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.
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Date: 2022-03-20 04:18 pm (UTC)I think I was one of the people who recommended Black Water Sister to you--- I agree that it shares some resonances with Crazy Rich Asians, but is a much better book. It didn't occur to me that it would be so personal for you, partly because I think I didn't know you were Asian until a short while ago. (This is the way things are on the internet, isn't it?) I agree that Jess is very alone in the story. There is a sense that she can't relate to her family members because she doesn't understand what they've been through--- was that another plot point in Crazy Rich Asians, actually? That the family matriarch's uncompromising attitude was shaped by Japanese occupation during the war, and once you understand this, all her cruel affectations start to look like self-defense? Or was this a different book? It's certainly part of the plot of Maus--- the damage the survivors inflict on the second generation is harder to measure, but it's still there.
I just put She Who Became and The Unraveling on library reserve, so hopefully I can read them soon. It's been a busy spring, but I hope all is well with you and your salon.
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Date: 2022-03-29 02:10 am (UTC):D <3
Ha, yes, the internet! And I think it's, yeah, a pretty common plot point in books that are about children of immigrants -- because, well, it's a very common occurrence (see also: reading my dad's memoirs). I don't remember Japanese occupation specifically in CRA? but I do remember her going through even worse issues due to her mother-in-law, so yes in any case to all her cruel affectations start to look like self-defense. And yeah, Maus! That book really struck me hard in any number of ways, but that was definitely one of them. And it's part of the plot of Encanto (which I just watched) too, no?
I'm very interested to see what you think of both of those books! I really have no idea what you'll think of Unraveling -- it's not the kind of book we've mostly been talking about, so I don't know if you'll like it, but then again we "met" over Cordwainer Smith and Tiptree, and it's written almost in a way that I feel like is an homage to that kind of work, while taking on subjects in a way that is more modern. So you might like it!
We are doing well; I hope all is well with you too! (And yes to busy! I feel like we are trying to catch up to everything that didn't get done over the last two years, a bit.)
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Date: 2022-04-06 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-10 03:09 pm (UTC)I also liked that I didn't feel completely talked down to about Chinese history and culture. I am hardly an expert on these, but for example, Kuang's "The Poppy War", if you happen to have read that, seems to assume that its Western readers will be surprised by "plot twists" from the Sino-Japanese war. Parker-Chan seems to basically think her readers will have heard of Chinese dynasties, cities and some classics like the Three Kingdoms even if they don't remember any of the details, and this is roughly where I am, so it worked out well.
I do wonder about how the tone of the series will shift as it progresses. Game of Thrones fell into this trap; the first book is really a quite well-done tragedy about how the Starks, who have made some compromises to get along but are basically decent people, are shoved into the power politics of Westeros, and forced either to compromise on their principles or be destroyed. As we go along, though, Martin expands on this thesis that human decency is a liability in politics by ruthlessly crushing every remotely sympathetic character in the series (except maybe Tyrion--- I forget what happens to him) or turning them into a villain, until I eventually stopped reading them because I loathed all the characters. While there's a nice sense of the dramatic in Zhu's melancholy forecast that Ma's love for him will eventually reconcile her to his increasingly heinous acts, I worry that I'm just going to hate them all by act three.
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Date: 2022-04-12 05:17 am (UTC)I felt like some of the identity issues (ethnicity, imperialism, and especially gender) were handled with a bit of a lighter touch than a lot of recent books you've reviewed here have taken. For example, the narrative never completely decides whether Zhu is transgender or not and keeps shifting pronouns the entire way through. I think this was the right decision--- it let Zhu be (them)self rather than struggling for some kind of "representation".
THIS. I felt like everything Zhu was, particularly gender, came naturally out of Zhu's circumstances and not in a way that was Obviously Making A Point, the latter of which annoys me and the former of which I find rather refreshing. (This is what I meant by "utilitarian," which I guess is not a great word to describe it but the one that I came up with at the time.)
for example, Kuang's "The Poppy War", if you happen to have read that, seems to assume that its Western readers will be surprised by "plot twists" from the Sino-Japanese war.
I have read it, and I didn't previously know anything about the Sino-Japanese war, so it worked for me, but yeah, I then did some reading so if Kuang continued to do that I suppose it might not have worked so well. But I also haven't read the sequels (which might tell you something about how well it worked, I guess). I did like the way Parker-Chan does it.
While there's a nice sense of the dramatic in Zhu's melancholy forecast that Ma's love for him will eventually reconcile her to his increasingly heinous acts, I worry that I'm just going to hate them all by act three.
I think there is only one more book planned, so while I agree that there is probably going to be rather more crushingness, I am hoping that in one book it doesn't have the chance to go overly far in that direction... maybe I'm being naive.
I agree with you about Game of Thrones, though. I was always kind of into those books at the level of skimming anyway (see also: lost the will for epic fantasy), but it was notable how much I didn't like anyone any more by the fourth book or so.