Hugo novellas, part 1 (of presumably 2)

[cahn]

Hi happy somewhat delayed Hugo season!

I have been flirting with the novels but I guess my attention span these days is novella-sized, so that's all I've managed to get through so far.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom) - On a starship where the inhabitants manage the long travel by recording their minds and swapping out bodies, a detective wakes up in another body and must investigate a murder, not just of a body but also of minds... I liked it! It wasn't super deep, and I was a bit side-eying the nod towards a potential ship at the end given what we know, but there was a lot of fun worldbuilding and yarn (knitting is both a character point and a minor plot point). I loved Ruthie and John, my faves.

The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK) - A fairy tale where Celia, the youngest of the Grand Duke Veris' three children, deals with the aftermath of the summer war with the magical faerie-like summerlings and the fallout in her own family while navigating her own heritage.

I really really liked this one, actually. I just think Novik matches up very well with what I want, thematically, and of course her writing is great. There was one character I was like, well, this is obviously the most interesting character, and was pleased that the author was not uninterested.

Spoilers!

I am of course talking about Veris here. From Argent's POV he seems like a run-of-the-mill homophobe, but even though Celia kind of thinks so too, she also sees that he actually doesn't particularly care about the gay thing, he just cares very very much about having to be very very careful as he has had to be his whole life (in other ways). So I really liked that characterization which I thought was quite interesting (much more interesting than if he had just been a regular homophobe), and I loved that he came back at the end and was able to redeem himself a bit. And then of course the recurring theme of "let's save everyone, not just the people we love," which I always adore, and also I absolutely positively adored how the whole family figured themselves out and came together. I am SUCH a sucker for that. I really loved how Novik had such empathy for each one of them, and understood that sometimes people can be jerks (and in fact each of them behaves badly at one point or another) but it doesn't mean that's the entirety of their character.

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire; Titan UK) - I always like Kingfisher's writing but I think I can get a tiny bit tired of it? So I read the first of these, What Moves the Dead, a couple of years ago and enjoyed it a lot but then didn't feel like I needed to read any more in this series. Then I read this one and I enjoyed it but felt like I'd already kind of read it? Alex Easton, the narrator of these books, is a sworn soldier (with ka/kan pronouns) in the fictional country of Gallacia. Ka helps investigate odd horror-ish events... so, yeah, that was the plot of both of them. This one is set in the US. I guess the difference is that

Spoilers for both books

in the first book they destroyed the fungus, and in this book, they saved the organism, yay! In both books it was very clear that Kingfisher's sympathy was with the non-human character, so it was nice for it to end well for it here.

Comments

[greenwoodside]

Avoiding reading The Summer War spoilers, but I love Novik's work and I'm happy you'd recommend this one.

I've been waiting for the price to come down, which finally seems to be happening, yay!

[cahn]

Yay! I hope you like it! I loved it -- I think it's got a lot of similarities to her more recent novels (which I also love).

[hamsterwoman]

I have no read any of these yet (well, I'm reading The Summer War, but not finished yet so avoiding spoilers), but the premise of Murder by Memory sounds interesting -- maybe I'll adopt that one as my next ePub book (since I'm slogging through the Novik in the PDF).

I am following my methodology* of starting with the shortest things first, and so far have read the poems and short stories, and ma finishing up the novelettes, so looking forward to you getting to those :)

(*One of the things I like about reading the shorter fiction is that they also help me vote on Editor Short Form and Semiprozine, as there's usually some overlap.)

[cahn]

Murder by Memory was fun! Oof, I hate reading in PDF. I was lucky enough my library had it in e-book -- not epub, so I couldn't read it on my kindle, but in some sort of e-book app I could load on my phone.

Haha, I may get to the short stories and novelettes last because they're so short, hee. I feel like I should do the novels as early on as possible while I still have some momentum :) (Though this has still not really happened...)

I think I'm going to skip the YA category this year, though. I just can't muster any enthusiasm for any of the entries.

