Hugos 2021: General thoughts, short stories

[cahn]

What I thought when I saw the Hugo ballot:

-...it did not occur to me in the slightest to nominate Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf, but that is awesome and I wish it had occurred to me, and I'm really excited that now I have to read it :D (I bought it months ago, and it is sitting there looking at me mournfully.)

-I hated GRRM's Hugo delivery as much as anyone else (it was... not the best first time to be tuned in to the Hugo award ceremony) but I would just as soon not have another year of shortform rage works winning the Related Works over longform works which people put a lot of time into. Please let's just have two categories, one for shortform and one for longform related works?

-Ah, Piranesi! Currently my favorite (see February reading), though I have read exactly zero of the other nominees... but I'd bet you a small amount of money it's still my favorite after I (try to) read the others. (A small amount because it could happen that Network Effect unseats it. I suspect not though.)

(yep, although I'm here for the fiction categories, as usual I have the most heated opinions on Related Work.)

Putting this link here for my own benefit and others': Where to find the 2021 Hugo Award finalists for free online.

I'm working through the short stories and novelettes; this year I decided to actually be proactive in putting some large number of the novellas and novels and Lodestars on hold, and I'm picking a couple of them up this weekend.

So, short stories! Overall these were nice stories, often very comforting and/or sweet, and I enjoyed all of them (which I don't often say about any given Hugo category), though I wasn't blown away by any of them. And you know, I think maybe that's appropriate for 2020, where all of us were kind of seeking out comfort reading anyway. I could probably sum up the whole category with "cute! Don't have much more to say than that."

“Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Rae Carson (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2020) - ...it's what the title says. And I guess this was the least comfort reading of all of them, being horror, but it had a happy ending, which I guess is what I mean by "comforting." I liked it, as much as I ever like zombie stories, I guess, because I like stories about moms, but I am not sure it ever really got all that much deeper than the concept. Also there was a pretty visceral description of giving birth that I was really not into.

“A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (in Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, Solaris) - I always think Prasad's stories are really cute, and I thought this one was too!

“Little Free Library” by Naomi Kritzer (Tor.com) - aw, again, another cute one. Liked the ending though it did seem like rather a prologue to a main story.

“The Mermaid Astronaut” by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2020) - Huh, I really liked this one. I am a sucker for fairy tales and for SPACE and, uh, yeah. And the story was nice, with some nice ideas and concepts. (Of course in 2020 it's hard to write something that hasn't been done before, and the problem with doing something Le Guin has done before -- in "Semley's Necklace," in this case -- is that one never wants to be compared to Le Guin, because it's basically impossible to win that comparison.) I always for some reason have some vague issues with Lee's writing, and I did here too, but it worked well enough for this. Probably my favorite on the ballot, despite the unfortunate Le Guin comparison.

“Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2020) - Kingfisher is always a good bet. I think the writing in this was probably the best of all the nominees, and there was a bit of interesting stuff in there about trust and deception. I wasn't particularly convinced in Brother and Sister as machines, though, or quite convinced by the melding of the fairy-tale tone and the SFian vibe.

“Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots, 2020) - Another cute story! I liked it. Though even less than the others did I really think it was about anything other than being cute.


Ballot: Current stance is Mermaid Astronaut > Little Free Library > Metal Like Blood > Guide for Working Breeds > Open House on Haunted Hill > Badass Moms, but honestly I could probably be swayed in all kinds of directions here!

Comments

[luzula]

I have read both Piranesi and Network Effect, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the latter, I really don't think it should beat Piranesi for an award.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, I agree with that. I love Murderbot, but Piranesi is such a beautiful, strange, original book. It would be a travesty if it didn't win.

[cahn]

*nods* I thought so too! But since I haven't read the Murderbot novel yet, I thought I should maybe give it a chance :)

[cahn]

That is good to know! (And what I thought -- I thought Piranesi was excellent -- but it was the only other one that I thought might even be in the running.)

comfort trends

[brainwane]

Overall these were nice stories, often very comforting and/or sweet, and I enjoyed all of them (which I don't often say about any given Hugo category), though I wasn't blown away by any of them. And you know, I think maybe that's appropriate for 2020, where all of us were kind of seeking out comfort reading anyway.

Hmmmmmmm.

