Hugo Reading 2020: Novellas

Three of this year's Hugo nominees for Best Novella

Every year since I started voting for the Hugos in 2016, I've told myself that next year I'm going to start reading earlier. And every year, like clockwork, I fail to do so. I've got until July 15 to finish this year, so I'm procrastinating according to plan.

I've grown fond of novellas lately: long enough to get into a story, but not so long as to grow tiresome. You've got to start someplace, so this seemed like as good a reason as any to start with the novellas this year.



Here's the Best Novella category (you can see a full list of this year's Hugo nominees here).

Best Novella

• “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador))
• The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes (Saga Press/Gallery)
• The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com Publishing)
• In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
• This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Saga Press; Jo Fletcher Books)
• To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager; Hodder & Stoughton)

I've read everything on the list except the Seanan McGuire novella, which is part of a series I couldn't get into in previous years (I apologize to McGuire's many loyal fans). I was really excited to read the other five novellas, and I'm happy to report that there are some really strong contenders this year. Ranking a top choice is going to be difficult for me, especially between Chiang, Chambers, and Solomon. Stay tuned for my Hugo ballot post, which will be coming sometime in July.


The Deep by Rivers Solomon (with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes

The origin of Rivers Solomon's The Deep as a work of art is unique and makes the work itself that much more powerful as a collaborative venture. It started with a collaboration on a song called "The Deep" by Clipping (this song was itself a Hugo nominee in 2018; see here). Through a game of artistic "telephone" (as musician Daveed Diggs puts it in an afterword) this became a novella by Rivers Solomon.

The result is a hauntingly beautiful story of "mer-folk" (of sorts) whose ancestors were babies born from enslaved African people thrown overboard during the middle passage. We meet a character who is the Historian who takes on all the memories of her people. It's a deep meditation on the legacies, complications, horrors, and hopes of history in present day collaborations to build something new from that history, especially for members of the African diaspora.

I may have more to say about this unique, challenging, and beautiful novella after I think about it for a bit. Or I may instead implore you, dear reader, to check this out and let this work of art speak for itself.

See my Goodreads review.



To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

Hovering somewhere near the boundary between a long novella and a short novel, Becky Chambers's To Be Taught, If Fortunate packs in plenty for a wide range of science fiction fans: plenty of geeky astrobiological detail, interesting characters, and deep philosophical questions about science, the pursuit of knowledge, and yes, even the meaning of life in a beautiful, terrible universe. All of this with Chambers's patented calm decency, or whatever the opposite of a bombastic, over-the-top writer is. I feel like I might have more to say after I've digested this lovingly prepared meal of a novella, but let me say one quick thing about the meaning of life (small topic, I know).

The novella (or at least the main character in it) seems to come down heavily on the idea that the pursuit of knowledge is an ingredient of a meaningful life, maybe even a sufficient condition for a meaningful life. You find this idea in the classical Indian Nyāya school, which identified knowledge of the world (including philosophy) with the highest good (a similar idea is found in the West in Aristotle).

The characters of this novella aren't philosophers (not technically, anyway), but their actions and especially the main character's reflections in the last few pages show that they deeply believe their pursuit of knowledge in the universe is meaningful in itself. Not because it will make money for folks back on Earth (it won't). Not because it will win glory for some political entity light years away (their space program is a nonprofit nongovernmental cooperative).

In today's world the main avenues for space exploration are shrinking government budgets, militarization (yes, the US Space Force is kind of funny, but also terrifying if you think about it), or capitalist exploitation (aside from the fact that I think almost all billionaires are selfish assholes, I can't get excited about private space exploration out of principle. Sorry.). Why must we militarize space or make it safe for capitalism? Why can't we leave our violence and greed on Earth? Are our imaginations really so impoverished?

Space, as this novella suggests, gives us a chance to rethink things. Maybe seeking knowledge of the universe is all the purpose we need. The world of the novella even more than our own faces plenty of troubles on Earth that raise serious questions about whether space exploration is a distraction from solving more immediate problems. But maybe, drawing on Octavia Butler's idea of Earthseed, space exploration for the sake of knowledge is what we need to pull together and solve our problems. Or maybe, as this novella seems to suggest, the pursuit of knowledge could at least make for quiet personal comfort and meaning in a vast, uncaring universe.

See my Goodreads review.



"Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is science fiction royalty--and rightly so. If his name isn't familiar to you, you might know the 2016 film Arrival, which was based on his story "The Story of Your Life."

"Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" appears in Chiang's collection Exhalation, along with his Hugo-nominated novelette, "Omphalos."

"Anxiety" is, much like a lot of Chiang's work, guaranteed to please philosophers, especially those who gravitate toward compatibilist views on freedom (see this Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Free Will for more). What if devices were created that gave you the ability to communicate with a different version of yourself in a parallel universe, who might make different choices than you do? What impact would that have on how you think about your decisions here in this universe?

The story is an excellent case for compatibilism being, well, compatible with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics (in his story note at the end of the volume, Chiang is careful to remain agnostic about whether many-worlds is the correct interpretation, and in the story he is careful to note that the theory does not say a new universe branches every time a person makes a decision). I may have more to say after I think through it some more, but as always, Chiang gives readers a lot to think about!

See my Goodreads review, which includes reviews of other stories in Chiang's volume Exhalation.



The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

P. Djèlí Clark's The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is a really fun novella set in an alternate-history Cairo. It follows two agents of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities as they investigate, well, the haunting of a tram car. And there are djinn. And more... If you enjoy alternate history, urban fantasy that's not just about werewolves and vampires, or procedurals, you'll probably enjoy this.

I also loved the world building: since this is a brisk novella, the world isn't so much described as evoked. As in most alternate history, there are big questions about why our history wasn't like this (here women win the right to vote in 1912 as opposed to 1956 in our world's Egypt). Could it have been? I mean, with the magical creatures and all. And how can the human and magical creature diversity in the novella get us thinking about our world?

I also read and enjoyed Clark's The Black God's Drum last year for the Hugos. I look forward to reading more from him.

See my Goodreads review.


This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone starts with a fun premise and the authors are obviously having fun with this experiment, but it just doesn't work for me. I've enjoyed El-Mohtar's short stories that I've read, so I was a little surprised this didn't click for me.

The plot is difficult to decipher underneath the poetic prose. The love story is nice, but doesn't make much sense. I think the idea of the Agency and the Garden fighting a time war is super interesting as are the ideas of strands (insert my soap box comment on how most "time travel" stories are actually stories about travel between universes/dimensions).

But all these cool ideas are never really fleshed out. I feel like this is one of those books for far hipper people than me. Maybe it's the kind of literary experiment that's for other writers of a certain bent, but as a reader I felt like a casualty in this time war.

See my Goodreads review.