Reading roundup and final Hugo nominations post
meathiel tagged me to post covers of seven books I love - one cover a day for a week. There is to be no explanations or reviews, just covers*. Each time I post I will ask someone else to take up the challenge. Obviously it goes without saying that if I tag you and you don't want to it, you don't have to do it, or should feel free to modify the meme rules as you see fit. Please do not feel obligated! (And if I don't tag you and you want to play, obviously you should! :D)
Day 6:
(OK, I know you are not supposed to say anything, but it was ridiculously hard to pick out a cover for this one. See this article, and this one)
Today I'm tagging profiterole.
*and as much conversation in comments as you'd like :D
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A zillion years ago, I volunteered for yet another iteration of the icon meme (you know the drill, comment and I'll pick 3 of yours to talk about if you want), and
tinny picked these three from LJ:
-- this is from an early crop of self-made icons, from when I think I was still manipulating them pixel by pixel in Paintbrush and not very well, before I discovered Paint.NET. The quote reads, "Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people." -- with the old-timey stretched out initial S's that look like f's. This is an image of a page from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which I got to see during my summer in Oxford. I'd always been someone who enjoyed reading the dictionary for fun, but this was my first introduction to the idea that once upon a time definitions were not always terribly impartial XP I don't use it very often, but it's my general language geekery icon.
-- this is another icon I made myself, a little later, from a poetry set which was my first concerted effort at making icons for myself (as opposed to for westerosorting points). The ones that I ended up liking from that set -- I'm using four over on LJ -- all more or less came out looking like they did by accident, but this one in particular. I did some kind of blur on the flame and it turned the text weird flame-y colors, and I have no idea how it did that or how one would go about repeating it, but I like it a lot! The line is from W.B.Yeats's "No Second Troy", which is my second favorite poem of all time (I also have an icon from my first favorite, Philip Larkin's "Aubade", and my third favorite, G.M.Hopkins's "The Windhover"). Really, my approach to quote icons is simple and a little silly -- I tend to look for a background image that fits the content of the line, then crop or manipulate it into a suitable background and add the text in colors and fonts that seem to go with the sense of it. This is one of the cases where I feel like it worked. I probably only ever use this icon to talk about Yeats, but that comes up more often than you might imagine :)
-- the reason I decided to finally get to answering this meme today, as this is a quote from Lolita. The faint English text is "and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.”
The Russian text in the foreground reads "mraz', gnil', smert'" = "filth, rot, death" -- which is from the line "и мигают звезды над амбарами, фарами, барами, парами и все вокруг - мразь, гниль, смерть", which is the equivalent Russian line. Nabokov is crazy hard to translate, but verbatim that reads "and the stars are blinking above the barns*, headlights*, bars*, couples* and all around -- filth, rot, death" -- where the starred words all rhyme. Here's the thing: I first read Lolita in Russian, but knowing it had been written in English first and then translated by Nabokov himself. And the mraz', gnil', smert' combination of words really struck me, because not only do the meanings go together very well, but the sound is amazing -- all of those consonant clusters, OMG! I then spent the next couple of years trying to figure out how this line could've gone in English, because I couldn't think of a combination of nouns that would work the same way and sound good together. (Yes, I could've just looked it up, but I wanted to figure it out on my own -- reverse engineer it ;P.) I did eventually give up and just read Lolita in English, which is when I discovered that the words were there, but they weren't the same words, and they weren't nouns, and while the melody of the sentence still worked more or less the same way, the rhymes had had to be changed, and the emphasis of the sentence fell differently, too. The coolest thing was, the Russian "mraz', gnil', smert'" was still way stronger than the English "soiled, torn, dead" -- you just get more satisfying consonant sounds in English. And I still wonder -- did Nabokov come up with the Russian triumverate first, even while writing in English? Or did he just hit on this amazing noun combination when translating? How does self-translation even work when you've got Nabokov's level of virtuosity with both? Anyway, this is my Nabokov icon, and my translation icon, and my bilingualism icon. when I started making text icons, I knew I wanted one of this phrase, and I'm fairly happy with how it came out. (The background is an oil slick on a puddle, which also features somewhere near that scene.)
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10. R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War -- I had slated this for a February read because I wanted to check it out in time for Hugo nominations, especially as Kuang is Campbell-eligible (and is going on my list). The book itself is not going to displace the five nominations I already have, but it did impress me. I'd also seen it suggested for Lodestar, despite the author's vociferous insistence that it's not meant to be YA (in fact, there's an in-book scene that I thought was a meta-level comment on that), but, yeah, no, I don't think so -- while the first part of the book does feel like it could be YA, part 3 is... not. Like, really, really not. Spoilers!
I've also heard people say that this book feels like it contains an entire trilogy, and, yeah, it actually does. Part 1 is the magic/military school, and predictably my favorite, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Name of the Wind, with the plucky disadvantaged heroine who's the best at stuff, rich asshole rival, teacher who dismisses her unfairly, and crazy teacher whom no-one takes seriously and who commands a discipline so rare as to be pretty much non-existent. (OK, none of these things are exactly unique to Kvothe's story, either, but the combination was pretty striking. And prompted me to observe that "Also, despite being the student with the most amazing determination and learning curve in the entirety of !China, Rin is only about 15% the Mary-Sue that Kvothe is. Although in fairness Kvothe was telling his own story, and could easily have been exaggerating by at least 700%. So the Stu/Sue quotient is difficult to compare.") Anyway, I liked this part a lot: Rin's journey, the disciplines they learn at school, Kitai, the strategy teacher, and Jiang's magical madness. I also enjoyed watching Rin whip herself into academic shape -- the description of the test itself felt like the author's SAT trauma, but, like, in a good way, and Rin using pain to drive herself to study harder, until she learned to associate pain with success, was a really nice establishing character moment.
Part 2 was the "army movie" with its squad of misfits coming together and that was also a reasonable choice, although I personally enjoyed it a lot less. I like how messy and complicated everything is -- how the small brilliant victories don't actually matter one bit, in the long run, and the students who were amazing at the academy fall apart under the pressures of real war. Well done, but not exactly enjoyable, although I did like the explosives urchin.
Aaaand then we got to Part 3 of the trilogy. Which, I knew going in there was going to be Rape of Nanking. But I hadn't expected quite this much of the literal Rape of Nanking (I'd read some articles about it a few years back, and it's the sort of thing that sticks with you, so I recognized a number of specific things I remembered from the accounts). And... I don't know how I feel about that. If it was someone with no personal history involved strip-mining a real-world atrocity for fantasy darkness, I'd not feel great about it, but one's own national/cultural tragedy? I really can't quibble with that. And if this had been just a made up atrocity, it definitely would've felt over the top, and like an author trying too hard to explain the protagonist's subsequent actions. But when it's things that actual people to actual other humans, it can't be over-the-top dramatic, because it actually happened... (As often happens in these cases, when I don't know how I feel about something like this, and whether or not I'm entitled to have an opinion at all, I reach for a comparison where I'm part of the in-group and how would I feel about that? And, well, I never minded Magneto's Holocaust origin story, for example, and definitely feel like it adds power and nuance to his characters, so.) The part between Rin witnessing the destruction of the city and her final act -- all the stuff with the magic mountain prison and their capture and Altan's sacrifice -- worked for me less well, but I realize something needed to go there, to give it time to germinate. And I did believe the "payoff", which is an audacious way to end the book.
There were various things I liked here in addition to the magic school story: the colloquial language, which worked really well for me and made such a thick book very readable; the mixed up centuries of this !China, which also worked surprisingly well; the unexpected turn with Nezha, where the school bully turns into something like a friend by virtue of being a familiar face and growing up real fast in the same war (and I'm sure we've not seen the last of him). Other things didn't work for me as much: this flavor of magic just isn't very interesting to me, with or without the drugs; the magical Speerlies stuff didn't work for me terribly well either, and I was disappointed when it turned out (apparently/presumably) that Rin was a lost child of the island. I did find it neat having the I Ching used the same way Tarot card images show up in a lot of Western fantasy; I mean, why not? -- and it's put to good use. Oh, and I figured out Jiang was Gatekeeper and who Rin's Pantheon ghost was (Queen Tearza, who chose to sacrifice her people rather than unleash a god upon the world), and thought that foreshadowing was nicely done.
But the thing I was most impressed me here, the thing that grabbed me from the start and kept me reading, the thing that will make me go back for the sequel, and the thing that kept ikel89 and me discussing the book afterwards, was Rin. She is a really amazing protagonist, not in any sort of inspirational sense, but in the sense of a character who is incredibly coherent from start to finish. Like, you can see the seeds of the person who will make the categorical, brutal choice and commit to genocide for revenge from the very start, from the girl who is willing to steal and lie and bribe and threaten and wear herself to the bone to grab onto a spar of safety, of power, because she knows just how steeply the world is stacked against her. I loved that from the start Rin had this ruthless efficiency to her, this willingness to cut away anything that was holding her back from doing the hard thing she considered necessary: her foster-brother's affection when she chooses to leave, her braid on the way to the big city, her womb at the academy, when cramps interfere with her schoolwork -- and not feel any regret as she does so -- until this culminated amazingly, inevitably, in her cutting away her humanity, essentially, her compassion, because that's what she needs to do in order to destroy the enemy utterly. Which works with everything that went before, back to her first kill, when she expected to feel something and felt nothing instead, just the realization that she had to keep doing this, and even farther back. The book builds to a tragedy in the classical sense, and that was very well done. And now that it IS done, I really wonder where the sequel(s) will take Rin from here. Can there possibly be redemption from this? I don't see how, but I'm really curious to see what happens next.
