cahn

look at me gooooooo (I have more, but I will probably not continue to be this fast, we'll see)

- 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 63) - I mean, I thought this was nice and I don't regret reading it, but I think I like a little more plot to my stories? It's... basically what the title says.

- "In My Country" by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, Issue 223) - Hm. I thought this story, set in a fictional and somewhat allegorical-sounding country, was trying to do something interesting with the ambiguity of stories, but I think it would have benefitted from... being less allegorical and more ambiguous, perhaps? Like, I think part of the power of the ambiguity of stories comes from the part where people are real and also ambiguous, and that didn't quite come through so much for me here. But I thought it was interesting, anyway.

- Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything”] by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots, May 16, 2025) - One-note amusing disabled-superhero story with a Point. It was fun!

- “Missing Helen”( by Tia Tashiro (Clarkesworld, Issue 226) - This one I really liked. It asks interesting questions about clones from the human standpoint: what would it be like to know you had a clone out there, what would it be like for the clone, what would it be like for someone who knew the original you? How does that play into human relationships?

- “Six People to Revise You”( by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62) - okay, so, the conceit of the story -- you can be "revised," which I guess overhauls your whole personality, and the data for doing this comes from asking people around you -- is rather interesting. The story itself didn't engage with the things I wanted it to. Why do you have to ask other people how they would revise you? What does it mean to overhaul your personality, is what makes you you still there? And what does it mean to feel about yourself that you would want to be revised? (Would I want to be revised? The devil is in the details, of course. I could imagine details where I'd jump at the chance, and other details where I'd definitely not want to.) So, yeah, very interesting concept and I wish it had played more with the ambiguities inherent in it; the story clearly feels a certain unambiguous way about it which made it not very interesting to me. As a paired read with "Missing Helen," I thought "Helen" did a much better job of engaging with the humanity in its premise.

- “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld, Issue 229) - This is the only one of the six I read before nominations, and I didn't like it enough to read it again sooooo these thoughts are a few months old and my memory is terrible. But my recollection is that it was sort of an interesting comment on AI (I must confess that LLMs have gotten to the point as of now, June 2026, where I do have to constantly remind myself it's an algorithm even though I know very well it is... I wonder what it will be like for the people who are kids right now, growing up with AI that sound like people) with an ending that had a bit too much shock value to it.

Helen >> Wire Mother > Revise > Country > Visions > Laser, I guess? idek. Everything under Wire Mother I'm sort of ambivalent about.

Hey, I am reading Hugos stuff! I am behind on posting, though. Have the novelettes!
I must confess I was not particularly taken by any of these, but it may also be that I read them mostly while traveling and probably at least slightly grumpy :)

- “Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62) - this was the one that took me longest to read. I think... this could have been a lot fewer words. Basically, this is satire-esque AU Cold War with kaijus. It was fun, when I finally got through it, if a bit in-your-face.

- “Never Eaten Vegetables”( by tH.H. Pak (Clarkesworld, Issue 220) - Story about a ship carrying embryos that abruptly finds it has to parent a number of them. I think somehow I was the wrong audience for this story and I don't quite feel like I can articulate why? [ETA 6-1: oh wow. See discussion below. This story clearly hit me in a very particular way that I couldn't handle, and I'm retroactively feeling like it's a much stronger story than I could consciously give it credit for when I read it.] I felt like it was very "corporations are bad! They are the bad guys! Have we mentioned this??" and also was trying to get me to feel things via parenting, but I never really did because the parenting didn't feel real to me, and I was not very surprised to find the author is not themself a parent. idk. I think for some reason, that may not really have been the writer's fault, I never quite gelled with the characters enough, even though sentient ships and things like that are usually my jam.

- “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells (Reactor, July 10, 2025) - Martha Wells, like several other authors on this list, is very hit or miss for me, and this one was a miss. I was vaguely aware that this takes place as sort of a Murderbot-adjacent story, but it turns out that Murderbot itself is the draw for me; I couldn't really make myself care that much about the people or the ship, for some reason -- perhaps because I didn't remember enough about Murderbot, I didn't really get why I should care.

- “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For”( by Cameron Reed (Reactor, April 2, 2025) - This story just kind of confused me. It started out life as a Cyteen-esque story about genetics and environment and its intersection with a corporate sort of mentality (which was fine, although I think I'd rather just go read Cyteen again) and then veered somewhat sharply into

I guess this is a spoiler

a desperate flight narrative where they have to run for their lives from a rival corporation who has demolished the one they were working for

. I felt like the sharp change made the story a bit incoherent to me? I guess it's trying to say something about different bodies, but I never quite caught up to the plot shift to get to the point where I was engaging thematically, I guess?

