Hugo Ballot Review: The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin

The Stone Sky, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit, 978-0-316-22924-1, $16.99, tpb, 416 pages) August 2017

A review by Rich Horton

As I noted in my recent review, I was quite late to the party in getting to the first book in the Broken Earth Trilogy, The Fifth Season, which won the 2016 Hugo for Best Novel. I was very impressed by that book, most particularly by the prodigious imagination displayed, by the world-building. I certainly agree that it deserved its Hugo. But my lateness in getting to the first book meant I was even later in getting to The Stone Sky, the concluding volume of the trilogy. (The second volume, The Obelisk Gate, probably the weakest of the three (which is not to say it's a bad book at all) also won the Hugo, last year.)

The Stone Sky is still a very impressive book. But I have to say that for a couple of reasons I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Fifth Season. Part of this is common to series – the bulk of the cool ideas are introduced in the first book, so the later books are less fresh. That said, there are new revelations in each book of the series, a continually deepening understanding of how the Earth (the living and angry Earth, we now understand) got to its current state, and likewise how human society got to its state (and we learn much more about that state as of thousands of years previously). So really that’s OK. However, oddly, as things go on the books – which from the start read as poised on that fractious border between SF and Fantasy – gain more and more of a Science Fictional rationale. We can read them as true SF – what we don’t understand, what we (and the characters) call magic seems to have some variety of rational explanation, even though we mere humans (including the books’ characters) don’t understand that. That’s OK, in fact it’s kind of cool, but it also caused my suspension of disbelief to fracture dangerously at times, particularly when faced with people being literally carried through the center of the Earth, through stone (and magma). And in a matter of hours. The other issue I had in enjoying the book – though I think this aspect was unavoidable (and correct) – the main characters are really rather unpleasant. As who wouldn’t be, having gone through what they did! But it did make it harder, in a way, to spend the whole book with them. And the resolution, while fairly sensible and honest, fell maybe just a bit flat to me.

The book is told in three threads. One follows Essun, the main character of the whole trilogy, as she accompanies her new comm, Castrima, in searching for a new place to live, all the while planning to leave and find her daughter Nassun. The second thread follows Nassun, who has been living in a new kind of Fulcrum (orogene training facility) called Found Moon. Her part opens with her killing her father in self-defense (her father, in the first book, killed her brother and ran away with Nassun). She and two allies of sorts – the Stone Eater Steel and her beloved personal Guardian Schaffa (who has escaped the control that makes Guardians abuse orogenes) also kill two other Guardians and leave Found Moon, to head to Corepoint, on the other side of the world, and wait for the Moon’s return, access the Obelisk Gate and destroy the world. The third thread – in many ways the most interesting – concerns a “tuner” called Houwha, in Syl Anagist, which we gather eventually is the civilization, thousands of years in the past, which created the obelisks but which was destroyed, leading to the creation of the supercontinent called the Stillness, and to the Fifth Seasons, and eventually the Yumenes empire. Houwha and her fellow “tuners” are, in the course of the narration, shown the reason for their creation, the fact of their oppression, and the multiple wrongs at the core of this sometimes utopian seeming civilization. These wrongs parallel, to some degree, the treatment of orogenes in the “present” as of The Fifth Season. Houwha’s mission is to activate “geoarcanity”, which will harvest the Earth’s power to permanently maintain Syl Anagist – but at great cost, to tuners, their quasi-ancestral race, the Niess, and to the living Earth itself.

The narrative strategy is striking, and ultimately wholly successful: the novel is narrated in second person, from Houwha (or what Houwha has become) to Essun, so that Essun’s sections are pure second person, Nassun’s third person in the form of a tale told to Essun, and Houwha’s pure first person. At first this seems a bit of a stunt, but once the reader realizes what’s going on, it comes together to make perfect sense.

