Hugo Reading: Novels
Jun. 12th, 2025 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseAlien Clay (Adrian Tchaikovsky) (2024): Hugo nominee, audiobook read by Ben Allen. Ex-biology professor is shipped off to an extrasolar labor camp for crimes against the totalitarian Mandate, where he is first drafted as a (silently) grumbling lab assistant, then demoted to the Expeditions team that clears alien ruins for the "real" scentists to study. This would be great fun for a biologist, except for the part where the planet's flora think humans look interesting to colonize, ultimately a death sentence. Well, a faster death sentence than being sent to an extrasolar labor camp, anyway.
First person present tense. I forget how tense this makes the read until the story opens, and my reaction is "oh this again" with a little active untensing of the shoulders. Which probably didn't contribute to me taking the novel for what it is, rather than what I wanted it to be.
The narrative is stuck on revolution the way I have strong feelings about my own sometimes narrow obessions. Perhaps I should have expected that from a novel whose three sections are titled Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. It's also keen to hammer in how terrible and mediocre and narrow the Mandate's authoritanism makes life. I'm not sure why Tchaikovsky created an Earth so crushed by surveillance and suspicion that revolution appears almost impossible, or why the answer to this is "if we just had absolute knowledge of other people's emotional state the revolution would succeed". Really. Why weigh the dice so emphatically that the best way to liberate humanity is an intervention of alien biology? Is this alien biology as metaphor or lesson about The Power Of Empathy And Trust? Is this a reflection of the cynical depths Anton Dargdev is drowning in?
(The protagonist, Anton Dargdev (the "g" is silent) (this is mentioned repeatedly) thinks he is a.) a master of black humor b.) clever c.) can be an unreliable narrator while also declaiming his unreliable narrator status to the reader. These are, in combination, very annoying traits in a narrator.)
As I reflected on the novel, I got a little stuck on the choice to string together "absolute knowledge of other people's emotional state via invasive alien biology", "unreliable narrator", "unreliable narrator argued to reader audience he is absolutely, 100% still himself post-alien biology intervention / empathy acquisition", and "novel ended with trip to Earth to continue the revolution by deliberately moving the alien ecology to Earth, but we're all still ourselves here, yep, not questioning it at all." I don't know that Tchaikovsky wanted me to conlude that the revolutionaries had an interesting new non-human component to their cognitive process, and that the humans might not have been calling the shots on the "return to Earth" plan. The horror of the Other drops out too dramatically in the final third of the novel for me to go along with the change in character momentum from "we're doomed" to "this time the revolutionary subcommittee has a shot."
I'm also super sad that the end of the second section set up a long group slog through a poorly understood landscape and part three, Fraternité, started with a jump cut to the end of the slog. There were flashbacks to the trip, but I think it might have been more convincing to me if the turn from being driven apart by the horrible conditions of the labor camp to bonding in the conditions of the wild were shown in linear narrative. Or I just was really looking forward to a long trip through the landscapes and ecologies. Something about the lead-up evoked a dim memory of The Left Hand of Darkness and the Ice, what can I say, I'm shallow.
Instead, we get the jump from distrust to brotherhood, handled in a way that made me want to Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, which I remember keeping the thread of alien horror right through humans living with and making families with aliens. (The Xenogenesis trulogy also featured deeply acquisitive biology. Anyway.)
Somwhere in the middle of the novel, I may also have uttered something about how done I am with the prisoner's dilemma, some people saw that one scene from A Beautiful Mind in the one semester of economics they took twenty years ago and have extrapolated from a spherical cow in the most artificial and limited of ivory tower circumstances into an entire subgenre of science fiction.
From this, I think I can conclude I'm not the target audience for Alien Clay.
A Sorceress Comes To Call (T. Kingfisher) (2024): More Hugo reading, again in audiobook, narrated this time by Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. Dual first person PoVs from Cordelia, the daughter of the titular sorceress Evangeline, and Hester, whose brother is ensnared in Evangeline's plot to a.) marry into a little money, b.) marry off Cordelia into real money, c.) arrange the early deaths of both men to gain control of everyone's money.
