Entries Tagged 'Books' ↓

Nnedi Okorafor\’s novella Binti won the Hugo Award for Best Novella last year.  This year, the middle volume of the trilogy, Binti: Home, has also been nominated, and a few months ago the conclusion, Binti: The Night Masquerade was released.  So it seems like a good time to talk about the whole series!

(As I am discussing the final book of a trilogy, there will be a certain amount of spoilers for the first two books.  I will do my best to keep them somewhat vague, and to avoid spoiling the third book much.)

In Binti, we met the title character – a gifted harmonizer able to create currents of energy by \”treeing\”, or meditating on mathematical equations, and the first of the Himba people to attend Oomza Uni, a prestigious galactic university.  The Himba are strongly rooted to the earth that they live on, as evinced by her people\’s tradition of covering their skin and hair with otjize – a mixture of red clay, oil, and fragrant herbs.  The neighboring Khoush people mock and belittle the Himba for that and for their general provinciality, despite the Himba specialty – and in fact Binti\’s family\’s own expertise – in the intricate and widely used technology of astrolabes (think smartphones taken to their logical conclusion of being one\’s entire interface to the digital world).

Despite derogatory comments from the Khoush and resistance from her own family, Binti boards a living spaceship full of Khoush students, literally covered in her own homeland as she travels out into the galaxy despite the way it separates her.  She also brings her edan – a strange artifact she found in the desert, which responds somehow to her treeing – and she brings her wisdom as a harmonizer in training as well.  All of these things allow her to be the sole survivor of an attack on her ship by the alien Meduse, in which the hundreds of Khoush students are killed. Binti is pressured into acting as a representative for the Meduse and brokers a truce between them and Oomza Uni – but she is irrevocably changed in the process, becoming somehow part Meduse herself, and developing a sort of bond with a Meduse named Okwu, who becomes the first Meduse student on Oomza Uni.

In Binti: Home, she tries to go home again, a year later, and Okwu accompanies her.  She is now wearing otjize made from clay on Oomza Uni, reflecting her confusion and ambiguous feelings about what \”home\” means to her. Her family, being so strongly rooted to their homeland, is still angry about her departure; Binti has to endure barbed comments from family and friends alike. The Khoush are still angry about the Meduse attack on their students, and see Okwu\’s accompanying Binti back to Earth as a provocation. And Binti learns more about the non-Himba side of her family; her father came from the Enya Zinariya people, who even the Himba look down on. Instead of going on the traditional pilgrimage of Himba women, to attain her status as an adult of her people, she is instead taken to see the leader of the Enya Zinariya and undergoes a ritual to unlock the alien technology embedded in their blood. At the end of the second book Binti discovers that her family home, the Root, has been attacked by the Khoush, seeking revenge on Okwu.

Binti: The Night Masquerade picks up immediately from that cliffhanger and thrusts Binti back into the position of trying to broker peace between humans and the Meduse.  Her own identity has been shattered into pieces – part Himba, part Meduse, part Enya Zinariya – and the tension between the different parts of her, as well as the disorientation from her new access to the Zinariya technology, leaves her unbalanced and unsure of herself.  Her otjize continues to carry the symbolic weight of her connection to her concept of home, which in this story takes quite a beating as Binti tries her hardest to resolve those tensions and figure out who she actually is – not who she\’s being told to be by her Himba family and friends, or who she\’s been turned into by the Meduse metamorphosis, or who she\’s been linked with through the Zinariya technology.  But despite all the strife she faces both within herself and at the intersection of the multiple different worlds that all try to claim a piece of her, her heart is still in the same place.  She is a harmonizer, and harmony is the meaning of her life; she seeks to bring it to those around her and strives for it within herself as well.

Dr. Okorafor writes Binti\’s struggles so empathetically.  It\’s an utter joy to spend time in Binti\’s head, even when she\’s miserable and unsure, because she just feels so real, despite the fact that the problems she faces are mostly alien to me, both literally and figuratively.  At her lowest points I was worried and desperately hoping she would find a path to happiness; at her highest points I exulted along with her in the wonders the universe had to offer, and at her strongest moments I marveled at her fortitude, her harmony, the gravitational pull she exerted on the world around her to try to make things better.  Binti: Home was a masterful conclusion to the trilogy, leaving me satisfied with the story but simultaneously hoping to see more of Binti\’s story someday.

Best Novella Hugo

Only two novellas in, and this is already a really difficult choice.  I suppose it\’s my own fault for starting with my two favorites.  As I have noted with previous ballots, I typically prefer to avoid voting to give a second Hugo to a series; in this case, Binti was awarded the Hugo for Best Novella in 2016, so I\’ll put the newcomer on top for now.

1. All Systems Red, Martha Wells
2. Binti: Home, Nnedi Okorafor

All Systems Red is the first novella of a new series entitled The Murderbot Diaries.  For some of you that\’s probably enough to recommend the book already; it was for me.  (Well, that and hearing about it via Seanan McGuire\’s Twitter feed.  Any murderbot that passes Seanan\’s standards is good enough for me.)  Suffice it to say, I was not disappointed.

The titular character is, well, a murderbot.  Specifically, a security unit with little ambition and less interest in murdering people, who has been contracted – rented out, really – as protection for a research group investigating a new planet.  Its main interests are serial dramas and gaining personal autonomy by hacking one\’s own governor protocols; its greatest dislikes are social interactions and being forced to do things it doesn\’t want to do.

