Author: Catherine (Page 17 of 54)

Hugo reading 2018: Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty

July 3, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty is both easy and difficult to describe. Six people wake up in cloning vats on a space ship, their brutally murdered bodies floating around them. They are – and always have been – the only people on the ship who aren’t in stasis. They only remember being on the space ship for two weeks – but with one exception, the bodies are 25 years older than they were when they got on the ship. Their memories are gone. The computer logs of the voyage so far are gone. The food synthesiser only makes hemlock.

Whodunnit? And why? And how?

This is a twisty, twisty, locked-room murder mystery, which also delves into a bunch of ethical issues around cloning. The personalities are interesting, though some are more sympathetic than others. The reasons for the murders clearly go back into the time before the ship was launched – but everyone on the ship has been cloned many, many times, so that’s a lot of past to look into. And everyone is hiding at least one thing relevant to the mystery from everyone else.

I feel reluctant to write more about this, because even more than with the last novel, I feel as though I have to either lie or give away chunks of plot (I have lied, slightly, above)

This is a really, really good story. It’s a strong thriller/murder mystery, but it does touch on quite a few bioethical questions that are already becoming relevant. It … drat, no, I can’t actually say any more without spoiling the ending. There are, I think, homages to Agatha Christie and Jean Paul Sartre in there that I spotted; there are probably others that I didn’t spot.

I thought this was excellent, and it’s going to the top of my ballot. Also, you should all read this one. if only so that I have someone to talk about it with who won’t be spoilered.

Actually, let’s just say – comments are for chatting if anyone else has read this book, and can be as spoilerific as needed – enter at own risk!

Hugo reading 2018: Provenance, by Ann Leckie

July 2, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Provenance, by Ann Leckie, was a lot of fun. I feel like there is a bit of a trend this year for twisty, political, space opera, featuring at least one character who isn’t what he or she seems. I’m totally there for this trend, but it does make it a little difficulty to review books without giving anything away (which is why my review of Raven Stratagem really doesn’t do it justice, sadly).

So, let’s see. Our protagonist is Ingray, who is in competition with her foster brother to become their foster mother’s heir. She decides that a good way to impress her mother would be to break out the son of a rival from prison, and get em to show her where e hid eir family’s vestiges.

And before I continue, let’s pause to actually understand what that sentence meant. Vestiges are… souvenirs with historical significance, basically. Letters from important ancestors, signatures on important documents, and so forth. Families on Ingray’s planet derive a lot of their prestige and political power from the possession of such vestiges.

As for the e/eir/em – well, in this book, that seems to be the third gender option, and about a third of characters are nomen. Which is just a thing, and not commented on. I have to say, I’m in two minds about the pronouns here. My linguistic, intellectual, aesthetic mind really loves them – they feel logical, organic in a way that zie/zir does not to me (I will, obviously, use whatever pronouns someone prefers, but that particular variant never looks quite like it belongs in English – a ludicrous statement that – to me). But for some reason, the same part of my brain that ‘hears’ punctuation and apostrophes when I read, and jerks to a halt when one is in the wrong place, kept on parsing this as cockney English and so every time someone was referred to as e or em, the whole sentence developed a strong cockney accent. Which… gave everything a strangely cheeky, working class vibe, and was a little bit distracting.

In short, I really liked these pronouns but the part of my brain that does reading has difficulty coping with them.

Back to the plot. Which is immediately complicated when it begins to look like the person Ingray broke out may not have been the right person. And then there are complications involving various alien species, political infighting, and extremely dysfunctional families.

I really enjoyed this novel. I like twisty politics, and I like families where some of the dysfunction comes from people being tools, but some of it comes from people meaning really well and just being terrible at it. Or doing stupid things to protect people. I appreciated the ways in which the various dysfunctions were resolved, and that some people were just going to continue to be tools and one just has to accept this as a thing and deal with it in whatever way works for you.

I liked, too, that this was something of a coming of age story for Ingray. Actually, between the family stuff and Ingray figuring out what she is good at, you could make a good case for putting this in the New Adult or Young Adult category.

Anyway. This was lots of fun, and I’m going to have to think hard about whether it comes in ahead of or behind Raven Stratagem.

