Month: August 2018

One for the Money, Two for the Show

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Agent Ptolema makes contact with defectors from a super-secret black agency, who have disturbing news.  Something very awful is happening off the coast of Maine, and the only way to keep it contained is by using the incestuous twins, Bête and Ivoire.  But what is the twins’ secret?  While Ptolema delves into the past and the future, the Signalman is waiting to see if it’s time to announce the end of the world.  Chaos theory and wave-particle duality are at work, and it turns out Bête and Ivoire are closer even than twins and lovers.

Hmm.  I’m not a hundred per cent sure this revised and expanded version of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s novella Black Helicopters is properly Hugo-eligible – the revisions from the 2013 chapbook are certainly substantial, roughly doubling the length just for a start, but then there’s the question of word count…. I’m glad I don’t have to decide these things.  Anyway.  This is abstruse Lovecraftian espionage-horror-SF, a companion piece to the same author’s Agents of Dreamland, and it’s, well… interesting.

The central gimmicks hinge on physics and mathematics sufficiently abstruse as to look like magic – which is moving into Lovecraft territory right there, as any aficionado of Charles Stross’s “Laundry” series will tell you.  The conditions which give rise to an incursion by the eldritch outer horrors are susceptible to manipulation, and very sensitive to initial conditions – if you make small changes to the initial conditions, say by folding a sufficient number of origami cranes, you can totally contain an invasion by shoggoths.  It’s all in the detail – of course, it depends on you being a sufficiently insane and alienated mathematical genius to appreciate the detail.  And, this being Kiernan’s world of shadowy counter-espionage counter-Lovecraftian agencies, there’s an awful lot of sinister meetings in dark alleys and assassinations going on.

It’s quite relentlessly erudite, demanding a great deal from the reader – you have to follow the physics and maths stuff, and the complex non-linear storyline, and the barrage of literary allusions, drawing heavily on James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and (for some reason) Watership Down.  Unlike other, lesser, works, this one contains two Chapter 9s – I thought, at first, there was some arcane cosmic significance to this, but it turns out the second Chapter 9 is just an appendix, containing a translation of the substantial amounts of French dialogue in the actual Chapter 9.  Kind of Kiernan to take pity on the non-Francophones, I guess.

I dunno.  It’s all very clever and erudite, and it’s got lots of good set pieces, and it’s very atmospheric… I can’t shake the suspicion, though, that it’s all a bit, well, meretricious.  I liked Agents of Dreamland quite a lot, but I can’t help but feel that one had a more definite plot.  Black Helicopters, well, there’s a story there… but not a very substantial one.  I can’t help but feel that if you tried to summarize it – “woman is duplicated by magical quantum physics so that both halves of her can fight off a shoggoth invasion” – it’d sound a bit silly.  Impressive and erudite as all hell, yes, but I have this nagging suspicion that, when you get down to it, Black Helicopters is something a bit less than the sum of its parts.

Here’s how I interpret the detailed Hugo voting results

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Unscientific graph
My own take on what those numbers in the Hugo detailed breakdown might actually mean….

Some winners are clear from the start, others shift back and forwards as they pick up transfer votes from eliminated finalists.

There’s sometimes a bunch of stuff that shifts around in order in much the same way – finalists that are more or less equally placed, where comparatively few voters have strong opinions.

There’s often a well-known finalist which will figure somewhere in everyone’s voting, so it picks up transfer votes and gradually rises in the placings; equally often, there’s something with a vocal, partisan fan base, but which no one else particularly cares for, so it drops in the placings as transfer votes go somewhere else.

There’s sometimes a finalist no one much has heard of, which struggles to get above “No Award” until it picks up a few last transfer votes from obsessives like me who fill out the ballot in full.

And, of course, there is the stuff that is obvious rubbish and everyone agrees shouldn’t be on the ballot at all. Less of that this year, for some unfathomable no-Puppies-related reason.

You’ll Find a God in Every Golden Cloister

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So, in my efforts to keep a finger on the pulse of current SFF, I picked up Cameron Johnston’s novel The Traitor God, a 2018 book from a new writer (no previous novels, but ISFDB shows some shorter stuff, going back a few years.)  It’s a finalist for the Dragon Awards, but I’ll try not to hold that against it.

Edrin Walker is a mage on the run, pursued everywhere by daemons and monstrous spectral cats.  Ten years ago, he did something which may have involved killing one of the five gods (actually just heavily over-powered wizards, but they get to call themselves gods) of the mage-ruled city of Setharis – his memory of the incident has been deliberately erased.  As part of whatever deal he struck, he faked his own death and has been on the run ever since.  But whoever he struck a deal with, they promised to protect his friends – so, when (through a magical link) he feels his best friend die horribly, Walker figures the deal is off, and he heads back to Setharis with vengeance in mind. He arrives in the middle of a wave of magical killings, with a very nasty conspiracy brewing somewhere in the background, while a horde of barbarian invaders is about to hove into view….

It’s not a bad performance, for a first novel, actually.  It’s fast-paced, high-energy grimdark fantasy – unlike that Anne Charnock novel, plenty of stuff happens; Walker no sooner settles down for a drink in a pub, in chapter one, when the place is fire-bombed and he finds himself outside, wrestling with a tattooed berserker who’s trying to bite his cock off.  You can’t fault it for lack of incident.