The murderbot simply refers to itself as Murderbot, and it is not a person, at least as far as its society is concerned.  The line between human and robot has become rather blurred – we know augmented humans exist, and Murderbot\’s body is at least part organic; nevertheless, Murderbot is an object, owned by a corporation and rented out like a rototiller.  But the first-person viewpoint of the story – engaging, emotional, and all too familiar to someone who suffers from social anxiety like I do – puts the lie to that idea almost immediately.

I found Murderbot to be a deeply sympathetic character, whether just trying to keep its head down and not shoot anyone, or fretting about how the humans it protected would see it, or recoiling from the humans\’ well-meant attempts to get to know it.  Murderbot clearly has a severe case of social anxiety from being treated as less than human for so long, and goddamn do I understand that feeling.

Lest I give the impression that the whole story is just Murderbot trying to figure out how to interact with humans – there are actual problems outside of its own head to solve, too; its personal development is driven by, and drives in turn, other events in the plot.  But it\’s Murderbot\’s emotional arc, and the tension between its clear personhood and society\’s refusal to consider it as anything other than an object, that grabbed my attention more than anything else – and that leaves me wanting so badly to read the next book in The Murderbot Diaries.

Best Novella Hugo

This looks like another strong year for several of the Hugo Award categories, so as I review each of the nominees for this year\’s Hugos I\’m going to build up my final ballot one by one, rather than trying to put everything in order at the end.  In this case, I read All Systems Red last year and nominated it for the Hugo, and I\’m happy to see it on the ballot.  Will it be my top choice?  Honestly, I\’m not sure; three of my nominees were finalists, and even among those I don\’t know how I\’ll order them yet.  But until I review them, my ballot so far:

1. All Systems Red, Martha Wells

Space Opera started as a joke. How else? Cat Valente was livetweeting the Eurovision Song Contest, Charles Tan made a joke about “you should write a Eurovision SF novel”, and Navah Wolfe immediately offered to buy the novel before a word had been written.  From these hilarious, humble beginnings came… well.

Take the combined aesthetics of David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Jem and the Holograms, and the Diva Plavalaguna and crush them into a glittery powder.  Now smash Douglas Adams and Hunter S. Thompson together in a transporter accident, and have the resulting author-golem snort an entire noseful of the aforementioned powder and then rewrite “Encounter at Farpoint” as a pop-song competition with humanity’s survival at stake.  That’s almost what Space Opera is like.

Almost, but not quite, because I still haven’t figured out how to describe the raw, beating heart and soul of the book.  The absurd descriptions of the aliens and their technology and culture, and the improbable appearances of certain Earthly avatars seven thousand lightyears away, are certainly due at least in part to Adams’ influence – but he never examined the failures and faults of humanity with such anguish.  The aliens’ gonzo music scene and the variety of neurochemical alterations needed to fully grok it, as well as the unflinching descriptions of humanity at its shittiest, are also somewhat reminiscent of Thompson’s work – but he never contemplated the human condition with such compassion.

In the end, comparisons to other authors and artists fall short.  The heart of this book is Catherynne Valente’s own, as is the variety of startling and revelatory imagery she employs, and they’re the same things that keep me coming back to every new book she writes.  Humanity, like all life across the galaxy, is beautiful and stupid.  We fuck things up all the time but we keep trying, and Valente loves us all for it, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting off easy.  Beneath all the glitter and glam, Space Opera reminds us that we’re capable of so much beauty, if we could just stop being assholes to each other for long enough.

Everything I read in 2018, with 2018-published works separated out and bolded if I\’m considering nominating them for Hugos.  See 2017, 2016, and 2015 lists.  (As usual, there are plenty of works that I enjoyed quite a bit but am unlikely to nominate; don\’t take the lack of bolding as an indication that I didn\’t like it!)

2018 Novels (at least 40,000 words):

• The Wonder Engine, T. Kingfisher
• Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente
• Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee
• Ruin of Angels, Max Gladstone
• Night and Silence, Seanan McGuire
• Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
• The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, Seanan McGuire
• Swordheart, T. Kingfisher
• Mass Effect: Annihilation, Catherynne M. Valente
• Tricks for Free, Seanan McGuire
• Rites and Desires, Amanda Cherry
• Spanish Mission, K.B. Spangler
• Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse
• Kill the Farm Boy, Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne
• The Labyrinth Index, Charles Stross

2018 Novellas (17,500 to 40,000 words):

• Beneath the Sugar Sky, Seanan McGuire
• The Armored Saint, Myke Cole
• The Queen of Crows, Myke Cole
• Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor
• Artificial Condition, Martha Wells
• The Flowers of Vashnoi, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Taste of Wrath, Matt Wallace

2018 Novelettes (7,500 to 17,500 words):

• TBD

2018 Short Stories (less than 7,500 words):

• \”The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society\”, T. Kingfisher
• \”What my Family Should Know in the Event of my Demise\”, Darrell Z. Grizzle

2018 Series (per Hugo requirements):

• TODO

2018 Graphic Stories:

• TODO

Non-2018 works read in 2018:

