Some stuff read for the Hugos
Mar. 8th, 2022 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnSo like everyone else I've been spending a lot of time reading about horrific current events, but also I read three novels published in the last year. All of which are going to go on my Hugo ballot, whee! Some brief thoughts:
1. So I read She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan) (which I think has an amazing title) and I have a lot of inarticulate thoughts about how when you take the genre of "secondary-world fantasy books about unconventional characters going up against the political system" and rate them for soul-crushing-ness, the spectrum ranges from The Goblin Emperor (happy shiny) to, on the other end, the Baru Cormorant books (so utterly and crushingly depressing that I still haven't tackled the series past the first book -- well, I might have if I hadn't heard that the second book was even more depressing than the first). This book is, hm, solidly on the latter end of that scale; you can see everyone kind of careening towards disasters of their own making, even if not all the disasters happen in this book (there is going to be a sequel). But there's something incandescent about the kid who takes her dead lout of a brother's name and glorious destiny, and grows up to fool not only almost everyone around her, but also Heaven and Its Mandate, which saves it from the utter depressingness of Baru Cormorant. (It's still not at all clear to me how seriously we are supposed to take Heaven -- Zhu obviously takes it seriously, with her internal understanding of Heaven as a major character arc, and Heaven's Mandate is a Thing. But I don't know what is going on with Heaven objectively, and I wonder if it will be a plot point in the next book.) I also really appreciated about Zhu (and the other characters and Parker-Chan), how she approaches gender in such a utilitarian fashion; it's woven in to everything else, especially Zhu's incandescent ambition.
2. I read The Unraveling (Rosenbaum) based mostly onseekingferret's rec -- warning, his rec has spoilers for, among other things, the most charming bit of the book, which fortunately I missed because I only read the first half of his review before reading the book. And, well, this is the kind of book where I want it to get a Hugo because it's so thought-provoking and playing with so many kinds of different things -- it's a world, probably descended (eta: by which I mean colonized) from our own, where each inhabitant has several different bodies (so the POV can change from one body to another very separated in space without it changing the character POV), where babies are assigned at birth to be a Staid (more cuddly and intellectual) or a Vail (more violent and emotional, into fighting and sex), where everyone's connected in a sort of super-social-media network, where families are made up of a number of adults whose neighbors vote on whether they're good enough parents to have another kid. It's a lot and Rosenbaum keeps all those balls in the air. (The Staid and Vail stuff was kind of hilarious to me because I'd just finished the Parker-Chan and admired how it thought about gender as an organic outgrowth of everything else, whereas Rosenbaum flatly was all "yeah, gender? Let's put those thoughts out there front and center," and Rosenbaum made me like that too :P ) And I kept thinking that with all of this, and with all of the strangeness that Rosenbaum delineates, it's still such a human book -- the conflict of Fift with zir family, how they both think they're doing the best thing while escalating their conflict, was very familiar.
(seekingferret talks about its debt to Le Guin and Delany, which yes! and to Joyce which I've not read so can't comment on, but to me it also reminded me a lot of John Brunner, especially his Stand on Zanzibar and its collections of different reactions and different conversations, but much more joyful than that book, of course!)
I totally would vote for this to win the Hugos over everything else I've read this year except maybe The Last Graduate (which is an incredibly different kind of book), and yet I'm... not totally sure I'd recommend it to some of you? Maybe even most of you? It's just dense and thinky in a kind of way that I think is really appealing to some people and not to others.
3. Black Water Sister (Zen Cho) - I felt about this book sort of how I would have felt about Crazy Rich Asians if it were well written, not about crazy rich people, and a fantasy. By which I mean that there was a lot of it that really resonated with me. Which was good and bad -- Jess reminded me a lot of younger!me, which mostly made me feel seen (great!), but also was a problem insomuch as there was a large slow stretch in the middle of the book where she was angsting about her parents and living up to their expectations and keeping her girlfriend a secret and so on, and I just... really didn't want to hear about it because I'd lived it already, I felt there was no need for me to redo the whole thing. (Details different, of course, but the general principles the same.) And I loved all the family relationships, although thinking about it now the book was honestly rather light on in-depth relationships (the love interest is long-distance and never on-screen, the other same-age characters never have enough interaction to become friends, the family relationships are basically characterized by all family members trying to hide secrets from other family members, which again, yeah, relatable, but ugh). But after that slow middle stretch it was great and very compelling, with at least one development that was set up well and that I totally missed until it happened. If all three of these were on a Hugo ballot, I'd probably vote for this under the other two, but only because it wasn't quite as mind-bendy; I still liked it a lot and thought it did good things.
4. I didn't read this for the first time recently (although I did reread it recently!) but just gonna rec again the STET fic Rephrase? again, and unlesscenozoicsynapsid objects I'm gonna put it on my Hugo ballot under short story. (It's worth reading STET and then reading Rephrase? -- both are pretty short.) Content note of child death strongly alluded to (but not on screen, not graphic) for both, and additional content note for Rephrase? that it is heartbreaking, chilling, and also funny.
