The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal. I was going to skip this one, having been lukewarm about the novelette, but then it made the Nebulas and the Hugos and here we are. And... I"m still lukewarm about it. I love space, and have a pretty endless appetite for stories about space exploration, and I'm interested by reluctant necessity in stories about how we might grapple as a planet with impending human extinction, but this book felt weirdly short on both of those, for its premise? Like, I guess for the end to feel like a big payoff, Kowal had to ration out how much space we could get before that, but it left a lot of the book just feeling like a workplace drama. And I have a lot of complicated feelings about stories about people struggling with their anxiety and whether/how to treat it (as a person currently not treating mine, myself), but they boil down to my not being into that particular part of this story at this particular time.
I'm excited that I get to rank novels now, though! (And also Long Editors, because one of them edited this, so I was waiting on it to do them.) This is the last of the big fiction categories for me, after this I just have Semipros and Short Editors, Relateds, Fanwriters, and Fanzines, and the three art categories. Which I guess is still a lot, but it feels like progress anyways. Novels and editors behind the cut!
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