BEST SERIES HERE WE GO
Jul. 24th, 2018 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraBut first, two more books from serieses:
City of Blades, Robert Jackson Bennett. Grittier and less fun than the first one, but kudos to Bennett for making a real attempt to grapple in a fantasy context with USian wars of occupation in the Middle East. I'll read the third one (although not before voting). Oh hey, also I found out he's apparently a double Shirley Jackson winner for two of his previous novels (this is mostly for Chaos's benefit now that we're interested in the Shirley Jacksons).
The Edge of Worlds, Martha Wells. First of a duology following the original Raksura trilogy. The first two thirds of this were very slow; by the end it had gotten somewhere interesting and I want to read the second one, but gah. A lot of buildup before we got into Wells' typical excellent settings and action. Also as much as I love Moon, I kind of wish she had decided to tell this story primarily from a fresh POV, and let us enjoy seeing someone else's POV on Moon.
Further comments and ballot behind the cut.
Where by "comments" I might mean "whining", at least in this paragraph: Series is *hard* and it's a *terrible, ill-conceived category*, blaaagh.
But, okay. First off, I'm not touching the Sanderson. I hear "ten planned volumes" and I think "okay you can't tell a story in a reasonable space to save your life", my time is more valuable than that.
Of everyone else, I had already read three of the Wells books, three novels and two novellas of the Bujold books, and, weirdly, one of the McGuire books, which I didn't even realize until I saw the title and read a description and was like waaaaait a minute I think I read this thing, back around the time it came out when I hadn't figured out yet that I don't like McGuire's stuff. (So possibly I should shut up about how much reading the series category adds when I'm sure I had a leg up on it by chance compared with some people. I mean, not entirely by chance, I actually nominated the Raksura books so it makes sense I would have read some of my own nominee. Anyways.) To wrap up McGuire, I didn't care for it, but I'm going to go ahead and list the series on my ballot, thus effectively ahead of the Sanderson series, and I feel okay about that. (If it comes down to the two of them I don't really care who wins.)
Figuring out how to rank the Bujold was the hardest thing on this ballot, that I've been grappling with basically since I saw the list of finalists, because the novels are *so good* and the Penric novellas are so uninteresting to me. I mean, I don't know how many times I've comfort-read Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls and recommended them to people and hoped Bujold would write more in that world (and I do like Hallowed Hunt, just not as much)... and then when what we got was *Penric*... gah. Thus my feeling that series are just too big and variable to try to rank for awards, it's just so messy to take something with two brilliant parts and several tedious parts and try to have one overall feeling about it. Especially when the brilliant parts happened *15-17 years ago*. What I have finally ended up with, though, is that we (the general Hugo "we", I wasn't voting back then) *did* recognize both Curse of Chalion (it was nominated for Best Novel in 2002 and lost to American Gods) and Paladin of Souls (it won in 2004) and that this series has thus already been adequately honored and I can go ahead and rank other newer stuff ahead of it.
And now we're down to three. The Divine Cities books are cool and clever and I'm happy to have started reading them because of this ballot, although I admit if I had never read them I don't exactly feel like I'd be missing something, any more than not having read any particular book.
The Memoirs of Lady Trent on the other hand were a surprise and delight and possibly my favorite thing I read this year for ballot purposes and, of everything, by far the strongest *series* on the ballot, like, *as a series* their pacing and development and overall arc was so much more coherent than anything else here. Divine Cities is (so far) two related standalones, Five Gods is three related standalones (or maybe a duology and a standalone if you prefer) plus a tacked-on novella sequence, Raksura was a trilogy, some miscellaneous novellas, and a duology. Lady Trent is really the only thing that read like it was planned as a series, written as a series, told its story, and finished, and I was really tempted to rank it first just for that, just for being such a good exemplar of what can be done with series format.
But while the Lady Trent books were aimed squarely at my particular id, in the end I don't feel like they're as broadly recommendable as the Raksura books. The original trilogy (Cloud Roads, Serpent Sea, Siren Depths) combines such a strong character/emotional arc (just think of Moon in Cloud Roads vs Moon in the first part of Siren Depths - the part where [elided] is one of my favorite found-family moments ever) with some of the best adventure and most vivid settings I've ever read. And the novellas have more good adventure and character moments, especially in Dark Earth Below, which I kind of wish had been the capstone to the series. (But it seems possible that Harbors of the Sun is going to redeem Edge of Worlds, so I don't want to hold the duology feeling unnecessary too much against the series.) So I'm going to have to pick the Raksura as the one series here I really think more people should read, even if, at this particular time, I have bigger heart-eyes over Lady Trent.
