psocoptera

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!

I talked about Spinning Silver here, Revenant Gun here, Record of a Spaceborn Few here, Trail of Lightning here, and Space Opera here. The very quick summaries of those are that I loved Spinning Silver, enjoyed Space Opera, and had issues with Revenant Gun, Spaceborn Few, and Trail of Lightning. So the top two slots on my ballot are going to be pretty easy here, and after that it gets harder. Sometimes it's hard to rank something as low as third place, here it feels kind of hard to rank something as high as third place. Still, the ranking must go on. It's maybe a little tempting to vote against whichever of the remaining four I think will be most popular, which probably means relatively downvoting Calculating Stars, although, gah, I don't know, would I rather see Calculating Stars take it than Trail of Lightning or Revenant Gun? How do I compare an exciting book that totally failed the landing vs a comparatively unexciting book that stuck theirs? This is hard, why was I excited to do this.

1 - Spinning Silver
2 - Space Opera
3 - Record of a Spaceborn Few
4 - Trail of Lightning
5 - Revenant Gun
6 - Calculating Stars

But no promises I'm not going to rerank the bottom half before the deadline. I do think Calculating Stars is the likely winner.

Here's what I know about Long Editors:

I haven't read anything that Sheila Gilbert edited in 2018, nor am I hoping to.

I haven't read anything that Anne Lesley Groell edited in 2018, nor am I hoping to.

Beth Meacham edited Calculating Stars, which, I don't know, did not strike me as particularly strong in the pacing department, but I think did what it was trying to do, and its real problem was that I just wanted it to be doing something different.

Diana Pho edited Black God's Drums, one of my absolute favorite 2018 works, and also The Barrow Will Send What It May, which had either some major plot holes in its mystery or was not edited well enough to not completely confuse me (I talked about it here). I guess I'm inclined to give her credit for Black God's Drums and forgive her for Barrow.

I haven't read anything that Gillian Redfearn edited in 2018, but I might eventually someday read the Ben Aaronovitch book if I ever make further progress in that series.

Navah Wolfe edited Space Opera, which must have been an undertaking.

So, I think I'm going to vote for Pho and Wolfe, in that order, and not attempt to rank anybody else.