The novel blurb online invokes the "Goose Girl" fairytale. It felt to me that Kingfisher used the fairytale as a springboard. Cordelia's mother is abusive; the horse Falada is Evangeline's familiar, and betrays Cordelia's hope of escape to her mother; the bad servant who takes Cordelia's place is Evangeline, using sorcery to puppet her daughter. The geese are Hester's, a gift to the man she refused to marry for fear of losing her freedom, or seeing his pity as her independence waned with her failing health.
...it's fine. If you are up for a spot-on depiction of child abuse, with magic, this is a novel that hits the marks it sets for itself. I'm not that interested in that much uncomplicated abusive parent energy.
The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley) (2024): The Hugo audiobook run continued, now narrated by Katie Leung and George Weightman. The shortest summary would be "RPF, 21st C progatonist / Graham Gore from the Franklin expedition, because time travel," which is about the least helpful explanation of the combination of romantic tropes and 21st century anxieties.
If I namecheck HP with respect to The Incandescent, I have to invoke Kage Baker's Company novels when discussing The Ministry of Time. The unnamed protagonist is hired into a top secret British Ministry which has pulled five individuals out of what the Company series would call event shadows: points in history where the "expats" died, or were believed to have died. The protagonist and her fellow "bridges" are full-tme companions and acclimitization assistants to people pulled out of England and France from the 16th through early 20th centuries, who bring their experiences and expectations with them. The Company series vibes are probably a case of convergent evolution, but there is the protagonist's ill-advised romance with a Victorian adventurer to consider.
The execution of the premise is absolutely bonkers from a logic perspective. Why would the two female and minority bridges, the protagonist and Simella, be assigned to (respectively) a 19th C British Navy man and WW1-era British Army man, when a man is assigned to the very Britsh 17th C woman? In what situation is it not massively unethical for a bridge to sleep with their expat charge? (Maybe the ethics can slide if you're trying to tie them to the Cause, more below.) Why split the expats into separate housing? Living in households larger than two people has been the historical norm more than it hasn't. Also, I'm shallow and appreciate the mild chaos of group living.
From a romantic trope perpective, though, putting a 21st C woman and her 19th C charge alone in a house makes perfect sense. Bring the heaving bosoms and strong yet sensitive gentlemen.
Since I'm not here for romantic tropes, I'm far more interested in the acclimitaztion, the group dinners and outings, the outrageous tangle of Arthur crushing on Gore, who is trying to court the protagonist through increasingly elaborate cooking, like a peacock trying to catch a peahen's interest with displays of elaborate plumage, while the protagonist obliviously lusts after Gore and refuses to admit any attraction to Maggie, whose desire (or lack) for the protagonist is opaque to the oblivious protagonist. Some people need to look up "polyamory" on the internet and use their words.
But then there's "sleeping with your expat because The Cause", since the other thread is 21st century anxieties. The protagonist gradually (or maybe, if you're paying more attention than me, not so gradually) reveals her motives to the reader. There wasn’t a man so special that he might not one day find himself in a footnote or one of my green hanging files. With my hand over the archives, I had control over the system. It didn’t matter that it was only the filing system. It was control, and that was what I wanted. Or, I took the lessons of the patient Missus Legs into my adulthood. I rarely hustled, was indifferent to grind. But I kept careful tabs and a great many secrets. and Butterflies demand so much attention. A spider just wants to eat. ... Who feeds a butterfly to a spider? ... Yes, I was still afraid of spiders. I had simply found the only way my child’s mind could conceive of placating the fear. Join up. Take a wing. Get to work. and When would it be my turn to hold the carrot and stick?
The late plot twists are: Vice Secretary Adela is a future iteration of the protagonist, Kyle Reese to her past self's John Connor, emphasis on a future where climate change has prodded the powers into war, and further ecological destruction worthy of Skynet. The future is in motion, and so is the present: Adela killed the mole from her timeline, but in the protagonist's timeline, it's Simella, not Quentin, who is working with Adela's opponents, who made the time travel device in a last gasp attempt at... controlling the past? Improving future outcomes?
What matters in the narrative, since this is a fevered romance, is that the protagonist and Gore are split apart by irreconciliable differences. You had a very clear idea of who I was supposed to be. You’ve been going hammer and tongs to get me there. Romance trope "I can change him" acknowledged and annihalated.