- "The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 67) -- so I feel like Pinsker can be very "is this story meant for you or not" but this story about two girls in a traveling show together, one of whom is a mentalist and the other of whom is an illusionist, was very much meant for me. It's not a story that has well-defined answers, but that's kind of the point (and perhaps now I know to expect that from a Pinsker story so I don't get blindsided by it any more), and I really enjoyed the relationship between the two girls and all the unspoken depths of it (which although complex is not written as explicitly romantic, which I highly approve of and I want more stories with complex friendship that isn't explicitly romantic yes please thanks!).

- “When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 65) - I always sort of brace myself when I see Valente's name, but for this piece about a vampire/succubus in rural America (which apparently is a Dolly Parton songfic?), she actually toned down her trademark over-the-top-ness enough that I actually liked it?? I did feel like it didn't quite draw the characters vividly enough that the end scene really felt earned -- and what's wrong with people who make the best of their circumstances anyway?? The way the story kind of denigrated that didn't sit well with me, as someone who tends to want to complain about my circumstances rather than make the best of them (and who very much admires people who do the latter).

Gosh, I don't know how I'd vote on this?? Probably something like this:

Millay > Kaiju > When He Calls > My Mother Is Leaving > Vegetables > Rapport > No Award, I guess?
6-1: I think I'm moving Vegetables up. Millay > Kaiju > Vegetables, I think? I feel like I should move the Millay down but I still like it better than the others...

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.

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

Hey heeeey Hugo books are out and although I am feeling kind of unmotivated for most of the categories, I might actually end up reading some of the novels. In the meantime I am researching romance novels for Reasons (beta reasons) and have read some romance or romance-adjacent books, one of which doubles as Hugo reading.

( Romancing the Beat (nonfic), Yours Truly, The Friend-Zone Experiment, A Sorceress Comes to Call )

Doc put a new splint on so let's experiment with posting (and maybe even commenting?) a bit. Will still not be posting/commenting as usual for at least the next month, but Hugo deadline is tomorrow, so... here are my novel/novella picks in order.

Novel:
-Some Desperate Glory (but you all knew that)
-Saint of Bright Doors (I had issues with it but it was doing interesting things, which I value for Hugo voting)
-Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
-Translation State
-Witch King (did not manage to finish)
-Starter Villain (did not manage to start, but I'm sure it's fine)

Novella:
-Mammoths at the Gates (which I loved, and which moved me the most, after not particularly gelling with the other Singing Hills novellas after the first)
-Seeds of Mercury (I'm inclined to rate the Chinese nominees higher, and I thought this one was interesting)
-Rose/House (intriguing)
-Mimicking of Known Successes (*)
-Thornhedge (enjoyed)
-Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet (I kind of feel like I could have summed this up in 3 sentences and saved myself the trouble of reading it)

(*) I thought it was fine in general, but I discovered while reading it that while I really like having spectrum-coded characters as the POV character, I intensely dislike having that character as the love interest (or at least did in this case) because I can see how annoying one can be and I do not like feeling seen like that! :)

The Saint of Bright Doors (Vajra Chandrasekera)

Fetter, raised as a child to kill his father, escapes his rural cult upbringing to live in the big city... but his past haunts him in more ways than one.

...I feel like that is a terrible way of describing this book. Perhaps if I say: it has the sensibility to me of a magical realism book, set in a world that has a lot in common with ours (email! committees!) but is not quite ours (devils, the mysterious bright doors of the title), or perhaps is not yet ours -- is that any better a description? Maybe not. Anyway, I thought it was trying to play with some interesting ideas and themes and I like seeing that kind of thing in the Hugos. On the other hand, I kept putting it down and not feeling any kind of impetus whatsoever to pick it up again. I felt rather as if there were short bursts of Important Plot Things Being Revealed interspersed with long passages where maybe something happened but it was not compelling or entirely comprehensible (sometimes because it was waiting for the next flash of lightning of Plot Things Being Revealed). Even something like 85% through (at which point you usually don't get any sense out of me until I finish the entire book), I ignored it for an entire day and on seeing my Kindle the next day was like, "oh, right, I haven't finished that book yet." Which I feel speaks to some fundamental problem with being able to sustain being compelling, or at least being compelling to me (it could well be a me problem).

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Shannon Chakraborty)

The title is basically what it's about, the adventures of the formerly-ex-pirate Amina al-Sirafi. She is hired/blackmailed into looking for her ex-crew-member's daughter, who studies the occult and may be mixed up in helping a Frank [European] get access to a powerful magical artifact. She starts gathering her old crew to help her in her quest, and they all start having adventures...

