Now that Hugo voting is finally available online, I’m going to post about a few categories over the next few days. I’m involved with the administration of the awards again this year, so I won’t be revealing my exact rankings; back to my normal procedure next year.

Of all of this year’s categories, I am most excited about Best Related Work. This was the category hit hardest by the Puppies, being No Awarded in both 2015 and 2016 (which incidentally means that if all goes well in DC next year, it will be only the second time since 2013 that the Hugo in this category has been awarded in the USA). This year’s finalists are a pretty remarkable set, and I heartily recommend them as a group. It’s interesting that each of them concentrates on the work of one particular creator – an autobiography, three monographs, a speech and a TV documentary.

Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood, by J. Michael Straczynski

Second paragraph of third chapter:

This was an extraordinary development, because until now my mother’s side of the family had always been something of a mystery. As far as Charles was concerned, only his side of the family mattered, and he often belittled Evelyn’s relatives as little more than hillbillies. Charles was so adamant about erasing any connection to Evelyn’s side of the family that he ordered her to destroy all her personal photos. She tore up a few in front of him, then secretly sent the rest to my aunt for safekeeping.

This is an exceptional read. I’m not in fact all that familiar with Straczynski’s work, having seen just a few episodes of Babylon 5; but you don’t have to know anything about him to appreciate his autobiographical story of emerging from a dreadful childhood with an abusive father and largely absent mother (and various awful other relatives) to finally make it good in show biz and personal life after various difficult starts. The first half of the book, as he works his way out of his origins, is gripping stuff. The second half, when he starts getting successful, is less interesting unless you know his work. I do notice a recurring pattern that he gets into a particular project and then has to (or is made to) walk away after confrontations with the studio executives, where he is always right and they are always wrong but more powerful. You can get it here.

Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It’s beyond the scope of this study to examine the Cold War reversal of women’s emancipation in detail, but it’s important to understand that the instigators of Second Wave feminism in America, including Joanna and her cohort in feminist sf, grew up in a stifling world,⁶ and their rebellion was driven by desperation as much as by sixties radicalism. Reform movements rise from immediate causes, as well as long term injustice. The “cloud of talking gnats”⁷ that bars the way to utopia in The Female Man was, to a great extent, created by Cold War politics.
⁶ “[T]hat disgusting decade.” Joanna, as an adult, became well aware of what the fifties had done to her generation.
⁷Magic Mommas, 69. Female Man, 104

I’m afraid this didn’t grab me quite as much. Russ is a fascinating writer, whose work I don’t know as well as I would like, and this book goes in great detail (perhaps too much detail) in its recounting of the stories in each of her published (and some unpublished) work. But I don’t get a sense of how she fitted into the broader sfnal picture – there is a discussion of the Khatru Symposium, but without really explaining where it came from and what happened after. Russ herself, as a personality, flits in and out of the narrative. I found it a bit frustrating. You can get it here.

The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, by Mallory O’Meara

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The house Milicent lived in sits on a wide street in a quiet, unremarkable residential area. It’s part of a row with other similar two-story homes, all with identical short flights of red brick stairs leading into the arch of the front door. This was about as far away from Hearst Castle as you could get. Marble was replaced by stucco, ornate architecture was replaced by plain buildings, lush gardens were replaced by plain, trimmed hedges. No more sweeping seaside vistas, no miles of rolling coastland, no enveloping fog.

This on the other hand is a completely fascinating book. I am ashamed to say that I had never heard of Milicent Patrick, nor have I even seen The Creature from the Black Lagoon, in which she created the eponymous Creature. Mallory O’Meara recounts both Milicent Patrick’s story and her own quest for information about this important creator who was written out of history, culminating in her efforts to trace and contact Milicent Patrick’s surviving relatives. It’s ultimately a sad story – after being fired for not being invisible enough in 1953, she lived another forty-five years without being able to do the work she was best at, doing odd bits and pieces of work in southern California. An important story. You can get it here.

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The sections of this chapter and the next do not represent an even or ordered mapping. Heinlein’s work followed a spiral path, and elements that I wish to identify turn up, are discarded, and then returned to again in later work. But there are three clear divisions in terms of the rhetorical techniques Heinlein uses: the cinematic, the didactic and the picaresque.

I wrote about this previously, and repeat now what I said then:

I was a huge fan of Heinlein’s writing in my teenage years, but the last awful novels came out just around that time and somewhat tainted the memory of the pleasure I’d had a few years earlier. I have gone back to his work a couple of times in recent years, but bounced off it as often as not.

But here Farah Mendlesohn approaches Heinlein with a redemptive eye. It is an interesting comparison with [Adam] Roberts’ Wells book – it is shorter, because Heinlein didn’t write as much despite living a bit longer; it is more consciously fannish; but it’s a much deeper analysis of what Heinlein thought he was doing with his writing, grouped more thematically than by time line. Heinlein’s politics, for good or ill, had much more influence on later science fiction than Wells’. Possibly Heinlein actually had more to say than Wells, even if Wells said more of it.

I learned a lot from this, including in particular what Heinlein thought he was doing with Farnham’s Freehold and how it went so badly wrong… You can get it here.

“2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech”, by Jeannette Ng

You can watch all two minutes of this online:

Here is her script (which she did not entirely stick to). The third paragraph is:

And I am so proud to be part of this. To share with you my weird little story, an amalgam of all my weird interests, so much of which has little to do with my superficial identities and labels.

I was in fact in the room where it happened, waiting offstage to help handle the Hugo trophies for the next set of winners, having some time previously counted the votes that brought Ng her victory. It was a real moment of sfnal history; Alec Nevala-Lee’s book had already dissected Campbell’s views to the point that it would have been difficult to continue with the award in his name for much longer, but this speech was the final push which made it happen sooner rather than later. I’m very glad to be involved again this year with administering the first Astounding Award under that name.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, produced and directed by Arwen Curry

Here’s a trailer:

A really lovely documentary about Le Guin’s work, with commentary from (among others) Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell, looking at her life and career and giving us a three-dimensional picture of this complex writer. It is a mainly positive picture, admittedly, but it’s well worth watching.

So, quite a difficult choice. But I must say I prefer that to the years when there are just one or two standout finalists.

The James Tiptree Jr Award, “encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender”, has announced that it is changing its name to the Otherwise Award, based on feedback received after the similar decision of Dell Magazines to change the John W. Campbell Award to the Astounding Award (also in the context of the 2015 decision a couple of years ago to redesign the World Fantasy Award so that it no longer looked like H.P. Lovecraft). It’s their decision, of course; I think it is regrettable.

I understand the hurt and discomfort felt by disabled people who felt that it was wrong to commemorate a carer who killed the person that they were caring for. But first, it’s not completely clear that that is a fair interpretation of what happened in the case of the Sheldon household; and second, Alice Sheldon never urged anyone else to kill their disabled spouse or themselves, whether under her own name or under the Tiptree pseudonym. In fact she did her best to maintain a sharp distinction between the private life of Alice Sheldon and the public literary identity of James Tiptree Jr. The award was the Tiptree Award, not the Sheldon Award.

In contrast, John W. Campbell Jr used his editorial platform to push his own racist political agenda under his own name. H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, also published under his own name, include massive bigotry against immigrants. (And in his letters he made clear what he thought of the Irish.) For me that’s a crucial difference.

This isn’t a question of censorship; people are free to buy and read and discuss the works of Lovecraft, Campbell and Tiptree. It’s a question of who we commemorate and how. The administrators of the Tiptree Award have ended up in a different place to where I think I would have done; it is, of course, their right to do so, just as it is my right to pass comment.

This controversy ties in also to the discussion about the award of the Nobel Prize last week to Peter Handke, who is an apologist for the regime of Slobodan Milošević and for the genocide committed under Milošević’s watch. I had some pushback on Facebook yesterday for reposting a piece by Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, regretting this decision in the strongest terms. In brief, I think that this was a very bad decision.

It is ridiculous to assert that the Nobel Prize for Literature is – or should be – seen as a pure literary assessment. Quite apart from the commonplace truth that the political context of the day informs all such decisions anyway, the Swedish Academy has often made blatantly political awards. Is there really anyone who can seriously assert that the most worthy writer of 1953 who did not already have a Nobel Prize was Winston Churchill? Never mind 1974, when the Academy decided to award the prize to two of its own members who were unknown outside Sweden. (And the Academy’s recent internal travails have been very well chronicled.) So it is entirely legitimate for a political decision to be criticised on political grounds. Anyway, this is a case where Handke’s political views cannot be separated from his art; they inform each other.

