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 sixth 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 I'm looking at the nominees for Best Series, a relatively new award which was seemingly meant to reward series whose value became clear over a series of installments, whose individual novels might not be award worthy but who as a whole were something truly special. Basically it was meant to remedy the fact that there were a few classic series in genre that never managed to get a big award - especially longer series, and the thought was that a Best Series award could remedy that.
The award hasn't really worked out that way, with four of the five Best Series winners being series that have earned Hugo Awards or Nominations for individual works within those series (The Expanse is the only one whose individual novels have never won an award). The series has also featured a bit more trilogies than longer series as nominees, which has kind of seemed to defeat the purpose of the award for me. I've also not loved the combination of works that aren't really a series but are simply within the same setting that have been made eligible for the award, honestly, but I'm clearly in the minority there.
This time around though, we have a really good ballot of six series, of which a few seem to be the type of work that Best Series is really meant for. Well to a certain extent anyway. As I've read at least two novels/novellas in each of these series, I'm pretty comfortable ranking all six series works, which I will do after the jump:
Tier Four:
6. Merchant Princes, by Charles Stross (Tor UK / Tor)
The Merchant Princes series is Charles Stross's second most well known series (after The Laundry Files), which began with a six book series from 2004-2010, and which were later consolidated into three omnibus novels. More recently, Stross has added a successor trilogy which concluded in 2021 with Invisible Sun. The overall premise of these novels is that there's at least one parallel world that a mafia-esque family with a certain world walking gene can travel back and forth between (with help of an amulet)....and that the family is essentially stuck in a medieval age, even as they use their world walking to run drugs in our own modern world. It's a really interesting setup with a really decent main character as its protagonist.
I've read the first four books in the series in two omnibus editions. And while I really enjoyed books 1-2 in that first Omnibus, Books 3-4 really really pissed me off with how they treated its main character Miriam, essentially sidelining her for Book 3 and then forcing her to have a pregnancy through secret artificial insemination in Book 4. It's just very ugh, and it turned me off from completing the original six novels, even though I'd already purchased the third omnibus.
There was enough that I liked in the setup here to I think keep this out of No Award territory. But it's close and this is easily the lowest rated work on my ballot.
5. Terra Ignota, by Ada Palmer (Tor Books)
Terra Ignota is Ada Palmer's Tetralogy of books which began with her Hugo Award Nominated novel Too Like the Lightning. The series is one of the more interesting ones to come out over the past few years, as its concept was basically: what if the 25th century was organized around the principles of Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Locke, and Hobbes...with those principles resulting in society being organized into certain factions with their own beliefs about how lives should be organized...beliefs that come to a head when the system is revealed not to be as utopian as it pretends. I'm not really a philosophy or PoliSci-esque person enough to appreciate the series as much as others, but I still really enjoyed this series for bits and parts, and one could not deny it was fascinating for large segments.
Unfortunately, the series had some issues - its novels were often essentially half volumes, so Books 1-2 really formed a complete whole, and Book 3 was more of a third of a book while Book 4 was basically a supersized two/thirds of another; and more importantly, the concluding Book 4 (Perhaps the Stars) is just an utter mess, with Homeric characters (who show up from the first book) showing up en masse and distracting from the rest of the narrative, as Palmer seemingly can't decide what to cut and just throws everything in to the point where it's hard to care too much about everything and it just becomes kind of laughable.
This is a series where there were points I enjoyed quite a bit, particularly the finish of Book 2. But it just ends poorly (after a multi year gap between installments) which prevents it from finishing pretty high on my ballot.
Tier Three:
4. Wayward Children, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
Wayward Children is the type of Series I sort of talked about in the Preamble - on one hand it's a continuing series that builds upon itself, which is what the Best Series award should be for. On the other hand, every installment of the series has been Hugo Nominated for Best Novella, with the first installment winning the award. I love Seanan McGuire, but it's hard to say that this is a series that needed a new award to be created to get the credit it deserved.
If you aren't familiar with the series, it features a world in which children with struggles find doors to portal fantasy worlds which give them adventures and lives tailored to them....which doesn't mean that those worlds are free of danger or hardship. And then the biggest hardship - where those worlds spit those kids out, leaving them lost and without direction back in the real world....and often find themselves at a school for such kids that help them cope until they can either go back to the real world or find a door back. Each odd book features a story at the school or that at least starts in our world after the kids have left the fantasy world, while each even book is a prequel that follows one of the kids as they grow up and find the portal fantasy world for them....until they find themselves kicked out of it.
