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 seventh and final part of this series. You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
Here we're dealing with the big kahuna of the awards: Best Novel. Best Novel gets all the headlines and gets the most votes every year mainly because these are the big novels that Hugo readers will likely have read even prior to nominations, and especially afterwards. This is where the average SciFi & Fantasy fan is likely to encounter the Hugo Awards (if they ever do), as getting a Hugo Award is something that has for many a book been featured on second printing book covers. Winning the other categories gets you press in specialized media - winning Best Novel gets press from regular media. So you really hope that there are some deserving candidates year after year.
And well, that's the case this year...mostly. This year's ballot consists of six novels that are very different, from a few new authors and a few well established Hugo-favorite authors, plus one author who has managed to hit the public consciousness. That said, two of these books I actually didn't like and will rank below no award, while one of these books was easily my favorite book last year. So there's a wide scope in my assessment of quality as well.....
Anyhow after the jump are my rankings of this year's ballot.
Tier Four (Below No Award)
6. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir (Ballantine / Del Rey) (Reviewed Here)
5. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager / Hodder & Stoughton) (Reviewed Here)
I thought about putting these in separate tiers, but since both are below No Award on my ballot, so I don't think splitting them up farther makes sense for this post, even though I liked The Galaxy and the Ground Within far more than Project Hail Mary.
You can see my reasoning in the linked reviews, but well Project Hail Mary felt like half an attempt to redo Weir's success with the Martian, and half just really irritating and pointless flashbacks (with one awful legal scene) that just did not work. There's some moments of interest in the book, particularly in a first contact situation, but otherwise I just came out of this book irritated.
With The Galaxy and the Ground Within, this was the 4th book in a series I'd loved, but I felt Chambers' usual character focused novel was hindered this time by her attempt to deal in part with some serious themes of colonization and expansion and oppression...serious themes that can't just be used as something people can disagree about and still be friends and yet that's sort of the resolution here. There's a lot of Chambers' goodness here, but this theme just did not work and sort of made the ending kind of fail badly for me.
Tier Three (My Worthy Contenders)
4. A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine (Tor) (Reviewed Here)
3. A Master of Djinn, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom / Orbit UK) (Reviewed Here)
I scored both these books a 9 out of 10, and would be very happy with either as the winner of this award, even if they're not in my top two tiers.
A Desolation Called Peace is the sequel to last year's Hugo Winner (A Memory Called Empire), which I honestly didn't really love....but this is a novel that improves upon it in every way, splitting its narrative into four...and working all the better for it, as it more fully examines Empire, conflicts of cultures and identities of peoples both within and without the Empire, and about the possibilities of a better future. It's great.
A Master of Djinn won the Nebula and it's not hard to see why - it's a tremendously fun story in Clark's steampunk Egyptian setting (previously the setting for a few other nominated stories), which also deals with issues of power, inequality, racism, and colorism....all the while its protagonist Fatwa is just really really great.
The only reason I have these two where I did is because the other two books on the ballot are up there with any works of the past few years.
Tier Two:
2. She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan (Tor / Mantle) (Reviewed Here)
I talked about this novel in my Astounding Award post and I'm going to repeat what I said there:
She Who Became the Sun is high on my Best Novel ballot for this year (which you'll see in a future post) and is just phenomenal - a Queer retelling of the rise of the first Ming Emperor, doing fascinating things with queerness, gender, and destiny along the way.
It's a fascinating novel here telling a story that surprises constantly, has fascinating characters, and is doing such interesting things with both history and gender/queerness that I was blown away. I cannot wait for its eventual sequel and conclusion, and think it's clearly a favorite to win this award.
Tier One:
1. Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki (Tor) (Reviewed Here)
This is my favorite novel from last year and it's one of my favorite novels over the past few years - a book I scored a perfect 10 out of 10 and I am THRILLED to see this make the final shortlist. It is a story that SHOULD not work in concept: A trans girl runaway meets a hell-damned Violin Teacher who takes her under her wing, while the Teacher's life also becomes intertwined with a refugee alien space ship captain....to say nothing of a bunch of other characters who also make an impact.
And yet it works so so well, with a story about the power of music, about the power of caring and what can do for someone who has only known being ostracized from society, and about how being forced away from home can cause different stresses, and about how there's something special about individual creations that can't be merely copied....and most of all about how the important it is for each person to find something to fit within their meaning of home, whether that be music, another person, or creativity, or whatnot.....
Seriously read my full review and then read this book, it's just so so so so good, and I am super rooting for it to win Best Novel. My favorite book of the year doesn't always get a Best Novel nomination, but it did here, and I couldn't be happier.
No comments:
Post a Comment