutely STELLAR name for a heroine in fantasy Russia, especially a clever, independent one like this Vasilisa is. Vasilisa (the Beautiful and/or the Wise, depending on the story) is a folktale heroine who holds her own against supernatural powers and defends her father's holdings with guile). Now, I don't actually know any Vasilisas in real life -- it is an extremely old-fashioned and "storybook" sort of name -- think Guinevere (but without even a modern form of it being common, as with Jennifer). And Wikipedia claims that "Vasya" is a nickname form of Vasilisa, and hell, maybe it even was seven hundred years ago when the name was more common. But to the modern year, "Vasya" is the default nickname form of the very common male name Vasiliy -- like, joke-common, Tom-Dick-and-Harry common -- and it is impossible for me to see the name "Vasya" in a Russian context and associate it with a female character. On top of that, while Vasya is used as the common use-name diminutive, there's also a tender diminutive form used, which does not exist at all (I'm pretty sure) -- "Vasochka". That's not even how such a diminutive would be formed -- you could say "Vasechka", I guess, though it actually goes "Vasen'ka" -- but on top of that, "Vasochka" just sounds like "vazochka", little vase/bowl, like one of those things old ladies keep their hard candy in, on top of a lacy doily. And this was really unnecessary, because Vasilisa does actually have a canonical tender diminutive which shows up in stories -- Vasilisushka. That one clearly should've been used in place of "Vasochka". What I would've done about the "Vasya" problem, in the author's place, I'm less sure. I think, honestly, the easiest thing to do would've been just to stick with Vasilisa throughout. It's not that long a name, and if it sets her somewhat apart from the other children, with their use names, I don't think that would be a problem -- she is apart from them. And affection can be shown with other, non-name-based nicknames, which the book does a really good job with, e.g. Olga calling her "little frog" (which cuted me out a lot, as that's what my father calls my kids), or Sasha and Alyosha calling her "little sister". The other option would've been to pick some nickname form that isn't Vasya -- Russian wiki entry offers Vasil'ka, Vasa, and a few others, none of which I particularly like, but none of which at least have the problem of being a male name in my head. The third option I would've considered would be picking a normal-sounding nickname form that could conceivably have com from Vasilisa -- something like Lisa/Liza, which diminutivizes further very handily; but I suppose that has the issues of both being not visibly Russian enough (i.e. insufficiently foreign to the English reader) and different enough from Vasilisa as to make it harder to link the two together. I mean, Arden did that with Alyosha/Leshka (and to a lesser extent with the other brothers, Nikolai/Kolya, and Aleksandr/Sasha), but I realize it's a different matter when it's your protagonist. And I know that Vasilisa goes full-on Polly Oliver in book 2 and dresses up as a guy, where the Vasya nickname I'm sure comes handy, but there was no need for her to go by tht for the sixteen years prior. Anyway, I doubt very much this would bother anyone who is not Russian -- it doesn't seem to have bothered anyone I know who's read this book -- but it irritated me because everything else about Russia was so well done, and everything had been clearly well researched, so this was a choice made not out of ignorance or a lack of caring -- which made it both better and worse, paradoxically.
There is also extensive, and clever and lovely, and almost everywhere correct, use of Russian words interspersed with English translations and explanation. This is a really delicate balance, IMO, and here it's handled really well. There's an extensive glossary in the back of the book (which I, of course, didn't need), and I'm not sure how intrusive or befuddling the Russian code-mixing is to a reader who doesn't speak it, but I really liked the way it was done, and the overall effect. Household things like "pech" and "dvor", and forms of address, as well as various supernatural critters (e.g. you get both "vampire" and "upyr" (which is more like 'ghoul', but close enough, along with the creature's description). I just thought this whole thing was masterful, and the only bits of Russian that were off to me were only two: 1) "matyushka" instead of "matushka" as a tender form of address to one's mother (an easy mistake to make, since the male form, "batyushka", does have that form) and 2) using "the Rus'" to refer to the people and not just the country once, which makes no sense with the indicated soft sign and could've been very easily avoided by just dropping the soft sign/apostrophy everywhere, since it was, by Arden's admission, the only word where she tried to preserve that apostrophe at all. That's really not bad for a book set in Russia.
