Hugos 2020: Novellas (and one novelette)
Jul. 1st, 2020 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnAll my June reading was Hugos reading. Besides the below, I also read more Lodestar stuff, which I'll post more about once I've finished them all.
Novelette: I previously posted about novelettes here, where I wrote about the as-yet-unread "Emergency Skin," “my previous experience of Jemisin is that she does relatively well on the scientific and personal and writing craft levels, but often falls down on the societal level because she is too quick to assign bad guys.”
Well done, previous self. Indeed this is exactly what I thought after reading it as well. It is a good story in terms of writing craft! It manages to evoke a plot and personality without actually ever showing the main character, only people's responses to it! it's pretty cool! And it completely falls down on the societal level. Hey kids, know what? if we just let rich overt bigots who wanted to go to space go to space and be bigots there, everything would be shiny and happy and we'd solve global warming and the rich bigots would be miserable and failures in space! Uh-huh. Also I want to know how the main character's society works with only like a thousand people, many of which don't qualify for personhood, almost completely divorced from Earth, and yet they are able to operate at a level of tech where all they need is the occasional stem cell?? How does that even work?? I wanted a story about how they made that work, which… I’m pretty sure was not supposed to be my reaction.
Anyway, just like I thought, I'm ranking it after "Omphalos" and the Jeoffrey story, but above the rest.
Novellas (in the order I read them):
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (Chiang) - This is the novella I wanted Pinsker's "And Then There Were N-1" to be -- I mean, Pinsker's story was great in the sense of that image of a conference of selves, but this story, I felt like, actually dug into what a world might be like if you could see what alternate versions of you had chosen. Some people would be like, eh, whatever. Some people would really get messed up mentally. Some people would get addicted to watching their alternate versions. Some people would figure out a way to run scams, because if the internet has taught us anything it is that everything leads to people figuring out to run scams on it :P IDK, I really like this kind of worldbuilding. And I also like the sort of understated but significant character arc that this story had. So I guess it was basically tailor-made for my likes!
This is How You Lose the Time War (El-Mohtar, Gladstone) - DNF. I liked the prose reasonably well in the narrative sections, but the letters just undid me. I couldn’t tell the difference between Blue and Red, and the letters were just too purple, no one writes letters like that to people they haven’t even met yet (well, maybe some people do, but I guess I don’t want to read those either). I just couldn’t take it.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Clark) - Bureaucrats in an alternate Egypt investigate the haunting of a tram car. I like Clark's writing! This was a fun novella with some fun ideas and interesting alternate worldbuilding. I don't really have anything else to say about it? I feel like this was one of those where I admired the worldbuilding but the story itself was pretty straightforward and doesn't keep me up at night :)
The Deep (Solomon) - Undersea people formed from pregnant enslaved Africans tossed overboard grapple with their history. I liked it better than Solomon's Murder Pregnancy short story. I suppose it's partially my mental state right now, but although rationally I can see that life was tough for the main character, I just did not want to read pages and pages of how terrible she felt as my fiction reading. Also I am not sure how I felt about Oori, who sometimes felt to me like she was supposed to be spectrum-y, but sometimes her reactions felt off to me (in comparison, for example, Murderbot feels more consistent to me). Also I felt like the magic happy ending was kind of weirdly tacked on after all the pages of angsting… the magic itself never felt very consistent to me, like it was basically there magically to help the author with the plot and not because it followed any sort of internal rules.
In an Absent Dream (McGuire) - my favorite Wayward Children book so far (this is faint praise, but still praise), as it is by and large free of the disturbing subtext that really bothers me about the other ones; the portal world here is not portrayed as the Greatest Good the way it is in the other novellas, but rather more as a sometimes-transcendent, sometimes-awful world that Lundy, the protagonist, loves whether or not it’s good for her. This portal world, the Goblin Market, is built on the concept of “fair exchange,” which -- well, if you think about what that concept might mean for a bright sensitive ten-year-old child, you probably have a reasonable idea of how it works out in the story. After reading it, I would like to say about this, fair exchange isn’t at all fair in the presence of greatly asymmetric and incomplete information!! I don't actually think that was supposed to be the moral, but I am choosing to read this as part of the point, which I think makes it a much stronger story :P I didn’t like it as much as Middlegame.
