Alright, so. Usually the Nebulas are the first of the book awards I do in the year`. This year the Great Stokertastrophe happened2, and so these are no longer in the pole position, but they’re still the first of the book awards that I’m able to cover well.
1 Nebula/Locus/sometimes Jackson/Hugo/World Fantasy
2 and will, I must assure you all again, never happen again
This year, nothing majorly scandalous seemed to happen with the Nebulas3, which means I’m free to keep this intro fairly short.
3 I have said that before, however, and turned out to be extremely wrong, so take that for what it’s worth.
It’s worth noting that the the only really SF novel4 is Network Effect, although there are two science fiction novellas, three (maybe four) science fiction novelettes, and only two in short story. I mention this only because it was interesting that that’s where the constantly-swinging Nebula pendulum is currently. Also it occurs to me that Piranesi could be sf if you squint, so I guess that would make one and a half. Sort of. Anyway.
4 there’s a secret F in SFWA that stands for fantasy, see, which is why they’re all like this
Onward to the nominees, and the rightful winners!
The Ray Bradbury Award for Dramatic Presentation
I will say, I kind of prefer the way the Nebulas does this, as opposed to the Hugos: the Hugos bifurcates the list, letting things over feature-length (including entire seasons of things) be considered in the “long” category, and short films (and tv shows, and lately, records) be considered in the “short” category. While it’s true that this sort of mirrors the “Novel/novella/novelette/short story” category5, I like the idea that length is another axis along which to consider, rather than a limning state. I would love an award that was given just for, like, whatever, at whatever length, and that’s kind of how this functions.
5 or the “short fiction/long fiction” of the Stokers and the World Fantasy Awards
Anyway, Lovecraft Country suffers here by being nominated for its full season. I liked it, in the main, when I considered it, and there were certainly individual episodes (the first one, the Tulsa Riots one, the one where Hippolyta travels) that were as good as anything here, but all told it was too inconsistent to win for its whole season.
The Expanse and the Mandalorian are both delivering satisfying television, and while I like The Mandalorian more, I don’t think that “The Tragedy” was as good as the episodes on either side of it, which makes this one another failure of the nomination process.
The Old Guard and Birds of Prety were both excellent comic-book adaptations, especially the latter but guys, you knew where this was going.
The Good Place stuck the landing, “Whenever You’re Ready” is a lovely piece of fantasy writing6, and I’ll probably watch it a billion more times before I, myself, step through the doorway.
6 the idea of finality giving things meaning is a personal favorite of mine, and I really enjoy the way they worked it in there
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: The Good Place, “Whenever You’re Ready”
Game Writing
I’m going to be honest (as I usually do) here and say: I haven’t played much of this category, but I’m impressed by the way that Kentucky Route Zero shook out, and I definitely will play it before too long, I promise.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Kentucky Route Zero
The Andre Norton Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
You know, this category has, in fact, been considerably more grinding and heart-destroying in years past. That’s nice.
Shveta Thakrar’s Star Daughter, perhaps surprisingly, does what it says on the tin: it’s about the daughter of a star. She has normal stuff, she has supernatural stuff, they are in conflict, she eventually figures out how to work through some of that conflict, and this isn’t my favorite of these books. The end.
Jenn Reese’s A Game of Fox and Squirrels was more to my liking than I thought it would be – it helps that the central metaphor that casts an abusive family relationship as being like playing a game with ever-changing rules is really compelling, and that the main character is struggling against her own brain chemistry/neurology without any of that being explicitly overburdened, textually. It’s also a very good tense little adventure story for all that. I would happily recommend it to any middle-grade readers that happened to ask, but it also isn’t quite my favorite here.
T. Kingfisher’s A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking was a terrific read. It’s very funny, as T. Kingfisher’s work tends to be, and it, similarly to Minor Mage deals with a person whose magic use is limited in a way that, at first, seems to make the role into which she is thrust impossible. But, of course, it turns out not to be. It’s extremely clever, and well-done, and if it falls short of being the best work here, it’s only because it’s one of three sort of close variations on the usual YA formula that were all very, very good.
Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe was the front-runner for a good portion of this writeup and, on another day, it might be the one I considered the winner. In fact, I may change my mind immediately after posting this. It’s a pretty tight race, is what I’m saying. Anyway, Elatsoe has a genuinely-frightening villain (or, more accurately, a villain with genuinely-frightening powers), and while it doesn’t stray too far from the “plucky teen detective” main character, the character is an asexual Native American, so there’s some grounding there that you don’t generally deal with. Add to that the fact that Little Badger is a terrific prosodist, and that, perhaps most refreshingly, it takes place in a world where magic is acknowledged to exist, so there’s no weird covering-up, no bizarre unseeing authority figures and no doubt that the things that are happening are really happening, and it’s an impressive bit of work.
Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer, however, was a real surprise: I knew that it had been pretty well-received, but the actual book is fantastic. It gives its characters both real conflict and real stakes7. It suffers a little bit by being the first book in a series – it’s clearly only (at most) half a story – but the characters are developed well, and there’s a really interesting set of guiding principles for the supernatural elements (in short: a “raybearer” assembles a group of people from across the cultures they govern, and this provides him with a cabinet and immortality all at once). I’m happy to call it the rightful winner, although, again, I liked Elatsoe almost as much, and sometimes probably more.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Jordan Ifueko, Raybearer (unless it’s Elatsoe. Ask me when you see me next!)
7 my primary problem with YA is that so few of the books actually create stakes – you know how it’s all going to go, and there’s no real long-term effects or urgency.
Short Story
This is as good as this category has been since I started doing these write-ups. I liked all of these, and several of them had a fair shot at being the one I liked the most. This is another one where I’m liable to have changed my mind about the winner, although significantly less so than before.
Jason Sanford’s “The Eight-Thousander” is the closest to a let-down that we have here. It’s a good, atmospherically-effective story about a mountain climber, his toxic climbing partner, and a spirit. It ends up separating a literal haunting from an allegorical one, and does a good job of communicating how terrifying the idea of climbing a tall mountain is. I, for one, will remain someone who does not do it. Good job, Jason Sanford.
Aimee Picchi’s “Advanced Word Problems in Portal Math” hides its portal story in, as the title implies8, a set of word problems involving a woman who is in need of a portal at several points in her life. It has a strong ending, and the prose is very good, but it hides a little more behind its gimmick than it probably needs to. Not a bad story, just a story that’s overshadowed by its concept.
8 it’s a year for patly-descriptive titles, I guess
“Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” is an extremely accurately-titled story: the world barely exists, a woman in an all-woman group is pregnant, and the difficulties of giving birth in a world that has ended, while surrounded by creatures who want to eat you and for whom blood is a strong reminder that you exist, are more than enough to provide both action and tension across a pretty-satisfying story.
Eugenia Triantafyllou’s “My Country is a Ghost” is a more straight-up allegory: the main character can’t bring her ghost (a real actual thing in this story) into her new country, she has to find a way to live in the community without it. It’s a lovely story, to be sure.
John Wiswell’s “Open House on Haunted Hill” is a terrific story9 about a house that is either haunted10 or just sapient. In any event, like any being tha tis forced to live alone with its thoughts, it’s quite lonely, and it goes to some lengths to make some folks like it. It’s an entertaining idea that also manages to score a lot of emotional depth out of its main character. Which character is, we shall remember, a house.
9 and, indeed, it’ll come up in at least two more awards writeups
10 note that the title is that it’s on haunted hill – people could have mistaken the house’s intelligence for haunting
Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s “A Guide for Working Breeds” is a delightful story about the mentorship between two very, very different robots, united only in the sense that they have a job. In telling its brief, funny story, it also does a terrific job of sketching out the circumstances of how these particular robots come to exist, adn the things they have to go through. It also successfully deploys its comedy by showing us only their messages, and so having the things that happen to the characters happen offscreen. This device also means that the fairly-tense action scenes are made even tenser. All told, another excellent outing from a writer I look forward to every time.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Vina Jie-Min Prasad, “A Guide for Working Breeds”
Novelette
Did you know that there are some people who prefer the novelette as a story-length? Those people are weird! This is, as it almost always is, the bag which is most mixed.
