cahn | (no subject)

On vacation (first vacation with baby!) and having a blast, but of course I did stay up a little past bedtime Saturday night and livememe the Hugos. I am pleased and unsurprised at the results. I knew there was no way the Puppies were going to win, because I am basically the epitome of the new voters this year: lazy, filled with inertia, feeling like the Hugos have been going on just fine without me for years so why should I do anything about it -- until they didn't go on just fine. And here we are.

(Dear Bad Loser Puppies: this church-going-Mormon, Asimov-and-Heinlein-reading, married-heterosexually-with-two-kids new voter -- basically your target demographic! -- would like to inform you that your literary taste sucks.)

Okay, I am surprised about Three-Body Problem; I would have bet money on Goblin Emperor to win, even though I (sort of) voted for 3BP. And I did not think the Heuvelt deserved a Hugo, although I'm okay with the idea that other people did.

But I am quite displeased at reading what was displaced by the Puppies, because that was some good stuff there. Best Related Work, as

ase wrote, has some really cool stuff. Although her fiction is not necessarily my thing, I would absolutely have voted for Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great; I've loved her Tor column for ages.

While nursing I've been reading the short stories that got bumped, and this makes me angry, because the worst of these was better than the best of the Puppy slate. (At some point, probably I'll post links and short reviews.)

So I know the Puppies are going to try again next year. I do not think they will succeed this time with the nominations, because I know I'm not the only person out there who loves the Hugos but never voted or nominated before. They have woken us up, and we are angry, and we are going to nominate.

(If you have any suggestions, I would dearly like to know. For novel, I've got Ken Liu's Grace of Kings and Ishiguro's Buried Giant on my reading list... what else? And obviously I've read Bujold's new Chalion novella.)

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Ha, apparently I'm your only source of new SF recs? Curious what you think of both of those books.

Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest is next on my TBR pile. I'm also intrigued by Aliette de Bodard's new book, The House of Shattered Wings, the beginning of which I heard her read at Worldcon and which features neat magic, fallen angels, and a post-apocalyptic Paris.

basically your target demographic!

Yeah, seriously, I'm a Republican CHORF. It's so confusing.

Yeah, you might be the only person I know who reads things in the actual year they're published :) I used to get recs from Abigail Nussbaum's blog, but she doesn't write as much nowadays.

Ah, I did read Aliette de Bodard's short-story-that-would-have-been-Hugo-nominated. I'll have to check that out. And of course I'm going to read Ancillary Mercy when it comes out...

Another new book that'll probably get some Hugo consideration from me when I read it is the third book in Marko Kloos's series, since I rather enjoyed the first two.

I do not think they will succeed this time with the nominations, because I know I'm not the only person out there who loves the Hugos but never voted or nominated before. They have woken us up, and we are angry, and we are going to nominate.

This is my feeling as well. As much of a mess as this year was, the Puppies have certainly gotten way more people paying attention to the Hugos than... ever, possibly? And that seems like an ultimately positive thing, possibly. I am exactly the same kind of first-time voter as you, and the fact that we can all now nominate for free bodes well.

I have not actually read any of this year's novels yet, but I went through a list of eligible stuff and picked out some I'm particularly interested in - The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor, Beasts of Tabat by Cat Rambo, The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard (all because I've liked their short fiction), Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman (sequel to Seraphina!), and Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear, which for some reason I've now forgotten I am convinced it is relevant to my interests. Also the Liu and Jo Walton's The Just City and sequel, because I've never read her before, but she was super cool at the panel I saw her on at WorldCon.

All of which is to say: yes! I am now excited to Read All the Things. :D

That all sounds great -- thanks so much for the recs! I must admit I haven't read Seraphina, even though as far as I can tell everyone's had really really great things to say about it... so I guess I should start there :)

Oh, and I forgot to mention, there's Ancillary Mercy I'm obviously going to read.

*fist-bump of first-time voter solidarity*

I'm honestly still boggled by how terrible the Puppy noms were, from a purely stylistic POV. I'm pretty sure there are conservative authors out there who can string together a readable sentence. I'm pretty sure I've read some of them. And the best they could come up with was John C. Wright, who writes like he swallowed a thesaurus and some 17th century hellfire-and-brimstone sermons and regurgitated them with a veneer of Narnia and all the words just slightly wrong? Ugh.

Yes! I'm pretty sure I have read them too! I mean, for that matter, you're talking to someone who has been known to read Ayn Rand, who obviously has a plethora of her own problems (...and because I am a bad person I find these problems endlessly fascinating), but at least she can string together readable prose. Whereas I can literally close my eyes and point randomly to a sentence on a page written by John C. Wright, and there will be something horribly wrong with that sentence.

who writes like he swallowed a thesaurus and some 17th century hellfire-and-brimstone sermons and regurgitated them with a veneer of Narnia and all the words just slightly wrong?

...This is an amazingly accurate description of Wright's writing. YES.