Hugo reading 2018: Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee

July 1, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Oh, wow, I’d forgotten about reading books where I don’t have to force myself to keep reading! I hadn’t realised how much hard work the last two books were until I started Yoon Ha Lee’s Raven Stratagem, and basically devoured a quarter of it before I even knew what was happening.

Raven Stratagem is the second book in a series, but in my view, it passes the ‘does this book stand alone?’ test with flying colours. I read the first book, Ninefox Gambit, when it was nominated last year, and had forgotten most of the plot. My memories were basically ‘main character has this long dead, brilliant, but genocidal, strategist in her head and there is space opera and also maths and calendars make the technology work. Also, torture makes the calendars work.’

I had, in fact, forgotten everyone’s names, why the main character was chosen to have the strategist implanted in her head, and what happened at the end of the first book – all I remembered was that I liked the relationship between the main character and her ghostly sidekick. And the weird maths/magic/technology stuff.

It didn’t matter. We meet Jedao (the long-dead strategist) almost immediately, and we know he is in Cheris’s body. And we get more of the mechanics of that later. We also get shown fairly early on how the calendar/maths/technology stuff works. But once you’ve taken the technology on-board, the plot stands alone. Yes, it’s enriched by the first book, but the first book isn’t necessary to it.

Once again, I felt that the strength of this book was in its relationships and in its worldbuilding. I really liked the various viewpoint characters, and enjoyed spending time in their heads (which… feels like a strange sort of double-meaning in the context of the book). One concept that hadn’t been very much unpacked in the first book (I think) was ‘formation instinct’ – something implanted in the soldier caste (the Kel) that apparently makes it impossible for them to disobey orders from a superior officer – or rather, if they try, their body will try to prevent them. But it’s more than just about obeying orders – it also seems to implant an absolute loyalty to whoever the commanding officer currently is. This makes it tricky when someone with a higher rank and a terrible reputation comes in and tries to take over. During the book, we see that there are a couple of exceptions to this rule, but the price of being such an exception is costly, both socially and physically. But the deeper you dig into this idea, the more disturbing its implications… true, the Kel consent to have the formation instinct implanted (though it is questionable whether this is an informed choice), but that is in many ways the last time they can consent to anything.

Which is perhaps also a metaphor for the military in its current form – but it’s deeply creepy.

There is a lot of pretty awful stuff taking place in this book. There is some on-stage and fairly grotesque torture (a single seen, mercifully short), but it’s a single scene and you can sort of see it coming, and skim that bit without missing anything vital. There are underlying and concerning issues in the Hexarchy (the fact that it runs on torture, and has an entire caste for that, for example, isn’t great…). And there is genocide, discussed in frighteningly administrative detail.

But despite all this, it seemed lighter than the first book – perhaps because it’s clear from the start that this is not OK and someone is trying to do something about it.

The plot itself is delightfully twisty – I saw a couple of the turns coming, but it was still fun watching them approach – and is quietly making a lot of points about choice and ethics and sacrifice and consent, which I also enjoyed.

Also, it is so BLISSFULLY readable. I could just… read it and enjoy it, rather than having to fight the text to figure out what was going on (looking at you, Stone Sky), or wade through dull prose and economic theory to enjoy the (admittedly highly enjoyable) characters (hi, New York 2140). This is going to the top of my ballot for now – though I have to say, the three remaining books are all looking pretty promising, so I’ll be interested to see if it stays there.

Hugo reading 2018: The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin

June 29, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I went into The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin with a bad attitude. I feel pretty strongly that a Best Novel (or Novella, or Dramatic presentation, etc) has to be able to stand alone, and the third book of a trilogy is unlikely to do that. Also, I read the excerpt when book 2 was nominated last year, and it did very little for me.

And… look, I don’t really know what to do with this one. The world building is complex and very thorough, which is a good thing in most circumstances, but coming in at book three felt rather like reading in a foreign language – there were bits that lacked context and which I felt I only half-understood at best. This was frustrating, and turned what would otherwise have been a strength into a weakness. (And this is why you shouldn’t nominate book three of a trilogy, folks! If you love the first book, then fine, nominate it. But after that, wait and nominate it for best series, already!)