As I mentioned above, after I finished the book, K (who had read it some months earlier) and I attempted to sort Rin via the Sorting Hat Chats methodology, and it was really hard! Or, rather, Secondary was easy: Rin is a textbook Hufflepuff. Yes she can do book learning and employ it like a Ravenclaw, yes she can be sneaky, and she can also lose it and go for full frontal assault, but its very clear her native way of doing things is grinding hard work. Primary was so hard, though! She seems like a petrified Slytherin with no-one in her inner circle (although a few, like Kitai, come close), or maybe a desultory Ravenclaw trying on different primary truths? She doesn't seem to have a moral compass although it seems like she wouldn't mind having one, or at least having someone tell her the right thing to do... It's almost like she's got no primary at all, only vague attempts to adopt one by accepting other people's worldviews -- the academy's party line, Altan's leadership, etc -- like a null primary almost. Which kind of makes sense, because she grew up in a setting with neither people who cared for her nor any sort of morals. But it makes for a fascinating sorting exercise. What a dark Puff! (to quote K).
Quotes:
Jiang: "You're a walking disaster. You're training with arcane techniques at a rate that will lead to inevitable injury, and not the kind you recover from. You've misinterpreted Seejin's texts so badly that I believe you've come up with a new art form all by yourself."
Rin: "Then why are you helping me?"
Jiang: "To spite Jun, mostly. I hate the man."
Jun: Privileges like never teaching class?
Jiang: I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.
"They're Hesperians. They always think they're helping." [Hesperians being the ~US analogue, as far as I could tell.]
11. Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths -- I really wanted to like this book, because the author is one of the three "serpents" from the Be The Serpent podcast, while at the same time feeling like there was a pretty good chance that I wouldn't, because of the three serpents, Alex's reading tastes are definitely the least well aligned with mine, as in, they routinely squee over books that leave me cold. Well this book ended up occupying that odd space where it was both a reasonably enjoyable read, on a page-by-page level, and an overall disappointment. Like, I liked a lot of the individual elements, but it didn't cohere or win me over as a book, and every time I put it down, I didn't feel particularly compelled to pick it up again.
Things I likes about the book, to various degrees, most of which, as you will see, were tempered by something about it I disliked:
- The "tales" -- stories being told within the framework of the story -- or at least some of them. There's some neat work going on here, with different people telling the stories in their individual ways and for different reasons: to entertain, to persuade, to threaten, to pass the time, to illustrate cultural relativity. Some of these work better than others. I really enjoyed the offhand "IDK he was doing blacksmithy things" way of telling a story that Consanza, who is not a professional storyteller, had. I also enjoyed the !Mongolian origin myth with Horse and Rabbit, and particularly the origin myth of the Milky Way -- it feels very true to myth stories, and is told in this fun colloquial way that feels really fitting. BUT. Most of the stories don't actually have enough to do with the core of the book to justify them being there, and a number of them are plunked down in really odd spots in terms of pacing, or feel too long. Like, I see what the book is trying to do with them, and it's an ambitious sort of thing, but it doesn't manage to pull it off, so it mostly just feels self-indulgent. Like, that really long story in the last 10% of the book which has nothing to do with anything except being a sort of "little guys banding together" parable maybe? Yeah, I was not amused, especially as it's cute, but not that great a story.
- The sense of different cultures, which came through the stories and the place names and little glimpses of religious believes and cultural practices, the little tidbits about language, like love poetry sounding awful and ominous in this one language and "These are just random words. Sunflowers. Mountain. Turquoise. Seventeen. You think they sound very mystical. You're a bigoted twit", the sand-scurrying desert huts, the Hrefni obsession with skills and rankings, etc. and the sense that the people aren't static -- they migrate and assimilate.
- The narrator's voice. Chant is a cantankerous old bastard, and ikel89 (whom I was pacing at first, as this started out as a sync read) found him quite unlikable. I liked him fine, especially his "my eyes are as good as they ever were!" insistence, and dwelling on old grudges like the stolen boots, and being grumpy about his apprentice while pretending not to care about him. But I had two problems with him: 1) he was a very audacious choice of narrator, as someone who spends the entirety of the book spoilers! locked in a succession of jail cells, before upgrading, in the last 5% or so, to faking being an unresponsive stroke victim, and 2) he does some things towards the end / holds some views that made me like him as a character quite a bit less. Now, I generally do not have a problem with protagonists who do highly questionable things: see above, and also Vlad "it's all good so long as I don't kill Easterners" Taltos and Mycroft Canner, right? But in those cases, I want to be really, really sure that the author does not actually agree with the character in question, and I wasn't entirely sure of that here (but more on that below). And to point #1, I do believe it's possible to craft a compelling story with those boundary conditions, but it's hard-mode stuff, and I just don't think Alex is an experienced enough writer yet to pull it off. (I kept comparing this book to Too Like the Lightning, which also has a distinctive narrator and narrative style, and spends a lot of time talking about things second-hand, but TLTL actually pulls it off.)
- I quite liked Consanza, Chant's advocate, who is very good at her job and cares about her standing (and her family), and does not care about fixing the world, or about the religion or culture of her immigrant parents. The thing is, Chant really didn't like Consanza, and while it started out as the sort of grumpy cantankerousness he has against everyone, by the end I felt like Alex agreed with him in certain key respects. Actually, I couldn't really believe that Chant, who hates Nuryevet and seems to be something of a misanthrope in general, and has led a nomadic lifestyle his entire adult life, should have any feelings on whether middle-class comfortable Consanza steps out of her comfort zone and uses her privelege to help the downtrodden -- .... -- while I do believe Alex cares about that very much, so that felt more like an authorial condemnation put in Chant's mouth than anything he would really believe. She gets a decently happy ending -- happier than most of her compatriots, probably -- so at least there's that. But it left a bad taste in my mouth.
- I also kind of liked Vihra, the one-legged general / Queen of, um, the war one. Order? Her ending did feel fitting, and even poignant.
The things that did not work for me:
- The plot, which was basically dissatisfying on every level. The blurb is something about a man orchestrating a revolution from inside a cell, and it's, in the loosest way possible, kind of what happens? Except he sort of blunders along for most of the book, and his motivations are nothing so lofty, And it's not so much a revolution as hasting along a civil war, and then leaving the country open to foreign invaders he'd invited in. Nothing Chant does is particularly clever, and his success relies on his targets being kind of dumb. And then, what was that ending? Are we supposed to cheer for the !Mongolian invaders? Feel like this will somehow sweep the board clean so Ivo's bunch of revolutionaries can... uh, probably not achieve a stable government, but give idealism a shot? Find Chant's actions problematic? The sequel blurb, from Ylfing's POV, seems to hint that maybe the latter at least a little bit, but I didn't feel like anything in this book really did, and not just in that Unreliable Narrator POV way. Because the narrative spends a long time on how Nuryevet is corrupt, and people are just deluding themselves that their democracy is working, and fuck capitalism, basically -- and not much time at all on showing any sort of opposing view. The revolution/invasion is hinted at/set up pretty early on, and one of the reasons I kept reading was to see if there would be any nuance or subversion -- and there really wasn't.
- Pacing/tension. Just, there isn't any. It's alway a bit of a risk when you have your protagonist telling the story as a story, but there are still ways to do it with tension. Well, not here -- there was no moment where I felt any sort of worry or tension for anyone. And the story just kind of plodded along, with Chant being shuffled from one cell to another, people disappearing for a while and then showing up again. Definitely a lot of it has to do with a lot of the action happening off-page and being relayed to Chant after the fact, but even what little action he is part of doesn't have any tension. And the digression of the indented stories don't help.
- In general, there was a lot of tell not show, especially early on. So much tell! Like, OK, good job not opening with a prologue treatise on the political structure of !Russia-land. Replacing it with essentially the same info-dump via storytelling/dialogue is only a minor improvement, though. It's not "as you know, Bob" because Chant is a stranger himself and has reason to be fishing for info, but it's still clunky. The worldbuilding isn't even that complex! When I think about how elegantly the intense background worldbuilding in something like the Broken Earth books or Terra Ignota or the Hexarchate are conveyed... well. On the podcast Alex has talked about their tendency to "underwrite" and having to go back and put in explanations per beta reader and editor comments, so possibly some infodumps are the result of that, but mostly it just feels like not trusting the reader enough to figure things out, or not having enough mastery (which is OK, in a first book) to share enough information in a way that doesn't feel like a Wikipedia download -- filtered through POV character, fortunately, but still. It just feels like Show Your Work.
- I also got that inelegant deliberateness from some of the Look, Diversity! moments, the most egregious one of which was that one guard who tells Chant he is asexual and dyslexic within the space of the same pagespread, as an overly elaborate way of explaining why he can't smuggle out a letter for him. I'm glad dyslexic and asexual people exist in this world! This is probably not how they go about behaving. I felt a bit more charitable about the digression about how you don't open doors for the one-legged general lest she kick your ass, because doing stuff for disabled people when they aren't asking for help is patronizing, but I wish it felt less like a "let's have a conversation about how doing things for disabled people when they haven't asked for help is patronizing" PSA and less like a character moment.