You can fault it on some other grounds, I’m afraid.  It’s rather self-consciously grimdark fantasy, with the grimness and the darkness put on with a trowel – I found myself muttering “a free poxed whore with every chapter” at one point, and I have quite a high tolerance level for grime and grit and gore.  Oddly, I find that grimdark works best in the hands of a writer with a light touch – people like Daniel Polansky and Joe Abercrombie have, if you look closely, quite a nice line in understated humour.  Johnston hasn’t really developed that – the writing is clear but rather uninspiring, a bit flat, a touch predictable.  Then there’s our first-person protagonist, Walker, who sets out on a mission of vengeance but doesn’t really have any sort of a plan – he spends most of his time trying to dodge trouble, while blundering into other people who throw useful bits of the plot at him.  Between the generous chunks of exposition handed out, and the overall constraints of the sub-genre (it’s grimdark fantasy, expect the hero to be betrayed), I was able to figure out several important revelations long before they were officially revealed, and I don’t think I’m especially clever in this regard.

Still, it moves along reasonably well, the (rather cartoonishly bad) bad guys get a properly explosive come-uppance in the end… and the final chapters contain a number of plot hooks, suitable for hanging a sequel on.  I don’t know that I’d actually be in a hurry to seek the sequel out, but I wouldn’t actively avoid it.  The Traitor God is pretty decent lightweight entertainment, at least.  If you can cope with all the grimdark, anyway.  2018 book, so eligible for next year’s Hugos, though I’d be surprised if it made my nominations ballot.  Which puts Cameron Johnston way up there with Anne Charnock in the literary stakes, come to think of it.

1943 Retro Hugos, in more detail

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This should be shorter, I hope, and simpler than the main event…. oh, yeah, link to the data.

Best Novel

  1. Beyond This Horizon
  2. Second Stage Lensmen
  3. Darkness and the Light
  4. Donovan’s Brain
  5. The Uninvited
  6. Islandia

Heinlein still has fans.  Even not particularly good Heinlein still has fans.  Beyond This Horizon led from the start, with Second Stage Lensmen in a dogged second place, and the others sort of milling around behind – the third, fourth and fifth places swapped around several times, though Islandia sank fairly swiftly to sixth place and stayed there.  I suppose I can see why, even though it was my own favourite – it’s kind of a left-field choice, and the book is a big, fat thing (though not as fat as some modern-day fantasy blockbusters.)  I’m grateful to the Retro Hugo packet compilers, by the way, for putting a good chunk more of Austin Tappan Wright’s background material out in the public view.  Wright’s imaginative construct is an extraordinary achievement, award or not.

Best Novella

  1. “Waldo”
  2. “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag”
  3. “Nerves”
  4. “The Compleat Werewolf”
  5. “Asylum”
  6. “Hell is Forever”

I bite my tongue, a little, over this one, as I’m seeing a Heinlein story I actually like being beaten by one I didn’t… but, well, it’s a solid win for “Waldo”, here.  Generally a straightforward race, with the only surprise coming in the last rounds, when van Vogt’s “Asylum”, which had been lying dead last all through the voting, suddenly found some legs and beat the Bester story down into sixth place.

Best Novelette

  1. “Foundation”
  2. “The Weapon Shop”
  3. “There Shall Be Darkness”
  4. “The Star Mouse”
  5. “Bridle and Saddle”
  6. “Goldfish Bowl”

“Foundation” won this one outright, with a clear majority on the first voting pass.  I suppose that’s hardly surprising, given that it’s one of SF’s key texts… I do find it a bit odd that its immediate sequel, “Bridle and Saddle”, came in so far down the order.  I’d have expected them to be closer together… were the Asimov fans all thinking they should only pick one of the two?  (For my money, “Bridle and Saddle” is actually the better of the two – it’s the one where you get to see the central gimmick of the Foundation trilogy actually working.  But never mind.)  Enthusiasm for Heinlein did not, apparently, extend as far as the obscure and rather downbeat “Goldfish Bowl”… on the other hand, fandom-in-general seems to have more fondness than I do for the comedy accents in “The Star Mouse”.  De gustibus non est disputandum.

Best Short Story

  1. “The Twonky”
  2. “Proof”
  3. “Runaround”
  4. “The Sunken Land”
  5. “Etaoin Shrdlu”
  6. “Mimic”

Mostly by the numbers, here, except “Proof” jumped up to push “Runaround” out of second place.  The winner is, I think, the best-known of these stories, and probably the one that best stands the test of time.  (My personal favourite is down at the bottom there.  I don’t think I’d have fitted in well with 1940s fandom, you know.)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

  1. Bambi
  2. Cat People
  3. Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book
  4. I Married a Witch
  5. The Ghost of Frankenstein
  6. Invisible Agent

I still don’t think Bambi is SF, but this is irrelevant, as my decisions are not legally binding, at least not until my army of cybernetic minions have finished tunnelling into the world’s key control systems and all humanity is brought beneath my iron heel.  (They say it’s going to be next Tuesday, but those slackers have let deadlines slip before.)  Frankenstein’s ghost and the Invisible Agent barely managed enough support to get over No Award, down at the bottom there.  This is what comes of flogging franchise properties to death.

Best Editor (Short Form)

  1. John W. Campbell Jr.
  2. Donald A. Wollheim
  3. Dorothy McIlwraith
  4. Raymond A. Palmer
  5. Oscar J. Friend
  6. Malcolm Reiss

In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.  Campbell swept this one, getting a clear majority – nearly twice as many votes as all his competitors put together – on the first voting pass.  Then Don Wollheim managed an equally convincing run for second place.  The third place voting went as far as two passes, Raymond Palmer having picked up enough transfers to get him over No Award by now… Friend and Reiss were struggling to manage that, in fact.  Not a surprise.  Campbell’s dominance of the field was pretty much complete, and Wollheim was definitely making his presence felt by 1943.

