melannen | Hugo-Nominated Novels

Hugo-Nominated Novels

Okay, I finally finished all three of the Hugo-nominated novels for this year, and I have no clue how I'm voting. :/ I was hoping one would be obviously stand-out good but I'm not really there.

Anyway, herein I will discuss them under the Hugo award critera, which is "are they the best science fiction and/or fantasy of 2014?"

I have a terrible feeling that "best" may be reaching too high for some of these categories so we're going with a) is it SFF, b) is it good, c) is it good SFF.

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

1. Is it science fiction/fantasy?

It has AIs and space stations and aliens and interstellar empires and etc. and explorations of the ramifications of those things when you put people with them, so yes. It is definitely science fiction.

2. Is it good?

So to start with, I really enjoyed this book. I am probably more interested in re-reading it than I am Ancillary Justice. Most of the new characters were great, Breq's voice and relationships were great, the worldbuilding was great, the writing was great.

The plot and structure had some. issues. So structure-wise it's basically a cozy mystery IN SPACE? Except a good cozy has a pretty tight structure, so this is more one of those cozies that gets distracted by the setting and sort of goes meandering around the gardens instead of concentrating on the mystery. I spent a lot of time wondering if something was supposed to be happening yet. Also the antagonists, such as they were, were a pair of completely cartoonish rich-arrogant-racist-slaver-domestic-abusers that kind of just had every "BAD PERSON IS BAD" marker tossed on them without any subtlety whatsoever. Plus a ship's captain who might have been interesting (esp. re: her relationship with her ship) but got no development really.

It's possible some of that will get expanded in book 3 and seem better in retrospect but I'm not judging book three right now.

Which. Ancillary Justice didn't exactly have a standard plot structure either, but it worked really well anyway, and there weren't any obviously bad/guy antagonists - that complexity of bad/good in that is part of what made it work.

So anyway as a fanfic writer I loved this book because it was like 100% hooks for fanfic, but as a connoisseur of novels, it is not nearly as mind-blowingly good as the first one was.

3. Was it good SF?

Leaving aside the things mentioned above, I would say yes, very good SF. It's taking a bunch of both standard SF tropes, and fundamental questions like what is the basis of individual identity, and spun them out in a series of what-ifs that it answers only as far as it needs to having posed the questions. And it does that via a combination of very good character work and very good worldbuilding. This series is hands-down the best use of the SF genre to do SF's work that I have encountered in a very long time.

4. Conclusion: if this was Ancillary Justice (or very likely the series as a whole) I would be voting for it as my first choice, no question. If Ancillary Justice hadn't won, I would be voting for Sword first choice because it's good enough and the series deserves an award. But. I dunno.

The Goblin Emperor by Kathryn Addison

1. Is it SF or fantasy?

I...guess? Like. The characters are called "Elves" and "goblins" and have pointy ears? And there are airships? And clergy from a non-earth religion who can do magic?

But I spent the whole book having this feeling that if you just removed all references to ears and search-replaced some words, you'd have a perfectly good Ruritanian romance. None of the skiffy stuff was really more than window dressing - as was actually pointed out in the text when the MC mentions that the airship crash that started things off could just as well have been a boat or a carriage. And while one of the elf/goblin characters mentions long lifespans, none of the MCs seem to have them and it's never relevant to anything, nor does their biology have any other plot impacts, afaict. Magic-wise, we get one prophetic dream that may or may not be real prophecy, and one "death spell" during a chaotic scene, that the MC doesn't actually witness, and could easily be replaced by a thrown knife with no difference to the story.

so. um. technically it's about an elf/goblin so technically I guess it's fantasy because it says it is,

I suppose there's an argument to be made that Ruritanian romance is secondary-world fantasy by default, but I don't really like that argument.

2. Is it good?

Again, I really liked this novel! It was great to read while trying to get rid of a bad summer cold. It was pleasant and well-put-together and I was never bored and never disliked it and it was a really good portrayal of a young person who has a firm foundation but an extended history of abuse suddenly discovering that he has his value.

...I'm afraid "pleasant" is maybe the best I can do for it though. :/ Pretty much everybody in the book was pleasant, and competent, and trustworthy, and even the less-competent villains were generally amenable to reasoned argument, and nobody held grudges, and given that this was meant to be an intrigue-filled court of corrupt power-hungry officials I just didn't buy it. I wouldn't have bought the grimdark opposite version either, admittedly, and I've read that one a lot more often and enjoyed it a lot less.

It also suffered from what I have been known to privately call "sudden protagonist onset syndrome", where we're introduced to a system that has supposedly been fairly static for decades if not generations, and then suddenly the protagonist turns up and everything gets fixed, in sufficiently simple ways that there's basically no reason why they couldn't have been fixed by other people long before. Like, admittedly Maia's dad was meant to be a not the greatest king, but all but one of the highly-placed people in his court seem to be good-hearted, competent people who have no trouble managing an untrained boy-king so I don't see why they couldn't have managed his dad, or how they got into power if his dad was really that bad.

