Hugo Blogging: The Short Stories
This is a difficult set of stories to review, as short stories can be spoiled in the way novels (at least good ones) really can’t – most consist of a single central idea or image, and without
Of the four stories nominated for the Best Story award in the Hugos, three of them are so similar in their thematic concerns that they could all have been written for a themed anthology, dealing as they do with small, self-contained communities, with single points of failure, and with restrictions on reproduction. For that reason they probably all seem better than they would if taken alone.
Ponies, by Kaj Johnson, therefore probably comes off slightly worse than it otherwise would, having little in common with the other three. A very short story indeed, and easily the best-written of these four as prose, it’s a beautiful fantasy piece about conformity and sacrifice, with a haunting central metaphor, and a story which more than hints at things like female circumcision. A little slight, maybe, but one that feels better in the memory than it did when reading it.
Amarylis, by Carrie Vaughn, did nothing for me. The crew of a fishing boat in a post-collapse society with strict limits on both food and breeding have a member who wants a kid, but the bloke in charge of weighing their catches keeps putting his finger on the scales so they can’t. Not a bad story as such – a perfectly decent way to spend five minutes – but hardly the best thing published last year.
For Want Of A Nail by Mary Robinette Kowal is, to all intents and purposes, an Asimov story. Set on a generation ship with strict limits on breeding, and where everyone gets ‘recycled’ as soon as they stop being productive, when a minor piece of hardware breaks in a robot and a spare part is needed, a secret that has been kept for years is revealed. A very strong story, and it’d be a worthy winner, but to my mind the ending is a little weak.
As for The Things by Peter Watts… I will link it, but want to place that link *AFTER* a trigger warning for any of my friends who have experienced sexual violence – and I’m afraid that that is also a spoiler for the story. EDIT – And I’ll reiterate that trigger warning – see the comment by Emily after this post. This story has a *NASTY* sting to it – one that I think works, and that is earned by the story, but that made me feel uncomfortable, and I am someone who does not get discomforted easily and who has never personally experienced anything like the events mentioned.
A reworking of The Thing (the John Carpenter film version, though anyone familiar with the 1950s film, or the short story Who Goes Here on which both were based, will get the gist of the references) told from the point of view of the monster, and even if you don’t know the source material it’s still stunningly effective, turning the body horror and paranoia about communism of the original(s) round while keeping the actual events identical to those in the film.
My ranking for these is going to be The Things, Ponies, For Want Of A Nail, Amaryllis, but the top three are all very close.
Hugo Blogging 2: Grandville, Feed, Blackout, Cryoburn
Continuing my reviews of this year’s Hugo entries. Remember, if you want to get a ton of SF ebooks for $50 and vote in the Hugos yourself, you can get the Hugo packet here.
One point here – the four books I’m reviewing here are a sequel, part one of a two-volume story set in a world where that author has apparently set several previous books, part one of a trilogy, and part of a ‘saga’. The Best Novel candidate I’ve not yet read is also part one of a trilogy. Since when did SF writers become physically incapable of writing individual, stand-alone books?
Grandville Mon Amour by Bryan Talbot
Nominated for Best Graphic Story, while this is far from the best comic released during its year of eligibility, it’s still a Bryan Talbot comic, and therefore deserves to win.
The sequel to Grandville, this has the same strengths and weaknesses as the previous book. The art is still gorgeous (though reading it as a PDF on the computer means you can’t see his masterful layout work in full) and it’s still as fun to play spot-the-reference as with the early League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen issues (I especially like the cameo by the misogynist aardvaark). But like the earlier work, the plot is a bit lightweight – and while the first one was roughly based around the conspiracy theories around the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, this one is *very* roughly based around Jack The Ripper conspiracy theories. This means it invites comparisons with From Hell, which are unfair, as this is a deliberately light, pulpy comic.
It’s no Luther Arkwright or Alice In Sunderland, but even when he’s just having fun Talbot is always worth reading.
Blackout by Connie Willis
This was really, really, really annoying. Five hundred and eleven pages long, this is all set-up with no resolution at all, because the resolution is in another book (I didn’t realise this til I was up to page 507 and the major plot point hadn’t happened yet). It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing at all happened in the book, but certainly the actual *events* in it could be compressed into a short story. Well, half a short story. The Wikipedia page for the book has a nine-line plot summary – and a nine *paragraph* summary of the sequel.
Willis writes well, but fundamentally this is like if someone had taken just the World War II parts of Cryptonomicon (say), removed all the discussion of ideas so you were just left with the painfully accurate research about the war years, and put that out as a book. Except have all the fiddly little details right about the war but totally wrong about the country in which it’s set. Yes, it’s part one of a two-part novel, but it’s still not structured *at all* as a single volume – it just stops, and after 511 pages giving the reader no reward whatsoever seems more than a little unfair.
