Tag: hugos

Reading the 2022 Hugo Nominees

~ EMM

It’s that time of year again!

I missed my opportunity to read the Nebula nominees before the Nebula award ceremony because I was busy writing and editing, but I’m planning on taking a bit of a summer break before diving into writing and editing my next series. So, I’m setting myself a little summer reading project.

It’s time to read the 2022 Hugo Award nominees!

I’ve done this for the last couple of years because I was signed up to participate in the conference and vote. However, this year I’m just going to do it for fun. I’m also motivated by the fact that all the books look fantastic, and most were on my TBR anyway.

The Hugo Award nominees for best novel and best novella

The books nominated for best novel are:

The books nominated for best novella are:

I guess this means I’m going to have to make a Hugo TBR spread for my reading journal, huh? I’ll be sure to add that to my July reading journal set-up.

Predictions

Just for fun, I’m going to make a couple of predictions about which book in each category will be my favorite before I’ve read them all. Then I’m going to make an initial guess at which one will win each category. Once I’m done reading them all (or at the very least, before the ceremony on 4 September), I’ll post an update.

I’ve already read two of the nominees for best novel (Light From Uncommon Stars and A Desolation Called Peace). Both were really good, and I liked them a lot! I started Project Hail Mary and abandoned it because I just wasn’t in the mood for that particular narrative voice at the time. And I’m currently reading A Master of Djinn and enjoying it. So there are only two here that I don’t really have a sense for (She Who Became the Sun and The Galaxy and the Ground Within).

My prediction is that my favorite of the best novel nominees is going to be She Who Became the Sun. Even though it’s one of the two I haven’t read/started, I just have a feeling based on the synopsis and the little bit of buzz I’ve heard that this one has strong potential to be my favorite of the bunch. Plus the blurb reminded me a lot of The Tiger’s Daughter, which was a book I really liked.

The novella category is a bit more of an open field for me because I’ve only read A Psalm for the Wild-Built. The two I’m most excited about reading based on the blurbs are A Spindle Splintered and Fireheart Tiger. If I have to pick one, I’d guess that I’m going to like Fireheart Tiger the best of the bunch, but we shall see…

Regardless of what I like best, as of right now I think Project Hail Mary will win best novel and A Psalm for the Wild-Built will win best novella. I’m basing this mostly on their current Goodreads ratings (4.52 and 4.28 averages respectively). We’ll see if I change my mind on this after I’m done reading.

I’m curious, which of these do you think I’m going to like best? Which were your favorites and/or which ones do you think will win?

Stack ranking Hugo best novel finalists

~ EMM ~ 1 Comment

I’ve finished* reading the Hugo finalists for Best Novel. Now it’s time to decide how they compare with each other and figure out which one I liked best.

These novels were so very hard to stack rank. They’re all so different and so good. It’s like trying to pick a favorite type of berry. All berries are awesome. Don’t make me pick a favorite. I want all of them.

But, alas, one of these novels will be selected to win the Hugo later today. So, before the awards are announced, I’m going to think it through and figure out which one I’d pick.

My current ranking:

  1. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
  2. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
  3. Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
  4. Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
  5. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  6. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

Here’s my rational for why I ranked these the way I did:

First off, let’s talk about Space Opera vs. Record of a Spaceborn Few. One I ranked at the top of the list, and one I ranked at the bottom. Both of these novels introduce a lot of alien culture world building. From that angle, these are two of the most similar of the bunch, and therefore maybe the easiest to compare. The first main difference between them was that Space Opera focused more on the weird aliens while Spaceborn Few focused more on the evolution of humanity after humans killed their planet and fled to space. In both cases, humanity is somewhere near the bottom of the ranks of the multitude of galactic sentient species. Both books also definitely have a message to convey (more so than the other books on this list), about living in harmony with each other and with those not like us. While I enjoyed both of these, I devoured Space Opera  while I merely slogged my way through Record of a Spaceborn Few. I think this is because Space Opera had a unifying plot while Spaceborn Few did not. Also, I liked the humor/voice in Space Opera better. So, I ranked Space Opera above Spaceborn Few, but why did it get ranked first on this list?