We also never really see outside the Imperial Court much, except via the very occasional third-party report, or even past the inner circle of the Imperial Court, and while that may be realistic, it makes it hard to believe in anything Maia's doing as having any actual consequences.

I also spent a long time not really buying Maia's motivations. Supposedly he has to become Emperor even though he doesn't want to because the only alternative is death. However we a) never see him seriously considering death as the alternative, and b) we never see him even vaguely considering escape plans that don't involve his death, despite the setup allowing for several of them, not least of which is "find the courtier least likely to kill you and be the best puppet you can be," which is historically what most princes in his situation have gone for.

As we get toward the end of the novel, and he started to be a bit more introspective, I started seeing more of how this reaction was built on defense mechanisms from his history of abuse and it made sense, so maybe it was just my own failure that I spent and least 2/3 of the book thinking his main decision was based entirely on plot necessity. But for a book that's based almost entirely on the internal life of one character, having it be so blank most of the time wasn't the best way to sell me on the story.

(And okay yes, Breq has a fairly opaque interior life to, but it's... limpidly opaque? Like she's doing things for reasons she can't/won't articulate, or different reasons than the ones she articulates, or blatantly going on instinct and pure emotion, but you never get the impression she's just mechanically going through the motions of a plot. She may be going through the motions of a plot with motivations she doesn't care to unravel, but she's never doing it anything but passionately.)

...that said there was a time in my life where I would have adored Maia for all the things I'm complaining about above, so. ehh.

3. Is it good science fiction/fantasy?

Well, to the extent that it's SFF at all, it's entirely due to the steampunky/secondary world aspect. I did enjoy the worldbuilding, and it was pretty good worldbuilding, although I kind of wish it had been more central to what was actually going on in the story. (I'm also 100% sure I would have enjoyed the story more if it was told from the POV of either the conspirators or wossname who caught the conspirators. It would probably have been a lot more skiffy, too.)

I guess where I'm going is that you could write some really good SF/Fantasy in this world that explored some really interesting stuff, but other than the way it's thumbing its nose at grimdark (which I did enjoy, admittedly!) I don't think this novel was that story.

I did fanwank myself into saying that the reason everyone is so nice and so reasonable is that elves and goblins are just fundamentally less screwed-up than humans, and also that possibly everybody in this society is ace-spectrum as well, which would make it excellent SF, but that's a pretty big fanwank and there wasn't really any textual evidence that it was intended.

4. Summary: I don't really have anything genuinely bad to say about this book but I am pretty sure nothing about it will stick with me for very long, either. It was nice. I'm not sure nice should get you a Hugo? On the other hand maybe it should, there have been plenty of books that have won awards just for being full of awfulness and I'd certainly rather this than them.

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin translated by Ken Liu

1. Was it science fiction or fantasy?

There are aliens and spaceships and full-body virtual reality games and mad scientists trying to destroy the world, so yes, no question.

2. Was it good?

I really enjoyed all the parts with Ye Wenjie. There's a few things in her portrayal that I'm not sure ring true, but in general they were both good and gripping.

I hated all the parts from Wang Miao's POV. I've seen people complain that he was a bland blank slate, but I'm okay with a bland POV once in awhile, that's not what he was. He was an asshole. Like, before we've known him three chapters, we know that he got obsessed with a young woman he's seen once and never spoken too and decided was his muse, but the obsession didn't actually extend to any sort of compassion for her grieving friends and relatives, that he treats his wife and kids like irrelevant NPCs (and seems to eventually forget they exist) and treats his subordinates at work even worse.

If you think that's bland blank slate rather than total asshole either you are an asshole yourself or you've been reading way way too many books about them.

The parts set on Trisolaris - both in the game and in the later summary - were just really boring. Not because of the density of technobabble in them - though I'll go into that later - but because they had no actual people in them? And the game segments at least should be full of real people - every attempt at gamifying hard problems in RL has quickly run into the problem that humans are social creatures above all, and that never comes up in the game scenes here - even if the game itself isn't actually multiplayer, which should have been much more obvious much sooner, there should be tons of social backchannels for it outside sanctioned meetups if it's going to have any point at all. (Or maybe all the other players just sense Wang Miao's fundamental assholery and avoid him. It could be that.)