Relatedly, would it kill a McGuire character to actually communicate in reasonable language? Like, I feel like both here and in Middlegame there would be this thing where one character would say, “Please explain X,” and the other character would be all, “Let me tell you a cryptic aphorism.” That is not explaining things! And at least one of the characters should know better -- the one in Middlegame is supposed to be the avatar of Order!
To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Chambers) - Astronauts on a long-term mission to explore life! So this probably won’t bother people who (a) aren’t in science fields and (b) didn’t havemorbane for a beta, but, well, morbane betaed for me once upon a time and a lot of her (excellent) critique had to do with how, in a first-person story, one has to think about who the narrator is writing/speaking to and how that interplays with how the story’s told. Here, we’re asked to believe that an engineer is writing to an audience she doesn’t know. While the science itself seemed quite reasonable (which is awesome!!), I could just never believe for a second that it was an engineer writing it or that it was meant as a piece of science persuasive writing. Don’t get me wrong: it is persuasive! It persuaded me! But I just could not buy that it was an engineer writing it; it’s so clearly a writer writing it… I can’t really give you a specific example, but everything about this says to me “person who doesn’t do science for a living who learned all these cool scientific things that she is excited to share with us.” Which is great! But not what it says it is! (If only the narrator had been a writer who somehow ended up as an astronaut, all of this could have been sidestepped.) Also I have this problem with Chambers where all her characters are really nice but also I can’t tell any of them apart. I remember Jack was the annoying one, and that’s about it.
Novella rating:
1. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
2. The Haunting of Tram Car 015
3. To Be Taught, If Fortunate
4. In an Absent Dream
5. The Deep
6. This Is How You Lose the Time War
Novelette: I previously posted about novelettes here, where I wrote about the as-yet-unread "Emergency Skin," “my previous experience of Jemisin is that she does relatively well on the scientific and personal and writing craft levels, but often falls down on the societal level because she is too quick to assign bad guys.”
Well done, previous self. Indeed this is exactly what I thought after reading it as well. It is a good story in terms of writing craft! It manages to evoke a plot and personality without actually ever showing the main character, only people's responses to it! it's pretty cool! And it completely falls down on the societal level. Hey kids, know what? if we just let rich overt bigots who wanted to go to space go to space and be bigots there, everything would be shiny and happy and we'd solve global warming and the rich bigots would be miserable and failures in space! Uh-huh. Also I want to know how the main character's society works with only like a thousand people, many of which don't qualify for personhood, almost completely divorced from Earth, and yet they are able to operate at a level of tech where all they need is the occasional stem cell?? How does that even work?? I wanted a story about how they made that work, which… I’m pretty sure was not supposed to be my reaction.
Anyway, just like I thought, I'm ranking it after "Omphalos" and the Jeoffrey story, but above the rest.
Novellas (in the order I read them):
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (Chiang) - This is the novella I wanted Pinsker's "And Then There Were N-1" to be -- I mean, Pinsker's story was great in the sense of that image of a conference of selves, but this story, I felt like, actually dug into what a world might be like if you could see what alternate versions of you had chosen. Some people would be like, eh, whatever. Some people would really get messed up mentally. Some people would get addicted to watching their alternate versions. Some people would figure out a way to run scams, because if the internet has taught us anything it is that everything leads to people figuring out to run scams on it :P IDK, I really like this kind of worldbuilding. And I also like the sort of understated but significant character arc that this story had. So I guess it was basically tailor-made for my likes!