Again, this is not about censorship; it’s about whose name goes on a list created by a political process, and who gets a million dollars in prize money.

As it happens, I’ve just finished reading the Tiptree winners for 1997, The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, and “Mountain Ways”, by Ursula K. Le Guin. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Sparrow is:

Sometime during the night, a delivery van had provided the last little bit of weight and vibration that could be withstood by a nineteenth-century street paved over a medieval bedroom constructed from the walls of a dry Roman cistern, and the whole crazy hollow thing collapsed. The road crew managed to extricate the van but hadn’t gotten around to putting up barriers around the hole. John, hurrying as usual, almost walked right into it. Only the odd echo from his footsteps warned him that something wasn’t right and he slowed down, his foot in the air, stopping just short of a historically interesting broken neck. This was the kind of thing that kept him constantly on edge in Rome but that he made comical in his messages home. His entire experience in this city sounded better than it lived.

I read The Sparrow way back at the start of the century, and like many others I was blown away by it. It is one of only two novels to have won the Tiptree, BSFA and Clarke Awards (the other being Air, by Geoff Ryman). It was a little jarring to re-read it and realise that the parts of the book set earliest in time, when astronomers in Puerto Rico (and elsewhere) detect signals from an alien planet, are actually set in early and mid 2019, in a future where Turkey has collapsed into bloody anarchy but humanity has mastered the technology of asteroid mining. The book is told in double flashback, the core narrative being the preparation of an interstellar mission by the Jesuits, framed as the account of the lone survivor of the mission, a Puerto Rican Jesuit who witnessed the horrible death of the rest of his team and was then subjected to horrible abuse before the next mission rescued him.

Coming back to it now, almost twenty years on, the book’s flaws are more apparent (and weirdly they became more apparent with the publication of the sequel, Children of God, which somehow failed to develop the success of The Sparrow). The physics of interstellar spaceflight is pretty implausible, and the grim abuse to which the protagonist is subjected seems over the top. On the other hand, the book’s earnest exploration of faith and religion, and a clash between two world systems of intelligent beings that are not ready for each other, still seems very timely; and the characters in general are vivid, memorable and believable. I would still rate it as a classic.

The Sparrow won the Tiptree Award for 1997 jointly with “Mountain Ways”, a novelette by Ursula Le Guin. A very long “short List” was also published, consisting of another five novels and another five short stories; also published was an even longer “long list”, including another 28 novels and 17 short stories! Angela Carter was also given a special award by the Tiptree jury. Full details here. That was the year that the Hugo went to Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, and the Nebula to Slow River by Nicola Griffith. For the “other” John W. Campbell Award, The Sparrow came third, Blue Mars second and Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley won (it had also won the Clarke Award the previous year).

It was not until the following year that The Sparrow was published in the UK, so it won the BSFA Best Novel Award for 1997 (awarded 1998) and the 1998 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The other shortlisted novels in each case were completely different. BSFA voters had the alternatives of Earthquake Weather, by Tim Powers; Jack Faust, by Michael Swanwick; Signs of Life, by M. John Harrison; and A Son of the Rock, by Jack Deighton. The Clarke judges also chose Days, by James Lovegrove; The Family Tree, by Sheri S. Tepper; Glimmering, by Elizabeth Hand; Nymphomation, by Jeff Noon; and Titan, by Stephen Baxter. I have only read one other in each list, Jack Faust and The Family Tree, and The Sparrow is definitely better than either.

The second to fifth paragraphs of the third section of “Mountain Ways”, by Ursula Le Guin:

“What is it? what is it, my dear love?”
“You’ll go away. You’re going to go away!”
“But not now—not soon—”
“You can’t stay here. You have a calling. A resp—” the word broken by a gasp and sob—“responsibility to your school, to your work, and I can’t keep you. I can’t give you the farm. I haven’t anything to give you, anything at all!”

I had not read “Mountain Ways” before – it is in the Birthday of the World collection, but also available online. It’s a fascinating tale of a society where the standard marriage, endorsed by religious custom and practice, includes two men and two women, with sex forbidden between two of the potential opposite-sex pairings, but expected between the other two opposite-sex pairings and also between the same-sex pairings. I have whined a bit about some of Le Guin’s work that she sets up interesting societies but doesn’t often look at those who do not fit in those societies’ rules. In this case, she has two women deeply in love with each other, one of whom fills a vacancy in the other’s four-way marriage by pretending to be a man. For such a complex idea, it’s very economically worked out, yet with great emotional depth. I feel that the Tiptree jury made two very good calls that year (I am not familiar enough with the work of Angela Carter to say whether it was three out of three).

“Mountain Ways” was also on the 1997 Hugo final ballot for Best Novelette; it came third, beaten by Bruce Sterling’s “Bicycle Repairman”, which won, and “The Land of Nod” by Mike Resnick. Fourth place went to “Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast”, by Suzy McKee Charnas, and fifth to “Age of Aquarius” by William Barton. The Nebula in that category went to “Lifeboat on a Burning Sea”, by Bruce Holland Rogers; unusually there was not a single shared finalist between the two ballots. The other short fiction categories went to “Blood of the Dragon”, by George R. R. Martin (Hugo Novella); “The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective”, by Connie Willis (Hugo Short Story); “Da Vinci Rising”, by Jack Dann (Nebula Novella) and “A Birthday”, by Esther M. Friesner.

Next in this sequence of reviews will be The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh, which won the Clarke Award in the year that The Sparrow won the Tiptree.

You can get The Sparrow here, and read “Mountain Ways” here.

Arthur C. Clarke Award winners:
The Handmaid’s Tale | The Sea and Summer | Unquenchable Fire | The Child Garden | Take Back Plenty | Synners | Body of Glass | Vurt | Fools | Fairyland | The Calcutta Chromosome | The Sparrow | Dreaming in Smoke | Distraction | Perdido Street Station | Bold as Love | The Separation | Quicksilver | Iron Council | Air | Nova Swing | Black Man | Song of Time | The City & the City | Zoo City | The Testament of Jessie Lamb | Dark Eden | Ancillary Justice | Station Eleven | Children of Time | The Underground Railroad | Dreams Before the Start of Time | Rosewater | The Old Drift | The Animals in that Country | Deep Wheel Orcadia | Venomous Lumpsucker | In Ascension | Annie Bot

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The bed, a massive bed on four legs, with a mattress far softer than that of the bunk on the Mindful, and complex bedclothes, some silky and some warm and thick, and a lot of pillows like cumulus clouds, had a room all to itself. The floor was covered with springy carpeting; there was a chest of drawers of beautifully carved and polished wood, and a closet big enough to hold the clothing of a ten-man dormitory. Then there was the great common-room with the fireplace, which he had seen last night; and a third room, which contained a bathtub, a washstand, and an elaborate shit-stool. This room was evidently for his sole use, as it opened off the bedroom, and contained only one of each kind of fixture, though each was of a sensuous luxury that far surpassed mere eroticism and partook, in Shevek’s view, of a kind of ultimate apotheosis of the excremental. He spent nearly an hour in this third room, employing all the fixtures in turn, and getting very clean in the process. The deployment of water was wonderful. Faucets stayed on till turned off; the bathtub must hold sixty litres, and the stool used at least five litres in flushing. This was really not surprising. The surface of Urras was five-sixths water. Even its deserts were deserts of ice, at the poles. No need to economise; no droughts…. But what became of the shit? He brooded over this, kneeling by the stool after investigating its mechanism. They must filter it out of the water at a manure plant. There were seaside communities on Anarres that used such a system for reclamation. He intended to ask about this, but never got around to it. There were many questions he never did ask on Urras.

When I first tried writing up the joint Hugo and Nebula winners at the start of this century, this was the first novel I got to. Here’s what I wrote in August 2001, with my own rejoinders from 18 years later:

The Dispossessed is about the physicist Shevek, and his mathematical research which makes possible the ansible, a faster-than-light communications device. The story alternates between episodes from his early life on his home planet Anarres, whose inhabitants are an anarchist colony who have no concept of property or government, and chapters detailing his experiences on Anarres’ twin planet Urras, in a society which functions on late capitalist lines. It becomes clear that the absence of formal authority on Anarres does not mean that Shevek is free to carry out his own work, but instead that he has to fight against the hidden power structures. Meanwhile on Urras, rival governments attempt to use his research for their own advantage. Shevek gets involved in an anti-government demonstration, and flees to the embassy of Earth with the vital equations, which he then makes freely available to all factions.

