Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Astounding Award for Best New Writer

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  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 the last five (wow, 5!) years, 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.

This is the fifth part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

In this post, we're going to take a step away from the traditional categories and move to one of the "Not-A-Hugo" awards, the awards that aren't officially Hugos but are voted on alongside them and might as well be.  I'm talking this time about the Astounding Award, which celebrates the best new writers in SciFi & Fantasy, those who have published their first genre works in the last two years (and thus can have two years of eligibility).  

This year we have two repeat nominees from last year, one other second-year eligible writer, and then three writers who are in their first year of eligibility.  And I really loved five of these six writers, so it's another great ballot, and if you haven't tried any of these authors before, I highly highly recommend them.  

Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novella

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  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 the last five (wow, 5!) years, 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.

This is the fourth part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

In this post we're dealing with the nominees for Best Novella, which includes works of between 17,500 and 40,000 words.  In essence, these are stories that are longer than most people will usually read in one sitting (although I still do so usually) but are shorter than that of a full length novel.  This format has had a resurgence in the last 5-7 years in genre publishing, led by Tor's Tordotcom imprint, which used to publish such novellas exclusively.  

And yes, this year we do indeed get another Tordotcom sweep of the novella category, for the second year in a row, after it seemed we were seeing some other publishers breakthrough for once in 2020.  That said, the publisher sweep does not mean we don't have a diverse group of nominees, with the stories including one fairy tale subversion, one tale of romantic, parental, and colonial abuse, one SF/Fantasy mix-up, one ecological dystopian sci-fi novella, one extremely optimistic character driven story, and one coming of age finding yourself in a portal fantasy world story - six very different stories centering very different but all valid perspectives.  On the other hand, all six of these nominees are well known authors in the field with at least five of them having prior Hugo Noms and possibly wins.  So I guess it's a mixed bag in that way.  

I've reviewed all six of these works in individual posts, so I'll link them next to my rankings below, but yeah all six of these were scored by me between 8 out of 10 and 9.5 out of 10, so this is another hard ballot to rank.  

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector: https://t.co/sainafpQx2

Short Review: 8 out of 10 - A long satiric (sorta) tale of fake soothsayer who is kidnapped by the spymaster of a Prince desperate to stop plots against his brother in a land...
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 8, 2022

Short Review (cont): filled with conspiracies, armies, and ridiculous factions, all of whom have eyes on greater things...eyes threatened by someone who might potentially see the future. Really enjoyable characters, especially its main protagonist, if a bit too long.
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 8, 2022

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on August 9, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.     


Kalyna the Soothsayer is the debut novel of author Elijah Kinch Spector, and is a fantasy example of a pretty classic genre: the fake psychic story (think Psych or The Mentalist), where a character pretends to have visions of the future and instead relies upon intuition or incredible observation skills to make it work for whatever purposes.  In this case, unlike the usual story, Kalyna is the story of a girl in an actual soothsayer (future teller) family, where she's the first one to not have the gift of foresight, to the embarrassment of her grandmother and to her own internal shame.  Naturally this doesn't stop her from getting involved in a fantasy tale filled with court intrigue, as she gets forcibly drafted to the service of a Prince in a Kingdom cracking at the seems...both politically and perhaps in reality as well.  

And despite Kalyna the Soothsayer featuring an absurd satirical narrative about its ridiculous kingdom setting - something that tends to get on my nerves more than make me chuckle - I found it to be highly enjoyable by the end, as its tale featured a number of enjoyable characters, surprises, and a protagonist in Kalyna who very much does not make the traditional choices you expect along the way.  It's probably a bit too long - the book is listed at 400 pages but shows up in my eReader as something closer to 500 - but by the book's last act I was eagerly turning the pages to see how it would all wind up, and while some things are resolved a bit easily, it all fits and winds up in a really satisfying ending.  A very interesting debut novel.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope: https://t.co/C7BxxdY2jh

Short Review: 9 out of 10 - a Historical Fantasy taking place in 1920s Black Washington D.C. featuring a heroine who can interact with Spirits such as Enigmas who offer bargains at...
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 5, 2022

Short Review (cont): major costs and finds herself, along with an oddball group of allies, trying to steal back a magical ring that is being used to turn the poorer members of the Black community into a zombie-like state. Really great historical fantasy, highly recommended
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 5, 2022

Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on August 9, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.     