I liked it, it was easy to read, and I totally appreciated that the main character was a middle-aged mom (and most of the supporting characters were middle-aged as well, for that matter). I also appreciated its taking place in the Muslim world, and occasionally had a rather embarrassing epiphany, like realizing that I'd actually never really thought about the Crusades from the Muslim viewpoint. I don't think this was meant to be a super profound book and I think that's OK; sometimes you want a rollicking adventure that makes you think differently about some things, and this fit that well.

I have been kind of busy and have not been doing my Hugo reading as I should. But I finally got around to finishing at least the short stories and novelettes. Working on the novels, and the novellas are this big blank space for me right now. ( Novelettes and short stories: )

In the Imperial Radch universe, Enae's life gets upturned from sie's previous circumscribed existence as sie is given the task to track down someone who has been missing for a couple of hundred years; at the same time, Reet struggles with never fitting in, and Qven grows up in a milieu that is alien to a human POV.

So for some reason, the only part of this I knew before starting was a little bit of Enae's opening dilemma. It was a much more complex and fascinating book than my priors made it sound! Which I should expect from Leckie; I love about her work that it always has a whole lot of threads running through it.

It's the sort of book where there are so many things I could talk about, but it turns out that I really only want to talk about a couple of things enough to type it out:

a) I really really like alien books from the POV of the alien, which probably says something about me, but anyway, I really like the idea that things look very different from the alien's POV and that they might have very different motivations and imperatives than a human in many ways. (This is something I loved about the Ancillary books.) This book kind of did that superficially -- Qven's upbringing is certainly very, very different than a human's and I enjoyed reading that (unsurprisingly, I especially enjoyed reading Qven's viewpoints about human scripts) -- but as the book goes on, I feel like it becomes clear that e's upbringing is just flat abusive and there's just nothing good or acceptable about it, which makes it much less interesting to me.

b) There is one character in the book that was absolutely my favorite -- who does try to do the right thing to the extent they are capable of, for no other reason than that they feel it's the right thing, as they are likely to not have gotten any reward or happy ending from it. I am speaking, of course, of ( Spoilers. )

I'm really glad this was Hugo homework, because like everything I've read by Leckie it was very worth reading. I still prefer Some Desperate Glory for the Hugo because it played to all my tropes, engaged even more with questions that really interest me, and blew my mind in ways that TS didn't, but TS would be a worthy Hugo winner, and I could totally see others preferring it to SDG.

Inspired partially by

sophia_sol (but I might have done this anyway), I'm incorporating a very liberal attitude towards not finishing my Hugo reading.

The Kaiju Preservation Society (Scalzi) - DNF. I'm not actually asking about this one as I've decided I'm not going to finish this. It's not bad, it's light and frothy and fun, but I think I am willing to deal with light and frothy and fun when it's tropes I'm interested in (galactic empires in The Last Emperox) and not when it's not (kaiju).

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Moreno-Garcia) - Is there a payoff here for someone who hasn't read Island of Doctor Moreau? I didn't dislike it and am willing to read more if there is a payoff, but I'm worried that it will only be a payoff if you know something about the original. Also, independently of this book, should I read Island? (That is to say, I wouldn't read it just to read Daughter, but if I read it I might read Daughter afterwards.)

A Mirror Mended (Harrow) - is this worth finishing? I read and liked the first of these but I guess I'm not super convinced there's enough more to say in this multiverse... is there? I got far enough in this one to be aware of what the gimmick is likely to be, but I also think I am near saturation on reversed fairy tales. ~~Tanith Lee probably did it better anyway~~

DNF. I tried to read The Spare Man. I really did! It's got a great title! However, I got less than 150 pages in (I think I made it to page 125 or so).

-In the first few pages I was informed that the heroine was named "Tesla," and she was an extremely rich heiress. Going to Mars. Like... seriously? I suppose at the time the book was published I didn't have nearly as many thoughts and judgments about another billionaire this might remind us of as I do now, but... still. That was a choice that aged even worse than its initial presentation.

-On the very first page we're informed that Tesla's wedding ring is "platinum-iridium---just like the historic kilogram standard, because her spouse knew she was a nerd."
...Or maybe just because 90/10 platinum-iridium alloy is a pretty standard one for platinum jewelry?? I mean... I guess there's been a move towards platinum-ruthenium, especially for cast jewelry. So does that mean her ring is hand-fabricated, which would be rather cool?
...The point here is that, although I fully understand this is kind of a stupid example and only one that bothers me because I actually am a nerd in this area, I have the same problem with Tesla that I did with the Calculating Stars heroine: that she is supposed to be this big engineering nerd, but she doesn't actually think about things the way an engineering nerd would think about them. Or she does for the one paragraph where the plot requires her to do something nerd-like and then goes back to her non-nerd ways.

-Tesla's poor service dog Gimlet seems to be less of a service dog and more of a tool Tesla uses for social engineering (e.g., getting other people to talk to her by softening them up by petting a cute dog), which I feel like is maybe not the message one wants to be sending about service dogs...?