Commenting on her own work in Ben Bova’s The Best of the Nebulas collection, Ursula Le Guin describes The Dispossessed as “a heavy, argumentative book”. She is a little unfair on herself. In a chronological list of Hugos and Nebulas it is bracketed by Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and Haldeman’s The Forever War; the former is heavy and the latter argumentative, so she was in keeping with the spirit of the times! The tone of the book is rather distanced, almost reminiscent of Camus in L’Étranger. It suits Shevek’s alienation from his own society. Funnily enough it also works very well to convey the passion of the relationship between Shevek and his partner Takver, and also manages to portray with dismal clarity his catastrophic attendance at a party on Urras. Shevek is, basically, a geek who would certainly have been an sf reader if there had been any sf to read on Anarres; this must explain why so many fans forgive the heavy prose.

The most controversial part of The Dispossessed is the portrayal of Anarres, which is indeed viewed by most of its inhabitants as a Utopia. Some right-wing critics read the first few pages and dismiss it as an idealistic tract – “Happy campers in North Korea”, as one contributor to rec.arts.sf.written put it. They have missed a treat; one of the successes of the book is its consistent and convincing portrayal of Anarresti society. Personal pronouns are absent from the Pravic language (Le Guin probably knew that “prav” is a Slavic root meaning “true”); “work” and “play” are synonyms; children’s names are allocated at random; with complete sexual freedom, there is no rape; without property, there are no thieves; without laws, there are no criminals. (In contrast the capitalist state of A-Io, where Shevek spends his time on Urras, is a rather unfair compilation of the worst of the West, perhaps what someone starting from the 1968-1973 baseline might have feared that the USA could become.)

Alas, I was far too optimistic about what the USA could look like in the late stages of capitalism. Maybe I was naïve in 2001 – well, certainly I was more naïve then than I am now – but I think things have actually got worse, and Le Guin’s depiction looks far more prophetic now than it did then.

The lesson Le Guin puts to idealists (at least, those who read the whole book) is that the anarchist society does not work as it should. The control exercised over Shevek’s work by jealous older scholars is one of several instances of hidden lines of authority in a society which is supposed to have none. More fatal, however, is the fact that Anarres has been left alone by Urras only because of a mutually agreed isolation; contact between Anarres and the outside world is limited to a few ore freighters and the dribble of information allowed to flow between scientific institutes. Shevek pledges to “unbuild walls”, and it’s clear that he and the author expect that the lowering of the walls between Anarres and Urras will result in both coming closer to the anarchist ideals on which Anarres is founded.

I still think that this is true of Shevek, but on rereading I am less convinced that Le Guin had a didactic purpose in this, not least because she surely appreciated that communication between cultures inevitably will change both sides in completely unanticipated ways. On a slightly different tack, I found the depiction of hidden lines of authority particularly thought-provoking, given my recent experience of the WSFS Business Meeting.

In 1973, this probably seemed a reasonable call; but in November 1989 we saw how the unbuilding of a wall between two worlds resulted in the instant collapse of one of them. Le Guin clearly had no time for the Soviet Union – the least explored but most stereotyped society in the book is the Stalinist dictatorship of Thu whose claims of intellectual kinship Shevek angrily rejects. But from what we now know about the weaknesses of that system, it’s apparent that her expectation of the extent to which personal corruption, and control of the economic levers of power, could be limited on Anarres purely by social pressure, was naive.

Rereading the book, I think I got Le Guin completely wrong on this point. There is personal corruption on Annares, and a certain hidden control of the levers of economic and political power; what I missed was the point that the general resource poverty of the world limits the extent to which this is possible, because there simply isn’t all that much to steal or control. Le Guin of course knew a lot about pre-industrial societies where co-operation a much better survival strategy than coercion, and was reading across here to a partially industrialised planet that tries to apply the same principles. It’s not naïve, it’s tremendously imaginative.

A lot of people seem to not only dislike The Dispossessed but bitterly attack it, perhaps for lacking or failing to inspire in the reader a “sense of wonder”. To contrast it again with the spaceships-and-aliens in Rendezvous with Rama and The Forever War, Le Guin’s spaceships are dull devices for getting from planet A to planet B, and her aliens turn out to be from Earth, and not very different from the narrator. I can see why those who prefer their sf good and hard find it a difficult book to identify with. However I happen to believe that sf at its best is a literature of ideas, and that The Dispossessed is an important milestone in that respect. It is good to see that the Libertarian Futurist Society, who presumably agree that sf is a literature of ideas, eventually voted the book into their Hall of Fame.

The “lot of people” were those whose comments came up on a Google search for reviews of The Dispossessed; in those days, the Internet was considerably less than half its present size. But I must say that on rereading, I was blown away by a “sense of wonder” experience. I really do think that this is one of the best SFF novels about politics out there, which is why I recommended it at my recent Worldcon panel on politics in sff. I suspect that a lot of you agree, given how many of you recommended it in my poll earlier this year, later recycled for a Five Books article. You can get it here.

One small incident in the book particularly moved me, the description of Shevek’s first encounter with the statue of Odo in Abbenay. Apart from the sculptures that his partner Takver makes, which are treated as toys, this is the only example of the visual arts we see on Anarres. Odo, the prophetess, is depicted reading her own words of wisdom, in the middle of the greatest city in the world which follows her ideals, a world she never saw (the last hours of her life are depicted in Le Guin’s story “The Day Before the Revolution”, which won a Nebula that same year). Shevek of course identifies with her as an outsider in her own society.

The city of my birth boasts an ornate parliament building, outside which there is a grandiose statue of the founder of the statelet making a defiant gesture towards the southern enemy. The only way to cope with its appalling pretension is to laugh at it. The only statue I have seen that moved me in the same way as Le Guin’s Odo is Imre Varga’s statue of Imre Nagy near the parliament building in Budapest. Rather than put the martyr of the 1956 rising on his own pedestal (as they did with an earlier failed revolutionary across the square), he is depicted on a small footbridge, wearing a raincoat, porkpie hat and thick glasses, gazing rather wistfully across the square towards the building that encapsulates his country’s democratic traditions.

I was very very sad to learn at the end of last year that the statue of Imre Nagy has been cut up and taken away, to be replaced by a reconstruction of a monument from the inter-war far-right Hungarian regime. I was writing, of course, in late August 2001, when the world was about to become a less innocent place. Carson remains outside Stormont, despite the massive changes that have taken place there.

Other novels shortlisted for 1975 Best Novel Hugo: Fire Time, by Poul Anderson; Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick; The Mote in God’s Eye, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven; Inverted World, by Christopher Priest. I have not read Fire Time, but I like all three of the others, especially Inverted World.

Other 1974 nominees for Best Novel Nebula: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick; 334, by Thomas M. Disch; The Godwhale, by T. J. Bass. As noted above I have read the Dick, and I also bounced off 334 a few years ago.

Other winners of 1975 Hugos: “A Song for Lya”, by George R. R. Martin (best novella); “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W”, by Harlan Ellison (best novelette); “The Hole Man”, by Larry Niven (best short story)

Other winners of 1974 Nebulas: Born with the Dead, by Robert Silverberg (best novella); If the Stars Are Gods, by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund (best novelette); as noted above The Day Before the Revolution, by Ursula K. Le Guin (best short story)

The following year saw three out of four Nebula and Hugo fiction categories go to joint winners. I will start with “Catch That Zeppelin”, by Fritz Leiber, Jr.

Plenty more to write about Worldcon, but I want to start with a note on this year’s Special Category Hugo, the award for Best Art Book. Please note that below I express my personal views, not those of any other member of the Dublin 2019 Hugo team.

We decided to run this category because it is one that has been discussed as a potential permanent Hugo category from time to time, and it has been a Locus Award category since 1979. It also seemed historically appropriate, given that 2019 is the 80th anniversary of the first Worldcon in 1939, whose sole guest of honour was the artist Frank R. Paul.