Contrary to what you may have surmised from the previous three paragraphs, there are things other than Russian code-mixing going on in this book, like it has characters and plot and everything. And they're all quite good, too. The "Vasya" thing was particularly frustrating because I actually really liked Vasilisa as a character, and so wished I could stop twitching every time I saw her name. She is wild and brave and clever and self-sacrificing -- but also often headstrong to her own detriment, lazy at things that bore her, disobedient in small petty things as well as large important ones, and this is well depicted over the sixteen years of her life we get to see here. She felt like a very coherent character, and a sympathetic one, with flaws which were rooted in her strengths and vice versa, which is always nice to see. Spoilers from here! She is also believably young, and I liked very much, for example, that she rushes off into the deadly winter forest to fetch snowdrops for her step mother so as to avoid being sent off to a convent, because she's going to Take A Stand -- and then realizes that, no, she wouldn't rather die than go to a convent, actually, she is scared and wants to turn back home, injured pride and lack of choices and all. You don't see that in fairy tale OR fantasy heroines very much, but it was a very human moment which made me like her more. (And then Morozko also called her out on the ridiculousness of what she did.) I actually liked/appreciated all the characters we got to know at all here -- Vasilisa's brother Alyosha, who loves her and teases her; there's a nice subtle thread there showing his privilege as a son over hers as a daughter, but a lot of very believable sibling love, and I was so happy that Vasilisa brought him in on the upyr-slaying and asked him to come with her the face the Big Bad at the end. I also liked Pyotr, the gruff father, who tries to do right by his witchy last-born daughter, whom his beloved wife died giving birth to, even when he doesn't actually know what is best for her or how to deal with her at all. I found it both unexpected and fitting that it was his sacrifice which bound the Bear again, when the supernatural folks could do nothing -- that scene put me in mind of a subversion of an Alenki Tsvetochek kind of tale, Pyotr explicitly refusing to hand over his daughter to save his own life, which worked for me very well. Dunya the old nurse felt very appropriately nurse-y, and it was a moment of eucatastrophe that Vasilisa was able to reach her in her undeath and "rescue" her to a clean afterlife with a willing and courageous gift of blood.
Even the human characters who act as antagonists, Anna Ivanovna and Father Konstantin, were sympathetic and compelling. Anna is the "wicked stepmother", but we meet her first as someone who is quite literally haunted by visions she thinks are demons -- she is a god-fearing woman who has the second sight and sees all the household spirits which she believes to be devils -- and driven mad by this when she is denied the peace of the convent, because, like all the other women, she is a pawn and chattel to be used by her father for political maneuvering or gain, and eventually is led to slaughter by a man she worships. And Konstantin is even more complex -- less a victim of circumstance (although it should be noted he is also not there by choice), more a victim of his own pride, but I found the development of his feelings -- about his surroundings, about Vasilisa (to whom he is grateful for saving his life and whom he sinfully lusts for and whom he feels it is his duty to save), about the voice that speaks to him which he at first thinks is God and then learns to be a demon. This was a lot more nuance than I'd been expecting in a fairy tale retelling. Of course, Medved, the supernatural Big Bad is ALL evil, feeds on fear and despair, raises the dead, but, well, what do you expect. Morozko, on the other hand, is interesting -- I liked his blend of cruelty and kindness, brusqueness and generosity -- he felt quite right for an ancient spirit of winter. (I'm not sure how authentic the Morozka / Karachun linkage is...) Actually, I'll blaspheme and say that I enjoyed this mortal witch/personification of winter interaction better than PTerry's Wintersmith... (maybe because it really needs to be a Morozko figure for me, given the fairy tales I grew up with). Anyway, I thought the interaction between him and Vasilisa was interestingly done.
The book did feel a little slow to get going. I didn't mind, because the writing and the descriptions of everyday life and interactions between the family are lovely, but it did feel rather slow at first, and then rather fast at the climax. Partly it might be because what the book has to establish as worldbuilding for the reader not familiar with the Russian folklore was just description of things I was already used to? At any rate, I didn't mind, because like I said, the prose was really, really lovely, and the dialogue felt right for the kind of tale it was -- I'm really impressed the find such accomplished writing in a first published work.