Over and over again Willis assumes that the UK is really just exactly the same as the USA except for us all drinking tea and loving the Royal Family. It’s a minor point, but the biggest problem I had with the book was that everyone speaks in USian dialect – they say “I’ve got to go get that” rather than “I’ve got to go *and* get that”, and “January thirteenth” instead of “January *the* thirteenth”. If you’re going to go to the trouble, as Willis obviously has, of researching dates of bombings and the names of shops on Oxford Street in the 40s, you could at least bother to listen to an English person speak. Maybe even get one to read the book before you put it out. Judging from these posts, the ePub has actually been revised and the most egregious errors fixed compared to the original paper publication. Christ alone knows how bad this was before that. Utter, utter, unmitigated crap.
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
The ePub file for this crashes my e-reader, so I’m just mentioning it so people know I’m not ignoring it.
Feed by Mira Grant
While I’ve had more than enough of zombies at the moment, seeing on the title page that Grant also writes as Seanan McGuire gave me hope, even despite this being ‘part one of the Newsflesh trilogy’ – McGuire’s piece had been the one piece I’d really enjoyed in Chicks Dig Time Lords, so I expected this to be at least decent.
And while hardly great, it was a pleasant, enjoyable read. The worldbuilding is deftly done – set a few decades after a zombie outbreak, the anti-zombie precautions are very much in the same mould as our current ‘anti-terror’ laws – though I’d question the idea that blogging will still be regarded as ‘new media’ at that time, rather than hopelessly antiquated. All the characters were well sketched, the plot, while predictable, does have one twist that I at least didn’t see coming (though I really should have) and the prose style is very easy to read.
In fact, this reads like what we are now euphemistically supposed to call ‘Young Adult’ books (they’re not for young adults. I’m a young adult – I’m 32 – and they’re not aimed at me. Call them what they are, children’s books – or use the old term Heinlein used, ‘juveniles’). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it makes the book very, very readable. But the end result is something lightweight and lacking substance.
That sounds a harsher judgement than I mean it to. I enjoyed this (and despite it being part one of a trilogy, it had a proper structure and ending. It can be done, Willis) and while I’m not going to eagerly seek out parts two and three of the trilogy, nor am I going to avoid them. Definitely the most enjoyable of the ‘best novel’ candidates I’ve read so far.
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold started with so many strikes against it that I almost didn’t even get through the first chapter. It’s part of a ‘saga’ (I don’t do sagas, and I’m certainly not normally going to start reading something that’s part nineteen or whatever of a story). The characters have odd names in what appear to be multiple different orthographies, causing extra cognitive load to keep track of them. It’s set on a planet where people address each other with -san or -sensei endings but in all other ways behave like Westerners, and its main characters are important in some sort of Galactic Empire (unless you’re Asimov, I want my viewpoint characters to be fighting against hereditary dictators, not helping keep them in positions of power) and have hereditary titles themselves. Were I not trying to read everything so I can vote honestly in the Hugos, I wouldn’t have read this if you’d paid me.
However, *despite* all those things I ended up quite enjoying this. It seems to be riffing off Clifford Simak’s Why Call Them Back From Heaven? and its main effect was to make me want to reread that book, but I found myself almost unwillingly drawn into the story. Admittedly, the plot runs on rails so obvious that I predicted one twist ( “Gung’f abg zl zbzzl!” (ROT13 to avoid spoilers)) two chapters in advance down to the precise wording, but it’s still a *decent* plot, and it’s well-written. I won’t be seeking out any more of Bujold’s work based on this, but am pleasantly surprised by how decent it seemed given that it’s very, *very* much Not My Sort Of Thing.
Hugo Blogging 1: Chicks Dig Time Lords
I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to start reading more science fiction (especially as I’ve been *writing* more SF, and it’s a field that demands keeping up with what’s current). Other than Charles Stross, Greg Egan and Neal Stephenson, I’ve read fairly little from the last thirty years or so (oddly, while I prefer SF to fantasy, I’ve read far more fantasy from my own lifetime than SF), though I have an exhaustive knowledge of the field before that.
So I decided to get the Hugo packet, to get an idea of the current state of the best in the field, and vote in the Hugos for the first time.
(I note incidentally, that the Hugos are awarded by AV *and* have a ‘none of the above’ option and so are more democratic than our Commons elections will be. Not that I’m bitter. (I am bitter.))