It’s not really my corner of fandom, but I was also aware from the problems we had differentiating between Professional and Fan Artist in 2017 that there is work to be done on the Hugo art categories in general. I was prepared to be convinced either way about its desirability as a permanent category. Up until 2009 (when participation in the Hugos began to surge to and beyond the current level) it was usual for one or two art books to make the final ballot for Best Related Work, and one or two more to make the top 15. They have won five times, including three times this century. (2001, 2002 and 2004.) From 2009 on, the record is as follows:

2009. Spectrum 15 was the last art book to make the final ballot in Best Related Work, with 32 votes. The cutoff that year was 21. There were two other art books in the top 15, a total of 3.
2010. The top art book in Best Related Work was Spectrum 16, with only 16 votes. The cutoff was 29. There were two other art books in the top 15, a total of 3.
2011. The top art book in Best Related Work was Outermost: The Art Life of Jack Gaughan by Luis Ortiz, with 18 votes. The cutoff was 35. Spectrum 17 was also in the top 15, a total of 2 art books.
2012. The top art book in Best Related Work was Spectrum 18, with 23 votes. The cutoff was 34. No other art book made the top 15.
2013. The top art book in Best Related Work was the John Picacio 2013 Calendar, with 24 votes. The cutoff was 39. No other art book made the top 15.
2014. No art book made the top 15 in Best Related Work, ie none got more than 21 nominations. (Some of the top 15 were beautifully illustrated, but the thrust of the content was not the art.) The cutoff was 52.
2015. (the first slated year) No art book made the top 15 in Best Related Work, ie none got more than 38 nominations. The cutoff was 206.
2016. (the second slated year) No art book made the top 15 in Best Related Work, ie none got more than 68 nominations. The cutoff was 384.
2017. Star Wars Art: Ralph McQuarrie (which benefited from slate support) was the last nominee eliminated under EPH. It had 78 nominating votes and the cutoff was effectively 88. No other art book made the top 16, where the threshold was effectively 41 votes.
      As it happens, I hold the full records of the 2017 nomination figures because I was the Hugo administrator that year as well. The next highest placed unslated art book I could find was in 37th place, with 16 nominating votes. The only other art nominee in the top 50 was a downloadable set of posters, in 48th place, with 9 nominating votes.
2018. The closest thing to an art book in the top 15 was the Worldcon 75 Restaurant Guide, and that is not very close. So no art book got more than 31 or 32 votes (the cutoff for the top 15).

It’s clear that while the number of Hugo voters had dramatically increased over the last ten years  (and so has the cutoff to get on the final ballot), support for art books in this category had barely remained where it was ten years ago. Apart from the one slated nominee, we do not know of any art book in the 2009-18 period that had more than 32 votes.

But it was worth testing the proposition that if non-fiction books now “own” Best Related Work (this of course was before AO3 was a finalist, let alone a winner), there might therefore be an untapped reservoir of support for art books out there. It took a while to settle on a definition of the category that we felt robust enough to go with, but eventually we came up with:

An eligible work for this special Hugo award is any art book in the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year, and which is not eligible in Best Graphic Story.

So, we unleashed it along with the other Hugo and Retro Hugo categories in January, and tallied the results after nominations closed in May. Participation at nominations stage was frankly disappointing.

• Best Art Book had the lowest participation at nominations stage of any 2019 category (248 voters compared to the next lowest two: 290 for Best Fan Artist and 297 for Best Fanzine).
• It had the lowest number of nominees (78, compared to the next lowest two: 91 for Best Semiprozine and 102 for Best Fanzine).
• The top finalist in the category had the lowest number of votes for a top finalist in any category (51, compared to the next lowest two: 70 for the top finalist in Best Fan Writer and 72 for the top finalist in Best Fancast).
• The lowest-placed finalist had the second lowest number of votes for the lowest-placed finalist in any category (28, ahead of 25 for the lowest-placed finalist in Best Fan Artist but behind 33 for the lowest-placed finalist in Best Graphic Story).
• The sixteenth-ranked nominee had the second lowest number of votes for any category (6, compared to 5 for Best Fan Artist and 8 for Best Fanzine).
• The count for Best Fan Artist had the second lowest number of rounds of any category (36, ahead of 31 for Best Fanzine, behind 43 for Best Semiprozine).
• The votes cast for the top 16 nominees were 51, 47, 47, 39, 30, 28, 25, 24, 24, 19, 15, 12, 12, 10, 8 and 6.

That’s still a somewhat higher level of support than we had seen for art books nominated in the Best Related Work category since 2009 – but not a lot higher. The level of interest is similar to that for Best Fanzine, whose vulnerability I have previously written about.

The six finalists were, in EPH order:

1. Daydreamer’s Journey: The Art of Julie Dillon, by Julie Dillon (51 votes)
2. Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History, by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, Sam Witwer (47)
3. The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, illustrated by Charles Vess, written by Ursula K. Le Guin (47)
4. Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine (28)
5. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – The Art of the Movie, by Ramin Zahed (30)
6. [qualified due to a disqualification] Spectrum 25: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, ed. John Fleskes (25)

The other ten in the top sixteen nominees were, in EPH order:

7. [Ruled ineligible due to 2017 publication] Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Imaginarium, by Paul Kidby (39)
8. Beyond Science Fiction: The Alternative Realism of Michael Whelan (24)
9. A Middle-earth Traveler: Sketches from Bag End to Mordor, by John Howe (24)
10. Marvel’s Black Panther: The Art of the Movie, by Eleni Roussos (19)
11. The Chronicles of Exandria, Vol II: The Legend of Vox Machina, curated by Liam O’Brien and Taliesin Jaffe (12)
12. Marvelocity: The Marvel Comics Art of Alex Ross, with Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear (15)
13. The Electric State, by Simon Stålenhag (12)
14. Monster Portraits, by Sofia Samatar and Del Samatar (10)
15. Cicada, by Shaun Tan (8)
16. Yoshitaka Amano: The Illustrated Biography – Beyond the Fantasy, by Florent Georges (6)

Several of these are problematic.

• We scratched our heads a bit about The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, given that most of the text had been published long before 2018, but on reflection we felt that the art (all of which is copyrighted 2018) was clearly a crucial element of the book, important enough to qualify it as an “art book”, and it’s clearly not a graphic story.
• As noted above, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Imaginarium, by Paul Kidby, received enough votes to reach the final ballot but was clearly published in 2017. (I went to the lengths of phoning Kidby in person to confirm, regretfully, that this was the case.) This was the only disqualification in any category for the 2019 Hugos. (Two nominations were declined in Best Novella and one in Best Fanzine, and we had a lot more disqualifications for the 1944 Retro Hugos.)
• Beyond Science Fiction: The Alternative Realism of Michael Whelan, which was the runner-up, also has a 2017 copyright date, though some people tell me that it was not actually made available in hard copy until 2018, which would have made it an interesting edge case. If it had done well enough to potentially qualify for the ballot, I would probably have ended up in a conversation with Whelan’s team directly about it, as I did with Kidby.
• There is however no doubt about The Electric State, by Simon Stålenhag, which is not only a clear case of 2017 publication but also clearly fits much better into the Best Graphic Story category (and to remind you, the definition we were using disqualifies any work that is eligible for Best Graphic Story).
• We’d have needed to reflect on Monster Portraits as well, though I think in the end it’s not really a graphic story in the way that The Electric State is, so there would have been a stronger case for ruling in favour of its eligibility.
• Cicada, by Shaun Tan, though published in the correct year (2018), is eligible for Best Graphic Story by any reasonable interpretation, and it would have been much more difficult to make a case for it as Best Art Book.

So one of the top six nominees, and three to five of the top sixteen, were not correctly nominated by voters.

I have one other concern, which is that for the diligent voter, this is a particularly expensive category to read. The cost of the finalists (today’s hardcopy prices) is $15.40pb / $26.59hc (Spectrum 25), $22.68 (Spider-Man), $27.14 (Earthsea), $27.40 (D&D), $30 (Dillon) and $42 (Tolkien). Also, it was more difficult to persuade creators to provide samples of their work for the Hugo packet here than in any other category bar the dramatic presentations – we ended up with only one work in full, and two cases where nothing at all was provided, for entirely understandable reasons.

Combined with the rather low level of overall interest shown, I felt that after the nominations stage that I would actively recommend against Best Art Book as a future permanent Hugo category based on what I had seen so far.

The numbers from the final ballot are more encouraging, I must admit. Total participation, at 1419, was 10th out of 20 categories, which is pretty respectable (again, see my comments on Best Fanzine). The performance of No Award was also remarkably poor – No Award got the fewest first preferences here of any category, the second fewest final preferences in the runoff against the winner, and the third lowest percentage in the runoff. (Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form saw the fewest final preferences for No Award in the runoff against the winner, and the second lowest percentage in the runoff; the lowest percentage for No Award in the runoff was in Best Novelette.) That suggests that the wider Hugo electorate were relatively satisfied with the choices made by the selectorate at nominations stage.

