Nominee Project Cancelled

In an effort to read more contemporary science fiction, I tried reading the Hugo award nominees for the last two years, and the Nebulas as well. It was a fun project, and I found several new authors to read.

I read books that I wouldn't ordinarily have read, and that's a good thing. But, I'm one of those readers who refuses to put down a book once it's started. No matter how much I find myself despising the book, or being bored by it.

As a result, I've done some hate reading, which isn't my favorite thing to do. And, in light of the strange turn of events involving the Hugo nominations (not going into it, check here for a run down or search sad puppies or rabid puppies if you want to live dangerously), I've decided not to do the project this year.

I am prejudging that there are works on the Hugo ballot that I won't particularly want to read. I'm also prejudging that the Nebulas nominees will likewise not be my cup of tea. I just haven't had much luck with getting into the Nebula nominees or enjoying them. And I want to find books that I enjoy.

I avidly reread books that I like. And I am going to go with the premise that I will learn more about how to write stories I like if I reread and analyze books that I like. Reading books I don't like is an interesting exercise, but not a productive one. I mean, I can point out why I'm stopping a read, but to continue past that point only gets me a larger list of negatives.

I want to find some positives. To examine what an author does well and try to see if I can make it work too. This is definitely something that I have seen floated as advice here and there through the years, but I have to credit Dean Wesley Smith (again) with giving the final push to this iteration.

I think that reading those award nominees, regardless of whether I like them or not, only gives me a sense of what is being published currently by publishing houses. If I'm not even going to try that route, then there's no sense in figuring that out. I only need to write what I like, publish it, and write the next thing better.

Nominee Thoughts: The Wheel of Time

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson was an epic journey to read. I actually finished it a while ago, but I'm not sure what to write about it. I'm not sure how to approach the series as a whole, especially since it's been months since I read the first one at this point.

I remember being a bit put off by the characters at first. I read a comment on io9 once about a trio of books that I personally enjoyed, the Crystal Singer books by Anne McCaffrey. The comment complained that those books were "female adolescent wish fulfillment." I'm not entirely sure why that is such a bad thing, when so many books with male protagonists are simply "male adolescent wish fulfillment," but the commenter seemed to be scornful of those books. And in the beginning of The Wheel of Time, so much time was spent on those teenage boys as the center of the world. The girls were there to be foils, to aid and to guide, but they could never be the Dragon.

And yet, the girls came along. They gained agency and became involved in their own interesting and necessary stories. Rand became more and more of an asshole, and it seemed to me that the women around him were all that stopped him from prematurely falling prey to the rage that threatened to consume him. Even if his emergence from that shadow was entirely on his own (possibly aided by his father, up for debate).

I enjoyed reading the books. I am glad that I didn't read them when I was younger, because I really hate waiting for books. When I have to wait a year for the next book only to find that the loose end upon which I have been hanging is not only not resolved, but is hardly mentioned, I get a little batty. Much better to wait for a series and catch up. And I think that there would have been books that I would have been very eager to read, had I started back when Scott Foster told me to in 2000.

The ending made sense to me, even if I didn't like the particular ends of some characters. There weren't completely unreasonable kills or saves. The loose ends that would have had me counting the days until the release of the next book were tied up sufficiently without implying an end to the lives of the characters that survived.

It seemed as if I had read some parts of them before, and I'm not sure if that's because I had or because they were similar to other things that I've read. I'm pretty sure I once had a sampler book of one of these books, but I also remember never wanting to read it. There may have been some desperate time that I opened it, but maybe not. 

Nominee Thoughts: The Golem and the Jinni

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker was a quiet read. Each time I picked it up, I was surprised to be as far along in the book I was. It would have been, perhaps, a different experience to read it electronically, when I would have had less of a sense of the pages passing.

I read it in fits and starts, around other responsibilities, but I never really wanted to put it down. I enjoyed the way that each of the main characters, the Golem and the Jinni, were introduced. Their individual stories were told, unconnected, only coming together gradually. The sections of the Jinni's memory that he did not possess were, at first, jarring to read, but the whole of the narrative came together nicely at the end.

I was invested enough in the story to be a bit put out that there was no attempt at a cure for Sophia, other than her traveling to warmer climes. The story is able to touch on the themes of becoming human through the human-formed, non-human Golem and Jinni. That journey is not finished at the end of the novel, but its continuation is implied.