3. Was it good SF?

It wants to be good SF. It is trying very hard. In particular it's trying to be hard SF. Unfortunately I didn't buy most of its hard science concepts, from the chaotic solar system on up (gravity doesn't work that way!), and when it did finally dive into what seemed to be its Big Cool Science Concept (the unfolded proton) it ... didn't really think it through? First that you're depending entirely on an entity with its own sentience, which never ends well, okay. And second that the Trisolarans seem to have invented an energy-neutral intelligent planetary shield that can selectively filter or concentrate light, which... seems like it would solve their problems all by itself...

Also I didn't buy the way science works here. Maybe he's pulling on that Cultural Revolution history, but the scientists he was showing in modern-day didn't really seem to be built on that model. So we're meant to believe that scientists all over the world are killing themselves in despair because they've realized there's stuff out there beyond the knowable? What? It took a hard-boiled detective to point out to them that this isn't cause for despair? Look maybe I shouldn't have gone right from finishing this into watching the New Horizons press conference with a multinational team of top physicists repeatedly breaking into joyful laughter at the proof of all the things they'd been wrong about. but. The book just didn't seem to be describing any of the scientists I know in their relationship to science. (Not that scientists never despair or get depressed or petty or short-sighted or just wrong. But not in that way.)

4. Summary: Of all these books, this is the one that most clearly feels like An Award-Winning Book. Unfortunately it's also the one that I felt had the most glaring flaws, and that I liked the least. And I have a general principle of never supporting Attempting To Be An Award-Winner Look At My Asshole Protagonist novels.

..aren't you looking forward to my analysis of the movies

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hahaha re the top physicists: I've occasionally observed that high level physics and mediaeval-to-ancient history are the two fields where I REGULARLY see experts going "so it turns out we just discovered something that means EVERYTHING WE PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT is totally wrong.... ISN'T THAT AWESOME?!!! LET ME TELL YOU HOW AWESOME!"

Yeah I mean there are TOTALLY reasons scientists will despair, and there are totally times scientists screw up or make a stand somewhere they really shouldn't, but "Look at all this stuff we don't know yet!" usually isn't enough to screw them up? You don't make it through science school if that's enough to terrify you, usually.

(It's entirely possible that in the sequel all of the apparent-suicides will turn out to have been murders but they didn't go there in this book, and the scientist hanging out with our MC was having the same issues. You're an astrophysicist! People being relatively insignificant in the universe should not be a new concept!)

My experience with astrophysicists is of their having an unseemly DELIGHT in ambushing OTHER people with that fact. XP

Also I am sort of sad to see the pattern of responses to TGE continue, which is to say that they all strongly imply to me that the book is JUST VERY CLOSE TO ALMOST EXACTLY my cup of tea, but just slightly Off (which sadly garners a much more negative reaction from me than Horribly Off), so I'm still giving it a miss.

Edited 2015-07-16 01:55 (UTC)

Alas. I would say that TGE is exactly my cup of tea, in that it's something I like in a casual way but only if I'm in a tea-party sort of mood. ^_^

It does work very well for me as a pretty accurate fairytale portrait of "abused kid escapes abuser, slowly discovers all people are not terrible and he is a real person too, fights his way out of his learned behavior patterns so that he can be a functioning person outside of abusive relationship" but it's all very gentle about it, and therefore doesn't work too well in the milieu of high-stakes palace intrigue.

You have articulated my issues with The Goblin Emperor far better than I've done. Particularly this:

Pretty much everybody in the book was pleasant, and competent, and trustworthy, and even the less-competent villains were generally amenable to reasoned argument, and nobody held grudges, and given that this was meant to be an intrigue-filled court of corrupt power-hungry officials I just didn't buy it.

As a story about political intrigue, which it seemed to be aiming for, it just wasn't. At all. I agree that The Three-Body Problem has a lot of flaws, but it still feels much nearer to what I want when I read Hugo novels. (I haven't read the Leckie books yet; the first is on my shelf right now.)

I feel like you should read

skygiants's post on TGH because she articulates them even better than me. ^_^

I'm leaning toward ranking Goblin Emperor above Three-Body Problem because while they both have major flaws, at least Goblin Emperor's flaws aren't ones that are ubiquitous enough to be sore spots that make me want to throw things, they are relatively new and different flaws, at least as far as award-nominated stuff goes. And then Sword above them both because tbf the main bad thing I have to say about it is that it wasn't as well-put-together as Justice. I could still be convinced otherwise though!

Edited 2015-07-16 01:42 (UTC)

Ooh, thank you for the link!

Interesting 'reviews', thanks! I haven't read any of these (yet) though I've seen a lot about them (and I have read Ancillary Justice, which I liked but didn't love).

Thank you for putting 'reviews' in scare quotes, these were definitely not intended to help people who have not read the books. ^_^ (They would have been less spoilery, to start with...)

aren't you looking forward to my analysis of the movies

After that? Actually? Yes!

I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to watch all five movies or just go on the non-puppy ones.