In the end it’s a strong book that, as I said, I respect a great deal, but don’t quite love. It’s an effective conclusion to a very strong trilogy. I think it will end up second or third on my ballot, behind Raven Stratagem and possibly New York 2140 (I won’t know until I finish reading that!). I still think, strongly, that Ka and Spoonbenders and The Moon and the Other deserved nominations (and would still rank 1,2,3 on my ballot had they gotten them), but The Stone Sky is a worthy nominee, if not quite the book I hope wins. (I will admit that to an extent this is because of a feeling that two Hugos are enough for this series – which may not be entirely fair, but there you are.)

In the end, of course, The Stone Sky won the Hugo, and indeed it's very fine book, and the Broken Earth trilogy is a remarkable accomplishment.

Review: The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, by Catherynne M. Valente

The Orphan’s Tales, Volume II: In the Cities of Coin and Spice, by Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra, 978-0-553-38404-8, $14, 528pp, tpb) November 2007.

A review by Rich Horton

Today is Catherynne M. Valente's birthday, so I'm taking the opportunity to post this review I wrote for Locus. It appeared in the November 2007 issue.

This is a book (or pair of books) written on an old model: The Thousand Nights and a Night. Yet I found it as original, and delightful, as any book I’ve read in years. It consists of fairy tales, yes, but not retold fairly tales. Rather, entirely new tales, abundantly imaginative, gorgeously written, and stunningly and intricately framed.

(Cover by Michael Komarck)

The outer frame is set in the garden of a Sultan’s estate. The Sultan’s daughter is about to be married. The Sultan’s son has befriended the orphan girl who lives in the garden. She tells him stories written on the inside of her eyelids (and eventually he tells her the stories written on the outside). The Arabesque setting of this frame immediately suggests The Thousand Nights and a Night, and so too does the way the stories do not come to immediate conclusions. But Valente’s design is more complex than Scheherazade’s: instead of simply ending stories in the middle and completing them the next day, these stories encounter other stories in their midst. So the character in one story will meet a new character with their own story to tell, and the first story will pause as the subsequent tale is recounted … and so on.

The book is divided in two main parts, “The Book of the Storm” and “The Book of the Scald”; each dominated, to an extent, by one story. “The Tale of the Crossing”, in the first part, concerns a one armed boy crossing a lake in the company of a ferryman in search of the girl who has been his companion during a terrible childhood. The lake is clearly enough analogous to the Styx, and the ferryman to Charon … but of course he has his own story. In the second part we read “The Tale of the Waste”, about a Djinn imprisoned in a cage, and her story concerns her position as one of the Queens of the Djinni, and the attack she is ordered to lead on the city of Ajanabh.

As the subtitle suggests, much of the focus is on a couple of colorful cities, both in terrible decline. The city of coin is Marrow, and their coins are most horrifying created. The city of spice is Ajanabh, but, as we learn, the spices are all dead. Despite the current state of decline of these cities, The Orphan’s Tales is packed with wonders. We read of living Stars, of mechanical women, of manticores, of a giant who is the gate of a city, of courteous kappas (and what happens when a kappa bows), of repentant sirens, of edible gems… Valente’s imagination is prodigious, and she weaves lovely new patterns with existing mythical threads, and she finds gorgeous new fabric as well. And all knitted together with poetic prose.

The stories are not just intertwined structurally, but thematically as well. And characters from one story will sneakily pop up later from a different angle. Time is rather fluidly treated – the book seems to cover perhaps the entire history of its exotic world. (I can imagine an annotated version attempting to arrange the events chronologically.) One repeated theme is marriage, and for the most part (though not entirely) the marriages treated in the book are sad. (Which seems to bode ill for the Sultan’s daughter’s wedding.) But perhaps more central to the book’s theme is Story – the way in which the stories change depending on the teller, or on the focus, or on the outcome, is fascinating. As to is the way Valente toys with our expectations for Story – the way in which familiar patterns are altered.

