Hugo novel-reading homework
Jun. 17th, 2020 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnHey, I've actually looked at all the novel nominees now! (Also I have signed up to attend virtual Worldcon... idk how all of this will work and how much of it I will actually end up attending but maybe let me know if you are going to be there?)
The Light Brigade (Hurley) - 3+/5. Soooooo this was a DNF at about 20% through until I saw a review bypsocoptera, who really liked it (caution: spoilers at the link; they didn't destroy the reading experience for me given that the alternative was me not reading it, but they might for someone else), that convinced me to read it again. And it turns out that if I'd just stuck it out one more chapter I would have started to come across plot, and the last 80% is actually quite good, with plot and characters that I ended up liking quite a bit. Also, its themes were, well, fairly resonant with current events. It also seems to be more of a sort of mashup/examination/inversion of classic SF-mil tropes than Starship Troopers in particular, so I wasn't quite right about that either (but now having read ST, I wasn't wrong either). It's still pretty depressing and violent, though with hope at the end.
Anyway, in terms of plot and theme, it's quite good, and not nearly as anvilicious as I thought it was going to end up (though I mean, really, who here thought the corporations were going to end up as good guys? Anyone?), and my issues with it are primarily niggly writing/editing issues, like... honestly... that first 20% really wasn't necessary and I feel like her editor should have made her cut at least half of it. (Heinlein made it work, but Heinlein was also trying to do something very different.) Also, something like 80% in, the narrator casually mentions that everyone in her military platoon has this language of gestures that's grown up. Which no one has ever used before in the book, as far as I am aware, even when it would have been extremely useful. (It occurs to me that it might be a subtle plot point, but in that case I still think it should have been discussed explicitly at a different earlier point in the book.) That kind of thing -- and I don't blame Hurley as much as I blame her editor :)
Middlegame (McGuire) - 3+/5. I liked this book! I was a bit shocked, as I didn't like the Wayward Children books that much, but then again I have a lot of subtext difficulties with Wayward Children that I didn't have so much with this book. It's a book set in an AU where alchemy works, and about a sister and brother crafted by an alchemist who split math and language between them; when together, they have ~powers~, so they are raised separately so that they don't get access to these powers until they've grown up. Lots of big plot ideas in this book, which I felt came to satisfying conclusions, and of course being me I was thrilled with the central relationship in a book being between a sister and brother who aren't at all connected romantically. I found it to have compelling, page-turning prose for the most part (okay, I didn't think A. Deborah Baker's best-beloved-by-generations books-within-the-book were all that). I do have to say that for the Hugo I prefer books that make me think over books that are entertaining, and though I found the plot and characters quite entertaining, more entertaining than Brigade, Middlegame didn't really have treatments of ideas or themes that I am chewing over after reading it, like both Memory and Brigade did. (Oh, and content note: lots of violence and death. Lots. It's a horror/thriller book as much as it is a fantasy, maybe more.)
A couple of things I wanted to talk about, though:
-Somehow I got really confused about Asphodel and James. I thought they were working together and her death was part of a plan until almost the end, when it turned out it... wasn't? But it wasn't treated like a plot reveal or anything, just like something I should have already known.
-So obviously the math/language alchemical split is kind of weird. It sort of works sometimes as a book device and sort of doesn't work so well other times, and it's pretty obvious McGuire is not an academic in either field (both kids are supposed to be in the academic system to a certain extent). It's treated as a glib plot device rather than actually being interested in what that might really mean. This is one of my interests these days because E seems to speak math natively -- her math teacher told me this year at parent-teacher conferences that she was a great communicator and I almost fell out of my chair ("Are you sure we're talking about the same kid? The kid where every single other teacher she's ever had, including her other teachers this year, maps out with me how we're going to work on her communication skills?") -- and I think it's related that she is also very good at vocabulary and spelling and nonfiction comprehension, but years behind in inference and body language and subtext and social cues that her little brother, five years younger, picks up without any sort of coaching, whereas she often has to be taught it, laboriously. (Little brother is, I think, reasonably bright for his age, but does not speak math natively in the way she did even when she was 5.) I would have loved a book that did some actual delving into what alchemy does at a fundamental level, and what it means to even partially split up math and language (and what does "language" even mean in this context). (Also the written word can be very powerful in this book, but I never got a real sense of how all that was related to, say, Roger.) But eh, it was pretty clear that wasn't the book McGuire wanted to write, and from her Wayward Children books I knew that thinking through something like this (in the particular way I think is interesting) isn't a priority for her, so there you go and I was able to let that slide. (To be fair, McGuire came out with quite a few neat ideas in relation to this -- like, I thought it was great to make Dodger in charge of time and Roger the one who can command obedience.)
