Hugo Novel Nominees, 2019
May. 13th, 2019 07:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseIt's Hugo season!
Record of a Spaceborn Few (Becky Chambers) (2018): Third novel in the Wayfairers universe. A tragedy in the human Exodus Fleet and the tragedy's fallout gradually force five characters to reassess their lives.
"Generation ships after humans have reached other planets" is exactly the sort of concept that sounds up my alley. Society-building! Spaceships. Ordinary people in extraordinary-to-the-reader circumstances! Humans as poor refugees struggling to maintain their heritage! Yet Record didn't grab me at all. If a reader jumps in at the 15% mark - around Isabel's second section in Part One - they can pick up most of what they need without additional context. There's been a tragedy, Tessa's daughter remains a little broken by the tragedy, and Tessa is resisting changes to her predictable-and-comfy-but-not-thrilling life; Eyas is no longer happy with her career, or perhaps her career-first life; in his late teens, Kip is struggling with post-high-school-ish plans and preparation for adult life; descendent-of-Exodans Sawyer belives he can find a place returning to the Exodus Fleet; the archivist Isabel hosts a colleague from a wealthy alien species who wishes to document Exodan life.
To my eye, the first chapters are disconnected from each other, reading like a '50s patch-up novel with more women. The choppy format slows the narrative flow; tight third PoV rotates among the three protagonists in a way that neither seemed organic to me, nor built momentum through cliffhanger intercuts. If you're writing little choppy stitch-up chapters - only this has always been intended as a novel, never as shorts or a serial - where is the structure that draws the reader forward?
Writing this out makes me desire to read Always Coming Home, which is notably unstructured, but based on other experiences I am willing to give Le Guin's fiction a lot more rope. Chambers doesn't have a record of killer prose, interesting worldbuilding, passages of fiction that I read and stay with me.
The story picks up a bit around the 60% mark, when people start looking at their larger picture, and by the end of the novel there's a retroactive understanding of how these five PoVs frame the story Chambers is telling. If feels like Chambers is doing the thing Bujold does, where the characters drive the story, only these characters do not have Miles Vorkosigan's plot-starting protagonismos. Neither does the story seem to really know what it's about, for a big chunk of the novel. After the story figures itself out, the pace accelerates. The Meaning Of It All (tm) is hammered in by a multi-page speech from the senior and experienced Isabel to young Kip about What Is The Point of Exodan Culture. The "wise old one lectures the teen" format reminds me very strongly of Heinlein; substitute the infodump-by-speechifying author of your choice. If the second to last PoV before the epilogue section has a big speech like this, it feels like the story isn't confident in its ability to deliver the message it's been trying to punch through for the last 300-plus pages.
The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) (2018): Historical AU. A very large asteroid takes out DC and the Chesapeake. Our Protagonists fear that an impact winter will be followed by an out of control greenhouse effect and the end of a human-survivable climate. Cue an accelerated space program, from the perspective of a woman, Edna York, who really wants to be an astronaut. Edna is an ex-WASP and mathematician working as a computer when the Meteor strikes the Earth. ("It's a meteorite!" Edna says, a lot. The media does not listen.) During the story her eyes are opened to racism, particularly against African-Americans, and Edna herself has to confront some pretty extreme anxiety issues.
I have very mixed feelings about this novel! When I finished Stars, my first reaction was, "this is half a story." (The author's notes confirm this; the sequel is already published.) Stars cuts out during a lunar mission, after a successful launch burn. It seemed a really weird choice. Why not embrace the cliffhanger and close on the launch pad, or close at the end of the mission?
There's not a lot of finesse in Stars. Multidimensional characters flatten out to Teachable Moments in Edna's arc of understanding racism, and pop back into vibrancy as the moment passes. Edna's anxiety arc is presented as a consequence of the harassment she suffered as a young women who had to wade through a lot of misogyny in college, but it's not explicitly linked to larger patterns of harassment, such as Parker's "grabby hands" or Betty's willingness to sell out to further her career as a journalist - and her chances to become an astronaut - which damages her social standing with other women. Edna's experiences of therapy and medication also have an earnest feel that Kowal did her homework. The presentation is still... off. Manifesting Edna's anxiety as repeated vomiting bouts to move an invisible disability into physicality and visibility side-steps the problems of invisible disabilities. Speaking of disabilities, I'm a little surprised that a novel stuffed with human computers and engineers did not have an Asperger's/Autism Moment.