The first volume of The Orphan’s Tales, In the Night Garden, is on the World Fantasy Award  shortlist. I haven’t read it yet, but if it is as good as In the Cities of Coin and Spice, it would be a worthy winner. And so too this book – not really a novel, nor a collection of short stories, but something different – should be looked for on next year’s award shortlists.

A (Mostly) Forgotten SF Novel: Born Leader, by J. T. McIntosh

A (Mostly) Forgotten SF Novel: Born Leader, by J. T. McIntosh

a review by Rich Horton

J. T. McIntosh (real name James Murdoch MacGregor (1925-2008)) was a Scottish writer of curious interest. McIntosh began publishing SF in 1950, and was remarkably prolific for most of the next three decades, then fell silent -- only about 54 when he quit writing. The great bulk of his work was of novelette length, though he published almost 20 novels (some assembled from series of novelettes). He's a writer I find persistently interesting and persistently frustrating. He achieved a certain popularity in the '50s which diminished through the '60s. Time might have passed him by, or he might have run out of ideas, or his faults might have overwhelmed his virtues.

(Cover by Richard Powers)

In dealing with him I must account for the fact that when I encounter a McIntosh story in an old magazine (there were no collections) I will happily read it, and also with the fact that I will often be annoyed with the stories. But -- entertained. The reasons for these facts are multiple -- for one, McIntosh really did have a smooth and engaging narrative style; and for two, he was really interested in, more than anything, social dynamics, especially as impacted by an SFnal change in circumstances. So that's good. But the problem is, he had a tendency (largely on purpose) to reduce his social speculation to a single change, amid a society otherwise indistinguisable from the Western society of the '50s. Moreover, he sometimes seemed to force his views on the effect of his SFnal change on society on the reader, instead of letting them arise (with perhaps surprises) from the external changes posited. Laid upon all that was a distinct flavor of the clichéd sexism of that time. (That said, he did feature women in prominent roles, with plenty of agency, to a degree not necessarily very common at that time.)


Put another way, McIntosh's futures, and his other worlds, were not "through-composed" -- one aspect of the world changed, and everything else was unaltered, in implausible ways. And the novel at hand, Born Leader, for all that it seems one of his better regarded earlier works, seems to me to exaggerate his faults and minimize his virtues.

Born Leader was first published by Doubleday in 1954. My edition is retitled Worlds Apart, and seems to have been issued in 1958 from Avon. Both titles are reasonable for the book.

(Cover by Richard Powers)

We open on the world Mundis, which was colonized a generation or so previously by a starship from a collapsing Earth. (Rather shockingly, all the colonists are white ... and this is presented as a choice which was made and acquiesced to by the entire Earth population in order to avoid conflict in the new settlement.) The colony is essentially split into two groups -- the older people, who were adults when they left Earth, and the younger generation, born on Mundis. (There is a big gap, due -- quite sensibly -- to no children being taken on the ship (nor, I think, born en route).) The "born leader" of the original title is Rog Foley, the most influential man of the younger generation. He is planning to leave Lemon, the single town of the colony, and form a new settlement. At the same time he is arranging the marriages of several of his friends (marriages on Mundis are temporary), as well as planning to marry one Alice Bentley himself. (Coincidentally, Alice Bentley is the name of the long time owner of an excellent SF bookstore on the north side of Chicago, The Stars Our Destination. Alice is now, I believe, running Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis, with Greg Ketter.) One of the main issues of contention between the younger and older generations is the older people's absolute taboo on any knowledge of atomic energy (because that's what destroyed the Earth -- in an extremely silly fashion as described in the book.)

Soon we learn that there is a second planet in the system, called, imaginatively enough, Secundis. (Mundis and Secundis, then, are "worlds apart".) It was colonized by a later ship, which was run in a very authoritarian and paranoid fashion. An expedition is being sent from Secundis to Mundis, with plans to conquer the latter planet. Phyllis Barton is the key character here -- a woman of influence, a lieutenant, in a society in which women are regarded almost exclusively as breeders, quite literally lesser beings. She is involved in various schemes to undermine her peers and enhance her position in the hierarchy.

