psocoptera

Puzzleheart, Jenn Reese, 2024 middlegrade. Cute fantasy about a sentient magical house that's a sort of living escape room. Did not quite entirely land for me - this is the kind of book that starts in the real world and then magical stuff starts happening, and the tween protagonist and new friend did not really seem like the kind of people who would accept this foundational break in world-logic without significantly more metaphysical distress (is there a better term for this? maybe supernatural shock?) - and I admit to doing some skimming, but it was sweet and fun and had a solid little middlegrade moral lesson about kids not being responsible for fixing their parents. I wouldn't necessarily rec it to other adults but I would cheerfully put a copy in every elementary-school library in America.

... goes to Nicola Griffith! Her blog post here.

I did not have Griffith on my list of likelies, but sure! I like that! Especially if the goal is to move toward awarding people who are current "masters" as in their career is still going strong/they are still producing interesting work.

Don't know who the Infinity is yet.

(My list of likely or potential recipients, edited for 2025: [John Crowley (1942)], John Varley (1947), Nancy Kress (1948), Kim Stanley Robinson (1952), Greg Egan (1961), Martha Wells (1964), Ted Chiang (1967), John Scalzi (1969), NK Jemisin (1972), Ursula Vernon (1977), Seanan McGuire (1978). Griffith was born in 1960 and is thus plausibly "ahead" of many of these people (and also has MS which might be a factor in trying to guess how close we are to losing her vs anyone else, which I know is morbid, but I think will always be a consideration after the Butler failure.))

(My Infinity list, while we're here: Diana Wynne Jones (still and always my #1 guess until they finally pick her), Terry Pratchett, Zelazny, Joanna Russ, Philip K Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Iain M Banks, Vernor Vinge. [ETA: last time I made this list some friends made some good suggestions in the comments, of whom CL Moore, Frank Herbert, James Tiptree, and Zenna Henderson fit my (suspected) criterion of having died after they started giving out the Grand Master award. And I added Crowley above who is still alive.] Plus people who are still alive but could be Grand Master candidates on the basis of their careers, but maybe not their personalities, and thus might be Infinity candidates once they're not around in person, although honestly I think nobody is going to bother when there are other candidates who would be more exciting to current SFWA membership: Orson Scott Card, David Brin.)

In the Shadow of the Fall, Tobi Ogundiran, 2024 novella. If you're looking for epic fantasy in a West-African-inspired world, this is one! Competently done but didn't have the little hooks of humor or character or beautiful writing that might have made me really care about it. Also felt more like the first act of novel than a complete story, which is fine - serialization is a valid way to publish - but means it could be awhile to an actual conclusion. ETA: Quite cinematic, though - I can see it working well as the first act of a movie, or the first couple episodes of a series. Maybe animated? Dreamworks style? A good theme would do a lot for emotional engagement - John Williams introducing Luke, but African. (Who did Black Panther, that was well-scored as I recall. Ludwig Göransson, apparently, who is... Swedish. Perhaps Michael Abels, who did Nope. I mean, probably actually someone from Nigerian cinema I've never heard of.) Anyways, I think it works better for me if I think of it as wanting to be a dramatic work.

The Ghost and the Golem, Benjamin Rosenbaum, interactive "choose your own adventure" style text game. On the Nebula ballot for Game Writing and I have high hopes of seeing it on the Hugo ballot as well.

Rosenbaum wrote my favorite book of 2021 so of course I was excited about this, but then I put off playing it for a long time because of anxiety. Some technological anxiety (was I going to need some special software to obtain or play it? no, it turned out to be a thing I could buy for my phone from the Google Play apps store) and some anxiety that I have only recently managed to name *as* anxiety around interacting with what I am tentatively thinking of as "anisotropic media" or "directional media", encompassing both dramatized forms like TV and movies and games like this one with a one-way flow forward through the game and no way to flip back a few pages to check something or refresh my memory of something. This is an anxiety both around not having attention/emotional control (what if there's a boring part but I can't speed up? what if something is unpleasantly tense but I can't look ahead to check in on what to expect?) and attention/memory (what if my mind keeps wandering and it's hard to follow? what if I lose track of key stuff? my memory is not what it used to be, and in fact I did make one choice in one of my plays of the game that I definitely would not have made if I had recalled who that name referred to, although in fact there is a character list (and a glossary for the Yiddish) that I could have gone and checked and I just didn't for whatever reason), and no doubt seems absurd to most people in our very drama-normative culture (my mom, at least, finds it baffling that one of the reasons I don't watch much TV is that I find watching TV "hard"), but it is anxiety I actually have, and I have decided I get to, you know, name and look at those, if I want to. And it became easier to actually sit down and play once I had figured out what I was nervous about.

