Reading and watching roundup
I've read (and watched) a few things and I should really write down my thoughts about them before I completely forget them.
7. Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog -- this is a collection of fairy tales set in the modern world, each one riffing on a specific tale. I've liked Kelly Link's other short fiction and was curious to see how this approach would work for me. Happy to report that it worked very well -- the stories did not feel same-y (there's actually quite a range, from humorous to horror vibes, classic fantasy to sci-fi to post-apocalyptic), and each was doing something neat with the referenced story (where I was familiar with the story; there were a couple where I was not). At leastone of the reference fairy tale/Link story pairs is such that I never would've guessed what the riffed-on story was, even when I'm quite familiar with it. A varied, intriguing collection! Spoilers for individual stories
"The White Cat's Divorce" -- this is a riff on "The White Cat", which class of fairy tale (Animal Bride) I'm more familiar with as Tsarevna-Lyagushka. Instead of a king there's a billionnaire who wants to live forever and who finds his sons to be reminders of his own mortality, and is trying to keep them away from him. This is the one story in the collection which is told in fairy tale narrative style, which I loved to see mixed with the very modern setting of entomologists and university scholarships and hypoallergenic dogs and video games and Facebook and reality shows and "sending unmanned vessels into the sun". Anyway, this was great, very funny (if not particularly deep), with the combination of fairy tale narration and very specific modern details melding together in a way that reminded me of some bits of my beloved Ponedelnik, and just really fun. The story went on a little bit too long for my taste, and I did not find the interludes at the pot farm interesting (there is a weird amount of pot in this book; I don't have a moral problem with it or anything, it was just weirdly noticeableto me), but overall it was great.
"Prince Hat Underground" -- this is a riff on "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", which is a class of fairy tale I'm more familiar with via "Finish the Bright Falcon" (it's not the same AT type, but the search for the lost beloved is similar, complete with the three nights to win himback). Apparently "Prince Hat" is the name of the Swedish version of this fairy tale (though I confess I found the name distracting). One of the tweaks on the classic story is that the person searching for Prince Hat is another man, the other, probably even more interesting, is that they've been together for years and are in their 50s. Thisone draggedon a bit for me, I confess -- it's a long fairy tale, and the story check in at the various plot points, as well as actually developing the characters -- and didn't have the intrinsically fun voice of "White Cat's Divorce". But I appreciated how Prince Hat's otherworldliness is compiled from mundane details of modern life ("He has no favorite restaurant, reads half a novel in an ecstatic trance and then puts it down forever [...] He has been a catalog model, a bartender, a tennis coach, a dog walker, an amanuensis to a famous intellectual" and "not knowing whether Prince hat will choose a teen slasher movie or some undubbed Ukrainian documentary on mushrooms"), and I liked Gary, the protagonist. The vision of suburban Hell is neat enough, but I did find it a little anticlimactic after how long it took to get there (though, in fairness, Gary did too).
"The White Road" -- a riff on "The Musicians of Bremen" (a fairy tale I know really well), and this is the one where I would not have guessed what it was riffing on, I think, even though once the two are linked, the common conceit is clear: a troupe of performers faking something to keep a threat away from their sanctuary. The post-apocalyptic setting and the protagonist and his companion being performers reminded me of Station Eleven, although the apocalypse is supernatural rather than a pandemic, and I was really impressed with how much of the worldbuilding you get through this quite short story narrated in first person to a contemporary audience, i.e. without explaining anything that those living in the postapocalyptic world would already know. This was quite creepy and dark, but in a way that worked for me (and on a random note, the way the things on the white road get some detail wrong, eyes in the wrong spot or too many legs, made me think of AI generated art). It's a very economical story in general, and there are really neat bits in it, like the narrator explaining usually playing villains (or tragic kings) because "a woman I once loved toldmethere was something about my face which suggested a capacity for strong action or even violence. And, too, I am a baritone." -- which of course plays out in the climax. Quote: "We know that they are monsters because they come at night and they tear us to pieces. But they are also monsters, I think, because we do not understand why they do what they do." Anyway, this ended up being one of my favorites in the collection, rather to my surprise, because the aesthetic of it felt kind of zombie-like, which is totally not my thing. But the norration is cool, and the twist on the story is really unexpected, and I really enjoyed the narration and the storytelling craft here.
"The Girl Who did Not Know Fear" -- I have never encountered the fairy tale it is apparently based on, but I liked this story on its own terms. I read most of this book while flying home from Chicago, so was reading this story while waiting to board my flight, which was interesting given how much of the story is about flight delays. The subtle details that hint at what the protagonist is, the subtle creepiness of various mundane details in the liminal space of traveling away from family, Quotes: "Pity the introvert with the face of a therapist or a kindergarten teacher. Like the werewolf, we are uneasy inhuman spaces and human company, though we wear a human skin." "In the aisle seat was a woman just a little older [...] wearing the kind of clothing and minimal makeup that signals camouflage worn by lesbians in administrative offices. And when they looked at me,I knew what the two women saw." This was another that is not my subgenre at all but that I thought was really interestingly done.
"The Game of Smash and Recovery" -- the book says this is a riff on "Hansel and Gretel", and honestly I don't really get the connection, but I did find the story interesting. Anat's POV is interesting, because you're dropped in it without knowing anything about the setting (a planet) or Anat (a girl who is actually a hobbled ship's AI). This is a sci-fi story (the only one in the collection), and I find that I really enjoy sci-fi fairy tales, and while I could not see the connection to "Hansel and Gretel" specifically, this did feel like a fairy tale in any case, and it was interesting to puzzle out the worldbuilding and what was going on.
