Tag: hugo awards 2018 (Page 5 of 6)

Hugo reading 2018: River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey

June 12, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey is a Western, with hippos. That’s… basically it, really. If you like Westerns, and like hippos, you’re going to like this one. I don’t feel strongly about either of these things, so I quite enjoyed it, but feel no need to reread it. It has lots of good Western archetypes and tropes. We have the protagonist, who fell in love with hippo ranching, but had his ranch burned to the ground and then had to sell the land to a villainous casino owner; he is now a lone cowboy (‘hopper’) type, living just-barely within the law – his best friend is his hippo, and he’s out for revenge and to make a buck. He joins forces with a heavily pregnant assassin, a female con artist, an agender explosives expert, and the fastest gun in the West, to clear out a bunch of feral hippos from the river, and inevitably comes into conflict with the casino owner.

It’s all competently done, the characters are fun and well-drawn, and there were enough twists to keep it interesting. My main complaint would be that it wasn’t very fantastical – it’s alternate history (based on a real-life plan at one point to point to breed hippos in the US for meat), but beyond that, the story is played very straight. I don’t know my US history, but there’s no sense that the hippos have changed anything beyond some of the geography of the land (there was a need to build more swamps, obviously). It’s almost too convincingly mundane as a world to feel like it’s fantasy.

Where this goes on my ballot will depend very heavily on the other books – it’s doing what it set out to do, indisputably, and it’s doing it well. But… I’m just not sure that what it is doing is ambitious enough to be worthy of a Hugo.

Hugo reading 2018: And then there were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker

June 11, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

And Then There Were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker, was clever and great fun and just a little unsettling. Sarah Pinsker receives an invitation from an alternate universe version of herself to attend a conference – SarahCon – at which all the other attendees are Sarah Pinskers from different universes. And then a Sarah Pinsker dies under suspicious circumstances and so Sarah Pinsker, who is an insurance investigator and the closest thing they have to a detective, is asked to try to find out what happened.

This is a fascinating exploration of the different choices people make through life, and their consequences. Some of the Sarah Pinskers are from very closely related strands, others from remote ones – what sent them there? Some of them are still with university girlfriends, others are single or have new partners, one of them invented the Transdimensional Portal, but four others very nearly did and were just not as fast.

I guessed one part of the murder mystery, but not the other part, and the resolution – or is it resolved? Can anything in a multiverse where every choice you make spawns a new universe ever be resolved? – was very satisfying. The motive for the murder was unexpected and clever and logical and in keeping with the Sarah who did it – and it made you wonder what else might happen at the end of the conference, when it was time for everyone to leave.

It’s an unsettling story to read, if you have ever questioned any of your own life decisions. Adding to the unsettlement is the fact that Sarah Pinsker is also the name of the author, and I can’t help wondering how autobiographical it is – it almost seems like a waste if it isn’t, but if it is, how very odd for her friends and acquaintances to read it.

This is a great start to the novella section. I think it’s going to place high on my ballot.

Hugo reading 2018: Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction), by Paul Kincaid

June 11, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Having done one excerpt today, I thought I might as well tackle Paul Kincaid’s Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction). We only get one chapter of this biography (Chapter 2, which mostly revolves around the Culture books), which is probably for the best as I haven’t read any Iain Banks and am unlikely to be a useful audience. It’s thirty pages, and I thought I could knock this one off very quickly, but oh dear, it was dull. I think you have to be a very engaging writer to write extended literary criticism of an author and make it interesting to people who haven’t read that author, and… this doesn’t manage it.

Andrew has actually read some Banks (though not the ones reviewed in this chapter), and he actually reads literary criticism for fun (why?), so he obligingly read the chapter when I gave up on it, and provided some comments.

Behold, the wisdom of Andrew!

Paul Kincaid’s book about Iain M. Banks appears to be a mixture of literary biography and critical history. It’s represented in the Hugo voter’s packet by Chapter 2, which seems an appropriate choice as it is largely focused on his best-known (and most strongly SF) works, the Culture series. Taken by itself, the chapter begins a little shakily as Kincaid introduces himself into the work and looks at a scattering of critical response to Banks’ early career – I assume that in the context of the whole book this would form the connective tissue between the first and second chapters, but here it just seems unfocused.

After this it reads more smoothly, with Kincaid spending most of the chapter looking in detail at the first four Culture novels (1987-1991), with some reference made to later instalments in the series. He provides a good survey of the range of critical response to these four books – one of the things I found most interesting was the difficulty some US critics had in accepting the viability of a successful civilisation developed along communistic lines. Kincaid also includes his own analysis of the books and contrasts the more nuanced ways in which Banks explores the complexities of the Culture with the more simplistic statements he has made about the Culture in interviews.

Although the book purportedly covers Banks’s work as a whole, both SF and non-SF, this chapter provides very little evidence of that. Espedair Street and Canal Dreams, both published during the period covered by this chapter, receive a few paragraphs each but are ultimately irrelevant to what Kincaid wants to talk about. Whoever was responsible for choosing this extract really should have included Chapter 1 as well (covering his first three non-genre novels) in order to allow for a more accurate assessment of the work.

I don’t know how to rank this one. I imagine it is doing what it is trying to do, and this is probably a worthwhile thing, and Andrew enjoyed it, so it clearly wasn’t a bad book, but it was fairly unreadable from my perspective. I sort of want to rank it above the Ellison book, because apparently I’d rather be bored than aggravated, but this is probably not fair. Part of me wants to leave them both off the ballot, but that doesn’t seem right, either.