Having said that, the characters carried me through to the extent that I kept reading all the way to the end, despite my disgruntlement, because I wanted to know what happened to them (mild spoiler: nothing good. This is only a mild spoiler because even going into this story with very little information about it, it seemed pretty clear that misery levels were going to be high).

The way the story was told was also designed to drive me right up the wall. There is a lot of second person, and a lot of random bits of documents from someone writing in the past, not to mention an entire separate plot thread from a different era entirely, and it was really only in the last couple of chapters that I felt that I had any idea what was going on. I suspect – no, I know! – that there are plenty of people out there who would love this sort of storytelling, but it drove me absolutely batty.

(Yes, Andrew, I can see you pricking up your ears. You would probably love this, because you are the sort of person who likes extremely irritating books, and I love you, but sometimes I don’t understand you…)

I don’t know how to review this fairly. The book 3 factor was a problem for me, but even without that, the literary style would have annoyed me, and even without THAT, I’d probably not have enjoyed this book very much because it’s really fairly depressing. The fact that I liked the characters didn’t help with that. I think the main reason I kept reading is that I wanted to find out who the characters in the Syl Anagist chapters were – their story, thankfully, WAS self-contained, and I liked it a lot – and this was resolved late enough in the book that I figured I might as well find out what happened to everyone else at that point. (Don’t get me wrong, I really did like the other characters – but they had Doomed, Doomed, Sadly, Miserably Doomed written all over them. I don’t think I could have read their story alone).

So, where does this leave me? It leaves me with a book that is, certainly, a very good book, but which I really didn’t like for a lot of reasons relating to personal taste. Does it past the ‘standalone’ test? Maybe. Barely. I think that depends on your tolerance for reading a book where you spend a lot of time not really understanding what is going on or why. And I’m not even sure that this isn’t intentional – I think Jemisin is deliberately opaque in places. To be frank, I don’t think I’d have liked this book very much even if it HAD been standalone.

I don’t know whether this goes above or below New York: 2140 on my ballot. It’s better-written, but an order of magnitude more annoying. And did I mention the general misery?

Let’s hope the next few novels turn out to be books I actually like without having to work quite this hard to be fair…

Hugo reading 2018: Crash Override, by Zoe Quinn

June 28, 2018 / Catherine / 2 Comments

Crash Override, by Zoe Quinn is the sort of book that makes you want to delete all your blogs and internet accounts and go live in Antarctica. It is a deeply, deeply upsetting book to read.

The Hugo Voter Pack provided us with an excerpt – about 100 pages – not the entire book, which has the subtitle ‘How Gamergate (nearly) destroyed my life and how we can win the fight against online hate’, so I can only assume it gets less depressing and more inspiring as it goes, but I’m not sure I’d be able to read through to get to that point.

The part we get is the beginning of it all – how Gamergate got started, how it escalated – and it’s really terrifying. Reading it, I really felt her sense of helplessness in the face of the online horde (made far more frightening by the fact that it quickly grew into offline threats, not just to Zoe, but to her friends and family). Nothing is safe, really.

Clearly, she has survived to write the tale, and I understand that she has even started a website, http://www.crashoverridenetwork.com, that provided advocacy and support to victims of online abuse, so well done her, but I’m feeling traumatised just from reading an extract of her story.

I have no idea how to rate this. It shouldn’t be a related work for the Hugos – and yet it apparently needs to be. I didn’t enjoy it – but I don’t think I was supposed to. I’m not going to finish it, but I probably am going to put it at the top of my list and make a donation to the website, because nobody should have to deal with this sort of thing.

(Also, the PDF kept breaking my kobo, which started becoming a source of concern in its own right – had Gamergaters somehow infiltrated the Hugo voter downloads and put a virus in this document? Only time will tell, but I have to say, I was getting super paranoid.)

Hugo reading 2018: Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal

June 27, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal, is not an easy book to review. It is a collection of about 50 letters written to Octavia Butler after her death by people who were influenced in one way or another by her work. The letters are personal, and also political, as is appropriate.