So we see the main conflict of the novel: can the Mundans unite sufficiently to, in their loosy goosy way, resist the invasion of the Secundans. You hardly need ask that question without knowing the answer. You can guess some other things, like who Phyllis Barton will end up with after she realizes that on Mundis she is allowed to be a woman. And how the rigidity of Secundan society, and the paranoia engendered by it, is key to the resolution. The plot itself, while a bit featureless (much like the surface of Mundis) is fitfully interesting, particularly the escape of an older man involved in a taboo relationship with one of the younger women, and their eventual capture by the Secundans.

I have to say I liked the other early McIntosh novels I read rather more than this one. (Most particularly World Out of Mind and One in Three Hundred.) Born Leader goes on rather too long, and not enough really goes on in the novel. It bored me, and most of McIntosh's early novels, and novelettes of almost any period, avoid that. I can't really recommend it, even as I suggest that an omnibus of, say, World Out of Mind, One in Three Hundred, and a selection of a dozen or so of his best stories would be worth rediscovering.

A Strange Mystery Novel: Essential Saltes, by Don Webb

A Strange Mystery Novel: Essential Saltes, by Don Webb

A review by Rich Horton

Don Webb was born on April 30, 1960 (which makes him younger than me! Sigh). He is a prolific writer of intriguing stories, often with a horror cast. He has written three novels, ostensibly mysteries but with weird aspects, for sure, all of which I enjoyed -- but also, none in over fifteen years. But in honor of his birthday, I thought to repost this review I did of Essential Saltes, his seond novel. The first was The Double, the third Endless Honeymoon.

The dedicated SF reader does well to scrounge other then the Science Fiction shelves. Many books are hard to categorize, and many books are categorized for marketing reasons rather than any formal genre definition. (Which is fine with me, genre definitions being so hard to come by.)

Essential Saltes seems to be marketed as a mystery, and indeed it is one. It’s also arguably speculative fiction, though it’s open to multiple readings. But it’s definitely good, and filled with outrageous content that ought to satisfy our desire for the strange.

Don Webb has published boatloads of short stories. As a writer, he is weird, often funny, often strange, always interesting, and Texan. As a book, Essential Saltes is all of those things.

The protagonist is Matthew Reynman, a used-book dealer in Austin. His wife was murdered two years prior to the action, and now her ashes have been stolen. Matthew had promised to keep them and arrange for his and her ashes to be mixed and shot off in fireworks after his death. This really annoys him, and, much worse, his wife’s murderer has been released from prison in a bureaucratic snafu. Matthew tries to find the thief of his wife’s remains, and at the same time avoid being killed by his wife’s murderer.

The story involves many very odd characters, and a mix of subjects that in its eclecticness reminds me of Robertson Davies (though it’s not a very Davies-like book): fireworks, sex, race, alchemy, used books, codes and code-breaking, mental illness, polyamory, and more. There are also some tantalizing hints of a story involving Matthew’s brother John, which is the subject of Webb’s first novel, The Double, also recommended. Essential Saltes is continually interesting just for the strange characters, the odd subject matter, and the well-described sex. The plot is full of action, but at times a bit discursive, and almost too strange for me. That is, the motivations of the very strange individuals involved were perhaps a bit too odd to always hold my interest. But the rest of the book was strong enough to keep me going, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Definitely worth reading.

A Forgotten Ace Double: The Duplicators, by Murray Leinster/No Truce With Terra, by Philip E. High

Ace Double Reviews, 40: The Duplicators, by Murray Leinster/No Truce With Terra, by Philip E. High (#F-275, 1964, $0.40)

a review by Rich Horton

This Ace Double review is posted in memory of Philip E. High's birth, on April 28, 1914.

