psocoptera | Entries tagged with 2024hugos

Here or below the cut. No commentary this time except hey, yay Ignytes.

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Thoughts about the Hugo voting and nominating stats, available here.

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Behind the cut! ( Read more... )

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Locus awards here, or under the cut. I forgot to vote in these this year and am unsure how much I care, but here they are.

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The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean, 2022 novel. I liked this quite a bit, although it was sometimes a difficult read for me - I will go ahead and spoil/content note that the forcible separation of a parent and child and harm/threats to other children are major parts of the story. Upsetting stuff if you are me. However, I thought it was neat that it was still possible in 2022 to come up with an interesting take on vampires. Dean definitely gets points for that, and for general pacing/narrative arc. Some of the worldbuilding didn't quite work for me if I thought about it (there is a definite "who is cleaning the toilets/who is sweeping the floors" problem, like, Dean proposes this Gothic manor setting with only gentry and no servants, divorcing that lifestyle from the historical reality of requiring a ton of staff support and erasing domestic labor as a necessity at all) but fair enough if she felt this was irrelevant to the story she wanted to tell. I did not put this on my to-read list when I first heard about it because I was suspicious that it would be precious about books (you know, "only works of stylistically-elevated fiction bound and printed on nicely book-smelly paper can truly inspire the human soul" unlike whatever we're against this week, thrillers/comics/movies/etc) but in fact (I guess this is spoilery?) ( Read more... ) Anyways, recommended if you can deal with the forced breeding/child taking plot aspects (as well as the more expected vampire-novel themes about, you know, eating people).

And now I get to rank Astoundings! ( Read more... )

The Witches of World War II, written by Paul Cornell, art by Valeria Burzo. This was neat - an alternate history in which Rudolf Hess's (real-life) flight to Glasgow was the result of manipulation by a team of (real-life) British occultists. I enjoy this kind of alternate history, and I like a good con story, and I liked the interplay and tension between belief and con-artistry, both between different people and internally. I also liked that I could tell and keep track of who everyone was, which is sometimes tricky with artists doing a more-realistic style, and great fun was being had with one character's devil-horns hairstyle.

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons, Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott. I was not enthusiastic about this - oh look, I thought, it's this year's obligatory big two entry, at least there's only one this year. I was so wrong! This was terrific! Epic story, gorgeous art, does interesting things with canon. Perhaps I should have considered from the start that Kelly Sue DeConnick is a more interesting writer than Tom King.

Bea Wolf, Zach Weinersmith, art by Boulet. Cute concept, but seems very much like the kind of project that was more fun to do than it is to read. At least, I found it tedious, skimming through silently in one sitting - I can imagine it might work better as a readaloud, read to kids chapter by chapter. (I tried reading Q the first page and we agreed it seemed to work that way. If he was younger or we were all stuck on a road trip or something, maybe. But not really something I'm looking to do at this time.) Some fun panels art-wise.

I talked about Shubeik Lubeik here.

Saga Vol 11 - I was such a big Saga fan in the early years (that breastfeeding cover! I was sold!) but I did not miss Saga when it went away for a few years and I was not eager to see it when it came back (in fact last year's Graphic ballot was so generally uninteresting that I had forgotten whether Saga 10 was on it or not) and I think at this point I can liberate myself from feeling obligated by further Saga.

Similarly, Three Body Problem seems to be everywhere - two different television series, and this comic adaptation (and also apparently a movie, an animated series, and a series animated in Minecraft?) - and I just don't feel like I need to read or watch any of it.

My ballot behind the cut: ( Read more... )

Behind the cut: ( Read more... )

Nebulas! ( Read more... )

Comments and my ballot. ( Read more... )

Two last novellas:

"Seeds of Mercury", Wang Jinkang, transl. Alex Woodend. This is very Hal Clement/Robert L. Forward (except some magical/handwavey science regarding durability of human engineering). I sometimes find SFF in translation more interesting as a chance to see what kind of things non-Anglosphere people are writing than interesting in themselves as fiction, and this was a case of that. (My favorite part was trying to remember my favorite scene from _Dragon's Egg_, where the one alien, like, spends a huge part of its life holding still so that it can streak by the window and just barely be seen by the human astronaut, do I have that right?) Some neat moments about how and why people make the choices to dedicate themselves to this creation of life on Mercury project, but I was bored by the anti-religion stuff at the end, and put off by how one character's disability was addressed. (Obviously I am not Chinese and am not going to understand the cultural context/cultural values Wang Jinkang is coming from here, just, for me as a USian reader, it felt ableist in a way I found uncomfortable.)

"Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet", He Xi, transl. Alex Woodend. I found this very clunky and confusing for awhile, possibly from translation problems, but it eventually coughed up some neat imagery and a vaguely Star-Trekkian ethical dilemma. I kind of think the whole doomed-romance angle must have been being carried in poetic language or literary references that didn't come across in the translation.

