The 2016 Hugos:
Novella
By Rich Horton
I’m going to write a series of posts on the short fiction
categories for the 2016 Hugos, now that I’ve read them all. I’ll rank them in
the order I intend to vote.
A quick word on my voting philosophy: I am not planning to
reflexively rank Rabid Puppy entries below No Award. I am of course disgusted
by the Rabid Puppy antics, and I feel that many more worthy stories were kept
off the ballot by the Rabid choices. And if a story is bad enough, it will
certainly be off my ballot, with No Award the last choice. (That’s always been
my approach.) But, this year in particular, many of the nominees supported by
the Rabid Puppies were either unaware of that, or aware and quite clearly not
happy with that. Also, I don’t want to reduce the meaningfulness of the win for
those worthy winners – if they finish first and No Award is second, to my mind
it to some extent delegitimizes their wins, through no fault of their own.
Better to have been chosen the best with every voting on merit than voted best
simply because all the other choices were automatically rejected regardless of
quality.
So, novellas first. The 2016 Hugo nominees for Best Novella
are:
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com)
The Builders by Daniel Polansky (Tor.com)
Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum)
Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel
Entertainment)
Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon)
I’ll go ahead and
show my nomination ballot:
The Two Paupers, by C. S. E. Cooney (Fairchild Press)
“Gypsy”, by Carter
Scholz (Gypsy plus …, F&SF)
“The Four Thousand,
the Eight Hundred”, by Greg Egan (Asimov’s)
“The Bone Swans of
Amandale”, by C. S. E. Cooney (Bone Swans)
“The Boatman's
Cure”, by Sonya Taaffe (Ghost Signs)
With these four
also contenders:
Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand (Open Road/PS
Publishing)
Penric's Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Penric's Demon)
Teaching the Dog
to Read, by Jonathan
Carroll (Subterranean)
Sunset Mantle, by Alter S. Reiss (Tor)
So you can see that
none of my personal nominations made the ballot. Three of my choices were
somewhat obscurely published, so I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t make the
cut (these are the Cooney stories, and the Taaffe story (which may be a long
novelette anyway)). By all means seek them out to read! I was quite bothered
that the Scholz and Egan stories, two of the very best hard SF stories of the
last few years, and both published in top magazines, didn’t get a nod.
Oh well, that’s enough
about my choices. It does give you a hint as what will come first on my ballot,
though!
- Penric's Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Here’s what I wrote
in the November Locus: “It's set in her Chalion universe (or, more
properly, The World of Five Gods). Penric is a pleasant young man, the younger
son of a not terribly prosperous noble family, whose life is turned upside down
when, while helping a woman stricken on the way, he unwittingly agrees to take
on her demon. This marks him as tied to the fifth god, the Bastard, and it's
also potentially a very dangerous thing. The rest of the story is about Penric
learning the nature of demons, his in particular (he names her “Desdemona”,
cleverly enough), and learning to navigate the dangers posed not just by his
possession, but by the jealousies and fears of those around him, particularly
those in his new Order. The depiction of demons (which remind me a little bit
of the (science-fictional) Aspects in Gregory Benford's Galactic Center future)
is pretty neat, and Desdemona is an interesting character (or characters). Nice
story, though not spectacular, but I'd be glad to see more of Penric and
Desdemona.”
So you can see that I liked the story, but wasn’t over the
moon about it. Still, best of this list, though I will say it’s pretty close
over the next couple stories.
- Slow Bullets, by Alastair Reynolds
I also wrote about this in the November Locus: “pure SF,
told by Scur, a veteran of a sectarian war that seems to have engulfed human
space. After the ceasefire, and an encounter with a vicious enemy soldier who
tortures her leaves her for dead, she ends up on a prison ship with a number of
war criminals. But when she wakes, with the bulk her fellow passengers, and the
ship's crew, they realize that something has gone terribly wrong – they seem to
have reached the right planet, but centuries late, and the planet seems unrecognizable.