It seems odd that a novel with such outlandish characters strikes me as so very quiet a novel. Quiet is the word, because it is not flashy or splashy. The Jinni's powers, constrained because of his physical form and the desire for concealment, are displayed and used subtly. The Golem is constrained by moral concerns from using her power in obvious ways as well. Even the villain's powers are generally subtle, swaying the minds of others and causing internal effects more than anything loud. Wecker brings the fantastic to a close and human level, speaking at a volume that encourages one to lean closer, lest one misses a single word. 

Nominee Thoughts: Fire with Fire

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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Fire with Fire by Charles E. Gannon was an enjoyable read once I got into it. Getting into didn't take very long, but it did take some time to get over my initial reaction to the use of characters from the Odyssey as point of view changes and indicators. I tend not to trust anything that smacks of being too clever in its classical references.

I was also confused by the direction of the plot. At first, it seemed to hop from one main concept to another. One thing seemed to be the main focus, but then it was resolved too quickly. Another concept came up, and was as quickly dealt with. Only at the end of the book was a main conflict revealed and not resolved.

And that main conflict was entirely different from what seemed to be the main conflict at the beginning of the book, but there were still unresolved issues surrounding just about every somewhat resolved issue. Loose ends that created curiosity.

This made sense in the context of the book being a prequel, but I didn't go into the book knowing that the next book in the series was actually Book 1. I do think that I will read that next book, if only because after my husband read Fire with Fire, he bought it. But I still have 11 books of The Wheel of Time to get through...

Overall, I liked reading the book more than I expected to, based on my reading of previous Nebula nominees. There were times when I didn't like the style especially, but for the most part the story drew me on. 

Nominee Thoughts: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman was a lovely book.

I had requested an electronic copy of this book from the library back in May, and it just came through before I went on my solo backpack this last weekend. Based on the other Nebula award nominees, I was anticipating another lengthy, complex book. I thought that it would take me the entire weekend to read it, or even the weekend and more.

But I finished it the second night of my trip. I'm not sure how long it is in pages, since the Kindle displays reading time remaining rather than page numbers, but I don't think it could have been very long. However, it wasn't just the length that made it a quick read for me. The style was inviting, and the story was compelling. I wanted to know what happened next through each chapter, and each subsequent event had that magic combination of surprise and inevitability to it for me.

The story utilized a framing device, telling the story of the narrator's experience as a young boy through the mind of him as an adult. That could have gone sour, but the way that it ended, that the narrator has returned to the house and remembered this many times, only to have the experience edited out of his memory each time, felt like a fresher turn than it simply being the first time he remembers these events.

The child perspective, or the tone, or the matter-of-fact aspects of the magic... something reminded me of reading Diana Wynne Jones.

On my first of three nights alone in the Sawtooth Wilderness, this book helped distract me from loneliness and fear of what might be out there in the dark. I believe I would have liked it anyway, but this novel will always have that special luster in my memory, and remind me of that night. 

Nominee Thoughts: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler is not, in my opinion, science fiction or fantasy. And yet, it was nominated for a Nebula award. The Nebula awards are meant to recognize the best of science fiction and fantasy published in the previous year, and yet, here we have this book that I don't find to be either science fiction or fantasy on the list.

I would argue that this book takes place in a contemporary timeline, in a manner that is clearly fiction, in that it did not happen, but clearly not science fiction or fantasy, in that it could have happened. I found everything described within it as clearly within the limits of possibility. That leaves me with the question of why other people, specifically the members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, found this work to be either science fiction or fantasy. Or both.

I try not to read about these books too much before I read them. I don't want my perceptions to be colored by what other people think. In this case, I unintentionally read some of the library's description of the book, which contained a significant spoiler, which, warning, I'm about to reproduce here.

The most fantastical aspect of the book is that the narrator was raised alongside a chimp for the first five years of her life. Being so young, she is raised to think of the chimp as her sister. And, in the first few chapters of the novel, the chimp is coyly described simply as a sister. The narrator does explain that she did this on purpose, in order to make the reader keep an open mind about her sister before writing her off as merely as animal, in order to give the reader the experience she herself had.

I'm not sure if I think the technique worked or not, because I read that damn description that spoiled it for me. I was pissed the moment she mentioned sister and didn't mention chimp, because I already knew about it.

Despite that irritation, and the lack of science fiction and fantasy (because people have actually been raised with chimps, therefore it is within the realm of possibility, and fiction, not fantasy or scifi), I thought the book was overall a good read. For a fiction book and all. 