So here's the thing for me - It's a series I've had mixed feelings about, with me loving certain installments but not really caring for others (the first two novellas for instance). Which prevents it from being higher than this on my ballot...it's a good series, but the ones below I have more consistently good feelings about. Still, I kinda expect this to win this year.
Tier Two:
3. The Kingston Cycle, by C. L. Polk (Tordotcom)
The Kingston Cycle is similar to my #2 choice below in that it's a completed trilogy rather than an ongoing series, but it's different in basically every other way, including in how I enjoyed it. The series is to some extent a trilogy of queer fantasy romances, featuring a world based on an alternate version of England, in which a noble overclass monopolizes magic all the while oppressing and imprisoning commoners who have magic as witches...and this is just a massive oversimplification of the ways of oppression, colonization, and Empire involved. The first book features a M/M romance between a runaway noble (who as second son would've been forced to be subordinate to his sister) and a strange man of magical origins as they investigated the truth behind what the noble government was doing; the second book featured a F/F romance between the noble sister and a journalist as they try to change things from within in the aftermath of book 1; and the final book featured a F/NB romance between a witch and the love who had been wrong imprisoned for years as they fight to change the system that oppressed them for so long.
I really loved book 2, but only liked books 1 and 3, both of which felt like they almost had too much going on, especially book 3, which ditches a cliffhanger from book 2, and sort of pushes its romance to the side in favor of a plot very directly targetted at the fascist police and government forces people of color deal with in today's world (and particularly in America, but not just here - Polk is Canadian). That book was powerful in its imagery at times, but at the same time, was so overstuffed with such imagery and ideas that it rarely had time to breath, and it wrapped up the series in an optimistic way that well....sadly didn't feel realistic for the real world ideas coming out otherwise.
The result is still a really good series I would recommend, but not at thetop of this ballot.
2. The Green Bone Saga, by Fonda Lee (Orbit)
If you'd asked me a year ago whether I'd be ranking The Green Bone Saga high up on my Best Series ballot (#2), I would have thought you crazy. The series, which is often pitched (not unfairly) as The Godfather meets Kung Fu/Wuxia, started with Jade City a few years back, which well I didn't love as much as I wanted to - something about its prose and telling just failed to have it really stand out for me. And then book 2, Jade Fire, featured one of the protagonists making a REALLY unsympathetic choice amidst a plot that I just didn't love, which made me pretty down on the series.
And then came book 3, Jade Legacy, which blew me away. Jade City started as the story of a single generation clan of mobsters in a Hong-Kong esque island filled with magical power (well physical and healing powers) granting Jade, struggling to move on with the old generation dying out as their seemingly more ruthless rival clan took steps in a changing and more globalizing world filled with powerful outside nations. Jade Legacy took that story through the future, as newer generations grew up and the world continued changing, and it was a truly remarkable read, even for as long a book (by far the longest of the trilogy) as it was.
It took the choices of the first two books and built upon them in the ways I want to see for a Best Series nominee, and as such I would be super happy to see it win, even if it's a completed trilogy rather than an ongoing series.
Tier One:
1. The World of the White Rat, by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (Argyll Productions)
Okay so I'm being a hypocrite here, because the World of the White Rat is everything I complain about for this award - it's not a single series really, but a shared setting that features three different series (the Clockwork Boys Duology, the Swordheart Trilogy (which is one book deep), and The Paladin/Saint-of-Steel Romance series (which is three books deep)), and thus really shouldn't count as a single series. This is exactly why I complained about World of the Five Gods winning for example, so for me to put this first is prety damn hypocritical, I admit it.
And yet I love this so so so much I can't help myself. The series is essentially a DnD world as imagined by oddball and amazing author Ursula Vernon, with its best books being essentially fantasy romances - Swordheart, a romance between a middle age woman and a warrior imprisoned for generations in a sword; and the Saint of Steel, 3 books into a 7 book series following Paladins of a god who seemed to have died, and who seem lost without the God to control their berserker instincts, as the Paladins meet romantic partners in the oddest ways and manners. The romances are sometimes infuriatingly slow-burn, but they are so so good, and the stories are incredibly fun and enjoyable.
And there's a major element of the setting, the Church of the White Rat, from which it gets its name, which is so so so fantastic, a religion dedicated to practicality in helping others, as lawyers, as housing advocates, as healers, etc. It's such a fun and well meaning institution in its attempts to help others, without any of the dogma that plagues our real world religions, and is led in most of the books by the most practical, witty, and just enjoyable authority figure you'd ever want to see in a world.
I love pretty much everything Kingfisher/Vernon writes, and this is an absolute highlight, making it an easy choice for Best Series....my hypocrisy not withstanding.
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