-Most importantly, there is something I found deeply, deeply classist about this book where the super-mega-rich billionaire takes great, great delight and righteous anger in punching down on people who have to work for a living and who are freaking trying to do their jobs. It's not even that I liked the space liner security folks, but when Tesla spends some astronomical sum of money to get her super-awesome lawyer to verbally punch out the head of security Wisor who, let us remember, has a lot of evidence at that point that Tesla's spouse Shal is the murderer -- that left a really bad taste in my mouth. Wisor is wrong, sure, and he could be more emotionally intelligent, sure, but the way Tesla throws her weight and money around so that she and her spouse aren't inconvenienced is just something else. (And her name, evoking another billionaire who likes to throw his weight around, doesn't help.)

We even get this from her POV: "There was a limit to how hard she could push without being a privileged asshole. To Josie. She'd definitely been one to Wisor, but he deserved it." No! That doesn't make it okay!

(I am weirded out how this got on the ballot with so many other works of the form "People in power SUCK," because this whole book is from the POV of someone in power who SUCKS.)

-I have no idea what her spouse Shal is like. Literally the only thing I knew about him 100 pages in was that he had formerly been a detective, because this is brought up kind of a lot. He seems to be bog-standard romance novel love interest, handsome and polite and considerate and probably it would be trivial to program a robot to respond exactly like him. At one point Tesla is asked, "How well do you know your spouse, anyway?" (because of all the preponderance of evidence against him) and instead of maybe thinking about that question? giving us some insight into how well she does know him?? anything??? she instead defaults to punching down on the person who asked it, because of course she does. I liked Shal, especially because he seemed to try to get her to do less of the punching down, but I didn't feel like I had any idea of why she was in love with him or why he was an interesting character or really anything about him! Oh, wait, there was one bit where he was able to make deductions like an ex-detective that was really cool, but again, just like Tesla, he turned that on briefly and then it wasn't plot relevant any more so we didn't get that any more. It would be cool if he made deductions about Tesla... and even more if that was why she loved him, maybe because she had no secrets from him? but... that's not what we got.

If you want me to care about your character's recent marriage, you kind of have to make me care about the spouse, and I just didn't.

-By page 100 I was only hate-reading to see what things I would hate next, but by page 125 I couldn't take Kowal's prose any more. There's a certain quality of compelling writing that Kowal just doesn't have for me.

In order of how much I had to say about them:

-When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (Vo) - Second Singing Hills novella about a cleric who collects stories. Not a Hugo nominee, but I wanted to read it so I could read the actual Hugo nominee (the third novella, which is currently on hold at the library). I liked it quite a lot, though not nearly as much as the first one, I think because it just didn't tap into my particular tropes quite as much (which is of course not Vo's fault).

-Ogres (Tchaikovsky) - Slight novella about a society in which the ogres lord it over the humans. It was pretty easy to figure out the main conceit, but I wasn't sure how it was going to end (and I liked the ending twist). Tchaikovsky continues to be a writer whose writing is very easy to read, which I appreciated.

The interesting thing about this one was I came away feeling like the novella was more deeply pessimistic about human nature than perhaps the author intended: humans can fix fairly dire problems, but humans are also infinitely corruptible, and in fact all the evidence available in the book is that these fixes only take place through profoundly hierarchical and subjugative means. ( Spoilers. )

The end is, I think, supposed to be hopeful, with its statement that sometimes you have to burn it all down. But given the events of the book, and that no one in the book seems to have thought at all about how to do it differently, I'm really not confident that what rises from the ashes is going to be any less hierarchical and subjugative than what was there beforehand... just that probably different entities are going to be at the top and the bottom.

-Even Though I Knew the End (Polk) - a queer noir story, set earlier in the last century, with a noir ex-warlock investigating murders in an alt-Chicago with demons and angels.

So the conceit is awesome, and I really enjoyed the writing here which I thought did live up to that conceit -- there is some lovely word-evocation and worldbuilding detail. My quibble is that I felt like there was something deeply incoherent about the worldbuilding and plotline.
( Spoilers. )

But even though those things bothered me, the writing was still strong enough that I liked it a lot!

Hugo nominees are out, and I have a bunch of stuff on hold and have also read the short story and novelette nominees that are available free and in English. I will post again if there is a packet with the other stories translated into English.

I think this year the theme is "people in power SUCK."

Short stories

“D.I.Y.”, by John Wiswell (Tordotcom, August 2022) - This is a story about a world in which the analogue of Hogwarts is a corporation with lots of power and it SUCKS. I... actually rather liked this one, in a way where I don't think it was being particularly subtle or saying something particularly profound, but it was satisfying to read.