Also, her enemy is also on board. The story blends a couple of mysteries – why
is Scur on the ship? What happened to it, and what happened to human
civilization? – with a tale of revenge and possible redemption. Parts of it
stretched my suspension of disbelief, and at times it drags a bit, but the
ending is moving and there are some neat revelations.”
Again, I wasn’t over the moon about it, but it’s got some
pretty good and powerful ideas.
- The Builders, by Daniel Polansky
I just read this story. It’s a caper story of sorts,
following the usual structure: the leader of a gang assembles all the varied
members, sometimes reluctantly. Then the plot is set in motion, and the caper is
executed. The first twist in this story is that all the characters are animals:
the leader, called the Captain, is a mouse; and there’s a rat, a badger, a
snake, an owl, a stoat, an opossum, and a salamander. The plan is to try again
something they had tried years ago, which we come to realize is a political
coup of sorts. We also realize that they were betrayed the last time by one of
their own … All these plot details aren’t so much the point, though – the story
is all style, offhand black humor, anthropomorphic descriptions of the
characters, cutting dialogue. And, eventually, lots of violence. This is pretty
fun, I have to say. It’s not really that interesting from an SF or Fantasy
point of view, and it’s really not all that deep (and doesn’t want to be). Fun,
though.
- Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor
Binti won the
Nebula for Best Novella, which may make it the frontrunner for the Hugo. But I
have to say I found it disappointing. It tells of Binti, a mathematical prodigy
from the Himba people (a Namibian group), who gets a scholarship to go to
University on another planet in what seems a Galactic culture with multiple
alien races. This first part is kind of interesting, as Binti meets a number of
other, more privileged, students, starts to make friends, and we start to
understand her culture. But that’s not the story Okorafor is telling – because suddenly
aliens attack and kill everyone but Binti. Binti is important, perhaps, because
she carries an ancient artifact that helps her communicate with the aliens
(jellyfish like creatures called Meduse). The aliens, without her permission,
modify her so that she can better understand and communicate with them, and
they use her to help them recover a significant artifact that was stolen from
them and housed at the University to which Binti is going. I was put off by the
wild jumps in the story, by the implausible and too often magic tech, by the
lack of apparent consequence or concern about the atrocities committed by the
Meduse, and by some slack prose. Against that I should point out that it has
more exotic ideas than any of the other stories, and appears to be trying to
engage “deeper” issues – just not, to my mind, quite successfully.
- Perfect State, by Brandon Sanderson
Perfect State
concerns Kaironimas, who is God-Emperor of his own little domain. He has
conquered his world after three hundred years, and is providing for his people pretty
well, and he’s getting kind of bored. There is the problem of Melhi, ruler of
another world, with robots, who wants to fight him … and then there’s the
summons he has received, from the Wode – he needs to find a mate an contribute
his DNA to create another “Liveborn”. And we realize that he’s really a “brain
in a jar” – and he knows it. He’s been given his own virtual reality, to make
of what he will, with limited contact with other domains. Everyone else in his
world is a simulation. And he must go to a Border State and meet a woman and …
And so he does, and she’s intriguing, and very different from him, and a bit
cynical, and he starts to fall for her. Well, there’s a twist of course, and it
involves his unwanted enemy, Melhi, as well as the nature of these virtual
lives. And it’s really not bad, coming to a real if slightly trite resolution.
None of the ideas here are terribly original, but this story is pretty well
done in that context. A fine story, not a brilliant one.
So there you have it. No story I would have nominated for a
Hugo myself, but also no truly bad stories. So I won’t leave any of these off
my ballot. Indeed, while this isn’t a great Novella shortlist, it’s really not
too different, in overall quality, from many previous shortlists. I just regret
the significantly better stories – in what was a very good year at the very top
of the novella list – that didn’t get nominated.
I’ll note something else: all 5 of these stories were
published as standalone novellas, either slim books or ebooks. So too were many
of the other stories I recommended, such as The Two Paupers, Wylding
Hall, Teaching the Dog to Read,
and Sunset Mantle. This seems
unusual, but it does seem to reflect the state of novella publishing these
days.