Best Professional Artist

  1. Virgil Finlay
  2. Hannes Bok
  3. Margaret Brundage
  4. Edd Cartier
  5. Hubert Rogers
  6. Harold W. McCauley

Finlay and his chiaroscuro win again, Bok jumps up to beat Brundage to second place, and poor Harold McCauley has to fight for two voting rounds to get past No Award.  There’s a very clear division in this and several Retros categories, between “finalists people know, or at least have heard of” and “finalists known only to weirdoes who’ve delved deep into the archives”.  As a weirdo myself, I am fine with this.  (People have heard of Finlay, Bok and Brundage; it’s evident from the votes that a lot fewer have heard of the other three.)

Best Fanzine

  1. Le Zombie
  2. The Phantagraph
  3. Spaceways
  4. Voice of the Imagi-Nation
  5. Futurian War Digest
  6. Inspiration

This one was oddly close, at least among the first four – Le Zombie tussles with Phantagraph for first place, Phantagraph has to fight off Spaceways for second, then Spaceways gets jostled by Voice of the Imagi-Nation on the way to third.  It would be churlish to suggest that this is consistent with people sticking in votes for the ones they’ve heard of, in any random order that comes into their heads…. My own choice was Futurian War Digest, which barely troubled the scorers; it did manage to come ahead of Inspiration (which was basically Futurian War Digest anyway, except American, and with only one issue, and with only one contributor.)

Best Fan Writer

  1. Forrest J. Ackerman
  2. Arthur Wilson “Bob” Tucker
  3. Donald A. Wollheim
  4. Harry Warner Jr.
  5. Art Widner
  6. Jack Speer

Oh look.  Ackerman wins.  Are we surprised?… At least his competition went the full distance.  Tucker beat Wollheim to second place by the skin of his teeth, and the divide is evident in this category, with Wollheim getting third place in a single voting pass.  The only real surprise in this category, in fact, is that there was one other nominee, and that was Ray Bradbury.  I think it’s safe to say that, these days, Bradbury is better known than Art Widner or Jack Speer… but he came seventh and last in the nominations, so he didn’t make the final ballot.

So there we go.  The Retros are interesting, and sometimes frustrating – the fiction categories invite me to re-connect with old friends, or discover fascinating obscurities, while the fannish things leave me scratching my head and puzzling over strange in-jokes and knowing references passed on by people utterly unknown to me; trying to put meat onto the dry bones of Fandom Past is an exercise in frustration.  (Of course, there are still fans out there who actually knew some of these people.  But I’m not one of them.)

2018 Hugos, in more detail

~ stevejwright ~ 5 Comments

So.  Looking at the detailed results, we get to see a bit more of the big picture.

Best Novel

  1. The Stone Sky
  2. The Collapsing Empire
  3. Provenance
  4. Six Wakes
  5. Raven Stratagem
  6. New York 2140

N.K. Jemisin’s superb conclusion to her epic “Broken Earth” trilogy led the field from the start.  Otherwise, well, it goes by the numbers you see on the list, except that New York 2140 gradually fell from an initial fourth to a final sixth place.  The high positions of Scalzi’s and Leckie’s books, I think, shows that a) both writers have strong fan bases, and b) fandom’s appetite for straightforward space operas has not diminished.

Best Novella

  1. All Systems Red
  2. “And Then There Were (N-One)”
  3. Down Among the Sticks and Bones
  4. Binti: Home
  5. The Black Tides of Heaven
  6. River of Teeth

Murderbot positively romped into first place here.  Fairly close race for second and third, with the Pinsker story winning by a short head, Nnedi Okorafor’s sequel slotting into fourth without much dispute, and a reasonably close-run thing for fifth and sixth.  JY Yang’s companion novella The Red Threads of Fortune figured a good way further down the nominations longlist.

Best Novelette

  1. “The Secret Life of Bots”
  2. “Wind Will Rove”
  3. “A Series of Steaks”
  4. “Extracurricular Activities”
  5. “Children of Thorns”
  6. “Small Changes over Long Periods of Time”

Straightforward race, bar a bit of jockeying for position between “Extracurricular Activities” and “Children of Thorns”, with the former finally winning out.  After some of the comments I’ve seen about “Small Changes over Long Periods of Time”, I’m not surprised to see it in sixth place, but I’m glad it comfortably beat out No Award, anyway – it’s not a comfortable read, but it’s a fine story in its way, I think.  (Though not as much sheer fun as “The Secret Life of Bots”.  Fun counts.  Fun is good.)

Best Short Story

  1. “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™”
  2. “Fandom for Robots”
  3. “The Martian Obelisk”
  4. “Sun, Moon, Dust”
  5. “Carnival Nine”
  6. “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand”

Rebecca Roanhorse’s perfectly formed short story led from the start, here; there was a bit of a tussle for second place with Vina Jie-Min Prasad coming out on top, and otherwise it was by the numbers.  “Carnival Nine” seems to have been a bit of a Marmite story – some loved it, some registered strong dislike; still, it beat out Fran Wilde’s unnerving piece of grand guignol.  Fandom’s taste for outright horror seems to have been on the wane, this year.

Best Series

  1. “The World of the Five Gods”
  2. “InCryptid”
  3. “Memoirs of Lady Trent”
  4. “The Books of the Raksura”
  5. “The Stormlight Archive”
  6. “The Divine Cities”

First one where I feel a little restive, because, while Bujold is in no sense an unworthy winner, she does seem a bit like, well, a safe and predictable choice.  It might have been nice if fandom-in-general had branched out into something a bit different, here.  (Especially as I do think Robert Jackson Bennett’s fine trilogy has been unfortunately overshadowed by other things in previous years.)  Some series from last year’s inaugural awards reappeared in the nominations, but were disallowed on technical grounds – I’m fine with that, actually, it helps keep things fresh, we wouldn’t want a situation where the award brought in a lot of German speakers and “Perry Rhodan” won every year, would we?