• The Sacred Hunt duology, Michelle Sagara West
• Jade City, Fonda Lee
• The Dispatcher, John Scalzi
• The Glass Town Game, Catherynne Valente
• All Systems Red, Martha Wells
• Terminal Alliance, Jim Hines
• Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty
• At the Table of Wolves, Kay Kenyon
• Barbary Station, R.E. Stearns
• \”The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant\”, Rachael K. Jones
• \”Utopia, LOL?\”, Jamie Wahls
• \”The Heart\’s Cartography\”, Susan Jane Bigelow
• \”Remote Presence\”, Susan Palwick
• \”The Worshipful Society of Glovers\”, Mary Robinette Kowal
• \”The Secret Life of Bots\”, Suzanne Palmer
• \”Three May Keep A Secret\”, Carlie St. George
• Binti, Nnedi Okorafor
• Binti: Home, Nnedi Okorafor
• The Escapement of Blackledge, Mary Robinette Kowal
• River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey
• The Black Tides of Heaven, JY Yang
• \”And Then There Were (N-One)\”, Sarah Pinsker
• New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson
• Provenance, Ann Leckie
• A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan
• The Tropic of Serpents, Marie Brennan
• The Voyage of the Basilisk, Marie Brennan
• Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
• Raven Strategem, Yoon Ha Lee
• Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee
• \”Extracurricular Activities\”, Yoon Ha Lee
• \”Wind Will Rove\”, Sarah Pinsker
• \”The Secret Life of Bots\”, Suzanne Palmer
• \”A Series of Steaks\”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad
• \”Children of Thorns, Children of Water\”, Aliette de Bodard
• \”Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time\”, K.M. Szpara
• \”Fandom for Robots\”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad
• \”Sun, Moon, Dust\”, Ursula Vernon
• \”Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experienceâ„¢\”, Rebecca Roanhorse
• \”Carnival Nine\”, Caroline M. Yoachim
• \”Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand\”, Fran Wilde
• \”The Martian Obelisk\”, Linda Nagata
• Rosemary and Rue, Seanan McGuire
• A Local Habitation, Seanan McGuire
• An Artificial Night, Seanan McGuire
• Late Eclipses, Seanan McGuire
• One Salt Sea, Seanan McGuire
• Ashes of Honor, Seanan McGuire
• Chimes at Midnight, Seanan McGuire
• The Winter Long, Seanan McGuire
• A Red-Rose Chain, Seanan McGuire
• Once Broken Faith, Seanan McGuire
• The Brightest Fell, Seanan McGuire
• The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross
• The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross
• The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross
• The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross
• The Rhesus Chart, Charles Stross
• The Annihilation Score, Charles Stross
• The Nightmare Stacks, Charles Stross
• The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross
• Aftermath: Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens, Chuck Wendig

My final ballot for the 2017 Hugo Awards, with links to my review posts:

Best Novel

1. Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee
2. A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
3. Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer
4. All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
5. The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
6. Death\’s End, Cixin Liu, tr. Ken Liu

Best Novella

1. A Taste of Honey, Kai Ashante Wilson
2. The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
3. Penric and the Shaman, Lois McMaster Bujold
4. Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire
5. The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Kij Johnson
6. This Census-Taker, China Mieville

Best Novelette

1. The Jewel and her Lapidary, Fran Wilde
2. \”The Tomato Thief\”, Ursula Vernon
3. \”You\’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay\”, Alyssa Wong
4. \”Touring with the Alien\”, Carolyn Ives Gilman
5. \”The Art of Space Travel\”, Nina Allan
6. No Award
7. Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex, Stix Hiscock

Best Short Story

1. \”The City Born Great\”, N.K. Jemisin
2. \”A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers\”, Alyssa Wong
3. \”Seasons of Glass and Iron\”, Amal El-Mohtar
4. \”Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies\”, Brooke Bolander
5. \”That Game We Played During The War\”, Carrie Vaughn
6. No Award
7. \”An Unimaginable Light\”, John C. Wright

For everything below this point, I have been limited by what I was already able to read/watch prior to the voting, hence the incomplete ballots in most places.  Some particular notes:

• I did read a few excerpts of each of the Best Related Work nominees, but not in most cases the entire thing.
• For the artist awards I looked through the provided portfolios.
• The editorial awards are primarily based off which of their various edited works I read and enjoyed; I deeply appreciate this year\’s Hugo packet including lists of editorial credits.
• Some categories I haven\’t read from at all, and have just omitted as a result.

You might see No Award pop up here or there; while I\’m just leaving most works I haven\’t seen off the ballot because I do not have enough information to make a judgment, there are a few cases that have specifically squandered any benefit of the doubt I might have had.

Best Related Work

1. The Geek Feminist Revolution, Kameron Hurley
2. Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, Ursula K. Le Guin
3. The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher
4. The View From the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman
5. The \”Women of Harry Potter\” posts, Sarah Gailey
6. Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg, Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Best Graphic Story

1. Saga, volume 6, Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

1. Hidden Figures
2. Ghostbusters
3. Rogue One
4. Deadpool

Best Professional Editor, Short Form

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

Best Professional Editor, Long Form

1. Sheila E. Gilbert
2. Liz Gorinsky
3. Devi Pillai
4. Mirian Weinberg
5. Navah Wolfe
6. No Award
7. Vox Day

Best Professional Artist

1. Julie Dillon
2. Chris McGrath
3. Sana Takeda
4. Galen Dara
5. John Picacio
6. Victo Ngai

Best Semiprozine

1. Uncanny Magazine
2. Strange Horizons

Best Fanzine

1. Rocket Stack Rank

Best Fan Writer

1. Mike Glyer
2. Chuck Tingle

Best Fan Artist

1. Vesa Lehtimäki
2. Elizabeth Leggett
3. likhain
4. Ninni Aalto
5. Spring Schoenhuth
6. Steve Stiles

Best Series

1. The Vorkosigan Saga, Lois McMaster Bujold
2. The Craft Sequence, Max Gladstone
3. The October Daye books, Seanan McGuire
4. The Temeraire series, Naomi Novik

John W. Campbell Award (for best new writer)

1. Ada Palmer
2. Malka Older
3. Sarah Gailey

Last of the prose fiction categories!  The first five nominees here are an amazing set of stories showcasing the breadth and depth of what the genre is capable of, and again I had a hard time making some of these choices.