-I was very much not impressed by the discussion of math girls. Several times the sister Dodger (the genius mathematician) and/or the narrator ruminates on how math girls / gifted girls are just the worst, amirite? Either they are in competition with you in math or they're in competition with you for a boy. This is presented as a Terrible Ironic Truth about the world.
...whaaaaat? I feel like this was spoken by someone who has never actually been around really smart math people (like Dodger is supposed to be). Thing is, though I don't qualify as a really smart math woman myself, I do happen to know some really smart math women, and none of them are like that! In fact, it doesn't... make any logical sense... to be like that?? Cutting off people you could do problem sets with in college?? And collaborate with for research projects after college?? And then the boys thing really makes no sense, as there is a surfeit of smart boys in math (if you even want a mathematician, some of us prefer physicists or engineers), omg, come on. I feel like McGuire met some fifth-raters who thought they were all that and thought they were really smart, and believed them, and wrote those into her book. It's not a book-destroying problem for me, as I understand that it would be hard for her to know the difference between world-class and fifth-rate without being a math person exposed to world-class people herself, but this annoyed me a lot every time it came up, especially since it wasn't even necessary to explain Dodger's introversion.
The City in the Middle of the Night (Anders) - DNF. I found this hard to read, with weird pacing, and I didn't really care about any of the characters (and in fact actively disliked a couple of them). I looked at review spoilers to see if any of this would change in the rest of the book. It doesn't, and although I could see it was doing some interesting things and some of the worldbuilding was interesting, I just couldn't bring myself to slog through more of it, so I stopped reading it. (Although I do prefer books for the Hugo that make me think over books that are entertaining, I also do need it to be entertaining enough that it isn't hard to read!) I like dthe crocodile, though.
I have now given all the novel nominees a try! (Wow... looking back, last year I finished a whopping ONE nominee. At least I got through half of them this year.) My ranking:
1. Memory Called Empire
2. Light Brigade
3. Middlegame
4. City in the Middle of the Night
5. Gideon the Ninth
6. Ten Thousand Doors of January
Now working on novellas and Lodestone...
The Light Brigade (Hurley) - 3+/5. Soooooo this was a DNF at about 20% through until I saw a review by
psocoptera, who really liked it (caution: spoilers at the link; they didn't destroy the reading experience for me given that the alternative was me not reading it, but they might for someone else), that convinced me to read it again. And it turns out that if I'd just stuck it out one more chapter I would have started to come across plot, and the last 80% is actually quite good, with plot and characters that I ended up liking quite a bit. Also, its themes were, well, fairly resonant with current events. It also seems to be more of a sort of mashup/examination/inversion of classic SF-mil tropes than Starship Troopers in particular, so I wasn't quite right about that either (but now having read ST, I wasn't wrong either). It's still pretty depressing and violent, though with hope at the end.Anyway, in terms of plot and theme, it's quite good, and not nearly as anvilicious as I thought it was going to end up (though I mean, really, who here thought the corporations were going to end up as good guys? Anyone?), and my issues with it are primarily niggly writing/editing issues, like... honestly... that first 20% really wasn't necessary and I feel like her editor should have made her cut at least half of it. (Heinlein made it work, but Heinlein was also trying to do something very different.) Also, something like 80% in, the narrator casually mentions that everyone in her military platoon has this language of gestures that's grown up. Which no one has ever used before in the book, as far as I am aware, even when it would have been extremely useful. (It occurs to me that it might be a subtle plot point, but in that case I still think it should have been discussed explicitly at a different earlier point in the book.) That kind of thing -- and I don't blame Hurley as much as I blame her editor :)
Middlegame (McGuire) - 3+/5. I liked this book! I was a bit shocked, as I didn't like the Wayward Children books that much, but then again I have a lot of subtext difficulties with Wayward Children that I didn't have so much with this book. It's a book set in an AU where alchemy works, and about a sister and brother crafted by an alchemist who split math and language between them; when together, they have ~powers~, so they are raised separately so that they don't get access to these powers until they've grown up. Lots of big plot ideas in this book, which I felt came to satisfying conclusions, and of course being me I was thrilled with the central relationship in a book being between a sister and brother who aren't at all connected romantically. I found it to have compelling, page-turning prose for the most part (okay, I didn't think A. Deborah Baker's best-beloved-by-generations books-within-the-book were all that). I do have to say that for the Hugo I prefer books that make me think over books that are entertaining, and though I found the plot and characters quite entertaining, more entertaining than Brigade, Middlegame didn't really have treatments of ideas or themes that I am chewing over after reading it, like both Memory and Brigade did. (Oh, and content note: lots of violence and death. Lots. It's a horror/thriller book as much as it is a fantasy, maybe more.)