To be honest, this particular Ace Double really didn't excite me prior to reading. Murray Leinster (a pseudonym for Will F. Jenkins) was a respected old pro, but he's never been a particular favorite of mine. Philip E. High is an English writer who never became prominent: he's not really very good, but I find him something of a guilty pleasure. Leinster published 9 Ace Double halves in 8 separate books (plus a later reprint of the one Ace Double that featured him on both sides). High published 6 Ace Double halves. The Duplicators) is about 46,000 words long, and No Truce With Terra is about 34,000 words.

(Covers by Ed Emshwiller and Jack Gaughan)

Will F. Jenkins was 68 when The Duplicators was published. He retired from writing just a few years later. His first SF story appeared way back in 1919 in the legendary all-sorts-of-fiction pulp Argosy: this was "The Runaway Skyscraper", a decent story that was reprinted in the first year of Amazing, and also a couple of times since then. He also had some mainstream success under his own name. He also had success as an inventor, holding two patents involving significant movie special effects technology. Jenkins died in 1975.

The Duplicators is an expansion of a novella called "Lord of the Uffts", from the February 1964 Worlds of Tomorrow. It takes on the idea of the matter duplicator, and like Damon Knight in A for Anything, Leinster concludes that this would be disastrous. The story begins with a rather rackety young spaceman named Link Denham getting drunk and in lots of trouble, and as a result (pretty much) signing on as astrogator on a beat up old ship owned by a disreputable and dislikable man named Thistlethwaite. Thistlethwaite is convinced he is about to make his fortune at a mysterious planet he has rediscovered.

On arrival at the planet, called Sord Three, Thistlethwaite immediately manages to be sentenced to hang, for the crime of being unmannerly. Link lasts a bit longer, but when he gives a speech to the indigenous intelligent race, the "uffts", the Household head, Harl, who has met the spaceship reluctantly decides to hang him too, despite his relatively good manners. But when Link gets to the Harl's mansion, he soon realizes that the entire economy of the planet is based on using some decaying "dupliers": duplicating machines. As a result, no human does any work, and what little work is needed is done by the uffts, in exchange for beer. But the uffts are getting restless. Worse, perhaps, the duplicating isn't working very well -- if you don't provide the right elements as raw material, the duplicated thing won't work. For example, steel knives don't duplicate very well if only iron ore is available; and electronic equipment doesn't duplicate well without, for instance, germanium for transistors. Harl has a beautiful sister, Thana, who is intelligent enough to realize the problem and try to work around it -- and Link has some ideas too. Naturally they fall in love and manage to avert his execution.

Link, perhaps a bit implausibly, quickly cottons to the disaster that dupliers have been for Sord Three, and he realizes that he must prevent the discovery of this tech by the rest of the Galaxy. He also befriends the uffts and starts to try to figure out a way to better their lot. The story, then, involves his sponsoring of an ufft revolution, his eventual solution (almost totally unbelievable) to the duplier problem, and of course his love affair with Thana. It's a breezily readable, if not plausible, novel. It's often somewhat funny. Not really very good, but not bad for half of 40 cents, I suppose.

No Truce With Terra was Philip E. High's second novel (at least according to the ISFDB), his first having been published as a single book by Ace earlier in 1964, The Prodigal Sun. Highbegan publishing short fiction in with "The Statics" in Authentic in 1955, and published quite a few short stories, mostly in UK magazines, through 1963. In 1964 he switched over almost entirely to novels, publishing some 14 through 1979. He seemed to retire at that time (he also retired from his day job, as a bus driver), but a spate of new short fiction began appearing in the Fantasy Annual series of original anthologies featuring mostly Carnell-era veterans, and other places, a total of more than thirty additional stories in the last decade of his life. He died in 2006, aged 92.

This novel begins with a scientist returning to his home only to find it impregnable -- apparently occupied by some strange being, quickly identified as an alien. These aliens seem to be metallic in nature, and to use electricity as a motivating force. They also seem all-powerful, capable of vaporizing attackers. They come in many rather terrifying forms. Soon all of England, and by extension the world, is under threat.

