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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: 2021-04-17 02:49 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-18 04:33 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-18 01:32 pm (UTC)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).