Fortunately, based on Andrew’s review, I feel that I *can* now put it above the Ellison book, which is very pleasing, because did I mention that I really took against Ellison?

(All of this begs the question, how do we judge quality, in any case? Readability for the widest possible audience? Quality of writing – not a useful category when there is no actual bad writing to be seen here –? Personal enjoyment? I’m hoping that the last three related works will just blow me away so that my votes for these two don’t matter.)

Hugo reading 2018: Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Liz Bourke

June 11, 2018 / Catherine / 1 Comment

I wasn’t going to do the Related Works in one big batch, but I accidentally opened Liz Bourke’s Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy on my Kobo and it was engaging enough that I kept reading.

For the Voter Pack, Bourke provided a 90-page extract from her book – the first two sections, I believe. The book is a collection of reviews and reviewish essays, focusing on women SFF authors.

The first four reviews all talk about Susan R. Matthews’ novels, which centre around characters who do horrifying things because the situation is horrific and the alternatives appear worse. There is a lot of conflict between duty and honour and ethics in her work. Bourke’s reviews are tantalising – they make it crystal clear to me that I never, ever want to read the books, but she brings out elements that sound so fascinating that I wish I could. (Doubly frustratingly, the last, Avalanche Soldier, sounds as though it might be really my style – but evidently one simply can’t trust Bourke not to torture her characters, sometimes literally, so I’m not game to read it…)

The next three reviews are of books by RM Meluch. On the whole, Bourke wants to like them, but doesn’t – they have fun premises (Roman Empire fighting the USA – in space!), but many problematic elements – sadistic homosexuals seems to be a common theme; rape culture is another, alongside male gaze; and a certain background level of denigration of non-western cultures. Also, it sounds like Meluch hasn’t thought through the history that would give you Romans versus the USA in space, something that mildly irritates Bourke but would drive me batty… Jerusalem Fire, though, escapes these issues, and does sound interesting.

We then get reviews of two books she really likes – Slow River, by Nicola Griffiths, and Trouble and her Friends, by Melissa Scott. Both featured strong female main characters who were lesbians. Both went out of print shortly after publication and have only been republished recently. Bourke does not think this is a coincidence.

Part two is a lot of individual reviews. Reviewing reviews is beginning to feel silly, so I’ll just say that these were, by and large, books that Bourke really enjoyed and she sells them well and usefully – I got a good sense of whether or not I’d enjoy a particular book or not from her writing, which is the gift of a good reviewer. It helps that Bourke’s idea of a good book is character-driven, with complex emotional journeys and diverse characters. She’s more drawn to science fiction and darker themes than I am, but she writes about them very well and usefully, and, be it good or bad, everything she writes about sounds *interesting*.

Overall, Liz Bourke is a very engaging writer. I enjoyed this collection of her work, and will keep an eye out for her reviews generally.

Hugo reading 2018: Graphic Story nominations

June 10, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Yep, skipping around all over the list here, but there is method in my madness! I plan to get the Campbells, Short Stories, and Graphic Novels under my belt by Saturday, so that I can feel like I’ve made some progress, and the Graphic Novels really need to be read on my computer at home (I learned my lesson about that last year when I read them on my work computer, and holy full-frontal nudity, Batman, was that not work-safe!)

So. Let me start by saying that this is a section I am very much unqualified to judge because I don’t really read or like Graphic Novels. Too often, I find it hard to tell the characters apart, and I find it very hard work to follow the story as a result.

Of course, this is isn’t helped by the fact that the Hugos give you one volume of a continuing story, and I don’t generally enjoy the story enough to want to go back and read the rest.

Anyway, first cab off the rank this year is Paper Girls, Volume 3, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, colored by Matthew Wilson, lettered by Jared Fletcher (Image Comics). Volume 1 was in the Hugo Reader pack last year, and I quite liked it, despite finding it hard to follow. I like the 12-year-old protagonists, the 80s look, and the time travel plot, which was just beginning to be implied in the first volume and is clearly in full swing here. There’s some nice dialogue (I’m especially amused by the conversation around one of the girls getting her period), and while there is a certain amount of violence, the worst of it is implied rather than shown. I like it enough that I’d probably go back and read Volume 2, if someone put it in front of me, but I’m unlikely to do so if it involves any effort on my part. I know this is damning with faint praise, but frankly, faint praise is all you’re likely to get from me in this section. Given how I felt about last year’s entires, the odds are high that this will be in my top two.

Next up is Saga, Volume 7, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics). We had one from this series in the Hugos last year, too. I don’t remember much about it. But on page two it’s Holy Giant Penises, Batman, and I remember that this was the one I really could NOT read at work. Pluses… well, when it’s not pictures of things I really was just fine not seeing, the artwork is rather nice – I like the use of colour a lot. And I do love the sphinxy cat who can tell if you are lying. Also, Meerkats in cute outfits! I like that they can watch the robot man’s dreams on his computer screen face.

This one suffers a LOT from not being read in context, I think – there are so many threads to keep track off, and so many characters to try to tell apart. But even aside from that, I’m pretty sure it’s not for me. Too much violence, too much very sexualised nudity, and also, wow, did they kill off a lot of sympathetic characters in this story. There’s also a miscarriage at the end of the story, so that’s fun. If this is a typical example of the death rate, I’m surprised there are still so many characters left. Seriously, that was a depressing read.

Last year’s shortlist included the first volume of Monstress. I remember finding the artwork beautiful and the plot horrific. This year we have Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics), and the same applies.