(Previous 2017 Hugo posts: Novelette nominees, Novella nominees, Ninefox Gambit, A Closed and Common Orbit, Too Like the Lightning, All the Birds in the Sky, The Obelisk Gate, Death\’s End.)

1. \”The City Born Great\”, N.K. Jemisin

At first, the juxtaposition of monsters on a plane of reality we can\’t quite see and police-driven racism in New York City would seem to place this story in very similar territory to The Ballad of Black Tom, but N.K. Jemisin takes a much more optimistic view.  In Black Tom, by the present day the entire world is already damned – has been, for close to a century – by our inhumanity towards those we refuse to acknowledge as people of equal significance.  Whereas in \”The City Born Great\”, taking place in the present, Jemisin says: see that kid over there?  The homeless guy you spit on, the gay teenager you kicked out of your home, the unarmed black man who could get murdered any day by the police while you look away?  He\’s going to stand against the darkness.  He\’s going to bring this place that reviled him into a new age of glory.  He\’ll save us all, if you\’ll only let him.

2. \”A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers\”, Alyssa Wong

When someone close to you commits suicide, woven through the shock and the grief is that question that may well haunt you for the rest of your life: What if you\’d done something differently?  Could you have saved them?  What if you had the chance to try again?  Is there, maybe, a universe where they\’re still here, and if so, can you make your way to it if you\’re willing to never make peace with your loss?  Alyssa Wong turns those counterfactuals into a reality-bending trip through multiple different ways this short, sad story could have unfolded.

3. \”Seasons of Glass and Iron\”, Amal El-Mohtar

The burdens and expectations that patriarchy puts on the two female protagonists of this story are rendered as physical, magical impediments.  One must wear down seven pairs of iron shoes on a quest to save her husband from his own abusive nature, while the other is locked in a glass castle on a glass hill as men dash themselves against it to reach her.  But when the two of them meet, each of them recognizes the injustice of the other\’s situation while still believing that, on some level, they deserve their own plight.  \”Seasons of Glass and Iron\” interrogates the stories we tell ourselves about the abuse we suffer, and raises the question of why we can so clearly see injustice against others and yet have so much trouble identifying our own abusive situations.

4. \”Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies\”, Brooke Bolander

The story of a murder and its aftermath, seeking to redress the imbalance between the men whose stories take center stage and the women whose deaths are used simply as motivation fodder.  If you\’re sick of seeing women fridged, this is a short but satisfying response, reclaiming at least this one story in the name of one seriously pissed-off harpy and her sisters who help her take revenge.  And for an ancient mythological creature, her voice is delightfully modern – not only in the liberal sprinkling of profanity, but also in the very matter-of-fact way in which she describes, as a series of fifteen or so bullet points, the relevant facts of the situation.

5. \”That Game We Played During The War\”, Carrie Vaughn

An enjoyable story about Calla and Valk, two soldiers on opposing sides of a recently concluded war, and each at one point a prisoner under the watch of the other.  Valk\’s race is telepathic, but they still passed the time playing chess on occasion; the game, and the strategies Calla developed for confounding his telepathy, becomes a symbol and a common interest around which they reconnect.

The optimistic theme of two nominal enemies building a bond of understanding during the war, and then building further on it during the ensuing peace, reminded me a little of Cordelia and Aral Vorkosigan.  As did the characters themselves; I thought of the dynamic between Cordelia\’s canny emotionalism and Aral\’s surface-level stoicism whenever Calla managed to surprise Valk despite being a completely open book to him.  She is so open, and he is much more closed off, and in spite of that mismatch, or because of it, they build a rapport that could hold the key to a future of peace.

6. No Award

Here we go again.

7. \”An Unimaginable Light\”, John C. Wright

For all the complaining the \”Rabid Puppies\” do over \”boring message fiction\”, they sure do write some excruciatingly dull stories.  I bailed on this story about a third of the way through.  Nearly the entirety of that time was spent by the two main characters, a robot and a robopsychologist, lecturing each other about the history of robotics and their analyses of each other.  Most of the remainder was spent in descriptions of the robot\’s appearance, like this paragraph of introduction:

The kneeling girl did not look like a robot. She looked like a love goddess. Her face was piquant and elfin, her eyes danced and glittered. Her lips were full, her smile ready. She was pulchritudinous, buxom, callipygous, leggy. Her torso was slender, and her abdominal muscles as well defined as those of a belly dancer, so that her navel was like a period between two cursive brackets. Her hair was lustrous, and tied in a loose knot at the back of her swanlike neck. Hair, eye, and skin color were optional. She was, of course, naked.

Six pages later, she still hasn\’t been given a name, but the author has made multiple sneering references to the social justice concepts he has spent the last several years railing against.  John C. Wright is going to make sure you know how little he thinks of ideas like pronoun choice and microaggressions, by God, no matter how shitty a story he has to write to do so.

Let\’s see if I can edit myself down a little bit, shall we?  (Previous 2017 Hugo posts: Novella nominees, Ninefox Gambit, A Closed and Common Orbit, Too Like the Lightning, All the Birds in the Sky, The Obelisk Gate, Death\’s End.)

