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

[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.