Last year I spent a lot of time highlighting interesting short speculative fiction that you can read for free online, so I had a very hard time picking a tiny subset of those to nominate. I did read the Carson, Prasad, and Kritzer, but none of them made my ballot. My nominations for Best Short Story were:

• "I'm with Muni -- How can I help?" by Annalee Newitz, in the San Francisco Chronicle
  
• "Thank You For Your Patience" by Rebecca Campbell, in Reckoning
  
• "This Is New Gehesran Calling" by Rebecca Fraimow, in Consolation Songs
  
• "The Hard Quarry" by Caleb Huitt, in Cossmass Infinities
  
• "Storm Story" by Llinos Cathryn Thomas, in Consolation Songs
  

I think that, of those, the Newitz, Fraimow, and Thomas are "cute"/comforting .... When the eventual nominations lists come out, I'll be curious to compare this to other recent years, and see whether people tended to nominate more comforting stories.

Re: comfort trends

[cahn]

Excellent! (And arrrgh, I need to read Consolation Songs, which I kept meaning to read and which kept not happening.) I will consult you next year before nominations! This year was just... nominations didn't happen for me, the first year since I joined (in, well, 2015), but now that I look at the ballot short stories, I wish I had :P The short stories on the ballot are all nice enough, I just wouldn't have nominated them personally. (Some of the other categories look more interesting, though.)

[hamsterwoman]

Yay, Hugo thoughts! (I need to also make a post with my own. They're less desultory than last year, yay!)

I'm still not sure what makes the Beowulf a related work, but whatever, I loved it, and I'll be happe enough when/if it wins, and I'm looking forward to your thoughts on it.

I hated GRRM's Hugo delivery as much as anyone else (it was... not the best first time to be tuned in to the Hugo award ceremony)

Aww, I'm sorry that was your first experience -- it was definitely my least favorite, by a long shot, of the three I've watched (San Jose, Dublin, and this virtual one), and while of course the format had significant limitations vs things like "moving choir performance" that Dublic had available to it, there was no excuse for the shambled we did get...

but I would just as soon not have another year of shortform rage works winning the Related Works over longform works which people put a lot of time into.

Definitely agreed on this! It seems like maybe... Related Work should be a better defined category, or maybe more than one category, as you say. It seems like a lot of stuff that gets nominated in the short form is actually fan writer sort of content? Except some of it is now in video form, which I don't suppose Fan Writer covers? (though admittedly I haven't read the category rules)

For novels, Network Effect is ahead of Piranesi for me in terms of pure enjoyment, and I expect those will stay as my top two even if/when I do read more of the nominees. Piranesi is definitely more unique/ambitious than "book 5 of a series that already won a bunch of Hugos", so I won't be at all sorry if it wins. (I just really loved Network Effect, because it's not often that a series entry just gives me everything I want from a series, and this one unexpectedly did XD But objectively speaking, Piranesi is probably more deserving...)

I haven't read any of the short stories yet (well, I had "Little Free Library" open in a tab at Yuletide time, since it was a nominated fandom, but two paragraphs in is about as far as I got), but I'm glad to hear they're all at least pleasant!

[cahn]

Huh, video form is a good point. Yeah, idk.

Heh, I tend to weight unique/ambitious/interesting when Hugo voting over enjoyment, though not always. But we will see! :)

Yeah, I wouldn't say I was super impressed by any of the short stories, but on the other hand I also didn't have any DNFs or "I hated this," which is better than it could be!

[sophia_sol]

Wild to think it's already time to start reading through another year's hugos! Isn't it just the other day that we last did this??

I'd already previously read most of the short stories nominated, and none of them super spoke to me. None of the short stories I nominated made it onto the list of finalists. Ah well. At least there are some stories on the list that I would be perfectly happy to have win, even if I don't think they're the best of what the year provided!

[cahn]

Ha, I know, right?

Yeah, none of these super impressed me, and perhaps relatedly I felt like none of them really engaged with ideas that were deeper than the story that was being told at the time (or if they tried to, it wasn't done in a particularly deep or resonant way). But I liked them, at least :)

[dolorosa_12]

Headley's Beowulf translation is great, and I hope you enjoy it.

I agree with your strong opinions about Related Work. I was discussing this with someone else in their own Hugo finalist reaction post, and we came to the conclusion that the whole category needs to be replaced with something like 'Best Nonfiction/Academic Book or Documentary on an SFF Topic'. At the moment, it's just a dumping ground for everything that doesn't fit in another award category, which leads to absurd situations where voters have to compare a blog post, a video essay on Youtube, two online conventions, an academic book, and a translation of an epic poem.