Also I didn't buy the way science works here. Maybe he's pulling on that Cultural Revolution history, but the scientists he was showing in modern-day didn't really seem to be built on that model. So we're meant to believe that scientists all over the world are killing themselves in despair because they've realized there's stuff out there beyond the knowable? What? It took a hard-boiled detective to point out to them that this isn't cause for despair? Look maybe I shouldn't have gone right from finishing this into watching the New Horizons press conference with a multinational team of top physicists repeatedly breaking into joyful laughter at the proof of all the things they'd been wrong about. but. The book just didn't seem to be describing any of the scientists I know in their relationship to science. (Not that scientists never despair or get depressed or petty or short-sighted or just wrong. But not in that way.)

You're not the only one I've seen complain in this way about the problem of the scientists' reaction to learning about the Trisolarians, but your complaint seems as incomplete to me as some of the others. True, some of the scientists committed suicide in response to their discovery, but it's pretty clear that others were killed by agents of the Trisolarians, and that yet others were coopted by the Trisolarians. Cixin Liu isn't writing about a mysterious epidemic of suicide, he's writing about an array of responses to a paradigm shift.

And those that do commit suicide are not despairing because their theories are wrong. They're despairing because the universe has literally been lying to them. Because the fundamental axiom of scientific research is that a result is meaningful only if it's repeatable. At least in the context of anything proton-releated, these scientists cannot do science, ever again, until the Trisolarians are defeated.

And I agree that it's not a coincidence that this discovery is preceded by the Cultural Revolution passages of the novel, because for the Chinese scientists persecuted by the Cultural Revolution, they have seen people forced to lie about science for political reasons, seen the way it poisons society, poisons your soul, poisons your relationships... and now they are seeing the observable universe itself manipulated in the same way, at the behest of the Trisolarians. Every lie they were forced to acknowledge about how Einstein was a reactionary and a liar is now true- Einstein's results can no longer be reliably replicated.

And I don't think Cixin Liu extends this very far beyond Chinese contexts, but I do think science is political in America, too, and that this kind of imposed limitation on research would devastate American science, too. Epidemic of suicide, maybe, maybe not. But Pluto-style joy at being proven wrong? Almost certainly not.

It's true, my complaint was incomplete. I was trying to keep the post short and was running out of time to type and that's really the least of my problems with this book. But here have one of many possible expanded versions.

See, I do see the possibility that they were mostly murders etc. instead of suicide (or that they were being driven to suicide for other reasons - if the protons can make you hallucinate there are infinite ways to kill inconvenient people. Or for that matter the protons could be convincing them that the inconsistencies were the scientists' own mistakes and they were going to lose their careers for it- that could do it). In fact at first I thought that was what this book was going to be about - figuring out what the suicides were actually about - but it never, in fact, went there. In fact it basically dropped that plot thread. It's possible later books will expand on that but for Hugo purposes I'm only looking at what's in this book, and in this book that was not handled.

It's not just the suicides, though - our non-dead scientist characters seem to accept that mindset automatically as well, so even if the suicides aren't really suicides, the author, or at least all the MCs, find it a reasonable response.

And I still don't. Because if you're a particle physicist in this world, either they don't know about aliens and you get "amazing new results that don't match our theories, we're going to have to do a lot more work" or they do, and you get "we have objective proof that it's possible to unfold a proton, that's amazing, that's going to move Earth particle physics ahead by centuries all by itself, so what if the accelerators don't work any more, so much yummy theory." Physics would *change*, no question, and you're right that it wouldn't be all joy, but it also wouldn't be existential despair. No more that scientists already face down, anyway. (I suspect that given enough results, they'd get to "we've discovered some kind of weird unknown chaotic particle that only appears in particle accelerators, this is so cool" before "science is dead, kill yourself" anyway, particle physicists are really good at deducing amazing stuff from minimal data, but that gets into my plot/technobabble issues instead.)

I mean. "Would alien contact existentially destroy humans" is a long-running question in SF and I was ready for this book to give me a good workout in that question, but it never actually did, it just made assumptions about what the answer is and then used them for background color. Possibly the workout is coming in later books, but for this one, it didn't do its homework to convince me of anything.

I certainly don't buy "results aren't always repeatable" as being enough to give up science; an "axiom" is something unprovable that you take as a given because it makes your math work, but you can always switch axioms if you have to, even the most fundamental ones, and that usually leads to EVEN MORE EXCITING theories (see: all of modern math), and I find it hard to believe that people working on the vanguard of science would never have encountered those kinds of thoughts before - most academically-inclined people spend at least a few months of their youth playing with the limits of reality-testing.