Best Related Work

  1. No Time to Spare
  2. Crash Override
  3. Luminescent Threads
  4. Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)
  5. Sleeping with Monsters
  6. A Lit Fuse

Ding-dong battle for first place between Ursula Le Guin and Zoe Quinn, with Le Guin triumphing in the later passes: those two were well ahead of the rest of the pack.  The Ellison biography sank slowly under Liz Bourke’s book – I don’t think it’s a bad book, it just doesn’t say much about Ellison that people didn’t already know from watching Ellison Ellisoning.

Best Graphic Story

  1. Monstress, vol. 2
  2. Saga, vol. 7
  3. Bitch Planet, Volume 2: President Bitch
  4. Black Bolt: Hard Time
  5. Paper Girls, vol. 3
  6. My Favorite Thing is Monsters

Poor showing from my personal fave, down at the bottom there, but I can scarcely criticize fandom for putting the visually gorgeous Monstress in the top slot.  My Favorite Thing is Monsters seems to have had some people like it strongly (me, for instance), but other people liked other things more, so enough other things picked up transfer votes for My Favorite Thing is Monsters to sink into sixth place.  That’s how it goes, I guess.  Lots of familiar stuff further down the nominations long list.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

  1. Wonder Woman
  2. Get Out
  3. Thor: Ragnarok
  4. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
  5. The Shape of Water
  6. Blade Runner 2049

Wonder Woman and Get Out were ahead of the rest from the start, with Wonder Woman leading by a nose and maintaining position to the end.  The Last Jedi seems to have picked up enough second (or other lower)-preference votes to rise slowly into fourth place – I guess a Star Wars film must look like a safe enough alternative to many voters.  I’d expected to see the much-praised Shape of Water finish a bit higher, but eh well.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

  1. The Good Place, “The Trolley Problem”
  2. Black Mirror, “USS Callister”
  3. The Good Place, “Michael’s Gambit”
  4. Doctor Who, “Twice Upon a Time”
  5. Star Trek: Discovery, “Magic to Make the Sanest Man go Mad”
  6. Clipping, “The Deep”

Interesting one.  “USS Callister” led from “The Trolley Problem” until the other Good Place episode was eliminated, at which point “The Trolley Problem” picked up lots of transfer votes from its defunct stablemate and went ahead into the top slot.  Shows the value of having a running mate, I guess.  Well, anyway – The Good Place obviously has its fans, I’m not amongst them, but never mind.  I can’t say I think a couple of not-very-distinguished Doctor Who and Star Trek episodes were unfairly robbed here.

Best Editor (Long Form)

  1. Sheila E. Gilbert
  2. Navah Wolfe
  3. Diana M. Pho
  4. Devi Pillai
  5. Miriam Weinberg
  6. Joe Monti

Gilbert a clear winner here; a bit of a tussle for third place, with Diana M. Pho coming through to snatch it from Devi Pillai… and the first real showing from No Award, which initially placed ahead of Weinberg and Monti and had to be gradually beaten down.  I think there’s a small but significant number of people who have existential issues with this particular category.  I guess I can see their point.  Liz Gorinsky, last year’s winner, declined a nomination… I can see why people might want to keep things fresh, but I hope previous winners don’t actually feel obliged to recuse themselves.

Best Editor (Short Form)

  1. Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas
  2. Sheila Williams
  3. Neil Clarke
  4. John Joseph Adams
  5. Jonathan Strahan
  6. Lee Harris

The main editors of Uncanny didn’t decline nomination (and why should they?), and Noah didn’t raise his head here, either.  Lee Harris was ultimately beaten down from initial fourth to sixth place, otherwise it’s pretty much by the numbers, here.  Some big names in the nominations long list, as you might expect.

Best Professional Artist

  1. Sana Takeda
  2. John Picacio
  3. Galen Dara
  4. Victo Ngai
  5. Kathleen Jennings
  6. Bastien Lecouffe Deharme

Tussle for first place here, with Sana Takeda coming from behind to beat out John Picacio.  Otherwise, it went straightforwardly, by the numbers.  I must see if I can get myself denounced by Terry Goodkind, it’s done Bastien Lecouffe Deharme no harm.  (The long list shows he just beat out Yuko Shimizu, whose covers for the JY Yang novellas I liked a lot.  Well, there’s always next year, isn’t there?)  Another category where a previous winner (Julie Dillon) declined nomination.

Best Semiprozine

  1. Uncanny Magazine
  2. Strange Horizons
  3. Beneath Ceaseless Skies
  4. Escape Pod
  5. Fireside Magazine
  6. The Book Smugglers

Uncanny continues to dominate.  Little bit of a scrap for second and third between Strange Horizons, BCS and Escape Pod (strong showing for the podcast-based newcomer, there), with Fireside and Book Smugglers honourably bringing up the rear.  Familiar names on the long list, too – there’s plenty of markets for short fiction out there, maybe I should write some.

Best Fanzine

  1. File 770
  2. SF Bluestocking
  3. nerds of a feather, flock together
  4. Journey Planet
  5. Galactic Journey
  6. Rocket Stack Rank

File 770 absolutely stormed this one, achieving flawless victory in only two passes.  Well done to it and Mike Glyer (who also clocked up a well-deserved Big Heart Award).  There was a certain amount of jockeying for position before slots two, three and four settled down… and both Galactic Journey and Rocket Stack Rank had to beat off a challenge from No Award.  I’m surprised by that.  I rated Galactic Journey very highly, and Rocket Stack Rank is good stuff (even though I still disagree with Greg Hullender about, well, everything.)  IMHO.  And my HO only counts for one vote, same as everyone else’s.  I suppose RSR doesn’t look so much like a fanzine (it’s in here, I think, because there is no Hugo for Best Fannish Something Or Other), and Galactic Journey – well, I guess it’s a bit niche.  But fandom is all about the niche, isn’t it?  I’m confusing myself now.  Let’s move on.