A final quibble: Can anyone explain to me why this book is called The Bear and the Nightingale? The Bear part I get, sure. The nightingale presumably refers to Vasilisa's new magical horse, Solovey, who is a shape-shifted magical bird or something? But he doesn't actually DO anything much, though he participates in the final battle, of course, along with everyone else. I found it especially confusing because there is one "nightingale" in Russian folklore, Solovei-Razbojnik, and was expecting him to show up, or for Morozko to turn out to be him or something (I mean, the more the merrier? since he's already Death apparently). It's a lovely and memorable title, which I guess is why it was chosen, but a very puzzling one for this book, at least to me...
I'm definitely planning to read the rest of the trilogy (probably after the Hugos, though we'll see... I probably won't be able to resist if I see book 2 on the shelf at the library...)
I've given up on (Campbell nominee) Sarah Kuhn's Heroine Complex. I got to about 30%, then got distracted by other books, and every time I tried to go back, better books were calling to me. Well, I've read enough to form an opinion of the Campbell-worthiness, anyway, and it's firmly at the heels of the pack (with the rider that I haven't read anything by Jeannette Ng yet, because my library doesn't have her book, so I'm hoping the voter packet (soon! they promised!) will have a sample. Anyway, since I did get 30% in, and for my own recollection come voting time,
So the idea is that a demon excursion into San Francisco 8 years ago granted exposed people limited super powers. One of those people is the protagonist (who was so bland, I could legit not recall her name until I just looked it up), Evie Tanaka, who has (spoiler? probably not, since it's kind of on the cover...) (emotionally triggered?) fire powers but is afraid of them after one time people almost got hurt, so she hides them. She is PR assistant to her childhood best friend, Annie Chang, a superhero who calls herself Aveda Jupiter, and for a lot of contrived reasons enabled by more magic from their other high school friend, Scott, Evie ends up impersonating Aveda while Aveda is convalescing, blah blah blah. There's also a burly scientist with whom Evie bickers a lot, and who I assume is her intended love interest, because this is most definitely chick lit under the veneer of superhero action and (attempts at?) social criticism. The superhero premise and Asian lead made me think of Not Your Sidekick, but honestly, NYS is way more charming, whatever its flaws. This was just... bland, and while the fact that the blandness had a high percentage of active female characters (Aveda and Evie, Aveda's weapons expert/trainer, a reporter and her sidekick, the head of the SFPD demon squad) and the protagonists are Asian makes it somewhat unusual, it doesn't actually make it any less bland.
I was also puzzled by the decision to set the book in the Bay Area, because, the idea is that Annie and Evie were the only Asian kids in their kindergarten class, and everybody thought the food they brought from home (dumplings and spam musubi) was weird and gross, and that was the foundation of their childhood friendship. Which is possible but not very plausible. I realize not all of the Bay Area is like SF (33% Asian), and my area of SF in particular (~85% Asian, where my kid was not-infrequently the only NON-Asian child in their class), and Annie and Evie grew up in the East Bay, which has towns with as low as 10-15% Asian population. But, like. Even kids who grow up in the East Bay probably do go to other parts of the Bay Area, and I doubt there's any town without a Chinese restaurant. And, sure, the diversity has increased over time, but triangulating from things like the characters use of iPads and Skype and what movies they watched at what age, Evie and Annie have to be somewhere between my age and my brother's age. So, Bay Area in the late 80s/early 90s when they were kids, 21st century when they're adults (and one of them says something about how just the fact that both of them are Asian is enough for some people to think they look alike... in San Francisco...). That's not exactly Kansas in the 50s or something. According to her bio, the author grew up in Oregon, in a small mostly-white town. So these may even be her own experiences. And, I mean, this is a totally valid narrative! It's just a weird place to set it, considering that absolutely nothing else (that I've reached, anyway) makes the Bay Area setting necessary.