What I'm interested in, if the Terminator reference didn't give it away, is the potential to change the future - to make a new fate. The time travel device Salese and the Brigadier (whose actual name we never learn, just as we don't learn the protagonist's) used to reshape their time is what brings into being the Ministry they blame for the apocalyptic 23rd century they were born into. Adela jumped back 20 years in her timeline to lock in the Ministry's existence and put Britain ahead in the "resource wars" of her lifetime. The narrative declares that, by changing which 20th and 21st century catastrophes the expats are first exposed to, Adela's specific future is (likely) cut off from existence. It is silent on whether the Ministry still comes into being in the form Salese and the Brigadier fought to avoid.
The "great man" theory of history isn't invoked, but it's implied by how delicately the future might pivot in this sequence. But the narrative also makes nods to the power of social forces, if only in discrimination's persistence through the story. If Alien Clay is as subtle as an airhorn about social constructs isolating people, The Ministry of Time almost underplays the idea. The scene were Simella tries to reach out to the protagonist about shared experiences of being minorities - "Being the experiment. Being the pioneer they break the concepts on." - and is rebuffed by the protagonist is about as strongly as this comes out.
Whether the protagonist learned anything from betraying the man she built a life with in another timeline and seeing him walk away, holding a gun on her; from seeing her future self fight tooth and nail to be at the top of a sinking ship (or to lose more slowly than people outside Britain); from her future self being remembered as merely competent middle management, not so in control of what was going on... well, the very end of the novel leaves that possibility open to her.
I don't know that this is a good novel, but it's the Hugo nominee that I was enjoyed enough to switch from audiobook to ebook, so I could stay up late reading it. (It always feels like I should be in motion - cleaning, or driving, or getting excercise - when I'm listening to an audiobook. Training from listening to audiobooks while in motion, probably.) It's also the novel that I want to turn over in my head, and make my friends read so we can talk about it. So props to Kailene Bradley for hugely entertaining me.
The Hugo nominees so far share the exploration of people treated as things, or ends to means. Cordelia as an extention of Evangeline, or as her tool; the Mandate's literal "work them until they die" labor camp; the Ministry's plans for their time travel expats. That might be one reason I was dragging my feet on Hugo reading this year.
First person present tense. I forget how tense this makes the read until the story opens, and my reaction is "oh this again" with a little active untensing of the shoulders. Which probably didn't contribute to me taking the novel for what it is, rather than what I wanted it to be.
The narrative is stuck on revolution the way I have strong feelings about my own sometimes narrow obessions. Perhaps I should have expected that from a novel whose three sections are titled Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. It's also keen to hammer in how terrible and mediocre and narrow the Mandate's authoritanism makes life. I'm not sure why Tchaikovsky created an Earth so crushed by surveillance and suspicion that revolution appears almost impossible, or why the answer to this is "if we just had absolute knowledge of other people's emotional state the revolution would succeed". Really. Why weigh the dice so emphatically that the best way to liberate humanity is an intervention of alien biology? Is this alien biology as metaphor or lesson about The Power Of Empathy And Trust? Is this a reflection of the cynical depths Anton Dargdev is drowning in?
(The protagonist, Anton Dargdev (the "g" is silent) (this is mentioned repeatedly) thinks he is a.) a master of black humor b.) clever c.) can be an unreliable narrator while also declaiming his unreliable narrator status to the reader. These are, in combination, very annoying traits in a narrator.)
As I reflected on the novel, I got a little stuck on the choice to string together "absolute knowledge of other people's emotional state via invasive alien biology", "unreliable narrator", "unreliable narrator argued to reader audience he is absolutely, 100% still himself post-alien biology intervention / empathy acquisition", and "novel ended with trip to Earth to continue the revolution by deliberately moving the alien ecology to Earth, but we're all still ourselves here, yep, not questioning it at all." I don't know that Tchaikovsky wanted me to conlude that the revolutionaries had an interesting new non-human component to their cognitive process, and that the humans might not have been calling the shots on the "return to Earth" plan. The horror of the Other drops out too dramatically in the final third of the novel for me to go along with the change in character momentum from "we're doomed" to "this time the revolutionary subcommittee has a shot."
