2017 novels - preliminary Hugo-nominating post

[psocoptera]

I have hit the point in my personal February when I'm starting to face the reality that I can't read, like, sixteen more 2017 books from my to-read list before Hugo nominations close on March 16th. I can probably read a couple more things, but what I can also do is start talking about my nominations far enough in advance that someone else could hypothetically read something I liked. Possibly I should have said weeks ago that if I was the Secret Master of Hugos, I would want Stone Sky to get Best Novel (and the threepeat), In Other Lands to get the YA/Lodestar, and the Queen's Thief series to get Best Series. Doesn't that sound perfect? It's so good it almost undermines my enthusiasm for coming up with 5-item ballots. But of course I'm going to do so anyways because I am not actually SMOH.

Here's a (hopefully complete) list of all the 2017 SFF novels I've read:

Seven Surrenders, Ada Palmer
Thick As Thieves, Megan Whalen Turner (YA)
Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee
The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, Mackenzi Lee (YA)
Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty
The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
The Wanderers, Meg Howrey
Waste of Space, Gina Damico (YA)
The Space Between The Stars, Anne Corlett
The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden
Squirrel Meets World, Shannon Hale & Dean Hale (YA)
Winter Tide, Ruthanna Emrys
Null States, Malka Older
Jane, Unlimited, Kristin Cashore (YA)
Provenance, Ann Leckie
The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman (YA)
The Prey of Gods, Nicky Drayden
Into the Bright Unknown, Rae Carson (YA)
Autonomous, Annalee Newitz
Artemis, Andy Weir
The Stars Are Legion, Kameron Hurley
An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon
The Power, Naomi Alderman (I would have sworn this was a 2016 book but it's on the wiki so I don't even know)
In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan (YA)
Frogkisser!, Garth Nix (YA)

And here's what I've pulled out of there for Best Novel nominees:

Definitely:
The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin

Very Likely:
Autonomous, Annalee Newitz
The Stars Are Legion, Kameron Hurley
Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee

Maybe:
The Wanderers, Meg Howrey
Null States, Malka Older

It's possible that what I really want with Null States is for more people to read the first one, Infomocracy. I think Wanderers is definitely SFF (it's about a simulated Mars mission) but I think was maybe marketed more on the literary side? Anyways I don't think it has any chance of seeing the ballot and maybe not even the long list and I'm willing to spend nominations on things with no chances if I absolutely loved them, but maybe not if there are other things I'd be just as happy to put on there.

YA/Lodestar: (I am trying really hard to learn the name "Lodestar" which I keep forgetting and having to look up)

Definitely:
In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan
Thick As Thieves, Megan Whalen Turner

Very Likely:
Jane, Unlimited, Kristin Cashore

Maybe:
Frogkisser!, Garth Nix
The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, Mackenzi Lee

Gentleman's Guide is only very slightly SFF and Frogkisser! was fun but... I don't know, a little young and not the precedent I want to see as the first recipient of this award? Man, I really need some more YA books for this category. I just started reading April Daniels' Dreadnought (which I almost typoed as Dreadnougat, which would make a fantastic band name), but I'm only a few chapters in.

(Here's everything else relevant that's actually in my house right now: City of Brass (S.A. Chakraborty; I"m about halfway through), After The Flare (Deji Bryce Olukotun), and Barbary Station (R.E. Stearns). And in my library ebook queue, Want (Cindy Pon) and An Unkindness of Magicians (Kat Howard), but I probably won't get either of those before, like, summer.)

Best Series:
Queen's Thief, Megan Whalen Turner
Books of the Raksura, Martha Wells

I haven't actually read the latest installments of the Raksura books but I really liked the first three, so I feel comfortable nominating them as a series on that basis.

Comments

[jedusor]

Gentleman's Guide was fun but I'm surprised to even see it in a discussion of the Hugos. I thought the supernatural element was the weakest part of it by far. I haven't read any of the others you note as nominees, though several are on my to-read list (Stone Sky high enough to be in the part of the list I've actually arranged into the order I'm going to read them in... I wonder how other people structure their to-read lists XD).

[psocoptera]

You're totally right, the supernatural element *was* weak in Gentleman's Guide, and if I was describing the book to someone I would say it was a historical adventure-romance and not use any SFF words at all until later in the conversation, and I wouldn't want to see it win, but, I don't know, I'm flailing. It's the perpetual conflict between my self-image as a YA reader and my actual lagging YA reading.

As far as my list, please ignore this if you didn't actually want to know, but like a year and a half later I'm still really pleased and excited about having moved from plain text (which was a giant mess, no structure, tons of duplicates) to a spreadsheet so I can sort by author or date added or priority. I have four priority rankings, a fifth for misc stuff like cookbooks or picture books, and then a sixth and seventh that mean either that I finished something or that I didn't (and then the original priority ranking moves over to a new column). So nothing ever comes off the spreadsheet, it just gathers more data like a happy reading snowball. I still have a huge swath of stuff I haven't given retroactive priority numbers or that's badly formatted (titles and authors swapped, etc... I was really not consistent with my original list) but I enjoy poking at those from time to time. In practice, most of what I actually read has a former priority ranking of 1 or 2, so you could say that a 3 or 4 means that I accept that I'm never going to make time for something, but I still find it useful to have already written them down the *next* time I see something that makes me think I might want to read them, and, I don't know, I like that the info is there if I ever want them, it satisfies some of my hoarding impulses in a completely harmless way :).

[jedusaur]

I did want to know! That spreadsheet sounds a lot like the one I keep for queer movies, which is pushing 500 titles at the moment. I don't have anything nearly so organized for books; I use a combination of Goodreads and my library's "For Later Shelf" function, with the planned order of the next few depending on what I have easily to hand, due dates, how likely the friend who loaned a book to me is to ask how I'm liking it and force me to admit I haven't started it yet, and sometimes what other people seem to be talking about the most. I usually have at least one fiction and one nonfiction going at the same time for different moods, and often one serious/cognitively-taxing fiction and one light fiction.

[jedusaur]

(don't mind me with the random account-switching, I'm doing a lot of Bitchin' Party concomm stuff these days and lose track of how I'm logged in)