Hugos 2021: Novelettes
Apr. 18th, 2021 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnThis, I felt, was a substantially more meaty category than the short story category.
“Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super” by A.T. Greenblatt (Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2020) - About a guy with one mild superhero power and how he interacts with a mild superhero league. I liked the story and thought it was well written, but I don't have much to say about it, not really being into superhero stories.
“Helicopter Story” by Isabel Fall (Clarkesworld, January 2020) - Here is a link (viahamsterwoman). A woman becomes an attack helicopter and her life is different. IDK. I see what it was trying to do. I see from google that the story resonated deeply with some and not at all with others; that this story has given rise to a lot of controversy and attacks on the author, and I'm sorry about that. I will say that (I suspect at least partially due to my slight neuroatypicality) it is not a story that resonated with me at all. I felt like it was trying to earnestly lecture the reader about how this-and-that reaction that either Barb (before Barb was an attack helicopter) or the reader might experience was because of pre-Barb/the reader's being gendered/sexualized female (or male) -- but to lines like "We want to fight the way a woman wants to be gracious, the way a man wants to be firm" my response was inevitably, "...but I don't react like that...? I don't particularly want to be gracious, except inasmuch as I've identified that it's clearly a cultural/societal norm for women to act 'graciously' so yes I often try to conform to social norms, especially when I'm in spaces where these norms are upheld more stringently, just like I conform to social norms by saying 'hi' to people instead of 'booga booga' although it would be kind of funny to do that so are you saying that you want to fight because you've identified that it is a societal norm that your society wants you to fight? I don't think that is what you are saying," and then I would start thinking grumpy thoughts about gender essentialism, and by that time I would have hopelessly lost the thread of the story. So yeah, I was probably not the target audience.
“The Inaccessibility of Heaven” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2020) - Huh, this was the kind of story where I quite liked it and so I shall nitpick it :P I think that for me, that it was part of her "Fallen" mytharc (I think?), as well as that I had read some but not all of her other Fallen work, worked against it-- I was never quite sure how much I was supposed to have known from other stories, if anything. The bond between Sam and Cal, which is central to the story's emotional arc, was taken for granted until it's sort of randomly half-explained halfway through the story, and I kept wondering whether maybe this was a later part of a series that I needed to have read to understand Sam/Cal? (I don't think so, now that I've finished the story.) That being said, the ending was really moving, I felt like it came with both emotion and a sense of the numinous that I really loved. That being said, I felt like it came this close to engaging with interesting questions about faith (what does it even mean for an angel to have faith?) but... didn't. So... yeah, I felt like it was quite good, but uneven?
“Monster” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld, January 2020) - A scientist looks for her childhood best friend. Hm. I thought it was a good story, though slight in the same way I thought the short stories on the ballot were slight -- there are deeper themes that it's going for, but I felt like it never really engaged with them head-on.
“The Pill” by Meg Elison (in Big Girl, PM Press) - A pill that can make fat people skinny. ...A horror story in a lot of ways. I thought this was a quite powerful story about how we feel about bodies, although sometimes I felt like it was trying to cram a novel's worth of stuff into a novelette, and thus sometimes I felt the pacing was rather odd.
“Two Truths and a Lie” by Sarah Pinsker (Tor.com) - So... all the Sarah Pinsker I've read, I've enjoyed but left with a niggling feeling that she hadn't quite told the story I wanted to hear. In this story, a quietly creeping horror story about one's personal individuality, and what defines it and doesn't (but without getting preachy at all), she has finally written a story where I was there for it all, and I felt like it was very well done, well written (as I always expect from Pinsker), and that the themes and plot were in sync with the content (which I haven't always felt about her stories). My favorite of this batch.
Ballot: Two Truths and a Lie > Heaven > Pill > Burn > Monster > Helicopter Story
“Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super” by A.T. Greenblatt (Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2020) - About a guy with one mild superhero power and how he interacts with a mild superhero league. I liked the story and thought it was well written, but I don't have much to say about it, not really being into superhero stories.
“Helicopter Story” by Isabel Fall (Clarkesworld, January 2020) - Here is a link (via
hamsterwoman). A woman becomes an attack helicopter and her life is different. IDK. I see what it was trying to do. I see from google that the story resonated deeply with some and not at all with others; that this story has given rise to a lot of controversy and attacks on the author, and I'm sorry about that. I will say that (I suspect at least partially due to my slight neuroatypicality) it is not a story that resonated with me at all. I felt like it was trying to earnestly lecture the reader about how this-and-that reaction that either Barb (before Barb was an attack helicopter) or the reader might experience was because of pre-Barb/the reader's being gendered/sexualized female (or male) -- but to lines like "We want to fight the way a woman wants to be gracious, the way a man wants to be firm" my response was inevitably, "...but I don't react like that...? I don't particularly want to be gracious, except inasmuch as I've identified that it's clearly a cultural/societal norm for women to act 'graciously' so yes I often try to conform to social norms, especially when I'm in spaces where these norms are upheld more stringently, just like I conform to social norms by saying 'hi' to people instead of 'booga booga' “The Inaccessibility of Heaven” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2020) - Huh, this was the kind of story where I quite liked it and so I shall nitpick it :P I think that for me, that it was part of her "Fallen" mytharc (I think?), as well as that I had read some but not all of her other Fallen work, worked against it-- I was never quite sure how much I was supposed to have known from other stories, if anything. The bond between Sam and Cal, which is central to the story's emotional arc, was taken for granted until it's sort of randomly half-explained halfway through the story, and I kept wondering whether maybe this was a later part of a series that I needed to have read to understand Sam/Cal? (I don't think so, now that I've finished the story.) That being said, the ending was really moving, I felt like it came with both emotion and a sense of the numinous that I really loved. That being said, I felt like it came this close to engaging with interesting questions about faith (what does it even mean for an angel to have faith?) but... didn't. So... yeah, I felt like it was quite good, but uneven?
“Monster” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld, January 2020) - A scientist looks for her childhood best friend. Hm. I thought it was a good story, though slight in the same way I thought the short stories on the ballot were slight -- there are deeper themes that it's going for, but I felt like it never really engaged with them head-on.
“The Pill” by Meg Elison (in Big Girl, PM Press) - A pill that can make fat people skinny. ...A horror story in a lot of ways. I thought this was a quite powerful story about how we feel about bodies, although sometimes I felt like it was trying to cram a novel's worth of stuff into a novelette, and thus sometimes I felt the pacing was rather odd.
“Two Truths and a Lie” by Sarah Pinsker (Tor.com) - So... all the Sarah Pinsker I've read, I've enjoyed but left with a niggling feeling that she hadn't quite told the story I wanted to hear. In this story, a quietly creeping horror story about one's personal individuality, and what defines it and doesn't (but without getting preachy at all), she has finally written a story where I was there for it all, and I felt like it was very well done, well written (as I always expect from Pinsker), and that the themes and plot were in sync with the content (which I haven't always felt about her stories). My favorite of this batch.
Ballot: Two Truths and a Lie > Heaven > Pill > Burn > Monster > Helicopter Story