"The Lady and the Fox" -- look, I'm easy for "Tam Lin" retellings, and I liked this one a lot. It's not as interesting a take as "The White Road" or "The Girl Who did Not Know Fear", but I liked it a lot. The thing I liked was the portrayal of the Honeywell family ("Honeywells like to talk. When Honeywells have no lines to speak, they improvise. All the world's a stage.", "It's exhausting, almost Olympic, the amount of fun Honeywells seem to require. She can't decide if it's awfulor if it's wonderful." ) and in particular that Elspeth is NOT the faerie queen, as I thought she'd turn out to be, but an aging actress who helps Miranda stand up to her -- and then makes it all about herself by saying,"What a voracious,demanding creature.Makes one wonder.Am I asbadas that?" -- and the relationship between Miranda and Michael, who grow up together and then attempt making out briefly and then move past it. Quote: "Miranda is well armored already against the Honeywell aresenal of tantrums, tempests, ups, downs, charm, strange." This was my favorite in the collection, I think. It's just a really well done retelling, with interesting people and an interesting take on the magic and holding on to Tam Lin, and just a lovely story.
"Skinder's Veil" -- a riff on "Snow-White and Rose-Red". I think this was my least favorite of the collection, because while it has some fun elements -- I did enjoy some of the stories within a story -- nothing about it hit that hard for me, and Andy was kind of annoying, and the ending was not very satisfying, as the book's closer especially.
So, favorite stories: the Tam Lin one, "The White Road", and "the Girl Who Did Not Know Fear", and "Skinder's Vale" as my least favorite, followed by "Prince Hat Underground", I guess. But this was a really good collection! Nice and crunchy, as I expect from Kelly Link.
8. Rebecca Fraimow, The Iron Children -- I knew skygiants had a book coming out, and then some kind of Kindle deals email that I at some point subscribed to put it in front of me before I even knew it was out, and I snatched it up of course, even though I could not remember the premise. And actually the premise ("Asher has been training her entire life to become a Sor-Commander. One day she’ll give her soul to the gilded, mechanical body and fully ascend. She’ll be a master of the Celesti faith, and the commander to a whole battalion of Dedicates. These soldiers, human bodies encased in exoskeletons, with extra arms, and telepathic subordination to the Sor-Commanders, are the only thing that’s kept the much larger Levastani army of conquest at bay for decades." per the Tor cover reveal) would not have helped, because I'm not really into any of those things. But I like skygiants' short fiction (the stories I've read, which I've been describing to people as "Sholem Aleichem with werewolves") and fannish writing, so I figured chances were good I would like this, too -- and I did! Also, cafemassolit and I were talking in Chicago and it turned out she had also gotten a copy of the book -- without realizing the author was skygiants, whose Ann Leckie write-ups I've linked Best Chat to -- and we made vague plans to read it together, which went the way of all such plans, meaning that I started reading and then wandered away to do sudoku, because this is how I consume fiction now, K linked me to a relevant Twitter theread "for when we read it together, and then a few days later I finished the book, without K having started it, which was a pity, because I was full of poorly formed thinky thoughts and wanted to talk through them with someone. Anyway, I liked it a lot, but also it made me feel acutely just how much I apparently brace myself when reading SFF these days for stuff that's going to be lacking in nuance or conflict -- in the sense that this novella had nuanced characters and meaningful, complicated conflict in spades, and I was thinking to myself how refreshing it was to be reading something that respected me enough to not blanket me in coziness or feed me kindergarten-level morality.
The story is told through three POVs, two tight third (Asher, the novice/Sor-Commander "intern", and Barghest, one of the "cyborg" Dedicates) and a first-person POV which allows there to be some mystery over which of the other Dedicates is an enemy spy. The POVs were great! Obviously the enemy spy has a very different perspective on things than the army unit on the other side of the conflict, but Asher and Barghest's POVs are also nicely different, and while the other Dedicates don't get POVs of their own, they definitely get enough dialogue and description through Barghest's POV to feel like people -- I appreciated the variety a lot. Spoilers from here My favorite was definitely Ester, the spy, whom I found the most relatable. Interestingly, I found the most 'baseline human' POV, Asher, the least relatable and sympathetic, despite her Ravenclaw-ness, which I would normally find endearing. It's probably because Asher is the only one who is there with any significant degree of informed consent -- the Dedicates are turned into their cyborg selves as children, and Ester's situation is complicated even beyond that; Asher actually chose to be there, though she was not expecting to be in charge and was, what, 14 when she set herself on this path.
There are a lot of things I like about this book! The way every character's distinct worldview is given space and respect is one of them -- it is so refreshing not to be hit over the head with a One True Way worldview. The political situation isn't really explained, but there's enough information to understand that the Celesti (Asher and Barghest's country) are fighting against conquest by a larger, more powerful neighbor, who considers them heretics and burns orphanages and such. At the same time, over the course of the story it becomes clear that the Celesti are not exactly on moral high ground here, what with turning children into mind-controlled cyborgs. I saw a number of reviews complaining that the worldbuilding was too dense for them to follow, because the book does not stop to explain the political situation or the technology or the religious differences (or at least not until later), but I love that sort of immersive worldbuilding. And the dialogue and first-person POV are colloquial and easy to get into, which helped ease into the rest.
