Middlegame and Hugo Novels
May. 29th, 2020 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraMiddlegame, Seanan McGuire. Let's just go right to the cut. Welp, if she was trying to capture the feeling of being stuck in this endless repetitive cycle, and the relief when it was finally over, nice work. There's a good SGA fic with the same punchline I would recommend instead. (Note: I didn't reread it before making this rec, so I can't swear it hasn't gotten un-good since my peak SGA reading years.) To get back to Middlegame, I am not really a Math Person, in the real math-person way, but I'm going to claim I'm a lot closer to it than a lot of people, and the way McGuire writes about math never felt "right" to me at all. I'd be curious to hear from anyone who wants to claim mathness or math adjacency and thought the writing about math did resonate for them.
This was my last Hugo Novel and I get to rank novels now! Behind another cut!
1 - A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
2 - Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
3 - The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley
4 - The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow
5 - The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders
6 - Middlegame, Seanan McGuire
First and last place were easy choices for me here. I was torn on the ordering of Gideon and Light Brigade - Light Brigade is so well-constructed, but Gideon is such a terrific mash-up of genres and tropes and aesthetics. I think Gideon gets the nod for how much of an urge I had to tell other people to read it, though. Similar trouble with City vs Doors - I think I enjoyed Doors more, but I've definitely thought about City more since reading it than I ever expect to think about Doors. City is ambitious but not entirely successful, Doors is slighter but tighter. Using the same criterion as above, though, I'd recommend Doors to most people before I'd recommend City, so, there we are.
I will predict that Gideon wins the Nebula but Memory wins the Hugo, although I still haven't read two of the Nebula nominees, so. It wouldn't shock me if Light Brigade got the Hugo in the proud tradition of its classic-milSF predecessors.
Other miscellaneous theories: publishers are waiting on the Nebulas to decide what they want to put in the packet, and we'll get the packet shortly thereafter, like next Friday.
This was my last Hugo Novel and I get to rank novels now! Behind another cut!
1 - A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
2 - Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
3 - The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley
4 - The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow
5 - The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders
6 - Middlegame, Seanan McGuire
First and last place were easy choices for me here. I was torn on the ordering of Gideon and Light Brigade - Light Brigade is so well-constructed, but Gideon is such a terrific mash-up of genres and tropes and aesthetics. I think Gideon gets the nod for how much of an urge I had to tell other people to read it, though. Similar trouble with City vs Doors - I think I enjoyed Doors more, but I've definitely thought about City more since reading it than I ever expect to think about Doors. City is ambitious but not entirely successful, Doors is slighter but tighter. Using the same criterion as above, though, I'd recommend Doors to most people before I'd recommend City, so, there we are.
I will predict that Gideon wins the Nebula but Memory wins the Hugo, although I still haven't read two of the Nebula nominees, so. It wouldn't shock me if Light Brigade got the Hugo in the proud tradition of its classic-milSF predecessors.
Other miscellaneous theories: publishers are waiting on the Nebulas to decide what they want to put in the packet, and we'll get the packet shortly thereafter, like next Friday.
