Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. 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 three 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. I have previously reviewed the nominees for Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award) and for Best SF/F Short Story.
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 continue covering the nominees in the Short Fiction categories with the nominees for Best Novelette. Novelettes are stories between 7500 and 17500 words, basically longer "Short" Stories - you should probably consume these all in a single sitting unlike a Novella or Novel, but it will take you more than a few minutes to do so. But the Hugo Nominees in this category have generally been worth it to do so.
4 of this year's 6 nominees are available freely online, and are linked below when I discuss them. As with my prior posts, I'm going to separate the works below into tiers in addition to just straight ranking them.
Tier Three
6. “The Archronology of Love” by Caroline M. Yoachim
The Archchronology of Love just didn't do it for me, and as such is last on my ballot. It's a story in which there is a way of visiting the timestream - Past AND Future (though the latter is forbidden and not done) called the "Chronicle", except that any attempt to do so prevents subsequent "Archchronologists' (as viewers of the Chronicle are called) from being able to view the same thing, just like a person investigating a scene inevitably alters the scene themselves. In this setup you have a colony on an Alien Planet killed by a deadly plague, and a researcher whose husband was so killed and is desperate to see him in the Chronicle...and to find out what was the cause.
It's....fine, but its ideas - of letting go of the past and moving forwards, or learning to deal with other beings and people without doing harm (in more ways than one) just feel kind of muddled and I just was left going "huh" at the end. Clearly the last place spot on my ballot.
Tier Two
5. “Omphalos” by Ted Chiang
4. “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye” by Sarah Pinsker
Both Omphalos and The Blur are very solid stories, whose inclusion on this ballot makes sense, although they're very different. What puts them here instead of in Tier One is that while I could enjoy and appreciate what both were trying to do, neither really made a lasting impact on me.
For The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, that might be mainly because the genre is horror, sort of. It's the story of a prolific mystery novel writer, who - guided by her assistant - goes to a secluded cabin somewhere in the US, without wifi or contact with the western world, in order to write her novels without distraction...only to discover a dead body that her brain can't leave well enough alone. I won't spoil anything more, but it's a fun story featuring companionship and horror in a way that was enjoyable to read, with an ending that doesn't quite go how you'd expect, but still works.
For Omphalos, Chiang is telling a story about Faith - in an alternate Earth in which science has essentially confirmed the existence of god by demonstrating life couldn't have existed before a certain point only a few thousand years ago, the story follows an archaeologist famed for such techniques as she follows a trail of archaeological relics she believes to be stolen to their source.....and finds something that makes her question her faith. It's a very solid story and it is well crafted, but the story spends nearly all of its runtime leading up to the revelation and then deals with the heroine's crisis of faith ridiculously quickly, which blunts a lot of its impact.
These are both good stories, but they just don't work for me as well as the top three, and thus are a tier below.
Tier One
3. “Away With the Wolves” by Sarah Gailey
2. “Emergency Skin” by N.K. Jemisin
1. “For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll
Again, I struggle with ranking these three and may change my mind before the vote is locked (I mean, assuming the vote ever opens....). They're all very different stories, and yet they're all excellent and all stayed with me.
Away with the Wolves is a story featuring a girl who is known to be a werewolf, and suffers tremendous pain all over whenever she's in human form, leading to her wishing to be in wolf form as much as possible - but her wolf form causes harm to the property and animals of the village, and in it she can't quite communicate with her best friend. It's a very different take on a werewolf story than you'd expect - there are no villagers with pitchforks here - and allegorically works as a strong story about fitting into one's own skin - or really the form one feels most comfortable in, even if one can't or may not want to be in that form full-time. It's a charming strong story that has a strong message, which is not surprising from Gailey, a multiple time nominee and former Hugo winner.
Emergency Skin is a story from a collection commissioned by Amazon by the great NK Jemisin, and readers will be unsurprised to see what themes it deals with. It features a future in which the rich/elite class left behind Earth to go to another world, which is strictly hierarchical (the lower classes have to earn the right to wear Skin)....except that the world needs resources from old Earth to maintain its way of life. As such, they send the silent protagonist back to Earth, supposedly a dead destroyed world by the remaining populace, to gather the resource...except what he finds on Earth is anything but a dead world. Told cleverly from the perspective of the classist AI within the protagonist's head, it's not a story with a new idea: that humanity would come together and save/improve itself if its elites/rich classes left them behind, as those people are the ones without empathy, but it's one that is executed incredibly damn well and is an enjoyable read to boot. Like typical Jemisin work, it's not subtle in its themes, but it is all the more powerful in its message for it.
For He Can Creep is probably the most fun and enjoyable of the stories however, and is my pick for this award, even if it doesn't pack the allegorical or overt themes of the other works on the ballot. Taking inspiration from English Poet Christopher Smart's Cat Jeoffrey, the story features that same cat trying to protect his master (Smart) while Smart is locked up in an asylum, where demons come every night to prevent the poet from continuing his poem to God...and to tempt him to a poem for the Devil instead. But when the Devil himself comes for the Poet, Jeoffrey finds he has met his match and may need assistance in saving his master. It's a truly fun story even if you, like me had never heard of Christopher Smart or his cat prior to reading the story.
So yeah, once again I really won't be upset if any of the top 3 win, and I have no idea which of these stories will take the award (the Nebula was taken by an award which didn't make the ballot, which I don't think measures up to these 6 anyhow).
No comments:
Post a Comment