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 4th part of this series. I have previously reviewed the nominees for:
Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award), Best SF/F Short Story, and Best SF/F Novelette.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This time around we're getting to one of the more popular awards, the Hugo Award for Best Novella. Novellas are defined as being between 17,500 and 40,000 words long, which tends to roughly come out to about 90-200 pages on average (although a lot of novellas don't count as such by the Hugo definition leading to some books missing out). The result is that Novellas are a type of work that fast readers (like myself) might finish in one day, but others will take a few days to get through them, and they have a lot more substance for characters, story, and ideas.
This has also meant that my feelings on the quality of these works is a lot more varied than for the shorter fiction, with some works I just plain didn't like having been nominated in the last few years (same is true of Best Novel for the same reason). And yet this year, despite the works being perhaps the most varied in origin in a number of years (there are only two Tor.com novellas, which used to dominate this category), I like pretty much every novella on the ballot - I scored each one with a rating out of 10 when I posted my initial review, and all of them rated an 8 out of 10 or above.
And yet, there's a clear winner for me here, and an easy favorite......which I'll get to after the jump.
As with my prior posts, I'm going to separate these novellas into several tiers and while I have to rank each novella individually, I don't think there's really a gap between works in the same tier and reserve the right to reorder them. Since I reviewed each of these for the blog, I'm not going to go into plot summaries here, but will link to my reviews.
Tier Four:
6. “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, by Ted Chiang (Reviewed Here)
Ted Chiang's novella, part of his "Exhalation" collection, is my least favorite of the nominees, and still earned a score of 8 out of 10, which is a really good grade from me. It's a story about parallel universes and viewing one's decisions in other worlds and what that says about one's character, and the free will we may or may not have to move beyond our past actions - in this world or others - and move forward. It contains two solid characters in its short page length (I think its the shortest of these works) and an interesting idea, but it just doesn't have the substance of all the other novellas on this list, and as such sits on the bottom of my ballot, just well above no award.
Tier Three:
5. In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire (Reviewed Here)
McGuire's Fourth Wayward Children novella might be my favorite of the series....and the most heartbreaking, as it dives into the background of a young girl we met back in the series' first entry, which a reader of the series knows has to go poorly in the end. It's tremendously well done such that I really felt for the protagonist as she grew up and found herself more longing to be in her alternate fantasy world, a world of perfect fairness, and wished I too could go to that world, despite it containing its own form of utter cruelty. Very well done, and I considered putting it in Tier Two, but I think it's just below the three novellas in that tier - it's not as interesting overall as any of the works I've ranked higher.
Tier Two:
All three of these works I initially graded with a 9 out of 10, and again, I might put these in any order in my final ballot:
4. The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes (Reviewed Here)
The Deep is a really interesting project: It started as a song by the band "clipping." which was itself nominated for a Hugo, and then was expanded into a novella by author Rivers Solomon, who was nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writers for her brutally powerful work, An Unkindness of Ghosts. The premise of the song, and of this novella, is that the pregnant black mothers thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade didn't die, but adapted to living under the sea. Solomon takes that premise and turns it into a story dealing heavily with the themes of the importance of memory in one's culture and life, as well as love.
It's a strong story that works pretty well, although to be honest the fact that I don't remember it as well as the other two novellas in this tier, despite having read them around the same time last year, makes me put it just behind them - obviously it had less of an impact on me.
3. The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark (Reviewed Here)
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is a tremendously fun novella from author P. Djèlí Clark, set in his alternate version of Cairo (previously introduced in another story, A Dead Djinn in Cairo). It's a steampunk version of Cairo, where with the help of Djinn Egypt managed to push out imperialist invaders (guess who). The story features two agents - one experienced and one not - from the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities dealing with a haunted tram car, as Cairo is itself filled with calls for women's suffrage.
As I mentioned above, it's a lot of fun overall, and between the story's focus on different kinds of spirits, which may take different names in other cultures, and the setting featuring a movement for women's suffrage, it deals with a lot of interesting ideas as well (AI rights is also in there as well in essence). Clark's work last year was my choice for this award (it lost to Artificial Condition), and he's once again managed another novella that ranks high on my list.
2. To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers (Reviewed Here)
I'm a big fan of Becky Chambers' Wayfarers' series and was excited to see her put out a novella unrelated to that series last year, and readers of that series will be pleased to know that similar concepts are at play here in this novella: it's the story of a quartet of scientists, aided by a technology that alters their bodies to adapt to changing environments, as they explore four exoplanets far from Earth. There they discover more about themselves and about the very different planets, and begin to question whether their work is really of value to Earth....especially when communications from home cut off.
It's really well done and open ended in its questioning, just as a lot of her Wayfarers' work is, both positive at times and questioning, even as it fits in a world closer to our own than that of her novel series. Unsurprising to see this nominated but it well deserves its spot.
Tier One:
1. This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Reviewed Here)
This is the favorite - having won the Nebula and a bunch of other awards, being co-written by a former Hugo Award winner (Best Short Story) and another Hugo Audience favorite (Gladstone picked up a Best Series nomination a few years back). It is almost certainly going to win. And it absolutely SHOULD win, this is utterly tremendous and you should read it immediately. It's one of the rare works I gave a 10 out of 10 too, for an absolute Must Read.
If you haven't read it yet, basically this is an epistolary romance novella, told through letters between two agents of opposite sides of a war between space, time, and parallel universes - one named Red and the other named Blue. Both women (although both can shapeshift into various other things, they use "she/her" pronouns) go throughout time and space and try to one up the other by changing various histories for the benefit of their various factions - Red's Machine based one and Blue's Plant based one - and at some point they begin to leave each other clever notes in their handiwork, and these notes constitute half of our story. Eventually through these letters the two begin to fall in love, even as the prospect of that begins to threaten everything they are and may force them to choose a path they could never have imagined.
El-Mohtar's poetic mastery and Gladstone's own style of prose come together here in a work of absolute mastery that will drag you in and not let you put this novella down until it's finished: I know at least one other reader, who reads slower than me, also found they had no choice but to finish this one in one day. It's just a tremendously joyous ending in it all and a perfect romance for me - well crafted in language, with characters and "dialogue" through the letters that are tremendous in their own rights and god, I just want to reread it right now writing about it again.
An easy choice.
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