SFF Review - 2024 Hugo Novelettes

Every year in our book club we read the Hugo nominated Short Stories and Novelettes. See previous post for Short Story reviews, this one is for Novelettes.

Best Novelette Nominees

“Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition”, Gu Shi /〈2181序曲〉再版导言, 顾适 translated by Emily Jin

This isn’t a story insomuch as it is a world-building doc. This seems to be pretty common among Chinese Sci Fi. The characters are barely there, and often there is no character arc. There is sometimes a basic storyline, though not always. But the worldbuilding is meticulous, and takes up the large majority of the wordcount.

This makes me wonder how much of what we (in the West) value in literature is just the current fashion? Who says that literature should be about revealing and exploring character, especially via their actions? Why does it matter that we see a character experience change from one state to another in the course of a story? Why not just create a world with different rules and see how it runs?

Some of my favorite reading when I was a teen was D&D source books. And then RPG source books in general. They set up worlds, and I could play out a million stories in my mind (and I did!). How lazy have we become, that we require an author to hold our hand through every bit of character growth and interaction, rather than dreaming them up ourselves?

OTOH, part of the reason I seek out other author’s words is specifically because they do many thousands of hours of labor to get to the coolest parts of those stories, so I can get to the good stuff fast. Is that not OK? And another reason I read others is because engaging with a brain other than my own when in a fantasy creates a lot of novelty, introducing perspectives and ideas that are alien to me. So maybe I shouldn’t judge, and actually both ways of doing fiction are fine?

If these are things you like to think about while reading fiction rather than thinking about the fiction itself, this is a good novelette for you! It actually worked for me, I am now excited about a new short story concept that I want to write in exactly this world! It’s a really neat inspiration! :) If you want a story in the traditional way we think of stories in the west right now, this probably is not for you.

Come to think of it, it’s not like we (in the West) don’t also have authors who focus primarily on world building rather than character. That’s been a staple of certain SF authors since forever. But even thinking upon this now… honestly, I would recommend those authors instead (I’m thinking of people like Ted Chiang, who is one of the best world-building authors of our generation). I think they’ve been refined by the many decades of SF culture in the US. I don’t know if Gu Shi is a good example of Chinese SF, maybe the Hugos are just as awful at picking good Chinese SF as they are picking good English-language SF. :( But if this is characteristic of Chinese SF, it feels like they’re still a few decades behind, and I expect they’ll get better as competition intesifies.

“Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C.L. Polk (no audio)

A pretty good story about existing land-owners fighting against new money that wants to move in. (But with magic). I don’t have much sympathy for old-money existing power structures, but I don’t really have any reason to care about the new-money interlopers either. The new money is the villains in this piece, but the Polk makes the same mistake as Clark (from my previous reviews, on short stories) in simply assuming that I’ll hate the antagonists as soon as I find out they are “gentrifiers” or whatever. That’s really not enough for me, I don’t hate people by default, certainly not because of their skin color or social class or desire to migrate. I need some reason to hate a villain beyond ‘hey you know that culture war we’re having? They’re on the other side!’

We do eventually get a reason, via a very effective plot twist! I loved this plot twist and I won’t spoil it, I did not see it coming! But the main effect of the plot twist is to make us feel pity for a child, and despising the villain is secondary to that. Plus it takes place like 10% away from the end of the story, which is far far too late. Better villains pls.

Aside from that it’s a fine story, if a big forgettable. (I’ve forgotten a lot of it already)

“On the Fox Roads” by Nghi Vo (no audio)

A fantastic exploration of the beauty and seduction of romantic evil.

The protagonist falls in with 1930s bank robbers. These are unreservedly awful people. They lie, murder, and steal from a population that’s already on hard times. But Vo has a gift for making their lives seductive as hell. The trio is beautiful. They’re smart, fast, and humorous. They rely upon their own strength and wits alone, along with the bonds between the three of them. Their robberies are legitimately dangerous and exhilarating. The lives of luxury they get to live between thefts are fun and carefree.

They are, in short, outstanding physical specimens leading joyous lives of complete independence. As long as we ignore all the people that they are stealing life from. Which, you know… we kinda can’t. Because they keep robbing banks in the middle of the story.