“Rabbit Test”, by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2022) - hey, I read this before nominations! This is a story, clearly inspired by this last year, about how people in power SUCK when it comes to abortion. (I found it powerful and heartbreaking because uh apparently this is my single issue. It is also the story's single issue. Just so you know.)

Hmm. I think maybe DIY>Rabbit for me (possibly because Rabbit is a bit of a sore spot for me) but I could easily go the other way.

Novelettes

“The Difference Between Love and Time”, by Catherynne M. Valente (Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance, Solaris) - This is one of two stories I've read so far that didn't have the theme of People in Power SUCKING. Instead, it is about the space-time continuum embodied as a person, which is a conceit that I hated Very Very Much. I think I have to come to the conclusion that whenever Valente wants to even mention concepts that are physics-related, I can't staaaaaand it, it sets off something in my brain that's all "noooooo that's not right! that's not even wrong!"

The really irritating thing about this story is that I got to the end (only because it was Hugo homework!) and I actually... I actually liked the ending, I could see how it would be moving if I had, even a little bit, been able to buy into this whole space-time continuum personification thing (NO) (WHAT) (THIS IS SO DUMB) and ugh I can see why people might like it and why it got nominated! I just... I can't, okay. I won't vote for it below No Award but I will just complain about it a LOT here.

“If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You”, by John Chu (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2022) - People in power SUCK when it comes to superheroes. I liked that this story had an Asian superhero! That was cool! Otherwise I admit that lifting weights, which was a major setting of the story, is not super my thing. But the story was still fine.

“Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness”, by S.L. Huang (Clarkesworld, December 2022) - this is a story about how the rich and powerful SUCK but there may be a shadowy AI that is doing something about that. I had read this before nominations. I liked it but not enough to read it twice.

“We Built This City”, by Marie Vibbert (Clarkesworld, June 2022) - this is a story about how the uncaring corporate government SUCKS when it comes to people who are just trying to do their jobs and make things work. That's the story. It was fine.

“A Dream of Electric Mothers”, by Wole Talabi (Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, Tordotcom) - Two hours into the third session of our fourth cabinet meeting on the border dispute with the co-operative kingdom of Dahomey, my colleagues finally agree that we need to seek the dream-counsel of our electric mother. Oh YAY, a story that actually has a reasonably interesting speculative element, is not a story about how people in power SUCK!, and does not involve the personification of the space-time continuum!

Mothers > everything else, I'm not even sure how to vote on the rest of it (mostly because "Difference" is screwing up my thoughts; I had more of a reaction to it than the others but that reaction is both negative and positive!)

Novelette rec from

psocoptera which will be going on my ballot which I am filling out right now, darn it:

To Embody a Wildfire Starting, Iona Datt Sharma, Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

I mean... basically I will just read anything by Iona Datt Sharma and put it on my ballot if reminded; they are just so thoughtful and always asking interesting and compassionate questions. This is a secondary-world fantasy about demi-human-dragons (it's not at all like Earthsea but I think it's a little in conversation with it) and rebuilding after seizing power back from an extremist takeover, and I really liked it.

ETA: Also of note for nominators is that Spear (Griffith) is a novel, not a novella as I had thought!

I guess nomination season is beginning, thus also my annual panic of "huh, I haven't really read anything published in the last year..." Fortunately

sophia_sol had a post that inspired me to read/post about a couple of things! But this will be short because I am writing this during E's math competition - we'll see whether she finishes first or I do ;) [I did, as you can see!] I loved all of these and they are going on my ballot for sure. In the order in which I read them:

A Garter as a Lesser Gift (Gray, novella?) - 3+/5 - rec from

skygiants - I really, really liked this. Basically there was no chance I was not going to like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Arthuriana in a WWII AU :D It's quite well done the way the characters are both all their own selves and their doubled Arthuriana selves, so that a character does something and I would be like, "ah, of course that's how that person acts!"

The Sadness Box (Palmer, novelette) - Dystopia, with nanobots and artificial intelligence. I forget who posted about this (I could have sworn it was

psocoptera, but I don't see it in any of their posts) but, like. Palmer is my jam when she writes about robots/AI. I wouldn't call this story particularly deep, I don't think? but I love it anyway, okay, and it's also about people, and relationships, and what makes us human, as the best robot/AI stories are.

Unraveller (Hardinge, YA) - 3+/5 - This is my third full Hardinge, and so far she's three for three on unsettling worldbuilding, lovely prose, fascinating ideas, deeply dysfunctional relationships, and hope despite all those things. Here, the idea is that people in this world, when they are angry enough at someone else, grow "curse eggs" inside themselves that, when hatched, spring a curse on the one they're angry with. You can see what kinds of ramifications this might have, both good and bad, and so does Hardinge.