I have not read any of Butler’s work (it always sounded like the sort of stories that were guaranteed to give me nightmares), and don’t know many of the authors of the letters in this book, so the threads, such as they are, are very tenuous for me. The Hugo Voter Pack gave me the entire book, which may not have been doing me a real service – I understand that there was, at the launch, a sampler booklet, containing two letters from each section for the reader to review, and I think this would have been helpful here. Rather than attempt to review 50+ individual letters, or try to find some sort of narrative or argumentative arc for them in my head, I decided to choose, somewhat randomly, two letters from each section of the book myself, and review these.

And… that didn’t really work either. How do you review 50 essays by different authors, linked not by a theme, but by a person? There are certain recurring themes – racism, representation, grief, politics, feminism, and the way these things are reflected in literature generally and the work of Butler in particular. They are good essays. They feel a lot like reading the sorts of blogs I like reading – political, left-leaning, concerned with race and gender and intersectionality and occasionally just really good books.

And they are kind of depressing, because the internal evidence suggests that a lot of these letters were written very soon after the election of Trump, and, unsurprisingly, the sorts of people who would be writing letters to Octavia Butler are also the sorts of people who find Trump’s presidency deeply upsetting.

This is, I think, a book to dip into, rather than to read from cover to cover. I’ve liked the bits I’ve read, but right now, I don’t feel as though I’m going to take much more in if I keep going. I may come back to it later. I think I’m putting it second on this ballot for now, after Sleeping with Monsters, and ahead of the Ellison and Banks books.

Hugo reading 2018: New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson

June 27, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

The Hugo Voter Pack for this section was fairly annoying this year, offering only two books in full and the rest as excerpts. I was in two minds about trying to get hold of the novels, to be honest, but when Andrew was able to find them all at the library, I accepted my fate.

I decided to start with New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, on the grounds that it was a gigantic tome which will never fit in my handbag, and I wanted to get it over with. We had heard Robinson interviewed about it on the Coode Street Podcast, and he had described it as being set in a post-climate change, drowned New York with a Venice-like feel. He said he had spent a lot of time walking around New York with a map showing altitudes, to work out where the intertidal areas would be and where the drowned areas would be, which sounded appealing. He also said that he had spent a long time figuring out the economic set up, and that the villain in this story was Capitalism which sounded both depressing and dull. It sounded, frankly, like a climate change dystopia with economics, in 600+ pages – not my cup of tea.

So I was surprised to find I quite enjoyed it. It was a strange sort of enjoyment – up until about halfway through, it was the sort of enjoyment where I quite liked it while I was reading it, but could also walk away and forget about it at any time. After that, it got a bit more compelling.

I’m not sure how best to describe the plot. It centres around the denizens of the MetLife building – Inspector Gen, a Black woman and a fourth generation cop; Charlotte, a lawyer who works for the Housing Cooperative and tries to sort out housing for refugees ; Franklin, a financier who is not quite as much of a good guy as he thinks he is, but does have more ethics than are immediately apparent; Mutt and Jeff, two ‘quants’ who work on the mathematical side of financial speculation and are somewhat lacking in sense; Vlade, the building manager and former diver; Amelia, a ‘cloud star’ celebrity, who uses her zeppelin to assist the migration of endangered species, and films this for the public; and Roberto and Stefan, two very bright ‘water rats’ – children without visible means of support, who support themselves by diving and scavenging in the drowned city.

And… they try to keep the building together. They try to find buried treasure. They try to save the polar bears. They try to rescue refugees when a hurricane creates a gigantic storm surge. They fight off hostile takeovers and predatory financial systems, and run co-operatives, and eventually realise that this piecemeal approach is not enough, and they will need to find a way to fix the system entire.

I liked the characters, some more than others. Amelia is delightful; Vlade is someone I’d like to know; Franklin deserves all the eye-rolling in the world, but is actually quite likeable once he starts looking outside his own bubble; Gen and Charlotte are both great, but perhaps not that well characterised because I was constantly mixing them up.

It’s a surprisingly optimistic book, given its subject matter. It’s so optimistic, in the end, that I found it almost unbelievable – but that’s probably the effect of the current political climate.

