And, at last, we come to the end of the book-related awards that I write about for real1, the World Fantasy Awards. I started covering them because it was a way to read outside my comfort zone – I don’t, as a matter of course, read much fantasy – while still providing reasonable fodder for the blog, as I have some grounding in the area2. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that they’re sort of the Nebulas for a different genre, which adds some symmetry for the year. Plus, up until this year (and FIYAHCON, specifically) there wasn’t much else going on in the book-awards-world in the fall, at least as far as something I’d be aware enough to comment on.
1 I also sometimes cover the Goodreads choice awards and/or the Amazon best-sellers lists, but those don’t count because I don’t take them seriously.
2 that is to say, I used to read a lot of fantasy, and still tend to read around where it intersects with horror
The World Fantasy Con this year has gone virtual, as pretty much every other con has. That’s probably fine. The Nebulas managed to happen without too much trouble (as such). The Hugos were, perhaps predictably at this point, a dumpster fire. The World Fantasy Awards are generally better than the Hugos, and worse than the Nebulas, as far as these things go. That said, they’re off to something of a rocky start, to say the least3.
3 or, if you’d like to be less forgiving – and there’s every reason to be less forgiving – a rocky “continuing on the same way they usually do”, see below
It started when the program appeared online, which resulted in, naturally, people reading the panel descriptions, which most certainly raised some concerns. David Levine, Yilin Wang, Kate Heartfield, Cat Rambo and others dropped over said concerns. Miyuki Jane Pinckard (the author of the tweet linked too at the end of that sentence there) put her concerns in an open letter, which also serves for our purposes here as a pretty good guide to what went wrong with the descriptions and the things that they expressed about the attitudes of the people assembling the World Fantasy Convention.
K. Tempest Bradford also lays out some of the problems that have plagued the convention, and its programming, for some time in this blog post, and she does a much better job of making her case than I, a spirited amateur, would be able to. This is part of a long history of this sort of thing on the part of the the World Fantasy folks4. For their part, the Con changed the programming descriptions and the chairperson, Ginny Smith, responded with a post on the Convention website detailing the steps that were taken to rectify the situation.
4 long-time readers may feel free to note that the linked blog post includes years where I didn’t know anything was going on, and said as much in these headnotes – turns out I was wrong!
All of that said, I’m still a person who is interested in awards, and as long as there’s an awards-granting body willing to grant awards, I’m at least somewhat interested in what it is that they’re granting awards to5. You know, within reason. Plus, you know, I read the dang things, so I’m gonna write about them.
5 NB also that most, if not all, of the problems with the World Fantasy Awards are with the convention and its attendant program, not with the works nominated or the awards-granting process itself.
So here we go, to name whom amongst the works is the most deserving! Lifetime achievement awards are due to go to Rowena Morrill (a prolific and impressive cover artist with a style that you could probably recognize if you saw it) and Karen Joy Fowler (who wrote “The Pelican Bar” and “Always”, co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. award, and also wrote The Jane Austen Book Club, which is probably the thin for which she is best known, no matter how much it should be “The Pelican Bar”). It’s all terribly exciting.
As always, I’m skipping the special awards – they’re considered each according to their own rubric, and I’m not enough of an insider to know what that might be, or what’s being evaluated. Unlike previous years, I’m also just straight-up skipping the art category. It’s hard to tell what came out during the period of eligibility, and, genuinely, I don’t know anything about visual art. Maybe I’ll take another stab at it next year. But I still won’t know anything about visual art next year either, so it’s not much of a chance. If you’re dying for my judgement, remember that I almost always give it to Galen Dara, especially in the absence of Victo Ngai. So there you have it.
Onward!
Collection
It’s probably worth saying up front, it’s a shame that the convention is mired in such fuckuppery, because the material this year is about as strong as it’s been since I started writing about the World Fantasy Awards (six years ago!). Even the least of these collections is pretty good, and it’s all pretty worthwhile.
John Horner Jacobs’ A Lush and Seething Hell, then, is the least of these collections. It’s two long-ish novellas, each of which is concerned with the pursuit of art and the way that it damages the people doing the pursuing. The first, and much stronger, story, “The Eye” sees a woman follow a firebrand poet into some pretty extreme ends. It handles its supernatural elements6 well, and really sticks the landing. The second story, “My Heart Struck Sorrow” is a little saggier, and is a little busier – it’s a story within a story, and the embedded story is basically a series of loosely-related digressions – and doesn’t quite work as well, but has some moments in telling the story of a musicologist researching the origins of what appears to be a very specific version of “Stagger Lee”7 that are very effective.