I thought it was great, but it didn't knock my socks off like Deeplight did. I think partially that I wasn't in the right frame of mind for reading about dysfunctional relationships right now. In addition the structure is a bit episodic -- they need to find clue X, so they go to place A to solve problem A'; that helps them find X, so then it's time to find Y, which takes them to place B to solve problem B'; and so on. Some of the characters do reappear, and there's certainly a through-arc, but there was a certain amount of "huh, I just got attached to this character, but now it's time to move on."

Now reading: Spear (Griffith, novella) - I absolutely adore Griffith's writing (I should read more by her) and also I just got to the (first?) reveal (!!), and I am dying to see what she does with this, and I forgot to pack it on this trip and I am kicking myself so hard (though I guess if I had I'd be reading it now instead of posting this, so there's that)

How much time do I have before nominations close? I could probably knock down one or two more...

So I spent the last month on three different trips, about which more later. Our family has now returned from the third of these trips, and very shortly thereafter got sick with covid (felt quite rotten for a day or two, not so bad now but still falling asleep at weird intervals) but also managed to read the rest of the Lodestar books.

A Snake Falls to Earth (Darcie Little Badger) - 3-/5. About Nina, a Lipan girl in a Texas much like ours, and Oli, a cottonmouth-person living in the Reflecting World connected to Nina's. I had high hopes for this book, having found Elatsoe charming, but this book didn't work well for me. Nina's sections were great, but the Oli sections just didn't work for me. The worldbuilding didn't seem coherent enough for me to understand when Oli and his compatriots would act like people in this world and when they would act like animals (as opposed, say, to LeGuin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" where it makes more intuitive sense to me, which I know is a flawed comparison for a host of reasons, but again, once I'm comparing you to Le Guin, you've probably lost the war), and, perhaps as a result, I never really felt like I connected with any of the Reflecting World characters (except, weirdly, Ami, who never says anything but whom I loved). I was looking forward to the Nina and Oli sections coming together, but it had the opposite effect from what I had hoped -- then the Nina sections also became less interesting to me, because there were all these characters I hadn't formed connections to.

Redemptor (Ifueko) - 3(-,+)/5. Sequel to Raybearer, in which Tarisai must deal with her Empire, uniting a bunch of countries, bring justice to the downtrodden, and make a journey into the Underworld. So -- the second half of this is pretty good! Ifueko has grown as a writer and doesn't fall into some of the writing traps that she did in her first book, although the integration of the subplots is occasionally still a bit rough, and the whole Underworld timing had the air of "eh, I said it would be a couple of years before Tar goes into the Underworld, but I ran out of plot hooks early, so we'll just get this over with early." But there's a lot that's good here -- the end of the Crocodile and what it meant for Tar, for instance; and her solution to the Underworld problem (probably predictable for someone who was paying more attention than I was, but still immensely satisfying). And the new minor character Adukeh is awesome in her little bits of on-page time :D Relatedly, one of my favorite elements is the chants and songs and stories that pepper the narrative, which I felt were integrated better into this book than Raybearer, or maybe I was more used to them? Anyway, I liked them a lot.

This is, however, Ifueko's first "second book," and the first half was such a slog for me because there is a real art to re-introducing characters and plotlines readers haven't thought about for a year, and Ifueko hasn't quite figured it out yet, and I was mostly both confused and bored a lot. However, I'm glad I pushed through because overall I think it was good. Anyway, I will chalk this up as a flawed but compelling outing, and I look forward to more Ifueko.

Lodestar voting:
Last Graduate >> Chaos > Redemptor > Victories > Iron > Snake

So I read some YA for the Lodestar.

Victories Greater than Death (Anders) - 3/5 - Girl grows up on Earth knowing she's not actually a human, but the avatar of a great alien hero who will someday go to space and be great and heroic. The one recognizable as YA because the fight against terrible evil etc. is just about as important as whether your crush likes you back. It was readable, unlike the last Anders where I quit about a third of the way through, and I liked it -- just very YA.

Iron Widow (Zhao) - 3/5 - Retelling of the rise of Empress Wu Zetian only with a bunch more giant robots. This is the one recognizable as YA because you can tell the good guys by the fact that they are the only ones spouting enlightened twenty-first century viewpoints, while everyone else is really, really into subjugating the wimmenfolk in archaic Bad Guy ways that are definitely not sympathetic at all, and if you ever feel the faintest inclination to sympathize with anyone who isn't one of the heroes, that's the signal for the narrative to make sure that person does something even worse. Meanwhile, the heroes also do bad things, but hey, it's just because people were mean to them first, and at least they're not subjugating women! (I do think this part is going somewhere and is not necessarily considered good by the narrative, but we won't see until the next book. Relatedly, I should mention it ends on a cliffhanger.)