Really, the artwork is gorgeous, but you are not going to get a proper review of this one from me, because the plot got straight onto the torturing of cats pretty early on, and then a cat looking sick and miserable, and I just couldn’t stop thinking of Mayhem and it was too much right now. It wasn’t graphic, but I remember from last time that this author is capable of VERY graphic violence, and I just don’t trust her to make things even worse.

(Which feels a bit lazy and cowardly – and it’s true I’m happy to have an excuse not to read a comic with strong horror elements – but I have vivid memories of last year’s unofficial Hugo theme of Stories In Which People Do Horrible Things To Cats, and I’m just not willing to go there again.)

So, douze points for art, nul points for story. Probably still goes higher than Saga, where I wasn’t that taken with the art and also didn’t like the story, but I don’t know. If anyone has read this one and wants to provide a proper review in the comments, they can. I may just give Andrew my vote on this whole category.

Next, I tried Bitch Planet, Volume 2: President Bitch, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, illustrated by Valentine De Landro and Taki Soma, colored by Kelly Fitzpatrick, lettered by Clayton Cowles (Image Comics). This starts with a content advisory that basically says “Hi! This is a flashback and it is super rapey, Catherine, do you actually want to read this?” So I went and complained to Andrew that I might not like Graphic Novels much, but these aren’t even stories I’d want to read in actual books, and he said, yes, well, Bitch Planet is kind of like A Handmaid’s Tale, only with more rape, so now I feel even more motivated to read it… Anyway, I then tried to hand over the entire graphic novel section of this project to Andrew, to which he responded by helpfully fast-forwarding through the flashback bit for me.

Which means I do have to at least try to read it, but I’m really not going into this with a strong sense of optimism…

Surprisingly, I quite liked this one. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I could distinguish the characters fairly reliably; while there was plenty of violence, it was somehow less graphic and confronting than in Saga or Monstress; and I did enjoy the feminism (especially the little sections from horrifyingly misogynistic women’s magazines). There were some strong emotional moments. I wasn’t sure what to make of the scene at the start of the second main story, when the security guard casually shoots and kills two children who are taking a shortcut through a shopping centre. It was effective (and very reminiscent of what happened to poor Trayvon Martin), but it didn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of the story. The ‘virtual visit’ between father and daughter later in the story was also very effective emotional theatre. And the authors seemed to be making some points about gender and TERFs, which seem like points worth making.

I didn’t quite follow the overall plot – hardly surprising coming in at Volume 2 – and the artwork did nothing for me at all, but overall, I think it’s coming in second, after Paper Girls.

I’ve read Saladin Ahmed’s first novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, and quite liked it, but the Hugo Voter pack did not contain a copy of Black Bolt, Volume 1: Hard Time, written by Saladin Ahmed, illustrated by Christian Ward, lettered by Clayton Cowles (Marvel), so in the normal course of things, I wouldn’t have read it. But Andrew had a copy of it on his computer, and since I thought there was a slightly higher than normal chance that I’d like this one, I thought I’d better read it.

Which was a good decision, because it’s my favourite so far.

I’m a terrible audience for graphic novels, as you are probably gathering. Aside from the fact that the ones which get nominated tend to have a lot more violence and misery than I prefer in a book (and that I’m really good at having nightmares and don’t require handy visual references for that), I’m not a very visual person, and find that I have to work hard to follow the story. I’m not great at remembering faces (and I often find characters in comics hard to tell apart in the first place), and so I have to concentrate a lot to work out who is doing what with whom. And even then, I don’t succeed.

So one nice thing about this comic was that I could, with only a couple of exceptions, readily tell the characters apart. I quite liked the art, too, particularly the use of colour (and I’ll be willing to bet that Andrew liked it even more than I did, since it had some mildly psychedelic moments and effects to it). Also, it was nice to have a story which had a plot that I could follow, a clear (and quite happy) ending, and in which the violence was almost all superhero comic style violence rather than being realistic. (Seriously, though, I could always use less violence in my comics…). I liked the way the various characters had to team up and use their skills to beat the villain, and I liked the way Black Bolt made his decision about whether to rescue the prisoners or his wife. I liked his realisation that while the prisoners were all legitimately criminals, nobody deserved this form of punishment. (It made me wonder if Ahmed was riffing on the concept of Hell, actually, particularly since the jailor turns out to have started off as the first prisoner…)

Basically, it was a strong, self-contained, coherent story, told well, with nice art, and unless the final graphic novel is extraordinary (and it might be – once again I’ve saved the thing I think I’m most likely to enjoy for last) it’s going to the top of my ballot.

Which brings us to the final work in this category, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, written and illustrated by Emil Ferris (Fantagraphics).

First up, I have to say I love the artwork – it’s in a pencil sketch style, and the narrator, Karen Anne (Kare for short) is a young girl (early high school, I think), so it looks like it’s written in her school notebooks, across her maths tests, and so forth, and there are layers to them – doodles off to the side or even inside the main drawings, faces superimposed on other faces if someone is listening to what the other person is saying, and so forth. It’s very detailed and very appealing. The lettering is in the same pencil, in square letters, which makes it a bit hard to read, especially on my computer.

There’s a lot of classical art in there, too, and a bit of art theory, which delights me, because I completely fail to get most art and any information on this front is a good thing. I love the relationship between Kare and the artwork she loves to look at. There are also some lovely descriptions:

Like I said, basements usually smell like surrealism but kitchens and gardens almost always smell like Impressionism. Because our kitchen is part of a basement apartment, it smells like the early Impressionism of Vincent Van Gogh – all big strokes of umber and ochre – a peppery greasy I-love-you smell.