Even though Asher was the least relatable of the POVs for me, I appreciated her dynamic with Barghest and especially with Titan/Ester. Barghest, sublimating anger and weariness under a sense of endless duty was great. But Ester is what took the book from something I merely appreciated to somethingI really liked. There's so much interesting stuff going on with Ester! I'm first going to talk about pronouns, which should make the rest easier. It looks like dedicates are automatically referred to by they/them pronouns (although I kept thinking of Barghest as "he", just because they were so much the "grizzled sergeant" trope), but Ester doesn't think of herself as a Dedicate, having grown up in Levasta, the enemy country, where Dedicates are not a thing, so she thinks of herself as "she", and corrects Asher's use of "they" once her being a spy is out in the open, and Asher dutifully switches to "she" and corrects the Dedicates who continue referring to Ester as "they". Which, fairly standard pronoun stuff, but I think this is the first time I've encountered "they" as specific (rather than generic) singular pronoun where it was the *incorrect* one, and that's kind of cool. Because, like, the pronoun itself doesn't matter, "they" is not necessarily more 'woke' than he or she; what matters is using the one that the person prefers. Ester's situatin is really interesting: she is a product of Celesti practices and absolutely cannot pass as anything else in Levasta, and she feels indebted to her adopted homeland, but it's complicated: "Back in Levasta I usually had to start shouting before anyone besides my mother remembered that I had emotions at all." "I would only look human to my enemies." The most interesting thing for me was the revelation that Ester believed she had escaped before the final thing that accompanies the Dedicate transformation, making the other Dedicates not people but just remote-controlled automatons -- but then she gets to know the squad and realizes that it's not that she's different/more whole, the others are people too, just people whose will can be overwritten. And it's her experience taking that kind of control herself that leads to her rejecting both sides and, well, joining Cascabela's revolution, basically, which was not an outcome I could have guessed! Last thing about Ester (and Asher): I found their conversation about their shared Gedank heritage really interesting. I'm not sure I would've drawn the same connection if I did not know that the author is Jewish, but I was with Ester in being kind of aghast at Asher's cavalier attitude about choosing Cesteli religion despite her Gedank heritage (Asher: "anyway, it's not like -- you know, the faiths aren't that different. It's importantto both of them that, um, you're generally virtuous, and behave well, and unselfishly?" Ester's POV: "She talked about my people like they were strangers, and my religion like it was a thought experiment." (the religion is obviously quite different, polytheistic, for starters, but the names, the curly hair, the in-group/out-group name decisions, it was all cool stuff. (Ester is also an interesting choice of namefor both someone 'undercover' and a would-be liberator.)
A couple of people on Goodreads mentioned Murderbot as a point of comparison, and I actually also caught a similar vibe, especially from Ester (thanks to the first person POV, but also general attitude, like: "It was a fucking scam how the cost of my freedom kept going up."
Quotes:
Ester, on Barghest: "What might this person have been, if their chance to be a person had not been stolen by the Cesteli gods?"
"I stared at myself through their eyes: a hulking armored monster swinging an unconscious girl, like one of Levasta's own army recruitment posters."
Barghest: "It was never pleasant to be moved by someone else's will. You learned how to make it easier. If you survived long enough, you learned how to make it harder, too."
Ester to Barghest: "You and me, everyone here, we're already casualties! What's so special about Cesteli that you have to keep this up no matter how many kids it costs?"
Asher: "Were you -- did Levasta kidnap you, or--"
Titan/Ester: "You kidnapped me. You -- your Holiest Houses, your sisters, your gods."
Also, stashing here for when K eventually reads this book: fanart, launch event on YouTube (including some interesting discussion on gender and diasporic culture in the worldbuilding of this book).
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I also watched Nimona on Netflix, and hm. I'm seeing unabashed squee for it on my flist, which is nice, I'm generally happy to see people liking things -- and I did like it OK. But I liked it less than I was expecting to based on the graphic novel, which I already liked-but-not-loved. I guess my overall feelings are somewhat conflicted, and it's taken me a couple of days to try to unpack them. I do think the movie is great as a vehicle for Nimona-the-character (who is a very cool character -- my favorite thing about the book -- and I'm happy more people will get to know her this way). As an adaptation of the graphic novel, I'm mixed on it. And as for the things that were explicitly changed -- not just expanded or foregrounded, but where the GN and the movie are actively different, well, almost invariably I prefer the GN way, of the two, even where I understand why certain changes were made. (I could not find my copy of the GN after I watched the movie -- I had JUST seen it when looking for something else on my shelves, and once I watched the movie, going, "I don't remember any of these things from the book..." at major plot points and backstory elements, I couldn't find the book! It's like magic. But fortunately there are plenty of articles comparing the two to refresh my memory/reassure me that I hadn't just forgotten/mixed up things (e.g. this one).
giallarhorn pointed me to this NPR interview with ND Stevenson, which I read after I watched the movie, and the discussion of how Stevenson was OK with changing a lot of things but wanted to keep Nimona herself pretty much unchanged made a lot of sense to me / reflected what I had seen. So, Nimona is great in the movie. The art style -- less angular, more brightly colored, with the big eyes -- took a little bit of getting used to for me, but other than that translation, she looked and sounded just like I was expecting, which, yay. Spoilers from here
I only recently (from the comments on the movie trailer on YouTube) learned that Stevenson (whom I still think of first and foremost as "gingerhaze" on Tumblr) had come out as trans, and it was really neat to see a reflection of a more complicated view of gender in movie!Nimona, who straight-up tells Ballister she is not a girl (even though she presents as one for most of the movie), encompassing more than what people see, the shapeshifting being a fundamental part of herself -- I liked all of those things a lot, and liked the change in her backstory, removing the sort of artificial experimentation thing. I also appreciated the Ballister/Goldenloin relationship being made more overt -- Goldenloin says he loves Ballister right at the start, they hold hands, and I was wondering if that was going to be as far as it was going to go, where you could still, just barely, but if you really wanted to, see the relationship as a close platonic friendship, but nope, they do share a kiss at the end, so apparently that was not a choice the movie had made, and good for them. I was initially also puzzled by the choice the give Goldenloin a haircut, when his flowing golden locks were his most prominent feature in the book. Someone suggested maybe they just didn't want to animate all that hair, but after the movie, I'm actually wondering if they gave him short hair (and a square jawline) so the m/m nature of that relationship was clear (especially as I found Gloreth, for example, quite androgynous in the movie's art style). Or maybe they wanted him to look more like his voice actor? (depending on the order in which casting and animation were done, which I don't know about, especially given how long this movie took to get made).
One thing I really did enjoy was getting to see all the hijinks and shenanigans in animated form rather than just still pictures, especially since GN is not my preferred format. That scene where Ballister is trying to sneak out of the Institution while Nimona is following him and making sure to trash everything they pass by -- that was so much fun! And the board game scene is fantastic! The shapeshifting sequences were also a lot of fun. And I found the sci-fantasy worldbuilding also worked better for me than in comic form -- IDK, something about the medieval and futuristic elements actually interacting rather than being static helped sell me on that mix.
