I thought yesterday’s story was the final nominee, but I was wrong, there’s another short story, As the Last I May Know by S. L. Huang, and it has to be a sign of the times that the story I almost forgot to review is… good?
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) As the Last I May Know”Tag: Hugo Awards
Reading the Hugos (2020): A Catalog of Storms
This is the final nominee (Disregard that, I actually forgot not just to review another one, but actually to read it! There’s still one more story left) for this year’s short story Hugo Awards, A Catalog of Storms, by Fran Wilde. If you were expecting a roaring end to this review series, you are going to be disappointed.
Fran Wilde wrote years ago one of the few Hugo stories I actually liked, mostly due to its raw, angry energy and somewhat autobiographical content, but A Catalog of Storms has none of those things as far as I can see. To me, it feels like a by-the-book Hugo finalists: wandering, dreamy, with florid language, oozing with magic realism, and with barely any plot or real tension.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020): A Catalog of Storms”Reading the Hugos (2020) Blood is Another Word for Hunger
This is the fifth of the Hugo finalists and, probably, the most important one. If you could distill the Hugo short fiction category into a platonic form, it would look very similar to this piece, Blood is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon. And now I have to review it.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) Blood is Another Word for Hunger”Reading the Hugos (2020) And Now His Lordship is Laughing
For this short story, you can play a little game. Thanks to the benevolence and foresight of the people at Strange Horizons, this story is preceded by a long list of Content Warnings. You can ignore those, of course, but who could resist the temptation of clicking on that button to see what awful sins it hides. It’s like a flashing red button saying DON’T TOUCH ME.
The game is this: Try to deduce the plot of this story just from those trigger warnings. So what sort of Gomorrah-style type of story do we have here for it to include all that stuff? A surprisingly meh one. Yes, a child dies, and that sets in motion this story of racial revenge, but I don’t even remember half of the things from the list.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) And Now His Lordship is Laughing”Reading the Hugos (2020) Do Not Look Back, My Lion
I wasn’t sure if this year I would bother writing these analyses of the Hugo short story finalists. Although my experience has usually been that close to 90% of them are bad, at least they are bad in an interesting way. This year they are mostly bad and boring. Besides, to be honest, I don’t care that much about writing anymore. But these reviews of mine are sort of a blog tradition, so here they are once more. I think, however, that this may be the last year I do these. It’s neither worth it nor funny.
If you have stumbled upon this without knowing what I’m talking about: The Hugo Awards is one of the most prestigious literary awards in science fiction and fantasy. Also, they nominate a lot of crap, but it’s from that fact that the hilarity ensues.
Continue reading “Reading the Hugos (2020) Do Not Look Back, My Lion”How fiction starts: an analysis of 1200+ sff books
When I make my writing analysis posts, I usually pick random sentences but beginnings may be an even better choice. They are probably the most edited, if not overthought, parts of a book, and it’s also where writers show off their skill or (if they fail at it) their weaknesses. And if you want to see how writing changes through time, the first sentence may actually be all you need to read. And for those who have huge submission piles to plow through, the first two sentences is all you need to read for the first culling.
If you have followed me for some time, you already know my dislike of contemporary writing fads and techniques and my belief that you can see its decline in quality just in the formal aspect of writing. Strange syntax, (too) deep POVs, -ing participles galore, unnecessary descriptions, showing where telling would be perfectly fine and, finally, no personal style and no distinctive narrator—just piles and piles of descriptions, one after the other, like a transcription of a video recording. And, sure, it’s fine and all to talk about these things in the abstract and using a few examples from time to time, but it’s better to have some solid evidence to back you up. So here it is.
Continue reading “How fiction starts: an analysis of 1200+ sff books”
Reading the Hugos (2019) STET
STET, by Sarah Gailey, is a short story finalist that plays with the layout and formatting possibilities of a website to explain a story through footnotes and comments. It’s basically a very short (a single paragraph) text written in standard, soulless academese but the text is expanded thanks to a copious amount of footnotes which, at the same time, have comments, back and forth, between the original writer and the editor of the piece. In fact, the title of the short story, STET, is the annotation written by writers or proofreaders when commenting alterations made by an editor, and it means “let it stand” (in other words, ignore that comment/I don’t agree with your correction.) It’s through these notes that the real story unfolds and you get a good glimpse of what is going on behind the apparently emotionless text.
As I said, the text itself is quite short, and I’m going to post it here (and there’s a reason I don’t want to link to it right now):
Section 5.4 — Autonomous Conscience and Automotive Casualty
While Sheenan’s Theory of Autonomous Conscience was readily adopted by both scholars and engineers in the early days of Artificial Intelligence programming in passenger and commercial vehicles, contemporary analysis reinterprets Sheenan’s perspective to reveal a nuanced understanding of sentience and consciousness. Meanwhile, Foote’s On Machinist Identity Policy Ethics produces an analysis of data pertaining to autonomous vehicular manslaughter and AI assessments of the value of various life forms based on programmer input only in the tertiary. Per Foote’s assessment of over eighteen years of collected data, autonomous vehicle identity analyses are based primarily on a collected cultural understanding of identity and secondarily on information gathered from scientific database, to which the AI form unforeseeable connections during the training process. For the full table of Foote’s data, see Appendix D.
Now that you have read it, you can jump straight to the first note and read them from there, navigating using the ↩ symbols. Don’t scroll up; only down. I’ve never cared about spoilers in these posts I make about the Hugos, but this time I will wait for you to read the story first; it’s not too long and I believe it’s worth it.
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Reading the Hugos (2019) The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society
This story is quite pointless. It’s also the female equivalent of those stories written by pervy old men whose dashing protagonists bangs every well-endowed lady in the land, but with the female twist (actually, the need) of the males longing for the woman many years or decades later. But as I said; it’s just pointless. Not bad, just without a point or purpose. I do not know why it exists. I do not know why 1,887 words were arranged to form this short story. I can see this existing as a joke, a post in somebody’s blog, a somewhat comedic snapshot, but I can’t see why this is a Hugo nominee, potentially the best fantasy or sci-fi short story of the year. In fact, there’s hardly anything fantastical in this story aside from the half-satyr’s titanic schlong and Rose’s irresistible sex appeal (and legendary endurance.)
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Reading the Hugos (2019) The Court Magician
It’s that time of the year once more: time to read the Hugo Award finalists and be shocked, amused, horrified, and (occasionally) entertained. As usual, I’ll stick to the short stories because they are free to and it’s where hungry, ambitious authors try to show off, so there’s hardly a better category to get a graphography (is that a word?) of the current zeitgeist, but I may throw in a novelette if I feel like it.
Of course, for the same reason there is such a thing as Oscar bait, there’s also Hugo bait, so expect to see certain patterns with these stories—or just with their authors. Like in previous years, gender is one main theme, and of the four big categories (novel, novella, novelette, and short story,) with 24 stories and 22 authors, 18 of the finalists are women, 2 identify as trans, and 2 weirdos are men. There are also many names you might recognize from previous years. Make of those things what you will.
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Book Analysis/review: “Law of the Wolves” and “Mortu and Kyrus in the White City.”
I mentioned in a previous post, and here they are, Schuyler Hernstrom’s latest two works, “The law of the Wolves,” a short story fable, and “Morty and Kyrus in the White City,” a sword & bikery novella with future installment already in-the-making, or at least planned out.
I’ll start with The Law of the Wolves, which is the shortest one, and one that won’t require me to sperg too much. Also, if you are a stingy asshat who can’t bother buying two books at 1$ each, I’d recommend this one first. Simpler, straightforward, shorter, and in a style underrepresented these days.
Emperor's Notepad 