Let me first say that I’ll be shocked if The Calculating Stars doesn’t win the Hugo this year. That said, why did I rank Space Opera above The Calculating Stars? This may come down to me being a bit ornery. See, The Calculating Stars is a crowd pleaser of a book (which is why I think it will win). The main character is delightful. She has a loving relationship with her husband. She’s fighting the good fight to get women (of all races) into space. It’s a pretty straight-forward, science based, research heavy, hard sci-fi story where you can root for the underdog. It’s great. I loved it.

Now, when you look at that compared to Space Opera, you realize that Space Opera is downright weird. Just look at the Goodreads reviews. They’re incredibly polarizing. People love it or they DNFed it out of frustration. But somehow, comparing this to The Calculating Stars, this is the book that I’m still thinking about weeks and weeks after reading it. This is the one I want to own so I can re-read it. Meanwhile, despite having the second book in the Lady Astronaut series on my Kindle, I haven’t been super motivated to start reading it. So, as much as I enjoyed The Calculating Stars, I have to rank Space Opera higher on my list.

That leaves me with three more (also great) novels that I need to decide where to place: Trail of Lightning, Spinning Silver, and Revenant Gun. These are all set in really unique worlds with excellent world-building and compelling characters. They’re also all very different novels. But, because they all had plots in addition to well crafted characters and worlds, I immediately liked them all more than I liked Record of a Spaceborn Few. Sorry. Please don’t think I’m dragging Record of a Spaceborn Few. I really liked it. I just also really like plot and, as good as it was, that book didn’t have one. Does that make it “literary sci-fi?” Maybe? But that’s not what the Hugos are about, so I’ll leave that discussion to the literary experts. I’m just here to explore which ones I liked best and why.

I also didn’t love any of these three books more than I enjoyed Space Opera and The Calculating Stars. That’s how they all ended up in the middle of my list. But, trying to decide how to stack rank them against each other was a much more difficult task. To determine a final ranking, I decided to rate them on how much I liked them based on the three pillars of storytelling: character, world-building, and plot. Plus a bonus (tie-breaker?) fourth component: structure.

Trail of Lightning shines in the world-building department. It’s a very unique take on dystopian that relies on a lot of Native American legends. Plus, it’s #ownvoices. So, that’s awesome. The plot and characters were good enough to make this a page turner, but I didn’t love it enough to want to continue with the series. The main reason this one is getting bumped higher than the other two is because there was nothing annoying about the structure. (See, I warned you that structure was going to be a tie breaker).

The world-building in Spinning Silver is equally as good, and rooted in the Jewish culture of (I think) Eastern Europe. I really enjoyed the three female lead characters in this book. The males were well-written but universally awful until a couple of them managed to (satisfyingly) redeem themselves at the end of the book. There were a lot of characters to manage in this story, but they were all unique, well-rounded, and ended up with solid character arcs, which is saying something given the number of point of view characters.

Even though I liked the characters in Spinning Silver more than in Trail of Lightning, I had to take some points off for plot and structure. I loved the first third and the last third of Spinning Silver. The middle third is where this book fell down a bit for me. That had a little bit to do with the plot (sagging middle syndrome) and a little bit to do with the structure (too many point of view characters). It’s almost as though the first third had one plot (turn silver into gold) and two primary point of view characters (Miryem and Wanda), while the last third had an entirely different plot (destroy the demon and the Staryk King), that’s not really even hinted at in the first half of the book, and traded one primary point of view character for several others. Once the first plot was resolved, the book sort of floundered for me (around the part where two of the characters are hiding in a creepy “witches” cottage) until the next part of the story kicked in.

