Hugo novels

[cahn]

I have now read the Hugo novel nominees, where by "read" I mean "DNF'd two of them" -- Ministry of Time, Service Model, Alien Clay, Tainted Cup, Someone You Can Build a Nest In (I read in this order).

In the reverse order of how much I liked them:

The Tainted Cup (Bennett) - 4/5 - this book is set in an Empire continually threatened by giant leviathans every year, and in which they have discovered how to do all kinds of biological manipulations. Dinios "Din" Kol is an engraver, a person who has been biologically modified to have a perfect memory; he works for the brilliant investigator Anagosa "Ana" Dolabra, who has her own set of personal idiosyncracies. As the book starts, Din is investigating a murder, but the murder rapidly expands to involve a larger set of deaths and a larger set of power structures within the Empire.

ase pointed out that of all the nominees this is in some ways the most traditional-Hugo one (concentrating heavily on worldbuilding and plot) and yeah, I am That Traditional Hugo Voter. I loved this book, which first of all had a great premise, but also I felt had a precision and detail that I really enjoy in both the worldbuilding and the murder mystery. All the clues were right there (some were more obvious than others), and I even picked up a few of them, although not enough of them that I really had any idea what was going on (I would have had to pay a lot better attention, for one thing). The worldbuilding is really detailed and interesting to me, and the mystery is one that is centered right in the worldbuilding in a lot of different ways, which I find really cool.

I also have as a long-standing complaint about media in general that whenever there's an unequal partnership, the person in the position of intellectual power, the chess-player who is the mover and placer of the pawn(s) on the boards, is always a man -- though the other person in the partnership may be a woman. And I was charmed to see that reversed here, with Ana being the mover and placer.

I could imagine someone not loving this book because Ana and Din do work within the structures of an Empire that is pretty clearly extremely imperfect and rife with corruption, even if Ana does give a rousing speech about how her duty is to try to root out the corruption. I do think that some of how I feel about it will depend on further books in the series and how they deal with that. But either way, I very much appreciated the complexity of how many if not all the characters turn out to be various shades of gray; the "good" characters are still working in a corrupted system, and at the same time, one can usually understand why the "bad" characters do the bad things that they do, often as reactions to that same system.

Major spoilers

I also kind of loved that the solution to the mystery turned on bureaucracy and also on a giant money-making scheme. That's so... plausible.

I loved this one enough that I'm immediately picking up the next one at the library. Which other Bennetts should I read? I started City of Stairs but never got very far -- but maybe I should have forged onward a bit more?

The Ministry of Time (Bradley) - 3+/5 - In which various people are brought through time to a near-future Britain and are acclimatized to modern life by living with a government-admin "bridge" -- most particularly Graham Gore, a nineteenth-century Arctic explorer, and his bridge, the unnamed narrator, who is a woman with a British father and Cambodian mother. Meanwhile, there are attacks that appear to be related to the time traveling...

I was confused while reading this book for a long time. The author seemed to have a pretty clear idea on how Gore's mind would have worked, historically speaking, which meant I had no idea why anything was set up the way it was -- why is Gore's bridge a mixed-race woman, why are they living alone together in a house, none of this makes sense -- until the romance started, and then I finished the book and read the afterwards, and ohhhhh, okay, it started life as a fanfic, and all of that was basically the setup to get the ship together, yeah, I get it now, I have written that fic too where the justification for throwing the ship together made, uh, minimal sense. (To be fair, there are some plot-relevant justifications for the setup of the Ministry that only get revealed near the end, and I thought that part was neat.)

All this being said, if one accepts the implausible setup, everything else that followed was interesting, and I did find the book compelling enough that I was eager to read it all the way through. I definitely liked it more than the average Hugo finalist this time out!