The scientist and a couple of friends, however, are able to analyze the aliens' means of transport, some sort of interdimensional warp gate. They copy the technology and by hit or miss open a gate to yet another planet. Their main thought is to hope at best for a lucky solution to the invader problem, or at least possibly to use this new planet as a refuge. This planet is at a low-tech developmental state, but it is also being monitored by some very advanced aliens, who soon detect the humans. These aliens make contact with the humans, and quickly offer their help. There is also a surprise about these aliens -- easily guessed in advance (I certainly did), but still I'll leave it at that.

Meanwhile, back on Earth the battle against the electronic invaders is going poorly. Even nuclear weapons are useless. But the new aliens do have some ideas ... Well, there aren't really any surprises coming.

High's prose style is fairly individual to him, and a bit shoddy. The plot here is implausible, as are the SFnal ideas ... but ... but ... The story is fast-moving and really kind of fun. The resolution is convenient but still interesting. There is one personal story that stretches belief but that I still found sweet. This is a good example of how Philip E. High could be a pleasure to read, albeit a guilty one.

A Forgotten Ace Double: Siege of the Unseen, by A. E. Van Vogt/The World Swappers, by John Brunner

Ace Double Reviews, 66: Siege of the Unseen, by A. E. Van Vogt/The World Swappers, by John Brunner (#D-391, 1959, $0.35)

April 26 was A. E. Van Vogt's birthday, so here's an A. E. Van Vogt Ace Double! Siege of the Unseen is about 30,000 words long. It is apparently the same story as "The Chronicler", a two-part serial from Astounding, October and November, 1946. I'm not sure if the story was revised in any way for the 1959 reprinting. It was also reprinted once as "The Third Eye of Evil", a really pulpy title that actually is the only one of the three that has much to do with the story. As for John Brunner's The World Swappers, it is about 43,000 words, and I don't know of any earlier or different publication.

(Covers by Ed Valigursky)

Siege of the Unseen is rather uneasily framed by a series of extracts from the coroner's report on the death of the protagonist, Michael Slade. Slade's mutilated body was found on his land -- identifiable by his third eye. I have to say I was never really worried about Slade's fate, though!

Michael Slade is a successful businessman who gets injured in a crash and suddenly develops a third eye on his forehead. He eschews treatment, and instead tries to learn to see from the third eye. As a result his wife divorces him and he is generally shunned. But when he does learn to see well with all three eyes (curing his previous two-eyed astigmatism in the process), he finds that he can transport himself to another world, apparently coexistent with Earth. This world is inhabited by three-eyed people, including a beautiful naked woman.

Before long, and somewhat against Slade's will, the woman has recruited him to come to her world and join her in a battle against the evil oppressor Geean. She dumps him in a gloomy city and says he must survive for a day. He finds that the city is inhabited by three-eyed vampires, who are apparently normal (if three-eyed) people who have been corrupted by Geean. A young woman befriends him, and tries to get him to lead an attack on Geean, but Slade doesn't feel ready -- especially when the woman asks him for a drink of blood.

Slade returns to Earth only to be recalled again, where he meets a nicer group of people, apparently primitives, but actually people living in superior harmony with nature. But they prove rather passive as to the evil Geean, and soon Slade is on his own again, before being captured by Geean forces. But Slade finds an unexpected ally, leading to his eventual confrontation with the evil leader (not to mention, of course, meeting the beautiful leading lady again ...)

It's a truly silly book, but at times the silliness is inspired. I can't say I liked it much, but I liked it more than I expected. Van Vogt could be so strange that you just had to play along at times. In John Boston's wonderful phrase, he "was the Wile E. Coyote of SF. He ran off the cliff in 1939 and looked down sometime in the 1950s."