1. The Jewel and her Lapidary, Fran Wilde

Hidden in a valley is a small kingdom, protected by the magical gems wielded by its royal family, the Jewels, and the Lapidaries who serve them and help control their magic.  This is the story of the Jewel princess Lin and her lapidary Sima, the last defense against the foreign invaders who have destroyed the Jeweled Court with the help of a betrayer within.  The invaders know they must control the last Jewel in order to solidify their conquest of the kingdom, but Lin and Sima have other ideas.  Their respective fathers, the king and his own lapidary, are both dead, one at the hands of the other, but under the incredible pressure of the deaths of everyone they love but each other, they persist in defending their home to the last.

The girls\’ friendship is the heart and soul of this book, as each is devoted to the other through bonds of duty and love.  But while that devotion gives them strength, they are each clever and resourceful as well.  I don\’t know if there is to be more of this series, but I hope so; despite a climax with great emotional effect, The Jewel and her Lapidary feels like it ought to be a prologue to a much longer story, and I\’d love to read more of it.

2. \”The Tomato Thief\”, Ursula Vernon

Ursula Vernon is at her best when she is writing unlikely, stubborn protagonists, and Grandma Harken is no exception.  The ornery, practical witch from \”Jackalope Wives\” simply wants to tend her garden and live in peace, with an occasional fresh tomato sandwich.  When her tomatoes start disappearing overnight as they ripen, she sets out to catch the thief – who turns out to be a bird-woman shapeshifter under some kind of enslavement, who Grandma Harken releases and then tracks as she tries to get to the root of the situation.

\”The Tomato Thief\” isn\’t a terribly long story, but the American Southwestern setting is dense with richly detailed magic and fantastic beings; the bird-shapeshifter seems practically mundane next to the train-god and the folds in reality and the Coyote with his sometimes-canine, sometimes-feline, always-tricky demeanor.  Grandma Harken\’s own personality reminds me a lot of Granny Weatherwax from Discworld, with her combination of stubbornness and a prickly sort of kindness.  But where Granny Weatherwax\’s canniness verged on genre savviness, in keeping with the metafictional nature of her world, Grandma Harken\’s keen sense of how the world works – and particularly, how to respect the desert so it doesn\’t kill you – simply feels like a lifetime of hard-won experience distilled into wisdom.  Between that and a gently snarky viewpoint, she\’s a great character to spend an hour with; at this point, I\’d happily read a story about Grandma Harken waiting in line at the DMV as long as Ursula Vernon was the one writing it.

3. \”You\’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay\”, Alyssa Wong

Speaking of magical fiction set in the Southwest… Alyssa Wong tells a story of Ellis, boy who inherited necromantic magic from his late father and desert magic from his absent mother, which has left him sort of betwixt-and-between.  He lives and works at a brothel in the Southwest, though his otherworldly nature and general aura of death tends to prevent customers from lingering too long.  His best friend, Marisol, a girl at the brothel, is more understanding of his nature than most.

The desert is dangerous.  It collapsed a mine outside of town, killing dozens of townsfolk, and drought now threatens the town while dead things roam the desert.  Ellis\’s internal conflict between the two halves of his magical heritage is reflected in that broken relationship between desert and town, and when the mining company tries to use his magic to return to the mine, things deteriorate further.

Ellis\’s emotional arc is about learning to accept himself, conflict and all.  He is scared to let Marisol know too much about him, but after the things he faces in the desert, he is able to find greater understanding from her as well, and is able to help the town heal.

4. \”Touring with the Alien\”, Carolyn Ives Gilman

Alien vessels have suddenly appeared all over North America.  Human \”translators\” have emerged from them, claiming to be children previously abducted (or \”adopted\”) by the aliens.  Avery is a woman working for a legally-gray \”shipping company\” and has been hired to drive an alien translator and an alien itself from its vessel near Washington, DC to St. Louis.  Avery spends most of the meandering road trip talking with the translator, Lionel, and trying to understand the aliens better.  Lionel is not exactly acclimated to human society either.

Avery and Lionel gradually establish a rapport, as she begins to understand the relationship between the aliens, Lionel, and human society, and as she tries to teach Lionel how to behave like a normal human.  Gilman does an excellent job of portraying a truly \”alien\” alien – a species that is extremely difficult for humans to understand because their very notions of thought and action differ in some fundamental ways from what we are used to – and the frequency with which Avery and Lionel talk past each other because they\’re making different assumptions felt like a much more realistic portrayal of the problems of first contact than most such stories I\’ve read.

That said, the ending seemed to come out of nowhere.  Specifically, the way Avery suddenly not only accepted the situation they found themselves in but actively shifted to helping it along seemed disconnected from her behavior for the rest of the story.  Her breakdown in the graveyard was likely supposed to motivate how she handled the ending, but I feel like there were still a few missing steps on that emotional arc.

5. \”The Art of Space Travel\”, Nina Allan

A story about a woman working at a hotel which will soon host the astronauts about to embark on a mission to Mars, decades after a previous launch ended in disaster.  Emily\’s mother was part of the disaster-recovery crew dealing with the fallout from the failed launch, and her health and memory have been gradually failing ever since.  Emily\’s paternity has been a mystery her whole life, with her mother only recently being willing to speak about it as she realizes in her more lucid moments that before long she may not be able to say anything meaningful at all.

This story kind of meandered through Emily\’s speculations about who her father was, having gotten some vague hints about it being someone her mother had met during launch preparations.  I frankly didn\’t find that aspect of the story terribly interesting, not having known the character long enough for me to be invested in the paternity question, and the eventual revelation of her father\’s identity was unsurprising to the point of being trite.  But there wasn\’t a lot else to the story; the Mars mission itself was basically just a background detail that only impacted the story to the extent that it made the paternity question a little more immediate and motivated some discussion of Emily\’s mother\’s illness.