- I had a problem with the way the Queen of Coin was written. She's the unworthy, manipulated adversary -- cunning, but in a self-serving way... and she's described with this fake girlish laugh, and stupid sparkly clothes, and the little dog she ignores. It's a very gendered sort of "evil", especially as compared to more positively gray-shaded female characters like Consanza and Vihra. OK, Helena, whom Chant loves, is also a more feminine sort of woman -- except that in her case the femininity comes from being pregnant and liking children, and also she doesn't actually DO anything, and Chant's liking of her seems out of all proportion to anything she actually does, so I almost wonder whether she's only in there so as to say, "see? this book does have positive feminine characters"
- Ylfing was OK, but Alex clearly liked him a lot more than I did.
Honestly, while I did like several aspects of this book and enjoyed reading it whenever I had it in my hands, I'm not at all sure I would've finished it if it hadn't started out as a sync read and I wasn't reporting in to Best Chat on how it was going. I probably will pick up the sequel at the library, because I'm curious to see how Chant comes across from outside his head.
Serpentcast is still awesome, though! and now has a Patreon. (I might actually have to figure out how Patreon works for this...)
I'm falling behind on reading again, or at least on finishing books. Although I should now be able to finish my Cetaganda reread, which I was doing along with ikel89 reading the Miles books for the first time. I've also been curating fic for her (she ships Miles/Gregor, as all right-thinking people should, after reading Vor Game), which has led me to a bunch of Vorkosiverse things I hadn't seen before, like a post about this French comic, and these Russian filks.
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My Hugo nominations are in!
Best Novel
My nominations:
- Spinning Silver
- Lies Sleeping
- Philosopher's Flight
- Revenant Gun
- The Calculating Stars
Other eligible works I've read:
- Witchmark -- definitely not
- The Last Sun -- as fond as I am of it, no XP
- The Consuming Fire -- nope, as I liked it a lot less than the first book
- Good Guys -- not bad, but not as good as the ones already on my list
- The Poppy War -- really good, but not quite relevant enough to my interests to unseat any of the five I already have. If I had an extra slot, though!
- A Conspiracy of Truths -- on eof those cases where the execution fell well short of ambition and resulted in a disappointing book
Other eligible works I would not be surprised to see on the ballot and thus may go back to read / may chekc out / finish regardless:
- Trail of Lightning (Roanhorse) -- I started, and the worldbuilding is neat, but the setup is a bit too horror-ish for my taste
- Blackfish City (Sam J Miller) -- I started and find the worldbuilding neat and the prose lovely, but did not get very far yet
- Foundryside (sync read with K?)
- Semiosis (started, want to continue)
- Swordheart (ursulav)
- Record of Spaceborn Few
- The Fated Sky
- Space Opera??
Best Novella:
My nominations:
- An Artificial Condition
- The Flowers of Vashnoi
- Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night -- it's kind of grown on me more with distance? from "fun but not Hugo-caliber" to "hey, why not"
Other eligible works I have some interest in checking out:
- Rogue Protocol (started, want to finish)
- Exit Strategy
- Tensorate (The Descent of Monsters)
Best Novelette
(bless Rocket Stack Rank's algorithms! <3)
My nominations:
- The Thing about Ghost Stories, Naomi Kritzer -- I usually like Kritzer's stories, and I found this one really affecting. I liked the narrator (folklorist dealing with her mother's death after a long descent into Alzheimer's), and I liked the way this unfolded, and it made me tear up a bit.
- Adriftica (Maria Dahvana Headley) from Robots vs Fairies -- I'd written: "another really great story from an author I'd not read before. This is a riff on Midsummer Night's Dream, with bits of Tam Lin and Pied Piper stories, and an aesthetic all its own, with an enjoyable narrator and a hopeful ending to its bleak setting. The story is all about music, and specifically rock'n'roll, but in a way that managed to make me care about it in this context, which is impressive."
- The thought that Counts (K.J.Parker) -- a really fun narrative voice, and a really fun setting, and I enjoyed the clever way this unfolded.
- Thirty-Three Percent Joe (Suzanne Palmer) -- I'd liked her previous Hugo-winning story pretty well thought it wasn't my top pick. This one's also a little too paint-by-numbers, but I like the premise, and I loved the final scene.
- An Agent of Utopia by Andy Duncan, which I happened to have in my TBR pile. It's not exactly my thing, but its definitely original, and it stuck with me. And I definitely did not see the final narrator reveal coming, but it made sense of a line that made me frown earlier
Other eligible works I've read:
- Joe Diabo's Farewell by Andy Duncan -- I liked the writing and the historical setting was neat, but the speculative element (a ghost) is virtually irrelevant to the story, so I wouldn't even consider it eligible (and I liked "Utopia" better, anyhow)
- The Nearest (Greg Egan) -- near-future police procedural, and I'd wanted to read some Greg Egan. I might have conceivably considered kicking this one up, too, but it's so near-future, it hardly feels like SF -- there are police drone swarms to examine the scene and autonomous cars that need to be disabled to drive them into a river, and facial recognition and cameras everywhere, but, like, all the technology described exists today, I'm pretty sure -- just not as widely adopted. And I didn't feel like the wider adoption made for a substantially different feel to the world, or a substantially different way the story unfolded. I did appreciate the story -- vague spoilers! I think it did a good job with the unreliable narrator while still making Kate feel like a smart person good at her job. And I appreciated that the ending is bittersweet -- hopeful and happy, but not a reset.
- Left to Take the Lead (Marissa Lingen) -- this was sweet, but I felt like it had too little plot for a novelette. I appreciated the spacer POV and the way it revealed the multiple differences between what's normal for her and what's normal for Earthers, and the musings on family. There was some lovely prose and it was a very easy read, pulling me into the POV and pulling me along, but I don't think this one will stay with me to any significant degree. (Side note: the early scene where space-born Holly who is unused to weather is freaking out in the tornado shelter while everyone else is not worried/having a fine time reminded me a lot of going to the apartment building bomb shelter in Israel, here I seemed to be the only one affected by the circumstances, and everyone else was like, ho-hum, how's your mother? let's arrange an impromptu playdate XD)
- What Is Eve (Will McIntosh) -- I liked the central idea and the psychological factors, but the narrator did not work for me (12-year-old boys don't sound like this), the B&W morality was ridiculous, the Very Special Lesson was not believable, and I hated the food fight.
- Murmured Under the Moon (Tim Pratt) from Robots vs Fairies -- it was fine, but I wasn't overly impressed
- Quality Time (Ken Liu) from Robots vs Fairies -- I liked aspects of it but found the story as a whole facile
Other eligible works I may still check out, especially if they show up on the ballot:
- If At First You Don't Succeed, Try Try Again (Zen Cho)
- Do As I Do, Sing As I sing (Sarah Pinsker) -- I started this and wasn't really feeling it, but I might go back. But maybe Pinsker is just a SF writer for me, not fantasy...
- Fitting In (Max Gladstone) [Wild Cards] -- 'cos it's Gladstone
- The Only Harmless Great Thing (Tor freebie) -- but I kind of doubt that I want to read about radiation and elephants... :/
Best Short Story
My nominations:
- A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compenidum of Portal Fantasies (Alix E. Harrow) -- this was great! I read it straight through and quoted it to Best Chat and send the link to
lunasariel (a librarian of, I assume, the second type :)
- Talk to Your Children About Two-Tongued Jeremy, Theodore McCombs -- wow, ouch. This is a near-future AI story narrated super-fittingly in first-person-plural by a town's parents, and it is darly funny and brutal and creepily plausible. Wow. The author is Campbell eligible (second year) and I'm seriously considering adding him to my list
- The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society, T.Kingfisher -- Look, I love fairies and I love Vernon's fairy tale subversions, so of course I love this.
- Madeline Ashby, "Work Shadow / Shadow Work" (Robots vs Fairies anthology)
- Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions), Debbie Urbanski -- RSR review of this is one word: "Shattering", and yeah, it is. I wasn't sure it would make the ballot for me, but it really stayed with me after reading, which I think is a sign it should. And I think this is a good example of a story where an "identity" type of story is all about that identity -- in this case, the narrator is a sex-repulsed asexual -- but it's still a powerful story (and I think a universally powerful? or at least I, as someone not at all in that demographic was affected/was able to appreciate it), and feels like a SF story rather than a "[minority identity]" or "[minority identity] sci-fi" story (unlike the trans dinosaurs short story I started reading and abandoned, because like with the author's previous work that I'd read, the two aspects ust didn't mesh together for me).
Other things I've read specifically for Hugos homework and enjoyed, though they didn't quite make the list:
- Field Biology of the Wee Fairies, Naomi Kritzer -- I like this one, but it feels a little formulaic compared to the Kritzer novelette. If I didn't already have a full ballot, I might have included it, but it fell just below the line of the other stories for me.
- My Favorite Sentience, Marissa Lingen -- very cute! I had it on the ballot at first, but then meatier stories kicked it off.
- Blessings, Naomi Novik -- a Sleeping Beauty retelling that I quite liked
- You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You, Maria Dahvana Headley -- I really enjoy this author's style, even when the stories aren't thematically or plot-wise exactly my cup of tea
- The Court Magician, Sarah Pinsker -- I enjoyed it, but it didnt stick enouh with me to be Hugo material. Possibly further evidence that I should stick to sci-fi with Pinsker.
