The 2017 Hugo noninations are out. Nominees are listed here.
I’ve ready three of the novels. I hated Death’s End. It felt disjointed and inconsistent throughout, and the last act is wholly contradictory.
If the techno door can let them out of the universe anywhere, why not use it to escape the reduced light speed planet they’re trapped on? That’s only the Big Problem I have with the last act.
All the Birds in the Sky was okay. I liked it, but it didn’t blow me out of the water.
Obelisk Gate is what I wanted after The Fifth Season. Fifth Season felt like a setup for a great story about world threatening events while most of the conflict in the intertwined stories was small stakes (in the grand scheme of things - obviously personal stakes were higher). Obelisk Gate pays that off and I’ll pick up the third book in the series when it comes out.
I’ve only skimmed some of the non-novel nominations. I don’t know that I’ve read many. A couple look like Puppy candidates, but it doesn’t look like they swept categories like they did the last couple years. (I’m okay with a group nominating something they think is representative of their viewpoint. It’s the massive slate that forced out others that I found objectionable.)
It’s a Rabid Puppy nominee. Apparently, when Chuck Tingle used the Puppies’ nomination of him as a platform to make fun of the Puppies, they had to find a different joke candidate. If Vox Day can’t have the award, he wants to shit on it.
A couple other nominees are in the category of “this had a good chance to be nominated without slate support, but they’ll claim victory anyway.” The Census Taker and the Neil Gaiman related work A View from the Cheap Seats were strong contenders based on their pedigree (no pun intended), but they were both Rabid Puppy Nominees.
Should it bother me that I didn’t recognize any of the names of the Best Novelists?
Should it bother me that none of the stories were from any of the “classic” magazines: Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF?
Should have guessed. It all reminds me of a favorite passage from Thomas Perry:
"You know, being around you has been something of a religious experience."
"Oh? How?"
"It's proof that the Lord, in his generosity and bounty, provided more horses' asses than there are horses around to attach them to."
I thought Obelisk Gate was fine, but not great. I actually enjoyed the first one in that series better. This one felt like a neglected middle child to me. The pacing felt especially wrong. But I love N.K. Jemisin’s voice, and look forward to the next one.
I thought Death’s End was a great conclusion to one of the best sci-fi trilogies ever. Yeah, there’s a loose end and a problem or two with the logic. But on the whole, I thought it was extremely well done. The translator deserves a ton of credit for what was still a pretty readable work. I’m considering reading the original. My HSK5-6 level Chinese would probably have me in a dictionary every other sentence, but these days that’s not too much hassle with an ebook.
Mine were legitimate, non-rhetorical questions. And I wasn’t just asking “Should it bother me that SF is changing?” but also “Should it bother me that I haven’t been keeping up?” and “Should it bother me that the best SF that’s being published nowadays is so obscure and so little promoted that the average person isn’t aware of any of it?”—or is that list (among) the best SF that’s being published nowadays, and if not, should that bother me?
Out of curiosity, how many of the Best Novel nominees do you recognize? And if you didn’t recognize any of them, would that bother you?
Is appearance in American sci-fi magazines a useful measure of obscurity and promotion?
I would have thought much better measures would be things like the number of readers, whether they have been optioned to become major motion pictures, or whether the books were mentioned by the President of the United States as being on his reading list. That kind of thing.
Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF all have stories that were nominated recently (i.e. within the last five years). They’re not sweeping the nominations in the shorter works categories like they threatened to do in years past, but they’re still part of the scene.
I read All the Birds in the Sky and loved it; it got my Nebula vote. I think it’s the best bit of genre fiction since Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
There is little overlap between this and the Nebula ballot. Those that made it here (other than All the Birds) were less impressive than the stories there. “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” was close to my favorite there, but I ultimately choose something else.
This may bother you more, but two of the Best Novel nominees (Death’s End and The Obelisk Gate) are sequels to the winners of the last two Best Novel awards.