On a totally random but related note: I think rarely have a read a book which name-dropped a place so much while having so little actual feel of it other than the name. This book takes place in San Francisco, which is mentioned roughly once per page, and a "sourdough bread factory by the waterfront" is namechecked (presumably Boudin at the Wharf) but... Like, there's a popular blog called "Bay Bridge Kiss" -- WTF does that even mean? Unlike Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge is not open to pedestrian traffic on the SF part of the span (although it could be in the universe where there are demons and superheroes, I guess). You could kiss in front of the Bay Bridge at the Embarcadero, I guess, but it's not a particularly pretty bridge, so, IDK... Worst of all, one of the blog posts actually calls San Francisco "Frisco", which I have never, EVER heard anyone living in the Bay Area do (actually, the urban dictionary entry for it is pretty delightful, especially the cops-and-robbers one with Frisco as shibboleth XP) It looks like Kuhn lives around LA, which may explain all that :P
Campbell tally: 5/6. I'm still debating at this point but I think Katherine Arden has edged ahead of my other favorite, Rebecca Roanhorse (who has a novel coming out soon). I like them both a lot, and it's a decision between a short work I have no quibbles with and a longer debut I do have some issues with but still was pretty impressed by. Rivers Solomon in third place (also impressive, but more issues), then Vina Jie-Min Prasad (worthy, but less ambitious and more uneven). And Sarah Kuhn last, but I'm still deciding whether above of below No Award. She's just nowhere near the same caliber as the other nomineess I've read this year, or past winners I'm familiar with (Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Lev Grossman, Novik with Temeraire). Still to be sampled: Jeannette Ng, whose book the library does not have.
46. Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters -- the only "related work" I plan to read for the Hugos, unless something in the voter packet really changes my mind. I probably would've wanted to read it anyway, In Memoriam, kind of. This is a collection of ~blog entries from her 80s, mostly about things other than writing/literature/genre (which is what I'd read her essays on before). I don't think I walked away with anything profound, but it was like getting to sit and listen to someone whose words I've loved for almost three decades, and whatever she had to say was perceptive and vividly expressed and down-to-earth, a joy to read even in those cases where I didn't agree with her or when she was writing about something I'm not myself interested in, like music. (The introduction, on the other hand, I couldn't get through.)
It's a short book of short essays/blogs posts -- sections on aging, on lit/writing (my favorite), on sociology, I guess, and on... I'm not sure what went into the last section, actually -- art more generally? nature? -- interspersed with blog posts about her new cat, Pard, which were very enjoyable even to not-cat-person me.
I'm not sure how to talk about these best -- probably remarking on individual pieces when I have something to say / calling out quotes?
"In Your Spare Time" -- about the Harvard alumni questionnaire she received: Question 14: "Are you living your secret desires?" [...] I finally didn't check Yes, Somewhat, or No, but wrote in "I have none, my desires are flagrant."
"Catching Up, Ha Ha" -- "Considering that I am on the eve of my eighty-fifth birthday, and that anyone over seventy-five who isn't continuously and conspicuously active is liable to be considered dead"
"Would You Please Fucking Stop" -- about swearing in literature. "Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead was forced to use the euphemistic invention fugging, giving Dorothy Parker the chance, which naturally she didn't miss, of cooing at him, 'Oh, are you the young man who doesn't know how to spell fuck?'"
"Readers' Questions" -- "Or they ask large, general questions about how Taoism or feminism or Jungian pschology or infomation theory has influenced me -- questions answerable in some cases only with a long PhD thesis, in others only with 'Not much.'" And: "The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn't changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is."
"Papa H", on Homer, was my favorite piece, and not just because Le Guin sides with the Trojans an calls Hector "a mensch" :). "I think Homwer outwits most writers who have writte on the War, by not taking sides. The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs Evil. It's just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal [...] His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it's unprejudiced. It isn't Satan vs Angels. It isn't Holy Warriors vs Infidels. It isn't hobbits vs orcs. It's just people vs. people. Of course you can tae sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to but it's no use, I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn't take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic." "Milton, a Christian, had to take sides [...] He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, geroic, and even sympathetic -- which is faking it. He faked it very well." "I don't know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy." "Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalized such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though these generalities can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. 'Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!' we cry, feeling that we have understood something important -- but we've merely recognized it."
"TGAN Again" -- on who wants the Great American Novel to exist: "Tired teachers, timid teachers, lazy students who'd like one text to read instead of the many, many great and greatly complex books that make up literature."