[hamsterwoman]

I have now finished Murder by Memory and liked it a lot! I agree that it's not super deep, and I'm not sure how well the worldbuilding would hold up to rigorous examination, but at no point was I tempted to rigorously examine it, I was just having fun with a detective story in space :D

and I was a bit side-eying the nod towards a potential ship at the end given what we know

I actually found it kind of hilarious in a femme fatale tradition XD

I feel like I should do the novels as early on as possible while I still have some momentum :)

See, MY fear is that getting into the novels will sap my momentum, which is why I'm hoping to get through everything else first :)

I'm actually looking forward to the YA category, mostly because of the Rachel Hartman book, but another nominee is also an author I've read and reasonably enjoyed before (though would not have described as Hugo caliber at the time. Maybe they've come along, though. Hopefully they have!)

[cahn]

Haha, exactly!! Like, I didn't really worry too much about poking the worldbuilding too much, it was just fun :) I'm glad you liked it!

See, MY fear is that getting into the novels will sap my momentum, which is why I'm hoping to get through everything else first :)

Hee, this is also a concern for me. I think last year this happened to me, in fact. Maybe I should be doing the short stories/novelettes in tandem with the novels...

Oh, right, Rachel Hartman! I suppose I should read that one, at least. Which is the other nominee you've read and enjoyed?

[hamsterwoman]

Which is the other nominee you've read and enjoyed?

C.B.Lee, whose early YA work -- Not Your Sidekick and I can't remember if I read/started/just vaguely poked at the sequel -- I found cute and reasonably fun but definitely not Hugo(/Lodestar) caliber. But that book is from 2016, so it's reasonable that Lee has upleveled as an author in that time, and I'm curious to see where they've gone from there.

Maybe I should be doing the short stories/novelettes in tandem with the novels...

If you decide to, me and the folks who are planning to do Worldcon together this year as well are posting our thoughts here as we go, and currently 3 of us have made it through the short stories and most of the novelettes.

[cahn]

Oh, okay, I haven't read any C.B. Lee! Maybe I will read the YA after all...

I did end up reading the short stories and novelettes! I will hopefully have some thoughts on them soon.

[hamsterwoman]

Ooh, looking forward to your short stories and novelette thoughts! (I have now also posted mine; "Missing Helen" and "Never Eaten Vegetables" were my respective favorites.)

I am now 47% into the C.B.Lee and it's definitely not a transcendent work of staggering genius or anything, but I'm finding it cute enough to sustain my attention. It's set in ~LA, and the two protagonists are high-school-aged Asian-American girls, one of whom is a fanfic-writing, D&D-playing nerd with a bullet journal and a million extracurriculars, that very fondly reminds me of a lot of people both I and my kids went to school with :)

[cahn]

Haha, I've finally posted my novelette thoughts (short stories to come). I didn't gel with "Never Eaten Vegetables," for some reason, but I think "Missing Helen" might have been my favorite short story too!

Aww, I was a fanfic-writing, D&D-playing Asian-American nerd with a million extracurriculars too :) (I didn't have a bullet journal, or whatever the equivalent would have been, though! I was/am not particularly organized :) )

[hamsterwoman]

I'm sad to report that 'Coffeeshop' started to lose me around the 50% mark and I finished it feeling rather annoyed... but I did enjoy the fanfic-writing, D&D-playing Asian-American nerd with a million extracurriculars, and am happy to have met her... :)

And, off to comment on the novelettes!

[hamsterwoman]

I have now also finished The Summer War, so coming back to say that I also really enjoyed it, and also found Veris to be the most interesting character (in fact, I think the "how Father won the Summer War" flashback was probably my favorite bit of the novella). And YES to enjoying how the family comes together at the end to resolve things and reconcile in a way that didn't feel twee but that I was definitely rooting for.

[cahn]

Yay!! I'm so glad you liked it and also that you too found Veris to be super interesting. I also really loved the "how Father won the Summer War" flashback! And I am just always here for families figuring themselves out and being functional.

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I found a copy of the Kingfisher one, but I wasn't thrilled. Kingfisher can't (or isn't inclined) to do a period style, and won't really do a period setting either. (What Stalks is set in 1898 or so, just after the Spanish-American War--- hence all the Guam references. The miner's headlamp (initially an acetylene burning carbide lamp) seems to have evolved around 1900, taking over from the Victorian gas-burning safety lamp, and then giving way to electric lamps around 1914-18. So our protagonist shouldn't be able to "turn off" kes lamp in the mine, nor need a lighter to detect firedamp--- the lamp should be burning something flammable, and the flame (shielded from exploding by a thin scrim of gauze) should change color slightly as the amount of methane around them rises.