The World Swappers is about a secret group of long-lived people plotting a better future for humanity. Which is a familiar enough idea, but Brunner uses it a bit differently than many others. It opens with a man, Saïd Counce, lying in wait for a powerful businessman. He confronts the businessman with his plan to rule the galaxy (that is, the smallish local group of planets humans have colonized). Earth, it seems, is a very nice place to live, but it is becoming overpopulated. Opening new colonies is not feasible, so the businessman plans to promote emigration to the existing colonies -- but they all resent Earthmen. Counce suggests that the businessman, Bassett, is going about things just a bit wrong, and offers his group's help, then disappears.

Then we meet others of Counce's group, on a distant unoccupied planet. They have discovered evidence of aliens, the Others, evidently humanlike but adapted to slightly different types of planets. They fear that humanity is not ready to meet the Others. Finally, we go to Ymir, the least pleasant of the human colonies, ruled by a very repressive religious sect. There we meet a rebellious young woman, Enni Zatok.

We quickly gather that Counce leads a group of people devoted to the interests of all humanity, as opposed to people like Bassett, interested only in themselves. Counce's group is desperately trying to arrange for humans to be welcoming to the aliens. In part they hope to solve the problem of Ymir -- especially as they have a plan for Ymir.

One aspect of the story I liked was the early use of matter transmission as a means of practical immortality, much as with Wil McCarthy's Queendom of Sol stories. (That is, a record of the copy of a person created when he is transmitted is saved (and possibly edited even, as with McCarthy's stories) and then the person can be recopied if his "original" dies.) That's the earliest use I can think of of this particular wrinkle on matter transmission.

On the whole, its an enjoyable novel, though a bit wobbly towards the end in particular. It tries to do too much too fast, perhaps. The noble central motivations are nicely presented, too. On the other hand, the ideas and events are often a bit strained, not quite convincing. Not Brunner at his best, at all, but as ever with him it is a decent read.

The Hugo Ballot: Novella

Novella

The nominees are:

All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

"And Then There Were (N-One)," by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017)

Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)

The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)

Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.Com Publishing)

River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

My views here are fairly simple. It’s a decent shortlist, but a bifurcated one. There are three nominees that are neck and neck in my view, all first-rate stories and well worth a Hugo. And there are three that are OK, but not special – in my view not Hugo-worthy (but not so obviously unworthy that I will vote them below No Award.)

My ballot will look like this:

1.       Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were (N – One)” – A story about a convention of alternate Sarah Pinskers, complete with a murder. It is warmly told – funny at time, certainly the milieu is familiar to any SF con-goer. But it’s dark as well – after, there’s a murder – and it intelligently deals with issue of identity and contingency.

2.       Martha Wells, All Systems Red – a ripping good novella about a security android which calls itself a murderbot, guarding a group of researchers on an alien planet. The murderbot mainly wants peace to watch its favorite TV shows, but that becomes impossible when the team comes under threat. It soon becomes clear that there is an unexpected group on the planet that doesn’t want any rivals, and the murderbot has to work with its humans to find a way to safety. That part – the plotty part – is nicely done, but the depiction of the murderbot is the story’s heart: convincingly a real person but not a human, with emotions but not those that humans expect: very funny at times but also quite moving.

3.       Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones – I was rather disappointed by Every Heart a Doorway, the first novella in McGuire’s Wayward Children series. I thought its main character boring, and its murder mystery plot rather a mess, and I thought the story just too long. For that reason, I passed on Down Among the Sticks and Bones until it showed up on the Hugo shortlist. So I came to the story with low expectations – and I was completely delighted. This isn’t just better than Every Heart a Doorway – it’s LOTS better. This tells the backstory of Jack and Jill, very important characters from the first book. They are twins, born to a couple who aren’t really interested in children except for how they look to their colleagues, and who force them into their ideas of the perfect girls – Jacqueline is the pretty one (thought they look the same), intended to be the popular one; while Jillian is the tomboy, the soccer player, the adventurer. (The one weakness of the story is the characterization of the parents – they’re a cliché, their faults seem forced.) The things is, that’s not who the girls really are, and when they find a door into another world, they take it, ending up on the Moors, a very dangerous place, ruled by a vampire, and featuring other horrors like werewolves. Jack stays with a relatively good man, and exercises her interest in learning and scientific research. Jill stays with the vampire, wanting to become a vampire herself – his heir, indeed. But when Jack takes a local girl as her lover, Jill’s eventual reaction catalyzes the inevitable ending.