This is How You Lose the Time War (El-Mohtar, Gladstone) - DNF. I liked the prose reasonably well in the narrative sections, but the letters just undid me. I couldn’t tell the difference between Blue and Red, and the letters were just too purple, no one writes letters like that to people they haven’t even met yet (well, maybe some people do, but I guess I don’t want to read those either). I just couldn’t take it.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Clark) - Bureaucrats in an alternate Egypt investigate the haunting of a tram car. I like Clark's writing! This was a fun novella with some fun ideas and interesting alternate worldbuilding. I don't really have anything else to say about it? I feel like this was one of those where I admired the worldbuilding but the story itself was pretty straightforward and doesn't keep me up at night :)
The Deep (Solomon) - Undersea people formed from pregnant enslaved Africans tossed overboard grapple with their history. I liked it better than Solomon's Murder Pregnancy short story. I suppose it's partially my mental state right now, but although rationally I can see that life was tough for the main character, I just did not want to read pages and pages of how terrible she felt as my fiction reading. Also I am not sure how I felt about Oori, who sometimes felt to me like she was supposed to be spectrum-y, but sometimes her reactions felt off to me (in comparison, for example, Murderbot feels more consistent to me). Also I felt like the magic happy ending was kind of weirdly tacked on after all the pages of angsting… the magic itself never felt very consistent to me, like it was basically there magically to help the author with the plot and not because it followed any sort of internal rules.
In an Absent Dream (McGuire) - my favorite Wayward Children book so far (this is faint praise, but still praise), as it is by and large free of the disturbing subtext that really bothers me about the other ones; the portal world here is not portrayed as the Greatest Good the way it is in the other novellas, but rather more as a sometimes-transcendent, sometimes-awful world that Lundy, the protagonist, loves whether or not it’s good for her. This portal world, the Goblin Market, is built on the concept of “fair exchange,” which -- well, if you think about what that concept might mean for a bright sensitive ten-year-old child, you probably have a reasonable idea of how it works out in the story. After reading it, I would like to say about this, fair exchange isn’t at all fair in the presence of greatly asymmetric and incomplete information!! I don't actually think that was supposed to be the moral, but I am choosing to read this as part of the point, which I think makes it a much stronger story :P I didn’t like it as much as Middlegame.
Relatedly, would it kill a McGuire character to actually communicate in reasonable language? Like, I feel like both here and in Middlegame there would be this thing where one character would say, “Please explain X,” and the other character would be all, “Let me tell you a cryptic aphorism.” That is not explaining things! And at least one of the characters should know better -- the one in Middlegame is supposed to be the avatar of Order!
To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Chambers) - Astronauts on a long-term mission to explore life! So this probably won’t bother people who (a) aren’t in science fields and (b) didn’t have
morbane for a beta, but, well, morbane betaed for me once upon a time and a lot of her (excellent) critique had to do with how, in a first-person story, one has to think about who the narrator is writing/speaking to and how that interplays with how the story’s told. Here, we’re asked to believe that an engineer is writing to an audience she doesn’t know. While the science itself seemed quite reasonable (which is awesome!!), I could just never believe for a second that it was an engineer writing it or that it was meant as a piece of science persuasive writing. Don’t get me wrong: it is persuasive! It persuaded me! But I just could not buy that it was an engineer writing it; it’s so clearly a writer writing it… I can’t really give you a specific example, but everything about this says to me “person who doesn’t do science for a living who learned all these cool scientific things that she is excited to share with us.” Which is great! But not what it says it is! (If only the narrator had been a writer who somehow ended up as an astronaut, all of this could have been sidestepped.) Also I have this problem with Chambers where all her characters are really nice but also I can’t tell any of them apart. I remember Jack was the annoying one, and that’s about it.Novella rating:
1. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
2. The Haunting of Tram Car 015
3. To Be Taught, If Fortunate
4. In an Absent Dream
5. The Deep
6. This Is How You Lose the Time War
no subject
Date: 2020-07-05 11:28 am (UTC)So now that you've given me permission...
got in trouble with my mother once when she said, "Will you miss me?" and E bluntly said, "No."
Ha! You will be unsurprised, if I haven't already told you this anecdote, to learn that I went to visit my best friend once for a week when I was 15 or 16, and when my mother said, "Did you miss me?" I said, "No?" and got in huge trouble. I was shocked. I was practically an adult, I hadn't had a day without her in many years, I knew I was coming back in a few days and wouldn't get another day without her until college, I was seeing my best friend!...it astonished me that I was expected not to be able to go without my mother for a few days out of my entire life. I was already desperate to be able to get away to college and be on my own!