Leah Cypress’s “Stepsister” is a re-imagining of Cinderella, from the point of view of the brother of the prince. Guys, I read it, and I tried, and, as could perhaps be predicted11, it did not work for me, like, even a little bit.
11 NB I really did try, though
A.T. Greenblatt’s “Burn or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super” is a fine, if a little long, look at the necessity of even superheroic organizations to have accountants, among other things. It’s joyful, or playful, or something that means “positively-inflected but just short of funny, as such”, which is nice, especially in this set of stories. It’s fine, but it also wasn’t my favorite thing here, and, while I wouldn’t discourage anyone from reading it, it’s not the winner here.
Meg Elison’s “The Pill” concerns the titular beauty treatment (it reduces everyone’s size/shape until they are a size/shape that is recognizable, specifically, as being a body from “the pill”), which has potentially-deadly side effects, and which sweeps through the culture. The main character, for reasons laid out in the story, is not interested, and the story follows her to the life that decision enables her to lead. It’s a good story about self-determination and the nature of bodies.
Sarah Pinsker’s “Two Truths and a Lie” was much-praised in the Stokers writeup12. It’s an astonishing story that I loved very much, and that means I was very surprised to read a better one.
12 and will be so for the Locus Awards, and the Hugo Awards. The World Fantasy Awards nominees aren’t out, but it’s eligible, and if it’s nominated, it’ll be praised in this space for those as well
Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Shadow Prisons”, is a story, presented in three parts, about a particularly terrifying future prison, or rather, a method of imprisonment, and the government that allowed and implemented it. It has a dread-inducing setup, and propels itself neatly to a third act that I found genuinely surprising, and highly effective. Go read it, it’s the best thing here.
RIGHTFUL WINNER: Caroline M. Yoachim, “Shadow Prisons”
Novella
While not everything here was exactly my cup of tea, this might be the most well-constructed that the nominees in this category have ever been: each of these is recommended if for no reason other than the craft of their writing itself.
R.B. Lemberg’s The Four Profound Weaves takes place in a world that was first detailed in a poetry collection, and it feels very like a novella written by a poet. The language is lovely and the images – magic is accomplished by weaving all sorts of materials, which lends itself naturally to a lot of lovely and surprising mental pictures – are intriguing. I like that the two main characters are, in fact, very old, and have to deal with the state of that. It’s languid, and, like its protagonist, moves slowly and not-at-all surely toward its goal, but the prose is wonderful.
Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald’s Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon is a tale of a post-apocalyptic Africa, in which nuclear weapons are diverted toward Africa to detonate after having been fired at someone else13. The survivors gather together, learn how to use magic, and divide the labor among the sexes, and then all but one of the women dies. It’s not so bad, but it’s very gritty, which is generally a problem for your humble narrator.
13 this, the setup for why the world of the book is the way that it is, is probably my favorite thing about it.
Yaroslav Barsukov’s Tower of Mud and Straw was one I’d never heard anything about. It’s a highly allegorical story about the dangers of little-understood technology, and the destructive nature of revenge (and, sometimes, of affection). It was definitely an impressive debut, and I bet I’ll have a lot more to say about Barsukov as time goes by.
I had high hopes for Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, which probably isn’t fair, or conducive to enjoying the work on its own terms, but it’s the case that, while I liked a lot of it, I found the economy of language both impressive and, frankly, a bit hindering – it was very easy to miss important information because lots of things are said once, and minimally. That said, it was a compelling story, and I found it genuinely moving.
Nino Cipri’s Finna is a sort of Wrinkle in Ikea story, where the titular14 gigantic home-goods store is connected to multiple dimensions, and the set of policies that guide the incursion into/out of those dimensions are, of course, terrible and complex. There’s meant to be at least one sequel (I think it comes out later this year), which is wonderfully exciting, and if you want to read the most fun one of these, it’s probably this one.