6 or are they? The supernaturality/lack thereof is an element of both stories, certainly, and it’s one of the more effective elements at that.
7 honestly, this story should have been total catnip for me, and I think it’s the baroque plotting that prevented me from engaging with it as much as I obviously wanted to.
Brian Evenson’s Song for the Unravelling of the World isn’t the best collection here, but it’s possibly the most fun8. It’s also the one here that had some material that just did not work for me. That said, some of it was tremendously effective – I liked “:Line of Sight” when I read it in Shadows and Tall Trees 7, and actually managed to mention “The Second Door,” both for the Shirley Jackson Awards a few years ago, and had read the effective Twilight Zone-style “The Smear” elsewhere. Of the stories I wasn’t familiar with, the similar “The Hole” and “The Tower” both deal with haunted locations that change the people that approach them. Evenson’s interest in film’s ability to capture what’s there, rather than what we see, comes into play in the aforementioned “Line of Sight”, where the titular lines of sight are wrong, but also in the wonderful, entertaining, almost-shaggy-dog-ish, “Lather of Flies,” which turns the tale of a man’s quest to find a film into something much weirder, and the tense “Room Tone,” which also manages to capture the mania of sound people. Evenson also makes better use than just about anyone in this set of nominees with brevity – “Glasses,” “No Matter Which Way We Turned” and “Cardiacs” all make excellent use of very little time and space, making their scary mark effectively. “Sisters” is a terrific story about some Very Weird little girls (well, not little girls) slash Halloween decorations. “A Disappearance” and “Song for the Unraveling of the World” make their hay out of the horror of being family, or of having the wrong sort of family anyway. “Wanderlust” brings a sort of trippy reality-questioning into the fold. “Kindred Spirit” deals more directly with self-identity than the other stories here, and is a little more serious than most. The high point of the book, at least as far as I’m concerned is the tense “Menno,” about a man’s fanatical paranoia.
8 although, you know, see below for what I have to say about Nino Cipri
Molly Gloss’s Unforeseen is almost uneven – there’s nothing here that doesn’t belong, as such, but not everything is as good as the best stuff. “Interlocking Pieces”9 is a good story about a new kind of colonialism, and “Joining” comes back around on a similar topic at the end of story, albeit this time about a more willing sharing of brain activity/space. A horse figures prominently on the cover, and many of the stories have a pastoral bent, from “The Blue Roan,” a small realistic story about a debt and how to pay it, to “Downstream”, in which the horse fulfills its usual metaphorical purpose for a woman in a bad situation, and perhaps climaxing with “Lambing Season,” which won a bunch of awards when it came out, and deals with a very strange sort of alien encounter, and the shepherd who has it. “The Presley Brothers” is a nifty bit of alternate history in which Elvis’s brother had lived10. “Seaborne” and “The Everlasting Humming of the Earth” both deal, in their ways, with supernatural gifts that aren’t nearly as useful as the people in the world around the characters with the gifts seem to think they are. “Eating Ashes” and “Dead Men Rise Up” are both, in very different ways, about how we deal with the past, and how it shapes us. Especially recommended are the title story, in which what seems like an insurance adjuster turns out to be something else, and the mundane evils of privilege turn out to be far harder to root out than even the most sure of sure things, and the incredible “Personal Silence,” about a man who is travelling to make a point, and the cost of war. All told, the high points are as high as just about anything, and the book only really drops in my estimation by comparison to the other, more consistent books here nominated.
9 which I know from one of the earliest volumes of the Gardner Dozois Best Science Fiction of the Year series – I think it’s in the third one.
10 and, if I’m being honest, gives us a much more erudite Elvis than we actually had, which I suppose could be part of the fiction, or could just make for a better read.