Ballot behind cut. ( Read more... )

Starter Villain, John Scalzi, 2023 novel. Fast and lightweight read, one of Scalzi's go-to plots - an average Joe dropped into an escalating SFnal situation - with one truly excellent laugh-out-loud moment that made me glad to have read the whole thing. If you like Scalzi this is one, if you don't like Scalzi you won't like this either. (If you've never read Scalzi I'd go for either Old Man's War if you want classic or I guess Kaiju if you want recent.)

Anyways, now I get to rank Novels! ( Read more... )

2024 Hugo nominees! Here, or behind the cut with my comments. Big picture: nothing profoundly obviously weird to my eye. Numbers of ballots in normal range; 0-2 Chinese nominees per category. If you wanted to fake the ballot and make it look reassuringly normal, with just enough Chinese inclusion to feel like we had some Chinese participation but not Chinese dominance, it would look pretty much exactly like this. Or that may be the real actual situation! :)

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Here, or below with my comments! ( Read more... )

Behind the cut ( Read more... )

Better Living Through Algorithms, Naomi Kritzer, Clarkesworld. An online AI-guided happiness club. Spreadsheet.

Spring Woods Spring, B. Pladek, Strange Horizons. A silent but bright apocalypse.

There's a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead, Sarah Pinsker, The Deadlands. A roadside attraction with a secret. Locus, spreadsheet.

missed connections - Central square today around 930, Jess Cameron, Strange Horizons. An interesting take on time loops and relationships.

The Big Glass Box and the Boys Inside, Isabel J. Kim, Apex. Also contracts, this time with Fae. Locus, spreadsheet.

Ok, here's everything that's a novelette. Five favorites in bold.

The Year Without Sunshine, Naomi Kritzer, Uncanny, novelette. Community solidarity and climate-collapse survival. Locus, spreadsheet.

The Fifteenth Saint, Ursula Whitcher, Asimov's, novelette. Spreadsheet.

One Man's Treasure, Sarah Pinsker, Uncanny, novelette. Garbage collectors and the perils of magical item disposal day. Locus, spreadsheet.

The Case of the Blood-Stained Tower, Ray Nayler, Asimov's, novelette. This is a case where if I tell you everything I liked about it, it would spoil the story, but I'm going to go ahead and spoil part of it and say that it's a sort of Holmes-and-Watson riff set in what I think, with a little research, is 17th-century Tehran. Spreadsheet.

Even If Such Ways Are Bad, Rich Larson, Reactor (the new name of Tor.com's online publishing, apparently), novelette. Living ships and memory modification and AI corporations who still need humans for some things.

On the Fox Roads, Nghi Vo, Reactor, novelette. Bank robbers, running away, finding yourself. Locus, spreadsheet.

Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Uncanny, novelette. Grief and deals with the devil. Locus, spreadsheet.

Contracting Iris, Peter Watts, Lightspeed, novelette. Disease and transformation. If you liked What Moves the Dead. Locus.

Ivy, Angelica, Bay, C.L. Polk, Reactor, novelette. A sequel to a story from a couple of years ago, about witches and bee magic. Locus, spreadsheet.

A Chronicle of the Mole-Year, Christi Nogle, Strange Horizons, novelette. A very different take on time loops, or maybe on virtual life.

It's sounding like in addition to voluntary censorship of specific works/people by the American Hugo admins, there was also a mass tossing of ballots (again, by the American Hugo admins) thought to be influenced by a list of recs in a Chinese magazine, and there should have been way more Chinese finalists.

I have no idea how I would have felt about it if most or all of the nominees had been linguistically inaccessible to me. Possibly I would have been a dick about it, who can say. I tried to make a good-faith engagement with the short stories and Astounding candidates we did actually get on the ballot, but comparing machine translation output to actual human writing is awkward. Maybe I would have been weird and grumpy about a mostly or entirely Chinese year for the Hugos. HOWEVER, I am so pissed off that we don't even get to find out. Like, all these people went to all the trouble of setting up this really interesting experiment, what happens when we try to do the Hugo awards in this cross-language-sphere, truly international way, and then they didn't even actually run the fucking experiment. It could have been really interesting! Something dramatic and unusual producing fascinating data! And instead they just, like, manipulated the results to be generic and "normal" and boring?? (And deeply unfair to all the nominees of course, both disqualified and not, and to the nominators whose votes got disregarded.) Gross and racist and pathetic. :(

Anyways, if anyone has been wondering if I'm going to do online short fiction recs this year, the answer is I don't know. I am not feeling a lot of enthusiasm for nominating for Glasgow, and entirely separately from all that, I have not been doing great on the executive-function-and-anxiety front, such that I'm not currently managing to do a great many things I should do or would like to do. If I do manage to read anything or post any recs they will probably be very limited (and in the timeline where I start making really good choices, I probably don't put time or energy there at all, given some of what else I should be doing.) So, in short, blaaaaaagh.