A couple of things I wanted to talk about, though:
-Somehow I got really confused about Asphodel and James. I thought they were working together and her death was part of a plan until almost the end, when it turned out it... wasn't? But it wasn't treated like a plot reveal or anything, just like something I should have already known.
-So obviously the math/language alchemical split is kind of weird. It sort of works sometimes as a book device and sort of doesn't work so well other times, and it's pretty obvious McGuire is not an academic in either field (both kids are supposed to be in the academic system to a certain extent). It's treated as a glib plot device rather than actually being interested in what that might really mean. This is one of my interests these days because E seems to speak math natively -- her math teacher told me this year at parent-teacher conferences that she was a great communicator and I almost fell out of my chair ("Are you sure we're talking about the same kid? The kid where every single other teacher she's ever had, including her other teachers this year, maps out with me how we're going to work on her communication skills?") -- and I think it's related that she is also very good at vocabulary and spelling and nonfiction comprehension, but years behind in inference and body language and subtext and social cues that her little brother, five years younger, picks up without any sort of coaching, whereas she often has to be taught it, laboriously. (Little brother is, I think, reasonably bright for his age, but does not speak math natively in the way she did even when she was 5.) I would have loved a book that did some actual delving into what alchemy does at a fundamental level, and what it means to even partially split up math and language (and what does "language" even mean in this context). (Also the written word can be very powerful in this book, but I never got a real sense of how all that was related to, say, Roger.) But eh, it was pretty clear that wasn't the book McGuire wanted to write, and from her Wayward Children books I knew that thinking through something like this (in the particular way I think is interesting) isn't a priority for her, so there you go and I was able to let that slide. (To be fair, McGuire came out with quite a few neat ideas in relation to this -- like, I thought it was great to make Dodger in charge of time and Roger the one who can command obedience.)
-I was very much not impressed by the discussion of math girls. Several times the sister Dodger (the genius mathematician) and/or the narrator ruminates on how math girls / gifted girls are just the worst, amirite? Either they are in competition with you in math or they're in competition with you for a boy. This is presented as a Terrible Ironic Truth about the world.
...whaaaaat? I feel like this was spoken by someone who has never actually been around really smart math people (like Dodger is supposed to be). Thing is, though I don't qualify as a really smart math woman myself, I do happen to know some really smart math women, and none of them are like that! In fact, it doesn't... make any logical sense... to be like that?? Cutting off people you could do problem sets with in college?? And collaborate with for research projects after college?? And then the boys thing really makes no sense, as there is a surfeit of smart boys in math (if you even want a mathematician, some of us prefer physicists or engineers), omg, come on. I feel like McGuire met some fifth-raters who thought they were all that and thought they were really smart, and believed them, and wrote those into her book. It's not a book-destroying problem for me, as I understand that it would be hard for her to know the difference between world-class and fifth-rate without being a math person exposed to world-class people herself, but this annoyed me a lot every time it came up, especially since it wasn't even necessary to explain Dodger's introversion.
The City in the Middle of the Night (Anders) - DNF. I found this hard to read, with weird pacing, and I didn't really care about any of the characters (and in fact actively disliked a couple of them). I looked at review spoilers to see if any of this would change in the rest of the book. It doesn't, and although I could see it was doing some interesting things and some of the worldbuilding was interesting, I just couldn't bring myself to slog through more of it, so I stopped reading it. (Although I do prefer books for the Hugo that make me think over books that are entertaining, I also do need it to be entertaining enough that it isn't hard to read!) I like dthe crocodile, though.
I have now given all the novel nominees a try! (Wow... looking back, last year I finished a whopping ONE nominee. At least I got through half of them this year.) My ranking:
1. Memory Called Empire
2. Light Brigade
3. Middlegame
4. City in the Middle of the Night
5. Gideon the Ninth
6. Ten Thousand Doors of January
Now working on novellas and Lodestone...
no subject
Date: 2020-06-18 04:43 am (UTC)Welp, that settles the question of whether I should even try reading the book. (McGuire's books never end up working for me fully, but some of them I keep reading in Uncanny Valley semi-fascination and some of them I bounce off right off, and for me this would be book-destroying, I think. (I really dislike McGuire's Terrible Ironic Truths that are not based in real life or her own worldbuilding but sound profound, even if I don't find them personally offensive, so, eh, save myself the aggravation.