- Pistol Grip (Vina Jie-Min Prasad) -- confirmed I want to nominate her for the Campbell (2nd year) but does not rise to Hugo level for me
- Suize Q, Jacqueline Carey -- the first urban fantasy by her I've read, and I definitely want to read more, because I do prefer this style to Kushiel
Best Series
(thank you, Dublin, for making the eligibility criteria VERY clear, entirely unlike San Jose last year - "at least three (3) volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2018, at least one of which was published in 2018" and for repeat nominees, "at least two (2) additional installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words after they qualified for their last appearance on the final ballot and by the close of 2018"
My nominations:
- Machineries of Empire (
yhlee has posted wordcount which confirms it's qualified)
- Seraphina-verse (via Tess of the Road)
- Tolkien Legendarium -- Fall of Gondolin makes this eligible, and is reportedly the last shot for Tolkien to get on the ballot... This totally feels like cheating, and I don't want it to landslide over newer series I'd like to get recognition, so I was waffling... but ultimately I had to.
- Tortall (with Numair pub) -- it's a mixed bag for me, but I had to add it, because The Lioness Quartet was foundational, and the Kel books are just plain awesome
Other eligible series I'm familiar with:
- Wayfarers
- Dark Gifts (Gilded Cage et al)
- Kate Daniels
- Alex Verus
Not eligible:
- Rivers of London -- it has published 2 installments since 2017, but I don't think Furthest Station + Lies Sleeping (+ even all the GNs and short story) total 240k words. Which sucks.
- Vorkosigan for sure
Best Related Work
My nominations:
- Jo Walton's Hugo book (THE RELATEDEST)
- Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth -- I'm only a little ways in so far, and have leafed through the exhibits, but it's like walking through the Bodleian's exhibition on Tolkien, i.e. 1000% relevant to my interests
Other eligible things I might want to check out:
- Ursula LeGuin, Conversations on Writing
Best Graphic Story
My nominations:
- Skyward, vol 1
- Cry Fox (Rivers of London)
- Runaways vol 2?
Other eligible things I've read:
- Paper Girls 4 -- disappointing after how much I liked 3
- Saga 9 -- not what I wanted out of this series...
- Runaways by Rainbow Rowell (vol 1)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
My nominations:
- Into the Spider-Verse
- Incredibles 2
- Black Panther
- Infinity War
Other eligible movies I've seen:
- Deadpool 2
- Venom -- definitely not for the Hugo ballot, LOL
Other movies that are eligible but I haven't seen:
- Ant-Man and the Wasp
- Aquaman
- Ready Player One
- Ralph Breaks the Internet
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
My nominations:
- The Good Place, s2, Best Self
- The Good Place, s2, Leap to Faith
- Disenchantment, episode 5
- Disenchantment episode 10
Other eligible things I've seen:
- The Dragon Prince
- Castlevania season 2 -- lol, nope
Other eligible sources I will hopefully watch at some point:
- The Good Place s3 (through episode 10)
- Killjoys s4
Best Editor, Short Form
To be eligible, the person must have edited at least four anthologies, collections or magazine issues devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy, at least one of which must have been published in the year of eligibility.
My list so far:
- Dominik Parisien (since Navah Wolfe is not eligible in this category and I'd really liked Robots vs Fairies)
- Jonathan Strahan
- Ellen Datlow
- Julia Rios (Fireside) h
File770 list here
Best Editor, Long Form
This Award is given for the editing work that person has done in the year of eligibility. To be eligible the person must have edited at least 4 novel-length (i.e. 40,000 words or more) books devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy in the year of eligibility, which are not anthologies or collections.
Possibilities who are eligible per the File770 post:
- Gillian Redfearn and/or Betsy Wolhein (Lies Sleeping)
- Joe Monti -- I'm not totally sure he's eligible, but the File770 list turned up 3 publications so hopefully there's one hiding in the wings (Trail of Lightning)
- David Pomerico (The Poppy War)
alternate:
- Anne Groell (Spinning Silver) -- but... 1) chapter breaks! and 2) and also they should've talked maybe?
- Navah Wolfe -- I wish I could've nominated her in the short form category, because Robots vs Fairies was really great. I had her on my long form list for a while just because I could, figuring Space Opera was just a matter of taste (I haven't read it, but seen excerpts), but then I did read A Conspiracy of Truths and I feel like an editor should've done a bunch more work on that one
Most of my favorite books from this year, the editors are not eligible or at least not clearly eligible from that list...
Last year's people I liked:
- Miriam Weinberg -- but she was the editor for Vengeful and from what K has quoted, that was NOT an endorsement...
Best Pro Artist
Rocket Stack Rank to the rescue again with novel covers and short fiction artwork.
Artists I liked:
- Alan Bao (like his range, icons and Asian art and silhouettes)
- Alyssa Winans -- I like the sort of clean, almost infographic style?
- Armando Veve -- intricate doodly weird drawings
- Chris McGrath? (I like his Gladstone covers but am kind of meh on his other stuff)
- David Palumbo (Binti covers, which I like more than the books)
- FORT (EHAD covers and similarly mono-hue and atmospheric ones)
- Galen Dara (though I wasn't sold on last year's crop)
- Goñi Montes -- I like the sort of bold colors and strong lines
- Jamie Stafford-Hill -- Calculting Stars cover and more atmospheric covers
- John Picacio -- I really liked his stuff last year
- Jon Foster -- a bit more mixed, but I like the sort of muted tones covers
- Micah Epstein (mixed on the foreground figures but like the more object/landscape ones)
- Rovina Cai -- shadowy sort of art, very dreamlike
- Sarah Anne Langton -- Lavie Tidhar covers on which I love the sort of ye olde travel posters style
- Tommy Arnold (Trail of Lightning cover and some other "action" covers I like)
- Yuko Shimuzu - Tensorate covers and http://yukoart.com/category/work/
Others:
- Ron Miller did the covers of LMB's assorted novellas, but I don't like the art all that much
- Will Staehle did the Witchmark cover, which is neat, and some other covers -- quite a lot of range -- but I mostly don't care for the style
my nominations:
- Alyssa Winans
- David Palumbo
- Goni Montes
- Sarah Anne Langton
- Yuko Shimuzu
Best Semiprozine
My nominations:
- Escape Pod
- Fireside Quarterly
- Uncanny (based on the number of stories I liked that came from there)
- Strange Horizons (based on the number of stories I liked that came from there)
(Apex and Lightspeed are not eligible, as they're pro)
Best Fanzine
My nominations:
- Rocket Stack Rank
(since File770 is no longer an option)
Best Fancast
My nominations:
- Be the Serpent!
- The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 -- I know a single-fandom podcast for a show that hasn't aired for 20 years is not actually going to make it onto the list, but it's eligible and I've been enjoying it a lot, so I'm going to put it on my list
Best Fan Writer
My nominations:
- Rebecca Fraimow (
skygiants)
- Foz Meadows
Last year's people I liked whose 2018 writings I checked out:
- Bogi Takacs -- not feeling it this year
Best Fan Artist
My nominations:
- Spring Schoenhuth (whose work I got to admire in person at Worldcon, and bought some of it) - http://springtimecreations.com/
- Laurie Toby Edison - https://laurieopal.dreamwidth.org/ (the jewelry artist of my Glorious Bug from Worldcon)
- Ariela Housman (Geek Caligraphy) - https://geekcalligraphy.com/art-prints/ (Lady Astronauts, Penric manuscript)
- Naomi Vandoren - https://www.naomivandoren.com/more-watercolors
Best Art Book (special category)
my nominations
- Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth (does that qualify? it has quite a lot of Tolkien's own art, and photographs, so it might?)
- A Middle-Earth Traveler (John Howe) -- I got a copy of this figuring it would likely make a good present for my friend R and leafed through it
Books that are possibly relevant to my interests:
- Terry Pratchett's Imaginarium (Paul Kidby -- although I dislike his style)
- Daydreamer's Journey: The Art of Julie Dillon
- the Art of Into the Spider-Verse
(This is the only one where I don't have at least one solid entry for a nomination so far, but am hopeful about the John Howe...)
Lodestar
My nomination:
- Tess of the Road (which I need to finish, but even just based on what I read)
Other eligible books I've read:
- The Cruel Prince -- alas, no
Other eligible books I might
- Numair book
(Wow, this was a weird year for me in terms of reading genre YA...)
Campbell
http://www.writertopia.com/awards/campbell
Last year I didn't have anyone to put on this list, and this time I have more names than nomination slots! After some pondering, I decided to follow the logic of giving priority to people in their second year of eligibility ho had never been finalists, then everyone else.
My nominations:
- Alex Yuschik (who I think is eligible? Their Escape Pod publication of "Texts from the Ghost War" is an eligible publication, and I think the 2016 story was not, so I think they're in their second year.
- Theodore McCombs (Two-Tongued Jeremy short story)
- Tom Miller (? I haven't been able to confirm eligibility)
- R.F.Kuang (first year)
- Rivers Solomon (second year)
Last year's folks still eligible this year whom I liked:
- Vina Jie-Min Prasad (second year) -- if I had an extra spot, it would've gone to her
- Katherine Arden -- I'm definitely less enamoured of her this year... on the fence but as have more than enough candidates at this point -- pass
Other eligible folks whose work I've read:
- Jeannette Ng (second year) -- last year's finalist, hard pass
- D.A. Xiaolin Spires (second year) -- not impressed at Fireside reading
- Alexandra Rowland (first year) -- maybe next year; I definitely think there's potential, but didn't quite rise to the level of the other folks for me
*
(I have RL things to post about. I will hopefully get to them eventually. But I miss talking about books.)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1102802.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
Day 6:
(OK, I know you are not supposed to say anything, but it was ridiculously hard to pick out a cover for this one. See this article, and this one)
Today I'm tagging profiterole.