But also it doesn’t stop being beautiful and romantic just because they’re doing awful things. And when you throw in the magical element of fox roads, and a gorgeous kitsune trickster god bubbling with laughter as your companion… man its hard to hold those two beautiful and terrible images in your head at the same time. It makes one both feel and think about those feelings. It’s the only nuanced short this year, I really love it! It’s the only Hugo novelette I recommend.

“One Man’s Treasure” by Sarah Pinsker

A cutesy story about a trash collector but the world has magic in it so he collects hazardous waste that is magical. A rich kid joins his crew specifically so he can dispose of a body, and he almost gets away with it because the protagonist assumes that rich people can just murder anyone without consequences.

There’s some weird complaints about rich people throwing away things that poor people can use. One of the weirdest parts is that they throw it away in such a manner that it DOES get back to the poor people, but since the government isn’t officially involved that’s bad? Also tax revenue is being misallocated because the trash crew aren’t given enough safety gear.

All three of these things are resolved by a one-day work stoppage stunt. The attempted murder (the body the kid was trying to dispose of gets better) is resolved most by dumb luck, when someone other than our protagonist tries to place a phone call to ask about why rich people can just kill anyone despite there being laws.

That’s the most crazy part of the story. It’s basically an analog to our world, but everyone just seems to accept that rich people can kill indiscriminately. But that doesn’t change anything about the world. WTF? Did Pinsker not bother to think about this at all? Any decent author would run into massive societal ramifications in the 2nd paragraph of their world building doc.

As far as I can tell this is just a way to signal to the reader “I too loathe the rich, look at how evil they are, they even kill people for lulz!” This wouldn’t be a big deal if it was the rare outlier, but as I said to Steven in our follow-up discussion on Fallout, it’s half of all media right now. To the point where people will say with a straight face “rich people will nuke the entire earth because of profits!”

It isn’t just a sign of rampant stupidity and gullibility. It’s a sign that someone is a legitimately terrible person who doesn’t care about the truth as long as they get to hate or hurt whoever it’s popular to hate or hurt right now. I’ve seen so many of the best literary SF minds of my generation fall into this trap. I’m sorry Pinsker is one of them. :(

The story itself is overall cute, if you can overlook the jumping on the hate bandwagon it’s popcorn-y fun.

“The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer

A disaster makes life really hard for a year. One community muddles through. I feel like this story is what happens when you take a zombie post-apocalypse source book and challenge yourself to make the most boring possible story you can imagine.

Something huge obviously happened. There are rolling black-outs through every major city at all times for months on end! Government trucks rumble through regularly, distributing food and aid to people. People are hoarding gasoline and worried about getting through the winter without heat. Apparently there’s no sunshine? Even growing your own vegetables in a garden barely works. What the hell is going on out there??

We will never find out, because the protagonist is far more interested in the logistics of setting up a mutual aid network in her community where they can trade blankets and cups of sugar and teach each other how to crotchet. The most important thing they do is figure out a complex system to make sure an old woman who needs uninterrupted electricity to keep her oxygen machine going can always have some (including volunteers on generator pedal-bikes :) ). All of this is certainly important on the smallest scale, and meaningful work for people…

But come on! There’s a world falling apart out there! There is incredibly interesting stuff happening just miles away, there are military convoys trying to keep the cities alive, and this is what the story focuses on? Not a single person in this community lost a friend or relative to whatever disaster is out there? No one talks about it? No one is afraid about it getting worse? There isn’t a single member of this community that is moved to volunteer to go help in the great social effort to fix whatever it is that’s gone wrong with the world? You’re telling me this entire community doesn’t give a damn about anything happening to the rest of the world, despite being supplied with the vast majority of their food, aid, electricity, and security, by those outside forces? That’s certainly a choice.

The most exciting thing that happens is, for the climax, some teens from a rival neighborhood try to sneak in and steal some stuff. One is grabbed in a headlock, another trips, and their plan is foiled. We can tell they’re the bad guys because they’re white they come from the suburbs. One of the kids is shocked (shocked) that the community here would spend any effort keeping alive an old lady that needs oxygen to live. He sheds a tear, accepts love into his heart, and converts and asks to join the community. This is only an exaggeration in that he doesn’t literally shed a tear.

Anyway, this one won Best Novelette for 2024.