(I'm not a math genius either, though I *am* really good at math, but know enough super-smart math people to find this really annoying.)
I'm curious to see how the Virtual Worldcon goes, though probably not enough to spring for an actual attending membership. I'm going to try to watch the stuff they stream publicly though, if there's anything (lately the Hugo Ceremonies and the opening/closing ceremonies were streamed live even at the non-virtual events.)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-19 03:58 am (UTC)I really dislike McGuire's Terrible Ironic Truths that are not based in real life or her own worldbuilding but sound profound, even if I don't find them personally offensive
YESSSSS and in fact the math girls thing wasn't the only time that she did this, just the most annoying to me. Well, actually, every time she does it with parenting it sets my teeth on edge even more -- that was the Wayward Children novella where I just had to skip past the parenting part, and only did that because
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 01:24 am (UTC)The Jack an Jill book, I'm guessing? I was actually a bit surprised by that NOT being a showstopper kind of thing to my reading -- I kind of expected it to be! But I think it helped that a friend warned me to expect it, and also that the parents were SO cartoonish, I just couldn't take it as any sort of real-world commentary at all, any more than evil stepmothers in fairy tales. But it was pretty egregious :/
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 04:16 am (UTC)Though if you were OK with that, I think you would be OK with the math girls stuff, which is a much smaller part of the book :) I think it's just that I can let things slide when it's not something I have strong feelings about, but I have strong feelings about parenting and math girls :)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-18 05:14 am (UTC)I feel like this sort of female rivalry/narrator who casually puts down other women has popped up in every McGuire I've read, and I am Not There For It.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-19 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-18 08:02 am (UTC)Like you I normally have real issues with Hurley and McGuire's writing, so I'm pleasantly surprised to hear that Light Brigade ends up being good, if too grim for me.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-19 04:03 am (UTC)Yeah, I found the Harrow to be twee and cloying enough that I stopped after a couple of chapters (I'd be willing to read it if someone told me it had good plot/characters, but not otherwise). And Gideon the Ninth I found unreadable because it ran hard against how I've been trained to read SF for worldbuilding. Like, if you compare something to mints in a hotel room, I'm going to assume that it's because there are mints and hotel rooms in this universe and this is your way of cueing me in to that. Which is not the way Gideon is written at all, so I got really confused after a couple of chapters and couldn't read any further.
I was really surprised to like both the Hurley and McGuire. The Hurley is certainly very grim, though, and the McGuire is very horror-ish, so yeah, I wouldn't recommend them to anyone who is looking for something a little lighter (isn't that all of us right now??)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-18 01:24 pm (UTC)Also your description of the math girls perspective of that character in Middlegame makes me even less interested in reading it. :/ As well as the dichotomy between language and math because......they are not opposites. I mean, computational linguistics is even a thing! This is not the first McGuire I've encountered where she seems to fundamentally not Get something core to her premise and it frustrates me.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-19 04:15 am (UTC)The math girls thing is really a very small part of the book (and it doesn't show up until quite a ways through), it just annoyed me much more than is perhaps reasonable for a couple of throwaway scenes :)
As well as the dichotomy between language and math because......they are not opposites. I mean, computational linguistics is even a thing!
PREACH IT. Even worse, the "language" character (Roger) becomes a professor of linguistics and all I could think is that when I was in college, all of us math/hard-science/tech people took linguistics because it had problem sets! I mean, he could have basically done almost anything else in the humanities (except, I guess, philosophy) and I would have had a less hard time with it.
But, yeah. Like, I could definitely see how you could do something interesting with something like this, by thinking hard about things like Aspergers and computer languages and social signals and different kinds of communication, but that was Really Not this book.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-19 04:55 pm (UTC)That's an extremely reasonable suggestion and we'll see whether I'm able to let myself do it. I'm too much of a completionist! I feel like I'm not giving a book its fair chance..... So far I'm 15 chapters into The Light Brigade and feeling very bored.
Like, I could definitely see how you could do something interesting with something like this, by thinking hard about things like Aspergers and computer languages and social signals and different kinds of communication
that sounds like an interesting book, I would much rather read that book!
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 04:19 am (UTC)that sounds like an interesting book, I would much rather read that book!
haha me too! maybe someone will write it someday...
no subject
Date: 2020-06-20 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-22 07:03 pm (UTC)Giving up is very fair! says the person who only finished half the nominees herself. But seriously, I really think an editor or beta reader should have flagged that at LEAST the first fifth of the book is completely unnecessary! Even after reading the entire thing, I'm kind of mystified why the first 20-30% had to be there at all. It doesn't help for plot or character development or... really anything!