The story matches the artwork – stories layered on stories, complex and sad and gently humorous and a little confusing. The setting is 1968 in Chicago, and Kare’s family is part Mexican. There is the Vietnam war in the background (and Kare’s older brother is of an age to be drafted). Her father is not there, and there is a general feeling of good riddance about that, but this means that the household is placed somewhat precariously, socially and economically.

Kare is a social outcast at school, and visualises herself as part monster – she always has fangs in the pictures, and a sort of low-slung jaw. She seems pretty content with this idea of herself, however – in fact, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that she finds power in being a young monster rather than a young girl. She is fond of monsters and detectives, and when her odd neighbour, Anka, who loves plants, especially roses, and fears the Nazis, dies in mysterious circumstances, she resolves to find out what happened. And… she mostly does. Though honestly, at the end of the book, there is still a bunch of staff that seems only half-resolved, or ambiguously resolved, which was very frustrating.

There’s a lot to like here. There is also an absolute abundance of triggers. Nothing is very graphic, but it’s all pretty detailed. I’m torn between spoilers and letting people know that really, this book does contain almost all the things that one might find unpleasant or psychologically triggering to read, so I’m going to put the next bit of this in yellow, so that you have to highlight it with your mouse in order to read it.

So, things in this comic that you might not want to read about:

child sexual abuse. There is a character who is sold by her mother, and later sold again to a child brothel. This section goes on for a fair while. She eventually manages to get free but,
she’s Jewish and it’s Berlin in the 1930s. So she gets shipped off to a Nazi death camp… and escapes by essentially setting up her own brothel.
there is attempted sexual assault of another character
there is a character who spends much of the book dying of cancer
there is lots of casual racism and a bit of casual homophobia (Kare prefers girls).
there is bullying, murder, blackmail, and adultery
I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. But if it’s unpleasant, it’s in here.

I mean, no wonder Kare prefers to be a monster. Look what she is surrounded with. Also, I’m seriously beginning to wonder about the background level of rape in hugo-nominated graphic novels. It seems to be very pervasive… why are these the stories graphic novelists want to tell? And then, we get an ambiguous ending where we still don’t know if Kare’s brother will be shipped off to Vietnam, or alternatively to prison, leaving her with no family in a pretty wretched environment. And we also get a ‘oh, by the way there is someone important called Victor but who knows who that is’ moment, which is probably sequel-bait but rather enraged me, because after putting me through that much grimness, I wanted a proper ending to the story, damn it!

Weirdly, despite all of this, the narration manages to be quirky and light enough that it isn’t an utter slog. But it’s not exactly a fun read. And I think it probably deserves best Graphic Story. It’s complex, beautifully drawn, and has a really unique narrative voice, and somehow it made me not hate it even though it did several things that usually annoy me beyond measure. I just wish I hadn’t had to read it.

I think my voting order will be My Favourite Thing is Monsters, then Black Bolt, then Paper Girls, then Bitch Planet, then Monstress, then Saga.

Hugo reading 2018: A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, by Nat Segaloff

June 10, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I’ll be doing the Related Work stuff interspersed with fiction categories over the next few weeks, because if last week is anything to judge by, this section can be somewhat hard work to read, because it’s lots of essays. And, like last year, I’ll probably give myself permission to skip a bit through some of the books of essays, just because there are only so many essays I can read in a row and get much out of them.

So, the first item on my list for this year was A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, by Nat Segaloff (NESFA Press). I went into this with low expectations. The only thing I knew about Harlan Ellison prior to reading this was that he is a big name in SF and that he groped Connie Willis at the Hugos and then made a particularly egregious series of non-poligies. So I started with a certain bias against him, and that did tend to colour my thinking.

The introduction by David Gerrold did not help. It is cringe-inducingly fulsome. (Also, when translated to an ePub on my Kobo, it is in haiku. This didn’t help, and I resigned myself to reading in an incredibly tiny font again, sigh). There are, we are told, two Harlans: Authentic Harlan, who is wonderful and compassionate and witty etc, but only revealed to the Select Few, and Performance Harlan, who is just too, too, provocative and iconoclastic for words, but really, if you are offended by him, that’s probably a reflection on your own lack of understanding or whatever.

I am unimpressed. Frankly, he sounds like a tosser. I tend to feel that if you are only kind, charming and delightful to those you deem worthy, and are rude and obnoxious to everyone else, thenyou are probably not a very kind, charming or delightful person…

The author of the biography, Nat Segaloff, has also drunk the Harlan Ellison Koolaid, but at least provides more content. Though I found his cheery acceptance of the fact that Harlan ‘tests’ people by behaving badly and seeing how they handle it before letting him into his inner circle somewhat disturbing.

The Hugo packet for this book consisted of the aforementioned introduction, and Chapters 1, 5, 6, 10 and 16.

Chapter 1, “Morning in the Sunken Cathedral”, is about Ellison’s early life, which was characterised by a lot of childhood bullying, some of it anti-Semitic in nature, some of it because he was a self-acknowledged brat right from the start. There’s a rather illuminating quote from Harlan here:

“When you’ve been made an outsider, you are always angry. You respond to it in a lot of ways. Some people get surly; some people get mean; a lot of people become serial killers. I got so smart that I could just kill them with their own logic or their own mouth.”