Perhaps more surprising was when I was 4 or 5 years old and she and my dad went on a 3-day trip, and left us kids with grandparents. This past week, I was reading
Me? I was mad at my parents for missing us and coming back a day early. :P It was funny because the baby was mad at them for leaving in the first place, I was mad at them for not doing what they said they were going to do (and I was having a great time with my grandparents and unhappy to have it cut short), and only the middle child actually greeted their early return with the happiness they expected. (My mother was less offended about a 4-year old not missing her than a 16-year old, which I would find weird, except that it's entirely consistent of her to take a small child's behavior in stride, while feeling incredibly viscerally threatened by a teenager's.)
I don't remember having trouble interpreting emotions
I was light-years ahead of my peers at my own emotions and light-years behind at other people's. Very sharp divide! To your point about giftedness, I've seen a lot of discussion about how gifted children often have more emotional difficulties rather than less, because they can internalize information that is way ahead of their ability to emotionally process it. The example given was the kid who watches Fiddler on the Roof and enjoys the songs, the kid who needs a little reassurance that that kind of thing isn't likely to happen to *them*, and the gifted kid who's like, "The INJUSTICE in the WORLD! WOE!" and has a meltdown. That was extremely not me.
But having learned about neurological development, I feel like my brain was doing all the things at 15 that the average brain isn't supposed to be able to do until the prefrontal cortex finishes myelinating around age 25. And I feel like it's related that I didn't have that significant personality difference before and after 25 that a lot of people report. (And by 36, I think I would notice.) By that point, all my developments were incremental and clearly tied to life experience, not to neurological capacity.
Things like this, and other ways in which I'm completely not typical even of non-neurotypical people, are what led me to eventually come to the tentative conclusion (subject to revision) that "on the spectrum" doesn't describe me nearly as well as "doing my own thing."
no subject
Date: 2020-07-11 04:06 am (UTC)Heh. Yes -- E's best friend, gifted and not at all on the spectrum, is sort of between (2) and (3). E, on the other hand, is more like "why are you making me watch this thing?" (A, super neurotypical, probably at least somewhat gifted, but also not really advanced with emotions, will probably enjoy it once he's E's age but not feel anxious about it at all, which was also my reaction -- actually my reaction was "OMG SOMEONE MADE A MUSICAL ABOUT MY FAMILY!" because a lot of the emotional dynamics inside the family are very similar to mine. To the point where we started playing out further Fiddler dynamics when we got older, which we couldn't have foreseen as children.) While it makes some parenting things harder, it's definitely true that it makes some things way easier, especially as she gets older. For example, when all the covid-19 stuff and lockdown started, E's best friend's mom was really cautious about not talking about it for a really long time, whereas I was like "E, here are all the facts about it and here's a website where you can look at the numbers," and she was like, "okay." (We still look at the daily county/world stats sometimes for evening entertainment.)
But having learned about neurological development, I feel like my brain was doing all the things at 15 that the average brain isn't supposed to be able to do until the prefrontal cortex finishes myelinating around age 25. And I feel like it's related that I didn't have that significant personality difference before and after 25 that a lot of people report.
Hm! Like impulse control? or what? I don't remember a personality shift at age 25, though I definitely had a shift around the time I had kids where I started caring a lot less what other people thought, but that was later than 25 (E was born when I was 28) and had a lot to do with not having time to care coupled with my social group substantially changing :P (I know, I know, you never cared what other people thought, but we've already established that I was a lot more susceptible to that kind of indoctrination from my mom.)
no subject
Date: 2020-07-12 01:14 am (UTC)Lol, my reaction to my parents deciding to needed to watch things when I would rather be reading a book. Ditto for going outside and playing. "Why are you making me watch/do this thing???"
To the point where we started playing out further Fiddler dynamics when we got older, which we couldn't have foreseen as children.)
Would you like to elaborate for someone who's never seen the movie? I always like hearing about your family's dynamics.
"E, here are all the facts about it and here's a website where you can look at the numbers," and she was like, "okay."
Hi, E!