He brings in hard-boiled cop dude to be the one who can like. teach people hope and see possibilities etc. And in fact he seems to be setting up a good ol' humanity vs. fancy sciency stuff conflict and I just don't buy it. I've met way more scientists who get super-excited about how amazing bugs are and how really they're the rulers of the earth and really we don't know much but we muddle along, than I have non-scientists. So he's setting up the central conflict of his book via setting up the concept of "scientists" as something that doesn't at all match my experience thereof.

And even if I just have a way-rosy view of scientists and they really are, in general, that hide-bound, inflexible and lacking in wonder and imagination, it's not really the version of science I'm looking for in a Hugo-winning science fiction novel, you know?

Especially when most of the scientists we actually do get to meet in the novel (with the possible exception of Yie Wenjie and her husband) fit all the stereotypes of cold, calculating, lacking in any higher feelings or sense of grand possibility. (Seriously the mathematician prodigy and his wife: everything I NEVER NEED TO SEE AGAIN in a portrayal of a nonsexual couple, and then you lump scientist stereotypes on top.)

It's possible that a lot of this *is* a cultural thing between Chinese culture and US culture, and if I was Chinese I'd be able to read the links between the Cultural Revolution background and the way he's drawing modern science and the way Chinese writers work with their political context, but I knew that was going to be a problem going in, and I can't really judge the book as anyone but me.

And I didn't actually get much of that from the book itself anyway? His modern Chinese scientists as shown all seemed remarkably free of overt political constraints - probably less so than the American scientists I know, TBH. Certainly Wang Miao, self-absorbed ass that he is, didn't seem to think the Cultural Revolution history had any particular relevance to his life, even though he probably lived through at least some of it. (And TBH the flashback scientists actually read *more* true to my experience of science in the US than the modern ones. ...which may say bad things about the current state of science in the US. but.) AFAICT, the history flashbacks mostly just seemed to be setting us up for Yie Wenjie's decisions and the question of where humans really are any good or not.

I mean! I didn't dislike this book (other than Wang Miao who I actively despise, seriously, you left your wife in tears last you saw her, maybe you could stop trying to win your stupid game for like, five minutes, to acknowledge she exists) but I thought it didn't really do a good job at a lot of what it seemed to be trying to do, and the portrayal of scientists as a group was one of those things.

It's not the particle accelerators not working anymore. It's the particles not working anymore. It's the observable universe not working anymore.

I certainly don't buy "results aren't always repeatable" as being enough to give up science; an "axiom" is something unprovable that you take as a given because it makes your math work, but you can always switch axioms if you have to, even the most fundamental ones, and that usually leads to EVEN MORE EXCITING theories

Not quite, and that depends on what you mean by even more exciting theories. In mathematicis, an axiom is something unproven you assume to make the math work. In physics, an axiom is something unproven you assume to make the physics work. Some non-Euclidean geometries have been unexpectedly physically useful, but most are just really EXCITING to mathematicians and of no interest to physicists interested in studying and modeling the observable world. Axioms matter to physicists in a very different way than they matter to a mathematician, because a physicist has very different reasons for using mathematics. It's actually highly unlikely that abandoning a validly established axiom will lead to exciting and physically useful results. There are good reasons why, even though we know that you can abandon the parallel postulate, we use it 99% of the time when we're doing physical real-world geometry.

most academically-inclined people spend at least a few months of their youth playing with the limits of reality-testing.

Yes, for example in A Brief History of Time, Hawking discusses his positivism, which requires him to accept only the presently observable universe. Per his positivism, he says that he believes that he could wake up tomorrow and the sun might no longer be rising in the East. And then Hawking says that for the purpose of doing science, he assumes that the sun will rise in the East when he wakes up every single morning until he gets evidence otherwise, because science depends on repeatability. In order to do science, you need to assume that the world obeys rules that can be measured consistently over time, even though Hawking doesn't have any philosophical basis for this assumption. If observed particle behavior doesn't obey any rules, you cannot do science. And that doesn't get replaced by a more physically useful axiom.

The things that the Trisolarians do really are disastrous. Is that disaster insurmountable? Possibly not. But they're disastrous nonetheless.

His modern Chinese scientists as shown all seemed remarkably free of overt political constraints - probably less so than the American scientists I know, TBH.

Really? What kind of American scientists do you know, and how can we liberate them ASAP? The modern Chinese scientists don't seem to me to be as financially constrained as American scientists, but they seem far more constrained to me in terms of the kinds of results they can extract from their data, because everyone seems to have a really heightened consciousness that *research* leads to *applications* and that *applications* means applications that the government finds acceptable. Whereas in America there's a much stronger value placed on pure research, consequences be damned.

Especially when most of the scientists we actually do get to meet in the novel (with the possible exception of Yie Wenjie and her husband) fit all the stereotypes of cold, calculating, lacking in any higher feelings or sense of grand possibility.