While I’ve got it, I thought I might as well blog my reactions to the various entries as I read them. First up, an entry in the “Best Related Work” category
Chicks Dig Time Lords is a book I *wanted* to like. It’s published by Mad Norwegian, who among other books have published almost all the Faction Paradox books and the wonderful About Time series of guidebooks, and who are a very small independent company. And it’s about the female experience of fandom, something that’s been neglected.
I certainly wouldn’t have any hesitation in recommending it to some people, but I am so far from the target audience for this that it’s not funny. While the promotion for the book has described it as being about female fandom, it’s actually, for the most part, about a very specific part of female fandom – namely people who will use the word ‘squee’ on a regular basis. We’re actually, here, looking at a snapshot of a sub-subculture – one that grew up around the website Outpost Gallifrey and communities on LiveJournal in the middle of the last decade, one mostly based around enjoying the Welsh series, and one that is extremely uncritical of the show itself.
Now, this is not an invalid perspective, and it is one that deserves to be shared, but this book seems written for people who already have that perspective. Words like ‘squee’ or ‘aca-fan’ are thrown around with an assumption that one has the cultural context to appreciate not just the literal meaning of the words but some kind of subtextual nuance for them. (I had to google aca-fan, having never come across the term before).
Far too much of the book is made up of short autobiographical sketches of very similar-sounding people. There must be at least four or five essays in here which could be summed up as “I remember watching Tom Baker on the PBS affiliate for my Midwestern US state with my annoying kid brother when I was a kid in the 80s. All the other kids at my school thought I was weird for liking this weird English English weird English thing with wobbly sets, so I grew out of it. But then Russel T Davies brought it back and I fell in love with all the characters, especially Jack Harkness, and SQUEE!”
Now, again, I am not criticising this as a perspective – as one of the essays (by Kate Orman, one of the better writers involved) is titled, “If I Can’t Squee, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution”, and enthusiasm is the reason why anyone becomes a fan of anything. And I would have a *LOT* of explaining to do to my wife when she gets back from visiting her Minnesotan parents tomorrow if I tried to say that the perspective of women who grew up in the midwestern US in the 1980s didn’t deserve to be shared.
But I am, fundamentally, an analytical person. Descriptions of how something makes you feel do very little for me, compared to descriptions of *why* something makes you feel that way (or attempts to make the reader feel the same way). I also find it far more revealing sometime to talk about something’s failures than its successes – I’d rather read About Time or The Discontinuity Guide than something that didn’t talk about Doctor Who’s flaws, for the same reasons I’d rather read Liberator than a Lib Dem party press release. And the analytical is pretty much absent from this book. Which is OK. That’s not what it’s for. It’s a celebration. I’m just not a very celebratory person.
Of these autobiographical sketch things, the best by far is “Mathematical Excellence: A Documentary” by Seanan McGuire, which moves away from the generic and had me genuinely laughing quite hard, as well as being moved by the rather poignant ending. Most of the rest of the pieces in this vein are descriptions of emotions, while McGuire’s piece inspires those emotions in the reader. Maybe more of the other pieces would, if I were part of the target audience.
More interesting from my point of view are the descriptions of fan creativity – people talking about creating costumes for their own imagined characters in the Doctor Who fictional universe, or writing fan fiction, or making fan videos. This is something that female fandom has been far more willing to do than male fandom generally (all exceptions duly noted – of course any female/male split is an artificial division, but this book *exists* because of that artificial distinction) – to take elements of others’ work and reimagine them as elements in their own creative projects.
Still, though, by the nature of the book, these essays are too short to properly go into the issues involved or the process of making these things, and I get the impression that a far more interesting book (from my point of view) could have been made just using examples of this fan-art (though I understand that it would be prohibitively difficult to do legally). At least one representative piece of this fan art has been included, a comic strip called Torchwood Babiez. Unfortunately, it didn’t display properly in my ebook reader.
And the book is rounded out by a few interviews with women who have been involved in Doctor Who, mostly actors who have performed for Big Finish, which might be interesting to those who’ve not read interviews with these people before.
It sounds like I’m being terribly critical of this book, and I’m really not. If you’ve taken part in online new-Who fandom, especially on LiveJournal or the old Outpost Gallifrey, this book will probably be precisely your thing, and I know some of my friends have been and are part of that world. The writers are obviously intelligent, talented people for the most part, and I can’t imagine a better book of this type. But it’s emphatically not for me. But that’s OK – not everything has to be. It’s an open-hearted, welcoming, *friendly* book, and that I’m a cold-hearted joyless curmudgeon is, essentially, my problem, not the book’s.
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