I'm glad you understand E in some ways better than my parents seem to have understood me. I'm sure she'll benefit greatly.
Hm! Like impulse control? or what?
Yeah, impulse control and long-term thinking and complex planning, that sort of thing. I was the kid who at 11 was regulating my emotions and behavior according to what I was expecting to happen at age 18. At 15 I think I was better at this than 11, but I don't think I'm better at it now than I was at 15--and ever since about age 15, I've always thought of myself as a 35-yo trapped in the body of a [35-n]-yo. Only now in my mid 30s have I stopped feeling periodically surprised to remember I'm not actually in my mid 30s.
The 25 thing is an average, it's obviously something that varies like the age of getting your wisdom teeth varies--I had one erupt at 21 and the others never erupted. But your brain is supposed to be finishing developing in your early 20s, so people apparently report that 30 is a lot different from 20, and I'm like...not in any way that I can tease out that's distinguishable from the effects of different life circumstances, greater life experience, and years of feedback loops in which I paid attention to how my brain worked and made conscious efforts to hack it. In terms of cognitive capacity for long-term reasoning, it feels the same.
My parents get some credit for giving me information that I could feed into my long-term planning, in that they explained the logical connections between making good grades, getting scholarships to pay for college that they couldn't pay for, getting a degree, getting a good job, and having the money for a nice house and
bookswhatever else you wanted. My wife never got this from any of the adults around her (Brazilian schools also apparently don't teach you how to prepare for college or adult life, the way American schools do), so at 18 she was woefully unprepared for real life.But cognitive capacity plays a role too, because my sister got all the same lectures I did on responsibility--in fact, we often got them at the same time--and she had zero impulse control except insofar as required for sneaking around. She knew it too; she and I once had this exchange, in high school: "You know that thing you have you're always talking about? Where you can make yourself do things?" "Willpower?" "Yeah, that. I don't have that."
I *prided* myself on my willpower as a kid (starting around sixth grade, I think), and in fact worked on developing it the same way I would exercise a muscle.
Whereas my sister...now that I've studied a little neuroscience, I've seen descriptions of tests for deterioration or underdevelopment of the prefrontal cortex, and I want to give them to her, because I'm not at all sure she could pass all of them. I was light years ahead of my age peers, she was behind. (Hence getting pregnant at age 16 and knocking out her 4th kid at age 21.)
On the other hand, she was just short of 25 the last time I had anything to do with her, so I wonder if that's changed at all. (Not that I have any intention of finding out. Being light-years behind the average 35-yo may be better than being light-years behind the average 15-yo, but still not something I'm interested in.)
no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 07:03 pm (UTC)I was going to say that I also noticed the lack of an inflection point in myself that's supposed to come when one becomes a young adult -- I didn't have a teenage inflection point either, I think, at least not one I can deconvolute from moving countries and changing social environments pretty drastically at age 11. Like, there was a period between when I was 6 or so (I think?) and when I was 12 when I was very shy, but once that phase ended, I'm not really sure I changed that much in the next 30 years? My areas of focus shifted as I discovered new things I liked (e.g. Lord of the Rings, chemistry, travel) and as I was consumed by new undertakings (e.g. parenting), but I don't feel like my core personality has changed in any appreciable way between like 15 and almost-42.
I *have* stopped caring about what other people might thing of me, as
So, basically:
and ever since about age 15, I've always thought of myself as a 35-yo trapped in the body of a [35-n]-yo.
-- this, pretty much, for me too. (In my case, this was reinforced by the fact that I had children in my early 20s, so that my parent cohort was 10-15 years older than me. But that suited me just fine.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-14 04:38 am (UTC)ETA: Now that I think about it more, I think I did get substantially better at impulse control after 25! I think it was less drastic than it might be for some, though.
Yeah, there are very many things where I understand E completely because I was exactly the same when I was her age. (Not everything, but a lot, especially when she was younger.) I can't always help her with those things, mind you...
Would you like to elaborate for someone who's never seen the movie?
Oh boy. I started writing this up and then I realized it would take kind of a while, so... someday, yes. Possibly as a locked post :P