In the end my worries turned out to be pretty much unfounded - it did not feel at all unmanageable to play, and was in fact extremely fun and engaging, especially once I got to the end of my first playthrough and was like "oh, okay, now I've seen one way things can go, and I can just do this again as many times as I want to see what other outcomes I can get". There is a list of possible achievements, which hint at possible outcomes, and if you go online you can also find a list that includes all the "hidden" achievements where some of the most interesting stuff is. :) I really like having an idea of the range of potential outcomes - in two and a half playthroughs I have unlocked 21 out of 68, or 410 out of a possible 1000 points, and I have ideas in mind for two more approaches I'd like to try after this one. A lot of the choices you get to make have to do with your feelings about things or your approach to solving problems, affecting a list of stats about your talents and your nature, which I think then affect what options you see later in the game or whether you succeed or fail in some of your later plot attempts. So in my three playthroughs so far I've tried to be somewhat different people with different priorities - pushing a little further away, each time, from my own natural impulses, playing characters who are less and less "like me". Like, the first playthrough, I think I was thinking "what is the best thing to do in this situation", and on subsequent playthroughs I've been more able to get into the mindset of "but what would this character do in this situation that might make for a good story (or get me more of those various achievements/outcomes)" even if it feels like a "bad idea" that "I"/my proxy in this world "shouldn't" do. (This is a tension I find interesting in narrative games, the space between player and character - there's a Lovecraftian text adventure I played with my friend D that forced an action I found abhorrent that was both upsetting to play at the time and remains by far the most memorable moment of any text adventure we ever played - which honestly seems like something that Rosenbaum might well have found interesting about the medium as well, and something that I hope awards voters find interesting about this game.) Subsequent playthroughs have definitely been a lot faster than the first one, because some of the events repeat verbatim (so I can, like, skim through that meal description) and some Rosenbaum is probably altering in subtle ways but I can't remember the exact wording from before enough to catch, so might as well skim until I get to something really different. (I have caught some of the differences though and they are neat!)

Anyways if you are interested in what it's actually about, it's set in the Pale of Settlement in 1881 (so if you loved Forbidden Book and would like to spend more time running around that world, this is perfect for you) and there is maybe going to be a pogrom and there is the question of an arranged marriage (so far I've been playing female-presenting nonbinary characters, because there are a whole bunch of neat options about ways the character can be trans and/or nonbinary and/or intersex, although for one of those two other playthroughs I have in mind I want to try Being A Dude which I think might be really different) and as you might guess from the title there is possibly a dybbuk and/or a golem. I might make another post sometime in the future about some of my different outcomes (and which I was or wasn't ever able to achieve) but I'll keep this one spoiler-free. Highly recommended if any of this sounds interesting to you at all.

Here, or below the cut with my comments!

It looks like they didn't name a Grandmaster or an Infinity yet - maybe they're saving those announcements for the ceremony this year?

( Read more... )

Swordcrossed, Freya Marske, 2024 novel. This is a classic sweaterboy/absolute nightmare romance novel set in a vaguely-early-modern secondary universe (or maybe I mean late medieval?) with a plot centered around rivalries between merchant families in the wool industry. Is that romantasy, or does romantasy specifically have to have magical elements, or even more specifically nonhuman love interests? Anyways, if you wanted Swordspoint to be cozier, this is the book for you. "High Heat. Low Stakes. Crossed Steel." as it says on the cover. (I really liked it but I am pretty much exactly who this book was catering to. People on goodreads were like "too many wool facts" and here I am delighted by a book where I can read dudes banging and falling in love and also learn some wool facts. I would read one of these a year set in a different late medieval industry until the end of time, or until running out of industries forced the introduction of the industrial revolution and the world got less fun.)

I wasn't going to attempt to nominate poems, but then a friend mentioned a hope of going through the spreadsheet poems, and I was like, self, why am *I* not even looking at the spreadsheet poems, and I had a weird little moment of, wait, am I intimidated by poetry? Do I feel unqualified to read poetry? That seemed incorrect - I keep a file of favorite poems. I occasionally write poems. Maybe I feel like I don't know what to make of *speculative* poetry? That also didn't sound quite right, I have no problem thinking about, say, Le Guin's poetry. Strange Horizons publishes poetry so I tried checking out some of their 2024 pieces and possibly part of the problem is that I just don't *like* a lot of poetry. (Although... I also don't like a lot of stories. Not actually sure if the proportion is different.)

Anyways here's some poems from the spreadsheet I liked.

The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program, Steve Wheat.

sunday in atlanta, Kelsey Day. I'm not sure this is speculative. Also I'm not sure it's a poem and not a comic. Powerful piece, though.

