Hugo Nominees: Novelettes
Jul. 5th, 2020 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseAll spoilers, all the time.
Siobhan Carroll, "For He Can Creep": The Devil comes for a soul. A cat is not letting that happen on his watch.
I read this right after the Yoachim (see below). In comparison, this is a prose powerhouse. It sings and moves, tightens up and breathes, it narrates, it describes. One can disguise sentence level weakness if one writes at novel length, if it's balanced by other strengths, but the shorter the story, the more prose technical skill matters, IMO.
"For He Can Creep" is technically RPF poem fanfic, which is either a plus or minus, depending, but the references to some English guy's completely bonkers poem were a plus for me. I didn't know about the poem when I first read the story, so it worked as a standalone. And when I was pointed to the poem after reading "For He Can Creep", I could connect the poem's content and the story, but also see how the story had evolved above and beyond.
Carroll's writing is new to me. Would read this author again, on purpose, of my own free will.
Ted Chiang, "Omphalos": speaking of free will. What if the world really was created N-thousand years ago? What if this was 100% in line with the Bible? What if you carried on in your life, knowing God had put Earth and its solar system at the center of all creation?
...what if astronomy demonstrated He created another solar system at the center of all creation?
What do you do when your understanding that your world is literally the center of creation is stripped away?
Add Chiang-level prose, stir, garnish with epistolary-ish format. Examine the question of making choices in a world the narrator perceives to have been irrevocably altered. Question your own feelings on this. Note rough temporal correlation with Einsteinian physics overturning perceptions in our world. Enjoy the feeling of one's brain working and expanding. That's "Omphalos".
Sarah Gailey, "Away With the Wolves": Suss turns into a wolf, and her body doesn't hurt. When Suss is a human, pain saps her energy and strength. Suss wrestles with her desire to be a pain-free wolf full-time.
Well, that was a disability metaphor. "Do I force myself to be in a way that is painful, because I was told this is the right way to be, or do I live in a way that is not painful?" Mother can't you see I've got / to live life the way I feel is / right to me ...annnd I'm stopping there.
It bugged me less than the one with the hippos, which is weak praise, I know. But there's not a lot I have to say about this other than, well, that... that was a novella.
N. K. Jemisin, "Emergency Skin": Second person story of a colonist who returns to Earth on what he's told is an essential and dangerous mission. Random people shrug, say, "it's one of you again, here's that thing you want, peace," and rock Second Person Protagonist's "Aryans Run The Colony" world.
"Emergency Skin" is smack in Jemisin's wheelhouse: injustice, interesting worldbuilding, absolutely zero interest in antagonist development. Antagonists are going to antagonize. And that's where I start digging into the assumptions of this novella.
When I hear, "X group ruins everything and they leave and then everything is Good" I just... but... isn't that some variation of every utopian scheme ever? It's usually "we will leave and found a lesbian commune in the country / have an SF/F con dedicated to feminism / go to the New World." But it never works! "If only the jerks would leave, we'd all get along and everything would be happy." If I have learned nothing else from post-racefail 2010's fandom, we'll just reclassify the "jerk" outgroup. Not to reach into my humanist / Unitarian / "read Kim Stanley Robinson at a formative age" roots or anything, but... how to handle intolerance in asociety that desires tolerance and diversity?
Going back to "Emergency Skin"... one, how *does* the fictional white supremacist dude society work? Two, how does post-jerks Earth avoid growing their own jerks? Three, why did everyone come back to Earth? Other than "because the jerks were gone". Is there something about colonialism in there, too, or am I reaching? Maybe European society has been a Hot Mess for Some Centuries now, I am willing to entertain this argument. But saying, "we got rid of some people and it turned out 1.) they were the root cause 2.) we didn't grow any more like them" seems... simplistic.
Sarah Pinsker, "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye": Mystery writer sits down to write the latest novel, discovers she's carrying a horror-monster in her body. Horror-monster escapes, tries to go Alien on the nearest humans, causes amnesia in the writer-host. Writer-host's unconscious recycles this into the next book.
It starts out as "mystery writer tries to solve a mystery"; proceeds to an infodump from the mystery writer's assistant, who is the one trying to prevent the horror-monster from doing its human-killing thing; and ends with the writer trying to make a change so that this time, she won't get amnesia and forget the whole thing. Again. There is a much more interesting story about being, whatshername, the assistant, wrapped around the actual story. Wrong protagonist, and the prose has the tension of cooked pasta: none at all.
Caroline M. Yoachim, "The Archronology of Love": It's a sad story of love. You'd think a story where a group of scientists uses time-archaeology to investigate a failed not!Mars colony would be filled with tension: how did it fail? How do we investigate this thoroughly, but without completely destroying an important site that future generations will visit and study? Okay, how do we do this while most of the people involved are reeling from the death of the loved ones who they had planned to join on the failed colony?
The story bogged on its ability to convince me I cared about the protagonist's tears over her dead partner. I blame the prose. And then there were aliens, the end.
In this category, there's three authors who I think demonstrate mastery over their prose, and three who aren't there yet. Chiang, Carroll, and Jemisin know how to structure a sentence. Gailey, Pinsker, and Yoachim seem to be still figuring out the difference between putting words in a row versus crafting a sentence for maximum impact.
Rankings: Chiang or Carroll, Jemisin, big gap, Pinsker-Yoachim-Gailey in a heap of Meh.
Siobhan Carroll, "For He Can Creep": The Devil comes for a soul. A cat is not letting that happen on his watch.