OK, so those were the ways in which the movie worked as well or better than the book for me. But there were a lot of other changes. I guess, fundamentally, it's to do with adapting the movie for a younger audience (I didn't realize when I watched that the movie was PG, but it is) -- which is understandable, but I do feel like a lot of the things I liked about the book are simplified and cleaned up as a result, and the final product is less interesting to me. Haircut aside, Goldenloin is kind of a different character -- he's got a different (extraneous, IMO) backstory as a scion of Gloreth, and the ambition that led him to some highly questionable decisions has been replaced by... I don't even know, honestly -- being a supportive boyfriend, with a brief detour into being torn apart by conflicting loyalties? The movie goes out of its way to establish that Goldenloin slicing off Ballister's arm is an automatic trained response to a crisis situation (the love language joke really was not so good that it needed to be repeated twice), so what is he even guilty of at all? I guess not immediately deciding that Ballister would never and the evidence of his own eyes had to be the result of a conspiracy? And then falling for the Director's explanation that Nimona was the person giving the (false) confession. But to me that seems like a fairly reasonable response. And Ballister is also very carefully not guilty of anything -- he is working to clear his name, but he doesn't want to hurt anyone! Which, I get it -- this movie I'm sure had to work very hard to be allowed to show a relationship between two guys to a young audience, and it's a ~100 min movie with not much room to show nuance -- I do understand why they went for mostly-adorable rather than shades of gray. But as a result, I feel like there's just not much CHARACTER to either of the guys. Goldenloin is just kind of there being alternatively supportive and conflicted; the only scene in which I felt he was at all interestingwas the one where he freaks out inside his head while sitting stoically next to the Director. Much worse, though, is the way Ballister is also pretty much stripped of personality. Riz Ahmed is a really charismatic actor/voice, but what does this Ballister get to do? His chemistry with Nimona is still really cute, but he seems to be a doe-eyed victim most of the time, with virtually no agency (until the very end) -- and I had LIKED the spiky, bitter, sometimes-going-too-far scientiest Blackheart of the book. (That's the other thing: Where was all the SCIENCE?! Other than the fact that Ballister has a mechanical arm that we see him making for himself, I didn't see that aspect of him at all, and it was one of my favorite things from the book.) Nimona aslo gets toned down. In the book, she came across as slightly over the line into Evil on the Chaotic Neutral/Evil line, and that was part of the fun for me -- I like characters like that! Of course, movie!Nimona is still fun, but I don't know that she is as coherent as book Nimona, actually. The moral the movie is pushing seems to be that Nimona never did anything wrong and is just lonely and misunderstood, but that's a little hard to believe given that she is also still gleeful about destruction and violence. But fine, one is probably not supposed to think that hard about it.
And then there's the whole plot, where Nimona gets to save everyone in the end and everyone loves her now (even Todd, who was where all the less-nice parts of Goldenloin were siphoned off to, I guess). Again, I get why the comic's open, bittersweet ending would not have workedfor a kid's movie, but it's very, IDK, antiseptic, compared to the bold choices of the book. Also, the whole thing with Gloreth did not work for me. If the idea is that the whole thing about monsters and the wall around the kingdom that 1000 years of separatism is predicated on was child!Gloreth turning on Nimona after her people managed to set their own village on fire while harrassing Nimona -- it just doesn't make any sense , except maybe allegorically, and kind of spoiled for me what had been a really lovely wordless sequence of Nimona trying to find a place to belong. And the class divide stuff felt tacked on.
But adaptations are not substitutive, of course, and the book still exists with the elements I like more, while this is a cute enough film that I'm happy to have watched.
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I'd been periodically checking in to see if Hugo nominations were out yet -- they are very delayed this year, even accounting for the late nominations and the late Worldcon. Last I heard they were supposed to be released end of June, and weren't, but then Hugo, Girl podcast, which I'm subscribed to, had a new episode pop up, and they were squeeing about a nomination (yay! I think I forgot to actually nominate them -- if Chengdu emailed ballot snapshots, my email must be treating them as spam, because I can't find them, lol -- but I definitely meant to XD), so I searched for a full list, and nothing popped up. So I went on File770, and the post they had made was already in its redacted form, because I guess the list they copied had been released in error by the Worldcon website (I guess prematurely, since it looks like plausible data). Someone in the File770 comments pointed out that the post was still available via Wayback Machine, and so it is.
I had a very sparse ballot this year, so if this is accurate, I'm happy to see the Nghi Vo novella, T.Kingfisher getting more nominations even though I haven't read either of these actual things, and I guess The Golden Enclaves under Lodestar because I may have nominated it mostly by default, but I did enjoy it. If this list is to be beieved, looks like Legends & Lattes also made this ballot (as well as the Nebula one); I have not read it, but everything I have heard about it suggests it's exactly the kind of SFF book that would piss me off, so I just have to kind of (perhaps unfairly) roll my eyes at the cozification of SFF. Also, apparently Seanan McGuire getting on the ballot (novella, series) transcends nations, but that's not a surprise. I did not realize Rivers of London was eligible for series again (or maybe it isn't, as this isn't necessarily a fully vetted list).
It's interesting to see where nominations that must have come from the host country made the list, or otherwise a different set of nominations than "the usual suspects" -- short stories (which tends to have a lot of scattered options, Editor (both short and long, but especially long form), pro artist, fan writer (not necessarily local ones, but just a different set thatthe namesI'veseen repeating a lot), a little bit in Related Work and fanzine and Astounding.
People have pointed out that one of the things that needs to be cleaned up on this ballot is the overlap between single episodes and whole seasons under the two categories of dramatic presentation. People have also pointed out that it's not an alphabetized list in each category (or at least in English it isn't), and hypothesized that these might be in order of nominations received. Will be interesting to check that, assuming the standard background info gets released at some point in 2025.
7. Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog -- this is a collection of fairy tales set in the modern world, each one riffing on a specific tale. I've liked Kelly Link's other short fiction and was curious to see how this approach would work for me. Happy to report that it worked very well -- the stories did not feel same-y (there's actually quite a range, from humorous to horror vibes, classic fantasy to sci-fi to post-apocalyptic), and each was doing something neat with the referenced story (where I was familiar with the story; there were a couple where I was not). At leastone of the reference fairy tale/Link story pairs is such that I never would've guessed what the riffed-on story was, even when I'm quite familiar with it. A varied, intriguing collection! Spoilers for individual stories
"The White Cat's Divorce" -- this is a riff on "The White Cat", which class of fairy tale (Animal Bride) I'm more familiar with as Tsarevna-Lyagushka. Instead of a king there's a billionnaire who wants to live forever and who finds his sons to be reminders of his own mortality, and is trying to keep them away from him. This is the one story in the collection which is told in fairy tale narrative style, which I loved to see mixed with the very modern setting of entomologists and university scholarships and hypoallergenic dogs and video games and Facebook and reality shows and "sending unmanned vessels into the sun". Anyway, this was great, very funny (if not particularly deep), with the combination of fairy tale narration and very specific modern details melding together in a way that reminded me of some bits of my beloved Ponedelnik, and just really fun. The story went on a little bit too long for my taste, and I did not find the interludes at the pot farm interesting (there is a weird amount of pot in this book; I don't have a moral problem with it or anything, it was just weirdly noticeableto me), but overall it was great.
"Prince Hat Underground" -- this is a riff on "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", which is a class of fairy tale I'm more familiar with via "Finish the Bright Falcon" (it's not the same AT type, but the search for the lost beloved is similar, complete with the three nights to win himback). Apparently "Prince Hat" is the name of the Swedish version of this fairy tale (though I confess I found the name distracting). One of the tweaks on the classic story is that the person searching for Prince Hat is another man, the other, probably even more interesting, is that they've been together for years and are in their 50s. Thisone draggedon a bit for me, I confess -- it's a long fairy tale, and the story check in at the various plot points, as well as actually developing the characters -- and didn't have the intrinsically fun voice of "White Cat's Divorce". But I appreciated how Prince Hat's otherworldliness is compiled from mundane details of modern life ("He has no favorite restaurant, reads half a novel in an ecstatic trance and then puts it down forever [...] He has been a catalog model, a bartender, a tennis coach, a dog walker, an amanuensis to a famous intellectual" and "not knowing whether Prince hat will choose a teen slasher movie or some undubbed Ukrainian documentary on mushrooms"), and I liked Gary, the protagonist. The vision of suburban Hell is neat enough, but I did find it a little anticlimactic after how long it took to get there (though, in fairness, Gary did too).
"The White Road" -- a riff on "The Musicians of Bremen" (a fairy tale I know really well), and this is the one where I would not have guessed what it was riffing on, I think, even though once the two are linked, the common conceit is clear: a troupe of performers faking something to keep a threat away from their sanctuary. The post-apocalyptic setting and the protagonist and his companion being performers reminded me of Station Eleven, although the apocalypse is supernatural rather than a pandemic, and I was really impressed with how much of the worldbuilding you get through this quite short story narrated in first person to a contemporary audience, i.e. without explaining anything that those living in the postapocalyptic world would already know. This was quite creepy and dark, but in a way that worked for me (and on a random note, the way the things on the white road get some detail wrong, eyes in the wrong spot or too many legs, made me think of AI generated art). It's a very economical story in general, and there are really neat bits in it, like the narrator explaining usually playing villains (or tragic kings) because "a woman I once loved toldmethere was something about my face which suggested a capacity for strong action or even violence. And, too, I am a baritone." -- which of course plays out in the climax. Quote: "We know that they are monsters because they come at night and they tear us to pieces. But they are also monsters, I think, because we do not understand why they do what they do." Anyway, this ended up being one of my favorites in the collection, rather to my surprise, because the aesthetic of it felt kind of zombie-like, which is totally not my thing. But the norration is cool, and the twist on the story is really unexpected, and I really enjoyed the narration and the storytelling craft here.
"The Girl Who did Not Know Fear" -- I have never encountered the fairy tale it is apparently based on, but I liked this story on its own terms. I read most of this book while flying home from Chicago, so was reading this story while waiting to board my flight, which was interesting given how much of the story is about flight delays. The subtle details that hint at what the protagonist is, the subtle creepiness of various mundane details in the liminal space of traveling away from family, Quotes: "Pity the introvert with the face of a therapist or a kindergarten teacher. Like the werewolf, we are uneasy inhuman spaces and human company, though we wear a human skin." "In the aisle seat was a woman just a little older [...] wearing the kind of clothing and minimal makeup that signals camouflage worn by lesbians in administrative offices. And when they looked at me,I knew what the two women saw." This was another that is not my subgenre at all but that I thought was really interestingly done.
"The Game of Smash and Recovery" -- the book says this is a riff on "Hansel and Gretel", and honestly I don't really get the connection, but I did find the story interesting. Anat's POV is interesting, because you're dropped in it without knowing anything about the setting (a planet) or Anat (a girl who is actually a hobbled ship's AI). This is a sci-fi story (the only one in the collection), and I find that I really enjoy sci-fi fairy tales, and while I could not see the connection to "Hansel and Gretel" specifically, this did feel like a fairy tale in any case, and it was interesting to puzzle out the worldbuilding and what was going on.