Gaia Sings the Body Electric, Jie Venus Cohen.

there are no taxis for the dead, Angela Liu.

The Sail, Ian Li.

The Quickening Rachel Pittman. Is *this* speculative?

the office//the after, Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey. How about this, is this speculative? Maybe I don't know what makes poetry speculative or not.

The Lost Dead World Thing, Mari Ness.

Dodging the Bullet, Lisa M. Bradley.

Change Your Mind, Gwendolyn Maia Hicks.

A War of Words, Marie Brennan.

There were 62 things on the list, although some of them weren't available online, so I probably read more like... 55? ish? And ended up liking about one in five?

I have tentatively picked some that I think I'll nominate although I would like to revisit this list in a day or two and see which ones I still remember, or which ones still grab me on rereading.

More pondering about nominations. Hugos feel pretty weird to be doing, tbh - how many of the non-USian authors can safely come to Seattle? I assume none of the Canadians will? Can USian trans authors even safely take domestic flights (like, without having their drivers licenses confiscated)? By this time next year, are all my favorite trans authors going to be hiding in attics so they don't get deported to a concentration camp in Panama, a weirdly specific yet terrifyingly reality-based scenario now that we have a concentration camp in Panama, and will that perhaps cut into their fiction output, and should we try extra hard to give them awards now? I've read Solzhenitsyn (well, I've read Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), am I supposed to have some thoughts about Literary Awards And The Gulag? My thoughts are mostly "how the fuck did we end up in a timeline where we might be going to have a gulag?" Also, how many of Musk's minions were Sad Puppies voters in 2015? I guess probably none of them because they're all like twenty years old?

Anyways, I promise no more crushing doom in the rest of this post, just sometimes it's hard to find the balance between "still trying to enjoy things" and "it feels gross to just pretend everything is normal". Onwards.

Novels:

Every 2024 sff novel I've read so far: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Malka Older; The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden; A Sorceress Comes to Call, T Kingfisher; Lady Eve's Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow; Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera; The Forbidden Book, Sacha Lamb; The City in Glass, Nghi Vo; Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan; Glass Houses, Madeline Ashby; The Sapling Cage, Margaret Killjoy; The Last Dragon of the East, Katrina Kwan. (Also I'm partway through Swordcrossed, Freya Marske, Sheine Lende, Darcie Little Badger, and I've read the first few pages of The Wings Upon Her Back, Samantha Mills. And even further away I'm still in hold queues for Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins and The West Passage, Jared Pechaček.)

Some of these I didn't like at all. Warm Hands of Ghosts and City in Glass jump out at me as "best written", in some sense. Sorceress Comes to Call and Glass Houses were gripping; Long Live Evil was a fun ride. Sapling Cage I'm probably nominating as YA for the Lodestar even if nobody else thinks so.

Novellas:

Every 2024 sff novella I've read so far: What Feasts At Night, T Kingfisher; The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler; The Brides of High Hill, Nghi Vo; The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P Djèlí Clark; Haunt Sweet Home, Sarah Pinsker; The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed; The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar; It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over, Anne de Marcken; North Continent Ribbon, Ursula Whitcher. (Also I have Yoke of Stars, R.B. Lemberg sitting on the table. And I'm still in hold queues for Transitive Properties of Cheese, Ann LeBlanc and In the Shadow of the Fall, Tobi Ogundiran.)

North Continent Ribbon and It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over for sure; maybe also The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, and can I possibly read enough Yoke of Stars to form an opinion about it.

Novelettes:

See previous post, except maybe I *should* nominate "Fisher of Stars" as a secondary outlet for my North Continent Ribbon feelings, because I'm kind of having a premonition about being less than thrilled by the novella ballot. (What Feasts At Night and Brides of High Hill and Haunt Sweet Home were all fine but two of them are sequels to things that were better and one is not Pinsker's most exciting work and I can totally see them all making the ballot on familiarity, bah.) I could ditch the Thomas Ha riff on Fahrenheit 451, I guess.

Short Story:

See previous post.

Series:

Has Singing Hills hit 240k words yet? If they're all novellas and there's five of them, then no, right? What else is even out there? I guess the third one of those Roanhorse books came out, I should queue for that, but I don't think I want to nominate the series without having read it.

Related Work:

It's always sort of interesting to see what turns up here, but I have nothing to contribute.

Graphic Story:

I'm nominating My Favorite Thing Is Monsters 2 despite its problems. And Ver's Sacred Bodies despite its obscurity.

Dramatic Long:

"Will I attempt to watch the Hugo Dramatic Long nominees" is a very open question but I'm leaning towards "no" on the grounds that they're going to be, like, Dune and Deadpool and Wicked and I already didn't want to see them when they were just movies. Anyways, no nominees.

