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For some time I've had a tab about Samuel Delaney and this year's Hugos open in my browser. It's a good article because it discusses racism and the Hugos, and it's not an article I'm comfortable with because it's continuing the theme of Delaney The Token Black Science Fiction Writer. It's a work in progress, but the science fiction community is becoming more diverse.

Race issues aside, it says something that this year's Hugo drama has been covered by mainstream journalism. Whether something about the science fiction community, or about the movement of geeks from a fringe group to a more central place in American culture, or something else, I'm not sure.

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( Too many words on my voting experience. )

So now I have evaluated the puppy slates on their own merits, and having done that once, I can say I can use any future slates as guidelines of work I can skip without missing something amazing, or even likely relevant to my interests, either in excellence in genre or particular types of SF/F.

The novelettes were a step up from the short story and novella categories, but still not exactly brilliant material. I'm on the fence about voting any of them over No Award.

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"Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium", Gray Rinehart (Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, 05-2014): Old man dies on planet colonized by humans, then recolonized by aliens, and uses his death to rebel against the aliens' death rituals, in the first step to triggering a conflict between the two colonizing groups.

After the previous categories, this... isn't bad. It's got a beginning, middle, and end; it's not brilliant but it tells the story it set out to tell. It's not masterful. It's not introducing new ideas to the field, or demonstrating award-worthy levels of skill with prose, worldbuilding, or plotting. It's not that insightful about the material it's retreading. What's the difference between humans rebelling against their alien oppressors, and Iraqis in conflict with Americans? The lack of nuance is enough of a failure for me to knock this way down the rankings.

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"Championship B'tok", Edward M. Lerner (Analog, 09-2014): Part two of a series about interstellar civilizations knit together by a lightspeed transmission network of... intellectual property? The story treats this as a background element to the unmasking of a conspiracy spanning millennia, but I kept getting hung up on the radiowave IP thing. It's like the backstory for Cherryh's Company novels smashed into Vinge's Qeng Ho, except without the things either of them do well. Both Cherryh and Vinge call out the lightspeed lags and the surprises that pile up between transmissions and reactions to transmissions, and how that plays out. "Championship B'Tok" foregrounds an in-system plot, which cuts down on your lightspeed lags, but treats the interstellar plot as the big reveal. It's a very distracting flaw in the story, which has sidetracked me from the dicey prose and flat characterization. If the plot and worldbuilding were better, I'd be able to overlook the prose and characterization, but that's not the case. Ambitious but flawed.

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"The Day the World Turned Upside Down", Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed, 04-2014): the next time someone is asking what nice guy syndrome looks like, look no further! Girlfriend ditches boy, magical realism happens, Young Flower Of Untouched Innocence appears, Symbol of Our Relationship suffers at ex-boyfriend's hands, ex-BF quits this plane of existence in a way that is supposed to show how over everything he is. You can tell because he's mentally telling his ex how so very over her he is in the last paragraphs of the story.

The "romantic breakup = world turned upside down, NO LITERALLY" is actually executed well. If I were doing magical realism, I'd want to have cool ideas like that.

However, the execution relies on me caring about a Nice Guy who pines until he is totally, really over her when he discovers - gasp - there is another man in her life! She contaminated her purity by seeing another man after she dumped him!

Spare me.

It's hard to tell if this is suffering in translation from the subtle difference between the characters being jerks, and the author being completely aware of the intended effect, and the protagonist being a waste of my time because that is the author worldview. Negative one million points for Nice Guy protagonist souring my week.

n.b. this was a non-slate nomination. In the immortal word of Carolyn Hax, wow.

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"The Journeyman: In the Stone House", Michael F. Flynn (Analog, 06-2014): This... isn't awful. It feels like a chunk hewn out of a larger story, but it has an acceptable beginning, middle, and end; mangles English in service of the story; and assembles the worldbuilding and characterization in a way that puts this that smidge over "Flow" where I cared enough to finish the story without skimming. The plot is, again, Ringworld natives; but it's competent Ringworld natives.

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"The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale", Rajnar Vajra (Analog, 07/08-2014): Space cadets - Exoplanetary Explorers in training - pick a fight in a bar, get detailed to punishment duty packing up a failed project, and save the project from failing by noticing things overlooked by all other personnel assigned to the project in the last 30 years.

Wiki tells me the golden age of SF is 1938 - 1946, with some scholars advocating the '50s as the true Golden Age. My assessment is that the Golden Age of SF is twelve, when you're old enough to read adult works widely and indiscriminately, before you suss out the qualitative differences between Piers Anthony and Lois Bujold. But going by the golden age as a historic time period, the subtitle is spot on. This is from the "golden age", with the stiff prose, cocksure protagonists, and lack of grounding in actual human psychology you'd expect from that era. I started reading, I started skipping, I started flipping ahead to the end. It might not be bad, but if there's a brilliant idea lurking in there it's hobbled by the deadly words "I don't care about any of these characters, or the thing they're exploring" that escaped my thoughts a fifth of the way through.

For the Related Works category of the Hugo packet we have "John C. Wright's Patented One-Session Lesson in the Mechanics of Fiction", an essay from Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth. I want to burn it and take a shower.

( I cannot believe I am putting this behind a cut for sexual content in an essay on basic fiction skills. And yet, here is a cut with a warning about surprise gross objectification of women in an essay on basic fiction skills. There's bonus slurs on non-Western beliefs. )

When an artist has mastered his or her craft and does amazing things with it, it's possible to have engaging debates about the merit of art versus the artist's personal failings. Sometimes there are good people who are not great at their chosen craft, but we'd like them to find success to reflect the quality of their character, even if their work isn't to one's taste. My exposure to Wright's fiction and nonfiction work fulfills neither of those categories. In fact, I'd characterize his fiction as amateur work unworthy of the Hugos, and the nonfiction I have read as actively harmful to building a vibrant community of high quality writers capable of engaging with the questions of speculative fiction, be those extrapolation of contemporary hard science, examining the human condition, exploration of space and the future of humanity, or... take your pick. Wright's advice on writing is lacking as his fiction is lacking.

In light of what I interpret as bad writing and a general vibe of "off", I won't be reading anything else be Wright for this year's Hugos and will be leaving his work off the ballot.

I have cracked the Hugo Nominations packet! It's an exercise in suffering! No, really, I see writers I've "noped" out of in the past! For example, I have been hating on Kevin J. Anderson's mediocrity as a writer since the Jedi Academy trilogy was published in 1994! (Sorry, KJA. I am glad other people like your writing enough to support you as a professional writer, but I am profoundly unmoved by the overwhelming "meh" of your fiction.) I will be doing my best to apply my usual questions to what I read:

Are the ideas compelling?

Does the plot interest me?

Do the spelling and grammar conform to a contemporary style guide?

Have the spelling and grammar been mangled for good reasons that support the idea or plot?

Based on previous experience with Hugo nominees in general and some cursory perusal of the nominees so far, I have serious doubts about some of the nominees doing well when judged by these questions. To keep my head from exploding, there will be a very special guideline for this reading project:

Do I have serious reservations about the writer's grip on her or his prose? Stop reading.

Usually I am a die-hard finisher. Sometimes this is justified: Possession was a slog for hundreds of pages and came together in a dead brilliant fashion at the end. However, from the very first page it was clear Possession was in the hands of a writer who had a very clear grasp of what she was trying to do and the impact of each word and sentence, plus the cumulative effect of each little building block as the story unspooled into paragraphs and chapters and a complete novel.

I do not have faith each and all of the Hugo nominees will demonstrate such subtlety or control over their tools. So watch this space as I suss out the good, the bad, and the ugly.