I find this interesting because I was absolutely an outsider and bullied for most of my school life (and certainly used cleverness as a weapon, it being the only one available to me), but while I carry a fair bit of social anxiety and insecurity from that, I wouldn’t say I am particularly angry. Both Ellison’s reaction and the fact that he assumes it to be universal give a fascinating insight into how his mind works…

His family is dysfunctional in some fascinating ways; while his parents were clearly a unified and loving team, his relationship with his sister was toxic from the get-go, and it sounds like there was friction with all his parents’ siblings, too.

The other interesting bit about this section is that his childhood sounds pretty unpleasant, and he is still clearly very angry about a lot of people and things from his childhood (he is still holding grudges and making his childhood bullies into characters in his stories so that he can torture them in literary form), yet he describes his childhood as a happy one. This is an interesting disconnect, and may explain a certain amount about him.

Chapter 5, “Science Friction”, is mostly about Ellison’s attitude to writing, both his own and other people’s. This didn’t grab me, but the most interesting aspects of it were his dislike for both the term science fiction and for genres generally (he views them as ‘laziness’ on the part of publishers and booksellers), and his very pragmatic view of writing as skilled labour, rather than an art form.

Chapter 6, “Teat for Two”, is probably the most fun chapter. It mostly discusses his work as a film critic and occasional columnist. There are extensive excerpts from his reviews, and I feel like he probably found his calling there – being a snarky, superior sort of git with a flair for writing seems to be a good fit for film criticism. (Actually, this reminded me of the Babylon 5 novels featuring Bester, where he winds up spending a number of years living in Paris and becoming an extremely popular literary critic. You don’t have to be a delightful person to be a gifted critic – it’s probably easier if you aren’t…) He also expresses his optimism about the human race, which is lovely, until he mentions that people who read romance novels undermine this. Cheers, Harlan! If it helps, you undermine my optimism about the human race, too.

Chapter 10, “The Snit on the Edge of Forever” is mostly about an argument about a Star Trek Episode. Ellison wrote it, the director changed it, and it was interesting to read about the process of this, but having never seen the episode (or indeed much of Star Trek), it was a bit lost on me.

Chapter 16, “The Flight of the Deathbird”, is about ageing, mental illness, his stroke, and diagnosis with bipolar disorder. In fact, this is the most sympathetic chapter, perhaps because it’s the only time where Ellison shows any weakness – he is usually far too self-satisfied and superior for me to want to do anything other than throw rocks at him.

I’m sorry, he really irritated me.

So, here are some things I noticed throughout the book that bugged me, but which I don’t know if I would have noticed without the Connie Willis stuff. On the one hand, Ellison clearly views himself as a champion of progressive values. He was a strong supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, and in fact did a very public boycott of a state that was refusing to ratify it by living in a caravan during the convention, in order not to give any money to the state. (Notably, this also gave *him* a lot of good publicity, which evidently didn’t hurt). He was anti-Vietnam, and pro Civil Liberties.

His intentions were good.

But I can’t help noticing that all his most vitriolic criticisms – at least quoted in this book – are reserved for women, and they are just a little bit gendered. I doubt he is conscious of this, but I suspect there is some baked-in, unconscious sexism there. He also uses racial epithets like ‘Chinks’ – not viciously, but casually, in passing, when talking about going to the Chinese restaurant that his family went to when he was a child. It’s hard to imagine that nobody has ever mentioned to him that this is not really OK any more – but it’s also hard to imagine him apologising or changing what he does for the sake of something as minor as someone else’s feelings. He strikes me as someone who views intellectual superiority as the chief virtue, and doesn’t see why he should change his phrasing if *he* doesn’t mean it offensively.

I could be being unfair, but after reading this biography, I really don’t find myself liking Ellison any more than I did when all I knew about him was the groping incident.

I realise that this review is more about Ellison than the book, but the book is, in fact, mostly composed of quotes and descriptions of interviews with Ellison – it’s a fairly transparent look into how Ellison sees himself and the world, almost a memoir by proxy. In that sense, it succeeds; as a critical biography, it does not, since no attempt is made at criticism. I’m not really sure how to judge it. I think it probably does succeed in what it set out to do, but I don’t think it’s doing anything particularly interesting or striking. And my antipathy for Ellison isn’t selling it to me, either.

Hugo reading 2018: The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden

June 8, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I saved Katherine Arden for last in this section, since I saw that she had provided a copy of her novel, The Bear and the Nightingale, which looked like a fairy tale retelling – one of my favourite subgenres.

It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous book, and stands alone beautifully, though I gather it is the first in a trilogy (I almost don’t want to read the rest when it comes out in case it spoils the perfection of this story). The protagonist of the story is Vasya, whose father is a lord in northern Russia, and whose mother had witchy blood. While her other siblings are normal, pleasant, people, Vasya is wild, loves the forest, and can see the little household and woodland spirits – and the larger spirits, too. Unfortunately for Vasya, when her father remarries, her new stepmother, the Tsar’s daughter, is a very devout woman who can also see spirits, but believes them to be devils. She does not like her wild daughter, and matters become even more difficult when the Tsar sends a charismatic young priest, Konstantin, to the household, and he forbids offerings to the local spirits, allowing the demon of winter to begin to prey on the village.