"The Lady and the Fox" -- look, I'm easy for "Tam Lin" retellings, and I liked this one a lot. It's not as interesting a take as "The White Road" or "The Girl Who did Not Know Fear", but I liked it a lot. The thing I liked was the portrayal of the Honeywell family ("Honeywells like to talk. When Honeywells have no lines to speak, they improvise. All the world's a stage.", "It's exhausting, almost Olympic, the amount of fun Honeywells seem to require. She can't decide if it's awfulor if it's wonderful." ) and in particular that Elspeth is NOT the faerie queen, as I thought she'd turn out to be, but an aging actress who helps Miranda stand up to her -- and then makes it all about herself by saying,"What a voracious,demanding creature.Makes one wonder.Am I asbadas that?" -- and the relationship between Miranda and Michael, who grow up together and then attempt making out briefly and then move past it. Quote: "Miranda is well armored already against the Honeywell aresenal of tantrums, tempests, ups, downs, charm, strange." This was my favorite in the collection, I think. It's just a really well done retelling, with interesting people and an interesting take on the magic and holding on to Tam Lin, and just a lovely story.
"Skinder's Veil" -- a riff on "Snow-White and Rose-Red". I think this was my least favorite of the collection, because while it has some fun elements -- I did enjoy some of the stories within a story -- nothing about it hit that hard for me, and Andy was kind of annoying, and the ending was not very satisfying, as the book's closer especially.
So, favorite stories: the Tam Lin one, "The White Road", and "the Girl Who Did Not Know Fear", and "Skinder's Vale" as my least favorite, followed by "Prince Hat Underground", I guess. But this was a really good collection! Nice and crunchy, as I expect from Kelly Link.
8. Rebecca Fraimow, The Iron Children -- I knew skygiants had a book coming out, and then some kind of Kindle deals email that I at some point subscribed to put it in front of me before I even knew it was out, and I snatched it up of course, even though I could not remember the premise. And actually the premise ("Asher has been training her entire life to become a Sor-Commander. One day she’ll give her soul to the gilded, mechanical body and fully ascend. She’ll be a master of the Celesti faith, and the commander to a whole battalion of Dedicates. These soldiers, human bodies encased in exoskeletons, with extra arms, and telepathic subordination to the Sor-Commanders, are the only thing that’s kept the much larger Levastani army of conquest at bay for decades." per the Tor cover reveal) would not have helped, because I'm not really into any of those things. But I like skygiants' short fiction (the stories I've read, which I've been describing to people as "Sholem Aleichem with werewolves") and fannish writing, so I figured chances were good I would like this, too -- and I did! Also, cafemassolit and I were talking in Chicago and it turned out she had also gotten a copy of the book -- without realizing the author was skygiants, whose Ann Leckie write-ups I've linked Best Chat to -- and we made vague plans to read it together, which went the way of all such plans, meaning that I started reading and then wandered away to do sudoku, because this is how I consume fiction now, K linked me to a relevant Twitter theread "for when we read it together, and then a few days later I finished the book, without K having started it, which was a pity, because I was full of poorly formed thinky thoughts and wanted to talk through them with someone. Anyway, I liked it a lot, but also it made me feel acutely just how much I apparently brace myself when reading SFF these days for stuff that's going to be lacking in nuance or conflict -- in the sense that this novella had nuanced characters and meaningful, complicated conflict in spades, and I was thinking to myself how refreshing it was to be reading something that respected me enough to not blanket me in coziness or feed me kindergarten-level morality.
The story is told through three POVs, two tight third (Asher, the novice/Sor-Commander "intern", and Barghest, one of the "cyborg" Dedicates) and a first-person POV which allows there to be some mystery over which of the other Dedicates is an enemy spy. The POVs were great! Obviously the enemy spy has a very different perspective on things than the army unit on the other side of the conflict, but Asher and Barghest's POVs are also nicely different, and while the other Dedicates don't get POVs of their own, they definitely get enough dialogue and description through Barghest's POV to feel like people -- I appreciated the variety a lot. Spoilers from here My favorite was definitely Ester, the spy, whom I found the most relatable. Interestingly, I found the most 'baseline human' POV, Asher, the least relatable and sympathetic, despite her Ravenclaw-ness, which I would normally find endearing. It's probably because Asher is the only one who is there with any significant degree of informed consent -- the Dedicates are turned into their cyborg selves as children, and Ester's situation is complicated even beyond that; Asher actually chose to be there, though she was not expecting to be in charge and was, what, 14 when she set herself on this path.
There are a lot of things I like about this book! The way every character's distinct worldview is given space and respect is one of them -- it is so refreshing not to be hit over the head with a One True Way worldview. The political situation isn't really explained, but there's enough information to understand that the Celesti (Asher and Barghest's country) are fighting against conquest by a larger, more powerful neighbor, who considers them heretics and burns orphanages and such. At the same time, over the course of the story it becomes clear that the Celesti are not exactly on moral high ground here, what with turning children into mind-controlled cyborgs. I saw a number of reviews complaining that the worldbuilding was too dense for them to follow, because the book does not stop to explain the political situation or the technology or the religious differences (or at least not until later), but I love that sort of immersive worldbuilding. And the dialogue and first-person POV are colloquial and easy to get into, which helped ease into the rest.