The Monsters We Defy is the latest novel by author Leslye Penelope, who previously had published (and first self-published) a number of romantic (epic) fantasy novels under the name L. Penelope.  Unlike those novels, The Monsters We Defy is a different genre: Historical Fantasy, taking place in Washington D.C. during Prohibition, using a real life person - Clara Johnson, a black girl who shot a white policeman in self-defense - as the basis for its heroine.  In this setting, in which humans, particularly black humans, kind find themselves in debt to the trickster Enigmas of the spirit world, Clara and a cast of others will have to pull of a heist for the sake of the entire Black community.

The result is a really well done novel, and while it never goes full on into heist mode like you might imagine it would by the midway point, it features some really great strong characters, a great setting, and some really strong themes.  Its heroine Clara deals with severe anxiety around people relating in part to her tragic past and magical curse, and the story features themes of class, greed and exploitation even among people of the same oppressed group...and all of this works very well.  A very enjoyable piece of Historical Fiction/Fantasy, and definitely recommended.  

SciFi Novella Review: The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

 


The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente


The Past is Red is a Hugo nominated novella from Hugo Winner Catherynne M. Valente, and really an expansion of a prior novelette by Valente (The Future is Blue).  Valente's work is very hit or miss for me - it's often marked by really clever wordplay and outrageous dialogue/happenings for comedy, but also often includes fairy tail subversions alongside such things.  In longer form, like her Hugo Nominated Novel Space Opera, I've found it too much for me.  In shorter form, like in a few anthologies, I've found these works really good.  

The Past is novella length and managed to work really well for me, with its ridiculous story feeling like a modern ecological sci-fi version of Candide.  The story features a girl named Tetley who lives in our ruined Earth, in Garbagetown, who takes for granted how ridiculously fucked up the world is after the "fuckwits" ruined it all and forced everyone to live on basically garbage and ridiculousness - a girl who refused to believe in false hope and was shunned for it, even as she tried to maintain a happy face.  The first half of the story is the original novelette, with the new addition finishing out the novella, and it all works really well, even with how ridiculous it is, to parody with happy ridiculousness how human selfishness is destroying our world....and how the privileged will never recognize that fact while those without privilege will be left only to hope for something better that will never come....

Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Novelette

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  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 the last five (wow, 5!) years, 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.

This is the third part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.

This time around we're going to look at the nominees for Best Novelette.  Novelette is the term for stories between 7500 and 17500 words in length - basically still what most people think of as "short stories", but the longer ones that have more time to develop characters and plots...sometimes Novelettes can be long enough to even be sold as novellas when they're really short, although that's fairly rare.  This time around, we don't quite have any of those long novellas, but still have six stories that take the format in very different directions - several fun and breezy stories, one angry ecological dystopian story, one take on Greek myth (subverted into a take on the Male gaze), one tale about surviving abuse, and one story of art and of being an outsider everywhere over years and finding oneself.  It's another very good crop with a number of candidates I'd be happy to win the award, so ranking these will be difficult.  

But I have to do it, so my rankings are after the jump.

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae and Other Contributors: https://t.co/EzO7LTktGx

Short Review: 8.5 out of 10 - Really interesting anthology set in the world created by Monae for their album Dirty Computer..
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 2, 2022

Short Review (cont): Although not requiring any foreknowledge of this world, this collection is a real interesting work of Afrofuturism dealing with queerness, gender, womanhood, oppression and control.
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 2, 2022

The Memory Librarian is an anthology of stories written by artist (most known for her* songwriting) Janelle Monáe, in collaboration with a number of generally established Black Science Fiction authors, inspired by the world Monáe created for her album, Dirty Computer.  It's a pretty great list of collaborating authors, including one of my favorite authors in Alaya Dawn Johnson - so I was pretty intrigued, despite never having listened to Monáe and not knowing really anything about Dirty Computer.  

*Monae is non-binary and uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, but the bio in this book uses She/Her, and so will in this review for consistency.* 

And I'm glad I did, because this is a pretty interesting Afrofuturist anthology, dealing heavily with gender, womanhood and otherness, control and oppression, and finding new ways to hope despite it all, in a world that is so so dystopian.  This is not to say that every story is optimistic - with the US controlled in large part by a memory altering fascist society that oppresses those who don't fit into the default gender (and largely racial) hierarchy, there's a lot of pain here...and much of that pain is also inflicted here by those who aren't necessarily cis fascists themselves.  And the stories are largely distinct as they explore science fiction and magic, and feature some really strong characters - so things never get boring here, even if the stories never really hit that top top tier of must read stories.  The result is a collection that's very good and well worth the hype this book has garnered.