Dramatic Short:

Someone wake me up if it turns out clipping did another SF album or something.

Pro Artist:

... if I come up with some artists it's going to be in a separate post.

Game:

Not only have I not managed to play The Ghost and The Golem, I haven't even managed to write my post about why I haven't managed to play The Ghost and The Golem. Gah.

Semiprozine:

Strange Horizons!

Fanwriter:

Bitter Karella is not on the spreadsheet - eligibility problem or just overlooked?

Fan Artist:

After years of exhorting everyone to nominate fan artists I feel like I had better nominate some fan artists. Perhaps in that separate post with the pro artists... definitely...

Poem:

Poem?? I look forward to reading in this category. Actually it would be neat if someone did an ebook anthology of, like, the whole longlist.

Lodestar:

As previously mentioned, I think Sapling Cage is. I'm enjoying Sheine Lende well enough but I don't think I'm excited enough about it to throw it in.

Astounding:

Moniquill Blackgoose is eligible again. Plus I think I'll go with Zohar Jacobs, Nadia Radovich, A.W. Prihandita, and Grant Collier from my short fiction nominees.

Links to their other work:
Zohar Jacobs: a story in each of Asimov's and Analog, plus this.
Nadia Radovich: this in Apex and this in Strange Horizons.
Grant Collier: nothing else
A.W. Prihandita: here, here, here, here.

Here's all the novelettes I recced this year!

Clarkesworld:

The Best Version of Yourself, Grant Collier, Clarkesworld. A particularly unsettling Rapture-of-the-Nerds, and a woman's relationship with her mother. Novelette.

The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video, Thomas Ha, Clarkesworld. This is very reference-rich and I'm probably only catching part of that but I think it's also a strong story entirely on its own without all that? Memory and filters and the work of wrapping up the loose ends of a parent's life. Novelette.

A Brief Oral History of the El Zopilote Dock, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Clarkesworld. Thoughts on what the next Underground Railroad might look like. Novelette.

Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being, A.W. Prihandita, Clarkesworld. Medicine and licensing and helping and listening. Novelette.

Himalia, Carrie Vaughn, Clarkesworld. Growing up on a remote space outpost, and coming home again. Novelette.

Lightspeed:

The Heist for the Soul of Humanity, Filip Hadjar Drnovšek Zorko, Lightspeed. Yet another heist story, this is apparently what I'm in the mood for at this time? Novelette.

Strange Horizons:

By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars, Premee Mohamed, Strange Horizons. An aging wizard, an apprentice, and a problem. Novelette.

Exit Interview, K.W. Onley, Strange Horizons. Portals, but only for Black women. Novelette.

Uncanny:

Signs of Life, Sarah Pinsker, Uncanny. An aging news anchor visits her long-estranged sister. Covers some similar ground as Haunt Sweet Home, like Pinsker was doing variations on a theme. Novelette.

Other:

What Any Dead Thing Wants, Aimee Ogden, Psychopomp. Magical terraforming. Novelette.

I'm Not Disappointed Just Mad AKA The Heaviest Couch in the Known Universe, Daryl Gregory, Reactor. I thought this had big Men In Black energy. Novelette.

"Lake of Souls", Ann Leckie, Lake of Souls collection.

"A Fisher of Stars", Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon novella/collection.

**

Of the five I've marked here, the Collier and Vaughn stories are on the Locus list; the Ha, Prihandita, and Leckie stories are not. My picks seem to be very Clarkesworld-heavy this year, but I'm pleased that they didn't end up just being all authors I already liked. Relatedly, Grant Collier and A.W. Prihandita are eligible for the Astounding, as is K.W. Onley. I don't think any of them are an Isabel J. Kim-level prolific breakout new talent but I would always like to see more short-fiction Astounding nominees.

North Continent Ribbon, Ursula Whitcher, 2024 novella/collection. I made the classic blunder of being so excited about this book that I wanted to actually own it as a book, which ironically made me less likely to actually read it, since it's much more of a hassle for me to read on paper. However I have finally done so and am pleased to report that it is awesome. I had read most of the stories before - possibly I had read at least pieces of all of them before - but I don't have a very good memory any more, and can't put together pieces of things I'm reading spread out over time, and so it was very different reading all six at once put together in an order with years added to form a whole chronology. Like, there is a lot going on here both in terms of world-building and in terms of a big-picture world narrative that I had not picked up on at all. Really well-built and nicely done. I'm not sure for awards purposes how fixups count exactly (fixup sounds pejorative but I don't know a better term for when parts of something have had prior publication) but I feel like it *should* count as a 2024 novella because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?