I should say that this was a quite compelling book -- Zhao is not a bad writer, and this was not at all a bad first book in terms of plotting and pacing. But in terms of characterization and worldbuilding, what I wanted it to be was either She Who Became the Sun with giant robots, where everyone had more consistently period-ish viewpoints, or something that leaned into the giant robots part and had everyone be super with-it futuristic internet cyber personalities. Either would have been fine!
But what I actually got was some sort of weird mishmash of the two, where everyone clomped around with giant robots and internet social media, but also literal bound feet, and it was hard for my head to reconcile all of it. Even when you don't count the part where I kept getting thrown out that the good guys all sounded like they had come from tumblr and everyone else sounded like generic One-Note Bad Guys.

Chaos on Catnet (Kritzer) - 3++/5 - Sequel to Catfishing on Catnet, but with a much better title. Hijinks with Catnet's AI and their friends which rapidly turn into a thriller. This is the one recognizable as YA because the YA character downloads a completely random social media app in the first few chapters just because a classmate tells her to. (I have definitely done my share of dumb things as a teenager, so I could have rolled with this -- except that with Steph's and her mom's history, I cannot believe her mom never told her not to download random social media apps?? Without even clearing them with her first?? Like, my kids know they're not supposed to do that and we have never had someone after us, much less for years.)

Anyway, I loved this book, which continues to have the comfort-read strengths of Catfishing in a very strong friend group and a very strong celebration of friendship, both internet and otherwise, as well as is an extremely compelling thriller -- and adds more strengths in the varied and awesome adult characters, and I was so glad when Steph finally told her mom about what was going on. The book ended really abruptly, though! Not in a cliffhangery way at all, just in a "OK, we won over the big bad, now we'll have a couple of pages of epilogue to wrap up, the end!" and she had managed to ratchet the tension high enough (she's really good at that!) that my heart was still racing and I was still all "so is anyone still after them?? Is something else going to happen?? Oh... it's the afterword? Oh, I guess it must be all OK then."

Definitely I would recommend reading Catfishing first, so as not to spoil it; if you don't like Catfishing, there's no reason to pick this one up, as it's more of the same, but if you do, this one is good too! (with the mild caveats above)

I read these! I just... kind of don't have a lot to say about them? They were (with one exception) fine! But not really standouts really, even the ones that I liked?

"Bots of the Lost Ark" (Palmer) - I totally enjoy Palmer's bot stories, and this was no exception! If you've read one of Palmer's bot stories you know what you're in for -- an enjoyable bot adventure.

"Colors of the Immortal Palette" (Yoachim) - Did you know that it's bad to discount woman artistes just because they're women? Okay, that's not all the story is about, but for the first half or so it seemed like that was quite a lot of it. I also felt like, for a story that was all about art, I never really got the sense of the craft and the skill of the art that I wanted to. Anyway, this was a more strongly written story than I'm making it sound, and I did like it, but sometimes it could be pretty unsubtle about its agenda.

"L'Esprit de L'Escalier" (Valente) - If you think reading a story about That Guy as Orpheus in a modern marriage with a zombie Eurydice sounds fun, you will love this story. If you think this sounds like a nightmare, you probably won't like it. I was somewhere in between -- I thought it was interesting with some interesting ideas, and it definitely ranks higher than some Valente I've read, but it's neither a favorite or a dis-favorite.

"O2 Arena" (Ekpeki) - I really didn't like this story and I'm kind of amazed that other people (like Nebula voters) seem to like it. The writing is just not great. It seems full of telling, not showing; it's is all very dystopia, and it features a woman who gets cancer and is eventually fridged to motivate the main character, and it's even more preachy than the Yoachim. I had to wonder why our society still looks [sic] down on women so much. Was gasping your lungs out in between toiling to purchase filters and breathable air in an atmosphere ruined by global warming not enough? Or was the audacity of being here, daring to compete with men in the most lucrative and influential profession in the Republic, simply too bold?

"That Story Isn't the Story" (Wiswell) - this was fine! Story of a kid who escapes.

"Unseelie Brothers, Ltd." (Wilde) - again, this was fine! I enjoyed it! I always like stories where people make things and which are shiny, and the shiny dresses here were great. And unlike "Palette,"
I felt like I understood why the dress-making was interesting (though, idk, it may just be that I have been interested in crochet lately, which is sort-of-kind-of related I guess, and not interested in painting). I feel like it didn't really aspire to be more than a fun story, though?

I guess Bots > Unseelie > Escalier > Palette > Story > No Award > O2, but I don't think I really have strong opinions here except that I liked Bots the best and O2 the least.

I have in fact been doing my Hugo homework in bits and pieces, even though Babylon 5 is way more compelling (btw, I am now at the beginning of S4, aaaaaaaaaaah)

Fireheart Tiger (de Bodard) - I found this piece on princesses and power struggles and a fire elemental more readable than her Fallen series, and all of those things are relevant to my interests! But it didn't really stick with me after I'd finished.