The fairy tale is set in northern Russia, where it is winter most of the time, and very, very cold. While there are personifications of Winter and Frost in this story, the non-personified season of winter is almost a character in its own right, too. Even without any supernatural interventions, the frost and cold are formidable foes in this world. Really, the setting of this book was one of its great strengths – I’m normally there for the characters and can take or leave the setting, but there was just something compelling about how *cold* everything was. Oh, and I also liked that even though Pyotr is wealthy and important enough to be marrying a princess, his house is still cold, they still start running out of food during winter, and so forth – in this world, even being wealthy doesn’t entirely shield you from want. It’s a very marginal existence, regardless of your status.

I loved the way the family in this book worked. Pyotr, Vasya’s father, is a kind, slightly stern father, who loves his daughter, but recognises that in their world, there is no place for a young woman who seems fitted neither for marriage nor a convent, and so he tries to bend her to one or the other of these things, even while knowing that this will not be good for her. He tries to be a good father, but lacks imagination – and, perhaps also, the power – to make a place in the world that will fit Vasya’s personality. And he makes hard choices – he does his best to save Vasya from what seems very likely to be an awful fate, but his way of doing so is something that he knows will make her absolutely miserable. And naturally, he doesn’t ever think to tell her what it is he is saving her from, or why he is so determined to see her settled, whether she likes it or not.

Vasya’s brothers and sisters are close and loving, even Vasya’s stepsister, who is the pretty one and much favoured by her mother, so that was a nice touch. And Pyotr did not marry Anna from choice, but rather from politics, but tries to be a good husband by the standards of the time (which… aren’t that great, but again, this is more about lack of imagination than anything else, and Anna does not seem to expect anything different from him.)

I also liked the way Konstantin, the young priest, was written. There were so many clichéd ways he could have been played – I thought this was going to be an old-gods-versus-new-gods situation, but I was pleased to see that this wasn’t where Arden went with the story. He’s definitely not a good person – he loves power rather too much for that – but for much of the book, he is torn in several directions, between what he believes to be right, and what he is seeing. He always makes the wrong decision, but he is not always unsympathetic.

The first two thirds of the book were increasingly oppressive and hard to read – I felt like matters spent a long time getting worse and worse before we finally got to see the heroine start taking decisive action – but this is perhaps realistic. Vasya is still very young, after all, and she does love her family – it takes an extreme situation to push her into defiance. The end of the story was also an interesting and appropriate choice. I thought the author might go somewhere different (and, well, if there is a trilogy, that may still happen), but was pleased that she didn’t take the easy choice.

I highly recommend this book – if you enjoy feminist fairy tales that have a fair bit of darkness in them but still allow light to triumph, then I think you’ll enjoy this.

Katherine Arden is unquestionably going to be my top vote for the Campbell awards. I think I want to put Vina Jie-Min Prasad second, because her stories were just such fun, then Sarah Kuhn, Jeanette Ng, Rivers Solomon and Rebeca Roanhorse.

Hugo reading 2018: Heroine Complex, by Sarah Kuhn

June 5, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Sarah Kuhn provided a copy of her novel, Heroine Complex, and it is enormous fun. It straddles a few different subgenres – I feel like it’s primarily a new adult coming of age sort of story, but the setting is urban fantasy / super hero comic, and it also has strong romantic elements. Ultimately, though, the novel is about friendship, found family, and acceptance.

Our protagonist is Evie Tanaka. She works as an executive assistant for her best friend, local superhero Aveda Jupiter (formerly Annie Chang). Aveda has been saving San Francisco from demons since the portal first opened eight years ago. Incursions since that time have been frequent, but fairly low level – which is fortunate, because so are Aveda’s superpowers. Primarily, Aveda uses her martial arts skills, her charisma, and her determination to be perfect at everything she does.

The amount of work Aveda puts into being the superhero who can save San Francisco is admirable, but it doesn’t stop her from being an utter nightmare to work for. When she sprains her ankle at training after throwing a tantrum over a pimple, she insists that she can neither go to the awards night to which she has been invited nor cancel it – and instead coerces Evie into pretending to be her (with a little help from their friend Scott’s ability to create glamours). Of course, demons promptly appear at the ceremony, and Evie finds herself having to fight them and thus deal with her own, unwanted superpower. Also, the demons seem to be evolving, Evie’s little sister is wagging school and getting drunk with her babysitters and Aveda is finding that she doesn’t really like having her best friend outshine her. And did I mention that Evie’s powers seem to get more unpredictable when she is under stress?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this story. The characters were well-drawn, and I liked the theme of found family. And really, any book that starts off with a superheroine fighting off flying, fanged, demon-possessed cupcakes in a cake shop is already going to be ticking a lot of boxes for me. If I must look at the novel critically, I’d have to say that I saw several of the plot twists coming – but then, I do read widely in the YA, urban fantasy and romance genres, and in any case, the fun was less in the destination than the journey. I especially enjoyed the relationships between the various characters, particularly that between Evie and Aveda. It felt very real, from their background as the only two Asian kids in their primary school, bonding over the mockery they received over their lunchboxes, to the way their roles were set early on in ways they weren’t always consciously aware of, and the friction that ensued when Evie was no longer happy with her role. This felt like a very real friendship to me.

I enjoyed the other characters too – Aveda’s trainer, Lucy, who uses karaoke to pick up girls (and who takes far too much interest in Evie’s love life); Evie’s cranky, clever 16-year-old sister Bea; Nate, Team Aveda’s doctor/scientist, who is also clever and cranky and distractingly hot; Scott, who should be hot, but inexplicably isn’t; and the terrible tabloid blogger and her sidekick. All the interpersonal relationships gave the impression of having existed well before the book started – they had a level both of closeness and of grown-in-assumptions and roles that felt very true to life.