6. No Award

If you need a refresher on the Hugo rules, voters are allowed to include \”No Award\” (occasionally personified as eleven-time Hugo winner \”Noah Ward\”) in the rankings on their ballots.  If a work is ranked below No Award by a voter, it means that voter would rather no Hugo be given out at all than one be awarded to that work.  No Award is not only treated as a normal candidate in the instant-runoff process, but if it does not win the category outright, it is also compared in a direct head-to-head tally against the eventual runoff winner; if a majority of voters preferred No Award to the runoff winner, then no Hugo is awarded for that category.

Which brings us to…

7. Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex, Stix Hiscock

This year\’s \”Rabid Puppies\” entry, a puerile and unimaginative attempt to out-Chuck-Tingle Chuck Tingle.  But \”Hiscock\” – I don\’t know whether it\’s a pseudonym for Vox Day or one of his sad little hangers-on, and honestly I don\’t care – apparently can\’t tell the difference between winking absurdity and simply bad writing.  This, if it isn\’t clear by now, is the latter.  It starts off like a Penthouse letter, with our titular alien stripper expressing confusion at how the current situation came to pass.  Then, after either an unmarked viewpoint shift or an out-of-body experience on the part of our extraterrestrial narrator, we get multiple pages of sentence fragments describing, in lurid yet somehow boring detail, the stripper\’s appearance and dancing technique.

Whereupon I returned to my Kindle\’s home screen and deleted the book from my device.  I\’m afraid no review of whatever Hiscock tried to pass off as a sex scene will be forthcoming here.  Reader, I tried.

I have to admit, it has been a while since I\’ve read Yoon Ha Lee\’s Ninefox Gambit – longer, I think, than any of the other Hugo-nominated novels.  But I still remember the feeling I had reading it – an awed fascination with the weird, exotic technology and the fictional science underlying it, and rapt interest at the dangerous intrigue driving the plot.  Ninefox Gambit is one of the most imaginative works of science fiction I\’ve read in years.

When I attended the University of Michigan as a computer science student, I still had to satisfy the university\’s base requirements in some non-compsci topics, including literature.  Luckily, the university offered a course on science fiction, taught by Prof. Eric Rabkin.  He also ran a research group, the Genre Evolution Project, which sought to quantify the ways in which science fiction had developed over the past eighty years.  I owe to that course and that project a certain portion of the vocabulary I use to talk about science fiction, as well as the development of my \”critical eye\” in reading stories.  One of the most important concepts I learned – or, rather, learned to discuss – was the idea of the novum: a thing that a science fiction story introduced to distinguish it from the real world we knew.  Science fiction, and more broadly speculative fiction, is defined by that concept; the essence of the genre is that there is something important about the world of the story that isn\’t true about the world of the reader.

The reason I bring this up is that the novum of Ninefox Gambit is one of the most compelling parts of the story.  In the world of the Hexarchate – ruled by six factions, which as a set have that same Sorting-Hat-like aspect as the Hives of Terra Ignota or the Houses of Dragaera – there are two distinct varieties of technology.  Conventional tech works everywhere in that predictable way our own civilization relies upon.  But exotic technology is dependent on the beliefs and behaviors of the people in the vicinity of the tech, and most strongly on the calendar that they use.  The Hexarchate relies on a calendar whose fundamental number is six, resulting in a six-day week among other things, and that fact plus the particular configuration of its feasts and holidays can be leveraged to enable seemingly supernatural effects from specially-built weapons.  But because of that reliance on the calendar, their technology – and their rule – is vulnerable to \”calendrical rot\”, as people start observing different holidays and maybe even different lengths of the week; take a weapon built for the Hexarchate calendar into a place where a different calendar rules, and that weapon isn\’t going to work in the way you expect anymore, if at all.  So maintaining control over the calendar is vital to maintaining technological superiority, and by extension military and political power.  And as with many other belief systems underlying power structures, defiance of the dominant calendar is defined as \”heresy\” and considered to be one of the most serious and dangerous crimes possible.  In addition to being a deep and complex metaphor for the interrelationship of cultural and political hegemony, that novum of belief-driven technology also provides some classic \”sensawunda\” sci-fi writing.

(For the sake of completeness, and to illustrate the dizzying complexity of the fictional science of Ninefox Gambit, I want to highlight that the calendar isn\’t the only thing involved in powering exotic tech.  The main character, Cheris, belongs to the Kel faction, whose military strength is underpinned by the \”formation instinct\” of its soldiers – psychological conditioning that makes it nearly impossible to disobey orders from one\’s commanding officers.  Those officers can direct their troops into formations to create exotic effects as well, but the formation required to accomplish a given effect depends mathematically on the prevailing calendar, which means that an officer fighting calendrical heresy has to be constantly doing math on the fly in order to figure out how to most effectively deploy their troops.)

That unique and new science-fictional concept – that novum – was already enough to make me sit up and pay attention.  Dropped into that world, the reader spends some time bewildered and lost before beginning to grasp the rules that guide the story, and that experience of figuring out just what the hell is going on here, anyway? is an absolute joy to a certain type of reader.  (If you enjoyed Hannu Rajaniemi\’s The Quantum Thief or M. John Harrison\’s Light, you\’re probably going to enjoy Ninefox Gambit too.)  But layered on top of that is a complex web of political intrigue among the six factions, in which Kel Cheris is forced to entangle herself in order to salvage her career, and which has been destablized by a rebellion\’s calendrical heresy.  And that\’s not the only thing she becomes entangled with; she has to work with the ghost/spirit/mind of Shuos Jedao, a legendarily clever but treasonously unstable general.  Even having Jedao anywhere on the same battlefield as you is already a risky proposition; trying to work directly with him is like wielding a three-edged sword made of snakes.