"Utopiyin, Utopiyang" and "A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters" were interesting to me less for the quotes and more because the concept of the yin utopia/dystopia (the feminine one) and the idea that "a fellowship of women [...] tends to be casual, unformulated, unhierarchical" made me think of the Cousins Hive in Terra Ignota (and also made me wish I knew what Le Guin thought of Palmer's book, if she read it...)
"Exorcists" -- "The church updated the rite in 1999, advising that 'all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.' This seems rather like issuing directions for driving a car while cautioning that all must be done to avoid the perception that a moving vehicle is being guided."
"Belief in Belief" -- "Darwin's theory vastly enlarges our perception of reality -- our always tentative knowledge [...] -- a great, rich, beautiful insight. Not a revealed truth, but an earned one."
"About Anger" -- "As my great-aunt Betsy said of a woman who snubbed her, 'I pity her poort taste.'" "I'd like to kick Ernest Hemingway for faking and posturing when he had the talent to succeed without faking."
"Rehearsal" -- "Sitting in on a rehearsal is a strange experience for the author of the book the play is based on. [...] People you thought you'd made up, invented, imagined, are there, not imaginary at all. And they speak to each other. Not to you. Not anymore."
"Without Egg" -- I apparently had no idea that an American egg cup has two "bowls", the bigger one for pouring the cracked egg into it. Then... what's the point? O.o "Like all good tools, it gives pleasure by its pure aptness. It does one thing only, but does it perfectly, and nothing else can do it." "My current egg spoon is stainless steel; on the handle are the letters K L M. I will not go into how we came to own this spoon." (As the owner of a similar one, I applaud such discretions :D)
"The Horsies Upstairs" -- on people being sad upon finding out Santa isn't real: "Is what people grieve over the pain not of losing a belief but of realizing that somebody you trusted expected you to believe something they didn't believe?"
"The Lynx" -- "If piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano." "Some children who came by squaled, 'Eeeyew! He's eating the insides!' and some other children who came by murmured with satisfaction, 'Oh look, he's eating the guts.'"
"Notes from a Week at a Ranch" -- "A peacock pulls his poor, slattern tail along through molting August, pride reduced to sapphire head and rajah's crest and the brassy, meowing, melancholy jungle cry." "The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability."
Some general remarks -- I found it neat to read the autobiographical bits, because LeGuin grew up and lived in Berkeley and thereabouts, and was living in Oregon when she was writing these essays, and both Berkeley and Portland (and environs) are cities I know, even if I didn't know all the places she mentioned (like, she wrote about Sunriver, and half my Oregon coworkers have vacation homes there). I also enjoyed learning stuff I'd never known about LeGuin, like her refusing a Nebula for a novelette in protest over SFWA revoking Lem's honorary membership, or the fact that she knew Steinbeck, who was the uncle of her best friend.
Hugos tally (best related work): The Ursula Le Guin essays by default, even though they're mostly not *about* SFF. I don't think I'm going to be reading any other related work nominees for this -- there are three things about SFF authors I've not read (Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, and Iain M. Banks) and a Gamergate thing, none of which I have any interest in. Sleeping with Monsters is theoretically interesting, but I can't say I've enjoyed Liz Bourke's essays on Tor.com all that much. I'll read whatever's in the voter packet, I guess, but it's going to be hard for it to beat Le Guin even in blog posts.
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And then we ended up watching Deadpool 2, which is a bit of a story in itself (the plan was for L to go see it with her friends, but O and I ended up joining them at the last minute). It was pretty great! But also cements my impression that it's a movie I would've been even happier watching on DVD, where I could have the subtitles on, and could pause stuff to make sure they'd said what I thought they'd said, or to have O explain comics references to me. We laughed a lot, especially at the potshots at the other superhero movies, Spoilers from here! like Wade's quip about "fighting a caped badass, only to discover that his mom was named Martha too." and "I'm Batman", and “Give me a bow and arrow, I'm basically Hawkeye!” (when he's de-powered), and the Hulk reference when he's fighting Juggernaut, calling Cable "Thanos" -- I think the superhero movie snark was my favorite, followed by general fourth-wall snark, like, "That's just lazy writing" and "Big CGI fight scene coming up" and so on. But pretty much everything in the movie was funny -- the stealth cameo from the X-Men team, Deadpool and Yukio giving each other little waves, the Deadpool/Colossus vibes (Colossus in general was pretty great, and neither L nor I were sure, based on the movie, if the actor was actually Russian or not -- the brief Russian was pretty good, as was the accent; turns out the actor is Serbian).
