Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Reviewing the 2018 Hugo Nominees: Best Novel

Hugo Award voting opened last month and continues through the end of July.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did last year, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.  As I mentioned in my Hugo Packet post, all of the short fiction nominees are available in the Hugo Packet, though many of these pieces are also available for free online already - if they are, I will link those stories in the post.

My Reviews/Rankings of the Nominees for the Award for Best Young Adult SF/F Novel can be found HERE:
My Reviews/Rankings of the Nominees for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer can be found HERE:
My Reviews/Rankings of the Nominees for Best Short Story can be found HERE:
My Reviews/Rankings of the Nominees for Best Novelette can be found HERE:
My Reviews/Rankings of the Nominees for Best Novella can be found HERE:

Best Novel is the most prominent award of the Hugo Awards* and usually gets the most votes.  For the second straight year, I'd managed to read all but one of the nominees before they were announced (hipster bragging alert....again), although this year's ballot was a lot more surprising - only two of the Hugo nominees for example also made the Nebula shortlist, and only two of the nominees made my own short list (and not the same two).   There are definitely some deserving candidates on the list despite the surprise.

Let's get into it after the Jump:

*Best Series actually had one more (yes 1) vote for the category last year, but as that's a newer category, I won't call it as prominent just yet.  I hope to have a post on the Best Series nominees next week, but I want to at least have read 1-2 works of each series before I start that post, so it's a bit more difficult.  



7th Place.  New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Review on this blog HERE:

Additional thoughts:  This was the one book I didn't read until the nominations were released, because I'd previously not enjoyed another work of Robinson's (I couldn't finish "Aurora" last year).  And well, when I did read NY2140, I was not impressed.  The book is painful to read at first (it does get better to its credit) and all too often feels like KSR wanted to critique the modern financial system but didn't want to write non-fiction to do it, and the story suffers as a result, often either not making sense, or just being painful to read even when it does.  I suspect I won't be reading any more of KSR's works for the immediate future. 

6th Place.  Provenance by Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Review on this blog HERE:

Additional thoughts: Unlike with Kim Stanley Robinson above, I'd enjoyed what I'd previously read from Leckie in her Imperial Radch trilogy and Provenance takes place in that same universe (although it's meant to be stand-alone).  But well, as you can tell from the linked review, I didn't think Provenance worked for me - I just wasn't interested in any of the characters, and the story is so character-dependent that without the characters working, there wasn't much to grab my interest - I just reread my review and honestly had to re-lookup who some of the referenced characters were since they just didn't stand out so much.  The book isn't bad, but it just didn't work for me, and thus I can't rank it above No Award. 

5th Place.  The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi (Tor US; Tor UK)

Review on twitter HERE:

Additional Thoughts: I've gone back and forth about whether or not to rank this above No Award and finally settled on "no."  Again, I enjoy most of Scalzi's work - he's one of the best writers of fun characters and witty dialogue out there and at this point I put most of his stuff on my "to-read" list when it comes out.  But The Collapsing Empire doesn't feel like a complete book but instead more like a series introduction - apparently the series was meant to be a duology at first and has since transformed into a trilogy, and it shows badly with where this book leaves off.  There's no problem with having a cliffhanger entry open a series (As in say, The Fifth Season), but as I've stated more than a few times on this blog, the cliffhanger of a story cannot satisfyingly be the very event you've hinted at happening all throughout a story, since the reader is expecting that thing to occur for a while and will not be happy with at least some resolution.  In this case, well, the very title of the book is "The Collapsing Empire" and how it is going to collapse is made clear in the very prologue....and yet that doesn't occur till the ending.

Again, the dialogue and characters are excellent, which almost makes this award worthy, but the groan I made when the book ended where it did just makes it clear I can't endorse it for the award - books don't need to be stand-alone to win this award, but they need to not make me feel annoyed that I spent my time reading it, and TCE does do that with its cliffhanger.

4th Place.  No Award

3rd Place.  Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (Orbit US)

Review on the blog HERE:

Additional Thoughts:  Six Wakes was one of the first reviews I did on this blog, and it's a very good SciFi mystery (it's no surprise to see it on both the Nebula and Hugo shortlists).  Unlike The Collapsing Empire above, Six Wakes not only contains a very interesting plot hook to get readers interesting, but pulls off a satisfying resolution that wraps things up really nicely.  And each of our main characters are a lot of fun in their own ways, whether it be in their present clone bodies or their past selves in flashbacks.

Basically Six Wakes is what happens when you take a genre like the mystery genre and combine it with several scifi concepts - in this case cloning, and DNA/mind-hacking - and you do it well.  It's an excellent novel and I'd be quite happy to see it pick up the award. 

2nd Place.  Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US; Solaris UK)

Review on the blog HERE:

Additional Thoughts:  Raven Stratagem is the only one of this year's nominees that I actually nominated myself (although I only didn't nominate The Stone Sky since I was sure it'd made the ballot and was gaming my nominations) and as such, it shouldn't surprise anyone to see it #2 on my ballot.  This trilogy - Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy - just concluded this past month with the third book, Revenant Gun, but I believe Raven Stratagem is the best of the series.

As with any second novel in a series, this book expands the world quite a bit - in this case by introducing a number of interesting new point of view characters - while remaining a book about in large part a battle of chessmasters in a space opera series, one of whom seems to be the shade of a mass-murdering general who seeks to alter the balance of power in the Universe from its presently tyrannical state.  The book does a great job keeping you on your toes about what is going on and keeping intrigue on, the new characters are excellent - the head of a faction of the government known for intelligence and assassination is a major highlight - and really all around it's just one of my favorite books of last year. 


1st Place.  The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Review on the blog HERE:

Additional Thoughts: The Stone Sky was one of four 2017-published books that I graded a perfect 10 out of 10 (Amatka, In Other Lands, and The Tiger's Daughter were the others).  There really isn't much more for me to say about this series, which has two Hugos already (and won this year's Nebula)- the only reason The Stone Sky won't win Jemisin her third Hugo in a row is if voters decide the series has already been awarded enough (and I thought that would be true last year but was surprised).

The Stone Sky wraps up The Broken Earth trilogy in absolutely phenomenal form, finishing Essun, Nassun, and Hoa's stories in an immensely satisfying and powerful fashion.  Too often series that have as much in the air as this simply can't resolve themselves, but that's not a problem here, as all the questions are answered in a way that makes total and complete sense (and is not predictable at all).  As with its predecessors, The Stone Sky is definitely not a subtle book about the issues of racism and discrimination, but it is still a necessary one (especially in this current climate) and it makes it all work.  I don't have any more words for this series, it is a total triumph, and it would be well deserved for Jemisin to become the first ever author to win this award three years in a row.

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