Basically, I loved this book and will be looking for the sequel. I suspect it’s a bit too fluffy to win its category, but it is clever and character-driven and funny and feminist and the perfect antidote to space-slavery-dystopias. I do wonder, sometimes, why I do these Hugo reads – so many of the books are so very much not for me – but every so often one discovers an author one wants to follow, and that’s what has happened here. Sarah Kuhn is going to the top of my ballot.

Hugo reading 2018: Short Story Nominations

June 5, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I’m doing this category in one giant batch, because I don’t think anyone really wants blog posts that go for two paragraphs at most…

Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience, by Rebecca Roanhorse is a near-future science-fiction story with a theme of cultural appropriation that expands to… appropriate the whole story, for want of a better description. It’s hard to talk about this story without spoilers, but the protagonist works in a virtual reality studio, providing ‘authentic’ Indian spirit guide experiences, which have more to do with what people have seen in old movies than anything relating to either the historical or contemporary experiences of American First Nations people. The story is told in the 2nd person, which is cleverer than it sounds, given the context. It’s very gritty, and a bit single white female, with a twist at the end that I’m not entirely sure I understood. It was fine, but didn’t grab me – it’s a bit grim for my tastes.

(Incidentally, Roanhorse was also nominated for a Campbell award, and this story was her contribution to the voter pack.)

Fandom for Robots, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, on the other hand, is a total delight. In this story, a somewhat obsolete sentient robot who works in a museum discovers an anime series about a human and a robot on a revenge quest and becomes hooked. And then he discovers fanfic. Which is not logical, nor does it portray the robot character accurately. So he decides to see what he can do to increase the standard of accuracy in fanfic, first by commenting, and then, when he sees that honest critiques are not always well received by authors, by writing fanfic himself. I absolutely loved this story – it’s funny and clever and affectionate and a complete joy to read.

‘Carnival Nine‘, by Caroline M. Yoachim is an odd sort of story. All the main characters are clockwork toys, who are wound up by the Toymaker every night, and have a certain number of turns during the day. These are determined partly by the quality of the clockwork, and partly by the Toymaker. As the toys get older, their clockwork tends to wind down a bit and they get fewer turns. It’s not very subtle, but the worldbuilding is fun.

The first part of the book introduces our protagonist as a child. She lives with her father, and has a LOT of turns by most standards (generally 35-45), so she is restless and wants adventure. She visits the carnival and meets Vale, and later on runs off to live with him and work at the carnival. It’s fun and the worldbuilding is cute, and it’s all light and fun and enjoyable. And then they decide to make a child together and things go wrong. The child only has four turns a day, which means he can do very little. And so she has to use a lot of her turns on his behalf.

If I’d never heard of spoon theory, I’d probably be fairly impressed by the analogy. As it is, I sort of sat back and watched the author ticking off all the boxes of Life With A Child With A Disability. Relationship falling apart under the stress – check. Guilt about doing anything that wasn’t related to caring – check. Worry about what would happen to child when protagonist dies – check. Resentment at having to use almost all her turns to look after child – check. Guilt about said resentment – check. Focusing on respecting child’s autonomy – check. Finding new ways to accommodate child without completely losing herself – check.

(Andrew wants to point out that this is an instance where the worldbuilding / fantasy genre is helpful in getting people who might not be interested in reading a story about disability to be exposed to these ideas, and he has a point. But I still think it could have been less heavy-handed.)

I like what the author was trying to do, but it felt a little heavy-handed, to be honest. And I felt that the tone of the story was really uneven – it started off very light and bright, but then kind of became a bit of a grim endurance exercise.

Also, I couldn’t help noticing that this was very much disability from the perspective of the carer. We never really know much about what the child thinks about the situation, which I think is a bit of a shame, really.

(Andrew’s perspective is a bit kinder than mine – he sees it more as a slice of life / average life in this world sort of story, though he agrees that the disability stuff is central to the story – but he also pointed out the centrality of not wanting to repeat the mistakes of her parents.)

To me, this story is definitely less successful than Prasad’s story. I’m not sure whether it’s better or worse than Roanhorse’s story. I’ll have to think about that one.

“Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand,” by Fran Wilde is a strange, strange story, where I’m not entirely sure I know what happened. It is told from the point of view of, I think, a carnival freak, who is showing you through some sort of exhibit. The nature of the exhibit is odd and uncanny and seems to have an unpleasant effect on the person viewing it. It mostly creates an atmosphere of gentle horror, rather than having much in the way of plot, but it does this very well. There are little, unpleasant, allusions to the sorts of medical studies done on the guide and people like her; a place where photos are taken of souls; and the atmosphere is such that when she asks ‘may I take your hand’, one is not at all sure that the question is not a literal one.

It’s very well done, if not quite my cup of tea.

“Sun, Moon, Dust” by Ursula Vernon is good fun, as stories by Ursula Vernon always are. Allpa, a nice, unambitious, down-to-earth farmer, is bequeathed a magical sword by his grandmother, and has to deal with three spirits who want to train him to be a hero and go forth and conquer when all he really wants to do is grow nice potatoes. It’s funny and sweet, and there’s a hint of a romance to it, and I like it very much.

