Reading the Hugo packet

Cafe Society
21

Ooh, interesting!

Death of the Author spoilers

I actually liked the ending and felt that it retroactively made the rest of it make more sense to me. (I really disliked the robot chapters because they did not at all make sense to me to be a best-selling book, so once I didn’t have to hold that in my head anymore I liked it much better.) I actually thought the people made a fair amount of sense, they just didn’t behave in ways that I personally would behave, and I didn’t like them very much. Zelu in particular I thought behaved very consistently like someone that I would never ever be friends with because she would drive me absolutely insane.

Raven Scholar spoilers

I actually did like it! I thought it was very compelling. I thought it was also a mess both in terms of the characters (all of whom are supposed to be in their 30’s to 50s, but all of whom act like they’re in their 20s) and the plot was very entertaining and compelling but didn’t always make sense with the characters, to me.

Soooo… the thing about Everlasting is that I read a lot of fanfic. And everything that Everlasting did, I would say, is very very familiar to me from fanfic, to the point where I started to be like “oh, cool, it’s that trope showing up.” So to me it’s not really doing anything new, and I also struggle with thinking it should be recognized in awards, even though I had a ton of fun reading it (and if I’d seen it on AO3, would absolutely have unabashedly loved it).

But this book is by far the most polarizing one on the ballot in my experience, so I think there are a lot of people who disagree about it. I know people who absolutely adored it and people who absolutely hated it.

22

Huh. I’m guessing Death of the Author will be the most polarizing. Right now, you have it first and i have it last, as an example. But i guess we’ll find out when they publish the votes.

23

Plus, of course, we haven’t yet gotten rid of the trogolodytes, and there are definitely some who will vote against a book just because it’s written by a Nigerian woman.

24

here’s what’s in the packet:
There are 21 categories, ranging from “novels” to “fancast”. I am mostly focussing on novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, but I might read the lodestar entries for “best YA fiction” and the vast amount of content offered in “best series”

For each entry, you get one or more of an except, the whole thing as an e-pub, whole thing as a PDF, an audiobook as an MP3, or you might get a DOCX with instructions to request the item on

Netgallery

NetGalley is a free service that allows you to read an authorized copy of a work. If you don’t have a NetGalley account, you have to register before you can use the service. (You can sign up as a reviewer, and when it asks for a link for your profile, you can link to any social-media website.) For some NetGalley books, you have to explicitly request access; the publisher may take up to three days to approve your request.

If you get the book on Netgallery, you have a couple of months to read it, either in the Netgallery app (on your phone or PC) or you can generally send it to your Kindle. I was not able to send any of them to my Kobo, although in theory that’s sometimes possible.

You can easily port the ePubs to any e-reader. (Kindle will convert it to their format, the others read ePubs natively.) I can read PDFs on my Kobo, I assume you can read them on a Kindle.

The most pages to read must be in the series category, where the packet includes:

Emily Wilde by Heather Fawcett PDF Excerpts from all three books.
October Daye by Seanan McGuire MP3, ePub EPubs of all nineteen books, and audiobook of Silver and Lead.
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi ePub All seven books.
The Chronicles of Osreth by Katherine Addison MP3, ePub EPubs of all four books, and audiobooks of the first two.
The Craft Wars by Max Gladstone ePub All three books.
White Space by Elizabeth Bear ePub, DOCX, PDF EPub ARCs of all three books, PDFs of all three books, and links to a limited number* of audiobooks of all three books. The audiobooks are available only in the US.

You didn’t get all the novels as ePubs this year, but you got most of them. If you are willing to deal with Netgallery, you got everything except Shroud. Even if you didn’t do Netgallery, you only missed Shroud and A Drop of Corruption. (As mentioned above, I had already purchased A Drop of Corruption.

Title/Author Format(s) Notes
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett PDF Excerpt, plus a NetGalley* link to read the whole book.
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor ePub, DOCX, PDF
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky MP3, PDF Excerpt.
The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow ePub
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh MP3, ePub
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson ePub, DOCX DOCX provides a NetGalley* link to read the audiobook.

I got the full version of every entry in the other categories I’m reading, although Naomi Novik’s The Summer War was distributed as an annoying PDF, and not a nice ePub.

25

Oh, yeah, that’s a good point!

I’m also almost always wrong about who I think will win the Hugos, and it also frequently does not line up with who I vote for, lol.

26

That’s too bad, because the Nigerian stuff is the strongest part of the book. That was really interesting. And having her Nigerian characters turned into cutsey American characters was one of the parts i believed.

27

Anyway, I’ve now finished the novels. I liked all of them. I’m tentatively rating them:

  1. the incandescent
  2. shroud
  3. a drop of corruption
  4. the Raven scholar
  5. the everlasting
  6. death of the author

But a lot of those are very close, and I’m interested in discussing it.

28

Your top three are the three that I’ve read, and I think I’d rank them the same, although they’re all really close: I enjoyed them all a lot, but none of them blew me away.

29

So, i decided to start the YA novels. First up was They Bloom at Night. I’m not liking it. Not because it’s not good, but because it’s not what I’d like to be reading.

As a YA novel, a major issue is the protagonist’s relationship with her mother, whom she both loves and and resents. But it’s also looking to be a “coming to grips with sex” story. And instead of being a cute, clumsy, intro, a lot of the story has been dancing around the protagonist’s losing her virginity to rape. I think the next chapter is going to say more about what happened, and I’m not really eager to read that.

Also, the genre is horror, which isn’t my favorite.

I’m about half way through, and i want to know what happens. But I’m tempted to look for a plot summary and move on to another book.

30

I voted. It’s ranked choice, and you can change your votes until voting ends. Here are my preliminary votes with a brief description. The descriptions aren’t meant to be value judgements, just a hook so i can remember which story is which. But some of those contain spoilers, since an ending or twist is often the most memorable thing about a story.

short stories

7 * 10 visions of the future: various future worlds
5 * in my country: creepy distopia with men in blue houses
6* laser eyes aren’t everything: disabled superhero
1 * missing Helen: a women meets her clone
2 * six people to revise you: getting fixed by the people who don’t like you. :wink:
3 * wire mother: a teenager struggles with digital humans
4 * no award

novelettes

6 * kaiju agonistes: about a messenger sent to save humanity from nuclear self destruction, that takes over the economy.
3 * never eaten vegetables: story of a mother ship that was hijacked, but not killed.
5 * rapport, etc: when Iris learns that Peri made a friend
2 * the girl that my mother is leaving me for: trans woman escapes corporation with her lover.
1 * the Millay illusion: girl magicians
4 * when he calls your name: Jolene vampire story

novellas

1 * automatic noodle: human-intelligent bots start a restaurant
2 * cinder house: Cinderella as a ghost, who joins a threesome and lives happily ever after
3 * murder by memory: a spaceship detective falls in love with a yarn store proprietor
4 * the river has roots: two sisters sing to the willows near Arcadia
5 * the summer war: the summerling king was shamed by the middle child
6 * what stalks the deep: cave mollusc learns to imitate humans, its twin learns to eat them.

novels

3 * a drop of corruption: murder mystery at the edge of the world
6 * death of the author: robots write stories about humans
2 * shroud: a fire upon the deep meets the Martian, with echos of 2001
5 * the everlasting: everlasting love in the motherland?
1 * the incandescent: a demon that wants a better life
4 * the Raven scholar: the 8 gods are trapped

Really interested if anyone wants to argue for different rankings.