The politics and intrigue of the Hexarchate and the narrative of the story itself is also shot through with the idea that games, and the careful and intentional design of games, can change the world.  As an aspiring game designer and a serious player of games of all kinds, the role that game-playing and game design holds in this world – a tool for not only entertainment but also pedagogy and propaganda – utterly delighted me.  Even when the story isn\’t specifically focused on games, the feeling of everyone in the world being pieces on a multi-dimensional chessboard never goes away; Cheris is aware from the beginning that accepting the assignment entails stepping onto that game board.  But both Cheris and Jedao create their own games too, and each wields them with devastating effectiveness.

Between her canniness, her mathematical genius, her love of games, and a dash of idealism that the world can be better than what the Hexarchate has made of it, Cheris is a character I felt instant and abiding sympathy for.  Jedao was more of a cipher, naturally, but as I learned more of his story I came to care about him quite a bit as well.  And the way the author took cerebral, abstract concepts like game design and complex math and turned them into forces of great import within the story made me feel at times like the story was targeted incredibly specifically at me as a reader.

As far as I\’m concerned, Ninefox Gambit marks Yoon Ha Lee as one of the breakout stars of science fiction.  It\’s been years since I\’ve read something that grabbed me by the brain like this did.  I imagine this was what readers in the 60s felt like when they encountered Dune for the first time, or picked up Ringworld in the 70s, or Neuromancer, or The Diamond Age…  I suspect we\’ll be seeing the influence of this novel, and its sequels, reverberating throughout the genre for years to come.  In a fantastic year for the genre, and among some very strong competition, I think Ninefox Gambit is the best novel of 2016.

I love emotionally optimistic science fiction and fantasy.  Stories where the protagonists are not only \”good\” on a moral scale but also empathetic and kind – and who can demonstrate that kindness can be a strength.  Basically, the opposite of the recent \”grimdark\” trend (though I have been known to enjoy stories fitting that label as well).  My prototype for this was Katherine Addison\’s The Goblin Emperor, whose protagonist Maia was a breath of fresh air I didn\’t know I needed.

Which is all to say that the first book in Becky Chambers\’ Wayfarers series, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, was a joy to read in a similar way.  The ensemble of protagonists, making up the crew of the Wayfarer, has drawn comparisons to Firefly and Star Trek – the crew\’s familial relationship, including not only love and cohabitation but also the occasional squabble, is the beating heart of the book.  The diversity of the crew (and the universe!) in species, gender identity, relationship structure, and biology brings a distinctly utopian feeling as well; most Humans((Side note on capitalization: Like Mass Effect, occasionally mentioned as another precursor to the series, the Wayfarer books acknowledge the inconsistency of capitalizing the names of alien species but not our own, as so many other SF stories do.  But it remedies it in the opposite way: while Mass Effect lowercased \”turian\” and \”krogan\”, Wayfarers chooses to uppercase \”Human\” (and so I have done likewise in this post).  It\’s a detail I noticed and appreciated in both works.)) are some shade of brown with dark hair because the diasporic Human society gave up on racial divisions long ago.  The members of the crew generally try to understand and accommodate each others\’ biological, cultural, and personal differences, though they don\’t always succeed, and under pressure the domestic peace aboard the Wayfarer is often strained.

So, on to A Closed and Common Orbit, which I read immediately following.  The sequel, to my brief and unjustified regret, does not continue with the adventures of the Wayfarer.  Rather, it tightens its focus onto two characters from the first book – Sidra, an AI recently transferred into an illegal \”body kit\” allowing her to emulate a Human rather than being confined to a server, and Pepper, a mechanic and technician who was a minor character in the first book.  The narrative alternates between their two stories.  Sidra\’s story takes place following the events of the previous book, and portrays her attempts to adjust to her body, pass for Human (with a little help from her body kit), and integrate into both galactic culture and Pepper\’s home.  Pepper\’s own story starts a couple decades earlier, with her childhood as an enslaved clone sorting scrap, interrupted by her discovery that there exists a world beyond the sorting facility\’s walls.  Despite my brief disappointment to be leaving the Wayfarer behind, I was soon deeply engaged by the characters\’ struggle for acceptance and growth.

As the meaning of family and the crew\’s creation of a family-by-choice was the core theme of  The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the heart of A Closed and Common Orbit is the idea of personhood.  What makes someone a person, rather than a tool, or an animal?  What freedoms are inherent to a person, and what happens to the right of personhood – if it is, indeed, a right – when those freedoms are curtailed?  What are the responsibilities of a person to their society, and what does society owe an individual person in return?  Both of the main characters\’ struggles in this book are about attaining the right of self-determination and the responsibilities, to oneself and to others, that come with it; those struggles themselves become part of the characters\’ identities, and help them each realize and fulfill those responsibilities in the end.