My favorite new thing about this movie was Domino, who was awesome and whose powers were so much fun to see, especially against the background of Deadpool's rant about how luck is not a superpower. Definitely looking forward to more of her in the sequels. My other favorite thing were the after-redit scenes. I'd actually spent the bulk of the movie wondering if Vanessa was going to stay fridged (and hoping the answer was No, because I love the relationship between her and Wade -- and her giving him her IUD for their anniversary, and him having no idea WTF it was, that was such a perfect next step for them), and then really frowning at the screen when Cable went back in time to the beginning of the battle and not farther enough back to save Vanessa and remove Deadpool's suicidal impulses. I mean, it was a very self-aware and respectful fridging -- I appreciated the continued scenes with Vanessa, and the brief "happy ending" in Heaven or wherever, complete with the "Don't fuck Elvis"/"Don't fuck Colossus" farewells. And then the Wolverine scene, which O had to explain to me, since I've not watched Wolverine: Origins and had no idea what was going on, and finally the Ryan Reynolds signing on for Green Lantern, which I did know about and had been waiting for.
Anyway, it was a good time, glad I got to see it, and O was really happy, too.
I'm also continuing to watch through the "dramatic presentation long form" nominees, and have now seen all of them.
Get Out: This... was an interesting one. So first of all, it is SO not my genre -- I don't watch horror movies, like, at all -- it's my least favorite genre in general, and especially in visual form -- and so all the conventions of the genre -- the creepy humming and small noises, the music -- was pretty much lost on me. I was spoiled for the central conceit, courtesy of Honest Trailer, which is for the better, as I doubt I would've watched it otherwise. The central conceit IS powerful, and there are some aspects that really worked for me -- the entirety of Chris's acting (the way he is unsurprised but not accepting, until the really weird shit starts), SPOILERS from here! the bingo/auction block scene. Rose and the family were very effective, and the way the "affluent white people" thing at the start -- the neurosurgeon father / psychiatrist mother / med school son, "we think of them as family", etc. -- turns out to be super explicitly sinister was really effective. Then there were things that worked less well for me -- I just didn't find Chris's TSA agent friend funny, or fitting to the tone of the the rest of the movie -- like, he didn't lighten the dark mood for me, he just felt out of place. And there were scenes where I was like, "Oh, I see what you're doing there", but they didn't land emotionally for me -- like when Chris gores the father with the mounted deer head, after the father's rant about how deer are vermin at the start. Other connections did land -- Chris going to check on Georgina after he hits her with the car, while muttering "No, no, no, just go" to himself -- was really effective for me as him basically getting to make a different choice than the one he is still traumatized by around his mother's death. And there's a ton of clever things going on in this movie... which unfortunately is still a genre I don't care about, so I wouldn't rewatch it to catch them all, but I enjoyed reading the explanations here for some connections I missed. So, I was pretty impressed with the movie, for all that it isn't my thing at all genre-wise, and then we got to the ending and I was like, huh? Really, that's it? But rewatching the Honest Trailer clued me in to the fact that there's an alternate ending which had been intended as the ending originally. It is really depressing but also way, WAY more powerful than what was actually released. After listening to the commentary, I understand what motivated the director to choose the happier ending, but I still think it's a much weaker one, and weakens the whole film considerably.