I don’t think I’d seek out more of Robinson’s work – it is SO long and his characterisation wasn’t strong enough to keep me really interested – but I liked it much more than I expected to. And a little political optimism is a balm in the current climate. It’s a good start to the best novel category.

Hugo listening 2018: Best Fancast Category

June 24, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Time for the podcast category! We’ve been listening to these in the car, over dinner, and at other random times, so I’m hoping that the ones I’ve listened to earlier will still be fresh in my memory for this…

Verity! describes itself as ‘Six Smart Women Discussing Doctor Who’. One of those women is Tansy Rayner Roberts, whose work I enjoy very much; the others are Lynne M. Thomas, L.M. Myles, Katrina Griffiths, Erika Ensign and Debora Stanish. I’m not really into Dr Who (mostly I find him to be an exceedingly annoying character), but Andrew more than makes up for my disinterest, and in fact would not allow me to listen to the third podcast listed because we do not yet have the episode it talks about available to us, and even though I love spoilers and am entirely happy to form opinions about shows I have not yet seen, Andrew disapproves of this attitude. And since I haven’t yet worked out how to listen to podcasts on my own (I’m sure it’s perfectly easy, I’m just lazy), what Andrew says, goes.

So we listened to two of the Extra podcasts instead, and they were very good. The first one was ‘Extra! In Defence Of … The Gavel Edition’, which is a sort of game show in which Deb gives her three fellow podcasters (Tansy, Katrina and Erika) a topic – such as the length of the Doctor’s scarf, or the Barbie doll in the 11th Doctor’s pocket – and each of them has one minute in which to defend it. This was extremely silly, and highly entertaining, and led to such conclusions as Tansy defending the existence of a character she didn’t even remember by claiming that a forgettable character just highlights the Doctor and the Companion more, and later contending that Doctor Who has a deep relationship with his wardrobe and a fascination with design and fashion, and spends his time in between eras and episodes doing fashion design and trying on new outfits. Perhaps best of all was Katrina’s theory about Doctor Who carrying a Barbie doll because he had been protesting Mattel’s unrealistically-proportioned dolls, and also because he intended to make it into a raggedy doll for young Amy Pond.

I would definitely listen to this game show again.

The other episode we listened to was called ‘There’s nothing “only” about being a Doctor”, which was the podcasters reacting to Jodie Whittaker’s casting as the next Dr Who. This was particularly interesting because while most of the podcasters were very happy and quite emotional about finally having a female doctor, one of them was actually very unhappy about it, and they spent a fair while unpacking some of the (non-misogynist) reasons why one might not be thrilled at this choice.

I enjoyed this podcast a lot – significantly more than I enjoy Doctor Who, in fact – and I expect that it will go high on my ballot.

The Coode Street Podcast, by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K Wolfe, is basically an interview podcast. We listened to the interview with Kim Stanley Robinson about drowned New York – sort of a preview of New York 2140 (which is apparently allowable, unlike Dr Who spoilers. Andrew, are you sure you are being consistent here?). He actually made the book sound like something I might want to read, which was unexpected – though I suspect that Robinson’s idea of comedy might be different to mine. I did like it that Robinson had actually walked around the streets of New York with a topograhpical map, checking what would be underwater and figuring out what the tides would look like.

This is a perfectly good podcast, but not for me. My attention span for listening to something is not sufficient to last through a full-length interview (I think it went for about an hour), and I kept on zoning out.

I remembered Fan Girl Happy Hour with great fondness from last year. It is hosted by Ana Grilo and Renay Williams, who I really want to invite over to my house, because they seem absolutely lovely. We listened to the episode where they discussed Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, which is a book I love so much that it overcomes my dislike of vampire stories (it has a lot of baking in it…). The conversation rambled in a highly entertaining fashion. Ana never re-reads books (something Renay simply can’t comprehend, being an inveterate re-reader, much like myself), and hasn’t read Sunshine since she was a teenager and had apparently imagined an entire sex scene that wasn’t even in the book (‘vampire dick’ was discussed at some length, as promised in the introduction, since blood flow might be assumed to be an… issue… for vampires). There was discussion of which genre the book falls into, of the source of Sunshine’s power, of whether Con is *really* as disgusting to look at as Sunshine says he is, or whether it’s her ability to see through glamour that makes him so (or whether she is in deep denial of the fact that she really wants to bone him, thank you, Renay). They also had a really interesting discussion about Sunshine’s relationship with her family and friends, and also what she is hiding from (or ignoring) about herself.