Nino Cipri’s Homesick was an absolutely top-flight collection, whose rightfulness is affected only by, well, see below. All of it is a highlight, really – there isn’t a clinker in there. “Silly Little Love Story” is the best love story between a person and their closet poltergeist I’ve ever read. “Which Super Little Dead Girl™ are you?” is a magazine quiz, of course. “Dead Air” is the first thing I read by them, and is a pretty good starting point – it does a great job of modernizing the town where Things Are Wrong, and how that affects the people who are there. “She Hides Sometimes” sees someone making some lovely adjustments due to their mother’s dementia. “Let Down, Set Free” is a letter that, in part, details the benefits of unnatural invasive species. “The Shape of My Name” is a fantastic time-travel story11 about acceptance and family. “Not an Ocean, but a Sea” has its titular sea in a very strange place. “Presque Vu” is as weird as the collection gets, at least conceptually, but is also a tremendous story about the human capacity to render just about anything that happens regularly as “mundane”, and how that mundanity takes shape. “Before We Disappear Like Star Stuff” also deals with its own sort of mundanity – the longest story here, it deals with an argument between academics about space weasels, partly because of their academic attitudes toward them and partly because of their knotty interpersonal relationships. It also has, probably, the best ending in the book. Highly recommended, go read it, it would have probably won in any other year.
11 they really play all the right notes, subject-matter-wise, as far as I’m concerned
Sarah Pinsker is one of the very best people writing stories currently, and Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea collects the ones that she’s written so far. Since I’ve gone on and on about some of them – “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea”, “And Then There Were (N-One)”12, especially “Wind Will Rove” and very most especially “Our Lady of the Open Road” – already, I’ll just point people to the search function, or, even better, tell everyone to just go read them. “And We Were Left Darkling” is a sort of recasting of Close Encounters if instead of abandoning his family, Richard Dreyfuss had wanted to expand it. “Remembery Day” is a beautiful story whether it’s better to remember than not to remember the worst things that have happened in one’s life. “The Low Hum of Her” is about a golem, and the refugee family to whom she belongs. “Talking to the Dead” is about a mismatch between one person’s inner gift and another person’s business lust13. “The Sewell Home for the Temporally Displaced” does pretty much what it says on the tin, and neither overexplains its position nor overstays its welcome. “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” is about the wife who survived an architect who definitely had to live with having done some things that caused him problems. “No Lonely Seafarer” is about what a pain in the neck sirens would be, and a novel attempt to get past them. “The Narwhal” is about a woman who didn’t know what her mother was doing, and said mother’s very strange car, as told by a different woman that the first woman hired to drive with her across the country. All told, it’s all wonderful, and every story is worthy of lavish praise. But, you know, after you’re done with it, definitely also ready Homesick. I think this is as close to a tie as its ever been.
12 actually, in the interest of full disclosure, my praise for “Highway” and “(N-One”) were somewhat more measured – I don’t think I was quite able to figure out what she was doing with “Highway” when I first read it, and “(N-One)” is a murder mystery.
13 Actually, that’s not what it’s about at all, but I find it hard to sum that one in a pithy fashion.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Sarah Pinsker, Sooner or Later, Everything Falls Into the Sea
Anthology
This category, then, is for books with more than one contributing author. It’s not quite got the sky-high quality level of the collections category, but it’s an above-average group of books that were pretty much all worth reading.
The Ellen Datlow-edited Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories is a galumphing bit of work. It is, as one could tell, a very large volume of ghost stories. It is also the case, as it is every year, that while the inestimable Ms. Datlow obviously deserves all of the praise due someone who’s been as successful and long-running at her job as she has, it is also the case that we almost certainly do not agree about what makes something a great ghost story. That said, this is generally fine. There are roughly ten thousand million stories in there, so I’ll try to be brief about the highlights14. Lee Thomas’ “Whimper Beg” is a ghost dog revenge story. Richard Kadrey’s “A Hinterlands Haunting” is one of the most entertaining of the stories here, about a man who wants to meet up with his ghost wife on the one day a year when he can do that. M.L. Siemienowicz’s “the Number of Things You Remember” does a great job with its setting of a train car, and thus a finicky phone connection15. Seanan McGuire’s “Must Be This Tall to Ride” sees the sort of ghost that demands a sacrificing making some surprising adjustments. Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Surviving Child” is a twisty story about a poet in a terrible marriage, and the way her family comes apart (such as it is). Richard Bowes’s “Icarus Rising” sees the ghost of an artist try to rejoin the art scene that he died amidst. Gemma Files’s “The Puppet Motel” is about the caretaker of a haunted Air B&B. Nick Mamatas’s “Air Valve Semilunar Astern” is actually an exceptionally good story about a very strange possession. An F. Marion Crawford story is always welcome, and “the Upper Berth”, despite a whole lot of use of the word “portmanteau” to not mean words made from smashing together other words, is a great story about a haunted ship. Aliette de Bodard’s “A Burning Sword For Her Cradle” is about ancestral magic and immigrants and sisters. Stephen Graham Jones’s “the Tree of Self-Knowledge” is a relatively straightforward (but effective) story about a small-town haunting. Alice Hoffman’s “the Other Woman” is about the trouble with determining just what (or who), exactly, is haunted. Bracken MacLeod’s “The Loneliness of Not Being Haunted” does what it says in the title, and is a very good story about obsession with a high-quality “ghosting” pun in the last line. Jeffrey Ford’s “The Jeweled Wren” is about a couple’s curiosity about a haunted house. Siobhan Carroll’s “The Air, The Ocean, the Earth, the Deep” involves a ghost that’s moving through a detention camp in the DRC16. Carole Johnstone’s “Deep, Fast, Green” is an incredibly gorgeous story about a man who’s haunted by a boat, and it’s worth soldiering through the eye dialect to get to it. John Langan’s “Nadya, Queen of the Hungry Dogs” has someone going to great lengths to make sure things are right for their sister, after a fashion. Obviously, as one can tell from all this, there’s plenty of good stuff here, but there’s so much of it, and it’s of such wildly different style and tone, that I’m not sure I can get with it as a book. If you don’t read it straight through it might just work.
14 Oh, and because I feel like I’m the only person tracking this: the Dale Bailey story here, while not precisely a highlight, definitely does not break his streak of describing a woman as “long”. There is a lady. Her length is addressed. The world may carry on.
15 it probably also deserves an award for the most number of uses of the word “couchette”
16 it also takes place in a future that is currently in the grips of a deadly respiratory virus, which is, you know, fun.
Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin’s The Outcast Hours is another book that spans a tonne of different tones and even genres. The tying-together theme of the book is that all of the stories take place in the middle of the night. Some are supernatural, some completely mundane. Some are scary, some tense, some just weird, and some are, unfortunately, kind of tedious. It’s got plenty of good bits – very few of the stories, like in the other collections, are actually bad as such – but it’s also probably the swingiest here, given the amount of ground it covers with such a loose theme. Sam Bessbecker, Lauren Beukes and Dale Halvorsen got together to write “This Book Will Find You,” a story about a woman bringing the TA that she was having a fling with back to life, with some surprises along the way. Will Hill’s “It Was a Different Time” delivers a tense story about a former film producer on the edge of losing his reputation, a gun, and a hotel worker. Sami Shah’s “Ambulance Service” is about ghostbusting paramedics. Frances Hardinge’s “A Blind Eye” is about the difficulties with the care and keeping of a literally demonic toddler. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Sleep Walker” is about a resident of a small town who escorts a tourist to a show, from which the tourist is Changed. Lavie Tidhar’s “The Bag Man” is about the goings-on in a Tel Aviv crime circle, and an old man who is unhappy with it. M Suddain’s “Midnight Marauders” is about a showdown between a post-apocalyptic town’s new pharmacist and the old, as performed by the loyalists to the old one. Genevieve Valentine’s “Everyone Knows They’re Dead, Do You?” is detailed below, but is excellent. Indrapramit Das’s17 “The Patron Saint of Night Puppers” is about dogs, really, and how great dogs are, and also a deeply strange world that exists primarily to support dogs. Yay dogs! Karen Onojaife’s “Tilt” sees a gambling addict make a deal for one more spin. Amira Salah-Ahmed’s “In the Blink of an Eye” is a lovely mundane story about a couple of Muslims who work at a night club. SL Grey’s “The Dental Gig” is about what happens when the gig economy reaches even the supernatural. Jesse Bullington’s “Above the Light” is about friends who like to go on hikes 18 Cecilia Ekback’s “Dark Matters” is told from the perspective of a little girl who can see that Death and Resurrection have moved in with her family. Yukimi Ogawa’s “Welcome to the Haunted House” is a really great story about a truly bizarre sideshow attraction, and the yoke of oppression. William Boyle’s “The Lock-In” might be the best story here, and is about a church lock-in, a highly believable teenager, and her reaction to the way she’s treated and the things she’s told. Kuzhali Manickavel’s “A Partial Beginner’s Guide to the Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters” is a set of rules that sketches out its story, and is a good, funny ending to the book.