I liked “Ninefox Gambit” a lot - though it took me a couple of chapters to get into.
The “Best Series” award (a special award this year) should be an interesting contest - the Vorkosigan books are very good and very popular, but the Expanse books have a tv series to get them attention (and are quite good too).
See, that’s a dictionary definition rhetorical question. How can anyone answer that for you?
What of it is so obscure? Every novel but one is from a major publisher. Four of the six novellas, two novelettes, and three short stories are from Tor.com, which has been the leading online site for science fiction for much of this century. Clarkesworld and Apex are also major online story magazines. China Mieville and Lois McMaster Bujold, both enormous names, put out short books. Yes, a few items are from obscure places but 75% are not. Everything else in the world is moving over to the Internet. Wouldn’t you expect f&sf to do so as well? Or is that too rhetorical a question?
I stopped reading modern sf more than a decade ago. Switched over to nonfiction. I have only a nodding acquaintance with the field. And even so I recognized instantly the sources I mentioned. Anybody who cared even vaguely about the field would.
Either you keep up with the times or you don’t. The people who do will think that doing so is worthwhile. The people who don’t have no opinions that matter. If you want to keep up, here’s a good place to start.
Huh. I read it, but almost didn’t finish it; it just didn’t capture my attention hardly at all. I only vaguely remember what it was about. Different strokes!
NK Jemisin is freakin amazing, though (and Thudlow Boink, you should do yourself a favor and pick up something by her, hers is a name you should be familiar with). The Obelisk Gate would be a worthy winner.
I look forward both to Death’s End–having loved the previous two in the series–and A Closed and Common Orbit–having just finished the first book in that series. The first one is delightful.
Haven’t heard of the other two nominees for novel; are they worth reading?
Of the novellas, I’ve only read two. First, This Census-Taker. I’m a huge fan of Mieville at his best, but I didn’t think this was him at his best. The ending left me annoyed.
A Taste of Honey, though, is well worth reading. It’s the second thing I’ve read by Wilson, and I really like his style. Unlike Mieville’s novella, this one ends really well.
That’s a great list in the Best Graphic Story category. I’ve read them all except “Paper Girls.”
Man, I would love to see “The Vision” win. It was, by far, the best title Marvel put out last year (followed by “Mockingbird”). It’s one of the rare superhero books where writing, art, color, and letters go together so well, you can’t take your eyes off it.
It doesn’t bother me if I don’t recognize this year’s Hugo nominees because I don’t feel it necessary to read science fiction that has just been published. I’m always several years behind. For instance, look at the list of Hugo novel nominees:
Going backward, I’ve read The Three-Body Problem, The Graveyard Book, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, American Gods, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Diamond Age, Doomsday Book, Neuromancer, Dreamsnake, The Forever War, Rendezvous with Rama, The Gods Themselves, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Ringworld, The Left Hand of Darkness, etc. Novels aren’t newspapers. They don’t become irrelevant because they are old.
A lot of what I read is determined by what we read in the monthly book discussion group I belong to. We read mostly science fiction and fantasy, but we also read various other kinds of literature. Everybody in the group gets a chance to pick a book occasionally. It doesn’t matter how new or old the book is. I can say that I picked both the newest book we’ve ever done (I chose Good Omens two months before it was published in the U.S., since I picked it up in the U.K.) and the oldest book we’ve ever done (The Epic of Gilgamesh).
No matter how long I live, I will never read all the books I want to read or even all the books on my shelves. So what? I will continue to read interesting books from both recent years and the long past. Perhaps at some point decades from now I will say to myself, “Golly, I should have read the 2016 novel nominees for the Hugo awards when the nomination list came out in April 2017, because they are all great books.” But that’s just the way life works.
The Rivers of London, October Daye, and Temeraire series are all very good too. I have only read a couple of the Craft Sequence ones, so I don’t think I could judge the whole series, but they didn’t leave me feeling frustrated with anticipation for the next book, so I wouldn’t vote for that one.
