My Hugo reading experience so far

[maharetr]

Hugo ramblings below!


Best Novel

• Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (Orbit): word of mouth says that this series is excellent, but it’s not one I’ve started. Given I had limited reading time, it’s the third in the series, she’s already won for a previous instalment (whoot), and there were many stylistically-valid-but-make-me-wince sentence fragments on the first page, I skipped over this one. I’ve got the first one as a mental marked to read, though.
• The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher (Roc): women doing stuff! Steampunky things! I… finished the Amazon sample, but wow was it overwritten. Passed.
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit): Interesting premise! Read all of the sample, and liked it. I couldn’t get into A thousand kingdoms, personally, but I have hopes for this one now that I’ve got the reading packet.
• Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow) I was gripped by this one. I mean, it helped that there was a lot of science that I mostly speed-read because it was well above my skill level, but even so, I was inhaling a hundred pages a day, and was keen to get back to it each time…for the first six hundred pages. Women doing things in space! Being immensely competent and smart and also relatively flawed. And the stakes were so high and the odds of success so low I was gripped, to the point where I carefully didn’t read the blurb too closely to avoid later spoilers. That gripped. The Very Obviously Based on-characters (I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson, a very centre-positioned Sarah Palin, and Malala Yousafzai, at least) was an … odd choice, in retrospect, but I mostly didn’t mind while I was reading. Reader reviews seem to like the first 2/3s, or the 1/3 best. I felt like I would have liked the last third a lot better had it been an actual separate book, and I’d had time to farewell the previous characters. And there wasn’t quite enough space to explore the otherwise legit interesting changes of the last 1/3. Flawed, but so far at the top of my ballot, is my current verdict.
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Del Rey): I went into this having already read Foz Meadows’s alarm at the first hundred pages. I thought: surely it can’t be that bad? It…really was. And then I thought surely Novik knows what she’s doing, and is going to address this in the rest of the book. She…really didn’t. It’s gorgeously written! The fantasy elements are compelling, and I liked the main friendship. I really, really liked the story behind the Wood, and especially how that gets resolved. But wow are the first hundred pages distressingly abusive on multiple levels (he’s verbally abusive, sexually threatening, and inflicts the psychological abuse of demeaning her for not following the rules when he hasn’t told her what they are.) And she takes it and turns it inward, right up to and including the “he’s just a perfectionist! I’m just not good enough” line. He literally blames her when a visiting man tries to rape her and none of this is ever redressed or even addressed. Hundreds of pages later, when she goes to his bedchambers to jump his bones, the main character narrates: “I’d never gone to this part of the tower, it had been the chambers of an ogre.” And I stared, because as far as I could see nothing had changed. I am so confused by it, frankly: I loved the idea of a gradual healing that has to be worked for over a long, hard period of time, and remain so flabbergasted that the author was writing that narrative all along, and just... never applies that to the abuse. I don’t even know how to place this one on the ballot, because of it.

Best Novella

• Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com): Currently reading. (45/100 pages) Not as tightly written as I might have hoped, but solid enough, and compelling complications that are keeping me interested.
• The Builders by Daniel Polansky (Tor.com) Probable to-read
• Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum) Probable to-read
• Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel Entertainment) Probable to-read
• Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon) Probable to-read

Best Novelette

• “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander (Lightspeed, Feb 2015): Fucking. Loved. It. It took me a while to settle into the sheer amount of swearing, but once I did I was making delighted little noises at my screen. I loved the main character, I believed wholeheartedly in her grudging admittance of her feelings, and grinned fiercely at the ending. I’ll be looking up other things by Bolander, for sure.
• “Flashpoint: Titan” by CHEAH Kai Wai (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House) - Not reading anything by Castalia House/Vox Day. Life’s too short, and he is too gross.
• “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu (Uncanny Magazine, Jan-Feb 2015) - to read.
• “Obits” by Stephen King (The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Scribner) - to read.
• “What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House) Not reading anything by Castalia House/Vox Day. Life is too short, and he is too gross.

Best Short Story

“Asymmetrical Warfare” by S. R. Algernon (Nature, Mar 2015) - This was competently written alien-POV. Nice ending, but I was never gripped. Currently 2.
 