17 of whose work I was largely unaware until this year, and whom I’m now pretty well hooked on, after his showing in the stuff I’ve read this year
18 I mean, there’s some other stuff too, but really, this book covers a lot of ground.
Nisi Shawl’s New Suns was also something of an uneven reading experience although, in this case, it comes down to my own taste (some of the stories were pretty emphatically not my thing) rather than any actual quality barrier. Highlights include Tobias S. Buckell’s funny “The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex”, which sees the life of a driver in a world that’s become a tourism hub for intergalactic travelers. Minsoo Kang’s “The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations” gives us a very unorthodox way of bringing about a peace treaty. Stephen Barnes’s “Come Home to Atropos” finds pioneering new ways to market tourism. Chinelo Onwualu’s “The Fine Print” is the best sort of genie story. Alex Jennings’s “The Unkind Mercy” is a genuinely-scary story about a particular kind of invasion. Jaymee Goh’s “The Freedom of the Shifting Seas” is about love and a peculiar sea monster. E. Lily Yu’s “Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire” is, indeed, a triptych of versions of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and is very effective. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Give Me Your Black Wings, O Sister” is a short, effective story about a witch on public transit. Indrapramit Das’s “The Shadow We Cast Through Hell” shows us a novel potential difficulty of sharing a planet. Andrea Hairston’s “Dumb House” is a highly-enjoyable story about a woman who steadfastly refuses to modernize. Hiromi Goto’s “One Easy Trick” is a surprising story about a woman who loses, and then finds, her belly fat. Rounding out the high points is Darcie Little Badger’s “Kelsey and the Burdened Breaths,” which, in addition to having probably the best prose in the book, also presents the best supernatural situation.
After years of being here19, Navah Wolfe & Dominik Parisien have finally put together a set of stories that appealed to me in the form of The Mythic Dream. Of course, it probably would be, given that it’s a collection of many of the genre’s best (and best-known) writers coming together to tackle stories based on myths, from the very familiar to the obscure. Seanan Maguire gives us “Phantoms of the Midway,” which is a lovely ghost story. The inestimable T. Kingfisher’s “Fisher Bird” 20 tells a story about someone who was only too happy to help Hercules. JY Yang’s “Bridge of Crows” also deals in tales of heroic birds, delightfully. Arkady Martine’s “Labbatu Takes Command of the Flagship Heaven Dwells Within” moves one of the most interesting aspects of The Epic of Gilgamesh into space, where it is awesome. Sarah Gailey’s “Thetis” recasts Achilles’s mother, who is so often denied agency or character, as someone who just wants to be out of it all. Carlos Hernandez’s “¡Cuidado! ¡Que Viene El Coco!” is about how unexpected outcomes in dealing with the long-term effects of mental illness, and also coconuts (obviously). Stephen Graham Jones’s “He Fell Howling” actually expands its original story, making Lycaeon responsible for much more than just “the thing we call werewolves when we’re being formal”21. Jeffrey Ford’s “Sisyphus in Elysium” is accurately-titled, but also manages to deal with the way that we form relationships. I’m a total sucker for any Sisyphus story, so obviously this one was probably my favorite. Indrapramit Das continues his rampage through my awareness with the wonderful, indomitable “Kali_Na”. Alyssa Wong wrote a revenge story I actually liked (not having murder involved helps) in “Live Stream”. John Chu’s “Close Enough for Jazz” is about intellectual property, really, and a very obscure apple-holder in Norse mythology (Idunn), as well as said apples. Naomi Novik’s “Buried Deep” is a retelling of the story of Ariadne and her brother. It does not end like stories of Ariadne and her brother usually do. Carmen Maria Machado’s terrific “The Things Eric Eats Before He Eats Himself” also does what it says in the title. Amal El-Mohtar finally wrote a story that I like unreservedly and with great gusto in the form of “Florilegia, or Some Lies About Flowers,” revisiting the story of Blodeuwedd, who is made of flowers, and who teaches us that flowers are made of some really weird stuff. It’s a very good collection, and it falls only because of the effectiveness and scope of the rightful winner.
