Hugos Invitational Opinion Post

[radiantfracture]

Hello! Do you have opinions on this year's Hugo nominees? I would enjoy hearing them -- not for any reason other than the sheer pleasure of thinking about books. Comment freely with your opinions, predictions, and recommendations.

The Backstory

sabotabby got me hooked on the Ancillary Review of Books' podcast A Meal of Thorns via her post on the MoT episode about Ready Player One, and I've been traipsing through the back catalogue.

Last year, host Jake Casella Brookins and frequent guest Roseanna Pendlebury hashed through the Hugo short lists book by book in great toothy detail. The episode was a sublime listening experience as I wandered through the wooded trails around Pkols / Mount Doug a few weeks ago, mostly because I agreed with almost everything they said. (At least about the books I'd read.)

(Last year I happened to do pretty well on Hugo reading. Without trying very hard, I read half the books -- 3/6 novels and 3/6 novellas. This year, not so much -- I've only read Amal El-Mohtar's novella The River Has Roots.)

(NB El-Mohtar's episode of MoT on The Traitor Baru Cormorant is also excellent.)

On precedent, I've been eagerly looking forward to the MoT Hugos episode this year, but so far they don't seem to have one planned.

Hence my rough approximation. Let me interview you about the Hugo noms you read and your takes thereon.

I guess I'll go first:

I liked The River Has Roots a lot. I'm shocked to discover it's El-Mohtar's first solo long-form fiction -- her voice has, to my ear, such assurance, both here and in This is How You Lose the Time War. She knows what she wants to do with this story and she does it, piece by piece. For such a small book, the story feels spacious. It's economical but doesn't feel rushed or compressed to me. I would have liked to know a little more about how she was imagining the phenomenon of grammar. I enjoyed the chicken.

Now you! (If you want.) -- Any Hugo short lister is fair game, whether I have read it or not.

§rf§

Comments

[ursula]

The Incandescent! I had a lot of fun with both Incandescent and Raven Scholar, but Raven Scholar is the one that I think is generically likeable and I'm recommending widely, and the Incandescent is the one that is laser targeted at me specifically.

I am curious about the Cameron Reed novelette but I haven't braced myself to get my heart broken yet.

[sovay]

Hello! Do you have opinions on this year's Hugo nominees? I would enjoy hearing them -- not for any reason other than the sheer pleasure of thinking about books. Comment freely with your opinions, predictions, and recommendations.

I would like Sarah Monette to win Best Series for The Chronicles of Osreth, which I hope is considered to include The Cemeteries of Amalo because I like those novels best of anything she has written that is not about Kyle Murchison Booth. I would actively like Alix E. Harrow not to win Best Novel for The Everlasting because after a furiously strong start it fell apart so badly that I wrote about half a dozen annoyed e-mails to skygiants. I would be cool with Cameron Reed winning Best Novelette for "The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For" which feels slightly like the trial piece for a longer work but which I enjoyed in its own right for its bodies.

[elusis]

I enjoyed The Incandescent a lot for the most part.

[elusis]

I enjoyed Goblin Emperor a great deal, and also Witness for the Dead. I thought Grief of Stones was pretty good as well. I was incredibly disappointed by Tomb of Dragons and when I realized it suffered from the Eight Deadly Words (because honestly Thara's shortcomings got incredibly tiresome 2.5 books in with no measurable changes in his character and I saw the queerbaiting coming from a mile off), I left it unfinished.

Also, I found Addison's (apparent) refusal to do any kind of glossary or "here's how names and their derivatives work" incredibly mentally tiring to deal with through at least the first 30-50% of each book, which contributed to my growing lack of patience with the whole thing.

[elusis]

I liked A Drop of Corruption (and its predecessor) quite a lot, and I'm looking forward to the next book. At times I was a bit irritated by the whole "Holmes and Watson but even more eccentric" thing, and Ana is not so much a character as a collection of tics a lot of the time, but it's an interesting world with lots to engage you. The thing I like least is that neither book's title wants to lodge in my brain, and the author's name just flows straight in and out of my eyeballs with no staying power whatsoever. I keep hitting mentions of him and his books and only belatedly realizing "oh I read that." Something doesn't hook up there for me.

I've got Shroud and will read it but I opted for Service Model first after reading Alien Clay last year.

Automatic Noodle was a fun read and a clever concept. I finished it just before seeing "Maybe Happy Ending" on Broadway last fall and those were interesting to have fresh in my brain together.