 

“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld, January 2015) - Competently written AI-pov, made me smile. Currently 1

“If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and S. Harris (voxday.blogspot.com, Jun 2015) - Life is too short, and he is too gross.

“Seven Kill Tiger” by Charles Shao (There Will Be War Volume X, Castalia House) - Life is too short, and he is too gross.

Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle (Amazon Digital Services) - to read. Looking forward with great interest/trepidation. Great respect for Tingle’s response to the whole mess

Comments

[transcendancing]

Interesting post lovely! So many books here that I have thoughts on too - and a bunch I haven't read (and maybe will/won't depending on THINGS). More on this when I have more brain/time. I do think you finally put my finger on what I *didn't like* about the ending of Uprooted - except I'd missed the beginning somehow but that's part of it too. I had gotten as far as 'the romance is unsatisfying' but hadn't poked at why.

[maharetr]

I'm very looking forward to your thoughts! :D

I mean, to be fair, I had been solidly primed by Foz's post to be looking for an abusive dynamic. And it was such an in-your-face thing, abusive on several levels, that I couldn't quite believe that it wouldn't be addressed and yet... it never was. The character endures a hundred pages, they kiss briefly, the plot launches, and then later she goes back and has sex with him, and I'm... still not sure why the main character did that. it's like the first hundred pages hadn't happened. So Confused.

[transcendancing]

I've had a few conversations about it, but I was distracted for a long time about the fact that I loved the way the magic worked differently for her. That was awesome and covered up the discomfort I felt with the other stuff such that I didn't really notice (?!?!?!) that it was never addressed - except I was unhappy with the ending and the romance in general. I've yet to write up my review, but I doubt I'll get more coherent than what I've posted so far.

[recessional]

and inflicts the psychological abuse of demeaning her for not following the rules when he hasn’t told her what they are.

OKAY I WILL BE MISSING THIS ONE. *TWITCH*

I mean I'm not a huge Novik fan anyway, having noped out of the dragon books when she started to put waaaaay too much ethical freight on them for her rather awful worldbuilding/historical understanding to support, but so many people I know LOVED Uprooted that I was idly toying of giving it a chance, now that I've decided to try the whole "let's read things" thing again.

And like I can even see why they liked it/that didn't boot them out, but specifically "follow rules you DON'T KNOW" is SUCH A NOT GOOD THING FOR FEATHERS that I will stay the hell away.

[sqbr]

Yeah I had been pondering but having heard about this aspect nooopppeeee.

[maharetr]

*nods* It was all so... textbook abuse is not the right word, but it's all so in your face and explicitly victim-blamey that I am mostly flat out Perplexed that it wasn't resolved later in the text. Just... *hands*

[maharetr]

YUUUUUP. like, I was snarling at the page "you can't yell at her for X if you haven't told her you want Y! That's not how it WORKS." And I mean, um. I'm sort of into considerable power imbalance dynamics. But they do have to right themselves, or at least balance in some other way. And this never balanced, romance-wise.

I'm glad-is-the-wrong-word, but glad you found this post first, before you picked up the book, because ugh... *makes face at book*

[recessional]

I am so into power-imbalance dynamics, but for me they do eventually have to come out to the benefit of the one who gives up/doesn't have the power, and for me that can't really happen if you don't address the part where you were freaking gaslighting/etc her to start with (as I consider "you will now be punished because you broke the rule you didn't know about" a kind of gaslighting, because it fucks up the target's ideas of reality and how reality works), because unless you've addressed it you could turn back to that person at any time and the anxiety of that is toxic.

Or at the very least I have to feel like I have the space to see it as toxic and messed up - that the narrative is not pushing me to see a happily ever after in a situation where that bs is not addressed. Like the chars can, if that's appropriate, but if the narrative is telling me "and now we have a totes trad HEA (or at least Happy For Now) everything is fine!" then I get pissed the hell off.

I'm glad! It saves me some raeg-face and everyone else an extensive rant on how this books is WRONG like a WRONG THING and should be ASHAMED OF ITSELF and also its ART SUCKS. >.>

[ironed_orchid]

"Cat Pictures Please" is so great.