Nominee Thoughts: Ancillary Justice

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie was a good book. I enjoyed reading it. But it didn’t live up to the hype.

I heard about this book soon after it was released. There was a big splash on many different blogs that I read about how awesome it was. I considered checking it out from the library, but I was busy with schoolwork and did not end up doing that.

The technique of alternating between a past timeline and a present timeline worked well to keep my interest in the story. It was also interesting in that the point of view in the present time and the past time were the same but different. Not just a singular character in two different times, but a multiplicity in one time and a slice of that multiplicity in the other.

And then there were the pronouns.

The language of the main society on which the story focuses has no gender. There are different ways to handle “translating” something with no gender into a language that does have gender. I would posit that the English language is not heavily gendered. It lacks that gendered nouns of, for example, Spanish, that require a matching gender for modifiers. But English does have gender specific pronouns. And, generally, when one wishes to remove gender from consideration in the English language, one will either use the neutral “it” or what ends up being the default, “he.”

Ann Leckie uses “she” as a default. The translation of gendered words from the Radch language of her book defaults to the feminine in English.

This is both disconcerting and neat.

I’m not used to it, and so every time I read one of those pronouns, I was bounced from the story, just a little bit. I had to consider and remember from other clues or outright pronouncements (“she was a male”) what the gender of various characters was.

Or maybe I didn’t have to, but I did. The gender of the point of view character is never discussed or revealed, and that makes sense, given that the personality was originally a ship and there is never discussion of whether a ship would have a gender (though I think my mind assigned female based on naval tradition - or my innate bias to see viewpoint characters as like me).

To me, this simple linguistic trick was the big deal behind the hype. And, in many ways, I believe the trick did live up to the hype. It feels like a big deal to me that a book has been written, and written well, that outright denies that the masculine gender should be the default.

But before reading the book, I thought all the hype was about the story. I thought I was going to read a mind-blowing story, rather than a good story with a mind-blowing concept in its structure.

Of course, that leads to the question of what I would consider a mind-blowing story, and I’m sure that answer is different for everyone. A mind-blowing story makes me want to read the book again, over and over. It makes me cry, and re-evaluate what I think about myself and how I live my life.

I’m looking forward to the sequel. I do want to know what happens. But I’m not going to be counting the days or marking it on my calendar, and I’m not going to be anguished if the publication date is pushed back. 

Nominee Thoughts: A Stranger in Olondria

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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A Stranger in Olondria by Sophia Samatar was not the sort of book that I would pick up based on the cover. Which is not to say that the cover is inaccurate. I believe in this case, my instincts against the cover would have prevented me from picking up a book that I would not enjoy.

However, I didn’t choose to read it based on the cover, or the subtitle that appears on the title page, “Being the Complete Memoirs of the Mystic, Jevick of Tyom.” I chose to read it because it was nominated for the Nebula award (though it did not win).

Reading these award nominated books has helped me understand what it is that I seek when I read. I enjoy books that read quickly, in part because I like reading books over and over. I have, on occasion, finished a book and started it again immediately. I find it easier to slow down on a book that reads quickly than to speed up when I find a book to be a slog.

Of course, a book that is a slog the first time around may end up being a quick one subsequently, but, for whatever reason, I like to read fast first and digest at my leisure on the second read. I understand that some people only ever read a book once, but I don’t get it.

Still, like many of the others on the list of nominees, I doubt I will reread A Stranger in Olondria. I don’t know exactly why some aspects of it bugged me, but bug me they did. There was a stretch of about 20 pages where the word marmoreal was used on three separate occasions. I have a decently large vocabulary, but I didn’t know that word and the context seemed vague - just another adjective in a list. Add to that I was at a trailhead with no dictionary or internet access at the time and it was as irritating as a mosquito bite (it means marble-like, by the way).

The subtitle bugged me, because I felt that it was the only hook into the book. Despite the title, the first few chapters do not take place in Olondria and might be better titled A Stranger in Tyom. Without the subtitle, I think there would be little to compel the reader to read past the first page. (If the reader happened to be me. Maybe I’m just not the market.)

I could not find interest with or connection to the main character or the ghost that haunted him. On the one hand, many aspects of the world were lovingly detailed, and on the other hand, the questions that I, as a reader, would have preferred to have answered were not addressed. It was almost as if the story itself were quite simple, but dressed up in very fancy clothing.

You know that a book is not for you when you keep checking to see how many pages you have left to read before it’s finally over and when you hope that there’s a glossary of terms at the back which will make the ending come sooner. Sometimes a book grows on me as I read it, but not this time.

