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Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 27
Apr. 15th, 2021 10:13 pmStill going! :D
Apr. 15th, 2021
What I thought when I saw the Hugo ballot:
-...it did not occur to me in the slightest to nominate Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf, but that is awesome and I wish it had occurred to me, and I'm really excited that now I have to read it :D (I bought it months ago, and it is sitting there looking at me mournfully.)
-I hated GRRM's Hugo delivery as much as anyone else (it was... not the best first time to be tuned in to the Hugo award ceremony) but I would just as soon not have another year of shortform rage works winning the Related Works over longform works which people put a lot of time into. Please let's just have two categories, one for shortform and one for longform related works?
-Ah, Piranesi! Currently my favorite (see February reading), though I have read exactly zero of the other nominees... but I'd bet you a small amount of money it's still my favorite after I (try to) read the others. (A small amount because it could happen that Network Effect unseats it. I suspect not though.)
(yep, although I'm here for the fiction categories, as usual I have the most heated opinions on Related Work.)
Putting this link here for my own benefit and others': Where to find the 2021 Hugo Award finalists for free online.
I'm working through the short stories and novelettes; this year I decided to actually be proactive in putting some large number of the novellas and novels and Lodestars on hold, and I'm picking a couple of them up this weekend.
So, short stories! Overall these were nice stories, often very comforting and/or sweet, and I enjoyed all of them (which I don't often say about any given Hugo category), though I wasn't blown away by any of them. And you know, I think maybe that's appropriate for 2020, where all of us were kind of seeking out comfort reading anyway. I could probably sum up the whole category with "cute! Don't have much more to say than that."
“Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Rae Carson (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2020) - ...it's what the title says. And I guess this was the least comfort reading of all of them, being horror, but it had a happy ending, which I guess is what I mean by "comforting." I liked it, as much as I ever like zombie stories, I guess, because I like stories about moms, but I am not sure it ever really got all that much deeper than the concept. Also there was a pretty visceral description of giving birth that I was really not into.
“A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (in Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, Solaris) - I always think Prasad's stories are really cute, and I thought this one was too!
“Little Free Library” by Naomi Kritzer (Tor.com) - aw, again, another cute one. Liked the ending though it did seem like rather a prologue to a main story.
“The Mermaid Astronaut” by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2020) - Huh, I really liked this one. I am a sucker for fairy tales and for SPACE and, uh, yeah. And the story was nice, with some nice ideas and concepts. (Of course in 2020 it's hard to write something that hasn't been done before, and the problem with doing something Le Guin has done before -- in "Semley's Necklace," in this case -- is that one never wants to be compared to Le Guin, because it's basically impossible to win that comparison.) I always for some reason have some vague issues with Lee's writing, and I did here too, but it worked well enough for this. Probably my favorite on the ballot, despite the unfortunate Le Guin comparison.
“Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2020) - Kingfisher is always a good bet. I think the writing in this was probably the best of all the nominees, and there was a bit of interesting stuff in there about trust and deception. I wasn't particularly convinced in Brother and Sister as machines, though, or quite convinced by the melding of the fairy-tale tone and the SFian vibe.
“Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots, 2020) - Another cute story! I liked it. Though even less than the others did I really think it was about anything other than being cute.
Ballot: Current stance is Mermaid Astronaut > Little Free Library > Metal Like Blood > Guide for Working Breeds > Open House on Haunted Hill > Badass Moms, but honestly I could probably be swayed in all kinds of directions here!
-...it did not occur to me in the slightest to nominate Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf, but that is awesome and I wish it had occurred to me, and I'm really excited that now I have to read it :D (I bought it months ago, and it is sitting there looking at me mournfully.)
-I hated GRRM's Hugo delivery as much as anyone else (it was... not the best first time to be tuned in to the Hugo award ceremony) but I would just as soon not have another year of shortform rage works winning the Related Works over longform works which people put a lot of time into. Please let's just have two categories, one for shortform and one for longform related works?
-Ah, Piranesi! Currently my favorite (see February reading), though I have read exactly zero of the other nominees... but I'd bet you a small amount of money it's still my favorite after I (try to) read the others. (A small amount because it could happen that Network Effect unseats it. I suspect not though.)
(yep, although I'm here for the fiction categories, as usual I have the most heated opinions on Related Work.)
Putting this link here for my own benefit and others': Where to find the 2021 Hugo Award finalists for free online.
I'm working through the short stories and novelettes; this year I decided to actually be proactive in putting some large number of the novellas and novels and Lodestars on hold, and I'm picking a couple of them up this weekend.
So, short stories! Overall these were nice stories, often very comforting and/or sweet, and I enjoyed all of them (which I don't often say about any given Hugo category), though I wasn't blown away by any of them. And you know, I think maybe that's appropriate for 2020, where all of us were kind of seeking out comfort reading anyway. I could probably sum up the whole category with "cute! Don't have much more to say than that."
“Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Rae Carson (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2020) - ...it's what the title says. And I guess this was the least comfort reading of all of them, being horror, but it had a happy ending, which I guess is what I mean by "comforting." I liked it, as much as I ever like zombie stories, I guess, because I like stories about moms, but I am not sure it ever really got all that much deeper than the concept. Also there was a pretty visceral description of giving birth that I was really not into.
“A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (in Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, Solaris) - I always think Prasad's stories are really cute, and I thought this one was too!
“Little Free Library” by Naomi Kritzer (Tor.com) - aw, again, another cute one. Liked the ending though it did seem like rather a prologue to a main story.
“The Mermaid Astronaut” by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2020) - Huh, I really liked this one. I am a sucker for fairy tales and for SPACE and, uh, yeah. And the story was nice, with some nice ideas and concepts. (Of course in 2020 it's hard to write something that hasn't been done before, and the problem with doing something Le Guin has done before -- in "Semley's Necklace," in this case -- is that one never wants to be compared to Le Guin, because it's basically impossible to win that comparison.) I always for some reason have some vague issues with Lee's writing, and I did here too, but it worked well enough for this. Probably my favorite on the ballot, despite the unfortunate Le Guin comparison.
“Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2020) - Kingfisher is always a good bet. I think the writing in this was probably the best of all the nominees, and there was a bit of interesting stuff in there about trust and deception. I wasn't particularly convinced in Brother and Sister as machines, though, or quite convinced by the melding of the fairy-tale tone and the SFian vibe.
“Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots, 2020) - Another cute story! I liked it. Though even less than the others did I really think it was about anything other than being cute.
Ballot: Current stance is Mermaid Astronaut > Little Free Library > Metal Like Blood > Guide for Working Breeds > Open House on Haunted Hill > Badass Moms, but honestly I could probably be swayed in all kinds of directions here!