Even though Asher was the least relatable of the POVs for me, I appreciated her dynamic with Barghest and especially with Titan/Ester. Barghest, sublimating anger and weariness under a sense of endless duty was great. But Ester is what took the book from something I merely appreciated to somethingI really liked. There's so much interesting stuff going on with Ester! I'm first going to talk about pronouns, which should make the rest easier. It looks like dedicates are automatically referred to by they/them pronouns (although I kept thinking of Barghest as "he", just because they were so much the "grizzled sergeant" trope), but Ester doesn't think of herself as a Dedicate, having grown up in Levasta, the enemy country, where Dedicates are not a thing, so she thinks of herself as "she", and corrects Asher's use of "they" once her being a spy is out in the open, and Asher dutifully switches to "she" and corrects the Dedicates who continue referring to Ester as "they". Which, fairly standard pronoun stuff, but I think this is the first time I've encountered "they" as specific (rather than generic) singular pronoun where it was the *incorrect* one, and that's kind of cool. Because, like, the pronoun itself doesn't matter, "they" is not necessarily more 'woke' than he or she; what matters is using the one that the person prefers. Ester's situatin is really interesting: she is a product of Celesti practices and absolutely cannot pass as anything else in Levasta, and she feels indebted to her adopted homeland, but it's complicated: "Back in Levasta I usually had to start shouting before anyone besides my mother remembered that I had emotions at all." "I would only look human to my enemies." The most interesting thing for me was the revelation that Ester believed she had escaped before the final thing that accompanies the Dedicate transformation, making the other Dedicates not people but just remote-controlled automatons -- but then she gets to know the squad and realizes that it's not that she's different/more whole, the others are people too, just people whose will can be overwritten. And it's her experience taking that kind of control herself that leads to her rejecting both sides and, well, joining Cascabela's revolution, basically, which was not an outcome I could have guessed! Last thing about Ester (and Asher): I found their conversation about their shared Gedank heritage really interesting. I'm not sure I would've drawn the same connection if I did not know that the author is Jewish, but I was with Ester in being kind of aghast at Asher's cavalier attitude about choosing Cesteli religion despite her Gedank heritage (Asher: "anyway, it's not like -- you know, the faiths aren't that different. It's importantto both of them that, um, you're generally virtuous, and behave well, and unselfishly?" Ester's POV: "She talked about my people like they were strangers, and my religion like it was a thought experiment." (the religion is obviously quite different, polytheistic, for starters, but the names, the curly hair, the in-group/out-group name decisions, it was all cool stuff. (Ester is also an interesting choice of namefor both someone 'undercover' and a would-be liberator.)
A couple of people on Goodreads mentioned Murderbot as a point of comparison, and I actually also caught a similar vibe, especially from Ester (thanks to the first person POV, but also general attitude, like: "It was a fucking scam how the cost of my freedom kept going up."
Quotes:
Ester, on Barghest: "What might this person have been, if their chance to be a person had not been stolen by the Cesteli gods?"
"I stared at myself through their eyes: a hulking armored monster swinging an unconscious girl, like one of Levasta's own army recruitment posters."
Barghest: "It was never pleasant to be moved by someone else's will. You learned how to make it easier. If you survived long enough, you learned how to make it harder, too."
Ester to Barghest: "You and me, everyone here, we're already casualties! What's so special about Cesteli that you have to keep this up no matter how many kids it costs?"
Asher: "Were you -- did Levasta kidnap you, or--"
Titan/Ester: "You kidnapped me. You -- your Holiest Houses, your sisters, your gods."
Also, stashing here for when K eventually reads this book: fanart, launch event on YouTube (including some interesting discussion on gender and diasporic culture in the worldbuilding of this book).
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I also watched Nimona on Netflix, and hm. I'm seeing unabashed squee for it on my flist, which is nice, I'm generally happy to see people liking things -- and I did like it OK. But I liked it less than I was expecting to based on the graphic novel, which I already liked-but-not-loved. I guess my overall feelings are somewhat conflicted, and it's taken me a couple of days to try to unpack them. I do think the movie is great as a vehicle for Nimona-the-character (who is a very cool character -- my favorite thing about the book -- and I'm happy more people will get to know her this way). As an adaptation of the graphic novel, I'm mixed on it. And as for the things that were explicitly changed -- not just expanded or foregrounded, but where the GN and the movie are actively different, well, almost invariably I prefer the GN way, of the two, even where I understand why certain changes were made. (I could not find my copy of the GN after I watched the movie -- I had JUST seen it when looking for something else on my shelves, and once I watched the movie, going, "I don't remember any of these things from the book..." at major plot points and backstory elements, I couldn't find the book! It's like magic. But fortunately there are plenty of articles comparing the two to refresh my memory/reassure me that I hadn't just forgotten/mixed up things (e.g. this one).
giallarhorn pointed me to this NPR interview with ND Stevenson, which I read after I watched the movie, and the discussion of how Stevenson was OK with changing a lot of things but wanted to keep Nimona herself pretty much unchanged made a lot of sense to me / reflected what I had seen. So, Nimona is great in the movie. The art style -- less angular, more brightly colored, with the big eyes -- took a little bit of getting used to for me, but other than that translation, she looked and sounded just like I was expecting, which, yay. Spoilers from here
I only recently (from the comments on the movie trailer on YouTube) learned that Stevenson (whom I still think of first and foremost as "gingerhaze" on Tumblr) had come out as trans, and it was really neat to see a reflection of a more complicated view of gender in movie!Nimona, who straight-up tells Ballister she is not a girl (even though she presents as one for most of the movie), encompassing more than what people see, the shapeshifting being a fundamental part of herself -- I liked all of those things a lot, and liked the change in her backstory, removing the sort of artificial experimentation thing. I also appreciated the Ballister/Goldenloin relationship being made more overt -- Goldenloin says he loves Ballister right at the start, they hold hands, and I was wondering if that was going to be as far as it was going to go, where you could still, just barely, but if you really wanted to, see the relationship as a close platonic friendship, but nope, they do share a kiss at the end, so apparently that was not a choice the movie had made, and good for them. I was initially also puzzled by the choice the give Goldenloin a haircut, when his flowing golden locks were his most prominent feature in the book. Someone suggested maybe they just didn't want to animate all that hair, but after the movie, I'm actually wondering if they gave him short hair (and a square jawline) so the m/m nature of that relationship was clear (especially as I found Gloreth, for example, quite androgynous in the movie's art style). Or maybe they wanted him to look more like his voice actor? (depending on the order in which casting and animation were done, which I don't know about, especially given how long this movie took to get made).
One thing I really did enjoy was getting to see all the hijinks and shenanigans in animated form rather than just still pictures, especially since GN is not my preferred format. That scene where Ballister is trying to sneak out of the Institution while Nimona is following him and making sure to trash everything they pass by -- that was so much fun! And the board game scene is fantastic! The shapeshifting sequences were also a lot of fun. And I found the sci-fantasy worldbuilding also worked better for me than in comic form -- IDK, something about the medieval and futuristic elements actually interacting rather than being static helped sell me on that mix.