And I also must concede that The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition was a really worthy winner. Voters thought so anyway – it had a higher share of first preferences than all but two other winners (Spider-Man and Archive of Our Own), and as noted above performed very well against No Award (and despite our own anxious internal discussion, nobody else questioned its eligibility as far as I know). Charles Vess commented to me that after 45 years of working in the genre, this was his first time on the Hugo final ballot. It is probably Ursula Le Guin’s last time on the Hugo final ballot (she lost in two other categories this year). So the result of the experiment in that regard was very satisfactory. Here’s my favourite piece from the book, an illustration from The Farthest Shore, with a close-up on the boat:

(I’m very sad to report that Charles Vess’s Hugo trophy for Best Art Book was damaged in transit, the base broken into several pieces – the only case we know of where this happened in 2019, though we have heard of one other that was simply lost by USPS. That is awfully bad luck and we will replace it. Vess also won a Hugo for Best Professional Artist, and that one did reach the Great Appalachian Valley safely. Unfortunately, it’s a known risk with ceramics.)

I think I would still recommend against making Best Art Book a permanent Hugo category, partly because of the reservations I felt about the data from the nominations stage, but mainly for a different reason. We already have 17 Hugo categories on the books, plus the Lodestar Award and the Astounding Award (formerly the Campbell), plus a special category if the Worldcon of the day decides to run it. Ten years ago it was only 15 categories; twenty years ago it was 12. Adding any new category means significant extra costs to Worldcon in terms of volunteer time and convention money that are frankly not appreciated by those who advocate for those changes. But perhaps that’s for a different conversation.

I was on the road last week, and will be again next week, so blogging will be light until things settle down.

However. An old friend contacted me on the first day of my trip, asking for recommendations for either “the three best sci fi novels? Or your three favourites?” I didn’t really have time while travelling to give this the thought it required, so I outsourced the question to friends on Twitter and Facebook. The results indicate only the views of a bunch of people responding to a straw poll on a Sunday evening or Monday morning, but I hope that they are interesting. I recorded 264 recommendations for 143 different books by 101 authors. (I slightly lost count of how many people had contributed to the discussion, but given that people were generally recommending three books, it must have been around 80-90.)

The top two, with 19 and 18 votes respectively, were not hugely surprising: Dune, by Frank Herbert, and The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Dune has its faults, but it has a lot of merits too – the ecology, the planetary politics, the role of religion in society – and I think it’s fair to say that by reading it you get a good sense of where sf has come from in the last fifty years. The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the best books ever written about sexuality without being particularly erotic; its politics is ever so slightly more progressive than Dune‘s.

Le Guin was the top nominated author on the list, mentioned by 31 people. This is mainly because the third book in the overall poll, The Dispossessed, with 10 votes, is also by her. (The other three Le Guin votes went to The Lathe of Heaven.) The Dispossessed is even more political, partly a parable about how where you stand affects what you see. These are all great books, and I am heartily recommending them to my friend if he wants only three.

As you would expect from a survey like this, people generally opted for the classics rather than more recent work. In fourth place, with seven votes, is the only book published this century that got more than three recommendations. It was, of course, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which blew most of us away when published in 2013 – a book that is more military and cybernetic than Le Guin, but equally feminist and progressive. I think it would be particularly interesting for someone unfamiliar with the field to read it soon after The Left Hand of Darkness. In fifth place, with six votes, is a personal favourite of mine, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, which I will admit has dated a bit but is still a good read about men and women trying to be gods. I’m quite pleased that the top five include three books by women.

Finishing off the detailed reporting, three books by men tied for sixth place with five votes: Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (which my friend has surely already read), Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (which I’m sure he has at least heard of) and Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (which I suspect is less well known outside the genre). Probably I should allow Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy here too, if I combine all the votes for it. I loved all of these when I first read them, though again I don’t think Asimov has aged well.

My friend can stop reading here, as he’s got his top three (indeed top nine) recommendations, but I’m sure others will want to know the final scores. The following six books, by four men and two women, got four votes each:
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
• Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
• Neuromancer, by William Gibson
• The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
• The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
I like all but one of these; if I had to pick a favourite, it would probably be The Handmaid’s Tale (recently a TV series of course). Personally I can’t take Neuromancer, but I know I’m in a minority.

Eight books, by five men and three women, got three votes:
• Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh
• Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
• The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin (counting also votes for the Broken Earth trilogy)
• The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
• The Lathe Of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
• The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
• Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein
It’s difficult for me to choose a personal favourite between The Lathe Of Heaven, The Man in the High Castle and Stranger in a Strange Land. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is of course the basis of Blade Runner. The Man in the High Castle is another recent TV series. Both are by Philip K. Dick, who got six books on the list, the most of any author. Particularly significant is that The Fifth Season and its two sequels won the Hugo Awards for Best Novel for 2016, 2017 and 2018, the only time an author has managed to win it three years in a row. Myself I’m not all that excited about them, but clearly lots of other people are. It’s also the highest ranking on this list for a book by a writer of colour. Here my disrecommendation is for Cyteen, but again I know that most other readers think it’s great.

Seventeen books by thirteen men and five women (one book is co-authored) got two votes. Five of these were published this century (marked with a copyright symbol ©).
• Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
• Blindsight, by Peter Watts ©
• Brasyl, by Ian McDonald ©
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
• A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
• Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick
• Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
• Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
• Kindred, by Octavia Butler
• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers ©
• Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood ©
• A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky brothers
• A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
• The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
• The Star Fraction, by Ken MacLeod
• The Three Body Problem (counting also a vote for the trilogy as a whole), by Cixin Liu ©
Again there’s one here I really bounced off while everyone else was excited by it, and it’s Blindsight. (Also not wild about A Fire Upon The Deep or Hyperion.) I confess that I may not have actually read A Princess of Mars. But there’s a particular favourite of mine here as well, A Canticle for Leibowitz. I also very much like Brasyl, Flowers for Algernon, Kindred and A Scanner Darkly. I am not sure if The Sparrow will stand up to re-reading.

Do you want to know what the other 105 books that got one vote each were? OK, though I must warn that the gender balance is a little embarrassing. For the record, they were:
Accelerando, by Charles Stross; Austral, by Paul McAuley; Babel 17, by Samuel R. Delany; The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal; Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut; The Child Garden, by Geoff Ryman; Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke; Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky; The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham; The City And The City, by China Mieville; Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny; The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke; Dahlgren, by Samuel R. Delany; The Dark Side of the Sun, by Terry Pratchett; The Death of Grass, by John Christopher; The Demolished Man , by Alfred Bester; Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks; Dogs of War, by Adrian Tchaikovsky; Downbelow Station, by C.J. Cherryh; Enders Game, by Orson Scott Card; Engine Summer, by John Crowley; Europe In Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson; Excession, by Iain M. Banks; Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury; The Female Man, by Joanna Russ; The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe; The Forge of God, by Greg Bear; The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse; God’s War, by Kameron Hurley; Green Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson; The Hammer and the Cross, by Harry Harrison; Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami; Helliconia Winter, by Brian Aldiss; Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, by James Tiptree Jr; High-Rise Darkness, by J.G. Ballard; His Majesty’s Starship, by Ben Jeapes; Hothouse , by Brian Aldiss; I am Legend, by Richard Matheson; If/Then, by Matthew de Abaitua; The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson; Isle Of The Dead, by Roger Zelazny; Jizzle (anthology), by John Wyndham ; The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham; Komarr, by Lois McMaster Bujold; Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon; Light, by M. John Harrison; Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow; Little, Big, by John Crowley; Lock In, by John Scalzi (who was one of the contributors to this survey); Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks; Madd Addam trilogy, by Margaret Atwood; The Man Who Fell to Earth, by Walter Tevis; The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury; Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick; Memoirs of a Spacewoman , by Naomi Mitchison; Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein; More Than Human , by Theodore Sturgeon; The Mote in God’s Eye, by Niven & Pournelle; The Murderbot stories, by Martha Wells; Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock; The Name of the Wind , by Patrick Rothfuss; Nemesis Games, by James SA Corey; The Neutronium Alchemist, by Peter Hamilton; The Night Sessions, by Ken Macleod; Nine Princes in Amber, by Roger Zelazny; Nova, by Samuel R. Delany; Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi (as noted above, a contributor; he did not vote for himself); On A Red Station, Drifting, by Aliette de Bodard; Passage, by Connie Willis; Past Master, by R. A. Lafferty; Permutation City, by Greg Egan; Pollen, by Jeff Noon; The Reality Dysfunction, by Peter F. Hamilton; Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke; Restoration Game, by Ken MacLeod; Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds; Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban; The Roderick trilogy, by John Sladek; Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction, edited by Terry Carr; The Separation, by Christopher Priest; The Shadow Of The Torturer) (and sequels), by Gene Wolfe; Shadow’s End, by Sherri S. Tepper; Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut; Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem; Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente; The Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison; Star King, by Jack Vance; Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon; Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, by Harry Harrison; Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick; The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells; Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer; 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke; Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks; Voyage Of The Space Beagle, by A.E. van Vogt; Who Goes Here, by Bob Shaw; The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss; The Wrong Man, by Danny Morrison; Women of Wonder, edited by Pamela Sargent; and The Year of the Flood , by Margaret Atwood.