I then saw that there was an episode about The King of Attolia, which I adore, but which Andrew hasn’t read yet, so I decided to read the transcript of this one (which means, sadly, that I don’t get to listen to Ana’s gorgeous accent, but I can imagine it…). Again, this was delightful, not least because Ana adores the book and Renay… doesn’t. She actually does like it (unlike previous books in the series), but fascinatingly, she finds that she can’t connect to it at all emotionally. Ana and I are both stunned by this, because both of us find it intensely emotional. Ana is also very dramatic on the subject, and I’m really going to have to listen to this sometime, because I can very nearly hear it in her voice, but I want the reality.

In short, Fan Girl Happy Hour is still utterly adorable and is currently at the top of my ballot. I really have to get around to listening to it in non-Hugo seasons.

Then today we had a really long drive, to Warburton and back, via Canterbury, so we knocked off the last three podcasts.

Galactic Suburbia was the next cab off the rank, and we listened to the episode recorded at Continuum last year. This was a fair bit of fun, and I enjoyed especially their reflections on Wonder Woman and on last year’s Hugo Reading, which of course I had also done. I liked it a lot, but not as much as Verity or Fangirl Happy Hour. (Andrew would put this one higher than I would, because he appreciated the different perspectives people brought to the work, which is fair enough. I think I like two or three person podcasts more, because the conversation is more intimate and direct or something I can’t define, but I prefer it.) Also, this was *very* long – more than an hour and a half – which I find a bit long for a podcast.

We then listened to the Ditch Diggers podcast on the power of saying No. This was also over an hour, oy. It had some good advice, and some good examples of how to apply it, and sort of reminded me of reading Ask A Manager, which is one of my favourite blogs. But after a point, it got a little repetitive for me.

This afternoon, we had a try at listening to Sword and Laser, which is only 40 minutes. It had that nice, two friends chatting about something dynamic, which I should have liked, but after about 25 minutes it wasn’t holding either of our attention. I feel as though it didn’t go into much depth about anything – a lot of things were mentioned, and there was a lot of ‘oh, that’s interesting’ or ‘oh, I enjoyed that’, but no further commentary. Theoretically, there was more interesting stuff in the second half of the podcast, but I think you do have to do more to engage your audience in the first twenty minutes if you want them to stick around for the second twenty. (I think perhaps the difference between this and Fangirl Happy Hour is that where Fangirl Happy Hour feels like you have two really enthusiastic friends geeking out about something in your loungeroom and giggling a lot, this felt more like overhearing a conversation on the tram without context – people who have known the two people talking for years will get more out of it, because they know the cues and backstory, but for the random tram spectator, there isn’t a lot to go with.)

I think my final ballot here will be Fangirl Happy Hour, then Verity!, then Galactic Suburbia. Ditch Diggers and Coode Street are tied in 4th and 5th, and I don’t know their final order. Sword and Laser is last.

Next up, I’m going to start on the Best Novels, but since New York 2140 is my first one, and it’s a gigantic tome, you may not hear from me for a few days…

Hugo reading 2018: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

June 18, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I had heard good things about All Systems Red by Martha Wells, and rightly so. This novella was an utter delight. It is told in the first person from the perspective of Murderbot, a Security Robot on a planetary survey mission.

Murderbot doesn’t like its job, and doesn’t like people, and really would rather spend its time watching soap operas through its satellite feed. It has hacked its governor module, so it doesn’t actually have to obey any of its commands, but it does need to obey enough of them that it isn’t obvious that it has been hacked, otherwise someone will try to fix it. So it’s basically half-assing its job, doing as little as it can get away with, and not paying attention to anything that might not be immediately relevant because why bother. The humans it is contracted to are disposed to be friendly, but Murderbot is not. It prefers to remain in armour, with its helmet darkened so that nobody can see its face. It doesn’t want to talk to you. It doesn’t want to be your friend. It just wants you to leave it alone.