OK, so those were the ways in which the movie worked as well or better than the book for me. But there were a lot of other changes. I guess, fundamentally, it's to do with adapting the movie for a younger audience (I didn't realize when I watched that the movie was PG, but it is) -- which is understandable, but I do feel like a lot of the things I liked about the book are simplified and cleaned up as a result, and the final product is less interesting to me. Haircut aside, Goldenloin is kind of a different character -- he's got a different (extraneous, IMO) backstory as a scion of Gloreth, and the ambition that led him to some highly questionable decisions has been replaced by... I don't even know, honestly -- being a supportive boyfriend, with a brief detour into being torn apart by conflicting loyalties? The movie goes out of its way to establish that Goldenloin slicing off Ballister's arm is an automatic trained response to a crisis situation (the love language joke really was not so good that it needed to be repeated twice), so what is he even guilty of at all? I guess not immediately deciding that Ballister would never and the evidence of his own eyes had to be the result of a conspiracy? And then falling for the Director's explanation that Nimona was the person giving the (false) confession. But to me that seems like a fairly reasonable response. And Ballister is also very carefully not guilty of anything -- he is working to clear his name, but he doesn't want to hurt anyone! Which, I get it -- this movie I'm sure had to work very hard to be allowed to show a relationship between two guys to a young audience, and it's a ~100 min movie with not much room to show nuance -- I do understand why they went for mostly-adorable rather than shades of gray. But as a result, I feel like there's just not much CHARACTER to either of the guys. Goldenloin is just kind of there being alternatively supportive and conflicted; the only scene in which I felt he was at all interestingwas the one where he freaks out inside his head while sitting stoically next to the Director. Much worse, though, is the way Ballister is also pretty much stripped of personality. Riz Ahmed is a really charismatic actor/voice, but what does this Ballister get to do? His chemistry with Nimona is still really cute, but he seems to be a doe-eyed victim most of the time, with virtually no agency (until the very end) -- and I had LIKED the spiky, bitter, sometimes-going-too-far scientiest Blackheart of the book. (That's the other thing: Where was all the SCIENCE?! Other than the fact that Ballister has a mechanical arm that we see him making for himself, I didn't see that aspect of him at all, and it was one of my favorite things from the book.) Nimona aslo gets toned down. In the book, she came across as slightly over the line into Evil on the Chaotic Neutral/Evil line, and that was part of the fun for me -- I like characters like that! Of course, movie!Nimona is still fun, but I don't know that she is as coherent as book Nimona, actually. The moral the movie is pushing seems to be that Nimona never did anything wrong and is just lonely and misunderstood, but that's a little hard to believe given that she is also still gleeful about destruction and violence. But fine, one is probably not supposed to think that hard about it.
And then there's the whole plot, where Nimona gets to save everyone in the end and everyone loves her now (even Todd, who was where all the less-nice parts of Goldenloin were siphoned off to, I guess). Again, I get why the comic's open, bittersweet ending would not have workedfor a kid's movie, but it's very, IDK, antiseptic, compared to the bold choices of the book. Also, the whole thing with Gloreth did not work for me. If the idea is that the whole thing about monsters and the wall around the kingdom that 1000 years of separatism is predicated on was child!Gloreth turning on Nimona after her people managed to set their own village on fire while harrassing Nimona -- it just doesn't make any sense , except maybe allegorically, and kind of spoiled for me what had been a really lovely wordless sequence of Nimona trying to find a place to belong. And the class divide stuff felt tacked on.
But adaptations are not substitutive, of course, and the book still exists with the elements I like more, while this is a cute enough film that I'm happy to have watched.
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I'd been periodically checking in to see if Hugo nominations were out yet -- they are very delayed this year, even accounting for the late nominations and the late Worldcon. Last I heard they were supposed to be released end of June, and weren't, but then Hugo, Girl podcast, which I'm subscribed to, had a new episode pop up, and they were squeeing about a nomination (yay! I think I forgot to actually nominate them -- if Chengdu emailed ballot snapshots, my email must be treating them as spam, because I can't find them, lol -- but I definitely meant to XD), so I searched for a full list, and nothing popped up. So I went on File770, and the post they had made was already in its redacted form, because I guess the list they copied had been released in error by the Worldcon website (I guess prematurely, since it looks like plausible data). Someone in the File770 comments pointed out that the post was still available via Wayback Machine, and so it is.
I had a very sparse ballot this year, so if this is accurate, I'm happy to see the Nghi Vo novella, T.Kingfisher getting more nominations even though I haven't read either of these actual things, and I guess The Golden Enclaves under Lodestar because I may have nominated it mostly by default, but I did enjoy it. If this list is to be beieved, looks like Legends & Lattes also made this ballot (as well as the Nebula one); I have not read it, but everything I have heard about it suggests it's exactly the kind of SFF book that would piss me off, so I just have to kind of (perhaps unfairly) roll my eyes at the cozification of SFF. Also, apparently Seanan McGuire getting on the ballot (novella, series) transcends nations, but that's not a surprise. I did not realize Rivers of London was eligible for series again (or maybe it isn't, as this isn't necessarily a fully vetted list).
It's interesting to see where nominations that must have come from the host country made the list, or otherwise a different set of nominations than "the usual suspects" -- short stories (which tends to have a lot of scattered options, Editor (both short and long, but especially long form), pro artist, fan writer (not necessarily local ones, but just a different set thatthe namesI'veseen repeating a lot), a little bit in Related Work and fanzine and Astounding.
People have pointed out that one of the things that needs to be cleaned up on this ballot is the overlap between single episodes and whole seasons under the two categories of dramatic presentation. People have also pointed out that it's not an alphabetized list in each category (or at least in English it isn't), and hypothesized that these might be in order of nominations received. Will be interesting to check that, assuming the standard background info gets released at some point in 2025.