The 2020 Hugo Aware Finalists have been announced.
Note the actual list is at:
There are also retrospective nominees for 1945:
The Hugos seem to be becoming ever less relevant as a guide to books that I would want to read.
I’ve read four of the six novel nominees, and two of the six novellas.
I did not care for The City in the Middle of the Night, and I’m not excited about reading anything else by Charlie Jane Anders after this second disappointment. She’s got some cool worldbuilding and some lovely prose, but her bad guys are so clearly bad guys in books that pretend like they’re respectful considerations of different philosophical approaches. It ends up feeling like I’m being lectured to; and even though I’m on Anders’s side of the lecture, it’s tedious.
Ima repeat myself from the April Khadaji thread about Gideon the Ninth: If you locked Robert Silverberg and Agatha Christie in a room and forced them to write a book together, and then got a brilliantly snarky teenager to rewrite the entire thing, the result would look something like this. It’s complicated and obscene and whiny-but-self-aware and violent and mysterious and so, so gross. I think I love it, and of the ones I’ve read, this is probably my favorite.
The Light Brigade was fine, yer bog-standard trippy time-travel/military science fiction. I like weird fiction, but this one didn’t do much for me. I’m surprised to see its nomination.
I apparently liked A Memory Called Empire when I read it; looking it up on Goodreads, I wrote, “Deeply political space opera at its best, using SF to explore themes of power and identity.” But I don’t remember much about it.
I haven’t read Middlegame, and the only other thing I’ve read by Seanan McGuire had similar problems (for me) as Charlie Jane Anders’s book. It was a novella that had a theme something like, “Some abused children grow up to be abusers, but not all of them,” and it kept pounding away at that point for like 150 pages; while I agreed with the point, I didn’t need to have someone keep telling me about it.
And I’ve never picked up The Ten Thousand Doors of January, but as soon as the library reopens I will (or maybe sooner if I finish my stack of books and start buying books).
As for novellas: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 was entertaining enough, but not as good as other things I’ve read by that author. To Be Taught, If Fortunate was perfectly beautiful, and is my pick (of the two novellas I’ve read so far). The Deep is in my “to be read” pile, and I might read it next.
One thing I find interesting is that all of the contenders seem to be stand-alones (or firsts in series - I can’t really tell), with none of them being sequels or prequels.That doesn’t seem to have been the casein the past. I wonder why that is.
I always get a kick out of seeing a friend’s name on these lists.
Diana M Pho has been nominated for editor, long form for three years in a row.
They have become politicized.
Other than the failed Sad Puppies movement, this is a pretty weak take, and is the least interesting thing anyone can say about the awards. Have you read the ones this year? Any of them? Which ones did you like, and why? Which did you dislike, and why?
That’s pretty interesting, and I suspect it’s coincidence. All four that I’ve read are either definitely, or possibly, the first in series. I’m sure about Gideon and Memory Called Empire. Anders says she has no plans for a sequel, but it sure set one up. I honestly don’t remember Light Brigade well enough to say, but I vaguely think it could.
And as we all know, science fiction has never been a political genre. :dubious:
They are tending much more towards fantasy and soft science fiction, so heading out of my main interests.
Maybe she meant not in novel form.
She has a sort-of followup short story on the Tor website released not 2 months ago: If You Take my Meaning
And clearly it’s kept SF authors across history with libertarian or conservative political views, like Robert Heinlein or Orson Scott Card or Vernor Vinge or Larry Niven or Jerry Pournelle or Gene Wolfe, from achieving either critical or commercial success.
Gene Wolfe? Really? I’m surprised that someone was capable of identifying something as mundane and pedestrian as a political opinion in any of his writings.
Hmm. Of those, A Memory Called Empire is pretty hard SF. Light Brigade is about as hard as Starship Troopers.
Last year’s finalists only had one hard SF novel–The Calculating Stars–but it won. Weird SF (such as Revenant Gun and Gideon the Ninth) is definitely featured prominently.
I’m not sure that this is a trend, though. Looking back at a random selection, starting in 1960, here are some winners:
-A Canticle for Leibowitz
-Stranger in a Strange Land
-The Man in the High Castle
-Dune
-The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
-Lord of Light
I wouldn’t call any of these hard sf, and some of them are only “science” fiction in the loosest possible sense.
Skipping to the 2000s, we’ve got:
-Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
-American Gods
-Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
-Spin
The last is very, very hard SF, but the others aren’t remotely SF.
It looks to me like the 80s had some stuff that was more bog-standard hard SF. But the Hugos have hardly been a bastion for the subgenre over their decades-long existence.
Now that’s interesting. A lot of hard sf fans consider Heinlein their patron saint and Mistress seem to often get included on hard sf lists. Not disagreeing really, because I can see nits to pick if you aren’t too keen on his take on an AI. But I find it curious just how individual these definitions can be.
Personally I liked Mistress and dislike most of what I consider hard sf, so maybe that’s a point against it ;).
I’ll definitely concede that one: I haven’t read any Heinlein in 20 years, and while I think I read tMiaHM as an adolescent, I can’t guarantee it. Probably should’ve left it off, and my apologies.
But I definitely read those others, and IIRC, Dune is the hardest among them, and that’s not super-hard, not like Spin or Red Mars or Blindsight is.
(FWIW, I don’t really think of Heinlein as in that latter company, either. The stuff I’ve definitely read by him, SiaSL and Starship Troopers and Job, were generally softer than Le Guin. I kinda assumed Moon was in that range, which was a bad assumption.)
You know, I tried to re-read Moon is a Harsh Mistress, onetime one of my faves. I couldnt. The professor , supposedly speaking as a RAH avatar :dubious: kept interrupting the story with long, tedious and wrong political lectures. 
Of course Mike is still there, but still…
It’s possible I might have the same reaction these days. Last time I read it I was maybe in my twenties( an increasingly long time ago ). It used to be a fave of mine as well and Heinlein’s juveniles were my entry drug into sf. But when I finally got around to trying The Puppet Masters several years back, the only major classic of his I missed in my youth, I really struggled with it. It came off almost like a Heinlein parody.
That said in recent years I’ve tried and still liked The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. Also the restored version of Red Planet, slight as it is - I found how the restoration of a handful of lines completely shifted my view of the two main teen protagonists.
I just bought a box of RAH PB books from eBay, and I am thoroughly enjoying the juveniles, except maybe Rocket Ship Galileo*. I also enjoyed the Past Through Tomorrow, mostly. Farmer in the Sky, Star Beast, Have Spacesuit- Will travel, Citizen of the Galaxy, Starman Jones, Tunnel in the Sky- they all hold up. I have a few more to read. But sadly, not TMiaHM.
- it is his first Juvenile, and kinda weak.