What more high feelings and grand possibility do you demand than that human calculator scene? I can't name more than a half dozen scenes in all of SF more evocative of the power of the imagination to fuel scientific discovery and work around obstacles than that one. I thought TBP was flawed in all sorts of ways, and I thought Wang Miao as much a jerk as you did, but my lord, I loved how playful and enthusiastic about science Liu was in the game scenes.

Well -- I have two reactions to this:

a) String theory! 15-20 years, and pretty much no experimental confirmation in sight. This has not stopped them. And they don't even have aliens reporting that they're on the right track (or not). Also, the multiverse! And this is exactly in the subfield that Cixin Liu is talking about... so yeah, I feel I have evidence for the assertion that there would be a veritable explosion in theoretical high-energy physics, even if experimental high-energy physicists weren't so happy about it.

b) It is not actually the case, at the end of the book, that science is not repeatable in a closed system, which I agree would be depressing. It is the case that it is not a closed system because the Trisolarians are messing with us, and that is a whole different problem, and a much more interesting one. I guarantee that there would be a whole lot of minds thinking about how to outthink the Trisolarians. For example, it is canonically true that the Magic Protons have limits on what they can mess with at once. Can we work with that? Can we somehow attack it via nanotechnology? (Apparently yes, otherwise they wouldn't be targeting Wang Miao.) What is the limit of what the Magic Protons can do? So interesting!

(And again, as melannen said, if they're making all the scientists hallucinate and because of that they're killing themselves, or being murdered, then yeah, that really is a disaster... but Isaac Asimov already wrote that story.)

I do love the human calculator scene. Although I think it says more about Cixin Liu's high feelings and grand possibilities than that of any of the characters', which I think is what melannen was referring to.

Hm. I think this is actually convincing me to rank Liu higher than No Award, because even though I think it's seriously flawed, I haven't needed to talk about a book this much in ages, which I think is worth something. I will probably rank something above it, though. Probably Ancillary Sword. *is dubious and annoyed at the Hugos this year*

Hahahaha you called string theory physics that's good tell me another one! Actually, there's a terrible moment in Michio Kaku's Hyperspace where he basically says something like "Even if string theory never produces anything with physical value, at least we got some pretty math out of it." So sure, high energy ~~physicists~~ mathematicians might have fun with the revelations at the end of TBP, but to what end? They'd just be manipulating formulas without any hope of verification.

Let's just say I'm an engineer and not a scientist for a reason. :P

Oh, well. Engineers. :P

Hahahaha you called string theory physics that's good tell me another one!

Ha, yes :)

But yeah, I'm not sure how much my bouncing off of this is because Cixin Liu isn't Western/ I'm not Chinese, and how much of it is because he's not a high-energy theorist.

See, I could see engineers losing their shit over aliens fucking with the observable universe. Just not the majority of physicists. ;)

My father got to go to two lectures given by Feynman at SFU when he (my father) was in university. In one, Feynman spent about three quarters the allotted lecture time lecturing on what he was SUPPOSED to be lecturing on (which was the assumed "correct" model of the time) and then, having more time left, he was like, okay: now I'm going to share with you this brand new stuff that some of us are tossing around. There's no way it's real: it's much, much too beautiful to be real. But because it's so beautiful and we're all here, I'm going to run you through it.

The next year Feynman came back and said, "How many of you were here for my lecture last year?" A lot of students put up their hands. "So you remember what I told you about last year? Throw it all out. Remember the stuff I said was too beautiful to be true? Turns out it's right. We're going to spend the lecture on that."

Particularly in a case where the actual problem isn't "the universe is fundamentally unobservable" but rather "aliens are FUCKING WITH US", I just do not find it at all plausible that the majority of the field would collapse into despair. Erupt into indignation, yes. Collapse into despair, no.

Which, again: is possibly cultural.

At the moment, I'm Goblin Emperor-Ancillary Sword-Three Body Problem-No Award. Though interestingly, based on my enjoyment of Terms of Enlistment, I'm betting Lines of Departure would have cracked above No Award for me if it were still on the ballot.

My current listing, I think, is Ancillary Sword - Three Body Problem - Goblin Emperor, which is kind of odd because it's in reverse order of how much I enjoyed reading them. I thought GE was the most enjoyable and probably the best written, but for some reason I balk at the thought that it deserves a Hugo, for a lot of the reasons that

melannen has articulated. (Also I don't seem to have nearly as many problems with Asshole Protagonists, no doubt due to way too much early Golden Age exposure.)

Yeah, I think this is basically my feelings.