Best Fancast

  1. Ditch Diggers
  2. Fangirl Happy Hour
  3. Coode Street Podcast
  4. Galactic Suburbia
  5. Sword and Laser
  6. Verity!

Odd behaviour in this one.  Ditch Diggers had a modest but solid lead from the start, then Fangirl Happy Hour leapfrogged over Coode Street to claim second place, and Galactic Suburbia, which had started out below everything (including No Award), suddenly jumped into fourth place.  Odd.  Last year’s winner Tea and Jeopardy declined nomination this year, which I think is a shame, as it’s quite the best thing I’ve found in this strange foreign land of people shouting things on the Internet.  Never mind.  Ditch Diggers was, to me, the best available choice in a category I’m not awfully comfortable with, so I’m glad enough to see it win.

Best Fan Writer

  1. Sarah Gailey
  2. Foz Meadows
  3. Mike Glyer
  4. Bogi Takács
  5. Camestros Felapton
  6. Charles Payseur

Sarah Gailey maintained a small but consistent lead from the start over Mike Glyer, and then Foz Meadows jumped up to beat Glyer to second place.  Modest but sound performances from Bogi Takács and the egregious Camestros Felapton… and it took Charles Payseur two whole rounds to beat out No Award, which surprises me – he’s a perfectly sound fan writer, even though I didn’t much like his style myself.

Best Fan Artist

  1. Geneva Benton
  2. Likhain (M. Sereno)
  3. Grace P. Fong
  4. Maya Hahto
  5. Spring Schoenhuth
  6. Steve Stiles

No great upsets here (unless you count me correctly picking the winner, which is positively startling) – Grace Fong put on a little spurt to take third place off Maya Hahto, and Steve Stiles declined gracefully from fourth to sixth place, but otherwise the order of the votes is the order you see.

Young Adult Award (not a Hugo)

  1. Akata Warrior
  2. Summer in Orcus
  3. In Other Lands
  4. A Skinful of Shadows
  5. The Art of Starving
  6. La Belle Sauvage

The Pullman book started out in fourth place, but was shouldered aside by A Skinful of Shadows (my personal favourite) and The Art of Starving: otherwise, it’s a straightforward one, with Akata Warrior maintaining a small but solid lead from the start.  And I’ll say it again, this inaugural year for what will (from next year onwards) be the Lodestar Award is one hell of a fine start.  Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage is a fine book in its own right, gripping reading from a respected YA author at the height of his powers, and that has come last in this poll.  There are several on this list that I think will be future classics.  It’s an amazing opening year.  I’m hoping for more of the same next year, but this sort of standard is going to be hard to maintain.  (YA authors, please take that as a challenge, not a gloomy prediction!)

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (not a Hugo)

  1. Rebecca Roanhorse
  2. Vina Jie-Min Prasad
  3. Jeannette Ng
  4. Rivers Solomon
  5. Katherine Arden
  6. Sarah Kuhn

Proper ding-dong battles, here, first between Rebecca Roanhorse and Vina Jie-Min Prasad for the first and second places, then between Jeannette Ng and Rivers Solomon for three and four.  All of these are writers to watch.  (Yes, even Sarah Kuhn, whose stuff I bounced off – just because I bounced off her doesn’t mean she’s inherently bouncy, the fault may easily be mine and not hers.)  Hard to argue with Rebecca Roanhorse’s win, though, considering her well-merited victory in Best Short Story.  (I think effective short story writing is hard.  And I think Roanhorse made it look easy.)

So there we are.  It’s been an interesting year – the first one, for me, with no Puppy infestation, so I got to read a whole bunch of proper good SFF stories (OK, I didn’t like all of them, but that’s only to be expected); N.K. Jemisin has pulled off a remarkable trifecta, and Rebecca Roanhorse and the YA award have both made hugely impressive debuts.  Now, off to read more good stuff and make next year in Dublin equally interesting.

…. and the 2018/1943 Retro Hugos

~ stevejwright ~ Leave a comment

Same deal applies.  I have, again, underlined all the ones where the winners were my first pick…. err. Um.  Well, you wouldn’t expect me to be in sympathy with the fannish mindset of twenty years before I was born, would you?

Best Fan Writer
Forrest J Ackerman

Best Fanzine
Le Zombie, edited by Arthur Wilson “Bob” Tucker

Best Professional Artist
Virgil Finlay

Best Editor – Short Form
John W. Campbell

Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form
Bambi, written by Perce Pearce, Larry Morey, et al., directed by David D. Hand et al. (Walt Disney Productions)

Best Short Story
“The Twonky,” by Lewis Padgett (C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner) (Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1942)

Best Novelette
“Foundation,” by Isaac Asimov (Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1942)

Best Novella
“Waldo,” by Anson MacDonald (Robert A. Heinlein) (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1942)

Best Novel
Beyond This Horizon, by Anson MacDonald (Robert A. Heinlein) (Astounding Science-Fiction, April & May 1942)

2018 Hugo Awards: First Look

~ stevejwright ~ Leave a comment

Quick list of the winners, as per last year.  Relentless and tedious analysis to follow.  I have taken the liberty of underlining the ones where fandom’s collective taste has been impeccable.