Thanks, everyone who contributed.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Larque on the Wing:

Emergency bells were ringing in Larque’s bones. She had to find Sky.

I confess I had never heard of Nancy Springer before reading this novel, which shared the 1995 James Tiptree Jr Award with “The Matter of Seggri”. It turns out that she is much better known for her YA novels about Sherlock Holmes’ smarter younger sister. I found Larque on the Wing a complete delight. The viewpoint character, Larque Harootunian, undergoes a mid-life crisis similar to that in Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark, with the important difference that she is able to create doppelgangers of people she interacts with more or less by accident, and that her conservative mother is able to blink away undesirable characteristics of the people she interacts with. Larque reinvents herself as a young gay chap, to the dismay of her husband, and everyone needs to do some readjusting. The tone is comic but the foundations are hard. One of those cases where the awards system identified a good novel that might not otherwise have got much recognition from the genre. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third section of “The Matter of Seggri”:

Anyhow I understand better now what I was seeing at the Games in Reha. There are sixteen adult women for every adult man. One conception in six or so is male, but a lot of nonviable male fetuses and defective male births bring it down to one in sixteen by puberty. My ancestors must have really had fun playing with these people’s chromosomes. I feel guilty, even if it was a million years ago. I have to learn to do without shame but had better not forget the one good use of guilt. Anyhow. A fairly small town like Reha shares its Castle with other towns. That confusing spectacle I was taken to on my tenth day down was Awaga Castle trying to keep its place in the Maingame against a castle from up north, and losing. Which means Awaga’s team can’t play in the big game this year in Fadrga, the city south of here, from which the winners go on to compete in the big big game at Zask, where people come from all over the continent – hundreds of contestants and thousands of spectators. I saw some holos of last year’s Maingame at Zask. There were 1280 players, the comment said, and forty balls in play. It looked to me like a total mess, my idea of a battle between two unarmed armies, but I gather that great skill and strategy is involved. All the members of the winning team get a special title for the year, and another one for life, and bring glory back to their various Castles and the towns that support them.

This is a late great Ursula Le Guin story, set on a planet where men are a small minority, pampered and constrained to athletics rather than anything intellectual. Le Guin takes us through Seggri’s history in a series of (mostly) external accounts, as integration with galactic society brings about the crumbling of traditional gender roles. It’s a parable, of course, but it’s very powerful as well. You can get it most readily as part of the Birthday of the World collection.

“The Matter of Seggri” was on the ballot for Best Novelette for both Hugo and Nebula, beaten in both cases by “The Martian Child”, by David Gerrold. Ursula Le Guin’s novella “Forgiveness Day” was also a finalist for all three awards. “Cocoon” by Greg Egan was on the Tiptree shortlist and the Hugo ballot, as was Le Guin’s “Solitude”. Temporary Agency by Rachel Pollack was on the Tiptree and Nebula shortlists. North Wind, by Gwyneth Jones, was up for the Tiptree, BSFA and Clarke Awards, but did not win any of them. This is the only SF award that Nancy Springer has won to date; the Tiptree folks rewarded her by making her a judge the following year.

This was the year that the Nebula for Best Novel went to Moving Mars, and the Hugo to Mirror Dance. In this sequence I am also tracking the Clarke and BSFA awards, which that year went to Fools by Pat Cadigan and Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks respectively; I shall take them in that order.

Two more Hugo finalists for Best Related Work – both of them books of essays and blog posts, originally published online.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Second paragraph of third chapter:

One of the things people often find when they get there [old age] is that younger people don’t want to hear about it. So honest conversation concerning geezerhood takes place mostly among geezers.

I was delighted last year when Ursula Le Guin won the Hugo for Best Related Work on my watch, and sent a lovely acceptance speech. I hadn’t anticipated that she would be up for it again this year; I was, of course, aware that her time might be running short, as alas it proved to be. These pieces are not as deep as those in Words Are My Matter, but they are just as wise; much less about literature than about age, experience, politics, and some lovely short pieces about her cat. There is a particularly good piece about anger. It’s a short book, but it will linger with me for a long time. You can get it here.

Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Liz Bourke

Second paragraph of third chapter:

So, Angel of Destruction. Together with The Devil and Deep Space (2002), the next novel in the Jurisdiction sequence, it marks a significant change within Matthews’ Jurisdiction universe. Previously, we’ve seen our protagonist, Andrej Koscuisko, act against the Bench only in —relatively —small ways, and only when in emotional extremis. Angel of Destruction and The Devil and Deep Space show characters acting against their unforgiving government in ways that are far more broadly subversive —and which have everything to do with prioritizing humaneness and justice over the rigid, inflexible, and inhumane rule of law and its application.
(Adapted from here.)

Most of the pieces collected here are book reviews, previously posted on Strange Horizons, Tor.com, etc; and all of the books reviewed are by women, which makes an important point but unfortunately means we miss this piece. This is all good material and certainly points me to a few authors who I should try out once I have escaped from the slopes of Mount Hugo. You can get it here.

That just leaves the Harlan Ellison book to go; I’ll publish my rankings in this category when I have read it.

76 days on from the awards, I think it’s OK to reveal my own preferences in the category that was hardest hit by the recent unpleasantness, with No Award (rightly) winning in 2015 and 2016. Thanks to the new arrangements, we had six viable candidates this year, and No Award came last.

My first preference vote went very firmly to Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Second paragraph of third essay:

They asked me to tell you what it was like to be a pregnant girl—we weren’t “women” then—a pregnant college girl who, if her college found out she was pregnant, would expel her, there and then, without plea or recourse. What it was like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it, this child which would take from you your capacity to support yourself and do the work you knew it was your gift and your responsibility to do: What was it like?

I found this collection of essays full of wisdom and wit, often making fun of people who deserve it. It made me feel like I was in conversation with a vastly intelligent and immensely compassionate old friend. I voted for it with no hesitation. It won by the narrowest margin of the night, 32 votes.

My second preference went to The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley. Second paragraph of third essay:

Clients come to you because sales are down, or a new competitor is in town, or they’ve been told they need “a website” or “a radio ad.” And a lot of the time you have to just be an order taker and do those things, even knowing that’s not the real problem. It’s like coming to your therapist and saying you have depression but what you really need to get better is a Snickers bar so if the therapist could just give you one, that’d be great, and you go on your merry way and wonder, three months later, why you’re still so depressed even though you got the Snickers bar you asked for, so you say it’s because you have a shitty therapist.

Includes the most recent previous winner of the Best Related Work Hugo, “We Have Always Fought…”. I deducted points for one piece where my take was rather different from hers, but in general this is the sort of interesting and often angry writing about genre that is firmly in the Le Guin mould, except several decades younger. In a different year, I’d have been tipping it to win. Having crushed all others at nominations stage, it came a respectable third in the actual voting.

My third vote went to Neil Gaiman’s A View From The Cheap Seats. Second paragraph of third essay:

This means that I have impressed my daughters by having been awarded the Newbery Medal, and I impressed my son even more by defending the fact that I had won the Newbery Medal from the hilarious attacks of Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report, so the Newbery Medal made me cool to my children. This is as good as it gets.

There are some nice pieces here, particularly if you are interested in the craft and career of writing either prose fiction or comics (which I confess I’m not particularly). There are some very passionate pieces as well. Nothing wrong with it! Just that I liked the other two more. The voters put it fourth. Although it had slate support, I am inclined to think it would have made the final ballot anyway.

I actually expected Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist to win, though it got only my fourth preference. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Everything was a little worse for the wear, but good things would happen in these buildings. Lives would be led, businesses would prosper, and men would attend meetings—hopeful meetings, meetings where big plans were made and ideas were proposed. But of all the meetings that had ever been held in that particular office, none of them could compare in world impact with the casting calls for the Star Wars movie.

