Hugos 2020: Novellas (and one novelette)
Jul. 1st, 2020 09:21 pmAll my June reading was Hugos reading. Besides the below, I also read more Lodestar stuff, which I'll post more about once I've finished them all.
Novelette: I previously posted about novelettes here, where I wrote about the as-yet-unread "Emergency Skin," “my previous experience of Jemisin is that she does relatively well on the scientific and personal and writing craft levels, but often falls down on the societal level because she is too quick to assign bad guys.”
Well done, previous self. Indeed this is exactly what I thought after reading it as well. It is a good story in terms of writing craft! It manages to evoke a plot and personality without actually ever showing the main character, only people's responses to it! it's pretty cool! And it completely falls down on the societal level. Hey kids, know what? if we just let rich overt bigots who wanted to go to space go to space and be bigots there, everything would be shiny and happy and we'd solve global warming and the rich bigots would be miserable and failures in space! Uh-huh. Also I want to know how the main character's society works with only like a thousand people, many of which don't qualify for personhood, almost completely divorced from Earth, and yet they are able to operate at a level of tech where all they need is the occasional stem cell?? How does that even work?? I wanted a story about how they made that work, which… I’m pretty sure was not supposed to be my reaction.
Anyway, just like I thought, I'm ranking it after "Omphalos" and the Jeoffrey story, but above the rest.
Novellas (in the order I read them):
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (Chiang) - This is the novella I wanted Pinsker's "And Then There Were N-1" to be -- I mean, Pinsker's story was great in the sense of that image of a conference of selves, but this story, I felt like, actually dug into what a world might be like if you could see what alternate versions of you had chosen. Some people would be like, eh, whatever. Some people would really get messed up mentally. Some people would get addicted to watching their alternate versions. Some people would figure out a way to run scams, because if the internet has taught us anything it is that everything leads to people figuring out to run scams on it :P IDK, I really like this kind of worldbuilding. And I also like the sort of understated but significant character arc that this story had. So I guess it was basically tailor-made for my likes!
This is How You Lose the Time War (El-Mohtar, Gladstone) - DNF. I liked the prose reasonably well in the narrative sections, but the letters just undid me. I couldn’t tell the difference between Blue and Red, and the letters were just too purple, no one writes letters like that to people they haven’t even met yet (well, maybe some people do, but I guess I don’t want to read those either). I just couldn’t take it.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Clark) - Bureaucrats in an alternate Egypt investigate the haunting of a tram car. I like Clark's writing! This was a fun novella with some fun ideas and interesting alternate worldbuilding. I don't really have anything else to say about it? I feel like this was one of those where I admired the worldbuilding but the story itself was pretty straightforward and doesn't keep me up at night :)
The Deep (Solomon) - Undersea people formed from pregnant enslaved Africans tossed overboard grapple with their history. I liked it better than Solomon's Murder Pregnancy short story. I suppose it's partially my mental state right now, but although rationally I can see that life was tough for the main character, I just did not want to read pages and pages of how terrible she felt as my fiction reading. Also I am not sure how I felt about Oori, who sometimes felt to me like she was supposed to be spectrum-y, but sometimes her reactions felt off to me (in comparison, for example, Murderbot feels more consistent to me). Also I felt like the magic happy ending was kind of weirdly tacked on after all the pages of angsting… the magic itself never felt very consistent to me, like it was basically there magically to help the author with the plot and not because it followed any sort of internal rules.
In an Absent Dream (McGuire) - my favorite Wayward Children book so far (this is faint praise, but still praise), as it is by and large free of the disturbing subtext that really bothers me about the other ones; the portal world here is not portrayed as the Greatest Good the way it is in the other novellas, but rather more as a sometimes-transcendent, sometimes-awful world that Lundy, the protagonist, loves whether or not it’s good for her. This portal world, the Goblin Market, is built on the concept of “fair exchange,” which -- well, if you think about what that concept might mean for a bright sensitive ten-year-old child, you probably have a reasonable idea of how it works out in the story. After reading it, I would like to say about this, ( Implicit spoiler ) I don't actually think that was supposed to be the moral, but I am choosing to read this as part of the point, which I think makes it a much stronger story :P I didn’t like it as much as Middlegame.
Relatedly, would it kill a McGuire character to actually communicate in reasonable language? Like, I feel like both here and in Middlegame there would be this thing where one character would say, “Please explain X,” and the other character would be all, “Let me tell you a cryptic aphorism.” That is not explaining things! And at least one of the characters should know better -- the one in Middlegame is supposed to be the avatar of Order!
To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Chambers) - Astronauts on a long-term mission to explore life! So this probably won’t bother people who (a) aren’t in science fields and (b) didn’t have![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
morbane for a beta, but, well, morbane betaed for me once upon a time and a lot of her (excellent) critique had to do with how, in a first-person story, one has to think about who the narrator is writing/speaking to and how that interplays with how the story’s told. Here, we’re asked to believe that an engineer is writing to an audience she doesn’t know. While the science itself seemed quite reasonable (which is awesome!!), I could just never believe for a second that it was an engineer writing it or that it was meant as a piece of science persuasive writing. Don’t get me wrong: it is persuasive! It persuaded me! But I just could not buy that it was an engineer writing it; it’s so clearly a writer writing it… I can’t really give you a specific example, but everything about this says to me “person who doesn’t do science for a living who learned all these cool scientific things that she is excited to share with us.” Which is great! But not what it says it is! (If only the narrator had been a writer who somehow ended up as an astronaut, all of this could have been sidestepped.) Also I have this problem with Chambers where all her characters are really nice but also I can’t tell any of them apart. I remember Jack was the annoying one, and that’s about it.
