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: 2020-07-13 06:47 pm (UTC)I was thinking of the part where you were talking with mildred about probably not missing even people who are close to you if something happened to them, which strikes me as a spectrum-y trait
Oh, right -- I do think that's something weird, probably, but I've not seen it listed as a spectrum trait before.
And the thing is, I don't think I would have ever said "No" to a "Would you miss me?" question as a kid -- partly because I knew what the "right answer" was (and was very invested in giving the right answer, but also because I think it took me, like, empirical observation and thus time to realize that I don't really miss people. My default assumption was, missing people was normal -- it happened in all the stories -- so I'd feel it, too, and then I didn't, and eventually reached the conclusion of, hey, maybe this isn't a thing I feel. But by then I was definitely old enough to know people would want to be missed and to tell them so.
but in retrospect there were a lot of emotions and things going on when I was a kid that I just never saw at all
I suppose this might be true in my case, too, because, like, statistically speaking, it's probably more likely that things were happening around me -- bullying, relationship drama, depression, skeeviness from adults -- that I was oblivious to, rather than that somehow I managed to avoid all that. Maybe it's something like, I was just fine at emotion when I made the effort to pay attention to it in others, but a lot of the time I just didn't, and so may well have missed all kinds of things.
Interesting about eye contact! I don't think I had to learn to make it, but I do wonder if the way I hold eye contact comes off as weird: because my eyesight is pretty poor (and I don't wear glasses unless I literally can't see the needed detail without them or, you know, I'm legally obligated to -- I tend to have to focus on people's faces kind of intensely to read their expressions, just physically, I mean, not cognitively, if they're like, across a table from me or otherwise at a more casual/professional distance, and I've wondered how that comes across.
ETA: Oh, right, I remembered the other thing I meant to say:
One of the sources of my "not sure if neurotypical?" wonderings about myself in the last several years has been my daughter. Now that she's in her late teens, we've been having conversations about feelings and reactions in various situations. These are not conversations I'd normally have with people
outside of LJ comments, and because I both see things real time/in real life and have these conversations with her, it's driven home that I definitely don't remember reacting to similar situations in the way she and her friends do. I feel like she's given me a better baseline, because when I was her age, my friends were all weirdos, too, and probably not a good benchmark :Pno subject
Date: 2020-07-14 04:45 am (UTC)Huh, you have a point there. It's definitely an E Thing, which is why it stuck out to me, but of course not everything about her is spectrum! Like you, I was definitely socialized to miss people, and I think I kind of do, but it's hard now for me to separate that from the socialization.
These are not conversations I'd normally have with people outside of LJ comments, and because I both see things real time/in real life and have these conversations with her, it's driven home that I definitely don't remember reacting to similar situations in the way she and her friends do.
That's really interesting! I'd love to hear more about this at some point. (Also lol to the LJ comments.)