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cahnWhat 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!
-...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!
no subject
Date: 2021-04-16 02:56 pm (UTC)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!
no subject
Date: 2021-04-17 04:44 am (UTC)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!