Tangenting off diverity of ability, the social justice arc also felt hit or miss. Is it wrong for me to say, the racism was not condescending enough? Either there's not enough bad behavior, or Edna's first person PoV is missing some (or a lot) of the slights and thousand cuts of an unjust society, by the author's choice. Perhaps I'm not the audience for this arc and the softer touch was appreciated by people well aware of the vicious mistreatment minorities face and who want a novel that doesn't shove that in their face. But for me, the sequence with white evacuees being prioritized over African-American evacuees worked well for me, better than many moments where Edna is called out on her assumptions. I wanted more of the internal journey and less of the preachy, Characterization Takes A Break For A Lesson On Race Relations moments.
The same finesse issue hits the worldbuilding. There's a couple of gestures toward the psychological burden of the Meteor, but they're very sketchy: passing mentions of architectural trends, impacts of rationing on a foodway or two, maybe the increase in Miltown (which might be tracking "our" timeline; per wiki, meprobamate had a burst of popularity before benzodiazepines came in). I'd expect the initial impact and fallout to to play havoc with social structure, zeitgeist, etc; but this isn't reflected in Edna's PoV. Integration might get off the ground faster? Edna is so focused on rocketry the signs of changes readers might look for aren't foregrounded - or efficiently backgrounded.
While talking withcahn, a question came up about Why Rockets versus What About Figuring Out Solutions on Earth. The Doylist answer, of course, is because Kowal wanted to write a story about rockets. From a Watsonian perspective, we're given a lot of information about Why Rockets, but not about the inevitable mad chemists who are promoting carbon sequestration and ways to pull water vapor from the air. It's tempting to make a comment about white flight to the Moon and Mars, versus inner core revitalization, which is probably not going to raise the tenor of any discussion! Yet, from the Watsonian perspective, local rehab versus leaving Earth would be an interesting discussion to have... and I would hope it comes up in stories set later in the colonization sequence.
Edna's focus on the rocket programs touches on a core issue: to me, Stars reads as a personal story against the backdrop of a slow(ish) apocalypse. For the Hugos, I know I tend to favor the epic stories over the personal. I come for the apocalypse and stick around for the fight against the end of the world. Stars doesn't overcome my bias with brilliantly controlled prose, or really clever takes on new ideas, or using that personal story as a focused lens for the human condition. There were just too many moments when I saw incidents and arcs that weren't connected but could have been; passages when the prose was acceptable but not shining.
And with all that said, I want to read the sequel. Give me flawed and imperfect and something I can argue with over perfect wispy nothingness.
Revenant Gun (Yoon Ha Lee) (2018): Previously read. Wasn't my fave, but I finished it. I'm still disturbed that I missed All The Consent Subtext, Which Is Not Actually Subtextual, because that really changes the reading of the entire Machineries of Empire Trilogy.
Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) (2018): Previously read. I suspect this novel is catering to my specific demographic in a way that blinds me to some of its flaws, but I finished it, and I liked it.
Trail of Lightning (Rebecca Roanhorse) (2018): To me, this feels very strongly of Harry Dresden in Diné land. Or maybe it's a subgenre with Laurell K. Hamilon? The takeaways are violence against women, and perpetuated by women; it's (almost) always Coyote's fault; in all that toting and shooting of guns, did the shotgun and Glock ever get cleaned / maintained? Trail didn't impress me as Hugo material. But continuing the the Dresden files comparison, I am curious to see what Roanhorse does as she matures as a writer and hits her stride. Butcher's later novels are much better at being novels compared to his earlier work.
Space Opera (Catherynne Valente) (2018): Valente really does not believe in using one descriptor when a rambling paragraph of description is available. Disengaged by mid-chapter 2 (of 36); did not finish. Its too bad; Valente is shooting for Eurovision in space meets Douglas Adams, but I wonder if it might be compared to the New Wave's shift into "softer" SF as well. But to find out, I'd have to get past a nearly unreadable prose style and the deadly words "I do not care about any of these people". Possible wispy nothing.
Rankings: Spinning Silver, Calculating Stars, toss-up between Revenant Gun and Trail of Lightning, toss-up between Record of a Spaceborn Few and No Award, Space Opera.
At least one other voter I've spoken with argues No Award should be saved for political statements, but I find that post-Puppies I am more willing to say, "this is not good writing" and rank No Award high.
