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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
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
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After that? Actually? Yes!
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