“The Martian Obelisk,” by Linda Nagata is a science fiction tale about a future where everything seems to be doomed by lots of little things – natural disasters, antibiotics failing, Mars colonies not working out. The protagonist, Susannah, views time as a Master Torturer – killing the world and the human race inexorably, but excruciatingly slowly, and responds to this by deciding to build a tower on Mars – a monument to the human race that nobody will ever see, since nobody is there except the robots who are doing her bidding. Except that… maybe someone is there. Or maybe it’s just another AI, or a rival corporation, or something else. This is a story about whether it’s safe to hope, and whether one should hope anyway, and it’s probably one we need right now, but mostly it left me depressed (and also quite pissed off with Nate, who withholds some fairly important information from Susannah, with the specious excuse that she didn’t want news… but I feel that he must have known she would have wanted this news, he just didn’t want her distracted from the project…).

This is a hard category to judge, because there were a lot of things I liked (or at least wanted to like) in it. I’m putting Fandom for Robots first, because it is just such a delightful story. If I’m pretending to be all lit-crit-ish, I could comment that it does some interesting things with the ideas of sentience, logic and emotion, but mostly it’s coming first because I just plain like it. “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience is clearly last, because it did nothing for me even after reading it twice, and “Carnival Nine” is fifth, because I got irritated with its lack of subtlety. But I like all the others for different reasons and just don’t know how to rank them! Right now, I’m inclined to put “Sun, Moon, Dust” second, “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand” third, and “The Martian Obelisk” fourth, but they could swap at any time, and may well do so before I put in my final vote.

I should probably look at this as being quite a good thing – there is a 2/3 chance that I’m going to be happy with the winner of this category, after all, and a 1/6 chance that I’ll be very happy with it!

Hugo reading 2018: An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon

June 4, 2018 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Rivers Solomon provided an ARC of her novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts. It’s set on a gigantic colony ship which appears to contain the last remnants of Earth’s population, possibly on the way to a new planet, though nobody seems to have any expectation of getting there. It’s a dystopian world, with a pseudo-religious dictatorship, and passengers divided into decks by skin colour. On the upper decks, pale skinned people live luxurious lives; on the lower decks, those with darker skin are essentially slaves, producing food and other necessities for the colony ship. The slaves – who are almost all women or coded female – are subject to beatings and sexual assault by the guards, to genetic mutations whose source is not mentioned but which I suspect spring from their high radiation environment, and also to electricity shortages that leave their residential areas so cold that they suffer from frostbite. They also have all the high risk jobs, as well as the generally unpleasant ones.

The protagonist is Aster, who is from the lower decks but has managed to get an almost upper deck scientific and medical education, with the help of the Surgeon General, Theo, who is closely connected to the Sovereign, though his mother was black. Aster is written as a highly intelligent and compassionate woman who has something along the lines of Aspergers – she is very literal-minded and her emotions are just a bit… off. Then again, in that environment, whose emotions wouldn’t be? Also, her mother killed herself on the day she was born, and Aster is trying to decipher her diaries and learn just what she discovered that may have led her to do this.

This is a thoroughly gruelling book to read. The brutality visited on the slaves is endless and pervasive, and periodically rises to deliberate and individual cruelty. Sexual assault is so endemic that part of Arden’s daily routine is to smear her vagina with a lubricant and a numbing agent, so as to minimise pain and damage if she is raped. There’s an image I didn’t need in my head, thanks.

The mystery of what Luna was working on is compelling and interesting, and the characters and world are well drawn, but dear God this was a harrowing read. In the last twenty pages, I began to wonder if the book was going to have an actual ending at all (and was preparing to throw a tantrum if it turned out to be another half-book!), but it did, of a sort. It was very rushed, though, and I’m not sure whether anything was really resolved. There were a couple of very dramatic events, but I’m not sure how I am supposed to feel about them – while they both have the potential to create positive change, nothing about the world the author has built leads me to believe that these will improve matters for anyone in the long run.

I have a feeling there is a sequel in the works. I shall not read it. Maybe I’m shallow, but if I’m going to be made to feel horrified and miserable and faintly guilty about slavery in the US (which is clearly what this author had on her mind when writing this book), I’d rather read about real people and events than made up ones.

In terms of my ballot, I’m not too sure where to put it. I, too, tend to fall prey to the insidious idea that serious, depressing books are somehow more Worthy, but I can’t bring myself to put a story I so strongly disliked reading high up. Trying to step back and be objective, the author clearly knows her craft, but I don’t think she quite managed the dismount – I just don’t know what she was trying to convey with the ending, I can’t tell whether she was deliberately making it ambiguous, and I can’t bring myself to go back and re-read it to see if I can determine this. I do think the ending was rushed. I would have liked to see an epilogue set a year or a month later, even if all it did was show that nothing had changed, the protagonist was dead and everyone who had tried to change anything had been crushed.

I do think this book is less successful than Under the Pendulum Sun (which also had a hasty ending, but a little more closure, and everything at least turned around and clicked into place so that one could see the whole puzzle at last), and it was certainly less enjoyable to read.

Drat it, I don’t want to put *either* of Ng or Solomon above Prasad, and I won’t. So there. I’m pretty sure that fluffy will not win out over harrowing in the long run, but I’m not going to be part of encouraging a trend of increasingly miserable books being written and nominated.

Tag: hugo awards 2018 (Page 5 of 6)

Hugo reading 2018: River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey

Hugo reading 2018: And then there were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker

Hugo reading 2018: Graphic Story nominations

Hugo reading 2018: The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden

Hugo reading 2018: Heroine Complex, by Sarah Kuhn

Hugo reading 2018: Short Story Nominations

Hugo reading 2018: An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon

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