I didn't like What Stalks the Deep nearly as much as the first two Sworn Soldier books - it wasn't bad, and maybe claustrophobia isn't really my thing in terms of horror, but Easton's character was less interesting in this book as well.

I liked the first Old Man's War book. I didn't realize there were seven. I've mostly read Scalzi's one-offs I guess.

[genarti]

I love Cinder House enormously. To be fair, I'm also biased (Freya is a friend and I read it in draft) but also, my feelings are sincere! It's going to be hard for any of the novellas to beat it for me, but obviously I'll give them all a fair chance to do so.

(The one Annalee Newitz book I tried I threw across the room -- figuratively; I was reading it on my wife's tablet and I don't think she'd've appreciated it if I'd done so literally -- after a single chapter, so I don't have high hopes for that one, but we'll see.)

I liked The Incandescent a lot too! There were a few aspects it did bobble a bit to me, but its strengths are many and central and compelling. I haven't read most of its competition yet though.

I liked "The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For" fine, and would not be unhappy if it won, but it didn't blow me out of the water. Again, haven't yet read its competition.

In short stories, I loved "In My Country." It's far and away my favorite of the ones that overlap between Hugos and Nebulas, which are the ones I've read already. (I voted for it for the Nebulas, but only after a whole lot of agonizing between it and "The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead," which isn't a finalist here.)

[sabotabby]

I liked A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett quite a bit, haven't read any of the other nominees for novel.

Of novella, The River Has Roots is going to be hard to beat. Automatic Noodle was cute not not in the same category.

If anything other than Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer wins for Best Related it'll be because people are intimidated by chonks, though based on her other work, Last War in Albion: “The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) by Elizabeth Sandifer is probably amazing (I didn't have the spoons to read it).

Andor > everything except maybe Sinners, Severance > everything for short-form.

James Davis Nicoll for best fan writer.

[radiantfracture]

The POV of The Raven Scholar looks really interesting (Ravencam?) -- what did you think of it?

[radiantfracture]

I am completely unfamiliar with the series, but now interested, and am off to print out the novelette on my work printer like the ancient and miserly para-academic that I am.

[radiantfracture]

I've got Shroud and will read it but I opted for Service Model first after reading Alien Clay last year.

Shroud looks right up my alley, but I just don't think I can do another Tchaikovsky this close to last year's two, even though I enjoyed them both.

Automatic Noodle

I like the concept of this, but was not taken by the voice in the first few pages. Worth going on with, though, you think?

[elusis]

ISTR that Automatic Noodle took a bit to grab me also.

[sovay]

I am completely unfamiliar with the series, but now interested, and am off to print out the novelette on my work printer like the ancient and miserly para-academic that I am.

I envy your work printer!

The Goblin Emperor (2014) is a political fantasy that I mostly wrote about in comments, but it was explicitly intended not to have sequels and instead triggered an entire secondary world. I have not read The Orb of Cairado (2025) thanks to it being a signed limited edition and also out of print, but The Witness for the Dead (2021) and The Grief of Stones (2022) are spinoff mysteries in the same universe that are also about incremental healing (again comments) and The Tomb of Dragons (2025) veers wildly from some of its own foreshadowing in a way that burned a lot of readers and was weirder for not being the usual case of fannish apophenia, but didn't kill me from liking the characters, the world, the desire to read more, etc. I have continued to bounce off Monette's other novels under whatever name which is an odd experience. Her short fiction is a reliable hit.

[edit] [rot13] V jbhyq abg qrfpevor gur fjreir nf dhrreonvgvat orpnhfr gur frevrf cebgntbavfg vf dhrre; jurgure cynaarq be abg V jbhyq pnyy vg fuvcgrnfvat, orpnhfr n cnvevat gung ybbxf fvtacbfgrq ol rirel gebcr va gur traer qbrf abg pbzr gb cnff.

[sovay]

I liked A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett quite a bit, haven't read any of the other nominees for novel.

I should ask you about Robert Jackson Bennett! I bounced very hard off my first try at his novels with City of Stairs (2014) whose particular plot-bearing queer death rather unusually whammied me so hard that I have never picked up another. Is it safe to assume that this problem never repeated?

[sabotabby]

I had never even heard of him until Tainted Cup was nominated for a Hugo last year! The Watson character in this series is an incredibly horny bisexual and given that it's first person POV, is presumably not going to die. So far his various love interests have been fine. Some minor queer characters have died in roughly the same way as minor straight characters die (i.e., we don't really get to know them and we just meet a grieving partner kind of thing).