The Past Is Red (Valente) - Okay, um - this is actually pretty good! It's about the post-climate-apocalyptic society that forms on the Pacific Garbage Patch, which by this point has melded into a large island, and Tetley, a girl who grows up there. It's clearly fabulist/fantastical and not supposed to at all be in any way a realistic depiction of dystopia (say I to the part of me that kept going "but it wouldn't work that way!"). It's about optimism and hope and also about the dark sides of those things, especially when they intersect with the dark parts of the human psyche -- but Tetley herself is clearheaded as well as hopeful.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Chambers) - In this novella, Dex, a tea monk (a monk who serves tea while people talk to him about their problems) meets a wild robot, Mosscap. They go on a long hike. That's pretty much it. I think I was supposed to get more out of it than that, but I didn't really. Dex seems to angst a lot for reasons that just didn't resonate with me at all. I think something in me is just not temperamentally suited for Chambers?

Oh gosh, I have to rank these now, huh.
Elder Race > Past > Spindle > Fireheart > Grass > Psalm, I guess. IDK. I liked Elder Race the most, but besides that I feel like it's even more the vagaries of my personal opinion than usual. This category I found kind of workmanlike -- I liked a lot of these stories and felt like they weren't doing anything that I found super interesting or innovative, which is something I always like to see for the Hugo.

A Spindle Splintered (Harrow) - I feel like mostly I've had bad luck with Harrow, but I quite enjoyed reading this remix of Sleeping Beauty. I think it's in large part because the POV character is a 21st-century snarky girl who is very aware of fairy tale meta, so it's playing to Harrow's strengths, and I liked the directions it took. My biggest quibble is that someone needs to sit Harrow down and talk about the writing advice I read when I was a kid from Orson Scott Card (who himself had got it from, iirc, a ruthless editor), which is that if the story/scene/etc. is about X, you never actually mention X by name, which makes it that much more powerful. Whereas Harrow will just beat X into the ground! Have I mentioned that X is an Important Theme yet??

Elder Race (Tchaikovsky) - I keep meaning to read Tchaikovsky and never have, so I'm quite pleased that this showed up on the ballot to force me to :) I really liked it! It's basically... "Semley's Necklace," in its examination of, basically, how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and how a society that is not technologically advanced will understand the advanced technologies, and how the society that is technologically advanced will understand the less technological society. My favorite bit is the one where we see Nyr's telling of history and Lynesse's understanding of that history side by side.

This is about the first time I've made a Le Guin comparison where I don't immediately start being disappointed in the comparator, not because Tchaikovsky is much like Le Guin, or is as good as Le Guin, but because his writing does have enough strength and consistency, and is interested in different enough themes, that I could enjoy it for what it was rather than keep being annoyed that I wasn't reading Le Guin. Which is rather a compliment!

Across the Green Grass Fields (McGuire) - I will say this for McGuire, she is easy to read. I was trying to multitask cleaning up with reading, and although I can usually read most things this way, I was getting over a cold and I couldn't concentrate on A Master of Djinn. "I know," I said, "I'll just read the latest Wayward Children," and indeed that worked very nicely.

This one reminded me of In an Absent Dream but was much better than that one, because there wasn't an irritating gotcha at the end, and as well as a plot there were relationships that were worth something, and the main character actually grew up and learned things. I like character development! Even though I felt like it was mostly told, not shown (I feel sometimes like pacing is weird in these stories because all the interesting growing-up stuff has to happen off-page).

The beginning made me angry, which in retrospect is probably not McGuire's fault. The bit where Mom A drags her 8-year-old daughter to a meeting with Mom B and B's 8-year-old daughter so that, with all four of them present and without talking to Mom B beforehand, Daughter B can apologize to Daughter A for not being friends with her -- I have a 7-year-old and I was like, WHAT. What parent does that?? You have just completely guaranteed that a) Daughter B will NOT apologize to Daughter A, b) if Mom B is any good, she will be forced to take Daughter B's side, and the whole thing will end in disaster. To be very fair, McGuire captured this dynamic very accurately! It just made me mad.

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Entries tagged with hugos

Hugo short stories

Hugo novelettes

Hugo novellas, part 1 (of presumably 2)

Hugo novels

Romance books (one with gore)

in lieu of proper reviews

More Hugo reading

Hugo novelettes/short stories

Translation State

Should I finish these?

The Spare Man (Kowal)

Hugo novellas, part 1

Hugo awards 2023 short stories/novelettes (1 of 1 or 2)

One more novella under the wire

Hugo-ish reading

the rest of the lodestars

Some books that are easily recognizable as YA