I read this right after the Yoachim (see below). In comparison, this is a prose powerhouse. It sings and moves, tightens up and breathes, it narrates, it describes. One can disguise sentence level weakness if one writes at novel length, if it's balanced by other strengths, but the shorter the story, the more prose technical skill matters, IMO.
"For He Can Creep" is technically RPF poem fanfic, which is either a plus or minus, depending, but the references to some English guy's completely bonkers poem were a plus for me. I didn't know about the poem when I first read the story, so it worked as a standalone. And when I was pointed to the poem after reading "For He Can Creep", I could connect the poem's content and the story, but also see how the story had evolved above and beyond.
Carroll's writing is new to me. Would read this author again, on purpose, of my own free will.
Ted Chiang, "Omphalos": speaking of free will. What if the world really was created N-thousand years ago? What if this was 100% in line with the Bible? What if you carried on in your life, knowing God had put Earth and its solar system at the center of all creation?
...what if astronomy demonstrated He created another solar system at the center of all creation?
What do you do when your understanding that your world is literally the center of creation is stripped away?
Add Chiang-level prose, stir, garnish with epistolary-ish format. Examine the question of making choices in a world the narrator perceives to have been irrevocably altered. Question your own feelings on this. Note rough temporal correlation with Einsteinian physics overturning perceptions in our world. Enjoy the feeling of one's brain working and expanding. That's "Omphalos".
Sarah Gailey, "Away With the Wolves": Suss turns into a wolf, and her body doesn't hurt. When Suss is a human, pain saps her energy and strength. Suss wrestles with her desire to be a pain-free wolf full-time.
Well, that was a disability metaphor. "Do I force myself to be in a way that is painful, because I was told this is the right way to be, or do I live in a way that is not painful?" Mother can't you see I've got / to live life the way I feel is / right to me ...annnd I'm stopping there.
It bugged me less than the one with the hippos, which is weak praise, I know. But there's not a lot I have to say about this other than, well, that... that was a novella.
N. K. Jemisin, "Emergency Skin": Second person story of a colonist who returns to Earth on what he's told is an essential and dangerous mission. Random people shrug, say, "it's one of you again, here's that thing you want, peace," and rock Second Person Protagonist's "Aryans Run The Colony" world.
"Emergency Skin" is smack in Jemisin's wheelhouse: injustice, interesting worldbuilding, absolutely zero interest in antagonist development. Antagonists are going to antagonize. And that's where I start digging into the assumptions of this novella.
When I hear, "X group ruins everything and they leave and then everything is Good" I just... but... isn't that some variation of every utopian scheme ever? It's usually "we will leave and found a lesbian commune in the country / have an SF/F con dedicated to feminism / go to the New World." But it never works! "If only the jerks would leave, we'd all get along and everything would be happy." If I have learned nothing else from post-racefail 2010's fandom, we'll just reclassify the "jerk" outgroup. Not to reach into my humanist / Unitarian / "read Kim Stanley Robinson at a formative age" roots or anything, but... how to handle intolerance in asociety that desires tolerance and diversity?
Going back to "Emergency Skin"... one, how *does* the fictional white supremacist dude society work? Two, how does post-jerks Earth avoid growing their own jerks? Three, why did everyone come back to Earth? Other than "because the jerks were gone". Is there something about colonialism in there, too, or am I reaching? Maybe European society has been a Hot Mess for Some Centuries now, I am willing to entertain this argument. But saying, "we got rid of some people and it turned out 1.) they were the root cause 2.) we didn't grow any more like them" seems... simplistic.
Sarah Pinsker, "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye": Mystery writer sits down to write the latest novel, discovers she's carrying a horror-monster in her body. Horror-monster escapes, tries to go Alien on the nearest humans, causes amnesia in the writer-host. Writer-host's unconscious recycles this into the next book.
It starts out as "mystery writer tries to solve a mystery"; proceeds to an infodump from the mystery writer's assistant, who is the one trying to prevent the horror-monster from doing its human-killing thing; and ends with the writer trying to make a change so that this time, she won't get amnesia and forget the whole thing. Again. There is a much more interesting story about being, whatshername, the assistant, wrapped around the actual story. Wrong protagonist, and the prose has the tension of cooked pasta: none at all.
Caroline M. Yoachim, "The Archronology of Love": It's a sad story of love. You'd think a story where a group of scientists uses time-archaeology to investigate a failed not!Mars colony would be filled with tension: how did it fail? How do we investigate this thoroughly, but without completely destroying an important site that future generations will visit and study? Okay, how do we do this while most of the people involved are reeling from the death of the loved ones who they had planned to join on the failed colony?
The story bogged on its ability to convince me I cared about the protagonist's tears over her dead partner. I blame the prose. And then there were aliens, the end.
In this category, there's three authors who I think demonstrate mastery over their prose, and three who aren't there yet. Chiang, Carroll, and Jemisin know how to structure a sentence. Gailey, Pinsker, and Yoachim seem to be still figuring out the difference between putting words in a row versus crafting a sentence for maximum impact.
Rankings: Chiang or Carroll, Jemisin, big gap, Pinsker-Yoachim-Gailey in a heap of Meh.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-07-06 04:40 pm (UTC)Very much agreed, as you know :) on your distinction between the people who are actually good at prose vs. those who aren't.
*waves pom-poms of reading the novellas! reading the novels! (*) reading the Lodestars!*
(*) actually tbh you could mostly skip the novels, except maybe make a stab at Memory :P And Light Brigade is one for skimming until about 30-40% through.