Hugos: best novel

[cahn]

D and I have caught the plague from our children (well, okay, it's probably just a random virus, but it's a pretty bad one) so instead of doing anything useful, and until D gets up so I can sleep, I am writing up my Hugo ballot.

I, um, got through my Hugo reading by mostly not finishing these, and in two cases didn't start.

Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan) 4/5 I really, really liked this one. I think my stance on it is encapsulated by (a) when I finished it I could already say with 95+% that I was voting for it -- enthusiastically! -- to win the Hugos even though I had not read any other nominees yet, and (b) I'm pretty sure this would not be true in a stronger year (say, 2019, which is already shaping up to be a very strong year for novels). One of the things that I thought was a weakness of Uprooted was that I felt the characters, most prominently Kasia, suffered from the single viewpoint; I never felt like I had a good handle on Kasia or what her viewpoint was. Novik deals with that brilliantly here with the differing viewpoints. It also allows her to include diverse viewpoints and angles without it devolving into Diversity Bingo. seekingferret: Jews dance in this book.

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor) - 3/5 - skimmed to end. This was one of those books that someone who isn't me might really like. And I really liked the first several chapters, which postulate a meteorite hitting (and taking out) Washington in the 1950s, and the resulting space program that's launched. My main problem with it was that I never really connected properly with the narrator/protagonist Elna, a Jewish "calculator"/pilot who becomes an astronaut. I mean, this should totally be my jam, right? I was puzzled as to why she never quite worked for me until I read the afterword, where Kowal gives credit to various people for the technical phrases Elna uses, e.g., "Today I 'simmed' terminal docking maneuvers and tried to tune RHC inputs through an overly generous dead-band." Kowal goes on to say, "I understand none of [the calculations Elna describes]." And... well. That's what was bothering me! There was something about Elna where I just couldn't believe in her as a geek, because she would say all these things but never think about them internally in a way that demonstrated technical understanding of or even interest in what she was saying, so it really was a bit like she was spouting off lines someone else gave her.

Also, at times it seemed just a bit check-the-boxes diversity bingo -- the narrator is Jewish! (Alas, I was not reading closely enough to keep track of whether Jews dance in this book.) Staying with a black family! Check off the box for narrator having realizations about intersectionality! Narrator has anxiety problems! Check off the box for modeling good and bad responses to mental health issues! I just felt like... Spinning Silver was doing a lot of similar things too, but somehow I didn't find SS nearly as check-in-the-box about it.

Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga) - DNF. I wanted to read this one, but I think I am just past the point in my life where I care about noir kick-butt girl heroines, unless we have a prior relationship of long standing (hi there, Veronica Mars). It's not you, it's me!

Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga) - DNF. ase sent me (part of) the first paragraph so we could goggle at it:

Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery, excitable country called Italy, a soft-spoken, rather nice-looking gentleman by the name of Enrico Fermi was born into a family so overprotective that he felt compelled to invent the atomic bomb. Somewhere in between discovering various heretofore cripplingly socially anxious particles and transuranic elements and digging through plutonium to find the treat at the bottom of the nuclear box, he found the time to consider what would come to be known as the Fermi Paradox.

There are so many reasons that this set of two sentences alone makes me so irritated that I didn't get much past the first chapter. Besides Italy not being an especially watery country the last time I checked, it struck me as both extraordinarily reductive and kind of inaccurate with respect to Fermi and subatomic particles in general. Maybe I just don't get Valente's humor, or maybe I am just sensitive because it's my field -- I probably wouldn't have felt nearly as annoyed if she had been talking about, oh, Alexander Fleming and made jokes about sentient fungi or something. (See also the flagrant misuse of "quantum," although I've mostly had to get used to that one.)

Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager) - DNS.
Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris) - DNS

I already knew I would bounce off both these authors' writing (again, clearly not them, as lots of people enjoy their stuff), so I didn't even try.

Voting SS >> Calculating Stars > Trail of Lightning > No Award > Space Opera. Not sure what to do about the Chambers and Lee.

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[cahn]

:D