“Sandor’s Tycho Memorial!” Pepe jogged my ribs. “There’s the old monument at the American capital! I know it from Dian’s videos.”
This won the the 2001 Best Novelette Award in both the Hugos and the Nebulas, the author having been born in 1908, making him certainly the oldest person to win either award in, I suspect, any category (Retro Hugos aside). These were the only final ballot places for fiction that Williamson ever got in his long career (his autobiography won a Hugo for Best Nonfiction Book sixteen years earlier, in 1985).
I wrote at the time of the Hugo final ballot that although I preferred Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” and Greg Egan’s “Oracle”:
None of the others were real turkeys though. “The Ultimate Earth” didn’t have a very satisfactory ending but that seems to be standard for stories about nanotechnology.
“The Ultimate Earth” came eighth in the Locus poll, which normally hews closer to the Hugo and Nebula rankings, and only fourth in Analog‘s own readers poll of novellas of 2000. (The Locus poll was won by “Radiant Green Star” by Lucius Shepard, and the Analog poll by “A Roll of the Dice”, by Catherine Asaro, both of which were also Hugo and Nebula finalists.) Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” surely has shown more staying power; likewise Greg Egan’s “Oracle”.
Looking back now, it’s clear that the Hugo and Nebula voters of the day were honoring Williamson’s career rather than the qualities of this particular story, which is rather old-fashioned despite the use of nanotechnology.
After disaster strikes Earth, a group of clone children who have been raised on the Moon steal a spaceship to go back to the home planet. They find it is not what they expected (this is where the nanobots come in) and head off into the stars. Not very new ideas, and not really done in a new way. But you can get it here.
The Hugo for Best Novel went to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; the Nebula to Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose, neither of which are brilliant choices. There is better luck in some other categories – Dave Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness” is a jewel of a short story Hugo winner, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won both Hugo and Nebula
Next in this series of joint Hugo/Nebula winners will be “Hell Is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang. After that, I will skip American Gods and Coraline and go straight on to Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold.
But now I have to say, just to clear my conscience, that sometimes I was in charge of the installations-strong technologies made for the insides of boys’ heads. Every batch was mass-assembled somewhere in [redacted], and when Èkó had marked them, had storied them in full, we inserted the chips pre-loaded with information on how boys would and should be. I watched the new skulls move through the conveyor belt in a cyclical choreography—perfect carbon copies. Some of us messengers were responsible for coding these cultures in the lab; others of us were in charge of delivering them, of fixing them in boys’ heads as soon as we were sure they’d at least live long enough to become men.
Interesting to come to this soon after Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi, which is also sf (well, fantasy really) set in Nigeria. There are big differences, though; the protagonist(s) of Freshwater move back and forth across the Atlantic, whereas the vagabonds of Vagabonds! are swimming around the murky middle and lower reaches of society in Lagos.
I made a mistake in reading it, in that I did not realise that it was more a collection of linked short stories than a novel, and got frustrated that later chapters introduced new characters without giving closure to earlier plot lines. That’s partly on me (though to an extent also on the publisher for describing it as a novel on the dust jacket). But I think the writer can sometimes demand too much of the reader in discerning the book’s structure.
It’s a very intense description of life at the margins, especially the queer margins, in a developing city economy. The deities Èkó and Tatafo guide us through the narrative (which is why the Clarke jury felt that it fell on the fantasy side of the line), but they don’t intervene much, allowing humans to make their own mistakes. The book is fuelled by an energising rage against injustice. It’s passionate and well-described; but as mentioned, I felt the last couple of steps to make it fully coherent were missing. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that pile is DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee.
Doctors explain to us that the immediate cause of insomnia is always some poisoned or depleted state of the body, and no doubt the fatigues and hasty meals of the day had left the bishop in a state of unprecedented chemical disorder, with his nerves irritated by strange compounds and unsoothed by familiar lubricants. But chemical disorders follow mental disturbances, and the core and essence of his trouble was an intellectual distress. For the first time in his life he was really in doubt, about himself, about his way of living, about all his persuasions. It was a general doubt. It was not a specific suspicion upon this point or that. It was a feeling of detachment and unreality at once extraordinarily vague and extraordinarily oppressive. It was as if he discovered himself flimsy and transparent in a world of minatory solidity and opacity. It was as if he found himself made not of flesh and blood but of tissue paper.