*and as much conversation in comments as you'd like :D
*
A zillion years ago, I volunteered for yet another iteration of the icon meme (you know the drill, comment and I'll pick 3 of yours to talk about if you want), and
tinny picked these three from LJ:
-- this is from an early crop of self-made icons, from when I think I was still manipulating them pixel by pixel in Paintbrush and not very well, before I discovered Paint.NET. The quote reads, "Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people." -- with the old-timey stretched out initial S's that look like f's. This is an image of a page from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which I got to see during my summer in Oxford. I'd always been someone who enjoyed reading the dictionary for fun, but this was my first introduction to the idea that once upon a time definitions were not always terribly impartial XP I don't use it very often, but it's my general language geekery icon.
-- this is another icon I made myself, a little later, from a poetry set which was my first concerted effort at making icons for myself (as opposed to for westerosorting points). The ones that I ended up liking from that set -- I'm using four over on LJ -- all more or less came out looking like they did by accident, but this one in particular. I did some kind of blur on the flame and it turned the text weird flame-y colors, and I have no idea how it did that or how one would go about repeating it, but I like it a lot! The line is from W.B.Yeats's "No Second Troy", which is my second favorite poem of all time (I also have an icon from my first favorite, Philip Larkin's "Aubade", and my third favorite, G.M.Hopkins's "The Windhover"). Really, my approach to quote icons is simple and a little silly -- I tend to look for a background image that fits the content of the line, then crop or manipulate it into a suitable background and add the text in colors and fonts that seem to go with the sense of it. This is one of the cases where I feel like it worked. I probably only ever use this icon to talk about Yeats, but that comes up more often than you might imagine :)
-- the reason I decided to finally get to answering this meme today, as this is a quote from Lolita. The faint English text is "and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.”
The Russian text in the foreground reads "mraz', gnil', smert'" = "filth, rot, death" -- which is from the line "и мигают звезды над амбарами, фарами, барами, парами и все вокруг - мразь, гниль, смерть", which is the equivalent Russian line. Nabokov is crazy hard to translate, but verbatim that reads "and the stars are blinking above the barns*, headlights*, bars*, couples* and all around -- filth, rot, death" -- where the starred words all rhyme. Here's the thing: I first read Lolita in Russian, but knowing it had been written in English first and then translated by Nabokov himself. And the mraz', gnil', smert' combination of words really struck me, because not only do the meanings go together very well, but the sound is amazing -- all of those consonant clusters, OMG! I then spent the next couple of years trying to figure out how this line could've gone in English, because I couldn't think of a combination of nouns that would work the same way and sound good together. (Yes, I could've just looked it up, but I wanted to figure it out on my own -- reverse engineer it ;P.) I did eventually give up and just read Lolita in English, which is when I discovered that the words were there, but they weren't the same words, and they weren't nouns, and while the melody of the sentence still worked more or less the same way, the rhymes had had to be changed, and the emphasis of the sentence fell differently, too. The coolest thing was, the Russian "mraz', gnil', smert'" was still way stronger than the English "soiled, torn, dead" -- you just get more satisfying consonant sounds in English. And I still wonder -- did Nabokov come up with the Russian triumverate first, even while writing in English? Or did he just hit on this amazing noun combination when translating? How does self-translation even work when you've got Nabokov's level of virtuosity with both? Anyway, this is my Nabokov icon, and my translation icon, and my bilingualism icon. when I started making text icons, I knew I wanted one of this phrase, and I'm fairly happy with how it came out. (The background is an oil slick on a puddle, which also features somewhere near that scene.)
*
10. R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War -- I had slated this for a February read because I wanted to check it out in time for Hugo nominations, especially as Kuang is Campbell-eligible (and is going on my list). The book itself is not going to displace the five nominations I already have, but it did impress me. I'd also seen it suggested for Lodestar, despite the author's vociferous insistence that it's not meant to be YA (in fact, there's an in-book scene that I thought was a meta-level comment on that), but, yeah, no, I don't think so -- while the first part of the book does feel like it could be YA, part 3 is... not. Like, really, really not. Spoilers!
I've also heard people say that this book feels like it contains an entire trilogy, and, yeah, it actually does. Part 1 is the magic/military school, and predictably my favorite, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Name of the Wind, with the plucky disadvantaged heroine who's the best at stuff, rich asshole rival, teacher who dismisses her unfairly, and crazy teacher whom no-one takes seriously and who commands a discipline so rare as to be pretty much non-existent. (OK, none of these things are exactly unique to Kvothe's story, either, but the combination was pretty striking. And prompted me to observe that "Also, despite being the student with the most amazing determination and learning curve in the entirety of !China, Rin is only about 15% the Mary-Sue that Kvothe is. Although in fairness Kvothe was telling his own story, and could easily have been exaggerating by at least 700%. So the Stu/Sue quotient is difficult to compare.") Anyway, I liked this part a lot: Rin's journey, the disciplines they learn at school, Kitai, the strategy teacher, and Jiang's magical madness. I also enjoyed watching Rin whip herself into academic shape -- the description of the test itself felt like the author's SAT trauma, but, like, in a good way, and Rin using pain to drive herself to study harder, until she learned to associate pain with success, was a really nice establishing character moment.
Part 2 was the "army movie" with its squad of misfits coming together and that was also a reasonable choice, although I personally enjoyed it a lot less. I like how messy and complicated everything is -- how the small brilliant victories don't actually matter one bit, in the long run, and the students who were amazing at the academy fall apart under the pressures of real war. Well done, but not exactly enjoyable, although I did like the explosives urchin.
Aaaand then we got to Part 3 of the trilogy. Which, I knew going in there was going to be Rape of Nanking. But I hadn't expected quite this much of the literal Rape of Nanking (I'd read some articles about it a few years back, and it's the sort of thing that sticks with you, so I recognized a number of specific things I remembered from the accounts). And... I don't know how I feel about that. If it was someone with no personal history involved strip-mining a real-world atrocity for fantasy darkness, I'd not feel great about it, but one's own national/cultural tragedy? I really can't quibble with that. And if this had been just a made up atrocity, it definitely would've felt over the top, and like an author trying too hard to explain the protagonist's subsequent actions. But when it's things that actual people to actual other humans, it can't be over-the-top dramatic, because it actually happened... (As often happens in these cases, when I don't know how I feel about something like this, and whether or not I'm entitled to have an opinion at all, I reach for a comparison where I'm part of the in-group and how would I feel about that? And, well, I never minded Magneto's Holocaust origin story, for example, and definitely feel like it adds power and nuance to his characters, so.) The part between Rin witnessing the destruction of the city and her final act -- all the stuff with the magic mountain prison and their capture and Altan's sacrifice -- worked for me less well, but I realize something needed to go there, to give it time to germinate. And I did believe the "payoff", which is an audacious way to end the book.
There were various things I liked here in addition to the magic school story: the colloquial language, which worked really well for me and made such a thick book very readable; the mixed up centuries of this !China, which also worked surprisingly well; the unexpected turn with Nezha, where the school bully turns into something like a friend by virtue of being a familiar face and growing up real fast in the same war (and I'm sure we've not seen the last of him). Other things didn't work for me as much: this flavor of magic just isn't very interesting to me, with or without the drugs; the magical Speerlies stuff didn't work for me terribly well either, and I was disappointed when it turned out (apparently/presumably) that Rin was a lost child of the island. I did find it neat having the I Ching used the same way Tarot card images show up in a lot of Western fantasy; I mean, why not? -- and it's put to good use. Oh, and I figured out Jiang was Gatekeeper and who Rin's Pantheon ghost was (Queen Tearza, who chose to sacrifice her people rather than unleash a god upon the world), and thought that foreshadowing was nicely done.
But the thing I was most impressed me here, the thing that grabbed me from the start and kept me reading, the thing that will make me go back for the sequel, and the thing that kept ikel89 and me discussing the book afterwards, was Rin. She is a really amazing protagonist, not in any sort of inspirational sense, but in the sense of a character who is incredibly coherent from start to finish. Like, you can see the seeds of the person who will make the categorical, brutal choice and commit to genocide for revenge from the very start, from the girl who is willing to steal and lie and bribe and threaten and wear herself to the bone to grab onto a spar of safety, of power, because she knows just how steeply the world is stacked against her. I loved that from the start Rin had this ruthless efficiency to her, this willingness to cut away anything that was holding her back from doing the hard thing she considered necessary: her foster-brother's affection when she chooses to leave, her braid on the way to the big city, her womb at the academy, when cramps interfere with her schoolwork -- and not feel any regret as she does so -- until this culminated amazingly, inevitably, in her cutting away her humanity, essentially, her compassion, because that's what she needs to do in order to destroy the enemy utterly. Which works with everything that went before, back to her first kill, when she expected to feel something and felt nothing instead, just the realization that she had to keep doing this, and even farther back. The book builds to a tragedy in the classical sense, and that was very well done. And now that it IS done, I really wonder where the sequel(s) will take Rin from here. Can there possibly be redemption from this? I don't see how, but I'm really curious to see what happens next.