Blade Runner 2049: Well, that was... long. I think that between when I watched and liked the original Blade Runner, as a college freshman, and now, I've lost my patience for artsy mindfuck movies, whatever limited patience I had for them to begin with. I mean, I enjoyed various things about this movie, but that enjoyment had worn off pretty much completely after two hours of it. I can totally see why it won all the cinematorgraphy awards and was nominated for a bunch of sound and music and effects stuff. It's a very stark movie, which is not the kind of thing I prefer to watch, visually speaking, but it does it future-noir thing really well. So, OK, it's a starkly gorgeous movie (all that sharp black and white, and various shades of orange and grey, and the geometric farm patterns at the opening, and industrial barriers and grates), but it's way too slow for my taste, and I don't see why it needed to be almost 3 hours long. I liked Gosling's Replicant K a lot, and Joi was just the right blend of sweet and creepy, and it was neat to see this much older Deckard. But overall I found the movie way too ponderous and self-important for what it actually had to say, and I'm not convinced it actually makes total sense, but damned if I'm going to try to pay enough attention to confirm one way or another. (On a random note, why did the California farm at the beginning have tents labeled "tselina" in Russian? O.o)
Hugos tally (dramatic long form): 6/6 (done! :) Thor 3, The Last Jedi, debating between Get Out and Shape of Water -- with the alternate ending, Get Out would be ahead, with the ending it was actually released with, I think Shape of Water wins, because at least it didn't feel half-finished, Blade Runner 2049, Wonder Woman.
Then there's the "dramatic presentation, short form" category. I learned from Wiki that the Black Mirror episodes are a) stand-alone and b) on Netflix, so I actually went ahead and watched USS Callister. It seems that I enjoy Star Trek parodies/subversions/commentary way more than actual classic Trek (which I can't stand on account of William Shatner's face). This was an enjoyable episode, although, wow, it had some dark bits. Spoilers from here! I did like the progression where the nebbishy Daly, brilliant programmer but awkward human being, turned out to be not a secret hero but a secret monster. He starts out sympathetic compared to Walton, and then is shown to be awful, and then sails way past awful when Walton explains what happened to his son. But I did like the fact that in-game Walton both acknowledged that putting Daly on this path was probably his fault for taking advantage of him in real life, and that the conclusion is still "fuck you" for the way Daly has acted, which, fair. I liked all of the actors, both as their in-game clones and real selves. The main thing that bugged me was actually the worldbuilding -- how does Daly's "gizmo" which constructs digital clones from DNA imbue the clones with the stuff that is NOT DNA-based, like skills and memories? I mean, I realize that's not the point, and it has to be like that for the episode to work, but I kept wondering about that.
And then I discovered that season 1 of The Good Place is on Netflix and kind of watched the whole thing... It's just as funny, adorable, and neatly conceived as everyone has been saying, and I had a great time with the first season and am now watching season 2. Spoilers, episode by episode
Episode 1: OK, yes, this was great. Eleanor is hugely entertaining in that "terrible person in an average sort of way" mode, and Chidi is just incredibly likeable, and Tahani and Michael round out the cast nicely. I keep being amused by the swearing euphemisms, and laughed out loud in the scene where drunk Eleanor is attempting to pronounce Chidi's last name.
Episode 2: "That's not a present, that's just common decency" (when Eleanor finally remembers and manages to say "Senegal"
Episode 3: OK, I can totally see why people are shipping Eleanor/Tahani XP And ooh, the twist with Jianyu is something I did not see coming at all and was awesome! :D
Episode 4: Ha, Jason is great fun! It's nice to so the actor playing "Jianyu"/Jason is actually Filipino.
Episode 5: Aww, poor Tahani, constantly upstaged by her sister (though I totally guessed that nothing after death would change the rankings). And, awww, Chidi continues to be the most adorable thing ever, with his theoretical fantasy of boat and French poetry and no actual idea of what to do with a boat. Eleanor and he trying to be soulmates for show was also really cute.
Episode 6: Michael on frozen yogurt: "There is something really human about taking something really great and ruining it a little so you can have more of it." Chidi and Tahani bonding was rather nice, but not as fun as Eleanor and Michael having human fun together (Michael is kind of Ariel from the Little Mermaid, isn't he XP)
Episode 7: I LOL'd at Chidi's advisor ditching him: "He said he was just going out for cigarettes, but then he left his tenured position at the Sorbonne." And oh wow, I didn't expect Eleanor to come clean so soon! Chidi's ethical dilemmas never stop being funny, though.
Episodes 8-9: The train announcements on the way to the Bad Place were brilliant, and the rest of the Bad Place crew was entertainingly despicable. I'm not so thrilled with baby-brained Janet, though.