Another in my dwindling pile of minor Wellsiana, this 1917 novel concerns the Reverend Edward Scrope, Bishop of Princhester, whose faith is challenged by its irrelevance to the people of his industrialised diocese and by the horrors of war. Scrope deals with this difficulty by falling under the influence of an attractive and rich parishioner, and taking mind-altering drugs. He resigns from the Church completely, goes through further spiritual wrestling and finds his own accommodation at the end, though one feels that his wife is unenthused by the new state of affairs, never mind their five daughters.
One of the few unexpected things I learned about the English way of life when I went to study at Cambridge aged 19 is that there are a lot of people, if a minority, who take the Church of England seriously, something that was not apparent from the popular culture that I had absorbed growing up in Belfast. Wells isn’t quite sure how funny he should be here. He finds the Church itself ridiculous, but wants to make us sympathise with the bishop’s spiritual torment (which is expressed at length). The story ends up falling between two stools, and has been justifiably forgotten over the last 108 years. But you can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is another H.G. Wells novel, Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump.
Brezovica Žumberačka has only a few houses, with thirty or so inhabitants, occupying an area of less than two hectares, but with the ‘neighbouring’ Slovenian village, Brezovica pri Metliki, it forms one place. Interestingly, it seems that the Croatian and Slovenian authorities are not entirely sure exactly where the border line is. It is even possible that there are currently a few more miniature enclaves and exclaves. Although this situation is less of an issue now that Slovenia and Croatia have entered into the European Union, a bizarre possibility is the fact that one house, together with the land around it, does not belong to either country. This would make it the so-called terra nullius, namely, no man’s land. This has created an opportunity for the proclamation of an independent country, which was exploited in a virtual way. A website for the newly formed Kingdom of Enclava emerged on the Internet, though it had nothing to do with the inhabitants of the house itself. After the Slovenian government officially declared it to be their territory, the Enclava moved to one of the disputed islands in the River Danube, on the border between Serbia and Croatia.
This is a very attractive book listing 47 cases of unusual borders around the world. As a map geek myself of many years’ standing, I was aware of most of these (and sorry that a couple of my favorites were missed, the Iliemi Triangle, the Drummully salient, and the now resolved case of the Chiṭmahals), but they are all sensitively explained and well illustrated. There is lots of potential for trivia here: where, for instance, is there a direct land frontier between the Netherlands and France? (In the Caribbean.) It would also be interesting to know what daily life is like in a situation like Baarle. Anyway, it’s a lovely production, and you can get it here.
See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Yemen, as explained further below.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced
Nujood Ali
23,627
1,231
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Paul Torday
16,461
1,631
The Panther
Nelson DeMille
23,158
1,125
The Monk of Mokha
Dave Eggers
20,958
754
Sold
Zana Muhsen
7,759
464
Henna House
Nomi Eve
4,266
215
Motoring with Mohammed
Eric Hansen
1,611
343
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
Jennifer Steil
1,432
153
Yemen has not been well served in the literature available in the West. Two of the above are about child slavery and sexual abuse (I Am Nujood and Sold) and the rest are all by foreigners (Jennifer Steil’s memoir of teaching journalism sounds particularly dire).
I excluded a lot of books which cover Yemen along with other places. Three of these were fiction: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (mainly set in Ethiopia), The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, which is set all over the Indian Ocean (but with Oman rather than Yemen as the heroine’s home base), and Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed, which starts in Yemen but is mostly set in East Africa.
The rest were non-fiction; War on Terror punditry (The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright; Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill), regional travelogues (Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger; Baghdad Without a Map, by Tony Horwitz), and general reporting (Our Women on the Ground, ed. Zahra Hankir). I am also sad to have to disqualify Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767, by Thorkild Hansen, which looks fascinating, but only 90 pages out of 370 are actually set in Yemen.
One case of huge divergence between Goodreads and LibraryThing: The Handsome Jew, by Yemeni writer Ali al-Muqri, has 2,955 raters on GR, but only 8 owners on LibraryThing, which clearly has failed to penetrate the Yemeni market. The more traditional travel books score comparatively better on LT.