It is a brutal reminiscence of youth from a woman who (though she did not know it) had only a short time to live after writing it down, making it clear how she was exploited by those around her and how clearly she sees that now. I think it will be pretty irresistible to those who loved her performance both on and off screen, especially if they haven’t read a lot of showbiz memoirs (personally, I’ve read a lot of books by and about Doctor Who people, so I’m more familiar with this sub-genre). It did in fact come within 32 votes of winning, and secured second place by a narrow margin over The Geek Feminist Revolution.

I voted Sarah Gailey’s Women of Harry Potter posts fifth. Second paragraph of third post (about Dolores Umbridge):

Is the villain the leader who starts the movement? The demagogue who decides to rally the tiny cruelties that live within the hearts of people who think of themselves as good? Is it the person who blows on the embers of hatred until they finally catch and erupt into an all-consuming flame?

I’m not a massive Potter fan (though I have no quarrel with those who are) and I found these pieces a bit one-note. Perhaps if I were more deeply immersed in the Potterverse I would have liked them more. If there had been only five finalists as in previous years, this would not have made the ballot. Like me, the voters ranked it fifth.

Sixth, both on my own ballot and as ranked by the voters, was Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg, by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Robert Silverberg. I awaken early in the morning. I eat regular meals. When at home, I have the same breakfast every day. I have the same sandwich for lunch every day. When I’m traveling, of course, anything goes.

In fairness, it’s not all as dull as this extract would suggest. But I’d have liked to hear more about Silverberg’s attitude to his own work, and the book lacked a chronology or other analytical apparatus. The voters were similarly unexcited and raked it sixth.

NB that I have pre-set this to post while I am on a business trip in Africa and won’t be able to respond quickly.

When you meet a Gethenian you cannot and must not do what a bisexual naturally does, which is to cast him in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards him a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the patterned or possible interactions between persons of the same or opposite sex. Our entire pattern of socio-sexual interaction is nonexistent here. They cannot play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. This is almost impossible for our imagination to accept.

I had of course read this before, long ago, and you probably have too, as it came joint top of this poll (with Rendezvous with Rama), so this isn’t a review, more a list of things I spotted this time round:

• The passage quoted above comes just before the paragraph justifying the author’s use of “he” for the Gethenians. I go back and forth on this myself. She uses “she” in the version of “Winter’s King” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters
• Actually the Gethenian sexuality is rather simple; apart from normal Gethenians there are only “perverts” who are those stuck in one gender. All Gethenian ἔρως appears to be between those taking different gender roles; there is no same-gender sex, and no playing around at the margins. OK, we are getting this from the viewpoint of an outside observer who may not have sought or been given full information, but this time round I found it paradoxically heteronormative. (Presumably Genly Ai has LGBT friends and colleagues, out there in the Ekumen?)
• One mustn’t only think about sex. There’s quite an intricate political plot, about industrialisation, developing economies getting hold of new technologies, constitutional monarchies vs authoritarian oligarchies, and the impact of a single outsider whose mission is to transform the world. At first it looks like Le Guin is trying to replay the Cold War on a cold planet, but that is (perhaps deliberately) quite misleading.
• And speaking of cold, the most effective passages for me are still the chapters covering the epic arctic journey, where Le Guin’s sparse prose style is perfectly suited to the bleak setting, and vividly conveys the intense intimacy that you get between two people thrown together in isolation with a shared task, with the added factor of kemmer.

Anyway, a brilliant book which I was glad to read again.

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A rather laid-back novel by Le Guin, tracing the life story of a slave boy with very limited powers of seeing into his own future. We are taken in detail through several carefully and intensely described settings – the slave-holding city of his boyhood, a rebel stronghold, his birth village and culture, a flight to freedom which draws from both Huck Finn and Uncle Tom, and finally an enlightened city of learning. She also lucidly shows the narrator’s gradually increasing consciousness of the evils of the world around him.

I’m frankly surprised that it won the 2009 Nebula for Best Novel. The only really sfnal bit is the narrator’s power of precognition, which isn’t actually of any use to him and doesn’t make much difference to the plot except to tell us when we have reached the end. There’s also a cartooney villain who exits the story rather unsatisfactorily. I would put this down as good but minor Le Guin.

The other novels nominated that year were: Little Brother, by Cory DoctorowCauldron, by Jack McDevitt; Brasyl, by Ian McDonaldMaking Money, by Terry PratchettSuperpowers, by David J. Schwartz. I have to say that of the four I have read from that list, Brasyl stands out by a long way as the obviously deserving winner. The McDevitt is on my shelf; I don’t think I have heard anything about Superpowers. It’s a good illustration of why the Nebula system so desperately needed to be changed (as I think happened the following year).

November Books 26) A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin
December Books 8) The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula Le Guin
December Books 9) The Farthest Shore, by Ursula Le Guin
December Books 10) Tehanu, by Ursula Le Guin
December Books 11) Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin
December Books 12) The Other Wind, by Ursula Le Guin

Partly inspired by Jo Walton’s set of essays (here, here, here, here, here and here) but more by the fact that Tehanu was next on my list of Nebula winners, I have been rereading the six Earthsea books. I strongly recommend this as a little literary project if you want to challenge yourself. The longest book, Tales from Earthsea, is only a little over 300 pages; The Other Wind less than 250 and the first four around 200. Also, you have probably read some of them already. I remember A Wizard of Earthsea on Jackanory when I must have been about eight, with creepy drawings and all; I found The Tombs of Atuan in a school library a couple of years later, and loved it; and I think I was given The Farthest Shore as a present before I was a teenager. But I read the last three as an adult, and one by one over a period of several years; and I don’t really recommend that, because despite the sixteen year publication gap between The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, the action follows directly from the one to the other. 

I won’t go into the detail of the plot, since Jo Walton has done that and you probably already know at least the first book. What struck me this time was the structure of the six books. They fall rather neatly into three trilogies, even though Tales From Earthsea is not a novel but a story collection and despite the close time link between the third and fourth books. The classic Earthsea trilogy, the first three books, are a thing of beauty; three Bildungsromane, the stories of Ged, Tenar and Arren/Lebannen, the latter two guided by Ged; but also with a very dark streak in all three, about the world of death leaking into the world of life – centre stage in the first and third books, and never far out of sight in the second. The images – of dragons and the shadow, of the subterranean labyrinth, and of the dry wall separating life and death – will stay with me all my life. Everyone should read them.

The second trilogy is more problematic. I like and appreciate the structure, where first we return to Ged and Tenar and the injured child, and then we divert into some stories of which the last takes us to the question of women and Roke (and dragons), and finally a grand restructuring of Earthsea to repair the damage done to its fundament by the misbehaving wizards of the first trilogy. But actually these are not really improvements. The urgency and vitality of the first three books – particularly the first two – has been slightly dissipated by a process of reflection, which is interesting and engaging but not fascinating and enthralling in the same way. So anyone reading the six books in order needs to be warned in advance that the first ones are the best. Which is not to say that the later ones are bad.

Having said that none of the books is actually bad, I’m afraid I concluded that Tehanu is much the weakest of the six. It’s nice to see what Tenar has been up to for the intervening decades between The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore but it’s not terribly satisfying to see her, a former incarnate goddess, being casually dismissed by her wastrel ex-pirate son. It’s nice to see how her relationship with Ged develops, with Tenar as adoptive daughter. But the means and motivation of the bad guys is very poorly explained, certainly compared to the other books; and the abrupt ending comes quite literally out of a clear blue sky, and is a jarring change of pace.

Tehanu won the 1991 Nebula against one book I’ve read a long time ago and think I liked better at the time though I remember very little about it (Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion) and four books that I not only have not read but have not even heard of (Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, James Morrow’s Only Begotten Daughter, John E. Stith’s Redshift Rendezvous and Jane Yolen’s White Jenna). The Hugo that year went to Bujold’s The Vor Game, likewise a volume I don’t particularly rate in a series I generally love.

Well, it is a pretty easy decision in the end: my vote for Best Novel in the BSFA awards goes to Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin. (Second: The City & The City, by China MiévilleYellow Blue Tibia, by Adam RobertsArk, by Stephen Baxter.)

Pretty much everyone knows the basic outlines of the Odyssey and the IliadAeneid has been rather lost in the last few decades. For those who don’t know it, it is a long poem in twelve books by the great Latin writer Virgil, recounting the tale of the Trojan prince Aeneas and his escape from Troy to found a settlement on the future site of Rome, despite the temptations of Dido, the queen of Carthage, and various other setbacks along the way. 