As I mentioned above, after I finished the book, K (who had read it some months earlier) and I attempted to sort Rin via the Sorting Hat Chats methodology, and it was really hard! Or, rather, Secondary was easy: Rin is a textbook Hufflepuff. Yes she can do book learning and employ it like a Ravenclaw, yes she can be sneaky, and she can also lose it and go for full frontal assault, but its very clear her native way of doing things is grinding hard work. Primary was so hard, though! She seems like a petrified Slytherin with no-one in her inner circle (although a few, like Kitai, come close), or maybe a desultory Ravenclaw trying on different primary truths? She doesn't seem to have a moral compass although it seems like she wouldn't mind having one, or at least having someone tell her the right thing to do... It's almost like she's got no primary at all, only vague attempts to adopt one by accepting other people's worldviews -- the academy's party line, Altan's leadership, etc -- like a null primary almost. Which kind of makes sense, because she grew up in a setting with neither people who cared for her nor any sort of morals. But it makes for a fascinating sorting exercise. What a dark Puff! (to quote K).
Quotes:
Jiang: "You're a walking disaster. You're training with arcane techniques at a rate that will lead to inevitable injury, and not the kind you recover from. You've misinterpreted Seejin's texts so badly that I believe you've come up with a new art form all by yourself."
Rin: "Then why are you helping me?"
Jiang: "To spite Jun, mostly. I hate the man."
Jun: Privileges like never teaching class?
Jiang: I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.
"They're Hesperians. They always think they're helping." [Hesperians being the ~US analogue, as far as I could tell.]
11. Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths -- I really wanted to like this book, because the author is one of the three "serpents" from the Be The Serpent podcast, while at the same time feeling like there was a pretty good chance that I wouldn't, because of the three serpents, Alex's reading tastes are definitely the least well aligned with mine, as in, they routinely squee over books that leave me cold. Well this book ended up occupying that odd space where it was both a reasonably enjoyable read, on a page-by-page level, and an overall disappointment. Like, I liked a lot of the individual elements, but it didn't cohere or win me over as a book, and every time I put it down, I didn't feel particularly compelled to pick it up again.
Things I likes about the book, to various degrees, most of which, as you will see, were tempered by something about it I disliked:
- The "tales" -- stories being told within the framework of the story -- or at least some of them. There's some neat work going on here, with different people telling the stories in their individual ways and for different reasons: to entertain, to persuade, to threaten, to pass the time, to illustrate cultural relativity. Some of these work better than others. I really enjoyed the offhand "IDK he was doing blacksmithy things" way of telling a story that Consanza, who is not a professional storyteller, had. I also enjoyed the !Mongolian origin myth with Horse and Rabbit, and particularly the origin myth of the Milky Way -- it feels very true to myth stories, and is told in this fun colloquial way that feels really fitting. BUT. Most of the stories don't actually have enough to do with the core of the book to justify them being there, and a number of them are plunked down in really odd spots in terms of pacing, or feel too long. Like, I see what the book is trying to do with them, and it's an ambitious sort of thing, but it doesn't manage to pull it off, so it mostly just feels self-indulgent. Like, that really long story in the last 10% of the book which has nothing to do with anything except being a sort of "little guys banding together" parable maybe? Yeah, I was not amused, especially as it's cute, but not that great a story.
- The sense of different cultures, which came through the stories and the place names and little glimpses of religious believes and cultural practices, the little tidbits about language, like love poetry sounding awful and ominous in this one language and "These are just random words. Sunflowers. Mountain. Turquoise. Seventeen. You think they sound very mystical. You're a bigoted twit", the sand-scurrying desert huts, the Hrefni obsession with skills and rankings, etc. and the sense that the people aren't static -- they migrate and assimilate.
- The narrator's voice. Chant is a cantankerous old bastard, and ikel89 (whom I was pacing at first, as this started out as a sync read) found him quite unlikable. I liked him fine, especially his "my eyes are as good as they ever were!" insistence, and dwelling on old grudges like the stolen boots, and being grumpy about his apprentice while pretending not to care about him. But I had two problems with him: 1) he was a very audacious choice of narrator, as someone who spends the entirety of the book spoilers! locked in a succession of jail cells, before upgrading, in the last 5% or so, to faking being an unresponsive stroke victim, and 2) he does some things towards the end / holds some views that made me like him as a character quite a bit less. Now, I generally do not have a problem with protagonists who do highly questionable things: see above, and also Vlad "it's all good so long as I don't kill Easterners" Taltos and Mycroft Canner, right? But in those cases, I want to be really, really sure that the author does not actually agree with the character in question, and I wasn't entirely sure of that here (but more on that below). And to point #1, I do believe it's possible to craft a compelling story with those boundary conditions, but it's hard-mode stuff, and I just don't think Alex is an experienced enough writer yet to pull it off. (I kept comparing this book to Too Like the Lightning, which also has a distinctive narrator and narrative style, and spends a lot of time talking about things second-hand, but TLTL actually pulls it off.)
- I quite liked Consanza, Chant's advocate, who is very good at her job and cares about her standing (and her family), and does not care about fixing the world, or about the religion or culture of her immigrant parents. The thing is, Chant really didn't like Consanza, and while it started out as the sort of grumpy cantankerousness he has against everyone, by the end I felt like Alex agreed with him in certain key respects. Actually, I couldn't really believe that Chant, who hates Nuryevet and seems to be something of a misanthrope in general, and has led a nomadic lifestyle his entire adult life, should have any feelings on whether middle-class comfortable Consanza steps out of her comfort zone and uses her privelege to help the downtrodden -- .... -- while I do believe Alex cares about that very much, so that felt more like an authorial condemnation put in Chant's mouth than anything he would really believe. She gets a decently happy ending -- happier than most of her compatriots, probably -- so at least there's that. But it left a bad taste in my mouth.
- I also kind of liked Vihra, the one-legged general / Queen of, um, the war one. Order? Her ending did feel fitting, and even poignant.
The things that did not work for me:
- The plot, which was basically dissatisfying on every level. The blurb is something about a man orchestrating a revolution from inside a cell, and it's, in the loosest way possible, kind of what happens? Except he sort of blunders along for most of the book, and his motivations are nothing so lofty, And it's not so much a revolution as hasting along a civil war, and then leaving the country open to foreign invaders he'd invited in. Nothing Chant does is particularly clever, and his success relies on his targets being kind of dumb. And then, what was that ending? Are we supposed to cheer for the !Mongolian invaders? Feel like this will somehow sweep the board clean so Ivo's bunch of revolutionaries can... uh, probably not achieve a stable government, but give idealism a shot? Find Chant's actions problematic? The sequel blurb, from Ylfing's POV, seems to hint that maybe the latter at least a little bit, but I didn't feel like anything in this book really did, and not just in that Unreliable Narrator POV way. Because the narrative spends a long time on how Nuryevet is corrupt, and people are just deluding themselves that their democracy is working, and fuck capitalism, basically -- and not much time at all on showing any sort of opposing view. The revolution/invasion is hinted at/set up pretty early on, and one of the reasons I kept reading was to see if there would be any nuance or subversion -- and there really wasn't.
- Pacing/tension. Just, there isn't any. It's alway a bit of a risk when you have your protagonist telling the story as a story, but there are still ways to do it with tension. Well, not here -- there was no moment where I felt any sort of worry or tension for anyone. And the story just kind of plodded along, with Chant being shuffled from one cell to another, people disappearing for a while and then showing up again. Definitely a lot of it has to do with a lot of the action happening off-page and being relayed to Chant after the fact, but even what little action he is part of doesn't have any tension. And the digression of the indented stories don't help.
- In general, there was a lot of tell not show, especially early on. So much tell! Like, OK, good job not opening with a prologue treatise on the political structure of !Russia-land. Replacing it with essentially the same info-dump via storytelling/dialogue is only a minor improvement, though. It's not "as you know, Bob" because Chant is a stranger himself and has reason to be fishing for info, but it's still clunky. The worldbuilding isn't even that complex! When I think about how elegantly the intense background worldbuilding in something like the Broken Earth books or Terra Ignota or the Hexarchate are conveyed... well. On the podcast Alex has talked about their tendency to "underwrite" and having to go back and put in explanations per beta reader and editor comments, so possibly some infodumps are the result of that, but mostly it just feels like not trusting the reader enough to figure things out, or not having enough mastery (which is OK, in a first book) to share enough information in a way that doesn't feel like a Wikipedia download -- filtered through POV character, fortunately, but still. It just feels like Show Your Work.
- I also got that inelegant deliberateness from some of the Look, Diversity! moments, the most egregious one of which was that one guard who tells Chant he is asexual and dyslexic within the space of the same pagespread, as an overly elaborate way of explaining why he can't smuggle out a letter for him. I'm glad dyslexic and asexual people exist in this world! This is probably not how they go about behaving. I felt a bit more charitable about the digression about how you don't open doors for the one-legged general lest she kick your ass, because doing stuff for disabled people when they aren't asking for help is patronizing, but I wish it felt less like a "let's have a conversation about how doing things for disabled people when they haven't asked for help is patronizing" PSA and less like a character moment.