Additionally, both characters have to deal with challenges within their own minds.  Sidra is used to the full scope of her sensory input being constrained to the inside of a ship and its crew, but in the body kit her external senses are narrowed to the typical Human sensorium.  Simultaneously the scope of her stimuli increases dramatically, with exposure to wide-open spaces and crowds far beyond the size of the crew she is dealing with, and on top of all that, the simple reality of having a body requires significant adjustment.  The result is a condition that in a Human would likely be considered a blend of agoraphobia, social anxiety, autism, and body dysmorphia; Sidra\’s development of coping methods (and the turmoil that ensues when they don\’t quite work well enough) will be familiar to many people who struggle with mental illness, particularly those who have undergone cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Pepper, on the other hand, is a survivor of years of abuse – primarily emotional, occasionally physical.  She escapes her abusers relatively early in the story, but escaping the long-term effects and psychological conditioning of the abuse is a much longer process.  I can\’t speak to the accuracy of the author\’s depiction of Pepper\’s abuse and PTSD as well as I could to Sidra\’s anxiety and coping, but from what I understand of the subject, Pepper\’s ongoing recovery – spanning multiple decades, and still in progress when the book ends – is just as faithful and empathetic a treatment of the topic.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet might be my favorite book of the last couple years, and so it was difficult for A Closed and Common Orbit to measure up to.  But the emotional heart of the first book is still there – the love and care between the characters; the emotional verisimilitude of people living together, rubbing up against each others\’ sore spots, arguing, and then working their issues out; and underneath it all the breadth and depth of a much vaster universe that I can\’t wait to see more of.  All that together makes A Closed and Common Orbit one of my favorite books of 2016.

I had been excited for Too Like the Lightning for at least eighteen months before it was published.  Ada Palmer is a historian (specializing in the development of thought, religion, and philosophy in the Renaissance, among other related topics); she is the blogger behind Ex Urbe, in which she makes complex topics (like the influence of Machiavelli on modern humanism, or the various art-historical aspects of Catholic saints, or the many layers of history stacked on top of each other in Florence and Rome) accessible to the lay reader.  I\’d been following her blog for a few years when I attended a panel she was on at Loncon 3, during which she mentioned that she was working on a novel that addressed historical ideas of how governments and countries worked, combined with the distributed-culture model that the Internet and social media seem to be developing.  I read it shortly after its publication in early 2016, and it was one of the novels on my nominating ballot, so I am certainly pleased to see it among the finalists.

The setting of Too Like the Lightning is a utopian culture about five centuries in the future, in which nations are no longer the dominant means by which humanity organizes and governs itself.  Rather, humanity is organized into seven \”Hives\”, each with its own ideals and corresponding form of government, and which are each spread across the planet; most major cities have neighborhoods or districts belonging to several different Hives.  There is a baseline set of laws agreed to by all Hives (and that even Hiveless people must abide by), though some people choose even to forgo the protection of those laws in exchange for not being bound by them in their own behavior.  Beyond that, each Hive may define and enforce its own laws that apply within its own territories.  The seven Hives each have their own character and ideals, and the distinctions between them make it easy for the reader to imagine how they would fit into one Hive versus another; they are rather similar to the Houses of Hogwarts in that way.  (Though the Hives are not the only axis along which people sort themselves; most people denote both their Hive and other affiliations through specific, distinctive articles of clothing or accessories.  National origin is considered to be one of these affliations, on a par with membership in a professional society or hobby group.)

Against this backdrop, we have our story, written by a self-admitted unreliable narrator, Mycroft Canner, the most notorious criminal of the last few decades.  Canner has as a result been sentenced to a lifetime of public servitude, but the same qualities that enabled him to commit a world-spanning series of grisly, torturous murders (the motive of which remains opaque, as we get tiny bits of detail about his crimes over the course of the book) also make him an indispensable servant to several of the most powerful people in the world.  Through his viewpoint, we get a slowly unfolding story of the use and abuse of power, triggered by a theft of information that for some reason threatens the balance of power among the world\’s governments.  The investigation of that theft culminates in the slow realization that this society is not quite as utopian as it may have appeared, and that in fact its stability is only maintained through covert and unethical means.  The heads of the seven Hive governments, in theory a set of independent peers, are tangled together in an incestuous web of intrigue and power struggles.  Meanwhile, the appearance of a boy with unusual paranormal powers, thus far kept hidden from the public, threatens that stability in a different way.   Too Like the Lightning closes with the world balanced on a knife\’s edge, and the question that remains isn\’t whether the utopia that has prevented war among humanity for two centuries will collapse, but rather when and how it will inevitably do so.

As the first part of the Terra Ignota series, planned to span four books, Too Like the Lightning avoids resolving any of its plotlines; it is essentially a tour of the world that puts all the interlocking parts of the narrative in motion, gradually revealing both backstory and the intrigues of the present.  The climax of the book is essentially the reader\’s realization of just how fragile the Hive system actually is, clarifying one mystery that had been subtly threaded through the storyline but still presenting us with several others.  The next book in the series, Seven Surrenders, was released earlier this year, and it\’s going to be one of the first things I pick up as soon as I\’m done with my Hugo reading.

I do have a few minor complaints about the story so far.  The description of how the current society was developed from our present-day post-Westphalian system of nation-states feels a little contrived, as is the notion that our single viewpoint character – a known murderer, at that – is, of the billions of people on the planet, among the closest confidantes of the most powerful people in nearly every Hive.  But those inventions, artificial though they may feel, certainly contribute to the way the story is told, giving the reader a personal, ground-level look at the secrets and intrigues that drive the politics of the world.  Though, as one of the author\’s specialties as a historian is the politics of Renaissance-era Italy, the tight web of interpersonal connections tying together all of the Hive leaders feels similar to the politics and intrigue among the various factions of that period.

Too Like the Lightning was one of my favorite books of 2016, but I feel like Terra Ignota hasn\’t quite hit its stride yet; for its length and complexity, it feels in retrospect like very little happens in the first book.  Still, with all the pieces in place, I am happily anticipating the fractures and strife yet to come in this doomed utopia, and I suspect I\’ll be discussing Seven Surrenders in this same post series next year.