If I Picked the Hugos, 2014 Edition

I don't know what the limit is of the number of books that may be nominated for "Best Novel Hugo" in a given year. This year there were nineteen. Let's have a look, in the order that I read them.

The "Wheel of Time" series concerns three youngsters who are caught up in events far beyond their ability to handle, and in adventures spanning a continent and several years manage to save the world from certain destruction. The story is rightly termed epic fantasy, and the characters are all engaging and well realized. The plot itself, a struggle against a nemesis from mankind's dimly remembered past, doesn't really become clear until book two opens, but that's OK, since book one was kind of an appetizer to get people started reading. Jordan writes well, and Sanderson has no flies on him, either.

Charles Stross' Neptune's Brood is a space opera combined with a mystery, diving from the edge of a solar system into the crushing depths of an ocean world. On the way we learn a little about economics, about meta humanity, and about a relationship a mother might have with her daughters that might have moved Nancy Friday to write something considerably more caustic than My Mother Myself. The story kept me engaged from cover to cover, and the ending was satisfying and amazing.

In the very near future of Mira Grant's (Seanan McGuire) Parasite scientists genetically engineer a symbiotic tapeworm that can do everything from dispensing life saving drugs to suppressing dangerous allergies. Sally, a tapeworm host who's been in an accident, discovers that there's a lot more to these tapeworms than anyone realizes when people start turning into zombies.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie is a leisurely paced journey of discovery. While I was discovering the world of One Esk, One Esk was discovering about moral responsibility and being human. The book engaged me on several levels and didn't disappoint me with its ending, either.

If you want magical battles with humongous guns then Larry Correia's Warbound is your ticket. Jake Sullivan teams up with the Knights of the Grimnoir to save the world from an invading extradimensional monster. Get your battles here!

So which one would I pick to win?

Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series started with a transparent rip-off of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, The Eye of the World, down to one-to-one mappings of plot and characters. The series picks up after that, but never actually shakes the sense that this is a kid writing a Tolkien fanfic - writing well, mind. Sanderson, working from Jordan's notes, can't really rescue the story from its fate. It's all well written, but I can't get past the fact that this story has already been told.

Larry Correia's "Grimnoir Chronicles" are a lot of fun to read, but I was frankly surprised to find it in the Hugo short list. Larry writes well, don't get me wrong, and if I were to measure this book up against some other action adventure series it would do well. But Larry's story avoids making hard choices. The ending employs the most blatant of deus ex machina, and then reverts everything to a kind of base state, as if none of what happened before mattered. It's what's done on TV all the time, but I personally expect more from serious SF&F.

I'm not really tired of zombies if Grant is going to serve them up with a fresh spin each time. Parasite really has me looking forward to the next one, and I have really no complaints about it. Grant brings her characters to life and doesn't stint on the rest of the story. It's obvious from almost the very beginning where the story is headed, but that's ok because I was looking forward to the journey. The book deserves to win, even if I don't want to pick it as my top pick.

Lecki's Ancillary Justice does start slowly, and the pacing is a bit uneven throughout, but the character One Esk is perhaps the best of her kind I've ever read about. For that reason I was really hard put to choose between her break-out novel and the one I'm picking this year.

Neptune's Brood was kick butt from the very start, as I've come to expect from Stross. His cast of characters is sparse and carefully chosen, and the ones that matter come to life as they make their way. Stross doesn't stint on describing a future that is plausible and amazing. Yes, he might be giving a small political fillip to some people, but I think it's subtle and fully part of the story. He does have to devote more pages to explication than someone writing about more familiar SF tropes would do, but I'm not holding that against him by any means.

If Lecki or Grant win the Hugo I'll be plenty happy. Both have written deserving books, but my pick this year is Stross's Neptune's Brood.

Cousins

Title:

Parasite

Author:

Mira Grant

Publisher:

Orbit, 2013

ISBN

ISBN 0316218952

In her first foray into the land of zombies (Newsflesh), Grant proposed a scientific reason for zombies that seemed scarily plausible. She did her homework then, and now she's done even more homework. If you haven't heard of the idea that too few parasites are bad for us, you might read up on Helminthic Theory. Yep, sounds legit.

But seriously, there are people looking into the question if there is such a thing as being too clean. Whether this turns out to be anything other than a crackpot notion I have no idea. While I'm not about to start swilling sewer water, it's also true that bacteria compete with each other, even in places like our mouth and our gut, and if not enough of the good or at least harmless bacteria are around, then nasties will take over and wreak havoc.

In Mira Grant's book Parasite (book one of the Parasitology series), Doctors Banks, Cale, and Jablonsky have developed a genemod variety of tapeworm, the Intestinal Guardian (TM), which, if ingested by a human being, will keep the host healthy, supplying drug dosage if needed, and suppressing excessive immune responses like dog or cat allergies. The story's main character, Sally Mitchell, also has one of these tapeworms when she gets into an accident. She's in a coma from brain damage, and her family is about to disconnect her, when she sits up in bed.

As far as anyone knows, the tapeworm will not resurrect you from the dead.

The action catches up with Sally six years later. She has by now relearned to speak. Reading is still very difficult, but from all appearance things are looking up. She even has a boyfriend who cares for her. And then people start getting the sleeping sickness (a lovely euphemism for turning into zombies), and SymboGen, the makers of the tapeworm, seem to be hiding something.

