2021 Hugo Novellas (part 2)
Jul. 14th, 2021 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnCome Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com) - DNF. Idk, I just couldn't get through this one, quite possibly because my memory super sucks and I've forgotten what happened in all the previous installments, but I clearly wasn't supposed to do that because these characters would randomly show up in scenes and I was clearly supposed to have an emotional reaction to them, but my actual reaction was "who the heck were you again?!"
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (Tor.com) - I loved this one, in a way where I am not sure how coherent I can be about it -- it's a story told through mini-stories that are attached to various items that a cleric is cataloguing. Which sounds super boring (and I imagine could be super boring) but Vo makes it work! I think part of it is that I am just in love with stories where you gradually find out what happens through smaller stories.
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com) - Magical swords against the alien-possessed KKK. I liked it! I don't think the writing was as good as Riot Baby's writing, and I always have a bit of trouble connecting emotionally with Clark's protagonists, and things wrap up neatly in this story in a way they don't in Riot Baby -- but I really liked that the story had as a central theme the difference between anger and hatred, and what we do with both of those, and what it says about us, which is in a sense very much a rebuttal of Riot Baby, which refuses to consider that as a theme. ...I think I'm voting this above Riot Baby, though I feel conflicted about it and I might switch those two. I wish I could vote for both of them as a pair? They work really well as a pair of stories, honestly.
Voting:
Empress > Ring Shout > Riot Baby >> (No Award) >> Finna >> Come Tumbling Down > Upright Women
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (Tor.com) - I loved this one, in a way where I am not sure how coherent I can be about it -- it's a story told through mini-stories that are attached to various items that a cleric is cataloguing. Which sounds super boring (and I imagine could be super boring) but Vo makes it work! I think part of it is that I am just in love with stories where you gradually find out what happens through smaller stories.
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com) - Magical swords against the alien-possessed KKK. I liked it! I don't think the writing was as good as Riot Baby's writing, and I always have a bit of trouble connecting emotionally with Clark's protagonists, and things wrap up neatly in this story in a way they don't in Riot Baby -- but I really liked that the story had as a central theme the difference between anger and hatred, and what we do with both of those, and what it says about us, which is in a sense very much a rebuttal of Riot Baby, which refuses to consider that as a theme. ...I think I'm voting this above Riot Baby, though I feel conflicted about it and I might switch those two. I wish I could vote for both of them as a pair? They work really well as a pair of stories, honestly.
Voting:
Empress > Ring Shout > Riot Baby >> (No Award) >> Finna >> Come Tumbling Down > Upright Women