Thus:
1. The Books of the Raksura, Martha Wells
2. The Memoirs of Lady Trent, Marie Brennan
3. The Divine Cities, Robert Jackson Bennett
4. World of the Five Gods, Lois McMaster Bujold
5. InCryptid, Seanan McGuire
City of Blades, Robert Jackson Bennett. Grittier and less fun than the first one, but kudos to Bennett for making a real attempt to grapple in a fantasy context with USian wars of occupation in the Middle East. I'll read the third one (although not before voting). Oh hey, also I found out he's apparently a double Shirley Jackson winner for two of his previous novels (this is mostly for Chaos's benefit now that we're interested in the Shirley Jacksons).
The Edge of Worlds, Martha Wells. First of a duology following the original Raksura trilogy. The first two thirds of this were very slow; by the end it had gotten somewhere interesting and I want to read the second one, but gah. A lot of buildup before we got into Wells' typical excellent settings and action. Also as much as I love Moon, I kind of wish she had decided to tell this story primarily from a fresh POV, and let us enjoy seeing someone else's POV on Moon.
Further comments and ballot behind the cut.
Where by "comments" I might mean "whining", at least in this paragraph: Series is *hard* and it's a *terrible, ill-conceived category*, blaaagh.
But, okay. First off, I'm not touching the Sanderson. I hear "ten planned volumes" and I think "okay you can't tell a story in a reasonable space to save your life", my time is more valuable than that.
Of everyone else, I had already read three of the Wells books, three novels and two novellas of the Bujold books, and, weirdly, one of the McGuire books, which I didn't even realize until I saw the title and read a description and was like waaaaait a minute I think I read this thing, back around the time it came out when I hadn't figured out yet that I don't like McGuire's stuff. (So possibly I should shut up about how much reading the series category adds when I'm sure I had a leg up on it by chance compared with some people. I mean, not entirely by chance, I actually nominated the Raksura books so it makes sense I would have read some of my own nominee. Anyways.) To wrap up McGuire, I didn't care for it, but I'm going to go ahead and list the series on my ballot, thus effectively ahead of the Sanderson series, and I feel okay about that. (If it comes down to the two of them I don't really care who wins.)
Figuring out how to rank the Bujold was the hardest thing on this ballot, that I've been grappling with basically since I saw the list of finalists, because the novels are *so good* and the Penric novellas are so uninteresting to me. I mean, I don't know how many times I've comfort-read Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls and recommended them to people and hoped Bujold would write more in that world (and I do like Hallowed Hunt, just not as much)... and then when what we got was *Penric*... gah. Thus my feeling that series are just too big and variable to try to rank for awards, it's just so messy to take something with two brilliant parts and several tedious parts and try to have one overall feeling about it. Especially when the brilliant parts happened *15-17 years ago*. What I have finally ended up with, though, is that we (the general Hugo "we", I wasn't voting back then) *did* recognize both Curse of Chalion (it was nominated for Best Novel in 2002 and lost to American Gods) and Paladin of Souls (it won in 2004) and that this series has thus already been adequately honored and I can go ahead and rank other newer stuff ahead of it.
And now we're down to three. The Divine Cities books are cool and clever and I'm happy to have started reading them because of this ballot, although I admit if I had never read them I don't exactly feel like I'd be missing something, any more than not having read any particular book.
The Memoirs of Lady Trent on the other hand were a surprise and delight and possibly my favorite thing I read this year for ballot purposes and, of everything, by far the strongest *series* on the ballot, like, *as a series* their pacing and development and overall arc was so much more coherent than anything else here. Divine Cities is (so far) two related standalones, Five Gods is three related standalones (or maybe a duology and a standalone if you prefer) plus a tacked-on novella sequence, Raksura was a trilogy, some miscellaneous novellas, and a duology. Lady Trent is really the only thing that read like it was planned as a series, written as a series, told its story, and finished, and I was really tempted to rank it first just for that, just for being such a good exemplar of what can be done with series format.
But while the Lady Trent books were aimed squarely at my particular id, in the end I don't feel like they're as broadly recommendable as the Raksura books. The original trilogy (Cloud Roads, Serpent Sea, Siren Depths) combines such a strong character/emotional arc (just think of Moon in Cloud Roads vs Moon in the first part of Siren Depths - the part where [elided] is one of my favorite found-family moments ever) with some of the best adventure and most vivid settings I've ever read. And the novellas have more good adventure and character moments, especially in Dark Earth Below, which I kind of wish had been the capstone to the series. (But it seems possible that Harbors of the Sun is going to redeem Edge of Worlds, so I don't want to hold the duology feeling unnecessary too much against the series.) So I'm going to have to pick the Raksura as the one series here I really think more people should read, even if, at this particular time, I have bigger heart-eyes over Lady Trent.
Thus:
1. The Books of the Raksura, Martha Wells
2. The Memoirs of Lady Trent, Marie Brennan
3. The Divine Cities, Robert Jackson Bennett
4. World of the Five Gods, Lois McMaster Bujold
5. InCryptid, Seanan McGuire
