2020 Hugo nominees: Best Novella
Jun. 16th, 2020 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonelvisIt took seven weeks for me to get through all the Hugo novels, what with not having read any of them – but I finished the Hugo novella reading in three days, because I'd read three of them already. A WINNER IS ME. (And what a relief it is to know I'll have read everything in the four main fiction categories well before the deadline.)
Anyway, all but one of these reviews already appeared on Goodreads, but the Ted Chiang one only appears here, because the novella was part of his Exhalation collection and not trackable separately. (I'll be making my way through the rest of Exhalation after Hugo season is over, though, that's for sure.)
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers
Good, but I didn't quite love it the way I've loved Chambers' other work. The prose has the same gentleness, and as with the other two Chambers books I've read, is character-driven more than anything else, but with only four characters, I expect more than two, maybe three of them, to be fully fleshed out. The story itself – a series of exploratory missions to four separate exoplanets – is compelling, and breathtakingly beautiful on one planet in particular. But there's a horrifying event that happens to an animal halfway through that was so excruciating to read about that I nearly put the book down entirely, and I stopped being able to fully connect with the story after that.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, Ted Chiang
I am always a sucker for a good quantum mechanics story, and this one has a great premise: the future has brought us "prisms," devices that allow us to contact our parallel selves born of different decisions we made at key branching points. This leads to a whole new set of social anxieties, but the most critical one, explored across several characters, is whether the decisions you make in this timeline mean you'd have always made similar decisions, and what that says about whether you're a good or bad person. This theme could get overwrought quickly in the wrong hands, but Chiang makes it look easy.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, P. Djèlí Clark
I was very into the turn-of-the-last-century Cairo-with-djinn setting, and the basic setup – government operatives tasked with investigating misbehaving magical entities – is definitely my jam. But I kept feeling like the story wanted to make points about feminism and womanhood that it never quite got around to making, and it ends abruptly rather than carrying those themes to fruition. It’s enjoyable, but ultimately a little frustrating.
This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
Gorgeously written, though some readers will likely find it overwritten and/or occasionally impenetrable. (Belated post-Goodreads edit: people will find it overwritten and occasionally impenetrable because it is overwritten and occasionally impenetrable, although I enjoyed it nevertheless.)
In an Absent Dream, Seanan McGuire
Probably a 3.5-star book, but definitely not four stars. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I found the language distractingly precious at times, and the story less compelling than the other books in the series.
The Deep, Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes
A beautiful, poetic reinterpretation of the clipping. song by the same name. It has its horrifying moments – Yetu, the protagonist, is the historian tasked with bearing the weight of her people's generations of trauma, beginning with being born of enslaved, pregnant African women thrown overboard as their captors sailed to the West, and continuing through the years, as humans encroached (and predated) on their deep-sea territory. This much trauma breaks her, and she flees, trying to reclaim herself. I won't spoil how she does, and the ultimate decision she makes; it's worth finding out for yourself.
The rankings:
1. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
2. The Deep
3. The Haunting of Tram Car 015
4. This Is How You Lose the Time War
5. To Be Taught, If Fortunate
6. In an Absent Dream
Anyway, all but one of these reviews already appeared on Goodreads, but the Ted Chiang one only appears here, because the novella was part of his Exhalation collection and not trackable separately. (I'll be making my way through the rest of Exhalation after Hugo season is over, though, that's for sure.)
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers
Good, but I didn't quite love it the way I've loved Chambers' other work. The prose has the same gentleness, and as with the other two Chambers books I've read, is character-driven more than anything else, but with only four characters, I expect more than two, maybe three of them, to be fully fleshed out. The story itself – a series of exploratory missions to four separate exoplanets – is compelling, and breathtakingly beautiful on one planet in particular. But there's a horrifying event that happens to an animal halfway through that was so excruciating to read about that I nearly put the book down entirely, and I stopped being able to fully connect with the story after that.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, Ted Chiang
I am always a sucker for a good quantum mechanics story, and this one has a great premise: the future has brought us "prisms," devices that allow us to contact our parallel selves born of different decisions we made at key branching points. This leads to a whole new set of social anxieties, but the most critical one, explored across several characters, is whether the decisions you make in this timeline mean you'd have always made similar decisions, and what that says about whether you're a good or bad person. This theme could get overwrought quickly in the wrong hands, but Chiang makes it look easy.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, P. Djèlí Clark
I was very into the turn-of-the-last-century Cairo-with-djinn setting, and the basic setup – government operatives tasked with investigating misbehaving magical entities – is definitely my jam. But I kept feeling like the story wanted to make points about feminism and womanhood that it never quite got around to making, and it ends abruptly rather than carrying those themes to fruition. It’s enjoyable, but ultimately a little frustrating.
This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
Gorgeously written, though some readers will likely find it overwritten and/or occasionally impenetrable. (Belated post-Goodreads edit: people will find it overwritten and occasionally impenetrable because it is overwritten and occasionally impenetrable, although I enjoyed it nevertheless.)
In an Absent Dream, Seanan McGuire
Probably a 3.5-star book, but definitely not four stars. I wanted to like it more than I did, but I found the language distractingly precious at times, and the story less compelling than the other books in the series.
The Deep, Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes
A beautiful, poetic reinterpretation of the clipping. song by the same name. It has its horrifying moments – Yetu, the protagonist, is the historian tasked with bearing the weight of her people's generations of trauma, beginning with being born of enslaved, pregnant African women thrown overboard as their captors sailed to the West, and continuing through the years, as humans encroached (and predated) on their deep-sea territory. This much trauma breaks her, and she flees, trying to reclaim herself. I won't spoil how she does, and the ultimate decision she makes; it's worth finding out for yourself.
The rankings:
1. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
2. The Deep
3. The Haunting of Tram Car 015
4. This Is How You Lose the Time War
5. To Be Taught, If Fortunate
6. In an Absent Dream