Myself, I did the first half of Book II for my Latin O-level many years ago (a lengthy flashback where Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy) and had skimmed to the end of Book VI in translation, but I realised reading Lavinia that I had never even started the second half. And the great thing is that it doesn’t really matter; it is striking that the book appears to appeal to readers who don’t know Virgil at all as much as to those who know him backwards.

This is partly because Le Guin introduces Virgil himself into the book as a character, a ghost from the future trying to finish his poem, discussing it with Lavinia, filling her in on the bit of Aeneas’ story she hasn’t experienced herself, aware some how that he himself is going to feature in someone else’s poem, and making her aware that she is in fact a character in his. It’s a profound reflection on Story and what it means to those who tell it, and those who are in it.

The other fascinating characters are Aeneas and his destiny. Aeneas, rather like Frodo, has a quest to follow and fulfill, and is grimly conscious of that burden (which loses him the first two women he loves, his Trojan wife Creusa and Dido of Carthage). Virgil likes to describe him is ‘pious’, which has all kinds of confusing connotations for today’s audience. Le Guin unpacks this infuriating adjective and explains Aeneas to us much better than any translation could.

On top of that, the world-building is super. Lavinia’s pre-Roman Latium is pagan, of course, but does not have the anthropomorphised gods that Virgil knows. It is also slightly magical – omens come true; Aeneas’ shield tells the future; and of course Virgil himself appears, possibly more real than Lavinia. The social structures of gender and power are beautifully delineated. I have no hesitation in voting Lavinia top of my bsfa ballot, and share the dismay of those who wonder why it did not greater recognition for the Hugos or Nebulas last year.

(See also an excellent group discussion of the book in four parts: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

This book has been strongly recommended to me for years, and I am glad I finally obtained it and read it. It is a collection of Le Guin’s writings about sf and fantasy, almost all from 1973 to 1978 (one piece on Philip K. Dick dates from 1967), originally published in 1979 and revised for a 1989 edition. It is all fascinating stuff, with the standout essay being “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”, which describes the rhetorical style of good (as opposed to bad) fantasy, and also includes the memorable line, “they are not only crazy but Welsh”.

The other particularly remarkable piece is her 1988 fisking of her own 1976 essay, “Is Gender Necessary?”, where she critiques her earlier defence of The Left Hand of Darkness, admitting that from a feminist perspective the book is not a success, and concluding that “women were justified in asking more courage of me and a more rigorous thinking-through of implications”.

I am writing this in transit and may return to it for further thoughts if I have the opportunity, but meanwhile thanks to those (namely here and here).

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

28) City of Illusions, by Ursula Le Guin

One of Le Guin’s early books, which I had not previously heard of; I thought it was rather impressive, though. Set in a far future depopulated American continent, the protagonist, Falk, has appeared out of nowhere with no memory and goes on a quest to recover / discover his identity. The first half of the (short) book is an Odyssey-style journey across the continent, the second half, after his arrival in Es Toch (the city of illusions in the books’s title), is his attempt to outwit the sinister Ching and fulfill his quest. It is a little pulp-ish in design and execution, but I really am surprised not to have heard more about this as part of Le Guin’s œuvre.

13) The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Under heavy work pressure at the moment, so I’m returning to basics. I’ve read the collection a couple of times before, but it was nice to be reminded of, say the early Earthsea story, “The Rule of Names”, with that great couple of sentences ending the penultimate paragraph:

But they did stop talking about it, three days later. They had other things to talk about, when Mr Underhill finally came out of his cave.

Which will mean nothing to you unless and until you read the story. There are a number of other cool stories in the book, such as “Nine Lives” and “Vaster than Empires and More Slow”. And one or two that still appeal to the teenage geek in me such as “April in Paris”.

The other issue that interested me – really because of my recent exchange with – was Le Guin’s claims about her own feminism. Her introduction to “Winter’s King” certainly sounds as if she defined herself as a feminist in 1975, but also as if she felt she had not been sufficiently conscious to gender issues when the story was first published in 1969 (a point she makes explicitly, for different reasons, about the first publication of “Nine Lives” in 1968 – in Playboy). I’ll obviously have to read more of what she says about her own work.

Here. Or, more briefly, here.

A train to Paris, followed by a trans-Atlantic flight, is a good way to make further inroads into the books bought the other week in London. I’m typing this up on my laptop during a stopover in JFK; it’s approaching 10 pm here, which is 4 am by the European clock. I slept very badly last night (Sunday night, that is) in Paris, and didn’t get a lot of sleep on the plane either (though I did have the luxury of three seats to myself to stretch across). So once I finally get to my hotel in Washington I will tuck in for a damn good night’s sleep, even though it will be my usual getting-up time. (Who knows when I will be able to post this? I hope the hotel has broadband in the bedrooms – the modem on this laptop is pretty dodgy.) I also still have a stinking cold (see lj entries for the last week or so) which should help the sleep process, though it didn’t really facilitate my participation in the Paris conference and won’t really help me in DC.

Anyway, to the books:

1) On, by Adam Roberts

A rather wacky setting this: a world where gravity goes parallel to the ground rather than perpendicular to it, so its inhabitants perceive it as a huge wall, with settlements clinging to ledges and everyone perpetually terrified of falling off (as indeed many do). We have some great scene-setting in the hero’s small home village; he then arrives in a much bigger civilisation, gets embroiled in a war, and eventually comes close to finding out the Secret Behind It All. But I was a bit disappointed; there wasn’t really much closure for any of the plot threads, and I rather felt the author had given up trying to think of things to do. I much preferred his earlier book, Salt; both are written in the same sparse style that I associate with English sf writers like Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest and Stephen Baxter.

2) Changing Planes, by Ursula Le Guin

This collection of short stories by one of my favourite authors is, of course, simply superb. (And I hate to carp on prices, but excellent value too, a 200-page hardback for £8.95.) The very first story reveals that “changing planes” in this case means changing between different planes of existence, which on our world can apparently be only done in airports. I’d read a couple of these before in other collections, but they do make for a good unified whole. Best of the bunch perhaps is “Seasons of the Ansarac”, tying in all the great Le Guin themes of unusual socialisations of sexuality, the dangers of meddling with technology, and damn good old-fashioned story-telling. Some of the others are just straight parables or satires, but no less effective for that; I particularly smiled at “The Royals of Hegn”.

The author comments that “this book was written when the miseries of air travel seemed to be entirely the doing of the corporations that ran the airports and the airlines, without any help from bigots with beards in caves”. Sitting here in New York it’s impossible to be unaware of the massive psychic gap in the architecture at the southern end of Manhattan. Security was fairly tight on the first leg of this trip – the flight from Paris I think is one where they have had specific threats recently (I called Anne once we were safely in the air, to reassure myself as much as her, as this was my first flight since poor Boris Trajkovski last week). But once I got here I was checked into the Washington flight by a real incompetent; he tore off my visa waiver form so now it’s loose in my passport, which will no doubt create problems in due course (especially if I lose it), and then failed to take my case off me as I checked in, no I am now sitting in the departure lounge waiting to bring it on by hand. It has already attracted the attention of three separate airport security staff as something that is clearly in the Wrong Place.

OK, am on the Washington plane now; the woman in the seat in front looks strangely like Chelsea Clinton. Just got time to write up:

3) Maul, by Tricia Sullivan

Shortlisted for both BSFA and Arthur C Clarke awards; I must be jetlagged (heck, let’s face it, I am jetlagged) but I couldn’t see the connection between the two storylines, one of a savage gun battle between girl-gangs in a contemporary shopping mall, and the other a future setting of women experimenting on one of the few remaining men in the world. There was a sort of hint that the contemporary setting was in some way an artifact of the nanobots in the body of the hero of the future setting, but it didn’t really hang together for me. Having said that, the two storylines taken separately are convincingly and breathlessly written. The teenage angsty one in particular can be found echoed in many livejournals (though I except present company). I honestly don’t see this book as a prizewinner though. Right, plane is about to take off, and the bloke sitting beside Chelsea Clinton is having a loud and disagreeable conversation on his phone. He’ll be asked to turn it off in a moment, but I’ll have to turn this off first.

[Final edit: The hotel does indeed have broadband, and almost drinkable Guinness. But much more excitingly, it turned out that Chelsea Clinton’s double was on the plane because she works for one of the other passengers, a man who looked strangely like Senator Edward Kennedy because he is Senator Edward Kennedy. I briefly considered flagging our mutual acquaintance in his former chief of staff, but decided it was far too late at night.]

1) with Ray Bradbury
2) with Ursula Le Guin

Both here thanks to Bookslut. If you haven’t bookmarked her, why not?