- I had a problem with the way the Queen of Coin was written. She's the unworthy, manipulated adversary -- cunning, but in a self-serving way... and she's described with this fake girlish laugh, and stupid sparkly clothes, and the little dog she ignores. It's a very gendered sort of "evil", especially as compared to more positively gray-shaded female characters like Consanza and Vihra. OK, Helena, whom Chant loves, is also a more feminine sort of woman -- except that in her case the femininity comes from being pregnant and liking children, and also she doesn't actually DO anything, and Chant's liking of her seems out of all proportion to anything she actually does, so I almost wonder whether she's only in there so as to say, "see? this book does have positive feminine characters"
- Ylfing was OK, but Alex clearly liked him a lot more than I did.
Honestly, while I did like several aspects of this book and enjoyed reading it whenever I had it in my hands, I'm not at all sure I would've finished it if it hadn't started out as a sync read and I wasn't reporting in to Best Chat on how it was going. I probably will pick up the sequel at the library, because I'm curious to see how Chant comes across from outside his head.
Serpentcast is still awesome, though! and now has a Patreon. (I might actually have to figure out how Patreon works for this...)
I'm falling behind on reading again, or at least on finishing books. Although I should now be able to finish my Cetaganda reread, which I was doing along with ikel89 reading the Miles books for the first time. I've also been curating fic for her (she ships Miles/Gregor, as all right-thinking people should, after reading Vor Game), which has led me to a bunch of Vorkosiverse things I hadn't seen before, like a post about this French comic, and these Russian filks.
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My Hugo nominations are in!
Best Novel
My nominations:
- Spinning Silver
- Lies Sleeping
- Philosopher's Flight
- Revenant Gun
- The Calculating Stars
Other eligible works I've read:
- Witchmark -- definitely not
- The Last Sun -- as fond as I am of it, no XP
- The Consuming Fire -- nope, as I liked it a lot less than the first book
- Good Guys -- not bad, but not as good as the ones already on my list
- The Poppy War -- really good, but not quite relevant enough to my interests to unseat any of the five I already have. If I had an extra slot, though!
- A Conspiracy of Truths -- on eof those cases where the execution fell well short of ambition and resulted in a disappointing book
Other eligible works I would not be surprised to see on the ballot and thus may go back to read / may chekc out / finish regardless:
- Trail of Lightning (Roanhorse) -- I started, and the worldbuilding is neat, but the setup is a bit too horror-ish for my taste
- Blackfish City (Sam J Miller) -- I started and find the worldbuilding neat and the prose lovely, but did not get very far yet
- Foundryside (sync read with K?)
- Semiosis (started, want to continue)
- Swordheart (ursulav)
- Record of Spaceborn Few
- The Fated Sky
- Space Opera??
Best Novella:
My nominations:
- An Artificial Condition
- The Flowers of Vashnoi
- Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night -- it's kind of grown on me more with distance? from "fun but not Hugo-caliber" to "hey, why not"
Other eligible works I have some interest in checking out:
- Rogue Protocol (started, want to finish)
- Exit Strategy
- Tensorate (The Descent of Monsters)
Best Novelette
(bless Rocket Stack Rank's algorithms! <3)
My nominations:
- The Thing about Ghost Stories, Naomi Kritzer -- I usually like Kritzer's stories, and I found this one really affecting. I liked the narrator (folklorist dealing with her mother's death after a long descent into Alzheimer's), and I liked the way this unfolded, and it made me tear up a bit.
- Adriftica (Maria Dahvana Headley) from Robots vs Fairies -- I'd written: "another really great story from an author I'd not read before. This is a riff on Midsummer Night's Dream, with bits of Tam Lin and Pied Piper stories, and an aesthetic all its own, with an enjoyable narrator and a hopeful ending to its bleak setting. The story is all about music, and specifically rock'n'roll, but in a way that managed to make me care about it in this context, which is impressive."
- The thought that Counts (K.J.Parker) -- a really fun narrative voice, and a really fun setting, and I enjoyed the clever way this unfolded.
- Thirty-Three Percent Joe (Suzanne Palmer) -- I'd liked her previous Hugo-winning story pretty well thought it wasn't my top pick. This one's also a little too paint-by-numbers, but I like the premise, and I loved the final scene.
- An Agent of Utopia by Andy Duncan, which I happened to have in my TBR pile. It's not exactly my thing, but its definitely original, and it stuck with me. And I definitely did not see the final narrator reveal coming, but it made sense of a line that made me frown earlier
Other eligible works I've read:
- Joe Diabo's Farewell by Andy Duncan -- I liked the writing and the historical setting was neat, but the speculative element (a ghost) is virtually irrelevant to the story, so I wouldn't even consider it eligible (and I liked "Utopia" better, anyhow)
- The Nearest (Greg Egan) -- near-future police procedural, and I'd wanted to read some Greg Egan. I might have conceivably considered kicking this one up, too, but it's so near-future, it hardly feels like SF -- there are police drone swarms to examine the scene and autonomous cars that need to be disabled to drive them into a river, and facial recognition and cameras everywhere, but, like, all the technology described exists today, I'm pretty sure -- just not as widely adopted. And I didn't feel like the wider adoption made for a substantially different feel to the world, or a substantially different way the story unfolded. I did appreciate the story -- vague spoilers! I think it did a good job with the unreliable narrator while still making Kate feel like a smart person good at her job. And I appreciated that the ending is bittersweet -- hopeful and happy, but not a reset.
- Left to Take the Lead (Marissa Lingen) -- this was sweet, but I felt like it had too little plot for a novelette. I appreciated the spacer POV and the way it revealed the multiple differences between what's normal for her and what's normal for Earthers, and the musings on family. There was some lovely prose and it was a very easy read, pulling me into the POV and pulling me along, but I don't think this one will stay with me to any significant degree. (Side note: the early scene where space-born Holly who is unused to weather is freaking out in the tornado shelter while everyone else is not worried/having a fine time reminded me a lot of going to the apartment building bomb shelter in Israel, here I seemed to be the only one affected by the circumstances, and everyone else was like, ho-hum, how's your mother? let's arrange an impromptu playdate XD)
- What Is Eve (Will McIntosh) -- I liked the central idea and the psychological factors, but the narrator did not work for me (12-year-old boys don't sound like this), the B&W morality was ridiculous, the Very Special Lesson was not believable, and I hated the food fight.
- Murmured Under the Moon (Tim Pratt) from Robots vs Fairies -- it was fine, but I wasn't overly impressed
- Quality Time (Ken Liu) from Robots vs Fairies -- I liked aspects of it but found the story as a whole facile
Other eligible works I may still check out, especially if they show up on the ballot:
- If At First You Don't Succeed, Try Try Again (Zen Cho)
- Do As I Do, Sing As I sing (Sarah Pinsker) -- I started this and wasn't really feeling it, but I might go back. But maybe Pinsker is just a SF writer for me, not fantasy...
- Fitting In (Max Gladstone) [Wild Cards] -- 'cos it's Gladstone
- The Only Harmless Great Thing (Tor freebie) -- but I kind of doubt that I want to read about radiation and elephants... :/
Best Short Story
My nominations:
- A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compenidum of Portal Fantasies (Alix E. Harrow) -- this was great! I read it straight through and quoted it to Best Chat and send the link to
lunasariel (a librarian of, I assume, the second type :)
- Talk to Your Children About Two-Tongued Jeremy, Theodore McCombs -- wow, ouch. This is a near-future AI story narrated super-fittingly in first-person-plural by a town's parents, and it is darly funny and brutal and creepily plausible. Wow. The author is Campbell eligible (second year) and I'm seriously considering adding him to my list
- The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society, T.Kingfisher -- Look, I love fairies and I love Vernon's fairy tale subversions, so of course I love this.
- Madeline Ashby, "Work Shadow / Shadow Work" (Robots vs Fairies anthology)
- Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions), Debbie Urbanski -- RSR review of this is one word: "Shattering", and yeah, it is. I wasn't sure it would make the ballot for me, but it really stayed with me after reading, which I think is a sign it should. And I think this is a good example of a story where an "identity" type of story is all about that identity -- in this case, the narrator is a sex-repulsed asexual -- but it's still a powerful story (and I think a universally powerful? or at least I, as someone not at all in that demographic was affected/was able to appreciate it), and feels like a SF story rather than a "[minority identity]" or "[minority identity] sci-fi" story (unlike the trans dinosaurs short story I started reading and abandoned, because like with the author's previous work that I'd read, the two aspects ust didn't mesh together for me).
Other things I've read specifically for Hugos homework and enjoyed, though they didn't quite make the list:
- Field Biology of the Wee Fairies, Naomi Kritzer -- I like this one, but it feels a little formulaic compared to the Kritzer novelette. If I didn't already have a full ballot, I might have included it, but it fell just below the line of the other stories for me.
- My Favorite Sentience, Marissa Lingen -- very cute! I had it on the ballot at first, but then meatier stories kicked it off.
- Blessings, Naomi Novik -- a Sleeping Beauty retelling that I quite liked
- You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You, Maria Dahvana Headley -- I really enjoy this author's style, even when the stories aren't thematically or plot-wise exactly my cup of tea
- The Court Magician, Sarah Pinsker -- I enjoyed it, but it didnt stick enouh with me to be Hugo material. Possibly further evidence that I should stick to sci-fi with Pinsker.
