Deeplight and the Deep
May. 15th, 2020 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSciiiience fiction, double feeeeature... ok, more like fantasy, but it's been awhile since I managed to have two books to write about at once!
Deeplight, Frances Hardinge, YA, on the Lodestar ballot. I've really liked some Hardinge I've read (Well Witched, Skinful of Shadows) and not others (Fly By Night); I have three of her older books on my to-read list. I found this hard to get into at first, but thought it really picked up once the plot broke out and once we got to spend some time with a relatively-late-introduced secondary POV character. Spoilers: I love a character who has a much better grip on what kind of book they're in than anybody else and is pissed off about it. There's some pretty good stuff from the middle onwards - some very cinematic action/vehicle sequences. Skinful of Shadows did not do especially well on the 2018 Lodestar ballot - it got the fewest first-place votes, although eventually beat Art of Starving and Book of Dust for fourth place (losing to Akata Warrior, Summer in Orcus, and In Other Lands in that order) - so I don't know that I expect Deeplight to do much better, but I'm pleased to have read it and it may well crack the top half of my personal ballot. (I still have one more to read, and I'm not entirely sure how I'm ranking things.)
(To digress a little, I think part of why I was having such a hard time getting into it is that I'm really not in the mood to read anything difficult or uncomfortable at all right now. In a world with no Hugo voting and where I wasn't trying to juggle my library holds, I would probably be reading nothing but romance novels. I have so many good queer-romance recs that I just never get to, and I actually have even thought about bailing on the Hugos this year. But I like the community aspect of the Hugo reading, like, if I keep at it, I get to talk to my Hugo friends about books, and I don't want to cut that particular tether to the outside world right now. So the ballot reading will continue and morale may or may not improve.)
The Deep, Rivers Solomon, novella. Mixed expectations here as I really liked the clipping. song and really didn't like Solomon's previous novel. Unfortunately this was a slog; repetitive, belaboured, didn't do much with the aspects of the song I found most interesting. Might have worked for me at novelette length.
I have however now read all six Hugo novellas, and that means it's ranking time! Behind the cut.
1 - To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers
2 - “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, by Ted Chiang
3 - The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark
4 - This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
5 - In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire
6 - The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
My ballot divides pretty cleanly in half here into things I liked and things I didn't (with some handwaving around Time War, which I did eventually enjoy but was *very* purple (discussed here)). The top half was easy for me to rank. The bottom two gave me some trouble... honestly if it comes down to the two of them I don't really care what happens and I hope one or the other camp ends up happy. My bet is that Hugo voters will continue to really like Ted Chiang.
The Nebula ballot is similar, but substitutes Vylar Kaftan's Her Silhouette Drawn In Water and A.C. Wise's Catfish Lullaby for To Be Taught and Absent Dream. I haven't read Catfish Lullaby but would slot Silhouette in somewhere around Time War on my ranking - it was enjoyable but not memorable. (Vs Time War, certainly memorable if not always enjoyable.) I think Time War is going win the Nebula though.
Deeplight, Frances Hardinge, YA, on the Lodestar ballot. I've really liked some Hardinge I've read (Well Witched, Skinful of Shadows) and not others (Fly By Night); I have three of her older books on my to-read list. I found this hard to get into at first, but thought it really picked up once the plot broke out and once we got to spend some time with a relatively-late-introduced secondary POV character. Spoilers: I love a character who has a much better grip on what kind of book they're in than anybody else and is pissed off about it. There's some pretty good stuff from the middle onwards - some very cinematic action/vehicle sequences. Skinful of Shadows did not do especially well on the 2018 Lodestar ballot - it got the fewest first-place votes, although eventually beat Art of Starving and Book of Dust for fourth place (losing to Akata Warrior, Summer in Orcus, and In Other Lands in that order) - so I don't know that I expect Deeplight to do much better, but I'm pleased to have read it and it may well crack the top half of my personal ballot. (I still have one more to read, and I'm not entirely sure how I'm ranking things.)
(To digress a little, I think part of why I was having such a hard time getting into it is that I'm really not in the mood to read anything difficult or uncomfortable at all right now. In a world with no Hugo voting and where I wasn't trying to juggle my library holds, I would probably be reading nothing but romance novels. I have so many good queer-romance recs that I just never get to, and I actually have even thought about bailing on the Hugos this year. But I like the community aspect of the Hugo reading, like, if I keep at it, I get to talk to my Hugo friends about books, and I don't want to cut that particular tether to the outside world right now. So the ballot reading will continue and morale may or may not improve.)
The Deep, Rivers Solomon, novella. Mixed expectations here as I really liked the clipping. song and really didn't like Solomon's previous novel. Unfortunately this was a slog; repetitive, belaboured, didn't do much with the aspects of the song I found most interesting. Might have worked for me at novelette length.
I have however now read all six Hugo novellas, and that means it's ranking time! Behind the cut.
1 - To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers
2 - “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, by Ted Chiang
3 - The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark
4 - This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
5 - In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire
6 - The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
My ballot divides pretty cleanly in half here into things I liked and things I didn't (with some handwaving around Time War, which I did eventually enjoy but was *very* purple (discussed here)). The top half was easy for me to rank. The bottom two gave me some trouble... honestly if it comes down to the two of them I don't really care what happens and I hope one or the other camp ends up happy. My bet is that Hugo voters will continue to really like Ted Chiang.
The Nebula ballot is similar, but substitutes Vylar Kaftan's Her Silhouette Drawn In Water and A.C. Wise's Catfish Lullaby for To Be Taught and Absent Dream. I haven't read Catfish Lullaby but would slot Silhouette in somewhere around Time War on my ranking - it was enjoyable but not memorable. (Vs Time War, certainly memorable if not always enjoyable.) I think Time War is going win the Nebula though.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-16 02:40 am (UTC)I do think that some of her books take a while to get into—most of them, now that I think about it, begin in one location and then shift to a different one, which sometimes means that the Plot Thing in the first section is discarded (or revealed to not be what we thought it was) and a new Plot Thing brought to bear. And sometimes that second, larger part of the book is just dark as hell.
Thanks,
-V.