Next up: Canada. This will not be at all surprising.
Marge from maintenance helped him hoof down fresh tubing and all his welding gear.
From the 2020 Hugo Voter Packet, a grim but very short story humanising the ecological devastation that we are wreaking on whales. You can get it here.
The BSFA long lists are out again. Some of them are longer than others. As usual, I’ve run them through the Goodreads and LibraryThing catalogues to see which of the longlisted works have scored on the two biggest book reviewing websites.
Not very surprisingly, this doesn’t work for the 23 longlisted works for Best Artwork, nor for the 26 longlisted works for Best Short Non-Fiction, none of which have been logged as separate publications by GR or LT users. For the other categories, the highest and median numbers for each system are as follows:
Category
GR highest
GR median
LT highest
LT median
Best Novel
102,956
398
1,432
35
Best Fiction for Younger Readers
88,111
428.5
878
30
Best Shorter Fiction
5,260
7
186
1
Best Collection
5,253
11
158
4
Best Non-Fiction (Long)
129
2
31
1
Best Short Fiction
164
0
10
0
Best Original Audio Fiction
53
0
3
0
Unlike last year, thee of the eight long-listees for Best Original Audio Fiction do feature on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. All three are Big Finish audios.
Title
Author
GR
LT
Doctor Who: The Quin Dilemma
Chapman, Valentine, Rayner
53
3
Torchwood: The Hollow Choir
Marshall, Devlin
27
2
Torchwood: Bad Connection
Aaron Lamont
23
2
The Best Short Fiction longlist features no less than 80 stories, of which I was able to find three which have been published separately and thus feature in the online catalogues.
Title
Author
GR
LT
Spill
Cory Doctorow
164
10
Evan: A Remainder
Jordan Kurella
78
2
Unquiet on the Eastern Front
Wole Talabi
15
2
Ten of the seventeen long-listed works in the Best Non-Fiction (Long) category are on either Goodreads of LibraryThing or both. Two of the other seven are podcasts, which wouldn’t usually score anyway. The ten which do feature are:
Title
Author
GR
LT
Everything Must Go
Dorian Lynskey
129
31
Speculative Whiteness
Jordan S. Carroll
23
4
Track Changes
Abigail Nussbaum
8
5
Spec Fic for Newbies Volume 2
Angus, Nolan
5
3
The Book Blinders
John Clute
3
3
Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction
Eugen Bacon (ed)
2
3
Urban Fantasy
Stefan Ekman
2
1
Utopia on the Tabletop
Jo Lindsay Walton
0
2
The Boom and The Boom
Guanghzhao Lyu
1
0
Three, Two, One, Let’s Jam!
Satoru Stevenson
1
0
I was able to find 48 of the 51 long-listees for Best Collection on one system or the other.
Title
Author
GR
LT
Your Utopia
Bora Chung
3140
158
She’s Always Hungry
Eliza Clarke
5253
62
Mystery Lights
Lena Valencia
532
40
New Adventures in Space Opera
Jonathan Strahan (ed)
196
31
Convergence Problems
Wole Talabi
209
28
The Inhumans and Other Stories
Bodhisattva Chattopadh(ed)
48
22
I Want That Twink Obliterated
Chris McCartney
41
13
North Continent Ribbon
Ursula Whitcher
33
9
A Jura for Julia
Ken Macleod
11
14
Pick Your Potion
Ephiny Gale
50
3
Deep Dream
Indrapramit Das (ed)
14
7
To the Stars and Back
Ian Whates (ed)
14
7
Calvaria Fell
Sparks & Warren
12
7
Limelight and Other Stories
Lyndsey Croal
38
2
Elephants in Bloom
Cecile Cristofari
7
10
Back Through the Flaming Door
Liz Williams
8
8
Discontinue if Death Ensues
Gyzander & Taborska (eds)
17
3
The Butterfly Disjunct
Stewart C. Baker
41
1
Nova Scotia Volume 2
Williamson & Wilson (eds)
6
6
Heartwood
Dan Coxon (ed)
3
11
Laughs in Space
Donna Scott (ed)
7
4
The Utopia of Us
