Tower of Mud and Straw by Yaroslav Barsukov
Tower of Mud and Straw is a novella that was serialized in four parts in Metamorphoses Magazine in 2020, the first part of which can be found online here. It also was perhaps the biggest surprise finalist for the 2021 Nebula Awards, being nominated over a number of seemingly more notable novellas. Naturally, with Nebula nominations coming out the week before Hugo nominations were due, I was immediately inspired to pick this one up to see if it was really worth an adjustment to my own Hugo ballot.*
*The Nebulas are voted for by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), so obviously I do not have a vote there.*
And well, uh, The Tower of Mud and Straw felt to me to honestly be more of a mess than anything. It features a number of notable ideas and character traits and actions that are clearly inspired by or appeal to today's world (the protagonist begins the story having disobeyed an order to gas protestors, for example), but even in serialized novella form doesn't seem to have enough length to really make much hay of them all - leading to the story seeming to flip flop back and forth on plot devices constantly. This is not unintentional - the protagonist remarks about it in the last act for instance - but it inspires more whiplash than anything else, muddling any message or character development that seems to be intended.
Quick Plot Summary: Shea Ashcroft was a Minister on the up in Queen Daelyn's government, until one fateful day, when he refused to gas protestors under her orders. With seemingly half the city destroyed as a result, he blames himself...and knows his career is over. But when he is sent in a new position to oversee the stalled construction of a giant tower on the Kingdom's border, a tower meant supposedly for defensive purposes, he discovers more going on than he could've known: a tower held up by the dangerous devices of the Drakiri, a people who literally float on air, arrogant nobles who refuse to listen to sense, and whispers of a Drakiri story about a similar tower they once constructed....which inadvertently opened a gateway to hell......
Thoughts: The Tower of Mud and Straw tries to do a lot. You have a character who prioritized what he thought was right, the lives of people, over his orders, now thrown into a situation where he's out of his depth. You have him both more accepting of other peoples and skeptical of the seemingly tall tales that the Drakiri people tell of the tower. And you have him haunted by the death of his sister, such that he talks to her in his thoughts. Add to that a plot that features a tower built seemingly for a vain statement of pride, and a series of people covering for their own mistakes in building it and trying to hold on to their own statuses, and well there's a lot to go on here.
The problem is there isn't really enough story for it. For example, so much of everything relies upon Shea's personality, but we rarely get to see any of it - it's pretty much all informed by what others say about him, about how accepting he is, about how he tries to do good....and yet all we see here is a dude who keeps wavering back and forth between decisions the moment he gets new information. He's honestly kind of an ass, if anything, as a result. And so while you could have a plot here about the conflict between doing some wrong to gain power to do so much right....it never really lands. Similarly while you could have a plot about believing in magic and tall tales vs being skepticism, but there just isn't really any depth there. Like I guess the only message that comes out of this whole thing is perhaps that even good people in bureaucracy wind up messing up everything, while bad people abuse it for their own careers? But even that message isn't carried off convincingly.
There's an interesting idea here, I suppose, or really ten. But there just isn't enough depth for my eventual reaction to be anything other than "huh." Which isn't enough to change my nominations, for sure.
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