19 and I think this is the last one
20 because of course
21 “lycanthropes”, for my readers that have never owned a Monster Manual
As previously discussed in this space, I go back and forth about whether to include “Best Of” type collections. In this case, however, Jeff & Ann Vandermeer’s The Big Book of Classic Fantasy is much more than that. Part genre-wide survey, part magpie’s collection, the book ranges all over the world, through traditions, genres and disciplines, to bring a more-or-less thorough22 survey of premodern fantasy. It’s very long, and has hundreds of stories in it, so I’m not going to do the usual rounding-up, but if only for putting so much necessary and curious early material in one place, and for bringing to light things that were unjustly obscured by time or circumstance, it deserves all sorts of accolades.
22 if, by necessity, incomplete
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy
Short Fiction
Alright! Now onto the categories where I only have to evaluate one thing at a time! This field was a little less competitive than the other ones. In fact, a couple of pieces were even downright disappointing.
Genevieve Valentine’s “Everybody Knows That They’re Dead, Do You?” has a pretty good story within it, and wraps that story in a framing device that is, frankly, unsuccessful. As a ghostly-obsession type story, it would probably work, but the story of a woman who is married to a cop who has some reasons to be haunted is periodically shot through with “study questions” which are, I guess, supposed to guide the reader into how to think about how the information is presented. This seems unnecessary, and serves several times to break up any narrative momentum the story might have. There may be readers for whom this device is a functional one, but I am not among their number.
I like Rivers Solomon’s “Blood is Another Word for Hunger” as much as I’ve ever liked a Rivers Solomon story, and about as much as I can like a murder revenge story (more or less). It’s got some nice touches, some reasonably good horror elements, and I like the ending. It’s fine, and I’ve written about it previously.
I’ve written about Sarah Pinsker’s “the Blur in the Corner of Your Eye” previously – a couple of times, really – and it’s still fine. It’s a murder mystery, I feel it would be better if it prioritized the thing that’s treated as the reveal and spent more time on it, but it’s not my story, so it doesn’t really matter what I think. If I call it a disappointing Sarah Pinsker story, it’s only because I have such high expectations at this point (see above, and, you know, almost everything else I’ve ever written about her).
Jerome Stueart’s “Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun” is a riff on an old-timey jazzbo who gets caught up with the wrong crowd, except in this case the jazzbo is a faun with a magic clarinet. The wrong student walks through his door and brings the past with him, see? And then he has to deal with the fallout, only to find out that the real magic was inside him all along. It’s a pretty good story.
Siobhan Carroll’s “For He Can Creep” is also addressed in much of the previous awards-writing-abouts, and it’s still a very good, enjoyable story about a very good, loyal cat and the poet that he protects. It’s not quite the winner here, but it almost was, and I’ve read it more times than any of the stories here, so it might actually be the most enjoyable.
Maria Dahvana Headley’s “Burn After Reading” is, as one might expect given that it’s the great and powerful MDH, the best thing here. It’s about a world where books are outlawed, so people become books and, like all the best MDH stories, it efficiently and effectively builds out its world and characters so well that it seems like it’s much longer than it is (I mean this as a compliment – it’s thorough without being dense, and covers a lot of ground without overstaying its welcome). MDH doesn’t win as many awards as she’s due, but she’s due this one anyway.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Maria Dahvana Headley, “Burn After Reading”
Novella
Usually it’s the case with the World Fantasy Awards that the Collection and Anthology categories have some real slogging to do, and the other categories are generally easier to swallow. This year, nothing was as bad as it can be sometimes, but a lot of the short stories and novellas just weren’t as good as they can be. Nothing here is actively bad, as with the other categories, but even the best among these would have lost in the last few years. It’s an interesting cycle.
Rivers Solomon’s the Deep has come up before, and I’m still not really on the same wavelength as Rivers Solomon, and it still doesn’t do nearly as much for me as the clipping.23 song upon which it’s based. This is probably the thing on this list (meaning all of the WFA nominees as a whole) that has the most mileage in which to vary – it’s probably very good if it’s even remotely up your alley, but it’s really not anywhere near mind.
23 the members of clipping. are, in fact, listed as co-authors on the World Fantasy Awards site.