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

  • Rebecca Roanhorse

The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) Award for Best Young Adult Book

  • Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor (Viking)

2018 Hugo Awards

Best Fan Artist

  • Geneva Benton

Best Fan Writer

  • Sarah Gailey

Best Fancast

  • Ditch Diggers, presented by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace

Best Fanzine

  • File 770, edited by Mike Glyer

Best Semiprozine

  • Uncanny Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, and Julia Rios; podcast produced by Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky

Best Professional Artist

  • Sana Takeda

Best Editor – Short Form

  • Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas

Best Editor – Long Form

  • Sheila E. Gilbert

Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form

  • The Good Place: “The Trolley Problem,” written by Josh Siegal and Dylan Morgan, directed by Dean Holland (Fremulon / 3 Arts Entertainment / Universal Television)

Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form

  • Wonder Woman, screenplay by Allan Heinberg, story by Zack Snyder & Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs, directed by Patty Jenkins (DC Films / Warner Brothers)

Best Graphic Story

  • Monstress, Volume 2: The Blood, written by Marjorie M. Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image Comics)

Best Related Work

  • No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Best Series

  • World of the Five Gods, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Harper Voyager / Spectrum Literary Agency)

Best Short Story

  • “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)

Best Novelette

  • “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)

Best Novella

  • All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

Best Novel

  • The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

(You’ll notice I got all the fiction ones right.  I’m available to find lost cats and get in touch with dead relatives at quite reasonable rates, you know.)

I’d Say her Values are Corrupted, but She’s Open to Change

~ stevejwright ~ 1 Comment

So Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time was lying on my virtual to-read pile, and I am supposed to be catching up with contemporary SF and stuff, and then it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, so it moved up the pile a few notches.  And in due time I set out to read it, wondering why this book had won a major award.  And now I am tempted to rephrase, wondering why the actual fuck this book won a major award.

OK, maybe that’s not fair.  It’s not an actively bad book… probably… well, I have some reservations, but they might just be my own opinions.  But for it to get a medium-sized gong in the world of SF awards, I’d expect it to be actively good in some way, and I’m… just not seeing that.  Sorry.

It starts in 2034, with two friends, Millie and Toni, who become pregnant.  Millie has thought long and hard over the matter, and is conceiving with donor sperm and without the intervention of her partner, somewhat to her mother Betty’s perplexity.  Meanwhile, Toni finds out about her pregnancy when she checks up on her personal medical monitor after a night’s partying, and she starts to wonder about her own partner’s long-term suitability, and whether she should explore other options for co-parenting.

And, well, it sort of carries on from there, in a vein which is so low-key it’s nearly inaudible.  We get, not so much a story, as a series of introspective vignettes as the various characters reflect on their available options and the paths they’ve actually chosen.  After a while, the action skips forward fifty years, and we see the next generation doing, well, much the same thing.  It finishes up in 2120, with the families of the original characters… continuing to mull over their options and wonder about their choices.  It would be a multi-generational saga if anything, y’know, actually happened.  The final scene has a very old Toni scattering Millie’s ashes on a trip through China, and I was hoping, all the way to the last page, that the Chinese authorities would come and slap her down for unauthorised disposal of human remains or something, but no such luck; the book maintains its unblemished record of “not much happens” all the way to the end.

Look, I don’t demand slam-bang-E.E. “Doc” Smith-galaxy-busting action from everything I read, but it would be nice to see a bit of interpersonal drama, a bit of conflict proceeding towards a resolution.  Millie’s mum Betty, the first character we meet, is a case in point.  She’s concerned about her daughter’s choices, wants something different for her; aha, says I, inter-generational conflict of attitudes, how will it play out, will they work it out sensibly or become estranged, and if the latter, will they reconcile…?  The next time Betty’s mentioned, she’s dead.  So much for that conflict.

The book seems to centre on the enhanced reproductive choices available in the future, and how these will affect the traditional vision of the nuclear family… well, fair enough, but a) SF has been doing this sort of thing for a while (look at Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Vorkosigan” series for example), and b) well, human beings have been exploring options other than the traditional nuclear family for a very long time – I mentioned, a while back, reading about the Plantagenets, didn’t I?  And that mediaeval aristocratic family was positively tame compared to some others I could name.  That increased LGBTQ+ awareness and advances in technology will put a lot more options on the table is… kind of obvious, really.  That people will still be conflicted and doubtful and vaguely unhappy about the choices they make is… also kind of obvious, what with people being people.

This leads me on to some definite issues I have with the world-building in this book.  It’s fairly well-stocked for diversity on the sexual side, with gay, bi, gender-fluid and ace characters drifting through…. It’s pretty lousy for any other kind of diversity, with the vast majority of the characters being well-heeled middle-class Londoners living the kind of lifestyle I only ever see in the Times colour supplement.  While they’re not all identical, they do all seem to share the same values and general outlook on life.  In particular, there is hardly any mention of politics, and no mention at all of religion – which struck me as distinctly a false note, given the way some religious people tend to horn in on any discussion of reproductive rights.  As for politics, well, there is one scene where some well-meaning Oxbridge graduate types have a brain-storming session about what to do with the disadvantaged and under-employed, in terms which make it pretty clear that this society has no truck with silly ideas like the disadvantaged having any say in their own lives.  By and large, though, this is a tale of smug middle-class people making more smug middle-class people.  One of them, Toni, goes on holiday to China a lot, so we get to see some Chinese people in the background… and there’s Fran, who has a child as a result of a one-night fling with one of the dynasty; Fran is actually working class, she’s a waitress, she has money worries, she actually spent three months in jail for drinking while pregnant… I could have done with seeing more of Fran.  She made a pleasing contrast with the rest of the smug yuppies being vaguely unhappy about the occasional speed-bumps in their otherwise smoothly running lives.