14 that is to say, the store is called Finna
Although, honestly, P. Djeli-Clark’s Ring-Shout is only a notch below it in terms of fun, and is a lot more besides. A sort of alternate-historical tale of a woman with a sword, who takes on the Ku Kluxes (in this case, supernatural pointy-headed beings) and their associated Klan, the former having been summoned by the latter via Birth of a Nation. It proceeds from there, and it’s as well-written and well-constructed as everything else Clark has written15, and I think it’s the best work here.
15 There’s also a brief mention of what I hope is a sequel hook, about Maryese going off to find a man in Rhode Island with some really terrible ideas. FINGERS CROSSED.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: P. Djeli-Clark, Ring Shout
Novel
And, finally, the hardest category: these are all so wildly different from one another that it was hard to compare them, but, of course, compare them I must, so I did. So there.
I talked about Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic when it was nominated for a Stoker award, and have nothing more to say about it there, except that it was still pretty good, and it still isn’t the winner here.
C.L. Polk’s Midnight Bargain is the best of their books that I’ve read, although there’s still an awful lot of Austenian court drama and all that. I get that that’s what they’re doing here, I also get that it’s not my favorite thing in the world, and that there are maybe two too many conversations that happen where one person is, in fact, refusing to say anything other than announce their own indignation, and a parent who is so selfish and pointlessly cruel that it’s genuinely frustrating to try to believe anyone would behave that way16. All the stuff with the fairies is a lot of fun, though, and if all of that stuff sounds like something that wouldn’t keep you away then, by gum, I bet you’ll enjoy it.
16 I probably should set aside some time to examine why I find that so unpleasant to read and not, say, all the stuff about slavering monsters or whatever that I don’t have any trouble with at all. I think it comes down to one of my oldest fears being that there’s a set of rules that I don’t know about (and have no way to know about), but am still expected to follow, which is, of course, more-or-less exactly what’s happening in this story, and it makes me really anxious.
Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun is a huge swing, and a lot of people love it. It’s got a lot going for it: Roanhorse is very good at giving the reader a glimpse at her unique characters (who are, in this case, also in a tremendously unique situation). There’s a big, world-changing set of events happening here, and, despite the novel’s length, they follow each other briskly enough that it never gets bogged down. My primary complaint is that this is extremely the first installment in a series – there’s a lot of world, and a lot of setup, and even as well as its drawn and paced, it’s also the case that it isn’t an entire story17. I look forward to finishing the story, though, in the future book(s).
17 my secondary complaint is that one of the four point of view characters makes it very far into the book before thinking “oho! Perhaps I am being undermined!” and another of them barely makes it into the book
Martha Wells’s Network Effect is Murderbot’s novel-length debut, and of course Murderbot crushes their novel-length debut. It’s different from the novellas in many of the ways that the Star Trek movies were different from episodes of Star Trek – there’s more time, so there’s more stakes, and also Wells was willing to do some absolutely wild things with her characters and the plot. My heart has a large part of it set aside for absolutely bonkers space-opera, and, well, this fits in there quite nicely. It isn’t the “best” bit of work here, but it’s the one I’m going to re-read the most often.
I also have a space in my heart for urban fantasy, especially when it involves dealing with Lovecraftian-type villainy, and so I also loved N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, in which the title is considerably more literal than I figured it would be. It kicks off with my favorite of her short-stories, “The City Born Great”, and proceeds from there as it brings the boroughs of New York City together to stop, well, I won’t give it away. There’s giant cities fighting, there’s people not knowing how to deal with each other, and there is, delightfully, occasionally the personifications of other cities. It’s a lot of fun.
Susannah Clarke writes very, very slowly (apparently), and so it seems like it’s been forever since Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but man, she can take as long as she wants when the result is as good as Piranesi. At first a mystery about what’s going on in a house, and then the sort of story where a thriller is taking place just offscreen, it actually is considerably more than both, a sort of puzzle-box of a thing, where a great deal is going on that you just can’t see, and that rewards all of the thought and attention and re-reading you can give it. It’s a lovely book, and while my heart thinks it should go to The City We Became (or, if I’m being honest, Murderbot), I really do think Piranesi is, as a piece of writing, the best of all of these.
THE RIGHTFUL WINNER: Susannah Clarke, Piranesi
Ohio Needs a Train 