Nominee Thoughts: Hild

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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I first heard of Hild by Nicola Griffith through its Big Idea post on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever. I distinctly remember reading the description and not being motivated to learn more. However, that is typical of my take on the Big Idea posts. The one time I thought that a book sounded really neat, I looked it up and read a sample. The writing style of the sample completely turned me off to what had been an intriguing book idea.

To be honest, that probably would have been my reaction if I had looked up a sample to read of Hild. Although, the writing style of Hild is not, as the other one was, simply irritating. Instead, it is exactly what it should be, an archaic, historical style. The story takes place in 7th century Britain and the language used fits.
And this kind of novel is not what I generally look for when I read.

However, once I got past the first two chapters, I found myself relaxing into the style of it. The names were still difficult to pronounce in my head, but not that difficult to keep track of. The variety of the names and the unfamiliar spellings and mysterious pronunciations did remind me of reading War and Peace, but without the excessive number of nicknames (and patronymics!).

I had some difficulty figuring out what the point of the book was. I couldn’t figure out what the hook was supposed to be, why I was supposed to care about the story being unfolded with such loving detail. And yet, about a third of the way in, I did find myself thinking about the book when I wasn’t reading it. Turning details and names over in my head. Wondering what might happen next and who might be the next to die.

This book crept up on me, becoming more engrossing the more I read. In that, it also reminded me of War and Peace, because once I got into reading that book I became engrossed with it. I keep meaning to reread it, but I want to get a digital edition, because I think I injured my wrists with the copy I read before.

Back to Hild, I liked how the structure of the story imitated a theme that was repeated within it, that of weaving. Throughout the narrative, a part of the woman's work of the main character involves cloth and weaving. At the same time, Hild's path is not simply that of a woman, and she weaves herself into places not traditionally open to women. 

I'm still not sure what the plot was, or how I would describe it. But I did enjoy the read overall. The main sticking points were the beginning, which I felt was off-putting stylistically, and the ending, which I wasn't satisfied with. It seemed to just end, leaving many questions open, loose threads dangling. If one or more books follows this story, then my comparison to War and Peace may become more true since this book clocked in at nearly 600 pages.

Nominee Thoughts: Warbound

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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Warbound by Larry Correia is the third book of the Grimnoir Chronicles. The Hugo voter's packet did include the first two books in the series, but I stuck with my policy of reading only the nominated work for the purposes of these posts.

I was put off initially by the title. I don't think this is a book I would have picked up based on the title of the book or the title of the series. Even the title page on the ebook included a font that made me dread beginning the book.

Then there was the prologue. . . I had a desire to stop reading after the first few pages of the prologue (not that that stopped me). The language was unappealing, a kind of arrogance and stiffness to it that I didn't like. I had a bias with the "noir" in the title of the series that this would be a certain type of book, and I found myself reading the words with what I think of as the noir cadence. It's the kind of cadence you expect out of a hard boiled detective story, where all the womens is dames.

But I found myself getting past that. By the second chapter, I was more interested in the story. I enjoyed learning the magic system and trying to catch up on the world that had already been built out by other works. I did not find it hard to follow as a solitary book. As a whole, I felt it was a fun romp by the last half of the book.

I might even read the other two books and the short story in the Grimnoir Chronicles, in part because I'm curious if I would like the main female character better if I read more about her. As it was, she was the part of the story that I felt most ambivalent about. On the one hand, she's extremely smart and powerful as well as empowered. On the other hand, I didn't like the way her point of view read. It was off-putting even though I wanted to like her.

The story sucked me in well enough to distract me from literary techniques, so I probably should reread it to try to figure out some of them. . .

Oh, alright, it's the compulsive part of my nature. If I do read the first parts of the series, then I'll have to reread the this book, and I don't think it will be a chore.

Nominee Thoughts: Neptune's Brood

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross bears the distinction of being the most boring story I’ve ever read about robot mermaids.

Okay, to be fair, it’s the only story that I can recall reading that involves robot mermaids.

Nonetheless, if I hadn’t been challenging myself to read all of the Hugo and Nebula nominated novels, I probably wouldn't have finished it.

Okay, okay, I would have thought about not finishing it. I did think about not finishing it. But I probably would have regardless, because that’s the kind of reader that I am.

I always feel a little awkward criticizing things that I am supposed to like. I feel as if, by virtue of being nominated, this work should be good. I should be the kind of person who likes this. But I don’t.