Then there’s the technology and the social change, or rather the lack thereof.  True, there are interesting options opening up in the reproductive arena (some of which could have used some more exposition – one chap, for instance, chooses to go it alone, making his child with only a sperm and a stem cell, and I’d be interested to hear where his resulting daughter got her second X chromosome from.)  And there are improved driverless cars and digital assistants, and exoskeletons for the older folks so they can still do their exercises in the park… but, aside from that, technological change is absent, and social change is completely absent.  You’ll be interested to know that in 2120, the same areas of London that are fashionable now will still be fashionable.  Brexit?  Rise of the alt-right?  Immigration?  Global warming?  All things with no visible consequences.  Even by today’s standards, some of the book feels vaguely old-fashioned – the 2034 section includes references to photo albums and photographs in frames, for instance, and it certainly looks like they’re actual physical photographs.  (They’ve gone digital, in this respect, by 2084, you might be relieved to know.  I will be 71 in 2034, and my photo albums are all on my hard drive today….)  It feels weird, even when the focus of the book is on reproduction, because social issues influence reproductive choices.  But you don’t see anyone, say, wondering if they can bring a child into the world when the rogue AIs in Liechtenstein could be unleashing their cybernetic death squads against humanity any moment.  There is no insecurity, in a future where nothing changes.

I forget who it was who said that Larry Niven’s vision of the future was one where we’re all Californians, and that the scary thing was that Niven thought that was a good idea.  Charnock’s world seems to be built along the same lines; a future constructed by and for the aspirational middle classes, with personal relationships carefully optimised in the interests of all parties – no discussion of politics or religion, because I don’t think any of these people would ever be so gauche as to believe in something.

So much for my unhappiness about the book – does it have any positive virtues?  Well, it’s competently enough written, I guess – fluent, unassuming prose, mostly third person and present tense, with an occasional excursion into a first person viewpoint (I don’t know why, exactly, as the first person narrators are no more interesting than anyone else, but never mind.)  The characters are efficiently drawn; despite the overwhelming similarity in attitudes, I could quite easily tell one from another if I had any reason to care.  As I said, it’s not an actively bad book.

But…. Clarke Award winner?  I’m mystified.  Perhaps the Clarke jurors looked at it, and saw all these characters living in London without any money worries, and handling things like sex and love and family and adultery in a quiet, rational, talking-things-through kind of way, and they decided, “yes, this is high fantasy and no mistake, more unlikely than anything you’ll find in Middle Earth or Narnia”.  Or perhaps they saw it the same way I do, and decided that this missive from the Planet of the Condescending Yuppies qualifies as a hellish dystopia in the spirit of Brave New World.  But I’m baffled, frankly.  Critics of greater acuity than me have, evidently, seen something in this one that I haven’t… personally, I think it would have been much better if, instead of that ashes-scattering trip to China, it had ended with those Liechtensteinian cyber-assassins bursting in and lasering “#firstworldproblems” into everyone’s skulls.  Maybe that’s just me.

Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

~ stevejwright ~ 4 Comments

So, I guess it’s time to talk about Revenant Gun, the concluding novel in Yoon Ha Lee’s “Machineries of Empire” trilogy, then.

Nine years have passed since Raven Stratagem, when Ajewen Cheris (sometimes Kel Cheris) used the hijacked remnants of Shuos Jedao’s personality and memories to take over his command, stage a largely successful revolution, and create a seismic shift in the oppressive Hexarchate’s society.  Cheris’s success was to make the various exotic abilities conferred by the Hexarchate’s high calendar optional for their recipients – which, when you consider the Kel caste’s ability of “mindless conformity with superior authority” or the Vidona caste’s ability to fold dissenters into origami sculptures, actually sounds like a pretty good idea.  Under Cheris’s system, the Hexarchate can move away from being an oppressive totalitarian dystopia founded on mass human sacrifice.

Unfortunately, not everyone thinks this is a good idea – particularly Nirai Kujen, one of the surviving Hexarchs and the architect of much of the Hexarchate’s original system.  Kujen’s own method of personal immortality depends on the unaltered high calendar, and he is keen to see it preserved.  Kujen is a nine-hundred-year-old inventive genius, and a dangerous adversary.  He has, for example, a warship with a devastating weapons system.  More importantly, he has a general with the ability to use that weapon inventively.  Cheris may have stolen most of Shuos Jedao’s memories and abilities, but Jedao was a major asset for Kujen, and you don’t get to be a nine-hundred-year-old inventive genius without realizing the importance of making backups….

It’s a solid conclusion to Yoon Ha Lee’s exotic space opera, centred on Shuos Jedao – or, at least, the current version of him – wrestling with the problem of being fundamentally an OK kind of guy, while also being a mass murderer on a level that makes him reviled even in the Hexarchate, where mass murder is basically a spectator sport.  Along the way, we get to see a bit more of Cheris – I can cope with that, Cheris is basically the only person in the series who isn’t horrendously morally compromised – and the parallel society of the Hexarchate’s robotic “Servitors”, and the various factions vying for control within the successor states to the Hexarchate, and a lot else besides.  (We get to find out more about this setting’s “voidmoth” spacecraft, too, in a development which, in retrospect, should have been obvious – all the other castes’ symbols are living creatures, after all, why should the Nirai’s be any different?)  Lee is good with personalities and motivations and interpersonal dynamics; there are no overt villains, despite all the torture and genocide flying around – even Kujen’s origins make him a vaguely sympathetic character, though one who has to be stopped at all costs.  And, despite all the space-operatic starships and exotic weaponry and stuff, it’s the interpersonal dynamics – the webwork of loves and loyalties and betrayals – that provide the drama and the tension here.