Which is not important, except it's all like that. I know relatively little about Albanian sworn virgins, either, but I feel Kingfisher's choice to use an actual cultural institution which real people were part of as a kind of Ruritanian fantasy through which to project non-binary-ness into the 19th century is a bit lazy.

Weird fiction is supposed to be *weirder* than this. It feels like the kind of thing my roleplaying group would come up with on an off night when nobody can stay in character and the monster isn't scaring anyone.

[cahn]

Hee. I was definitely reading this as a sort of fantasy set in a world that was not really period. (Probably helpful for Kingfisher that right now I'm reading a lot of fic that's like that for canon-specific reasons.) So I didn't object to that particularly as a result (though I do prefer period style/setting), although it did mean that I didn't really think about it taking place at a particular time versus "vague time in American past," even with all the Guam references.

It was a bit annoying, yeah, that it's not all that weird in general. Like, I shouldn't think when I end the book that my enjoyment of it was directly related to how much I had forgotten about the previous book, because they were the same book. Which shouldn't be the case, as you note, if the worldbuilding were sharper, but which I also think has to do with the simplicity of the plot and also Kingfisher's sympathies, like, I got the distinct impression that she just wanted to write a fix-it for the collective organism.

[ase]

Hah. I took nine - nine! -sequential days of vacation leading up to and including the Memorial Day long weekend. The original plan was to travel. I actually spent most of that time cross-stitching while listening to Hugo novel and novella nominees on audiobook. (The SFPL gets high marks for its ebook and audiobook license purchases.)

I knocked out the Kingfisher first of the novellas; I missed the year the other story was nominated, and also somehow missed that Gallacia (Galicia?) is an actual place. It felt vaguely placed compared to the European geography I could pull out of memory, so I assumed Kingfisher was doing bog-standard Ruritania with bonus queer history insertion. Huh. I wasn't 100% in sympathy before learning that, and using real history as a way to invent a convenient backstory doesn't make me feel better about it. Especially since I finished The Everlasting yesterday!

"Murder By Memory" - it was a story, all right. "Not deep" is about my take, too. Nice job artfully arranging "enemies, but also lovers" femslash hooks in the finale. I'm not sure if the murder mystery is considered a fair or unfair puzzle, I'm too busy trying to figure out if the not-a-generation-ship premise includes someone doing significant ship labor behind the knitting and finance scenes.

"The Summer War" it's a reasonable Novik story. The driving theme seems to be "I deeply regret my angry words": Celia cursing Argent; Veris trying to hammer Argent into being not gay, or at least not out of the closet; Elithyon swearing oath after rash oath until upholding one means breaking the next. Lucky for the characters that Celia is in a spot to untangle the mess. It's not the most elaborate plot Novik's done, but I enjoyed it.

[cahn]

Cross-stitching while listening to audiobook sounds lovely!

and also somehow missed that Gallacia (Galicia?) is an actual place. It felt vaguely placed compared to the European geography I could pull out of memory, so I assumed Kingfisher was doing bog-standard Ruritania with bonus queer history insertion.

Huh, I missed this too -- I thought it was also Ruritania (although I think I'd heard somewhere that the sworn soldier stuff was vaguely real).

I wasn't 100% in sympathy before learning that, and using real history as a way to invent a convenient backstory doesn't make me feel better about it. Especially since I finished The Everlasting yesterday!

Ahhhhh I am a quarter through The Everlasting and I feel it is a reasonably compelling book in terms of prose but it is this constant irritation to me that Harrow seems to be taking advantage of all the resonances from King Arthur and also Britain in both WWI and WWII but without, you know, any of the fuss of having to engage with the depth of actual history. I think. Maybe there's, like, multiverse shenanigans that will make me feel better about this? I guess we'll see. I'm hoping to finish this one this weekend.

"The Summer War" it's a reasonable Novik story. The driving theme seems to be "I deeply regret my angry words"

Ha, yes. It's very reasonable. Maybe not superlative, but I do feel like reasonable Novik is better than, well, a lot of other authors.