Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the November 19, 2021 (The voting period is extra long this year due to COVID delaying the convention till December). 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 four 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.
This time around we're going back to the main fiction awards with 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.
In past years, there have been some nominees in this category that have been incredibly clear frontrunners and easy picks for this award. This year the major awards have split on two novellas, which are both very worthy of the award, although neither obviously outshines the other. Still, even beyond those two, in my mind there's at least one other solid contender.
Okay rankings after the jump - I'll have a link to my longer reviews of each work with each work as I discuss them.
This year, for the first time in a short while, we have a Tor.com sweep of these awards, with all six nominees coming from that publishing house. In my opinion, the novellas nominated fall into two tiers: a tier which features three highly worthy winners, and a tier which features solid novellas that i don't think are on the same level.
Tier Two:
6 Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com) (My Review Here)
Come Tumbling Down is the fifth novella in McGuire's perennial hugo favorite series - her Wayward Children series of novellas (the first novella, Every Heart a Doorway, won this award four years ago). It's the rare series of McGuire's that I haven't always loved - I've been meh on books 1-2, but did really like books 3-4....but this book is essentially a direct sequel to books 1-2, so it's unsurprising it didn't really do it for me.
For more details, see my review.
5 Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com) (My Review Here)
Sarah Gailey's work is always interesting, even if I've tended to usually find something within their work that bothers me just a little bit, especially with their endings. Upright Women Wanted is honestly one of the more conventional types of stories I've seen from Gailey....mind you by conventional here, I mean a dystopian sci-fi western featuring a bunch of queer librarians and a queer girl trying to figure out her feelings in an America where such feelings are supposed to be denied as wrong.
It's a solid novella...but honestly is really predictable and doesn't really do anything that special in its execution, even if that execution is done pretty well. It's fairly enjoyable, and maybe a higher tier than the story above, but it just doesn't do enough unique to really feel award worthy like the tier one novellas.
4 The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (Tor.com) (My Review Here)
So this probably the story I'm the most against common wisdom about - this is one of two novellas that Vo put out in this world, and I really loved the other one (When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain), while I only liked this one. It's a nice story of memory and queerness and found family and love, told by an older woman to a cleric and the cleric's hoopoe companion. And it's certainly well executed.
But it's also very short and probably near the low-word limit for this category, and I didn't quite feel there was enough here in the story to really make this one hit that higher level (by contrast, the sequel was so much fun in its bifurcated romance tale)..
Tier One:
3 Finna by Nino Cipri (Tor.com) (My Review Here)
So this is a very different novella than the two favorites in this category, and yet I loved it enough to place it in the same tier. Finna (and its sequel) features an Ikea-like Swedish Furniture Company as its setting....except that company exists in a multiverse which has wormhole connections to each of its stores throughout. It's a fun setup for a multiversal adventure through ridiculous worlds.
But what really makes this novella work, besides being a really enjoyable and fun quick plot, is that the two main characters are queer exes, who still have to work together since they're employed by the same company, and must figure out a way to move forward now that the romance is gone. It's an idea you don't see enough of, of people learning to interact and deal with each other after a break-up, and it's something that works really well in this story - and makes it actually special. Hence this novella's status in tier one for me.
2 Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com) (My Review Here)
Ring Shout won the Nebula Award and is one of this year's almost certain co-favorites, which shouldn't be surprising given how Clark has been a nominee for this award for the last three years. Ring Shout is definitely the sort of crowd pleaser fun action/adventure story of Clark's last two award winning novellas, with it being similar to his prior nominee The Black God's Drums in that it directly takes on historical and present racism and oppression via its alternate history setting. This time that takes the form of a black woman with a sword fighting against the KKK and demonic beings that appear to be behind them.
It's a very strong enjoyable story about the various forms of anger - destructive irrational hatred driven by fear of the other vs righteous fury directed at those who do wrong, as its protagonist struggles due to the demon's temptation and evil aims, all the while again dealing with the very real historical setting of the Klan and the impact of the film "Birth of a Nation". It works really well - again see my review for more details.
1 Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi (Tor.com) (My Review Here)
Riot Baby won the Ignyte Award and was also nominated for the Nebula and Locus, so it's an easy co-favorite. And well that makes sense, as this story features two black siblings, a brother who winds up in the system and suffers and exploited, and a sister with superpowers who observes it all, and observes the oppression of black people in America through first history...and then the near-future, until she finally makes a choice of having enough, a choice of righteous fury.
It's a powerfully written tale of what it means to feel powerless, even when one is actually powerful, in a world that just takes and takes for others. This is not a simple tale, or a fun one in any way, and it's more a feature of what is happening around us today and what will likely happen in the future....until someone steps in and says enough and breaks it all, because nothing less will do. I don't want to say anything more, other than to say this is a powerful read, and a worthy #1 pick.
No comments:
Post a Comment