Teika Marja Smits (ed)
5
5
Drive or be Driven
Aliya Whiteley
3
8
The Mad Butterfly’s Ball
Grassman & Kelso (eds)
7
3
Our Savage Heart
Justina Robson
2
10
Bestiary of Blood
Jamal Hodge (ed)
14
1
Different Kinds of Defiance
Renan Bernardo
14
1
Egypt + 100
Ahmed Naji (ed)
14
1
All Tomorrow’s Futures
Benjamin Greenaway (ed)
4
3
Schrodinger’s Wife (And Other Possibilities)
Pippa Goldschmidt
5
2
Little Sisters & Other Stories
Vonda N. McIntyre
3
3
Gallus
Faulds, Milton & Williamson (eds)
4
2
A Stitch Between Worlds
Frazier Armitage
7
1
Cursed Shards
Leanbh Pearson (ed)
3
2
Human Resources
Fiona Moore
1
4
Three Curses & Other Dark Tales
Leanbh Pearson
1
1
The Neurodiverseiverse
Francis & Olmsted (eds)
18
0
A Night so Dark and Full of Stars
Nikky Lee
12
0
Fight Like a Girl 2
Clarke & Hall (eds)
8
0
Offshoots: Humanity Twigged
Juliana Rew
8
0
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2023)
Ekpeki & Eziaghighala (eds)
7
0
A Place Between Waking and Forgetting
Eugen Bacon
5
0
Extrasensory Overload
Chun Hyon Lee (ed)
3
0
Sunflowers in the Snow
Dawn Bonnano
3
0
Different Times and Other Places
Juliet Mckenna
1
0
Out of the Window Into the Dark
Marian Womack
1
0
Triangulation: Hospitium
Brandon Ketchum (ed)
0
1
Weathering Youth
Dawn Vogel
1
0
In the Best Shorter Fiction category, 23 of the 41 long-listed works feature on LibraryThing and 25 on Goodreads; almost all of the rest are periodical or website publications.
Title
Author
GR
LT
The Butcher of the Forest
Premee Mohammed
5,260
186
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
Anne de Marken
4,733
122
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
Malka Older
2,090
159
The Practice, The Horizon and the Chain
Sofia Samatar
1,455
102
Lost Ark Dreaming
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
982
58
Saturation Point
Adrian Tchakovksy
1,459
34
Navigational Entanglements
Aliette de Bodard
480
64
Countess
Suzan Palumbo
341
35
Unexploded Remnants
Elaine Gallagher
201
30
The Dragonfly Gambit
A.D. Sui
135
12
A Cursed Hunt
Rebecca Grey
96
4
12 Hours
L. Marie Wood
42
4
Charlie Says
Neil Williamson
28
3
Elephants in Bloom
Cecile Cristofari
7
10
Songs for the Shadows
Cheryl S. Ntumy
13
4
Ghost Apparent
Jelena Dunato
51
1
The Year of Return
Akotowaa Ivana Ofori
41
1
No Sympathy
Eoin Dooley
32
1
The Last to Drown
Lorraine Wilson
29
1
Star Pattern Traveller
Joyce Ch’ng
6
4
Luna
Allen Stroud
10
2
Waypoint Seven
Xan van Rooyen
6
1
The Runemaster’s Daughter
Lawrence Schoen
2
1
Jezero
Allen Stroud
7
0
Chimera
Chinaza Eziaghigala
1
0
All fourteen of the long-listed works in the Best Fiction for Younger Readers category score on both systems.
Title
Author
GR
LT
Somewhere Beyond the Sea
T J Klune
88,811
878
Immortal Dark
Tigest Girma
11,881
462
Snowglobe
Soyoung Park
4,177
163
Blood at the Root
LaDarrion Williams
2,767
112
Songlight
Moira Buffini
1,344
67
Until We Shatter
Kate Dylan
946
85
The Dividing Sky
Jill Tew
491
28
Redsight
Meredith Mooring
366
32
Doctor Who: Caged
Una McCormack
161
13
Benny Ramirez and the Nearly Departed
Jose Pablo Iriarte
113
11
Braided
Leah Cypess
53
4
Wayfinders
Bryan Chick
59
3
Rebel Dawn
Ann Sei Lin
40
2
The Rarkyn’s Fall
Nikky Lee
16
1
And finally, with apologies for the length of this post, all 61 of the works long-listed for Best Novel are on Goodreads and/or LibraryThing. (59 on GR and 60 on LT.) On the version of the long-list I was working from, one novel was actually listed twice, but I’ve only listed it once here (and there’s another which also features in the Best Shorter Fiction list).
Title
Author
GR
LT
The Ministry of Time
Kaliane Bradley
102,956
1,432
Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands
Heather Fawcett
64,569
1,022
A Sorceress Comes To Call
T. Kingfisher
25,913
716
An Education in Malice
S. T. Gibson
16,561
400
The Teller of Small Fortunes
Julie Leong
11,357
521
The Book of Love
Kelly Link
7,027
378
Someone You can Build a Nest In
John Wiswell
8,063
278
Alien Clay
Adrian Tchaikovsky
6,253
218
Absolution
Jeff Vandermeer
4,517
279
Fathomfolk
Eliza Chan
3,341
365
Private Rites
Julia Armfield
5,658
155
Floating Hotel
Grace Curtis
2,790
177
The Mars House
Natasha Pulley
2,666
167
House of Open Wounds
Adrian Tchaikovsky
2,347
163
Machine Vendetta
Alastair Reynolds
2,978
128
Womb City
Tlotlo Tsamaase
2,193
132
The Principle of Moments
Esme Jikiemi-Pearson
1,209
200
The Great When
Alan Moore
1,196
195
The Briar Book of the Dead
A G Slatter
2,163
105
The Bezzle
Cory Doctorow
1,789
125
Rakesfall
Vajra Chandrasekera
622
91
Deep Black
Miles Cameron
1,283
41
Asunder
Kerstin Hall
795
57
The Wings Upon Her Back
Samantha Mills
615
73
Lady Eve’s Last Con
Rebecca Fraimow
594
69
Navigational Entanglements
Aliette de Bodard
480
64
Calypso
Oliver K. Langmead
422
47
The Legacy of Arniston House
T. L. Huchu
526
36
On Vicious Worlds
Bethany Jacobs
588
24
The Last Shield
Cameron Johnstone
398
31
Redsight
Meredith Mooring
366
33
Beyond the Light Horizon
Ken Mcleod
415
27
The Siege of Burning Grass
Premee Mohammed
281
37
Lake of Darkness
Adam Roberts
235
32
The Collapsing Wave
Doug Johnstone
361
17
Three Eight One
Aliya Whiteley
201
30
The Nightward
R. S. A. Garcia
161
36
Archangels of Funk
Andrea Hairston
147
35
Morphotrophic
Greg Egan
203
11
The Book of Gold
Ruth Frances Long
101
21
Archipelago
H. R. Hawkins
201
7
Ninth Life
Stark Holborn
103
11
The Tapestry of Time
Kate Heartfield
106
10
Extremophile
Ian Green
94
11
The Green Man’s War
Juliet Mckenna
108
8
Grim Root
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
121
7
Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory
Yaroslav Barsukov
91
8
We Are All Ghosts in the Forest
Lorraine Wilson
92
6
The Heart of Winter
Shona Kinsella
85
6
Conquist
Dirk Strasser
40
5
Inversions
M.V. Melcer
36
3
Vigilance
Allen Stroud
16
6
Dark Shepherd
Fred Gambino
13
6
Rabbit in the Moon
Fiona Moore
5
5
Her Gilded Voice
K.C. Aegis
24
1
Three Men in Orbit
Sandra Bond
4
6
Watermyth
Anita Harris Satkunan
8
2
The Headland
Abi Curtis
10
1
The Factory
Ihor Mysiak
0
4
Dakini Atoll
Nikhil Singh
0
2
That Perfect World
BXMN
1
0
As I said last year, I don’t really know how useful a long-list of 51, 61 or indeed 80 can be. I appreciate that awards can call attention to otherwise overlooked work, but a) I’m not convinced that an award decided by popular vote, as the BSFA and Hugo Awards are, is the best vehicle for doing that and b) this is best done with a short list, not a long list where the most interesting stuff risks getting lost in the crowd.
