New York 2140 and my Hugo Novel ballot

[psocoptera]

New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson, standalone. (Could possibly secretly be in a bigger universe with some of his other books but I didn't catch any references.) I liked this more than I thought I would during the first fifth or so, although I do think he's developed some acquired editing immunity, the phenomenon in which as an author accumulates prestige, their editors fail to edit them as strictly anymore. Didn't help that he's deliberately doing a Steinbeck-Melville thing with chapters of direct commentary/future history/free association, etc. Really felt its length.

Also (cut for some more specific/spoilery comments) I think he's trying, but it's *so hard* for cishet dude writers to not view their women characters through the lens of how fuckable they are, and I'm just so over that POV. I found Franklin's endgame romance with Charlotte kind of distasteful - whether you read her as a reward for him becoming a better person, or *proof* that he's become a better person, we don't really get her POV on it and it just felt to me like it was more a part of his story than hers. Not in a deliberate "romance/sex/this-particular-fuckboy just aren't as important to her as other parts of her life" way, but in a "he's more of a character than she is" way. Meh. Content note for animal harm.

And now, some space, and then my ranking and comments.

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Predicting Stone Sky to win it and earn Jemisin the threepeat. If there were another strong contender/serious challenger I might predict that people would feel that Jemisin had been awarded enough already, but I don't think there's any one of these that's going to rally more people around it than Stone Sky. (And I'll be appalled if one does tbh.)

So I've got:

1. The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
2. Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
3. Provenance, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
4. Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)
5. The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor)
6. New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)

The first three were pretty easy to rank. (For the record, this is my first time I'm personally top-ranking one of the Broken Earth trilogy; in 2016 I ranked Fifth Season third, after Ancillary Mercy and Uprooted, and in 2017 I ranked Obelisk Gate fourth after Ninefox Gambit, Closed and Common Orbit, and All the Birds in the Sky. So I guess in one sense I'm a bandwagon fan, but I really did enjoy Stone Sky a lot more than the first two, and the trilogy is so clearly the big thing that happened in fantasy in the late 20teens.) Ranking the bottom three was harder - I loved the concept of Six Wakes, but somewhat less how it played out; Scalzi is *so* competent (but this isn't the "what book would I pick for a transatlantic flight" award), NY2140 is a lot more serious and ambitious than most of the non-Jemisin books and yet ended up feeling kind of shallow and frustrating in its serving up of political fantasy. But I had to rank them somehow, so here they are.

Comments

[ruthling]

am not reading whole thing because spoilers, but enjoy the phrase "acquired editing immunity" because true

[glassonion]

Ooh, hey, i've actually finished my novel ballot, so i can reply to this (on your tip that i should finish reading that last YA book, i still need to do that, so i'm coming back to it, and i'm on-track for novellas, but it's only Friday, so that means i'm not done yet. This is really a marathon. I wish either the packet had come out 3 weeks earlier or i'd been more willing to accept that it wasn't going to and gotten my act together. But this isn't the me whining about voting category either).

Thanks for the blink-tagged "don't bother finishing this book, Glassonion" spoiler for 2140; i probably don't say often enough how much your friendship improves my life.

In response, i'll take a stab at encouraging you not to feel bad for not rewarding KSR's vision. Because i think i've read more of his books in this universe and/or about global warming than you have (in particular, i read 2312, and about 1.5 of the 40/50/60 books), and i don't see this as a Serious Ambitious book; i see it as a "playing around in my sandbox" book. Like, all the pieces of how humanity adapts and evolves and the serious warnings about the dangers of climate change are already in place in this universe. This is the book where he said, "Ohhh, and i bet in between all of those things, that would happen. That would be fun." I didn't get far enough for even the beginning of Franklin's redemptive arc, so take with a grain of salt, but i definitely read him as an authorial standin, like, my lesson from the first quarter of the book was that this day-trading-about-tides scenario is the awesome nugget that made KSR want to write this book. And i don't consider myself obligated to respect that as a serious vision if i don't want to. I think it's playing around with a fun corner of an existing sandbox in very much the same way Provenance is, and if you enjoyed Provenance and didn't enjoy this, there's no reason to feel a moment's hesitation about that.

[psocoptera]

It's always the whining about voting category! I feel like I have been cranking away for *months*, how do I still have *eleven categories* left. Which, okay, include things like "put some fanart in my eyeballs" which will presumably not take so long, but still.

Awww re friendship. ::hugs you::

Re NY2140 - major spoilers after a small space; I know you said you aren't finishing it so I'm guessing you probably won't mind but just in case, bail out now, space space space etc

space

etc

So, about halfway through the book, a bunch of the plot lines that have been going so far wrap up, at which point I was like "how is there *half of this book left*??". And the answer is that the second half is pretty much a case for nationalizing the finance industry, with KSR laying out this case in various ways and then spinning a scenario in which the US of the early 2140s actually manages to do that, through the coincidence of public outcry after a major hurricane disaster in NYC, manipulation by Franklin, personal persuasion of the chair of the Fed, etc. But it's basically KSR arguing that the banks should have been nationalized in 2008 and should *be* nationalized the next time there's a major financial crisis, and claiming that a lot of little factors could come together to make such a hard-to-imagine thing possible. Which, on the one hand, I respect that he's seriously grappling with this big question of capitalism and is there anything we can do about it, and on the other hand there's something pretty frustrating about a scenario in which winning depends on people having to literally find a billion-dollar buried gold treasure and an erotic river-ice breakup exactly at the moment someone is discussing bank nationalization with their ex-husband chair of the Fed, like, welp, yay for serendipity, I guess, but what are the odds, out here in reality. (Hmmm, and now I'm wondering if the treasure thing makes this an explicit rebuttal to Cryptonomicon, which as I recall involves buried gold treasure being the key to totally-govt-independent finance.)