Episode 10: I also wasn't expecting Eleanor to realize (or "realize", whichever it ends up being) she was in love with Chidi and definitely not to confess to him right away, though it's really refreshing that she did. And the "Her love confession was a lot better than mine, can I get a do-over?" was really fun, too. The best thing, though, was the way the Eleanor and Tahani thing played out when they thought Chidi was supposed to be both their soulmate. And the Eleanor/Tahani vibes are still hella strong. Also, Chidi's inability to make a decision is something I personally identify with pretty hard.
Episode 11: Not a lot to say about this one, but I do like the twist about stealing Shawn's train, and also Jason's bank robbery scheme was pretty funny.
Episode 12: Eleanor's parents are pretty awful... This was actually a thing that made me feel for her even the way she was originally.
Episode 13: OK, that's pretty brilliant as a twist! And I do love the way little things come back up, liked Jason calling it as a prank show from the start, or the random tidbit that Janets don't eat.
I also listened to "The Deep" song, which is definitely not my thing, but I do like the IDEA of a song being nominated for short form...
Hugos tally, short form: (3/6) "Michael's Gambit" (The Good Place), USS Callister, "The Deep". I should get to the other nominated episode from The Good Place, too, but that will be it, probably, since I don't see myself watching Star Trek Discovery, at least not in time.
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So, the Nebula winners are announced, and I was going through the list with an eye towards the Hugo shortlist. I'm not sure the Nebulas actually function as the Golden globes due relative to the Oscars, but I've never actually paid attention to it before, and was kind of curious to see what happens.
Novel: The Stone Sky is the winner, which at first I found unsuprising, but then I went back over the 2016 and 2017 winners, and neither of the previous books in the trilogy had won (it was Uprooted in 2016 and All the Birds in the Sky in 2017), so this was more like making sure something of the Broken Earth won, which is only right and proper. Hopefully the Hugos, in contrast, will give this one a rest and let something else win for a change. (I also found it interesting that only two novels, this and Six Wakes, showed up on both shortlists. And Six Wakes was a neat idea but not up to par on execution, I thought.)
Novella: All Systems Red! Which hopefully bodes well for it in the Hugos. It's no longer my top choice, but if And Then There Were (N-One) has to lose to someone, I hope it's to Murderbot. And I'm especially pleased River of Teeth (the disappointing-to-me bisexual hippo book) did not win. Hopefully that will carry over in the Hugos. (Four titles of overlap here -- these three, plus The black Tides of Heaven.)
Novelette: The only category where the winner is not something I've read -- "A Human Stain" by Kelly Robson (I may remedy that, once Hugo homework is done). Here there was an overlap of 3 titles with the Hugos -- my favorite "Wind Will Rove", "A Series of Steaks" (which I also liked), and "Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time" (which I DISliked, but am not surprised to see on both shortlists.) This category really doesn't let me predict much...
Short story: My Hugo favorite "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience" (from one of my two Campbell-favorite authors) won this, which makes me very happy. This is another category with 4 overlapping nominees -- "Fandom for Robots", "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand", and (the other one I liked, and nominated for Hugo myself) "Carnival Nine".
YA novel: For some reason, this category only had 4 on the shortlist, of which the only overlap, and the only one I've read, is the winner, The Art of Starving. Which increases my suspicion that it will win the not-a-Hugo too (which I won't be disappointed by, even though I'm rooting for two other titles above it).
Dramatic presentation: Get Out, which I liked less than several of the other movie nominees I've seen -- Logan, Thor 3, and as you see above, I'm waffling on Shape of Water. But it's the most overtly message-y movie -- although I actually do think the message is really well and cleverly done and not anvilicious at all. Overlap is a bit harder to judge here because Nebula doesn't split up long form and short form, but five of the six Nebula nominees appear somewhere on the Hugo short list, and the only one that does not is Logan, which I think was robbed as far as the Hugo long form nomination is concerned. The two movies absent from the Nebula ballot are Blade Runner 2049 and Thor 3 (which is currently my top pick for the Hugos). The one nominee that shows up on the "short form" of the Hugo but was judged against the movies here is "Michael's Gambit" from The Good Place, and I don't really know how to judge a TV show episode/season finale against a movie, but I think I'd rank that above Get Out too.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1081063.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).