[cahn]

The bits and pieces I've read of Headley's translation I like very much!

YES I would go for that! I know, I don't blame Hugo voters for being confused and divided, given the situation as it stands now.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yay Beowulf translation! You will like it!

[cahn]

Heh, it was your post on it that gave me the impetus to buy it! (I would have ended up buying it sooner or later anyway, but that was the extra push.)

[genarti]

I very much agree with your thoughts about Related Work, and especially about breaking it at least into short and long categories. In theory I think it's a valuable sort of Other Stuff category to have, but in practice it's just such an apples-to-oranges catch-all right now.

[cahn]

Yes! I love Related Works, it's always ends up being the one I have the most thinky thoughts on and often the one I enjoy reading the most, it's just... so all over the place.

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I've read a surprising number of the novels this year. I suspect they get their own threads, so I'll wait to discuss, but I liked the Roanhorse and Muir ones, and somehow didn't connect with the Jemisin. Piranesi left me surprisingly cold--- I thought it was good, but I didn't connect with it the way I expected to. I haven't been reading Murderbot; should I? I don't have the Beowulf, but my Significant does and I have been meaning to borrow it sometime. I have put some more T. Kingfisher on order (something I meant to do anyway after reading Jackalope Wives during Yuletide last year) but my library has a smaller-than-hoped-for selection of them, so we'll see where I get.

I read the Prasad story at some point, and I was grabbed by that opening joke about adversarial feedback to the vision library making the narrator see dogs everywhere--- that connection between AI as it is practiced nowadays with all its stupidities and vulnerabilities, and AI as we imagine it in science fiction. Sadly, that went nowhere in the story. It's not about what it would be like to live as a robot wired together out of slightly-improved 2020s machine learning tech, it's just about a traditional sentient robot. I think the ensuing disappointment overshadowed the entire rest of the story, which is hardly fair, but there it is.

[cahn]

Heh, well, it depends how much I like them? In any case "Hugo novel nominees" will be its own post if nothing else (unless I really like one or have a lot to say about it, then it'll get its own post). Nice to know what you thought, though, before I go in! I've previously bounced off of both Roanhorse and Muir, so I'm glad you liked them. (Muir, in particular, I know exactly why I bounced, and I'm giving it another try -- picked up the hold today at the library and so far so good.)

Piranesi, let's see, I talked about it here (one day I really need to do an overhaul of my tag system, but... well) -- I enjoyed it and I thought it was extremely well done as well as compelling, and my guess is that it will be my top vote for the Hugo, but like you I didn't connect with it on a visceral level (as I did with, say, Memory Called Empire). I suppose not everything has to be like that, though.

Re Prasad: Heh. Yeah. I rather felt that way about all the short story nominees -- they were cute, and after I'd read them I was like "that was nice...so was there any there there?" Though I think my previous exposure to Prasad's work had conditioned me not to expect anything particularly deep AI-wise from this one either. I'd love to see more interesting AI/machine learning in fiction -- one of the things I have liked about Martine's writing is that she at least tries to engage with machine learning concepts as plot points.

Murderbot, hm. I feel that there's sort of a bimodal distribution of people who read Murderbot: the ones who are like, it's okay but nothing special, and the ones who are like I EMPATHIZE SO HARD WITH MURDERBOT, LEAVE IT ALONE TO WATCH ITS SERIAL DRAMAS. I mean. If you are a decided introvert who might be spectrum-adjacent, then yeah, I totally recommend it! if not, then I might vaguely dis-recommend it. I've really enjoyed the previous novellas but I have a huge amount of empathy for Murderbot; they're heavy on plots and feels but won't really scratch your itch for a harder-science take on robots/AI/cyborgs.

[cenozoicsynapsid]

If you are a decided introvert who might be spectrum-adjacent,
As which of us is not? I might go find another one or two Murderbots and see if they grab me any harder this time. It's not that I insist on all robots being hyper-realistic. I just felt that way because Prasad started her story with a hyper-realistic conceit (pulled, according to her acknowledgments, from Goodfellow, Shlens and Szegedy’s “Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples”, so she's definitely reading the hard stuff).