1. So I read She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan) (which I think has an amazing title) and I have a lot of inarticulate thoughts about how when you take the genre of "secondary-world fantasy books about unconventional characters going up against the political system" and rate them for soul-crushing-ness, the spectrum ranges from The Goblin Emperor (happy shiny) to, on the other end, the Baru Cormorant books (so utterly and crushingly depressing that I still haven't tackled the series past the first book -- well, I might have if I hadn't heard that the second book was even more depressing than the first). This book is, hm, solidly on the latter end of that scale; you can see everyone kind of careening towards disasters of their own making, even if not all the disasters happen in this book (there is going to be a sequel). But there's something incandescent about the kid who takes her dead lout of a brother's name and glorious destiny, and grows up to fool not only almost everyone around her, but also Heaven and Its Mandate, which saves it from the utter depressingness of Baru Cormorant. (It's still not at all clear to me how seriously we are supposed to take Heaven -- Zhu obviously takes it seriously, with her internal understanding of Heaven as a major character arc, and Heaven's Mandate is a Thing. But I don't know what is going on with Heaven objectively, and I wonder if it will be a plot point in the next book.) I also really appreciated about Zhu (and the other characters and Parker-Chan), how she approaches gender in such a utilitarian fashion; it's woven in to everything else, especially Zhu's incandescent ambition.
2. I read The Unraveling (Rosenbaum) based mostly on
seekingferret's rec -- warning, his rec has spoilers for, among other things, the most charming bit of the book, which fortunately I missed because I only read the first half of his review before reading the book. And, well, this is the kind of book where I want it to get a Hugo because it's so thought-provoking and playing with so many kinds of different things -- it's a world, probably descended (eta: by which I mean colonized) from our own, where each inhabitant has several different bodies (so the POV can change from one body to another very separated in space without it changing the character POV), where babies are assigned at birth to be a Staid (more cuddly and intellectual) or a Vail (more violent and emotional, into fighting and sex), where everyone's connected in a sort of super-social-media network, where families are made up of a number of adults whose neighbors vote on whether they're good enough parents to have another kid. It's a lot and Rosenbaum keeps all those balls in the air. (The Staid and Vail stuff was kind of hilarious to me because I'd just finished the Parker-Chan and admired how it thought about gender as an organic outgrowth of everything else, whereas Rosenbaum flatly was all "yeah, gender? Let's put those thoughts out there front and center," and Rosenbaum made me like that too :P ) And I kept thinking that with all of this, and with all of the strangeness that Rosenbaum delineates, it's still such a human book -- the conflict of Fift with zir family, how they both think they're doing the best thing while escalating their conflict, was very familiar.(
seekingferret talks about its debt to Le Guin and Delany, which yes! and to Joyce which I've not read so can't comment on, but to me it also reminded me a lot of John Brunner, especially his Stand on Zanzibar and its collections of different reactions and different conversations, but much more joyful than that book, of course!)I totally would vote for this to win the Hugos over everything else I've read this year except maybe The Last Graduate (which is an incredibly different kind of book), and yet I'm... not totally sure I'd recommend it to some of you? Maybe even most of you? It's just dense and thinky in a kind of way that I think is really appealing to some people and not to others.
3. Black Water Sister (Zen Cho) - I felt about this book sort of how I would have felt about Crazy Rich Asians if it were well written, not about crazy rich people, and a fantasy. By which I mean that there was a lot of it that really resonated with me. Which was good and bad -- Jess reminded me a lot of younger!me, which mostly made me feel seen (great!), but also was a problem insomuch as there was a large slow stretch in the middle of the book where she was angsting about her parents and living up to their expectations and keeping her girlfriend a secret and so on, and I just... really didn't want to hear about it because I'd lived it already, I felt there was no need for me to redo the whole thing. (Details different, of course, but the general principles the same.) And I loved all the family relationships, although thinking about it now the book was honestly rather light on in-depth relationships (the love interest is long-distance and never on-screen, the other same-age characters never have enough interaction to become friends, the family relationships are basically characterized by all family members trying to hide secrets from other family members, which again, yeah, relatable, but ugh). But after that slow middle stretch it was great and very compelling, with at least one development that was set up well and that I totally missed until it happened. If all three of these were on a Hugo ballot, I'd probably vote for this under the other two, but only because it wasn't quite as mind-bendy; I still liked it a lot and thought it did good things.
4. I didn't read this for the first time recently (although I did reread it recently!) but just gonna rec again the STET fic Rephrase? again, and unless
cenozoicsynapsid objects I'm gonna put it on my Hugo ballot under short story. (It's worth reading STET and then reading Rephrase? -- both are pretty short.) Content note of child death strongly alluded to (but not on screen, not graphic) for both, and additional content note for Rephrase? that it is heartbreaking, chilling, and also funny.
