Confessions of a Middle-Aged Adrenaline Junkie

The Hugo voting deadline is coming up at the end of this month, so here are my thoughts on the novelettes and the one short story that I read:

Kudos to Uncanny magazine for continually bringing us fantastic and thoughtful works of short fiction. I am sorry for all the trouble the editors have had in the last year, and I'm thankful the staff kept the magazine going.

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We Built This City by Maureen Vibbert is a story about labor relations, which, as some of us know, are the third most important thing in life. The setting is a city enclosed in a bubble, where workers have to do the dangerous work of climbing outside the bubble to clean it off. Working conditions are unpleasant.

I agree that labor relations are critically important, and I am unhappy to say that I personally failed as a labor organizer. I didn't particularly enjoy this story, and I can't say how much of that is because the storytelling was unexciting and how much of that is because this is such a sore subject for me. I have fortunately solved my problems and found a better situation for as long as it lasts, and those suffering difficult working conditions have all my sympathy.

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The Difference Between Love and Time by Catherynne Valente is a decidedly unusual love story, where the love interest is the spacetime continuum. Imagine having a love affair with the spacetime continuum. It is more emotionally impossible than most humans. Valente cleverly presents the spacetime continuum as it might have been as a child, an adolescent, a young adult. She presents the ways it gets into fights, the ways it acts passive aggressively, the ways it is mostly not a dick. She takes us through the life of a nameless narrator character, who describes her relationships not only with the spacetime continuum but with other partners and with her mother. We hear about the narrator's parents' divorce, her mother's health, and many of her life experiences. The story is gradually revealed in out-of-order vignettes, because time is all the same to the spacetime continuum, right? The life vignettes are full of pop culture references that bring back the reader's memories of the times.

I enjoyed this story quite a bit, and I found the ending particularly meaningful. The entire work is just unutterably human. Valente uses a non-human character to tell us something important about our humanity.

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If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You by John Chu is a tale of cautious romance involving a crimefighting superhero who also fights police and anti-Asian violence. It is told from the perspective of Steve, a gay bodybuilder of Taiwanese descent. The story flips back and forth between descriptions of videos of a flying superhero and Steve's life lifting weights in the gym, slowly building a romance with a very strong but soft-spoken bodybuilder whom Steve initially identifies only as "Sweatshirt Guy." After many weeks of lifting together, when Sweatshirt Guy asks him to help move a couch, Steve finally finds out that Sweatshirt Guy's name is Carl.

This touching story explores the secret identities of both superheroes and closeted queer people, and the frustrations of being in the closet. I thoroughly enjoyed both the romance and the superheroism.

Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills is full of poignant rage. The story is told as a series of vignettes, exploring the lives of women with unwanted pregnancies, in a near-future US with illegalized abortion. The story is interspersed with vignettes highlighting moments in the history of abortion rights. I was particularly proud when I read the parts about reproductive rights activists in the early 70's, because my father was one of them. The story builds, bit by bit, further into the future, making it clear why women's rights to control their reproduction are so critical. It does indeed tell a narrative story, with ongoing sympathetic characters, rather than sermonizing. Listening to it as an audiobook was a particularly intense experience. This is one of the most powerful works I've read. Thank you, again, Uncanny Magazine, for bringing this to us, and I hope it wins a Hugo!

Wow. I was so annoyed at the quality of the Best Novella nominees that I almost stopped reading. But the Best Novelette nominees have been much better, and I am encouraged. It's much more difficult to rank nominees when you don't despise any of them! Perhaps there is a future for science fiction after all.

( Hugo Best Novelette Nominees )

And that concludes my series of Hugo nominee reviews! I've now read the whole package. I enjoyed more of it than I hated, but I did despise several pieces. So I understand what trinsf is saying about getting involved at the nomination level, so as to avoid having to read the tripe that other people nominate. Assuming I can afford hardcover books, I can try to do that at the novel level. It will be difficult for me to find the time, however, to read all of those short stories, novelettes and novellas, as work is (fortunately) picking up. Also, there is a part of me that thinks, well, if I'm trying to avoid reading drivel, I should be more selective, not less. If I'm reading Hugo nominees, the works will have been vetted beyond the level of magazine editors. In the end, we will just have to see what time permits.

This year, I have flung myself into the Hugo awards as never before, partially because of things being slow enough at work that I really needed things to read online, and partially because of the encouragement of trinsf and the other Fanzine Loungers. So far, I've read not only all of the Best Novel nominees (my comments on some of them here), but also the nominees for Best Novella. I keep going back and forth on whether or not I should continue this project of trying to read the Hugos, because I just seem to have different taste than a lot of other fen. I do want to be a charmingly robust drinking companion, but I only liked two of the five novellas. And I wasn't even screamingly into the two that I did like. My thoughts, for what they're worth...

( My Thoughts on This Year's Novellas )

Things are picking up at work (fortunately!), so I'm beginning to doubt I'll have time to read the Novelettes before the voting deadline. I probably have a reasonable chance of getting through the Short Stories, however, so I am going to focus on those next.

Every year, I try to read at least some of the nominees for the Hugo award for Best Novel. When I'm attending the convention and thus am allowed to vote, as I am this year, I try to read them in time to vote. That was a struggle this year, because I forgot that, with the convention being early, the voting would be early as well. But I've finished them, five days before the deadline, and am now ready to vote.

Below are my reviews of the five books nominated this year. The cut is for length, not for spoilers. Do not worry; I will not spoil you. I will preface my remarks by saying that I am voting solely on how much I enjoyed the experience of reading each book, not on literary merit or any other quality. Furthermore, my taste tends toward hard science fiction; if a fantasy novel is nominated, I do not bother to read it, because I just don't usually like fantasy novels much or get much out of reading them. Fortunately, there were no fantasy novels nominated this year, but there was an alternate reality story.

I was almost considering giving up on the annual Hugos-reading project this year, because I really did not like one of the novels (the alternate reality story, naturally). Also, I had a couple of conversations with friends where we discussed authors we very much liked (Cory Doctorow and Greg Egan), and each friend told me that those authors never get nominated for the Hugo. Apparently Hugo nominees tend to be on the light side compared to those authors. Or something. But, while I've read a lot of Hugo nominees I didn't like, the annual project has also introduced me to some great authors, such as Robert Charles Wilson, John Scalzi and Jack McDevitt. And one of my friends was wrong -- Egan has two nominees for Best Novelette this year. So, I think I'll keep reading.

Before my reviews, I'd like to give a big shout out to John Scalzi, who made four of the five books available electronically to convention members. This enabled me to read the books at work without looking like I was reading novels at work. This was absolutely essential to my ability to finish reading the books in time to vote. Thank you, Scalzi! And I hope I'm doing exactly what you wanted here by getting the word out about the books.

( My Hugo Reviews )