Aaron's Take on the 2014 Hugo Nominees for Fiction

Today is the day to cast your ballots for the Hugo Award. Since this seems to be the year for block voting, if you don't know how to vote, I will gladly tell you . . .

Aaron's Ballot for Best Short Story
1. Sofia Samatar - Selkie Stories Are for Losers
2. John Chu - The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere
3. Rachel Swirsky - If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love
4. Thomas Olde Heuvelt - The Ink Readers of Doi Saket

To me, this is a group of three well-crafted stories and one brilliant one. Selkie Stories Are for Losers is elegantly written and in only a few pages creates a memorable main character, a young woman who is hurt and fearful after being abandoned by her mother but who is brave enough not to give up on love. At the same time, the story is an insightful commentary on an entire sub-genre of fantasy stories. This is the kind of piece the Hugo Awards were created to recognize.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Novelette
1. Aliette de Bodard - The Waiting Stars
2. Ted Chiang - The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
3. Mary Robinette Kowal - The Lady Astronaut of Mars
4. Brad R. Torgersen - The Exchange Officers
5. NO AWARD
6. Vox Day - Opera Vita Aeterna

In the novelette category, my vote goes to Aliette de Bodard, one of the finest young writers in the field. The Waiting Stars exemplifies her work's excellent craft and striking empathy. The other nominees are all good, until you get to the last one.

It would perhaps be more fun if Opera Vita Aeterna were more amusingly bad than it is. Instead, it reads like a lot of stories sent round for critiques in writers' groups: an amateurish effort by an author with some ability who doesn't seem to know yet how to construct an actual story. Opera Vita Aeterna could not have sold to any professional market in the field, and it's doubtful it could have sold even to a semipro, because it's dry and dull and simply does not tell a story. Only one real event takes place in the entire piece and, incredibly, it takes place offstage, even though the primary viewpoint character is there when it happens. Shame on the block of voters who stuffed this turkey onto the ballot. I suspect few of them even read it, yet they nominated it for reasons that have nothing to do with what the Hugo Awards should be about. (And because I do respect what the awards are supposed to be about, my reasons for rating it below "No Award" are unrelated to the author's political views or the offensive way he expresses them.)

The good news is Opera Vite Aeterna is the only one of the Correia slate of nominees that is not written at a professional level, so the embarrassment is not so deep as it might have been. The Brad Torgersen story in this category, for example, is a solid example of the Analog style of writing, even if that style isn't much to my tastes. (Brad, by the way, can transcend that style when he chooses, for instance in his brilliant novelette "Ray of Light.")

Aaron's Ballot for Best Novella
1. Catherynne M. Valente - Six-Gun Snow White
2. Andy Duncan & Ellen Klages - Wakulla Springs
3. Brad R. Torgersen - The Chaplain's Legacy
4. Dan Wells - The Butcher of Khardov
5. Charles Stross - Equoid

Snow White as a Western is a great concept, and no doubt many authors could have done it credit. But could anyone else have turned it into something as striking and captivating as Six-Gun Snow White? Catherynne Valente is a marvel.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Novel
1. Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice
2. Charles Stross - Neptune's Brood
3. Larry Correia - Warbound
4. Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire) - Parasite
5. NO AWARD
6. Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson - The Wheel of Time

I hate to say it, but this strikes me as a lackluster group of best novel nominees. Ancillary Justice is by far my favorite, the most original, the best written, and the most thought-provoking of the group. But then, if we're using thought-provoking as a criterion, Neptune's Brood is the only other nominee to try. The Correia and Grant novels are entertaining but have little to say. I choose Correia over Grant because of the writing quirks in Parasite that annoy me: multiple passages that don't advance the story (minor character drove me home and told me about her dog for five pages), and the fact that the main character's dialogue and the same person's first-person narration are in markedly different voices.

I rate The Wheel of Time below No Award, because it was a terrible precedent to allow that entire series on the ballot at once. I already feel badly for whichever friend of mine writes a brilliant novel in the near future and gets stuck on the Hugo ballot opposite the entire Discworld series. Here's hoping the rule gets clarified to keep multi-volume series off the ballot in future.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: Legends edited by Robert Silverberg

Continuing our tribute to Jim Rigney, better known as Robert Jordan (1948-2007), the Book of the Week is the 1998 first edition of Legends, an original anthology edited by Robert Silverberg. This contains the first appearance of "New Spring," a stand-alone novella by Robert Jordan set before the events of his best-selling Wheel of Time series. "New Spring" was later expanded and published in 2004 as a separate novel, a prequel to the main sequence of The Wheel of Time. It spent five weeks in the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list, but never hit #1 due to poor timing -- it came out during The Da Vinci Code's long run at #1.

Robert Silverberg designed the two Legends anthologies to showcase some of the most popular secondary worlds in modern fantasy. It is a great way to sample The Wheel of Time before deciding whether to dive in to the series' many thousands of pages. Other very successful fantasy worlds for which Legends provides a nice introduction include Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Terry Pratchett's Discworld, and George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire.

If the worlds' leading science fiction and fantasy authors will all refrain from dying this week, next week's Book of the Week will begin a survey of some of the most recent additions to my collection. In honor of the American Library Association' s Banned Books Week, we will begin with a novel that (like A Wrinkle in Time, our BOTW three weeks back) ranks high on the list of most frequently challenged books.

Aaron's Book of the Week :: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Book of the Week is the hardcover first edition (but unfortunately not first printing) of The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan, cover art by Darryl Sweet. This is to honor Robert Jordan, the pen name of James Rigney, Jr., who passed away last week at the age of 58. In the 1980's, Jim Rigney wrote historical romances under the pseudonym Reagan O'Neal, a western under the name Jackson O'Reilly, and new adventures of Conan the Barbarian as by Robert Jordan. But it was The Eye of the World, first published in 1990, that rocketed him to prominence.

The Eye of the World is the first book in the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series, a fantasy epic in the Tolkienesque mode, but even more densely detailed and intricately plotted than The Lord of the Rings. The series has been an immense commercial success -- the last five Wheel of Time books published have all reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It is a testament to Jim Rigney's skills as a storyteller that the series has only gained in popularity, even as it climbed toward 8,000 pages in total length (10,000 in the paperback editions).

The Wheel of Time series was projected to cover twelve volumes (not counting the stand-alone prequel New Spring, the first appearance of which we will see next week), but only eleven have appeared to date. Knowing that his health was deteriorating from the rare blood disease amyloidosis, Rigney prepared detailed outlines of the final book in the series and had lengthy discussions with his wife, son, and other writers regarding its completion. It seems the Wheel of Time series will be finished, a fitting testimony that fantasy fans' devotion to Robert Jordan was mutual.