Also, they weren't in a situation where science wasn't replicable - I absolutely believe that would drive people to suicide; a world in which you drop a feather and bowling ball in vacuum once and they fall at the same rate, twice and the bowling ball is faster, thrice and the feather goes up and the bowling ball goes sideways, four times and the feather turns into a whale and the bowling ball turns into petunias - yeah. That would probably drive a lot of people to despair. I actually thought that's what he was doing with the game at first, tbh - a world where the sun doesn't always rise, and the fundamental constants change, and a slow lovecraftian seeping of that into our own world - I would buy the cosmic despair then. But then it just became a weirdly literal thing about a trinary star that follows strict rules but in a chaotic system (which isn't how gravity works! but not in a cosmic horror way, in a 'poor science' way), and the 'violations of natural law' in RL occur only in very specific conditions and/or in ways that, even if you don't know about the aliens, make it look like they're under sentient control. And yeah. That's a really different situation.

I mean, I've read SF where the basic laws aren't replicable? Many versions. Probably the first was the reality quakes in I Left My Sneakers In Dimension X (great book, btw.) This was not that.

It could be a cultural thing, but Ye Wenjie and co. don't seem to react that way? IDK.

It's true though, this one was way more ambitious than the other two.

tl;dr (am at work! Will read later; I promise! Looks fascinating but I only have a few minutes.)... you have found the problem with the Puppy slates: is not that they got a bunch of sub-par stuff nominated, or that's not directly the problem, but that what got nominated around the slates is not necessarily "best in the field this year"--and that's why a number of people are voting "no award" even on the non-puppy works.

If there's nothing that jumps out at you as "this is worthy of a Hugo; I'd be happy to have people 20 years from now claim this was the best 2014 had to offer," it's ethical to vote "no award."

Yeah, there are definitely going to be several non-puppy works below "no award" on my slate. IDK if any of these are, though - they're all competently put together and were enjoyable to read, I wouldn't be embarrassed if any of them won a Hugo, I've read worse Hugo award-winners. But I'm being overcritical in these posts because I've also read some REALLY AMAZING Hugo winners, and none of them meet that standard. (Also I think I would also have voted for The Martian over any of them, if it had been eligible.)

I think what the Sad Puppies have done by bringing so many new voters and so much attention is to (successfully) point out how broken the noms process is - tbh I looked back at the past few years' winners and wasn't terribly impressed there either. I just don't think the remedy is going to be the one they'd want...

Yeah, the long-term results are likely to be: oh look, you brought modern SF fandom back into awareness of the Hugos. In the future, we'll likely see Hugo nominees that better represent what today's fandom likes.

...I don't think the Puppies actually know what modern SF fandom's tastes are. Or who's doing the most reading these days.

Cue outrage (and wank, endless wank) the first time a Yuletide fanfic gets nominated as "best short story," followed by bizarre scrabbling to redefine the categories.

I'm still holding out for somebody managing to nom The Whole AO3 for something. (I don't think I'd vote for it 'cause it's only marginally SF, but I want to pretend I can add "Hugo nominee" to my business cards. :P)

AO3 is a fanzine, right?

... It's not like there are definitions for "what is a fanzine." Except no, wait, it doesn't have publication dates that allow you to call it "this year's" fanzine. Hugo categories...

"Best Related Work" is possible for any year where it substantially modifies its code.

Most likely would be an extra category for "best public archive/library." Or "best fannish nonprofit org."

Surely we could nominate it as a completed serial work whenever it finally comes out of beta. ^_^

but yeah no, the noises I heard were about "best related work". I think it is vanishingly unlikely and probably against the spirit of the awards but man would it be fun.

I'm looking forward to your movie reviews! Are you planning on tackling any other category?

Also, you mention Maia's "history of abuse", can you elaborate?

I'm planning to get through as many as I can before I hit my deadline, but a lot of them are going to be just 'all puppy no award'.

I'm assuming you haven't read Maia's book and you want more detailed warnings rather than my elaborating on my interpretation?

basically maia's dad resents his mom, and him by extension for making it impossible to divorce her, so he sends them both into internal exile, and while his mom is great the situation is not. And then after his mom dies he's sent to an even more isolated exile on the guardianship of a mentor who hates and resents him for it. The guardian is an alcoholic and verbally and emotionally abuses him for years (as well as one incident of serious physical abuse which horrifies him enough that it's not repeated.)

Most of that's on the past of the book though-we start when Maia suddenly becomes king and basically the only thing hes sure of about his new power is that he is never going to have to interact with his guardian again. A lot of the book is him figuring out how much of his self is defense mechanisms from the abuse, and there are a couple instances where he had to interact with the abuser as king-to-subject and barely makes it through the interaction.

It's not the major theme of the book, but it's sort of the throughline to most of maia's character development.

Out of curiosity, how much influence do the Hugos have in the Anglophone SFF sphere?

Yeah, that's what I meant, than you. You're actually the only person I've seen mentionning the abuse.