Nathan Ballingrud’s The Butcher’s Table is fine. It’s about a group of Satanists who wish to go to Hell, and then get exactly what they wish for, told in a series of sort-of interlocking stories. It’s got a lot of style, and the prose is pretty good, but it’s probably too long, and there’s a huge chunk of the middle that gets kind of bogged down. The beginning and end are very good, though, and some of the world stuff is very impressively done, especially the stuff about the way and reason for the raising of the kid. It’ll make sense when you get there.
Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood is about a wood spirit, his lover, and his lover’s mother, and the way that they all have to learn to survive amid one another. It was fine, and I really enjoyed reading it at the time24. It suffers some from being the setup to a longer tale, and thus seeming to hold some of its story back, but it does pretty well for a planned series installment. Good world-building, pretty good characters and an interesting situation are all set up here, with little actual payoff.
24 although I’ll have to read it again if I go on to read the other parts of it – it didn’t really stick with me
CSE Cooney’s Desdemona and the Deep is a much better story about interplanar travel and interactions with demons. It primarily concerns a very privileged young lady trying to come to terms with the origin of her family’s wealth and power in a deeply unequal society. It does what it does very well, doesn’t come in too long or too short, tells a complete story, and is deeply satisfying. If there were a bunch more like this one, this category would have been a lot better off.
Seanan McGuire’s In An Absent Dream, then, is the best thing here. It’s probably my favorite of the Wayward Children books so far. It provides a backstory for a character from the first WC book, and that back story turns out to involve a goblin market, in which she learns that rules are rules, and that there are consequences for her actions. It was such a relief to read a book in which a character is not Goethe-style saved from the negative stakes established in the beginning that I may have an over-fond sense of appreciation for it, but it’s a well-told story that is odd in all the right places, and I’m happy to call it the rightful winner.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Seanan McGuire, In An Absent Dream
Novel
And finally we come to the novels. This category was actually all pretty high-quality, especially compared to previous years. A couple of these could have won in just about any year, and it was hard to decide which one was the rightful winner. Ultimately, however, it’s my website, and therefore my taste that dictates the correct answer. So there.
Kacen Callender’s Queen of the Damned is the one that probably wasn’t in the running. It wins full marks for its unique premise and its approach to its character – it’s an own voices historical fantasy about an alternate-universe Caribbean, in which some people have superpowers/magic usage, and this is heavily policed. The exciting bits (and it’s definitely worth a read if it sounds good) are that it’s explicitly about someone who is trying to work within the privileged part of society to bring down the system of slavery around them. It turns out to be quite a twisty story, and has a couple of elements at the end that were genuinely, delightfully surprising. My issue with connecting with it all the way was in the style. Specifically25, there is a lot of time spent with the point of view character analyzing how someone’s history affects the current interaction, and telling the reader explicitly what the person wants out of it, and how they plant to get it, then having the interaction, then doing the whole thing again the next time we see that character. A little bit less of that sort of thing, and this would be much higher up in my estimation. Maybe the sequel irons that out.
25 and it could be for plot reasons – the character can read minds, and this might be the author’s way of expressing that power, but it’s still pretty excessive, even if that’s the case
Alix E.Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a book that I’ve covered pretty thoroughly. It’s also very good, with very effective prose and a surprising take on the portal fantasy. Great work, everybody. And Now I’m out of things to say about it, officially.
Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth is another one that I’ve written a lot about. It’s a good book that has basically everything you could want out of a fantasy book. It’s huge and sweeping and ambitious in all the right ways, and it manages to make a locked-room (or, well, locked-tomb, since that’s the series title) mystery seem compelling to me, a person who usually does not like that sort of thing. It probably could have won in any previous year.
Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower is another of the ones that really could have won in any previous year. It’s a story from the point of view of an inanimate object (kind of), and also about power, and how that is accrued and used. It does a fantastic job of presenting the priorities of, say, a rock who is also a deity, as being completely different from those of the people around it – whether they serve it or not. The ending is terrific and complete26, and there’s literally nothing about it that could be any better.
26 it’s a standalone! Praise Leckie!
Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police is probably the actually rightful winner. It takes place on an island where the titular memory police keep removing things from the memories of people, except for the people who are able to remember. The amount of humanity and emotional depth that Ogawa brings out of that already-weird premise is incredible, and while it’s safe to say that the story ends in pretty much the only place it could, it still came as a huge surprise. The prose, even allowing for translation, is wonderful, and the story itself is likely to stick with me for a very long time.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police
Ohio Needs a Train 