I adored Murderbot’s character. It isn’t depressed, or angry, or sad, it’s just disgruntled and antisocial, and has no interest in pretending otherwise. There are days when I would love to be that character. Of course, it does feel that its particular humans are not too bad, as humans go, and is not impressed when it seems that someone is trying to kill them, but it does not want to bond with them or be part of their team or accept favours or help from them. It does, over time, begin to like some of its humans, in a standoffish sort of way, but resents having to waste emotion on actual people. It would rather save this for fictional characters. Did I mention that I love Murderbot and want to be Murderbot when I grow up?

The story itself is well-plotted, and – hallelujah! – has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is certainly room for a sequel, but you can also stop at the end of the book having read a satisfying story. The other characters are well-drawn, and very nearly as annoyingly nice as Murderbot thinks they are, which is a pleasant change.

I really enjoyed this book (hmm, and apparently, sentient robots are a thing this year…).

I think And then there were (N-one) is still my top pick for this section, though it’s a close thing, followed by All Systems Red and Down Among the Sticks and Bones. After that, The Black Tides of Heaven, which I would like to put higher, but the ending really frustrated me. I don’t know what to do about the last two. I think Binti: Home is *part* of a better book than River of Teeth, but to my mind it remains just that – part of a book, and not a story in its own right. I’m almost tempted to put it below No Award, not because it isn’t good, but because I don’t think it’s a novella, in the sense of being a self-contained narrative. I’ll have to think more about this.

Hugo reading 2018: Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor

June 18, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I read Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor a couple of years back, when it was nominated for best novella, and I liked it. I was under the impression that there had been a novel between that and Binti: Home, which is this year’s nomination but it turns out that this is the second novella in the series.

Once again, the worldbuilding is very rich, and I enjoyed the character of Binti. This book was somewhat painful to read, as Binti returns (temporarily) to the family she left in order to go to Oomza University, and the dynamics are… tense, to say the least. She also brings her Meduse friend, Okwu, with her, and this nearly leads to disaster the moment they reach earth. Binti’s intention is to go on pilgrimage (and I would have loved to know more about that), but instead, she winds up taking a different journey. There is some interesting exploration of cultural hierarchies, here. While Binti’s people are viewed as primitive by the Khoush, they in turn look down on the Desert People, who of course turn out to be more than they seem (and not ‘mystical primitives’. either).

All of this is great until Binti gets word of a catastrophe, which means she must return at once, and then you turn the page and the book stops, and you *don’t* scream rude things because you don’t want to wake your husband, but really, why do people keep nominating portions of books for the Hugos? Once again, I’m at a bit of a loss of how to judge this. If I were judging it as a chapter or extract from a book, it would get very high marks and make me want to read the book. But as a story in itself, I think it fails. It has, if anything, even less resolution than The Black Tides of Heaven, and also less of a beginning, though that bothered me less – I think it stands alone at the front end, if one doesn’t mind being dropped into a world and needing to figure some things out, which I believe is a requirement for enjoying a lot of science fiction!

So yeah. I don’t think I can put this or Tides at the top of my ballot, even though they are both excellent at what they are doing, because what they are doing is not writing a novella. But equally, I feel like they deserve a higher ranking than River of Teeth, which is a complete story, but which did not leave me with any particular desire to read the sequel (which, yes, clearly exists, and the story clearly ends at a point where you would like one – but it has the courtesy to finish the first story first.) And I don’t know where to put them in relation to Sticks and Bones, which I did like and which is complete, but which I suspect isn’t quite as good, objectively.

Ah well. I’ve been saving the Murderbot book until last, and I have high hopes for it… though since it has never previously occurred to me to ask whether books have proper endings or not, I’ve not scanned the reviews for it with that in mind. Here’s hoping I won’t be unpleasantly surprised on that front…

Author: Catherine (Page 17 of 54)

Hugo reading 2018: Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty

Hugo reading 2018: Provenance, by Ann Leckie

Hugo reading 2018: Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee

Hugo reading 2018: The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin

Hugo reading 2018: New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Hugo listening 2018: Best Fancast Category

Hugo reading 2018: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

Hugo reading 2018: Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor

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