It’s a good book.  It’s also the conclusion to a darn good trilogy (with a couple of random additions thrown in; a scene in Revenant Gun openly calls back to the events of “Extracurricular Activities”, for example.)  The construction of the trilogy, overall, is… interesting.  Lee rather throws the reader in at the deep end in Ninefox Gambit, with a lot of the exotic background left unexplained – which, I think, makes it more rewarding to read the second and third books; having navigated the deep waters at the start, so to speak, it’s a relief and a pleasure to be on firmer footing with the later stuff.  Ninefox Gambit, among other things, presents the Hexarchate’s setting as a given, leaving it to the reader to decide that “hang on, this society is absolutely horrible, isn’t it?”   And then the sequel comes along, confirming that yes, indeed, this society is absolutely horrible, and encouraging us to cheer along as Cheris sets out to change it.  It’s canny writing, that.  I think I could stand to see a lot more from Yoon Ha Lee, in the future.

Revenant Gun is, of course, published in 2018, so eligible for a Hugo in 2019 – and, equally of course, the whole “Machineries of Empire” is eligible for the “Best Series” Hugo.  I’m inclined to go that way, myself, nominating the whole trilogy rather than one of its component parts.  It makes sense to me, although Revenant Gun, by itself, is up there with many individual Hugo winners, quality wise.  Still.  Worth thinking about, come next year’s nominations, that’s for certain.

But If You Don’t Play, You Can’t Win

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So, I suppose the time has come to think about next year’s Hugo possibles, and I suppose Roger Levy’s novel The Rig is one of them.  It’s published in 2018, it’s got an approving cover quote by Lavie Tidhar, it’s worth a look.

Razer is an itinerant tale-teller in the System; she’s guided from planet to planet by her AI Cynth, who points her in the direction of people whose lives would make good stories.  On the aptly-named planet Bleak, she’s pointed at tough cop Bale and loner Tallen; when Tallen is attacked by a serial killer whom Bale takes down, it looks like a suitably dramatic incident for a story… except Bale is convinced there is more going on than meets the eye.  Meanwhile, Tallen is faced with massive medical bills and is forced to take a job running one of the rigs that mine Bleak’s core.  Neurally interfaced with the rig, Tallen becomes its guiding intelligence.  It’s an important job, because mining isn’t all the rigs do – the seas of Bleak are also used to store thousands of “sarcs”, suspended-animation capsules, holding people at the verge of death, who might get a second chance at life through the offices of the all-pervading AfterLife corporation.  Tallen’s rig is looking after a couple of very special sarcs – and both Tallen and Razer have been manipulated into the positions they’re in, as part of a decades-long plan….

Interleaved with this is the life story of Alef, an autistic maths genius following in the footsteps of his father – who was also a maths genius, and was recruited by one of the System’s biggest criminals, who could use a maths genius.  Alef falls in with the crime-lord’s son and heir, the psychotic Pellonhorc, whose ruthlessness will exterminate both his rivals and his father – and, finally, threaten to exterminate everyone, as Pellonhorc imagines himself in a personal duel with God, and will destroy all human life in the System, just to score a point.  Surviving Pellonhorc’s madness, and preserving humanity from it, will take extensive planning on Alef’s part – a decades-long plan, in fact….

OK.  It’s all smoothly enough written, and the final tie-up between the two plot threads is neatly enough executed.  I have to confess, though, I didn’t entirely warm to this one.  The setting – Earth is dead, humanity has relocated to a system with multiple terraformable planets and moons, including one at the edge of the system which is sealed off and nobody talks about it – struck a certain note of familiarity, though it’s grungier and has more incurable diseases than Firefly.  Then, too, I didn’t wholly buy the premise by which AfterLife – which offers a fifty-fifty chance of revival to its subscribers, if a) a cure is found for whatever’s killing them and b) their life stories get enough up-votes on social media – becomes an all-pervading, culturally dominating influence that effectively replaces religion (a suggested tagline for the book, apparently, was “Who needs God, when you have social media?”)  I suppose it’s possible.  Anything’s possible; SF is the literature of possibilities, innit?  I just didn’t buy it.

This might be part and parcel of my bigger problems with the book, one of which is structural.  I couldn’t figure why AfterLife wouldn’t have competition… until fairly late in the book, where it is made clear that the whole set-up has been created by Alef with the resources of the super-Mafia crime syndicate (so any potential competitors would have been discouraged, perhaps by horses’ heads in their beds.)  The thing is, the insertion of Alef’s entire life story, from early childhood onward, stretches the other half of the narrative all out of shape – it’s unevenly paced, padded out with superfluous extreme-sports sequences, even with superfluous characters (like the unfortunate Bale, who, unlike most redshirts, gets to die in the second act to prove the situation is serious.)

My other major problem is with the characters – I didn’t much like either Razer or Alef, and I think the problem here is that they are too passive.  Razer is being manipulated throughout the story, guided into position by her tricky AI.  As for Alef, he, too, is basically responsive rather than proactive, reacting to the demands made on him by Pellonhorc and his father.  Even at the end of the story, when his plan is finally coming to fruition, Alef still turns out to have been played, in a very important way.  Personally, I prefer my protagonists to have a bit more in the way of agency.

If you don’t share my prejudices, the book’s got stuff going for it – the action sequences are nicely spectacular (even if I think some of them are superfluous), the dystopian setting is filled with interesting detail, and the writing is just fine – Levy can convey the excitement of a chase or a catastrophe, can build up the atmosphere of his grim and grimy setting, can handle the rather frequent explosions of violence; it’s all good stuff (unless you have a low tolerance for spurting gore, of course.) The things that bothered me won’t bother everyone – and it’s not like I’m actually hurling it against the wall and demanding my time and money back.  Ultimately, I think The Rig is, well, fairly OK.  It’s just that, for the reasons given, I’m not wildly enthusiastic about it.