- Pistol Grip (Vina Jie-Min Prasad) -- confirmed I want to nominate her for the Campbell (2nd year) but does not rise to Hugo level for me
- Suize Q, Jacqueline Carey -- the first urban fantasy by her I've read, and I definitely want to read more, because I do prefer this style to Kushiel
Best Series
(thank you, Dublin, for making the eligibility criteria VERY clear, entirely unlike San Jose last year - "at least three (3) volumes consisting of a total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the calendar year 2018, at least one of which was published in 2018" and for repeat nominees, "at least two (2) additional installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words after they qualified for their last appearance on the final ballot and by the close of 2018"
My nominations:
- Machineries of Empire (
yhlee has posted wordcount which confirms it's qualified)
- Seraphina-verse (via Tess of the Road)
- Tolkien Legendarium -- Fall of Gondolin makes this eligible, and is reportedly the last shot for Tolkien to get on the ballot... This totally feels like cheating, and I don't want it to landslide over newer series I'd like to get recognition, so I was waffling... but ultimately I had to.
- Tortall (with Numair pub) -- it's a mixed bag for me, but I had to add it, because The Lioness Quartet was foundational, and the Kel books are just plain awesome
Other eligible series I'm familiar with:
- Wayfarers
- Dark Gifts (Gilded Cage et al)
- Kate Daniels
- Alex Verus
Not eligible:
- Rivers of London -- it has published 2 installments since 2017, but I don't think Furthest Station + Lies Sleeping (+ even all the GNs and short story) total 240k words. Which sucks.
- Vorkosigan for sure
Best Related Work
My nominations:
- Jo Walton's Hugo book (THE RELATEDEST)
- Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth -- I'm only a little ways in so far, and have leafed through the exhibits, but it's like walking through the Bodleian's exhibition on Tolkien, i.e. 1000% relevant to my interests
Other eligible things I might want to check out:
- Ursula LeGuin, Conversations on Writing
Best Graphic Story
My nominations:
- Skyward, vol 1
- Cry Fox (Rivers of London)
- Runaways vol 2?
Other eligible things I've read:
- Paper Girls 4 -- disappointing after how much I liked 3
- Saga 9 -- not what I wanted out of this series...
- Runaways by Rainbow Rowell (vol 1)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
My nominations:
- Into the Spider-Verse
- Incredibles 2
- Black Panther
- Infinity War
Other eligible movies I've seen:
- Deadpool 2
- Venom -- definitely not for the Hugo ballot, LOL
Other movies that are eligible but I haven't seen:
- Ant-Man and the Wasp
- Aquaman
- Ready Player One
- Ralph Breaks the Internet
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
My nominations:
- The Good Place, s2, Best Self
- The Good Place, s2, Leap to Faith
- Disenchantment, episode 5
- Disenchantment episode 10
Other eligible things I've seen:
- The Dragon Prince
- Castlevania season 2 -- lol, nope
Other eligible sources I will hopefully watch at some point:
- The Good Place s3 (through episode 10)
- Killjoys s4
Best Editor, Short Form
To be eligible, the person must have edited at least four anthologies, collections or magazine issues devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy, at least one of which must have been published in the year of eligibility.
My list so far:
- Dominik Parisien (since Navah Wolfe is not eligible in this category and I'd really liked Robots vs Fairies)
- Jonathan Strahan
- Ellen Datlow
- Julia Rios (Fireside) h
File770 list here
Best Editor, Long Form
This Award is given for the editing work that person has done in the year of eligibility. To be eligible the person must have edited at least 4 novel-length (i.e. 40,000 words or more) books devoted to science fiction and/or fantasy in the year of eligibility, which are not anthologies or collections.
Possibilities who are eligible per the File770 post:
- Gillian Redfearn and/or Betsy Wolhein (Lies Sleeping)
- Joe Monti -- I'm not totally sure he's eligible, but the File770 list turned up 3 publications so hopefully there's one hiding in the wings (Trail of Lightning)
- David Pomerico (The Poppy War)
alternate:
- Anne Groell (Spinning Silver) -- but... 1) chapter breaks! and 2) and also they should've talked maybe?
- Navah Wolfe -- I wish I could've nominated her in the short form category, because Robots vs Fairies was really great. I had her on my long form list for a while just because I could, figuring Space Opera was just a matter of taste (I haven't read it, but seen excerpts), but then I did read A Conspiracy of Truths and I feel like an editor should've done a bunch more work on that one
Most of my favorite books from this year, the editors are not eligible or at least not clearly eligible from that list...
Last year's people I liked:
- Miriam Weinberg -- but she was the editor for Vengeful and from what K has quoted, that was NOT an endorsement...
Best Pro Artist
Rocket Stack Rank to the rescue again with novel covers and short fiction artwork.
Artists I liked:
- Alan Bao (like his range, icons and Asian art and silhouettes)
- Alyssa Winans -- I like the sort of clean, almost infographic style?
- Armando Veve -- intricate doodly weird drawings
- Chris McGrath? (I like his Gladstone covers but am kind of meh on his other stuff)
- David Palumbo (Binti covers, which I like more than the books)
- FORT (EHAD covers and similarly mono-hue and atmospheric ones)
- Galen Dara (though I wasn't sold on last year's crop)
- Goñi Montes -- I like the sort of bold colors and strong lines
- Jamie Stafford-Hill -- Calculting Stars cover and more atmospheric covers
- John Picacio -- I really liked his stuff last year
- Jon Foster -- a bit more mixed, but I like the sort of muted tones covers
- Micah Epstein (mixed on the foreground figures but like the more object/landscape ones)
- Rovina Cai -- shadowy sort of art, very dreamlike
- Sarah Anne Langton -- Lavie Tidhar covers on which I love the sort of ye olde travel posters style
- Tommy Arnold (Trail of Lightning cover and some other "action" covers I like)
- Yuko Shimuzu - Tensorate covers and http://yukoart.com/category/work/
Others:
- Ron Miller did the covers of LMB's assorted novellas, but I don't like the art all that much
- Will Staehle did the Witchmark cover, which is neat, and some other covers -- quite a lot of range -- but I mostly don't care for the style
my nominations:
- Alyssa Winans
- David Palumbo
- Goni Montes
- Sarah Anne Langton
- Yuko Shimuzu
Best Semiprozine
My nominations:
- Escape Pod
- Fireside Quarterly
- Uncanny (based on the number of stories I liked that came from there)
- Strange Horizons (based on the number of stories I liked that came from there)
(Apex and Lightspeed are not eligible, as they're pro)
Best Fanzine
My nominations:
- Rocket Stack Rank
(since File770 is no longer an option)
Best Fancast
My nominations:
- Be the Serpent!
- The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 -- I know a single-fandom podcast for a show that hasn't aired for 20 years is not actually going to make it onto the list, but it's eligible and I've been enjoying it a lot, so I'm going to put it on my list
Best Fan Writer
My nominations:
- Rebecca Fraimow (
skygiants)
- Foz Meadows
Last year's people I liked whose 2018 writings I checked out:
- Bogi Takacs -- not feeling it this year
Best Fan Artist
My nominations:
- Spring Schoenhuth (whose work I got to admire in person at Worldcon, and bought some of it) - http://springtimecreations.com/
- Laurie Toby Edison - https://laurieopal.dreamwidth.org/ (the jewelry artist of my Glorious Bug from Worldcon)
- Ariela Housman (Geek Caligraphy) - https://geekcalligraphy.com/art-prints/ (Lady Astronauts, Penric manuscript)
- Naomi Vandoren - https://www.naomivandoren.com/more-watercolors
Best Art Book (special category)
my nominations
- Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth (does that qualify? it has quite a lot of Tolkien's own art, and photographs, so it might?)
- A Middle-Earth Traveler (John Howe) -- I got a copy of this figuring it would likely make a good present for my friend R and leafed through it
Books that are possibly relevant to my interests:
- Terry Pratchett's Imaginarium (Paul Kidby -- although I dislike his style)
- Daydreamer's Journey: The Art of Julie Dillon
- the Art of Into the Spider-Verse
(This is the only one where I don't have at least one solid entry for a nomination so far, but am hopeful about the John Howe...)
Lodestar
My nomination:
- Tess of the Road (which I need to finish, but even just based on what I read)
Other eligible books I've read:
- The Cruel Prince -- alas, no
Other eligible books I might
- Numair book
(Wow, this was a weird year for me in terms of reading genre YA...)
Campbell
http://www.writertopia.com/awards/campbell
Last year I didn't have anyone to put on this list, and this time I have more names than nomination slots! After some pondering, I decided to follow the logic of giving priority to people in their second year of eligibility ho had never been finalists, then everyone else.
My nominations:
- Alex Yuschik (who I think is eligible? Their Escape Pod publication of "Texts from the Ghost War" is an eligible publication, and I think the 2016 story was not, so I think they're in their second year.
- Theodore McCombs (Two-Tongued Jeremy short story)
- Tom Miller (? I haven't been able to confirm eligibility)
- R.F.Kuang (first year)
- Rivers Solomon (second year)
Last year's folks still eligible this year whom I liked:
- Vina Jie-Min Prasad (second year) -- if I had an extra spot, it would've gone to her
- Katherine Arden -- I'm definitely less enamoured of her this year... on the fence but as have more than enough candidates at this point -- pass
Other eligible folks whose work I've read:
- Jeannette Ng (second year) -- last year's finalist, hard pass
- D.A. Xiaolin Spires (second year) -- not impressed at Fireside reading
- Alexandra Rowland (first year) -- maybe next year; I definitely think there's potential, but didn't quite rise to the level of the other folks for me
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(I have RL things to post about. I will hopefully get to them eventually. But I miss talking about books.)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1102802.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).