Next: the novellas!
Record of a Spaceborn Few (Becky Chambers) (2018): Third novel in the Wayfairers universe. A tragedy in the human Exodus Fleet and the tragedy's fallout gradually force five characters to reassess their lives.
"Generation ships after humans have reached other planets" is exactly the sort of concept that sounds up my alley. Society-building! Spaceships. Ordinary people in extraordinary-to-the-reader circumstances! Humans as poor refugees struggling to maintain their heritage! Yet Record didn't grab me at all. If a reader jumps in at the 15% mark - around Isabel's second section in Part One - they can pick up most of what they need without additional context. There's been a tragedy, Tessa's daughter remains a little broken by the tragedy, and Tessa is resisting changes to her predictable-and-comfy-but-not-thrilling life; Eyas is no longer happy with her career, or perhaps her career-first life; in his late teens, Kip is struggling with post-high-school-ish plans and preparation for adult life; descendent-of-Exodans Sawyer belives he can find a place returning to the Exodus Fleet; the archivist Isabel hosts a colleague from a wealthy alien species who wishes to document Exodan life.
To my eye, the first chapters are disconnected from each other, reading like a '50s patch-up novel with more women. The choppy format slows the narrative flow; tight third PoV rotates among the three protagonists in a way that neither seemed organic to me, nor built momentum through cliffhanger intercuts. If you're writing little choppy stitch-up chapters - only this has always been intended as a novel, never as shorts or a serial - where is the structure that draws the reader forward?
Writing this out makes me desire to read Always Coming Home, which is notably unstructured, but based on other experiences I am willing to give Le Guin's fiction a lot more rope. Chambers doesn't have a record of killer prose, interesting worldbuilding, passages of fiction that I read and stay with me.
The story picks up a bit around the 60% mark, when people start looking at their larger picture, and by the end of the novel there's a retroactive understanding of how these five PoVs frame the story Chambers is telling. If feels like Chambers is doing the thing Bujold does, where the characters drive the story, only these characters do not have Miles Vorkosigan's plot-starting protagonismos. Neither does the story seem to really know what it's about, for a big chunk of the novel. After the story figures itself out, the pace accelerates. The Meaning Of It All (tm) is hammered in by a multi-page speech from the senior and experienced Isabel to young Kip about What Is The Point of Exodan Culture. The "wise old one lectures the teen" format reminds me very strongly of Heinlein; substitute the infodump-by-speechifying author of your choice. If the second to last PoV before the epilogue section has a big speech like this, it feels like the story isn't confident in its ability to deliver the message it's been trying to punch through for the last 300-plus pages.
The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) (2018): Historical AU. A very large asteroid takes out DC and the Chesapeake. Our Protagonists fear that an impact winter will be followed by an out of control greenhouse effect and the end of a human-survivable climate. Cue an accelerated space program, from the perspective of a woman, Edna York, who really wants to be an astronaut. Edna is an ex-WASP and mathematician working as a computer when the Meteor strikes the Earth. ("It's a meteorite!" Edna says, a lot. The media does not listen.) During the story her eyes are opened to racism, particularly against African-Americans, and Edna herself has to confront some pretty extreme anxiety issues.
I have very mixed feelings about this novel! When I finished Stars, my first reaction was, "this is half a story." (The author's notes confirm this; the sequel is already published.) Stars cuts out during a lunar mission, after a successful launch burn. It seemed a really weird choice. Why not embrace the cliffhanger and close on the launch pad, or close at the end of the mission?
There's not a lot of finesse in Stars. Multidimensional characters flatten out to Teachable Moments in Edna's arc of understanding racism, and pop back into vibrancy as the moment passes. Edna's anxiety arc is presented as a consequence of the harassment she suffered as a young women who had to wade through a lot of misogyny in college, but it's not explicitly linked to larger patterns of harassment, such as Parker's "grabby hands" or Betty's willingness to sell out to further her career as a journalist - and her chances to become an astronaut - which damages her social standing with other women. Edna's experiences of therapy and medication also have an earnest feel that Kowal did her homework. The presentation is still... off. Manifesting Edna's anxiety as repeated vomiting bouts to move an invisible disability into physicality and visibility side-steps the problems of invisible disabilities. Speaking of disabilities, I'm a little surprised that a novel stuffed with human computers and engineers did not have an Asperger's/Autism Moment.