Novella rating:
1. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
2. The Haunting of Tram Car 015
3. To Be Taught, If Fortunate
4. In an Absent Dream
5. The Deep
6. This Is How You Lose the Time War
Novelette: I previously posted about novelettes here, where I wrote about the as-yet-unread "Emergency Skin," “my previous experience of Jemisin is that she does relatively well on the scientific and personal and writing craft levels, but often falls down on the societal level because she is too quick to assign bad guys.”
Well done, previous self. Indeed this is exactly what I thought after reading it as well. It is a good story in terms of writing craft! It manages to evoke a plot and personality without actually ever showing the main character, only people's responses to it! it's pretty cool! And it completely falls down on the societal level. Hey kids, know what? if we just let rich overt bigots who wanted to go to space go to space and be bigots there, everything would be shiny and happy and we'd solve global warming and the rich bigots would be miserable and failures in space! Uh-huh. Also I want to know how the main character's society works with only like a thousand people, many of which don't qualify for personhood, almost completely divorced from Earth, and yet they are able to operate at a level of tech where all they need is the occasional stem cell?? How does that even work?? I wanted a story about how they made that work, which… I’m pretty sure was not supposed to be my reaction.
Anyway, just like I thought, I'm ranking it after "Omphalos" and the Jeoffrey story, but above the rest.
Novellas (in the order I read them):
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (Chiang) - This is the novella I wanted Pinsker's "And Then There Were N-1" to be -- I mean, Pinsker's story was great in the sense of that image of a conference of selves, but this story, I felt like, actually dug into what a world might be like if you could see what alternate versions of you had chosen. Some people would be like, eh, whatever. Some people would really get messed up mentally. Some people would get addicted to watching their alternate versions. Some people would figure out a way to run scams, because if the internet has taught us anything it is that everything leads to people figuring out to run scams on it :P IDK, I really like this kind of worldbuilding. And I also like the sort of understated but significant character arc that this story had. So I guess it was basically tailor-made for my likes!
This is How You Lose the Time War (El-Mohtar, Gladstone) - DNF. I liked the prose reasonably well in the narrative sections, but the letters just undid me. I couldn’t tell the difference between Blue and Red, and the letters were just too purple, no one writes letters like that to people they haven’t even met yet (well, maybe some people do, but I guess I don’t want to read those either). I just couldn’t take it.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Clark) - Bureaucrats in an alternate Egypt investigate the haunting of a tram car. I like Clark's writing! This was a fun novella with some fun ideas and interesting alternate worldbuilding. I don't really have anything else to say about it? I feel like this was one of those where I admired the worldbuilding but the story itself was pretty straightforward and doesn't keep me up at night :)
The Deep (Solomon) - Undersea people formed from pregnant enslaved Africans tossed overboard grapple with their history. I liked it better than Solomon's Murder Pregnancy short story. I suppose it's partially my mental state right now, but although rationally I can see that life was tough for the main character, I just did not want to read pages and pages of how terrible she felt as my fiction reading. Also I am not sure how I felt about Oori, who sometimes felt to me like she was supposed to be spectrum-y, but sometimes her reactions felt off to me (in comparison, for example, Murderbot feels more consistent to me). Also I felt like the magic happy ending was kind of weirdly tacked on after all the pages of angsting… the magic itself never felt very consistent to me, like it was basically there magically to help the author with the plot and not because it followed any sort of internal rules.
In an Absent Dream (McGuire) - my favorite Wayward Children book so far (this is faint praise, but still praise), as it is by and large free of the disturbing subtext that really bothers me about the other ones; the portal world here is not portrayed as the Greatest Good the way it is in the other novellas, but rather more as a sometimes-transcendent, sometimes-awful world that Lundy, the protagonist, loves whether or not it’s good for her. This portal world, the Goblin Market, is built on the concept of “fair exchange,” which -- well, if you think about what that concept might mean for a bright sensitive ten-year-old child, you probably have a reasonable idea of how it works out in the story. After reading it, I would like to say about this, ( Implicit spoiler ) I don't actually think that was supposed to be the moral, but I am choosing to read this as part of the point, which I think makes it a much stronger story :P I didn’t like it as much as Middlegame.
Relatedly, would it kill a McGuire character to actually communicate in reasonable language? Like, I feel like both here and in Middlegame there would be this thing where one character would say, “Please explain X,” and the other character would be all, “Let me tell you a cryptic aphorism.” That is not explaining things! And at least one of the characters should know better -- the one in Middlegame is supposed to be the avatar of Order!
To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Chambers) - Astronauts on a long-term mission to explore life! So this probably won’t bother people who (a) aren’t in science fields and (b) didn’t have
morbane for a beta, but, well, morbane betaed for me once upon a time and a lot of her (excellent) critique had to do with how, in a first-person story, one has to think about who the narrator is writing/speaking to and how that interplays with how the story’s told. Here, we’re asked to believe that an engineer is writing to an audience she doesn’t know. While the science itself seemed quite reasonable (which is awesome!!), I could just never believe for a second that it was an engineer writing it or that it was meant as a piece of science persuasive writing. Don’t get me wrong: it is persuasive! It persuaded me! But I just could not buy that it was an engineer writing it; it’s so clearly a writer writing it… I can’t really give you a specific example, but everything about this says to me “person who doesn’t do science for a living who learned all these cool scientific things that she is excited to share with us.” Which is great! But not what it says it is! (If only the narrator had been a writer who somehow ended up as an astronaut, all of this could have been sidestepped.) Also I have this problem with Chambers where all her characters are really nice but also I can’t tell any of them apart. I remember Jack was the annoying one, and that’s about it.Novella rating:
1. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
2. The Haunting of Tram Car 015
3. To Be Taught, If Fortunate
4. In an Absent Dream
5. The Deep
6. This Is How You Lose the Time War
