Last Friday, before descending into fluff topics like a serious scholarly treatment of Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber posted about something really important: The Hugo Awards.
Weirdly, I find myself in the position of having read all of the Best Novel nominees, and this months before the awards themselves are announced. This is unprecedented– even the year that I voted for the Hugos, I didn’t read all the nominated works. (I’ve read basically none of the short fiction nominees– of which there are many— but this is nothing new.)
This obviously demands some surprisingly-well-informed comment from me. As this topic is of interest to approximately six of my readers, I will provide it below the fold.
Taking them in the order that I would rank them on the ballot, were I to vote:
- Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. I thought this was far and away the best SF novel I’ve read in the last year, and probably in the last several years. It’s got SF ideas on a grand scale, and characters and relationships that are every bit as good as you find in mainstream literature. It’s a fantastic book, and everybody should read it.
- Learning the World by Ken MacLeod. I finished this just the other night (so there’s no booklog post to link to), and it’s a very strong second. It’s a first contact story of sorts, with a generation ship full of post-humans arriving at their destination planet to find it already inhabited by a race of alien space bats with approximately Victorian technology levels. It’s got lots of good stuff, as the alien scientists detect the presence of the humans, and the humans debate what to do about the space bats. It goes off the rails a little bit at the very end, with a big dramatic showdown that felt kind of forced, and a metaphysical coda that struck me as slightly dippy (in that it’s basically a hard left turn into landscapeology). It’s a clear step down from Spin, but an excellent book, and I say this as someone who really disliked some of his earlier books.
- Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. This was probably the most fun of any of the nominees– Spin is excellent, but it’s the sort of book that you finish, and want to sit quietly and think about for a while. Old Man’s War is more of a “Hey, that was cool, when’s the sequel coming out?” kind of book. It’s got snappy dialogue, space battles, boot camp scenes, and a quickly moving, highly entertaining plot. I put it below Spin and Learning the World because it’s just not as weighty as those books– it’s not total fluff, but it’s not quite as substantial as the other two. It’s still a very good book, and a lot of fun to read.
- A Feast for Crows by George R. R.
TolkienMartin. The latest book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, I put this low on the list because it shows some worrying signs of Robert Jordan syndrome. It’s close to a thousand pages long, and nothing much happens, other than a number of characters wandering around in a way that seems to position them for future events. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t really bode well for the series as a whole. - Accelerando by Charles Stross. This is probably the book with the most buzz of any of the nominees, but I thought it was an incoherent mess. There are some nifty ideas, but there’s so much stuff thrown into the book that there was bound to be something cool. It’s not just too clever for its own good, it’s too pround of its cleverness to not be annoying. The book is a fix-up of some older stories, and I thought it was significantly inferior to last year’s Iron Sunrise (which was written later).
So, those are my thoughts, for whatever that’s worth (not much– my voting was almost perfectly anti-correlated with the final results the year that I voted). You are now welcome to hold forth in the comments on how I’m a cretin with no taste in literature.
I can’t compare Accelerando to Iron Sunrise, but I can compare it to Singularity Sky. Specifically, I thought A was much better than SS, which is due mostly to the fact that I actively disliked SS. I disliked it sufficiently that I won’t bother with IS as a result.
I still don’t think that means A is award worthy, but I predict it will win because Charlie has a good grasp of what the market wants, a good grasp of marketting once he’s made that decision, has generated a lot of personal buzz, and is a competant writer at the very least.
I’d give it to Spin, myself, which was just an excellent, excellent novel, in addition to being a good piece of SF as well.
Hold on, you’re admitting that you were voting for the Hugos and didn’t bother to read all the books? Isn’t that a bit irresponsible?
Hold on, you’re admitting that you were voting for the Hugos and didn’t bother to read all the books? Isn’t that a bit irresponsible?
I read four of the five nominees that year, and the fifth was the second book of a trilogy by Robert Sawyer. The first book looked pretty unappealing, and I couldn’t see myself reading both volumes just so I could vote the second below “No Award” with a clear conscience.
John: I still don’t think that means A is award worthy, but I predict it will win because Charlie has a good grasp of what the market wants, a good grasp of marketting once he’s made that decision, has generated a lot of personal buzz, and is a competant writer at the very least.
That’s more or less my feeling as well. MacLeod has a lot of the same factors going for him, though, plus he has the advantage of his nominee not being a fix-up of a bunch of short stories from several years ago.
Thanks for the precis on Spin – I will definitely NOT read it – sounds too damn much to me like ID or religion affecting things to be realistic or something I would like. Old Man’s War however, was excellent, and yes, I will eagerly await the sequel as much as a new S.M. Stirling .
Thanks for the precis on Spin – I will definitely NOT read it – sounds too damn much to me like ID or religion affecting things to be realistic or something I would like.
Huh?!
I guess it’s high time for me to give MacLeod a try and this one appears to be something I may like. Isn’t it a shame I have not read anything by him yet?
I almost bought the Connie Willis novellette this morning. If I have known at that time that it was nominated, I probably would have bought it. I will next time (or online).
coturnix: I guess it’s high time for me to give MacLeod a try and this one appears to be something I may like. Isn’t it a shame I have not read anything by him yet?
I bounced hard off The Cassini Division, but I enjoyed both Newton’s Wake and Learning the World quite a bit. What I’ve heard about his earlier series really doesn’t make me inclined to go back and give them another chance (though some things he said at Boskone almost do), but I’ll definitely keep an eye out for his future books.
j-Dog: Thanks for the precis on Spin – I will definitely NOT read it – sounds too damn much to me like ID or religion affecting things to be realistic or something I would like.
I’m also sort of puzzled by this. It is a godlike aliens story, but the godlike aliens are offstage, and not at all what you might expect. And the only real religion in the book is an unflattering portrayal of a cult.
My experience with R.C.Wilson has been quite mixed so far – I loved some of his stuff and just hated some other. I see that blogosphere is quite split on Spin: some love it, some hate it. I’ll put it on the back burner for now, perhaps get a cheap second-hand copy some time later.
Learning the World seems to be the best entry to MacLeod for me, topic-wise and style-wise, from what I have read on blogs so far. Someone mentioned that it is similar to Vinge’s Fire From The Deep (which I loved!) but is more subtle. That is something I am interested in.
I’m puzzled at how much people seem to like Spin. It was pretty good, but didn’t strike me as outstanding in any way. I only read it a few weeks ago, and already I can’t remember much about it.
Coturnix: Actually, the Vinge novel to which Learning the World has been frequently compared is A Deepness In the Sky.
I just read Spin this week (On the beach, in Jamaica ), and I thought it was excellent. A few caveats about particular characters notwithstanding, I thought both the ideas and the relationships the book presented were skillfully realized and captivating.
I’d say it’s a better book than the Martin (which suffers major hump-o-the-series-itis) or the Scalzi (which is immensely fun but not quite as significant in scope; still a close call for me). I’ve yet to read the other two, but hope to do so before the vote, just because I’ve never tried to before. The MacLeod, in particular, sounds right up my alley.
I failed to notice that my pseudo-HTML [braggart] tags surrounding my first parenthetical were stripped from my previous comment. Just so’s ya’ know.
The MacLeod, in particular, sounds right up my alley.
After looking at Amazon, I realized that he was writing a first contact story about literal Alien Space Bats.
Someone who knows my taste in science fiction is going to have a eal job convincing me that I wouldn’t just vomit all over the pages in response to that.
Even better! That’s his best IMHO!