Aside from inducing some boredom, I disliked the narrative tactic, which was used several times, of the narrator stating, “I don’t know what happened, but this is what I imagine happened.” And then the imagined happenings are described in exacting detail. It seems like cheating to me, a clumsy way of conveying information that the narrator did not witness. Or perhaps a way that is trying too hard to be clever. I’m not claiming that I could do it better, but I think that it could have been done better.

The pace felt odd. There was an overall sense of urgency to the narrator’s desire to find her sister, but everything in the world happened slowly. To me, there was a disconnect between the pace of desire and the pace of action. I will concede that the pacing fit the subject matter of the book.

Not the described subject matter on the dust jacket, but what the book was actually about. Judging from the description, this was going to be exciting. Space Opera! Missing sibling! Treasure! Oh, but wait, the crux of it all is banking. That’s right, this is all about interstellar finance.

And while I’m writing about things that the author doesn’t necessarily have control over, there’s the cover. The cover features a mermaid. A mermaid with a perfectly ordinary human face. But in the novel, there is a specific description of this specific character, detailed and repeated more than once. The character harps on the fact that her face is changed in order to adapt for the deep water (and she really doesn’t dig the tail), but the cover reflects none of that weirdness. It seems misleading to depict a non-hard science version of the mermaid on the cover of what is clearly, by all the exacting detail of space flight and finance, a hard science novel. People who like that sub-genre will like it for what it is, not for what the publishers would like you to believe that it is.

It seemed like every time something moderately exciting came up, it was immediately drowned in “realistic” finance. Oh, look, pirates! Wait, not, those aren’t pirates. They’re insurance adjusters. In bat bodies. That are also robots. But still manage to be boring.

The main villain is a caricature, completely one-dimensional and evil. She has no motives beyond greed, and barely appears as a character, let alone as an obstacle for the protagonist. It’s all about long laid plots and dastardly financial dealings that necessitate the death of various robots. And I couldn’t quite bring myself to care about their deaths. As robots, their personalities exist on soul chips. The reduction of the concept of a soul to a physical object that can be copied, transferred and backed up gave me the sense that their deaths had little meaning. In a way, the concept of infinite monkeys typing up Shakespeare is related, in that if your soul is data on a chip, then it is possible to reproduce “you” given enough time and processing power.

I didn’t relate to the personhood of the protagonist sufficiently to find her banking adventure compelling, despite the space battles and robot mermaids, squids and bats.

Nominee Thoughts: Parasite

This year I'm giving each nominated work for the Hugo and Nebula novel awards their very own entry after I read them.

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Since it was the first work I was able to find available as an ebook at the library, I'm starting with Parasite by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire).

Last year, I read another work by Mira Grant for this project, Blackout. Now, Blackout was the third book in a trilogy, and I chose not to read any preceding books for any of the nominated works. I enjoyed Blackout a lot. The characters were engaging, and I found myself intrigued, but not lost, by the world that was surely more understandable if one had already read the first two books. 

I kept meaning to read the first two books, but I haven't yet. 

Parasite was a quick read, like Blackout. I liked that about it, and it is something that I want to learn how to do in my own writing. The narrative flows by quickly and doesn't sag. But I felt like something was missing when I finished the book. 

Granted, it is the first book of a trilogy, and it has to do a lot of work to lay the groundwork of the world. But, despite flowing quickly, it felt as if the narrative had been stretched out just to provide more room for backstory rather than actually having something to "say" about the action. On the one hand, that's a clever writing move, but on the other hand I felt vaguely cheated by it. 

Without going too far into spoiler territory, I found the most fantastical element of the book was not the parasite science, but the boyfriend. Tell me that tapeworms have been recombined with a variety of other species DNA, and that people are willing to eat them for their own health - if that's the premise of your story, I'll buy it. I'm willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to the fantastic. 

But tell me that this girl with six years of memories has the most perfect boyfriend that could possibly be described in words, whose worst sin is to occasionally freak out said girl by taking his hands off the steering wheel in an excess of emotion, and I just can't. There is no reason for me to believe that such a man exists - especially since he doesn't even have a magical, er, pseudo-scientific tapeworm in him. 

Still, that I'm invested enough in the characters to think that the boyfriend was unrealistically perfect does say something about the book. It is easy to get into this book, and I did like it. I didn't love it, and I especially didn't love the made up children's book that played a large role in it, but I think that opinion is more about my own relationship with poetry.