Tangenting off diverity of ability, the social justice arc also felt hit or miss. Is it wrong for me to say, the racism was not condescending enough? Either there's not enough bad behavior, or Edna's first person PoV is missing some (or a lot) of the slights and thousand cuts of an unjust society, by the author's choice. Perhaps I'm not the audience for this arc and the softer touch was appreciated by people well aware of the vicious mistreatment minorities face and who want a novel that doesn't shove that in their face. But for me, the sequence with white evacuees being prioritized over African-American evacuees worked well for me, better than many moments where Edna is called out on her assumptions. I wanted more of the internal journey and less of the preachy, Characterization Takes A Break For A Lesson On Race Relations moments.
The same finesse issue hits the worldbuilding. There's a couple of gestures toward the psychological burden of the Meteor, but they're very sketchy: passing mentions of architectural trends, impacts of rationing on a foodway or two, maybe the increase in Miltown (which might be tracking "our" timeline; per wiki, meprobamate had a burst of popularity before benzodiazepines came in). I'd expect the initial impact and fallout to to play havoc with social structure, zeitgeist, etc; but this isn't reflected in Edna's PoV. Integration might get off the ground faster? Edna is so focused on rocketry the signs of changes readers might look for aren't foregrounded - or efficiently backgrounded.
While talking with
cahn, a question came up about Why Rockets versus What About Figuring Out Solutions on Earth. The Doylist answer, of course, is because Kowal wanted to write a story about rockets. From a Watsonian perspective, we're given a lot of information about Why Rockets, but not about the inevitable mad chemists who are promoting carbon sequestration and ways to pull water vapor from the air. It's tempting to make a comment about white flight to the Moon and Mars, versus inner core revitalization, which is probably not going to raise the tenor of any discussion! Yet, from the Watsonian perspective, local rehab versus leaving Earth would be an interesting discussion to have... and I would hope it comes up in stories set later in the colonization sequence. Edna's focus on the rocket programs touches on a core issue: to me, Stars reads as a personal story against the backdrop of a slow(ish) apocalypse. For the Hugos, I know I tend to favor the epic stories over the personal. I come for the apocalypse and stick around for the fight against the end of the world. Stars doesn't overcome my bias with brilliantly controlled prose, or really clever takes on new ideas, or using that personal story as a focused lens for the human condition. There were just too many moments when I saw incidents and arcs that weren't connected but could have been; passages when the prose was acceptable but not shining.
And with all that said, I want to read the sequel. Give me flawed and imperfect and something I can argue with over perfect wispy nothingness.
Revenant Gun (Yoon Ha Lee) (2018): Previously read. Wasn't my fave, but I finished it. I'm still disturbed that I missed All The Consent Subtext, Which Is Not Actually Subtextual, because that really changes the reading of the entire Machineries of Empire Trilogy.
Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik) (2018): Previously read. I suspect this novel is catering to my specific demographic in a way that blinds me to some of its flaws, but I finished it, and I liked it.
Trail of Lightning (Rebecca Roanhorse) (2018): To me, this feels very strongly of Harry Dresden in Diné land. Or maybe it's a subgenre with Laurell K. Hamilon? The takeaways are violence against women, and perpetuated by women; it's (almost) always Coyote's fault; in all that toting and shooting of guns, did the shotgun and Glock ever get cleaned / maintained? Trail didn't impress me as Hugo material. But continuing the the Dresden files comparison, I am curious to see what Roanhorse does as she matures as a writer and hits her stride. Butcher's later novels are much better at being novels compared to his earlier work.
Space Opera (Catherynne Valente) (2018): Valente really does not believe in using one descriptor when a rambling paragraph of description is available. Disengaged by mid-chapter 2 (of 36); did not finish. Its too bad; Valente is shooting for Eurovision in space meets Douglas Adams, but I wonder if it might be compared to the New Wave's shift into "softer" SF as well. But to find out, I'd have to get past a nearly unreadable prose style and the deadly words "I do not care about any of these people". Possible wispy nothing.
Rankings: Spinning Silver, Calculating Stars, toss-up between Revenant Gun and Trail of Lightning, toss-up between Record of a Spaceborn Few and No Award, Space Opera.
At least one other voter I've spoken with argues No Award should be saved for political statements, but I find that post-Puppies I am more willing to say, "this is not good writing" and rank No Award high.
Next: the novellas!