Service Model (Tchaikovsky) - 3/5 - A robot butler puts himself out of work and goes on a road trip, occasionally accompanied, to try to find humans to give him more work. It was fine and quite readable (Charles, as the robot butler starts out being called, is a reasonably engaging POV), although I felt like it could probably have been wrapped up in a novella or even novelette -- I felt like the road trip went on and on without adding very much value, and then suddenly all the plot (which I enjoyed!) happened in like the last five percent. One of those angry books about how terrible modern society and human beings are. It's not that I disagree, it's just that it is a bit wearisome to read a whole book about it.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In (Wiswell) - DNF - a tale told from the POV of the monster Shesheshen, who likes to eat humans. This wasn't a bad book, it would probably have gotten at least a 3/5 if I'd finished it, but I made the mistake of not tackling it until after having read The Tainted Cup. Nest just doesn't have that kind of complexity at all, by which I mostly mean the characters. (I also don't think the worldbuilding and plot is nearly as complex and interesting either, but I didn't read far enough for those things to bother me as much.) In Nest, there are definitely Bad characters whose only function is to be so over-the-top obnoxious that we cheer when Shesheshen eats them. I also was annoyed by the character-worldbuilding in which Shesheshen knows just enough about humans to be able to be all self-righteous about how annoying and hypocritical humans are. (Monsters, as far as I can tell, are totally great. Like, they eat their parent and siblings and all, but that's cool, that's just the way they are.) Idk, maybe I was brought up on too much Tiptree, I would have liked her to be a little more, well, alien than to be able to discourse on humans being hypocritical (which to my mind presupposes a reasonably sophisticated understanding of human behavior). But yeah, I should have read it around the same time as Service Model, I would have been able to finish it then.

Alien Clay (Tchaikovsky) - DNF - I can't even make it through the first chapter, I am not sure why. There's something about the narrative voice that I just really am having a hard time getting past.

Hugo novels: Tainted Cup > Sorceress > Ministry of Time > Service Model > Nest > Alien Clay

Comments

[philomytha]

I have just read Ministry of Time too, and yeah, it is compelling even though the plot is all too obviously in service of the time travel self insert romance fic. I could have read volumes of Time Travellers Experience Modern London, but I found a lot of the plot logic hard to follow at best.

[cahn]

Yes! I really liked the Time Travellers Experience Modern London and Time Travellers from Different Eras Hang Out Together aspects and found them extremely readable! But the setup was odd for sure.

[isis]

Huh, I DNFed Service Model at somewhere after 50%, don't recall exactly, I just got bored with the road trip. If you think the last 5% made it worth it, I might pick it up again. (Or maybe not!)

I liked The Ministry of Time but mostly because of Margaret Kemble.

I really like Bennett's work for the most part, and I think that one of his hallmarks is that his male characters and female characters are mostly completely independent from being male or female - that is, you can imagine swapping them out for the opposite sex without changing anything in the narrative other than pronouns. What I mean is, they are very much individual people, and gender is mostly irrelevant. You will not get any romance, and certainly no romantic happy endings in his books.

I liked the Divine Cities trilogy a lot, mostly because I adored the character of Mulaghesh, but also because asshole gods is a genre I enjoy. Each book is pretty much self-contained and is centered on a different character (though the major characters appear in all three) and take place over a long timespan.

I liked Foundryside a lot, but the rest of the books in the trilogy were a little on the weird side for me. The industrial magic premise is one I really love, but the asshole gods here were a little too powerful and bizarre, and the ending left me unsatisfied in many respects.

I felt as though American Elsewhere (one of his earlier novels) leaned a bit more into the horror than I personally enjoy. It was also very bizarre and ended up going in a very different direction than I expected it would.

[cahn]

Hm. I would say that the last 5% does not make worth slogging through the other 95% worth it, but it might be worth skipping directly to. I'm trying to think if there's anything that you would need to know to skip straight there, and I'm not sure.

Margaret Kemble was great!

I really like Bennett's work for the most part, and I think that one of his hallmarks is that his male characters and female characters are mostly completely independent from being male or female - that is, you can imagine swapping them out for the opposite sex without changing anything in the narrative other than pronouns.

Ohhhh I really like this, actually. Okay, yeah, I might have to check him out more.

Not having any romance is... actually right now it is a major plus (as I have to read straight-up romance for other reasons, and am finding that i don't really have a very high tolerance for it).

[greenwoodside]

Re Robert Jackson Bennett.

Like you, I really enjoyed Tainted Cup.

The Divine Cities Trilogy is definitely worth giving another go to. I finished it last month. That being said, I did have reservations about it -- for a start, I wished the detective duo at the centre had been kept together for a few more books. I enjoyed their dynamic, and I think it could have worked brilliantly as a means to explore the DC world, as well as giving certain aspects of the finale much more power.

A word of warning -- Bennett in Divine Cities did like killing off sympathetic characters -- plus one of the male characters, whom I liked in book 1 and most of book 2, by book 3 does read to me as rather cliched. But I still found the series gripping. Fun to read after work when I want to relax and go elsewhere by hook or by crook or by book.

