Ballots for the 2019 Hugos are due in just a few days on July 31. See here for the full list of finalists. If you want to vote, too, check out how to do so here either as a supporting member from your armchair or as an attending member in Dublin, but do it soon!
I've been voting for the Hugos since 2016 (ironically it was the obnoxious Sad and Rabid Puppies that motivated me to get involved back then, and thankfully they have since taken their yapping elsewhere). Every year I tell myself I'm going to start reading the finalists earlier. This year I failed even more than usual and didn't really get started until mid-June. I may end up voting in fewer categories. Oh, well.
Back in 2017, I came up with Three Principles of Hugo Voting.
- Works that are more ground breaking in the field in their construction, plot, characters, setting, ideas, etc. are to be preferred as are works that are neither sequels nor works by authors who have won Hugos in recent years.
- Works that delve more deeply into philosophical content are to be preferred.
- Works that are just plain fun and enjoyable are to be preferred as long as such preference does not conflict with the first or second principles.
(Of course, I can no more consistently apply these than Asimov could consistently apply the Three Laws of Robotics on which they are riffing).
Keeping these principles in mind, let's get started!
Best Novel
This is the most high profile category, at least as measured by what I paid most attention to since way before I had any idea how the Hugos work. So how do this year's finalists fare?
While I thought most of the novels were pretty good, none of them completely blew me away like some recent winners (The Fifth Season, The Three-Body Problem) or older classic winners (The Left Hand of Darkness, Dune). Maybe it's fine to have a year of just pretty good. Maybe it's unfair to expect every year to yield classics. Or maybe there are a lot more fans of Fritz Leiber's 1965 winner The Wanderer than I know about?
So, initially I wasn't sure how I was going to rate all these, but somehow it all came together as follows.
1. The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
- It was a tough call, but this just seemed most like a Hugo winner out of this bunch, even if it's stronger on the first and third principles of Hugo voting than the second. From my review: "I thoroughly enjoyed Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars, an alternate history mashup of Hidden Figures, The Right Stuff, and classic science fiction, all wrapped up in a thinly-veiled metaphor for climate change. That doesn't entirely do it justice, of course, but you'll have to read it for yourself to see what I mean by all that."
2. Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)
- Valente has a lot of fans, but I wasn't one of them until I read this. Humorous science fiction is hard to pull off, perhaps because most authors have the immense misfortune of not being Douglas Adams. But I liked this a lot. There are even a couple serious philosophical issues. From my review: "I really, really loved Catherynne M. Valente's Space Opera, a sort of Douglas Adams-style take on the Eurovision Song Contest. I'm not sure if this book is entirely groundbreaking or whether it deserves a Hugo Award and it has its share of problems (for example, it's all just a bit too much sometimes), but I just might give it my #1 spot for the Hugo Awards because I love humorous science fiction and I think the universe might be a better place if we had more of it." [Note: obviously I'm not giving it the #1 spot, but maybe I did in some alternate timeline.]
- Another author with a lot of fans. This is technically the third in a series, but it's only loosely connected to the previous volumes. I went into it with mixed feelings, but Chambers won me over. From my review: "Instead of traversing the inky depths of interstellar space, the Fleet orbits a planet. Still, the people continue to live there. Why? It's complicated. But it prompts the existential question: What are we, the readers, doing on a rock hurtling through space heading nowhere in particular, destined to die? It starts off subtle but it all gets pretty deep ... This really surprised me considering a lot of the novel feels pretty... light and fluffy."
- I loved Roanhorse's Hugo-winning short story from last year, so I was looking forward to this novel a lot. While I didn't like the novel as much, it was enjoyable. From my review: "... Trail of Lightning combines three things that may not have been combined before: Diné-inspired fantasy, urban fantasy, and post-apocalyptic science fiction. For the most part, it works pretty well. I was pulled into the book more than I expected, especially since I'm generally not the biggest fan of urban fantasy..."
5. Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan)
- Another author with a lot of fans, but I just couldn't get into it. My Goodreads review: "It started off potentially interesting, but after 116 pages I couldn't muster the interest to keep going. I guess fairy tale-type fantasy isn't my thing, although I see why other people like it."
(Leaving off my ballot) Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
- This is the third in a series. I read the first one a few years ago, which was certainly unique and ended up being my #3 choice for the 2017 Hugo, but wasn't really my thing, mainly because a central element of the world building remained completely opaque to me. So I never picked up the second one, which was a finalist last year. I might pick up the rest of this series later just to see if it explains things, but didn't have the time or will to do so before Hugo voting was due. Sorry.
Best Novella
Novella is the only literature category in which I had read anything before the finalists were announced (Okorafor's Binti: The Night Masquerade), but I read most of the others in the last week. As in the novel category, I'm not sure anything completely blew me away, but there's some good stuff here.
1. Binti: The Night Masquerade, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com publishing)
- I've loved the Binti series since the first one came out, continued with the second, and I'm not about to stop now with part three. From my review: "... Binti is a harmonizer, so she raises the question: can tense, violent conflicts be solved nonviolently and with reconciliation for parties with generations-long grudges? ... who are we and what do we make of our identities, especially when we all have hybrid, complex identities from various traditions, cultures, and new ideas?"
2. The Black God’s Drums, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com publishing)
- I was unfamiliar with Clark's work before I did my Hugo reading this year (he also has a short story finalist), but he's definitely a rising star to watch. From my Goodreads review: "This seems like it's going to be a standard New Orleans steampunk alternate history with airships (and it is all that, complete with an airship named Midnight Robber, perhaps a nod to Nalo Hopkinson?), but there's a bit of a twist in that West African Orishas grant powers to our main character, a street kid looking for bigger and better things. ... I was a little sad when it was all over because the world was so interesting..."
- A novella in de Bodard's ever-expanding Xuya universe (of which I have previously only read one story, a situation I will have to ameliorate soon). From my Goodreads review: This is a fun detective story in an interesting setting, and includes ship AIs, which I always enjoy (they even have elaborate names à la Iain M. Banks). ... I think the Sherlock Holmes angle is way over emphasized in other reviews, but I guess it's there if you want to dwell on one aspect of a complex novella (that includes, among other things a far future in which Vietnamese and Chinese cultures are dominant, 'teas' that make human travel in deep space possible, Confucian-style exams and scholars, and so on)."
4. Artificial Condition, by Martha Wells (Tor.com publishing)
- Oh, Murderbot! So funny! So awkward! So murder-y, but not really! From my Goodreads review: "I love Murderbot. You love Murderbot. We all love Murderbot. In this one we learn some more about the secrets of Murderbot's origins... Also, Murderbot makes friends (sort of), one of whom is a ship computer, and figures out how to pass for an augmented human ... Philosophically, I was interested in personal identity. Muderbot keeps referring to itself ... as something other than a person, but that can't be right. Anybody who loves binge watching dramas that much must be some kind of person. Binge watching as a sort of Turing test?"
5. Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, by Kelly Robson (Tor.com publishing)
- This one had a lot of cool ideas, but it didn't quite come together for me. The method of world building by bureaucracy and office politics was interesting, but not terribly exciting. From my Goodreads review: "When the time travel does start, we get some interesting stuff: the 23rd century humans in a world recovering from climate catastrophe are trying to gather data and specimens from Mesopotamia, circa 2000 BCE. One ethical issue that wasn't developed greatly was that the 23rd century humans don't worry about changing the past because they think they are going to a different timeline... But this ignores deeper ethical questions: Do we owe something to humans, animals, or ecosystems of other timelines? Why is our own timeline so precious at the expense of others? Isn't this just timeline-ism?"
(Leaving off my ballot) Beneath the Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)
- I couldn't get into the first one, and didn't start the second, so I'm not going to rate this third one. Does this make me a bad Hugo voter? Maybe.
So there you have it for novel and novella! Stay tuned for novelette, short story, and more coming soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment