…please bear in mind that it is a privilege, not a right.
There is nothing about the Hugo voter package in the WSFS constitution. It depends entirely on the goodwill of creators to produce the works, and also the goodwill of volunteers to assemble it. It’s probably the most laborious of any of the tasks involved with Hugo administration, and definitely one of the most thankless. (I hope that I have thanked those who have done it for me.)
I’ve had my share of Hugo-related tensions over the years, but among the most annoying are the entitled complaints of people who expect the Hugo voter packet to be designed for them and their specifications. To be very clear, I’m not talking about accessibility here – people with visual difficulties deserve consideration from publishers and Hugo administrators alike – but about those who demand the free reading material but then can’t be bothered to install the free software. (And then there are those who “forget” to download it in time and still want to get hold of it after the deadline has passed, and get all miffed when we have the audacity to honour the terms of our agreement with publishers, and say no.)
Inevitably some creators will provide their material poorly formatted, or in a form that some people don’t like, and readers will blame Worldcon for it. Inevitably the packet will be released later than had been hoped, because nobody in their right mind does the packet more than once, and it always takes longer than first expected. Inevitably other things go wrong. (My top complaint about creators – those who expect us to download sample copies of their work from NetGalley. Hardly anyone will bother to try, and those few who do try usually find that it doesn’t work.) The fact it that we are lucky to get the Hugo packet at all, and it frustrates me when I see commentary that doesn’t take that into account. My best wishes to those dealing with this year’s challenges.
While we are waiting for this year’s packet, I urge you to start buying (or borrowing) Hugo finalist books, rather than wait until you can get them for free. Creators deserve your money. One possible approach, if you want to be efficient about this, is to work through them from cheapest to most expensive. If you want to be super efficient, you could work through them in order of value measured by the number of pages per dollar, pound or euro. How to calculate that, you ask? Well, as it happens I’ve crunched those numbers for Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Graphic Story, Best Related Work (for four of the six finalists, the other two being an online essay and a Chinese website) and the Lodestar Award, and I can share it with you here. (Prices are from Amazon.com on Kindle, but links go to Amazon.co.uk hard copy, for Reasons.)
¹ As checked recently on Amazon.com for the Kindle version, which is generally what I read. Other regions and formats will likely be broadly similar. ² Buffalito World Outreach Project consists of thirty translations of a single story. Taking that into account, the number of pages of original content per dollar would put it at the other end of this table.
NB that the above list totals 7,500 pages, not counting the Buffalito World Outreach Project, nor the other two Best Related Work finalists, nor anything from the other categories. That’s why I am getting reading now…
I felt it was a bit too derivative of Hunger Games and Earthsearch (for those with longer memories), and the powers of the AI (and indeed the human kids) are just sufficient for the plot to proceed as the writer wants. You can get it here.
Last books finished In the Serpent’s Wake, by Rachel Hartman Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam Jill, by Amy Dillwyn The Popes and Sixty Years of European Integration How to End Russia’s War on Ukraine, by Timothy Ash et al Jill and Jack, by Amy Dillwyn Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, ed. Paula Guran Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier Saga, Vol. 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
Next books Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks Drawing Boundaries: Legislature, Court and Electoral Values, eds. John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon, David E. Smith Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
As the pandemic finally receded, I had two very interesting trips in May 2022: at the beginning of the month, to Northern Ireland for the coverage of the election to the Northern Ireland Assembly (which at time of writing has yet to resume sitting):
And a couple of weeks later to Geneva, Switzerland and Podgorica, Montenegro for work. The end of the month had me under the surgeon’s knife for a (benign) lump in my larynx.
With all the travel, I managed to read 35 books that month.
Non-fiction 16 (YTD 45) Carnival of Monsters, by Ian Potter Thursday’s Child, by Maralyn Rittenour Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, by Mark Blake Queens of the Crusades, by Alison Weir A Norman Legacy, by Sally Harpur O’Dowd Tower, by Nigel Jones The Pilgrimage of S. Silvia of Aquitania to the Holy Places (circa 385 A.D.), trans. John H. Bernard, with an appendix by Sir Charles William Wilson. The Pilgrimage of Etheria, trans. M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe Signs and Symbols Around the World, by Elizabeth S. Helfman The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit, by Simon Bucher-Jones The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation, by Anne McGowan and Paul F. Bradshaw Terrorism In Asymmetric Conflict: Ideological and Structural Aspects, by Ekaterina A. Stepanova Marco Polo, by Dene October The Halls of Narrow Water, by Bill Hall Never Say You Can’t Survive, by Charlie Jane Anders CBT Workbook, by Stephanie Fitzgerald
Non-genre 1 (YTD 9) The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak
SF 11 (YTD 43) The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki A Master of Djinn, by P. Djélì Clark Flicker, by Theodore Roszak Stardust, by Neil Gaiman Demons and Dreams: Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror v. 1, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling She Who Became the Sun, by Shelly Parker-Chan Mort, by Terry Pratchett Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells Mythos, by Stephen Fry
Second frame of third story (“The Infinite Corridor”):
Continuing the adventures of the Tenth Doctor and New Yorker Gabby Gonzalez. The first of these, the title story, has a rather cliched arena situation crossed with a much better than usual take on the characters losing and recovering their memories. Gabby’s friend Cindy joins the TARDIS at the end of the story, though to be honest I have difficulty distinguishing between their characters. The second story, “The Wishing Well Witch”, is a pleasing little vignette set in an English village that is not quite Stockbridge. The third story sets us up for the next volume with the Osirians returning to the fore. You can get it here.
Next in this sequence: Sins of the Father, by a similar team.
My sister cried. My sister rarely cried; I was the one who sat and screamed over every scraped knee and torn skirt, the one who our father fluttered to and swept up in his arms and kissed on the head and called mia Gracino and mia trezoro and mia karulino in the Malisintian tongue of our ancestor, taking little notice of the fact that despite all my howling, my eyes were always dry. But on the day we left for Ceiao my sister had wept at the runway in the harbor as the ship heat curled up around our feet, face red and silent, her mouth a fiat line and her eyes so hot on me that I was afraid my hair would burn.
Yet another space operatic tale of dynastic politics witha same-sex romance twist. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but I stopped after a hundred pages with the feeling that nothing new was going to happen. You can get it here.
In the boys’ division, this sentiment informed his nightly blessing – his benediction, shouted over the beds standing in rows in the darkness. Dr Larch’s blessing followed the bed-time reading, which – after the unfortunate accident to the Winkles – became the responsibility of Homer Wells. Dr Larch wanted to give Homer more confidence. When Homer told Dr Larch how he had loved reading to the Winkles in their safari tent – and how he thought he had done it well, except that the Winkles had fallen asleep – the doctor decided that the boy’s talent should be encouraged.
A long but tremendous book, set mainly in an orphanage in Maine before, during and after the second world war. Dr Larch, the head of the orphanage, is also an abortionist and helps women from all over the community to end unwanted pregnancies. His protégé, Homer Wells, makes friends with coastal orchard kids Wally and Cindy and leaves the orphanage. We know that he will come back in the end but the journey is beautifully told and heart-breaking.
The Cider House Rules was published in 1985, twelve years after Roe v Wade, when it seemed improbable that abortion rights would be rolled back. Now of course we are seeing precisely that, as the U.S. Right attempts to run away from the devastation it has wrought on the country by picking culture war fights with the poor and oppressed. One hopes that the current situation is a nasty temporary blip, but I recommend this book educationally as a reminder of why abortion rights were and are needed. You can get it here.
This was the top book by LibraryThing populatiry on my shelves that I had not yet blogged here. Next is “The Metamorphosis”, by Franz Kafka.
I had been walking, as was my habit, without purpose along the Portway. In a melancholic state, vision turned inwards, I felt as if I drifted in this manner most mornings. Looking for what, I could not recall. I wandered alone, my hands firmly plunged into my pockets, my fingers twitching rhythmically in forgotten arrangements, remembering the ghostly movements of some old functionality long since dissolved. What was it I had used to do, before I had begun to walk here every day? What had I used my hands for? (Mummy, can you pick me up? I can’t see!). I could never remember. My shoulders hunched against the chill. Every now and then, I managed to drag my eyes away from the beautiful bridge that hung above me, a bridge I stared at without really seeing, trying and failing to block out its insistent, persuasive calls. I would look away, struggling to reconnect my feet and my body to the ground beneath me, but my gaze always drifted back. The bridge was magnetic.
Protagonist is being treated for profound psychiatric problems by dodgy contemporary British academics with an agenda and a dream machine. It all goes horribly wrong. Author makes it clear from the foreword that it’s partly based on personal experience of psychiatric treatment. It comes from the heart, but I’m afraid I found the writing very clunky, especially at the start; it improved a bit as it went on. You can get it here.
At junctures the quakes seemed to come often, sending the water quivering over her skin again and again in reverberating series. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, the concussions jarring through her bones and sending chills through her teeth. Goosebumps lifted on her skin, so rare an occasion she felts at them in wondering confusion. Any texture at all came as a fascinating alleviation to the endless litany of despair that was her only company.
Catie’s rate of output is very impressive, and I have long given up trying to keep pace with her books; I enjoyed this tale of an immortal from Atlantis getting involved with an archaeological dig into his own past, and finding that past relationships come back to haunt him. Some online reviewers insist that it’s rather closely linked to the Highlander series, but I don’t know that particular show and to me it seemed pretty fresh and interesting; ancient secrets and relationships coming to the surface. Good fun. You can get it here.
This was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile (and last of those acquired in 2016) is There Will Be War Vol X, edited by Jerry Pournelle.
“Nobody.” Jes repeats his answer for who knows how many times. He can’t blame the big guy for being cautious. He hadn’t planned on telling them about his ability or the Institute so soon, if at all, but the equipment failure happened, and people were going to get hurt and he had to show them some reason, some value he could add to their operation. Disclosing his ability just opened the door.
Space opera where our protagonist has psychic powers over the forces of gravity. Some nice ideas and good treatment of gender, but not startling. You can get it here.
Russia’s act of aggression against a neighbour jolted the EU into becoming more of a geopolitical actor, forcing it to demonstrate a degree of unity and purpose, which the fractious 27-nation bloc rarely achieves in quieter times. The EU and member states deployed a broad toolbox of measures to support Kyiv, assist Ukrainians, sanction Russia and reduce supply chain dependencies for food, energy, minerals and microchips. They also, for the first time, used collective funds to supply lethal weapons to a partner country under attack.
I’ve decided to be a bit more assiduous about tracking my work-related reading, some of which qualifies as books to blog here. This is a mercifully brief report – 120 pages, available here – which was presented at a conference that I attended last month – I don’t recall actually speaking but I’m visible in the audience at several points.
For those of us inside the policy bubble, there’s nothing very surprising here, but it’s good to get the orthodox view down on paper (or pixels). Taylor reports that both NATO and the defence aspects of the EU have been strengthened, of necessity, after the Russian attack on Ukraine, and that policy-makers are now grappling with the likelihood that we’ll need to be combat-ready for the next decade at least. Lessons have been and are being learned about what armaments are and aren’t necessary. There remains a spectrum of debate but there’s a consensus among defence experts about the big picture.
Necessarily he concentrates on the countries that really drive this – France, Germany, in NATO but outside the EU the UK and USA, and the central and eastern European frontline states. His recommendations are largely things that the main actors are doing or want to do anyway. But it’s a very handy summary of what’s really going on in the policy world, and I hope a helpful counterbalance to the extremists of left and right who prefer to lie about these important issues.
Her experience with taking on passengers is, admittedly, limited. Mostly she only transports refugees, cramming as many people as possible into her ship and running as fast as possible to the nearest safe planet or moon or spacedock. Sometimes there’s a bit of a kerfuffle about food or room, but usually it’s pleasant and she gets to have a wide variety of interesting conversations about planets that she’s never set foot on.
Bluebird is a debut novel, and I felt it showed; quite a complex universe and political set-up which didn’t always hold up to examination, and some odd choices of pacing. A promising start to the author’s career, though. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“Timebox”, by Janelle Monáe and Eve L. Ewing):
“What are you doing? It’s freezing out.”
Five stories set in the world of Monáe’s Dirty Computer, about women caught up in the near-future totalitarian state of New Dawn, where those who don’t fit in, especially in terms of gender and sexuality, face memory wiping by the powerful state. It’s rooted in her Hugo finalist album and film from a few years back:
All five stories are billed as being co-written by Monáe and a series of other writers. They all take the fictional society in new and slightly different directions; my favourite was the third, “Timebox”, co-written with Chicago activist Eve L. Ewing, in which two women discover a room in their apartment which sits outside time, and react to it very differently. But these are all good and thought-provoking, and recommended. (Eligible surely for the BSFA’s new Best Collection category next year?) You can get it here.
This was top of my pile of unread books by non-white writers. Next is a rather different one: The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul.
This is also the first write-up here of a book that I finished this month.
Those godsdamned corsairs had stolen the cruiser’s Eva core.
Ion Curtain is a nicely assembled MilSF story featuring a ruthless intelligence agency and rogue AIs in control of space battleships. But I’m afraid this year in particular, I’m uncomfortable with a book about the glorious Russian space navy. You can get it here.
Current Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam In the Serpent’s Wake, by Rachel Hartman Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, ed. Paula Guran Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier
Last books finished Amy Dillwyn, by David Painting The Memory Librarian, ed. Janelle Monáe After the War: How to Keep Europe Safe, by Paul Taylor Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy The Cider House Rules, by John Irving Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadzis et al A Burglary, or, Unconscious Influence, by Amy Dillwyn
Next books The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences, by Bernard Grofman (if I can find it) Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
The highlight of the month for me was Reclamation, the 2022 Eastercon, at which I was one of the Guests of Honour.
We got the Hugo ballot out; I celebrated my 55th birthday in a pub on Place Lux (the same place where I had celebrated my 50th, five years before); and I took little U to the Magritte Museum in Brussels.
Non-fiction read in April 8 (YTD 29) Human Nature / Family of Blood, by Naomi Jacobs and Philip Purser-Hallard Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Colour, by Joy Sanchez-Taylor The Ultimate Foe, by James Cooray Smith Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Francesca T Barbini Hergé, Son of Tintin, by Benoît Peeters Stucwerk, Hechtwerk van het Kasteel te Boxmeer, by W.V.J. Freling The Limbless Landlord, by Brian Igoe Full Circle, by John Toon
Non-genre fiction read in April 1 (YTD 8) No Country for Old Men, by Cormac MacCarthy
SF (non-Who) read in April: 11 (YTD 32) Blackthorn Winter, by Liz Williams Purgatory Mount, by Adam Roberts Air, by Geoff Ryman Hive Monkey, by Gareth L. Powell L’Esprit de L’Escalier, by Catherynne M. Valente Valley of Lights, by Steve Gallagher Elder Race, by Adian Tchaikovsky Across the Green Grass Fields, by Seanan McGuire A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers The Past is Red, by Cat Valente A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. Harrow
Doctor Who books read in April: 4 (YTD 15) Doctor Who: The Ultimate Foe, by Pip and Jane Baker Legends of Camelot, by Jacqueline Rayner The Man from Yesterday, by Nick Walters Doctor Who: Full Circle, by Andrew Smith
First of all, this is the first year since 2018 that I have not been involved with the Hugos, and I’m finding it curiously liberating. Best of luck to Dave and the team; there have clearly been some glitches (as there are every year), but we do it because we love celebrating the best of the genre.
1,847 nominating votes is a good tally – the highest since 2017, which was my first year, and the fifth highest ever, after the 2014-2017 peak. Incidentally, one of the Sad Puppy talking points, back in 2014-15, was that Hugo participation was in potentially terminal decline because people were nominating the Wrong Things. In fact both nominating and final ballot votes had increased steadily year-on-year from 2007 to 2011, and then stabilised before surging again in 2014.The peak in final ballot votes was reached in 2015 and the peak in nominations in 2016, largely in reaction against the Puppies.
Year
2023
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
Noms
1847
1368
1249
1584
1800
1813
2464
4032
2122
1923
Final
?
2235
2362
2221
3097
2828
3319
3130
5950
3587
Year
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
Noms
1343
1101
1006
864
799
482
409
533
546
>462
Final
1848
1922
2100
1094
1074
895
>471
>660
684
1093
I don’t have formal tallies for the final ballot votes in 2006 and 2007, or for nominations in 2004; the number I have given here is the highest count in any single category, which is generally 50%-80% of the full number.
The 2023 announcement video refers to votes for “25,000 individual works”, but I think this must mean the total sum of the number of nominating votes for each and every individual nominee. I have last year’s figures to hand, and I see that the total number of nominations, counting every single vote separately, was just over 24,000 with 1,386 voters, so that suggests that 2023 voters had an average of 13.5 things on their ballots, while 2022’s voters had an average of 17.5.
One technical point, because it is a category that interests me: the leaked version of the ballot for Best Related Work included The Art of Ghost of Tsushima, but the final ballot includes instead Buffalito World Outreach Project, by Lawrence M. Schoen. The fact is that The Art of Ghost of Tsushima was published in 2020, and therefore is not eligible for the 2023 Hugos. I will add that back in 2021, when the game Ghost of Tsushima seemed likely to make it to the ballot for the Best Video Game special category, we were a little concerned that it does not have much in the way of sfnal elements – despite the title, its setting is firmly historical and rooted in the real world of Japan in the 1270s. I suppose we would have allowed it in the end, on the technicality that you can heal your character by the use of charms.
Buffalito World Outreach Project is a single short story, published in thirty different translations. It very clearly fits the rubric of Best Related Work, which states that to be eligible, a nominee “if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and … is not eligible in any other category.” The story “Buffalo Dogs” itself was first published in 2001, so it is not eligible for the Best Short Story or Best Novelette categories (at 7800 words it’s on the cusp between them). And the whole point of Buffalito World Outreach Project is that it’s noteworthy not for the primary text but because of the translations. We applied exactly the same argument in 2021 when deciding on the eligibility of the eventual winner of the category, Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf.
When I ran the stats on Thursday, Buffalito World Outreach Project unusually had only two owners on Goodreads and none at all on LibraryThing, very very low for a commercially publish Hugo finalist. But it had 56 Kickstarter backers, and I suspect that half of that number nominating it for the Hugo would have been sufficient to get it seventh place on the ballot after The Art of Ghost of Tsushima was disqualified. (Last year, the seventh placed nominee in that category had 23 votes, and the year before, 27.)
The Art of Ghost of Tsushima was among the subjects of two competing conspiracy theories. The 2023 Hugos have been subject to unprecedented and deeply regrettable negative attacks from certain quarters of fandom, determined to discover the traces of undue Chinese Communist Party influence on the process, despite the absence of any evidence whatsoever that the CCP takes the slightest interest in the Hugo Awards.
On the one hand, a commenter on File 770said that:
As described on Wikipedia, the Ghost of Tsushima game is about “a samurai on a quest to protect Tsushima Island during the first Mongol invasion of Japan.” I could see a Chinese censor objecting to that being on the list. Without more to go on, though, it’s just speculation.
To allege that censors are manipulating the Hugo ballot is a really strong accusation, and weasel words about “it’s just speculation” don’t make it any better. It is disgraceful to make such a statement without any proof, especially since the real explanation is pretty straightforward: the book was published in the wrong year.
There has also been a similar suggestion that Babel, by R.F. Kuang, was removed from the list, either by censors or by Kuang declining the nomination. Obviously only Kuang herself can speak to the latter point, and I’m sure she will at a time of her choosing; on the former, it’s worth noting that most critics, including Kuang herself in interviews, see Babel as a critique of British imperialism, and it’s difficult to see why Chinese censors might get upset about that.
Babel has indeed proved very popular, has already won the Nebula and Locus Awards, and is ahead of the actual finalists on Goodreads and LibraryThing (over 110,000 GR ratings, almost 2,500 LT owners, compared with 90,000 and 1,500 for the top Hugo finalist). But Hugo voters have different tastes to Nebula and Locus voters, and it’s not at all unusual that a Nebula winning novel fails to make the Hugo ballot – I count eight precedents so far this century, starting with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents.
Another crucial point is that a number of successful finalists have been pretty critical of the Chinese government. One of them, Chris M. Barkley, comments:
I also think my, and the other nominees from the US and (presumably, other nations) refutes any claims that the Chengdu Worldcon Committee or the Chinese Communist Party have the final say or control over the process.
(Technically of course the Chengdu Worldcon Committee does have control of the process under the WSFS Constitution, but I imagine that they have followed the usual practice of irrevocably delegating all such powers to a special subcommittee.)
On the other hand, a different narrative has the sinister Chinese putting finalists on the ballot rather than taking them off it. One Facebook commenter went full froth on this:
“I sense some state purchased memberships and vote buying”
…by my reckoning 14 of the "recommendations" on that list also made it on the "leak" list. Not all of the "recommendations" were on the "leaked" finalist list, and not all categories had recommendations, but in a few categories, all the recs got through
This was discussed on File 770, a debate that I also contributed to. It’s notable that in several categories there were more recommendations than votes available (there are only six finalists per category and you can only vote for five). It’s also notable that The Art of Ghost of Tsushima was one of the recommendations made by Science Fiction World, even though it was not actually eligible. Given the rather low impact of the recommendation list, I would be surprised if the number of voters who followed it can be demonstrated to be more than a couple of dozen – roughly 1% of the 2,006 voters who supported Chengdu as the 2023 Worldcon site. There are individual authors in the USA who can and do regularly mobilise twice that number to support their own Hugo nominations, without apparently attracting scandalised criticism from wider fandom.
(And I think the conspiracy theorists have to choose – are the Chinese fiendishly adding the Tsushima book to the ballot? Or fiendishly removing it?)
The World Science Fiction Society is not as global as its name would claim. I was very sorry that in my first run as Hugo Administrator, for Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017, saw no Finns on the final ballot (there were Finnish runners-up in Best Graphic Story and Best Semiprozine).
Edited to add: Silly me. There were in fact two Finnish finalists in Best Fan Artist. My apologies to them.
It’s fundamentally a very good thing that the Hugos are a little less dominated by America this year than in previous years, and it’s also not at all surprising that a Worldcon in China gets more Chinese finalists on the Hugo ballot than previously. Those voters will also be eligible to nominate next year, when it will be my turn to be involved again, and I hope we’ll see a diverse Hugo ballot also in 2024.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Mothers, the Mothers, How Eerily It Sounds” by David Skal):
He looked at the stars. More of them, every year more of them, just as the elders had promised. The air had been angered once by the earth man had been the cause of the quarrel, and thus had been denied the light of stars. Digger had heard the tale a hundred times and had no doubt of its truth. The elements must never be angered again, lest man be denied more than starlight.
I had got hold of this 1976 anthology mainly because it is the first publication of the Hugo and Nebula-winning story, “‘Houston! Houston! Do You Read?'”, by James Tiptree Jr. The rubric of the anthology is “Amazing Tales of the Ultimate Sexual Revolution”, the editors sayiong in their preface that they wanted fiction that explored what the world might look like after equality between the sexes had been achieved. They didn’t really get it, but it’s a good anthology anyway.
In fact it incudes two stories by the same author, as the editors were not aware that Tiptree and Racoona Sheldon were the same person. It also includes the first chapter of Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, and Ursula Le Guin’s non-fiction essay “IS Gender Necessary?” A couple of the others are real duds, but the good pieces are very good, and I think it’s a useful representation of both how far sf had come in 1976 and how much farther there still was to go. You can get it here.
“He’s a wonderful man. So homely, so sincere. And look what he’s done for us!” Eleanor nodded politely at the store clerk who was staring out his window to the president and his bodyguards and the carefully selected citizens who were allowed to go up to him and chat.
I really enjoyed The Splendid City and read it to the end, a charming and slightly subversive suburban fantasy, but I don’t think there’s any way it could reasonably be classified as science fiction. All the technology is contemporary, and there is lots of magic. You can get it here.
Next in my sequence of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, these two shorter pieces were published in 1990 and awarded in 1991. They also mark the beginning and end of my previous project of writing up the joint winners of both awards; back in the early 2000s, I decided to go through them in alphabetical order of title, and although since then American Gods, Among Others, Ancillary Justice and All Systems Red have picked up both awards, back in 2001 that was not yet the case and “Bears Discover Fire” was the first in line. And when I ran out of steam with that project a few years later, I had started but nowhere near finished a write-up of “The Hemingway Hoax”.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Bears Discover Fire” is:
The school bus let Wallace Jr. off at my house on Wednesday, the day they left. The boy doesn’t have to pack much of a bag when he stays with me. He has his own room here. As the eldest of our family, I hung onto the old home place near Smiths Grove. It’s getting run down, but Wallace Jr. and I don’t mind. He has his own room in Bowling Green, too, but since Wallace and Elizabeth move to a different house every year (part of the Plan), he keeps his .22 and his comics, the stuff that’s important to a boy his age, in his room here at the home place. It’s the room his dad and I used to share.
First time around, I was not super enthusiastic about the story, but I was enthusiastic enough about the project to give it a long write-up:
“Bears Discover Fire” is described by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as a story that “elegizes the land, the loss of the dream of America; it is also very funny”. I appreciated the story but didn’t see the joke at all. Obviously others enjoyed it more: apart from the Hugo and Nebula, “Bears Discover Fire” won four other awards and was nominated for another two, probably a record. (Having said that, the competition from other short stories in 1990-91 was not very strong. [I don’t think that was really fair of me.])
Terry Bisson writes very American science fiction, rooted in a strong sense of place (Owensboro, Kentucky) and time (the present day, or something very like it); his best-known books include Talking Man and Fire on the Mountain, set in an alternate history where the US Civil War had a quite different course. His website gives a good feel for the man. I really dislike his story “macs”, even though I completely agree with the political point of the story. Perhaps a non-American inevitably has difficulty in accessing Bisson’s work. I notice that I am not alone here [dead link to Asimov’s readers forum]. It took me a couple of rereadings of “Bears Discover Fire” to realise that the “torches” held by the bears at the end of the first section were not battery operated, and this despite the whacking great clue in the story’s title.
Bisson has described “Bears Discover Fire” as being about exactly what the title says. This is not true. The narrator, his brother and his nephew suffer a flat tyre one night; their flashlight goes out, and the narrator changes the tyre in “a flood of dim orange flickery light… coming from two bears at the edge of the woods, holding torches.” It seems that the bears have given up hibernating and are instead settling in the wooded medians (what I would call the central reservations) of the interstate highways, surviving on a newly evolved fruit called a “newberry”. The narrator’s elderly mother disappears from her nursing home, and he and his nephew find her sitting around a fire with a silent group of bears. They fall asleep together, and wake in the morning to find that the bears have gone and she has died in the night.
The most sensitive element (in what is anyway quite a sensitive story) is the portrayal of the narrator’s relationships with his mother and his nephew. The nephew, Wallace Jr, is “old enough to want to help and not old enough (yet) to think he knows it all. If I’d married and had kids, he’s the kind I’d have wanted.” Wallace Jr stands up for his uncle against his father; his uncle responds by correcting his grammar, not wanting him to end up talking like “what Mother used to call ‘a helock from the gorges of the mountains.'” It’s beautifully portrayed. The mother, on the other hand, is long prepared for her own death, and the narrator is gradually coming to terms with it. Bisson (introducing the story in Nebula Awards 26) comments that the story was his own way of coming to grips with the deaths of his mother and a favourite uncle.
The tone is elegiac throughout. The narrator’s brother chides him for wasting time on fixing old tyres rather than using the new radials. The brother himself is introduced to us as a preacher, but it turns out he makes two-thirds of his living in real estate. The bears seem to be gaining something that we humans have lost, the art of enjoying company by a warm fire in the woods perhaps. “It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything?” The scientists who try to explain the bears’ new behaviour are at a total loss; it’s a phenomenon which is only really understood by the narrator’s mother. “It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking.”
The bears are individuals: “Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.” That “gathered together” is very Biblical, particularly reminiscent of Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Even the narrator is astonished to find the new natural paradise that is in the median, “all tangled with brush and vines under the maples, oaks and sycamores. Even though we were only a hundred yards from the house, I had never been there, and neither had anyone else that I knew of. It was like a created country.” The bears are truly in Eden.
Meanwhile the average human is just insensitive. The nursing home tell the narrator that he will have to keep paying for his mother’s care for another two days even though she has disappeared. The state troopers who arrive in the morning after the bears have gone “scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do.” Hunters in Virginia (not Kentucky, I notice!) complain that the bears have burnt down their house. The narrator clearly feels that if the bears did it, they had a right to do so: “The state hunting commissioner came on and said the possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back… I’m not a hunter myself.”
John Kessel notes [dead link] in particular an exchange between the narrator and his nephew where the nephew wants to shoot one of the bears (for me, the horror I feel at the idea of a twelve-year-old running around with a rifle illustrates yet another cultural difference with America). “I explained why that would be wrong. ‘Besides,’ I said, “a .22 wouldn’t do much more to a bear than make it mad.'” New paragraph. “‘Besides,’ I added, “it’s illegal to hunt in the medians.'” Kessel says that “This combination of the legal, the practical and the moral sums up something about the voice of Terry Bisson.” I think Kessel has it right, but in the wrong order: it’s significant that the moral reasoning, God’s law, is mentioned first; then the practical, Nature’s law; and the legal issues, Man’s law, are an afterthought.
John Kessel [kindly] sent me an email in response to this paragraph: “I think you have it exactly right, and I was trying to say exactly that – that for Bisson, the issues are moral, practical and legal, in descending order of importance. This reflects a rather Emersonian and typically American faith in the idea of a “natural” virtue that only coincidentally has any connection with the law, and is often in opposition to law.”
One of the roles of speculative fiction is to make us look again at our world and re-evaluate what we are doing to it. “Bears Discover Fire” has been described by Robert Sawyer and Bob Sabella [dead link] as a “tall-tale”. I think it’s actually a fable, in the Aesopian sense of a moral story featuring animals which behave as humans. But whereas we were meant to look at Aesop’s animals and laugh at their failings while realising that we share them, Bisson’s bears are in fact on a spiritual plane which may or may not be higher than ours, but is certainly better.
Michael Swanwick has [also kindly] sent an reaction by email: “I was dumbfounded that you couldn’t see the humor in ‘Bears Discover Fire,’ particularly since the opening is structured as a shaggy-dog joke. Every time I reread it, that last line, ‘”Looks like bears have discovered fire,” he said,’ makes me laugh out loud. And those triads of explanations the narrator offers, always ending with the anteclimactic: ‘Besides, it’s illegal to hunt in the medians.’ Or: ‘Also, old people tend to exaggerate.’ (You were spot-on about the hierachy of values, incidentally; one of the things I love about this story is how many virtues Bisson layered atop each other.) I think it’s a profoundly funny story, one whose humor lies in its wisdom and vice versa.
“Oh, and did you notice that the last line of the story is implicitly the last statement of one of his triads with the prior two omitted? Terry’s a sly guy.”
I must say that on rereading it more than twenty years later, I still don’t see it as very funny. I guess that this is an American thing.
“Bears Discover Fire” was the only story to be on both Hugo and Nebula ballots in the Short Story category that year. The other Hugo finalists were “Cibola”, by Connie Willis; “Godspeed”, by Charles Sheffield; “The Utility Man”, by Robert Reed; and “VRM-547”, W. R. Thompson. I don’t think I have read any of these – “Cibola” has not been republished in any of the Connie Willis collections. W[illiam] R[och] Thompson was born in 1955 and has published precisely one story since 1996.
The other Nebula finalists were “Before I Wake”, by Kim Stanley Robinson; “Lieserl”, by Karen Joy Fowler; “Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates”, by Pat Murphy; “The Power and the Passion”, by Pat Cadigan; and “Story Child”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I think I have read “Lieserl”; I note that four of the five losing stories were by women.
There was more overlap in the Best Novelette category that year. The Hugo was won by “The Manamouki”, by Mike Resnick, and the Nebula by “Tower of Babylon”, by Ted Chiang. Both were on both shortlists, as were “Over the Long Haul”, by Martha Soukup, and “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk”, by Dafydd ab Hugh.
The Hugo and Nebula for Best Novella were jointly won by “The Hemingway Hoax”, by Joe Haldeman. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
John left the place soon, walking slowly through the afternoon heat. He was glad he hadn’t brought the bicycle; it was pleasant to walk in the shade of the big aromatic trees, a slight breeze on his face from the Gulf side.
As mentioned above, I hit a permanent block when trying to write about this story fifteen years ago, which I think was much more because of family and work circumstances at the time than due to any difficulty with the story itself. It’s complex, but not overly so; an English literature professor and Vietnam veteran, in a marriage that is less happy than he realises, gets inveigled by his wife and a conman into forging the papers lost by Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, on a train leaving Paris in 1922. (The Hemingways were members of the same library as my grandmother.) This scheme attracts the attention of time-travelling entities, one of whome keeps reappearing in the form of Hemingway, for whom it is crucially important that Hemingway’s early writing history remains unchanged and unchallenged, because of his importance to the development of civilisation. Sex, violence and time paradoxes ensue, as the Hemingway entity kills the protagonist only to find him resurrected in a slightly different universe. I enjoyed it without being entirely clear what had happened at the end.
The one element that really has dated is the notion of Hemingway’s exceptionalism.
“the accelerating revival of interest in Hemingway from the seventies through the nineties is vitally important. In the Soviet Union as well as the United States. For some reason, I can feel your pastiche interfering with it.”
When I first read The Hemingway Hoax I had not read any of Hemingway’s books; in the interim, I have in fact read several, and I’ll agree that they are great literature, but really not as earth-shattering as all that. I think we’re meant to take seriously the notion that Hemingway’s writing is central to the present and future of Western civilisation; and I can’t.
On the plus side, the story is clearly also Haldeman working out his own feelings about Vietnam and literature, and both of those are deep wells to draw from. The women characters (wife and lover) wobble on the edge of stereotype but don’t quite fall over. I felt that while it has dated, it’s still very good. You can get a standalone version, slightly expanded from the original publication, here.
Two other novellas were on both Hugo and Nebula ballots that year; “Bones”, by Pat Murphy, and “Fool to Believe”, by Pat Cadigan. The others on the Hugo ballot were Bully!, by Mike Resnick, and A Short, Sharp Shock, by Kim Stanley Robinson; and the others on the Nebula ballot were “Mr. Boy”, by James Patrick Kelly, and “Weatherman”, by Lois McMaster Bujold, which is the only one of these that I am sure I have read (see next para).
The only novel on both Hugo and Nebula final ballots was The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, which I liked when I first read it but didn’t like so much on rereading, though it won the BSFA Award. The Hugo for Best Novel was won by Bujold’s The Vor Game, which incorporates “Weatherman”, and the Nebula by Le Guin’s Tehanu.
I saw Cooper alongside pad 21. He had changed and was now dressed all in black separates with a long trench coat with shiny black boots that came up to his knees. Dark glasses and a baseball cap turned back to front finished the look. I think he tried to give the impression he was some sort of gangster. I think it gave the impression of a moron.
Real Nutty Nuggets stuff, with a shortage of commas and other punctuation. In the future, all astronauts have firmly Anglo-Saxon names – not even a token Celt, let alone anything more exotic. The first named woman character to speak does so on page 48, and again on page 60; she is clearly being set up as the protagonist’s love interest. I stuck it out to page 100. You can get it here.
As usual, I have crunched the numbers to see the extent to which Goodreads and LibraryThing users have assimilated this year’s Hugo finalists. Each table is ranked by cumulative raters/owners on the two systems, the highest number in each column is bolded. In one category, only four of the six finalists appear on either Goodreads or LibraryThing. Links are to Amazon.co.uk (yes, I know, but commissions from those links are my only reward for writing all this).
St Leger’s occupancy of the lord deputyship was critical in maintaining the fragile peace and stability that resulted in both Irish abstinence from involvement in intrigue with France and consequent minimal demands for financial, military and naval resources from the English privy council to fortify Ireland’s defences. His success, however, proved short-lived. Within months of the arrival in Ireland in May 1548 of St Leger’s successor, Sir Edward Bellingham, his aggressive handling of the midland septs led to insurrection. In the aftermath, the dispossessed O’Connors embarked upon a sustained campaign to elicit military support from Henri II of France in support of their opposition to the English crown in what was the most serious episode in sixteenth-century Franco-Irish intrigue.2 2 See Ch. 4 below.
This is a nice short book adapted from the author’s Ph D thesis on the same topic. French interest in Ireland waxed and waned over the long sixteenth century; the big game was always in the future relationship with England, and Scotland was a far more important factor (and Scottish politics much better known) in Paris. Also, the Irish chieftains were much kore assiduous and successful at building relations in Spain, whose relationship with England was much less complex.
So Franco-Irish relations in the Tudor period are a bit of a sideshow, but there is still quite a lot to tell if you want to look into the official documents and archives in France and England (and Ireland, to the limited extent that it is possible). The most interesting Fact I Had Not Known is that Henri II of France came close to organising an invasion of Ireland via Scotland in 1549-50; but the politics didn’t quite work out, and nor did the weather. It would have been a tough defence for the English, provided that a critical mass of Irish leaders had joined the French; in the end I think they would likely have opted for the devil they knew, but that would not have been clear from the beginning.
It’s also just useful to have a look from a different perspective. I’ve read a lot about Tudor Ireland over the last few years, but it’s almost all been internally focused with occasional references to the court in London. It was good to be reminded that there were other neighbouring countries with skin in the game, even if not very much. I’d love to read something about the Spanish angle, however – and that would include Belgium, then under Spanish rule and a hub for Irish exiles.
Anyway, a good book if you are interested in the subject. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next, if I can find it, is Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences, by Bernard Grofman.
Her grandmother had taught her that, when Tesla’s rage turned a room incandescent red, the best thing to do was to stay very, very still. The time her elementary school science teacher had marked her correct answer anout the most recent supernova as wrong “because it wasn’t in the textbook” had impressed in Tesla’s mind how effective that stillness could be. It was also the first time she used any version of “I want to speak to the manager” when she asked to go to the principal’s office in a voice that was, in hindsight, too cold and flat for a ten-year-old.
This was very interesting – a detective novel set on an Earth to Mars space cruise. Intricate plotting, lots of good stuff about gender diversity and invisible disabilities, and a very cute dog. And cocktail recipes. I was not quite sure about the ending, though. You can get it here.
As is often the case with more recent New Who, I don’t seem to have written up the closing episodes of Series 5 previously. In case you have forgotten, it is the climax to the first set of stories featuring Matt Smith as the Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy and Arthur Darville as Rory, first shown in 2010. (And Alex Kingston also turns up as River Song.) It’s a story that merrily zips back and forth from Roman times to the present day, with loads of Doctor Who monsters and also Stonehenge. The universe gets destroyed and then put back together again, and the Doctor and the TARDIS are almost eliminated from it but summoned back by Amy at her wedding to Rory. It’s a lot of fun.
Doctor Who is meant to be entertaining, and I’m with the majority who find that this time it worked – The Pandorica Opens had the highest audience ratings so far of any Series 5 episode, beaten the following week by The Big Bang. It was the fifth of six Doctor Who stories to win the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), remarkably rising from second last place in both nominations and first preferences to win the award on transfers. It’s the first of the Hugo winners to be covered by the Black Archive series (and at time of writing, the only one).
I noted briefly before that it “manages to avoid pulling its punches”; I think I’d go further, and say that it’s the best of all of the Moffat era season endings (cf Dark Water / Death in Heaven, and Heaven Sent / Hell Bent).The plot doesn’t honestly make a lot of sense, but this is covered with spectacle, action, wit and knowing references to things that had happened earlier in the season so that you are made to feel that it all hangs together, more perhaps than it really does. Amy’s line “something borrowed, something blue”, tying ancient and incomprehensible wedding traditions to the TARDIS is simply beautiful.
Philip Bates has written a fair bit of commentary, but this appears to be his first book. A short prologue states his case that the story succeeds because it is “an intimate tale on epic proportions”. The rest of the book provides supporting arguments.
The first chapter, “Balancing the Epic and the Intimate”, looks at how Moffat pulls off the feat of intricately linking the story with the preceding episodes of the season, and indeed how they are linked to the rest of Doctor Who.
The second chapter, “Myths and Fairytales”, interrogates the concept of fairytales, stopping off briefly at Pandora’s Box, and the way in which fairytale lore informs both the story in question and the character of the Doctor.
The third chapter’s title is “Anomalies”. Its brief second paragraph is:
And so, we’re teased with timely anomalies that hint at what we’ve lost and what could return.
Here Bates looks at the concept of anomalies and how they contribute to the plot of the episode, going (perhaps a little more than necessary) into the scientific concepts underpinning the term.
The fourth chapter, “When Time Travel Wouldn’t Help”, looks at the “rules” of time travel and how Moffat uses them to support the plot – referring back also to his first Doctor Who work, the short story “Continuity Errors“.
The fifth chapter, “The Trouble with Time”, which is the longest in the book, looks at the arrow of time, time loops, and (again) the current scientific understanding behind them, and the way in which they are used in the story.
The sixth chapter, “Endings and Beginnings”, is mostly about scientific understandings of the end (and beginning ) of the universe.
A brief conclusion meditates on the concept of “favourite stories”.
An appendix, “Good Question for Another Day”, attempts to unpack the question of why the TARDIS explodes and who, if anyone, is responsible.
This book lacks a lot of the things I usually like about the Black Archives – analysis of the development of the script or of details of the production -and includes a fair bit of science, which is not what I get the Black Archives for. But I can forgive a lot of it for Bates’ infectious enthusiasm for a story that I already liked a lot. You can get it here.
Groaning, I wipe my mouth on the back of my hand, squeeze my eyes shut, and gently rest my pounding head against the window. Rain patters against the roof. My clothes are wet, and my skin feels oddly sticky. The faint, sharp scent of rubbing alcohol drifts around the interior of the truck. My mouth tastes earthy, fishy, like I’ve guzzled overly chlorinated water.
This is a tale of uploaded intelligence and parallel realities. It started well, but lost me a bit in the middle because all of the characters sounded increasingly like John Scalzi (or like John Scalzi characters, it’s the same thing), and then lost me even more at the end with the revelation of vital plot information that I felt had been unfairly kept from us readers. So I’m not especially recommending it. You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
This was another month when I did not leave Belgium, though such months are again becoming increasingly rare. I compensated with a couple more trips to see Hansche stuccos:
I had planned to travel to Belfast to give a lecture at the end of the month, but pressure of work in Brussels compelled me to do it virtually. Here is the preview interview I gave with Alan Meban.
The big excitement at home was the installation of a bee hotel at the end of our drive.
I mourned Erhard Busek, and did the last of my ten-day plague posts as life returned to normal.
And this humble blog moved from Livejournal to WordPress; probably not before time.
We were also busily working on the 2023 Hugo Awards, my sixth time of overseeing the process, so I read only 15 books (and was still getting to grips with WordPress).
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 21) The Twinkling of an Eye, by Brian Aldiss The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe in Contemporary Culture, by Mark Bould Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades, by Anna McFarlane Elles font l’abstraction/Women in Abstraction, by Christine Macel and Laure Chavelot Nine Lives, by Aimen Dean
SF 6 (YTD 21) The Green Man’s Challenge, by Juliet McKenna Skyward Inn, by Aliya Whiteley Light Chaser, by Peter F. Hamilton and Gareth L. Powell The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao Shards of Earth, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 11) The Unofficial Doctor Who Annual 1972, ed. Mark Worgan A Very Private Haunting, by Sharon Bidwell Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Comics 1 (YTD 3) Snotgirl Volume 1: Green Hair Don’t Care, by Brian Lee O’Malley and Leslie Hung
4,300 pages (YTD 16,600) 7/15 (YTD 21/63) not by men (McFarlane, Macel/Chavelot, McKenna, Whiteley, Zhao, Bidwell, Hung) 3/15 (YTD 10/63) by PoC (Dean, Zhao, Lee O’Malley/Hung)
Greatly enjoyed rereading Brian Aldiss’ autobiography The Twinkling of an Eye, which you can get here; greatly enjoyed first acquaintance with The Space Machine, which you can get here, and volume 1 of Snotgirl, which you can get here. I will draw a veil over the ones I didn’t like so much.
I’m in my desk chair, turned to face the bed. Eight is sitting up now, leaning forward with his head in his hands. I know how he feels. Waking up straight out of the tank is like the world’s worst hangover, with little bits of leprosy and the bends mixed in for flavor.
From the front cover, spine and headers, it looks to me like the number in the title is intended to be superscript – Mickey⁷ – though the narrator is always referred to as Mickey7 in the text, with no superscript.
I enjoyed this. If you ever played the RPG Paranoia at any stage you’ll appreciate the premise; the narrator is the latest in a series of clones established to help colonise a hostile planet, and faces lethal challenges from his fellow colonisers. The ending left some things unresolved, but I found it satisfactory all the same. You can get it here.
Nomadland won the 2020 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Director (Chloé Zhao) and Best Actress (Frances McDormand), more Oscars than any other film that year. The other contenders for Best Picture were The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7; I haven’t seen any of them. The Hugo went to The Old Guard, which I really didn’t grok, and the Bradbury Award to a TV script.
Apart from this and the six films nominated for the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), I have also seen Enola Holmes and the film-of-the-stage-show of Hamilton from that year, which was of course the first full year of the pandemic. I’d put Nomadland somewhere in the middle of that pack. IMDB users rank it an OK 13th on one scale, but a lowly 43rd on the other. The top films on the two IMDB rankings are Tenet, which I also couldn’t get on with, and Extraction, which I have not heard of.
Here’s a trailer.
I normally run through the other appearances of the cast in Oscar/Hugo/Nebula-Bradbury winners and in Doctor Who. This time, there are hardly any professional actors in the film – most of the cast play themselves. McDormand has the most exposure, but I had only previously seen her in Raising Arizona and Almost Famous. (This is a serious omission on my part; Nomadland was her third Oscar win for Best Actress after Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, putting her level with Ingrid Bergman and Meryl Streep, and more likely than either of them to catch up with Katharine Hepburn.)
The film is about McDormand’s character, Fern, who is displaced from her home by capitalism and links up with the American subculture of people living in their vehicles, crossing the huge area between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi, working on subsistence jobs. As I said, while not my favourite film of the year, I liked it well enough.
It is one of a number of Oscar winners to be based on a contemporary factual situation with some fictionalised elements – apart from the biopics, I would include On the Waterfront, The French Connection, Argo and Spotlight. But Nomadland is a very different kettle of fish. In The French Connection, two of the real-life protagonists play minor figures in the story, and one minor figure plays himself. Here, almost all of the speaking roles, apart from the lead character and a couple of others, are played by people playing themselves.
It makes me a little uneasy, to be honest. A documentary is a documentary; it’s a work of art, sure, but one that relies on showing an existing truth to us on the screen. But this is a film where an A-list Hollywood actress pretends to be part of the lives of very real people with very real problems. To tell their story, was it necessary to bring in a fictional person to help them tell it? And if so, is it still their story, or a similar yet different story belonging to the film-makers? Are we getting the real Linda May, Gay, Patty, Angela, Carl, Doug, Ryan, Teresa, Karie, Brandy, Makenzie and Bob Wells? Or are we getting Chloé Zhao’s version of them?
Still, it’s unusual to be asking this question about middle-aged and elderly white people. (cf Slumdog Millionaire.) These folks are making the best of the disruption to their lives caused by late stage capitalism in a crumbling state (ie the USA); they narrate their situation to themselves and to us as a positive choice; we get to make up our own minds. Some may wish that the film had taken a more polemical stance against poverty and its causes, and I think I’m probably one of them, but I don’t know if an angrier film would have been a better film in this case.
Apart from that, you have to admit that the film looks really good and sounds really good. Those landscapes from the sparsely populated Mountain Time Zone speak for themselves. The music could have been gruesomely sentimental and manipulative, but opts for quiet and contemplative. McDormand herself is not called on to do all that much, but does it very well, and it is impossible to take your eyes off her. (Somewhat related: not many actors of either gender get nude scenes, however discreet, in their 50s.)
So I’m putting it about three fifths of the way down my list of Oscar winners, just below Marty and above The Life of Emile Zola.
As previously mentioned, it’s based on a book with the same title by journalist Jessica Bruder. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Empire was six miles north of “the gyp,” an open-pit gypsum mine nestled at the foot of the Selenite mountain range. There miners detonated blasts of anfo—an explosive blend of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—to dislodge white, chalky chunks of ore from five terraced pits, the largest a half-mile across. Haul trucks shuttled sixty-ton batches of gypsum up the highway to a drywall plant on the edge of town. There workers pulverized it, heated it to 500 degrees in massive kettles, and shaped it into the wallboard found in homes across the American West.
I’m a huge sucker for the participant-observer mode of anthropology, and this brand of “immersive journalism” comes very close to it. Good writing like this lets the stories come out in their own way and their own time, and although the book is not long, nobody is rushed into fitting into a film scene. Inevitably the book ends up angrier than the film, even if its subjects in general accept their lot, because the mere facts of what the USA is doing to its own people are so enraging, and decent reportage will bring that out.
It also reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich, though Alexievich rarely inserts herself into the narrative as Bruder perforce has to, and her subject matter is much rawer. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the impact on its people was far more gruesome and broad than what has happened in America. So far.