And I do feel Bennett is developing and changing as a writer, getting stronger and shedding some of the "baby author" tics, so I'm looking forward to reading along with him in that respect.

I'm reading the first book of the Founders trilogy now. Finding it hard to get into, and not sure why. I suspect I will be sucked in later -- I'm not getting any DND vibes off it.

I normally love Tchaikovsky, but Service Model and Alien Clay didn't work for me. Alien Clay felt like too much of a retread of his earlier works. Service Model I didn't finish -- despite enjoying the start -- because it seemed a bit one note, like something that started as a funny-macabre short story and was allowed to balloon beyond all need.

Tchaikovsky is so prolific that I do wonder if he should take a year's break from writing to refresh himself. But I bet he's not the kind of personality that can do that.

[greenwoodside]

Of course, the instant after posting "maybe Adrian should go on an extended holiday" I saw rachelmanija's very positive review of his recent novel Shroud.

So maybe he should continue being the most workaholic author in modern SF/F! Don't stop, man. Keep typing.

[rachelmanija]

Haha. I felt like Shroud was a bit like a way more enjoyable version of Alien Clay. Service Model sounds like not my cup of tea at all.

[cahn]

That's a relief! I was surprised by how much I bounced off Alien Clay, and felt like Service Model was just so padded with what seemed like extraneous stuff -- I think I'd liked the previous stuff I read by him rather better.

[greenwoodside]

Service Model -- I was a bit disappointed by it because I did really enjoy the start. I think one of the problems was that Uncharles* was too much of a robot to be a compelling central character. Even though Tchaikovsky's playfulness and cleverness are there (well, they're visible in the Wikipedia summary I've just read to bring back my memory of the book), the unemotional, task-queuing driven narration sucked the life out of it.

* written as an actual robot rather than an autism analogue like Murderbot

[cahn]

Hee, I guess it says something about me that I actually liked (at least at the beginning) the parts where he was trying to queue tasks and so on -- in fact I thought that a real robot might have been even more so -- but yeah, it's hard to sustain that kind of thing over an entire book without it getting really old.

[cahn]

Ugh, thanks for letting me know about the killing off of sympathetic characters. It's not a dealbreaker or anything, but it is the kind of thing I like knowing beforehand so I can brace myself.

And I do feel Bennett is developing and changing as a writer, getting stronger and shedding some of the "baby author" tics, so I'm looking forward to reading along with him in that respect.

I do wonder whether my bouncing off City of Stairs had a little to do with his not having been quite as strong an author at that point as he is now. Pretty exciting to see an author developing and getting better!

Yeah, I remember liking the previous Tchaikovskys that I read better than these. But re your comment below, I wonder if maybe he just experiments with a lot of things and some of them don't work, which is fair.

[greenwoodside]

Yeah, I remember liking the previous Tchaikovskys that I read better than these. But re your comment below, I wonder if maybe he just experiments with a lot of things and some of them don't work, which is fair.

Could well be! I certainly check his Amazon page a lot just to see what's in the pipeline from him, knowing there's a fair chance I'll be surprised.

[wendelah1]

I thought the romance was the least interesting aspect of The Ministry of Time. Nothing about the time travel stuff made sense, even given the low bar for time travel plots in general.

[cahn]

Heh. I was there for the time traveler hangouts, those were great. I must admit I never did figure out what was going on with the Brigadier exactly, but the rest of it I assumed was a standard time loop that "Adela" went through. I admit that it still isn't a very good Watsonian explanation for why all the ministry stuff is so silly!

[wendelah1]

I'm reading another time loopy novel On the Calculation of Volume. The first two volumes (of eight) were translated into English from Danish It was shortlisted for the Booker prize for translation. It's surprisingly engrossing considering everything takes place on the same day. Repeatedly. And then differently of course.

[cahn]

Ohhhhh I saw that at the library a while back and didn't know if it would be any good, so I didn't pick it up. But I'll definitely pick it up next time, thank you!

[landofnowhere]

Robert Jackson Bennett: after you finish A Drop of Corruption, read Foundryside and its sequels -- they are doing some really cool and ambitious things with fantasy steampunk! The third book doesn't work as well as the first two, but they're all interesting.

[cahn]

Ah, cool! I will look that up, thanks!