4.       Sarah Gailey, River of Teeth – a caper story (OK, not a caper – an operation!) about a mixed team of “hoppers” (hippopotamus wranglers, basically) assembled to clear the lower Mississippi of feral hippos. Their leader, Winslow Houndstooth, also wants revenge, against the man who burned down his hippo farm years before. There’s a lot of violence, a truly evil villain, and a fair amount of believable darkness. I mean, I enjoyed it. I just didn’t see it as special – in particular in a speculative sense – yes, there’s the fairly cool alternate history aspect involving the hippos in Louisiana, but nothing with real SFnal zing. Still – it’s pretty fun.

5.       JY Yang, The Black Tides of Heaven – The story concerns the twin children of the Protector, originally promised to the local Monastery. But one of them turns out to have precognitive powers, and the Protector claims them … the other strikes off on their own, ending up in a rebellion against their mother. The good – a decent magic system (alas, treated in a clichéd fashion on occasion), interesting if seemingly inconsistent and underdeveloped treatment of gender (to be fair, the supposed inconsistencies may well be eventually explained), and decent characters. The not-so-good: a fairly clichéd plot (which doesn’t really resolve, though to be sure its companion novella was released in parallel, and that may illuminate the story), rather ordinary prose, and some pacing issues, mainly in the opening section (about a fourth of the story), which really should have been almost entirely cut. Bottom line – an okay story that has been ridiculously overpraised.

6.       Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: Home – Much as with Every Heart a Doorway, I was puzzled by the extravagant praise Binti received – I thought it kind of a mess, really illogical, hard to believe. Alas, the sequel, unlike the McGuire story’s prequel, is not much better than the opening, in my view. (Also, it doesn’t come to a real conclusion.) Binti, after spending some time at Oomza Uni, comes home to her family for a visit, and a pilgrimage. She is accompanied by her friend Okwu, one of the murderous Meduse (who also altered Binti’s genetics, though they didn’t kill her, unlike all her innocent prospective classmates). The notion is apparently to make some repairs in the Meduse’s relationship with humans, especially the Koush, a rival people to Binti’s Himba. But little enough happens on that ground (presumably that’s left for the next installment) – instead, Binti’s pilgrimage becomes a trip to the home of the mysterious Desert People, who turn out to be part of her ancestry, and to have a relationship going far back in history with a group of aliens with special tech. I have to say, my main problem was that I just didn’t believe in the story, nor, really, in Binti. It’s obvious a lot of people love these stories, and so it’s clear they’re seeing something I’m missing. So be it – the fault may well lie with me. But I didn’t like this story much, to be honest.

My nominees were, in alphabetical order by author:

1.       Kathleen Ann Goonan, “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse”

2.       Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Prime Meridian

3.       Sofia Samatar, “Fallow”

4.       Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were (N – One)”

5.       Martha Wells, All Systems Red

In reality, the three that weren’t nominated are easy to understand – they are the three least readily available. Goonan’s story is from an original anthology (and one that didn’t seem to get a ton of attention, Extrasolar, from PS Publishing in the UK). Samatar’s story is from her exceptional collection Tender, and story collections typically get less attention, especially for original stories, than either magazines or anthologies. Moreno-Garcia’s may be the most obscure – available only to supports of her Indiegogo campaign (and to lucky reviewers!) Indeed, I suspect it might be eligible for next year’s Hugo. But there were plenty of other worthy potential nominees; for instance Damien Broderick’s “Tao Zero”, Dave Hutchinson’s Acadie, and Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The Dragon of Dread Peak”.