Huh, I'm kind of surprised no one else has mentioned it. :/ It's not like your typical fairly tale with the obligatory evil step-parents: it's pretty explicit that Maia was abused and he's still dealing with that a year after getting out. But it does handle it... if you can imagine an abuse storyline that's fairly realistic and doesn't gloss anything over but is still a nice, pleasant read. that's this book.

Like. Everybody takes him at his word when he tells them what happened and is appropriately horrified and supportive, and even the abuser is basically like "fair cop, I was awful, I understand that you never want to see me again" and then goes away, and all the descriptions of what happened are very matter-of-fact not torture porn-y, and his breakdowns are the quiet kind not the messy kind, and so on - most of it really is just revealed in how Maia slowly realizes that his abuse survival mechanisms a) exist, and b) don't work well as Emperor survival mechanisms.

And I don't actually know! I think that's one of the things that the scandal this year is going to help us find out. For a long time the Hugos were THE award you wanted to win and a guarantee of a spot in the SF canon and never going out of print, and "Hugo award-winning author" meant your career was made.

A Hugo nom is still not something you turn down lightly, but I do think that with the social changes in fandom in the last century and the huge proliferation in ways to get tailored recs, and the change in how the genre finds its audiences and defines itself, its influence has been changing too. But I think after this year's Hugos it's going to change again, I'm just not sure in which direction.

Edited 2015-07-17 23:52 (UTC)

To be fair, it could have been me not really paying attention. On the other hand, no one said anything about Sense8 or Daredevil either. It's not so much that I'm triggered so much as I like to be forewarned.

Thank you for the amount of details, btw. It'll help me decide if I want to/am in the right frame of mind to read it.

Thank you for the explanation. I don't live in an Anglophone country and tend not to care about awards, so it wasn't really on my radar before this whole thing.

I have read both Ancillary Sword and TGE... and I quite agree with your comments. You managed to articulate what are my feelings about TGE: nice, and a good read, but ultimately kind of bland... Also you pointed out the fact that it could easily not have been a fantasy novel at all, which I had intuited, but not really thought about in that way... While reading it, I had those flash that it kind of felt inspired by Chinese’s dynasty and if the characters had been human, it could well have been an historic fantasy book à la Guy Gavriel Kay, only the writing wasn't rich enough for it? Anyway, nice book, but I agree it doesn't really deserve an award.
And I have to say that your review of The Three-Body Problem didn't really make me want to pick it up... Maybe because you spent more time discussing its flaws than what it did right; and because those flaws seems to overpower the good parts? Would you recommend it at all?

I'm being way harsher than I usually would here because I'm judging them against the standard of "does it deserve a hugo award" rather than "was it worth reading".

Three-Body problem probably isn't a book I'd've picked up on my own, but it probably wasn't as bad as I'm making it seem? If you can put up with an asshole protagonist who mostly just wanders around getting blandly exposited to with no initiative on his part (I think I'm going to call him a "narrative tool" because he is 100% a tool) it's got some interesting, if incompletely developed, SF concepts and aliens, and some vivid images, and I did really like everything with Ye Wenjie and it certainly challenged me more that Goblin Emperor- it just had some major flaws as well. It definitely isn't a rip-roaring yarn or anything that will make you get invested in the characters, though.

calledtovienna tells me that she's heard from someone who read it in the original that in the original, a bunch of chapters were arranged differently and that Ye Wenjie was more clearly the protagonist of the novel. I definitely have the feeling that Ken Liu was not the right translator for this project, and that has me curious how the second book, with a different translator, will look.

I would believe that! It would be interesting to read that version, hmm.

I put Goblin Emperor first because Ancillary Sword is a sequel to a book that won last year and I bounced off The Three Body Problem so hard. I tried to give it a fair shake. But I got to the thing about physicists killing themselves because they don't know stuff, and went, "you know, I have been forcing myself to get through a whole pile of really disjointed stuff that is unpleasant and sometimes horrifying without any redeeming features, hoping that once the Real Plot came in and started, it would all come together to make sense. At this point, I don't care whether or not it ever makes sense. And if this is a major plot point, it is inane. I have better things to do with my time."

I caught the abuse dynamics and how those were driving whats-his-face, the hero of The Goblin Emperor, from fairly early on.

I picked up the abuse dynamics fairly early on but I didn't realize until much later specifically that he was Emperor because what's-his-face had told him he had to be Emperor and he hadn't gone out of survival mode long enough to think about it. (I should have picked up on it sooner, probably, but I was trapped in the "is it bad writing or subtle writing?" dilemma.)

I enjoyed the Ye Wenjie stuff enough to keep going in hopes of more of that but I can see how that part could have turned someone off enough on its own (And it took a long time for that narrative to have any SF aspects in it.)

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