I kind of started suspecting what was going on almost from the beginning - this is a story by Mira Grant, after all. Still, rather than making everything predictable, Grant kept me on the edge of my seat for all five hundred pages. Sally is a recovering amnesiac, and her recovery may strike people who know a little bit about, for example, retraining TBI patients or stroke victims, as if Sally is doing far too well. The mystery ingredient is obviously the tapeworm, but we don't know quite what role it is playing until about halfway into the story (when it's still a mystery to Sally and her friends).

Yes, from that point on you'll probably know what is really going on, and you'll be wondering how Sally and her boyfriend Nathan haven't caught on yet. Well, there are perfectly good reasons, of course. Meanwhile the mere fact that you know will not at all detract from the story.

Grant's story takes place in a near future California. We're not told what all has happened, but a fair amount obviously has. Maybe some of that backstory will be featured in the sequels, but it doesn't really matter. It's a believable version of the future. You will feel right at home, I'm sure.

This is the second of the Hugo nominees I've read. It is definitely a worthy nominee, and I highly recommend it.

If I picked the Hugos, 2013 Edition

I just realized today that I've read all the nominees! Woohoo!

Well, let's have a look, in no particular order.

Mira Grant's Blackout came out early last year, and I read it on the spot. It's number three of her "Newsflesh" series, an innovative and fun zombie thriller that follows the lives of a team of professional bloggers. In book three, a number of reveals have already happened, and the one that remains is unmasking the conspiracy that has been driving the zombie infestations. The heroes bring it off, although they can't avoid a tragic death.

John Scalzi's Redshirts is a fantasy about getting writers of TV shows to give their characters a bit more thought. The title makes fun of the observation that many Star Trek fans have made that characters who join the captain on a mission, but who wear a red shirt, have a terrible life expectancy. Well, Ensign Dahl is quickly clued in how to avoid falling prey to bad writing, but tragedy still strikes. Dahl contrives to journey to the Real World^tm, where he and his friends confront the people responsible for their meaningless lives.

Lois McMaster Bujold's latest entry Captain Vorpatril's Alliance is another addition to her "Vorkosigan Saga." It concerns Captain Ivan Vorpatril, an easygoing fellow her fans met earlier in A Civil Campaign, who once again gets unwillingly dragged into an adventure by Byerly Vorrutyer, whom fans also met in the earlier book. Ivan is the sort of guy all guys wish they could be - competent, cool under pressure, able to see through mind bending plots - and apparently is being shoved into a bit of a screwball romantic comedy in this case. There's some danger to life and limb, especially towards the end, but as long as we get the requisite happy ending, it's all cool.

Kim Stanley Robinson's decidedly hard SF entry 2312, set, obviously, 300 years in the future follows a handful of characters around the solar system, a place that's at the same time exotic and familiar, well settled and filled with intrigue. The story starts with a death, and intimations are that the death wasn't entirely natural. When that event is quickly followed by what appears to be a sophisticated terrorist attack, our characters head off in various directions with varying levels of purposefulness to try and nab the bad guys.

And, finally, there's Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon, a Dungeons and Dragon-esque adventure in the world of One-thousand-and-one Arabian Nights. Wizard Adoulla, with the help of a holy fighter and a shapeshifting desert girl, faces down an evil wizard who has designs on the khalif's throne. The story has a number of battles and finishes with a battle royal at the khalif's palace.

I had a soft spot for Blackout. The second book in that series, Deadline concerned itself with several interesting philosophical questions, and I thought Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire) just rocked the zombie world with a refreshing take on the science of becoming a zombie, and on the politics that might arise in such a world. Sadly, her conspiracy driven finale fell short of my expectations. Conspiracies are difficult things to write well, and I got the distinct impression that she was letting herself get sloppy, when compared to the tight plotting of the first two novels. Still, it was an excellent book.

John Scalzi writes some cracking good yarns, and Redshirts was a fun read, as well, but it was more a fannish love letter to Star Trek and the like than it was what I would think of as a serious SF&F story. Yes, the story had to be written, and, yes, I'm glad I read it. I compare it favorably with many stories. But because it's mostly an in-joke with some thinly disguised advice to writers, I think it falls short of my admittedly idiosyncratic requirements for a Hugo nominee. That it got nominated is more due to the love fans have for Scalzi the author, I think, than for the quality of this book.

Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan" series has such a strong following, that she pretty much only has to publish another book in the series, and her fans will push her into the short list. That's not a slam, but it means that she's had some fairly weak offerings get nominated, like her novel Cryoburn, which I reviewed a few years ago. Happily, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance is a much stronger book than Cryoburn, though setting is still a bit weak, giving us generic city scapes with only a little better sense of place than she managed in the earlier book. But the characters are more fleshed out, and even the somewhat one-sided female characters she introduces are given more stage time. Still, this book falls short for me.

I reviewed Saladin Ahmed's Kingdom of the Crescent Moon earlier. When I describe it as a Dungeons and Dragon-esque adventure, I don't mean it as a slam, but the tropes are transparent enough that anyone familiar with the game will recognize it. What made me happy about the story is that here I had a sword and sorcery fantasy that was not set in a Euro-centric medieval world. We need more like that, and I'd be happy to see this book win for that reason.

However, Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 is a true tour-de-force. This is a book with well thought out and well fleshed out characters. It's got plotting, oh heavens it's got plotting. It's got setting, yessir, complete with surfing the frickin' rings of Saturn. And it's hard SF. OK, I'm told the market for hard SF is a fraction of the market for fantasy. That only makes me love this book more: Robinson has not knocked off just another copy of write-by-the-numbers novel. I know all authors pour a little bit of their very soul into their books, but with this book, it shows. Yes, 2312 also won the Nebula this year, but, hell, it deserved it.