[landofnowhere]

I also have as a long-standing complaint about media in general that whenever there's an unequal partnership, the person in the position of intellectual power, the chess-player who is the mover and placer of the pawn(s) on the boards, is always a man -- though the other person in the partnership may be a woman. And I was charmed to see that reversed here, with Ana being the mover and placer.

Interesting! I'm aware this is a problematic trope in general, but I think my own media consumption is nontraditional enough that I find it much easier to think of examples of the opposite, starting with Lloyd Alexander's Vesper Holly series, which was strongly formative for me. But also Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities and Alexis Hall's The Affair of the Mysterious Letter (Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes AU with gender-swapped Sherlock).

[cahn]

Oh, ha -- I read Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, of course, and those were formative for me, but I never got into the Vesper Holly books. I'm not sure why, as I should have been exactly the right age for them. (I did read the first two or three, but they weren't books that stuck with me.) I've also not read the other books you mention, I will have to put them on my list! So maybe I'm just not reading the right books :)

[lightgetsin]

I have lots of RJB opinions. The sequel to Tainted Cup blows out the world building in lots of cool ways that I really liked, and even almost made me care about the characters, who I found uninteresting in the first book. It made me realize how unusual it is to find a fantasy series where the sequel genuinely is better/more complex.

I like the Divine Cities books a lot, and they continue to be my favorite of his. They are in a different mode than a lot of fantasy about colonialism, and they take big narrative risks. I also found them nuanced and tender with a lot of hard things.

The Founders trilogy stands or falls on whether you find the premise -- a sort of magically based programming -- to be super interesting or not. I found it moderately interesting, and thus was my enjoyment of the books.

I will say for him in general that he is the rare male fantasy author who has almost never made me tilt my head and make the squinty face when he writes about women. Which he does a lot. And should continue to do, please and thank you.

[cahn]

Oh cool, I am now looking forward to the sequel even more. I did actually like the characters in the first book, though I did feel Ana and Din are certainly characters in the way of classic detective novels (that is to say, their personhood isn't nearly as important as their detecting functions).

Ooh, it sounds like I might like both those sets of books. Magically based programming actually does sound pretty interesting.

I definitely did like the way he wrote the women in Tainted Cup! Glad to know that is a consistent thing.

[mildred_of_midgard]

As you know, I can barely read fiction, and lately I can barely read anything, and I still managed to read and love Tainted Cup!

[cahn]

That's amazing! Huh, that makes me wonder if there are other fiction books you would be able to read. Though I don't think I've read anything else lately that's like Tainted Cup!

[primeideal]

I mostly enjoyed "Divine Cities"! It can be somewhat bury-your-gays, and the places where it's kind of like "fantasy Russia, fantasy India, fantasy 'this is why RL institutional religion is often bad'" are not too original. But the weird worldbuilding and pantheons and spycraft are great.

I read the first 2/3 Founders books and it was like..."touch-starved woobie and also Did You Know Slavery Is Bad?" Like, I enjoy hard fantasy systems, that was a plus for me, but it didn't really grab me.

[cahn]

Hm! Okay, I'm glad to be warned about those things. I will probably give it a shot (another shot, for City of Stairs) and see how it goes... we'll see!

[hidden_variable]

I also really liked The Tainted Cup, and I’m midway through A Drop of Corruption right now. The worldbuilding is definitely very cool—I like how they have what in many ways is very sophisticated technology, but completely biology-based, so everything is gooey and squishy and made out of parasitic worms or weird mushrooms that smell bad, so it’s sort of a visceral reflection of the corruption inherent in the empire. And I’m assuming they’re building up to some horrifying revelation about the origin of the leviathans…

I also found the gender-role reversal refreshing. It’s nice that there doesn’t seem to be much built-in sexism in this universe; a lot of officers at all levels are women, and no one has anything in particular to say about that. And Ana and Din’s relationship is kind of weirdly heartwarming in its own bizarre way.

[cahn]

I like how they have what in many ways is very sophisticated technology, but completely biology-based, so everything is gooey and squishy and made out of parasitic worms or weird mushrooms that smell bad, so it’s sort of a visceral reflection of the corruption inherent in the empire.

Yes! But also how it's just a very different vibe than the sort of, idk, metal/silicon-based vibe that I usually associate with technology, and I just found that all fascinating. I also am very curious about the leviathans!

I did really like Ana and Din's relationship, which like you say is bizarre but also seems to work really well for both of them.