[mr_world]

> Best Novel: Emily Tesh -- Some Desperate Glory (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)

A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you

> Best Novella: T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) -- Thornhedge (Tor, Titan UK)

A retelling of sleeping beauty from the perspective of an atypical fairy godmother and knight. There’s a princess trapped in a tower. This isn’t her story.

> Best Novelette: Naomi Kritzer -- “The Year Without Sunshine” (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2023)

One tiny community pulls together – and does it effectively – because one community member is suffering from COPD and will only live as long as her oxygen concentrator has power.

> Best Short Story: Naomi Kritzer -- “Better Living Through Algorithms” (Clarkesworld May 2023)

Linnea, a young woman working a boring office job, is told about a new productivity and wellness app called Abelique from a friend. When her boss encourages her to download it to increase her productivity, she is surprised when the app encourages her to prioritize her personal life to the neglect of her professional life.

> Best Series: Ann Leckie -- Imperial Radch (Orbit US, Orbit UK)

Ancillary Justice is a space opera set thousands of years in the future, where the principal power in human space is the expansionist Radch empire. The empire uses space ships controlled by AIs, who control human bodies ("ancillaries") to use as soldiers. The Radchaai do not distinguish people by gender, which Leckie conveys by using "she" pronouns for everybody, and by having the Radchaai main character guess, frequently incorrectly, when she has to use languages with gender-specific pronouns.

[akuchling]

I think this just shows it's possible to write boring summaries, and log lines are often very non-specific. I read almost all of the Hugo-nominated fiction, and wrote these summaries for my own blogging:

SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh, is set roughly twenty or so years after the Earth was destroyed by an antimatter bomb, deployed by a galactic civilization called the majoda. Now a small remnant of a few thousand humans live in an authoritarian military encampment, hiding in a small planetoid called Gaea. 17-year-old Valkyr and her brother Magnus are teenagers about to be assigned to their own duties, perhaps in the attack squads or perhaps to the internal divisions such as Oikos (maintenance), Nursery (pregnancy and childrearing), Suntracker (energy production), etc. Valkyr and Magnus are both warbreed, biologically enhanced for combat, so she's horrified to be assigned to Nursery. This leads to her escaping Gaea with an alien prisoner, and then things get complicated and timey-wimey.

... T. Kingfisher's THORNHEDGE is another re-spin of Sleeping Beauty that takes a different angle: our POV character is Toadling, the fairy who now lives in the forest surrounding the castle and spends a lot of her time in toad form. She watches passers-by with suspicion, hoping they don't notice the castle hidden behind the hedge, and then after a few centuries a knight arrives in search of the lost castle. Its approach is reminiscent of Gaiman's story "Snow, Glass, Apples", but brighter ...

"The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer, is set in St Paul MN after an unspecified disaster and follows a neighbourhood as they self-organize, share resources, and face different obstacles over the course of a year.

[noch]

Thank you for this summary.

It's too late for me to scream at clouds, about the politicization of literature awards. Should I lament the rise of the MFA and the institutionalization of writing fiction in the academy? That ship has sailed and many celebrate that, which is fine.

And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression.

I especially want to read writing by authors who can hold conflicting ideas in their heads without imploding and are able to say to themselves, "there's a high probability that all my fundamental values and beliefs are wrong and it is instead 'they' — the spectral, despicable They! — who are ethically and philosophically correct."

I imagine a sci-fi author who has seen further than other humans, and wants to share what they have seen. I'd also love beautiful sentences if possible.

Then I'd love literary sci-fi prizes whose judges have a deep and principled understanding of human history, who aren't activists in spirit, but want contrarian ideas that set the imagination and intellect on fire about the possibilities of technology and science and human problem solving. Finally, I want a sci-fi prize that conveys optimism about humanity on the cusp of great accomplishments; humanity on the verge of even greater and more bewildering and challenging adventures.

[trescenzi]

Why are relationships, identities, trauma, and oppression trivial ideas? Why do you think these authors cannot hold conflicting views in their mind?

I fully appreciate what you’re trying to say and absolutely there should be an award for what you’re looking for too. But it doesn’t help the discussion to put down those who write what you’re not interested in.

You might already know this but my recommendation would be to look at the Nebula awards. Those are industry awards. The Hugo is a fan award so the style of writing is much more likely to change as popular tastes change.

[troyvit]

I'm re-reading The Expanse series, which started in 2011. I was talking about it with some friends, and they basically said, "Oh cool my MFA friends really like that series because it has so many non-binary relationships and stuff." I'm paraphrasing but you get the gist.

I literally had to stop and think about it. It's not that I didn't notice while I was reading that there was relationship stuff going on, and concepts of identities, traumas and oppression, it's just that all those things were woven so well into some damn good hard science fiction that it just felt natural right next to rail guns, asteroid bases and mysterious alien stuff.

Whether the series has optimism about humanity ... well I personally think the point of the series is to explore that.

The series won a Hugo in 2020 and I think they deserved it.

[surgical_fire]

Speaking as someone who rolled his eyes at the synopsis of each entry in GP's list... I mean, you can just ignore the awards.

Like, think of it like the Oscars. It has been a very long time that "winning an Oscar" was predictive of how much I would enjoy a movie. What would some book awards be any different?

Just look for authors that write the sort of things you want to read, awards be damned.

[CRConrad]

> And yet, I still find myself wanting to read sci-fi (not fantasy) that's about non-trivial ideas, written by authors who are obsessed with science and things, rather than relationships and identities and traumas and oppression.

Still quite a lot of that around, AIUI. Just takes (quite a bit) more trial and error to find it nowadays.

[ReptileMan]

Yup. For me the cutoff date is 2010 when it comes to "is there any chance to enjoy it".

[katzinsky]

If you pay enough attention to metapolitics it will ruin most media going back as far as the 70s even.

Asimov himself was a communist and it shows in a lot of his work. I try to just ignore it.