I'm also super sad that the end of the second section set up a long group slog through a poorly understood landscape and part three, Fraternité, started with a jump cut to the end of the slog. There were flashbacks to the trip, but I think it might have been more convincing to me if the turn from being driven apart by the horrible conditions of the labor camp to bonding in the conditions of the wild were shown in linear narrative. Or I just was really looking forward to a long trip through the landscapes and ecologies. Something about the lead-up evoked a dim memory of The Left Hand of Darkness and the Ice, what can I say, I'm shallow.
Instead, we get the jump from distrust to brotherhood, handled in a way that made me want to Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, which I remember keeping the thread of alien horror right through humans living with and making families with aliens. (The Xenogenesis trulogy also featured deeply acquisitive biology. Anyway.)
Somwhere in the middle of the novel, I may also have uttered something about how done I am with the prisoner's dilemma, some people saw that one scene from A Beautiful Mind in the one semester of economics they took twenty years ago and have extrapolated from a spherical cow in the most artificial and limited of ivory tower circumstances into an entire subgenre of science fiction.
From this, I think I can conclude I'm not the target audience for Alien Clay.
A Sorceress Comes To Call (T. Kingfisher) (2024): More Hugo reading, again in audiobook, narrated this time by Eliza Foss and Jennifer Pickens. Dual first person PoVs from Cordelia, the daughter of the titular sorceress Evangeline, and Hester, whose brother is ensnared in Evangeline's plot to a.) marry into a little money, b.) marry off Cordelia into real money, c.) arrange the early deaths of both men to gain control of everyone's money.
The novel blurb online invokes the "Goose Girl" fairytale. It felt to me that Kingfisher used the fairytale as a springboard. Cordelia's mother is abusive; the horse Falada is Evangeline's familiar, and betrays Cordelia's hope of escape to her mother; the bad servant who takes Cordelia's place is Evangeline, using sorcery to puppet her daughter. The geese are Hester's, a gift to the man she refused to marry for fear of losing her freedom, or seeing his pity as her independence waned with her failing health.
...it's fine. If you are up for a spot-on depiction of child abuse, with magic, this is a novel that hits the marks it sets for itself. I'm not that interested in that much uncomplicated abusive parent energy.
The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley) (2024): The Hugo audiobook run continued, now narrated by Katie Leung and George Weightman. The shortest summary would be "RPF, 21st C progatonist / Graham Gore from the Franklin expedition, because time travel," which is about the least helpful explanation of the combination of romantic tropes and 21st century anxieties.
If I namecheck HP with respect to The Incandescent, I have to invoke Kage Baker's Company novels when discussing The Ministry of Time. The unnamed protagonist is hired into a top secret British Ministry which has pulled five individuals out of what the Company series would call event shadows: points in history where the "expats" died, or were believed to have died. The protagonist and her fellow "bridges" are full-tme companions and acclimitization assistants to people pulled out of England and France from the 16th through early 20th centuries, who bring their experiences and expectations with them. The Company series vibes are probably a case of convergent evolution, but there is the protagonist's ill-advised romance with a Victorian adventurer to consider.
The execution of the premise is absolutely bonkers from a logic perspective. Why would the two female and minority bridges, the protagonist and Simella, be assigned to (respectively) a 19th C British Navy man and WW1-era British Army man, when a man is assigned to the very Britsh 17th C woman? In what situation is it not massively unethical for a bridge to sleep with their expat charge? (Maybe the ethics can slide if you're trying to tie them to the Cause, more below.) Why split the expats into separate housing? Living in households larger than two people has been the historical norm more than it hasn't. Also, I'm shallow and appreciate the mild chaos of group living.
From a romantic trope perpective, though, putting a 21st C woman and her 19th C charge alone in a house makes perfect sense. Bring the heaving bosoms and strong yet sensitive gentlemen.
Since I'm not here for romantic tropes, I'm far more interested in the acclimitaztion, the group dinners and outings, the outrageous tangle of Arthur crushing on Gore, who is trying to court the protagonist through increasingly elaborate cooking, like a peacock trying to catch a peahen's interest with displays of elaborate plumage, while the protagonist obliviously lusts after Gore and refuses to admit any attraction to Maggie, whose desire (or lack) for the protagonist is opaque to the oblivious protagonist. Some people need to look up "polyamory" on the internet and use their words.