* So, that leaves Revenant Gun. In the spirit of transparency, I’m going to note that I’m just over halfway through this book. I’ll update this post when I’ve finished reading, if my opinions have changed.

Revenant Gun is the third book in the Machineries of Empire series, which makes it even more difficult to rate it against the others which are either first in their series or stand-alone books. If you picked up this book without reading Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem first, you’d probably be completely lost. Hell, when most people (myself included) pick up Ninefox Gambit (the first book in the series), they are completely lost. I LOVED Ninefox Gambit after I finally gave up trying to understand all the new world-building terminology and just let myself enjoy the story and figure it out as it went along. This is one of those series where you have to really suspend your need for info-dumps (since I hate info-dumps, I love this style of writing). Some stuff just doesn’t get explained and that’s totally fine.

I really love the world-building in this series. It believably incorporates food and fashion and politics and pastimes and prejudices and pop culture into a far-future, space-faring world. It’s not at all “realistic” in the hard-sci-fi sense of the term. Not like Spaceborn Few or Calculating Stars. And yet, the world is rule-based and logical, birthed from the mind of a mathematician. Plus the characters are great. I love all of them. They all feel very unique and have colorful personalities. They may not have traditional character arcs, necessarily, but that’s in line with this sort of military/adventure sci-fi sub-genre. The plot has plenty of satisfying twists and turns and shocking (but inevitable) reveals. Even though this final book in the series did a little weird “nine years ago” interspersed with “present day” thing with the structure, it was necessary to the story and only slightly confusing. Less confusing than Spinning Silver got, at times with all that POV switching.

As much as I enjoyed this series, how do you rank the last book in the series against a field of books that are first books or stand-alones? I was sorely tempted to just not rank it at all (especially because I’m not 100% done reading it, yet). But it’s a good series, and (so far, at least), I like this last book more than I liked Spinning Silver or Trail of Lightning. So, I decided to rank this book third, behind my two faves. It’s highly unlikely that Revenant Gun will take home the Hugo, but I have my fingers crossed that maybe Machineries of Empire will win the completed series award.

Now I’m going to get myself a bowl of popcorn and tune into the Hugo livestream. I am really excited to see if I’m right about which novel will win this category and to see who else will take home a Hugo this year. Best of luck to all the finalists. They are all amazing authors, and I really enjoyed reading all these books.

Let me know in the comments if you read any of these books and which one you think will win.

Stack ranking Hugo best novella finalists

~ EMM ~ 1 Comment

Last night I finished reading the Hugo finalists for Best Novella. Now it’s time to stack rank them. I figured I’d blog my thoughts and see where that gets me.

My current ranking:

  1. The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark
  2. The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard
  3. Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
  4. Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
  5. Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor
  6. Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Let me start by saying this is all me trying to rate these books relative to each other. I really enjoyed them all. There’s not a “bad” book in the bunch, as you might expect from a batch of Hugo finalists.

That said, I definitely enjoyed some more than others. For example, I really enjoyed the Binti series. The Night Masquerade was the final novella in the trilogy, but it was the one that I liked the least, unfortunately. I also think the Every Heart a Doorway series by Seanan McGuire is awesome. But, Beneath the Sugar Sky was my least favorite of the three that have been released so far. So, that’s how those two novellas ended up in the bottom two slots. They’re both still really good. I just liked the others better.

Along the lines of follow-up novellas in a series, Artificial Condition is the second novella in the Murderbot series. I loved All Systems Red, the first book in that series, but didn’t really feel the need to continue with the series after it was over. The first novella ends with a satisfying conclusion, even if it leaves things open for more adventures. But, I wasn’t convinced that I needed more. So, I didn’t expect much from Artificial Condition.  I expected more of the same — a character I loved going on a new adventure. That’s pretty much what I got, but it was still a joy returning to that world and the “voice” of Murderbot. So, I stuck this one in the middle slot. It edged out the next novella on a technicality which I will discuss next.

