2018 Hugos: Novellas

As I continue my Hugos vote-reading, I come to Novellas! This category has really been growing in accessibility for the past few years, not only in the voter packet but out in the wild. My lovely local library had several of them, and ebooks mean you can find novellas easily by themselves instead of just serialized in magazines or contained as the cornerstone of an anthology, with some short stories to pad out the publication to book length.

Mind you, I've read some "novellas" that just feel like Part One of what should be a book-length book, but the best feel like complete stories, with tighter focus than book-length books but a little more room for exploration than short stories or novelettes.

The nominees for this year's award:

• All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)
• “And Then There Were (N-One),” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017)
• Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)
• The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)
• Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.Com Publishing)
• River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

"And Then There Were (N-One)" is mildly enjoyable, but I really don't see why it's drawn the accolades it has. The idea of encountering multiple versions of oneself, from various universes where one has made slightly different choices, is not new. I've heard several stories on this theme from Escape Pod and others in the past few years, my favorite being "Send in the Ninjas" by Michelle Anne King on Podcastle. The murder mystery here isn't all that special to me either. However, I'm OK with the open-ended ending, because the premise implies that all choices would be made at the end, spawning new variations of the multiverses.

"Binti: Home" is interesting, and let us find out much more about Binti, her homeland, and her conflicts. However, although "Binti" stood on its own as a first story, B:H really feels like a part-two excerpt from a novel. It posits as a fundamental piece of her origin something that, if it was even hinted at in the first novella, I never caught; moreover, the ending is a cliffhanger. So this isn't at all high on my list of votes.

"The Black Tides of Heaven" is interesting, although I never got emotionally attached to the characters. It's disturbing what happens to some of them, but it feels removed, like an old fairy tale. However, I understand from Paul Weimer's review on Skiffy and Fanty that the twin/sequel to this novella, The Red Threads of Fortune, explores the characters' choices some more, after the events of the first, and deconstructs some elements. I'd like to read that sometime.

"Down Among the Sticks and Bones" is a prequel to the excellent "Every Heart a Doorway," which I think was my top novella vote for 2017, although I might have voted for the amazing "A Taste of Honey" by Kai Ashante Wilson instead. EHAD is about a school for children who've had portal adventures in other worlds and have trouble adjusting when they come back home, and it's great. DAtSaB is about two sisters who were at that school, and their repressed childhoods, and their lives and choices after they go through the portal to a world that's grim in different ways, before coming out. But I already knew how everything would turn out for them, and how they would turn out, so while the prequel is mildly interesting, it lacks impact.

"River of Teeth" is a story with great worldbuilding and interesting characters. I love this alternate world where hippopotami infest the Louisiana bayous, which is a thing that actually almost happened. The people in this world are sharply drawn, if some of them are a little flat, and there's a lot of good action. However, stories where people feel impelled to do something that they know will probably doom them, and don't seem to struggle much against their fate, aren't compelling to me. I was very excited waiting for this to come out, and in fact pre-ordered it, but I haven't gotten around to reading the sequel.

"All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries" is my favorite in this category this year. I have loved Martha Wells' fantasy for a long time (Wheel of the Infinite, The Death of the Necromancer, etc.), so I was excited when I heard she was going to try science fiction, and pre-ordered it. What a debut this is! Murderbot, as the protagonist calls itself (I think the pronoun was "it" IIRC), is a guard cyborg who just wants to be left alone to watch its soap operas, and conceal that it's hacked its control software, but the people it's assigned to protect are attacked, and it has to figure out what's happening and how to save them, and itself. I just adore this story, and have reread it several times. I had been putting off getting the next one in the series, due to my mountainous TBR pile, but I just bought it, to save as a treat for myself (we'll see how long that lasts -- hopefully until after the Hugos voting period, at least) and to encourage one of my favorite authors to keep writing in this genre.