But then there's "sleeping with your expat because The Cause", since the other thread is 21st century anxieties. The protagonist gradually (or maybe, if you're paying more attention than me, not so gradually) reveals her motives to the reader. There wasn’t a man so special that he might not one day find himself in a footnote or one of my green hanging files. With my hand over the archives, I had control over the system. It didn’t matter that it was only the filing system. It was control, and that was what I wanted. Or, I took the lessons of the patient Missus Legs into my adulthood. I rarely hustled, was indifferent to grind. But I kept careful tabs and a great many secrets. and Butterflies demand so much attention. A spider just wants to eat. ... Who feeds a butterfly to a spider? ... Yes, I was still afraid of spiders. I had simply found the only way my child’s mind could conceive of placating the fear. Join up. Take a wing. Get to work. and When would it be my turn to hold the carrot and stick?
The late plot twists are: Vice Secretary Adela is a future iteration of the protagonist, Kyle Reese to her past self's John Connor, emphasis on a future where climate change has prodded the powers into war, and further ecological destruction worthy of Skynet. The future is in motion, and so is the present: Adela killed the mole from her timeline, but in the protagonist's timeline, it's Simella, not Quentin, who is working with Adela's opponents, who made the time travel device in a last gasp attempt at... controlling the past? Improving future outcomes?
What matters in the narrative, since this is a fevered romance, is that the protagonist and Gore are split apart by irreconciliable differences. You had a very clear idea of who I was supposed to be. You’ve been going hammer and tongs to get me there. Romance trope "I can change him" acknowledged and annihalated.
What I'm interested in, if the Terminator reference didn't give it away, is the potential to change the future - to make a new fate. The time travel device Salese and the Brigadier (whose actual name we never learn, just as we don't learn the protagonist's) used to reshape their time is what brings into being the Ministry they blame for the apocalyptic 23rd century they were born into. Adela jumped back 20 years in her timeline to lock in the Ministry's existence and put Britain ahead in the "resource wars" of her lifetime. The narrative declares that, by changing which 20th and 21st century catastrophes the expats are first exposed to, Adela's specific future is (likely) cut off from existence. It is silent on whether the Ministry still comes into being in the form Salese and the Brigadier fought to avoid.
The "great man" theory of history isn't invoked, but it's implied by how delicately the future might pivot in this sequence. But the narrative also makes nods to the power of social forces, if only in discrimination's persistence through the story. If Alien Clay is as subtle as an airhorn about social constructs isolating people, The Ministry of Time almost underplays the idea. The scene were Simella tries to reach out to the protagonist about shared experiences of being minorities - "Being the experiment. Being the pioneer they break the concepts on." - and is rebuffed by the protagonist is about as strongly as this comes out.
Whether the protagonist learned anything from betraying the man she built a life with in another timeline and seeing him walk away, holding a gun on her; from seeing her future self fight tooth and nail to be at the top of a sinking ship (or to lose more slowly than people outside Britain); from her future self being remembered as merely competent middle management, not so in control of what was going on... well, the very end of the novel leaves that possibility open to her.
I don't know that this is a good novel, but it's the Hugo nominee that I was enjoyed enough to switch from audiobook to ebook, so I could stay up late reading it. (It always feels like I should be in motion - cleaning, or driving, or getting excercise - when I'm listening to an audiobook. Training from listening to audiobooks while in motion, probably.) It's also the novel that I want to turn over in my head, and make my friends read so we can talk about it. So props to Kailene Bradley for hugely entertaining me.
The Hugo nominees so far share the exploration of people treated as things, or ends to means. Cordelia as an extention of Evangeline, or as her tool; the Mandate's literal "work them until they die" labor camp; the Ministry's plans for their time travel expats. That might be one reason I was dragging my feet on Hugo reading this year.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-06-17 05:06 am (UTC)That was a good part! If somewhat short :P :)
It's also the novel that I want to turn over in my head, and make my friends read so we can talk about it. So props to Kailene Bradley for hugely entertaining me.
Yeah, it does hit that "compelling" bar! So yeah, she gets a lot of points for that.