For the first two thirds or three quarters of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, I was fairly certain that this one was going to be in the top three. I liked the structure of the novella and the characters. There was a clear story arc and character development along the way. The author did a great job of depicting a complicated new world in a relatively short story. But, the ending didn’t work for me. I don’t think it stuck the landing. So freaking close, though. If I thought about this more and applied the “Writing Excuses” concept of how elements of the MICE quotient were introduced and then closed out, I’d probably be able to pinpoint the exact bit that didn’t work for me, but I haven’t taken the time to do that yet. I have too many more books to read. I suspect if I did that I’d find that the closing of the parenthesis got out of order at some point. That, and something about the antagonist character (Fabian) that didn’t work for me. Now that I’ve said all that, I think I may have to flip this with #5 on my list above and boost The Night Masquerade up to #4.

That leaves the two novellas I put at the top of my list. I read The Tea Master and the Detective before I read The Black God’s Drums, so there may be a little bit of recency bias in my ranking. While I thought The Tea Master and the Detective was a solid novella and a creative re-telling of the classic Sherlock Holmes detective stories, The Black God’s Drums was an equally solid novella in terms of storytelling mechanics, but took me to a completely new world I’d never seen before. I’m always going to give extra points to imagination and world-building. Ultimately, the thing that made The Tea Master and the Detective endearing and enjoyable (the fact that it was a Sherlock Holmes re-telling, and I love Sherlock Holmes and have since I was a kid), was the thing that held it back from taking the top slot.

I’m going to sit with this for a while and think about it some more, but those are my initial thoughts. As of right now, The Black God’s Drums wins in this category for me.

What do you think? Have you read any of these? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

What’s on my July TBR

~ EMM ~ 3 Comments

I started to create a second half of 2019 TBR, but as I worked on the post, I realized that it is insane and way too ambitious. So, I’m throwing out that plan, and I’m going to take it month by month instead.

This is what I’m planning to read in July:

This month, most of what I plan to read are Hugo finalist novels and novellas.

I still have four of the novellas to read. Two of them (The Tea Master and the Detective and Artificial Condition) were already on my TBR. The other two (The Black God’s Drums and Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach) also sound great, and I’m excited to read them as well. Novellas are fun and usually fast reads. So I think I can get through these pretty quickly. Then, it’s on to the novels…

All three of the remaining finalists for best adult novel (Revenant Gun, Record of a Spaceborn Few, and Spinning Silver) were already on my TBR. The only reason I hadn’t read them yet was because I was waiting for library holds (or the Hugo packet, whichever arrived first). Of course, I also need to read book two in the Machineries of Empire series (Raven Stratagem) before I can read Revenant Gun. But, now I have my holds and my Hugo packet, and I own both Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun in paperback. So, I have no more excuses. Time to get reading. 🙂

Besides all this Hugo reading, I’m still trying to stay on track with the 2019 Read Harder Challenge this month. Luckily, there’s some overlap between my Hugo reading and a few of the challenge tasks. Both Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun will satisfy Task #6 (Read a book by an author of color set in or about space) and/or Task #18 (Read a novel by a trans or nonbinary author). Plus, Dread Nation, which is a finalist for best young adult novel, will satisfy Task #2 (Read an alternate history novel). So, I may get to check off three tasks this month.

Finally, if I have time, I’d like to read book one in Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy (Assassin’s Apprentice). I was planning to read this with my friend and her son this month, but I think he’s already way ahead of us. I also moved book one in Alyssa Cole’s near-future dystopian romance series (Radio Silence) up in the “to-read” stack. Plus, the cover of You’d Be Mine is calling to me. I think it might make for a fun book to read while enjoying the sunshine this month.

This is still a very ambitious TBR for July. We’ll see how I do, and how much rolls over into August. Did I mention that I’m also working on writing the first draft of book three in my Modern Fae series this month, too? Yikes.

What’s on your TBR for July? Are you planning on reading any of these books? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.