awards:hugo-award-nominees 📚 log(book)

Anathem

by Neal Stephenson · published 2008 · read 2019-09-20

Anathem by Neal Stephenson kept me busy. Between a bunch of conferences, the sufficient concentration was a bit hard to come by. What's worse: Now that I have read it, I can't tell you if it is a good book or not.

Leviathan Wakes

by James S.A. Corey · published 2011 · read 2017-07-06

★★★★★

Fantastic space opera, even more fun than the TV series. 4.5 stars for me, but I'm rounding up 'cause I'm feeling generous today and it was just so much immersive fun!

Coraline

by Neil Gaiman · published 2002 · read 2003-02-01

★★★★★

Coraline is a wonderful book. Terrifying, too. Coraline and her parents move to a new place, where there's nothing apart from the other (strange!) people living in the house. Her parents are busy all day, and she's just left to her own devices. So she wanders around and eventually finds a mirror world, where everything is duplicated, only uncanny and weird – and where she finds parents who love her and have time for her. Now if only they were human.

American Gods

by Neil Gaiman · published 2001 · read 2012-02-01

★★★★★

American Gods is a polarising book, and I belong to the people enchanted by it. Gaiman does wonderfully dirty, touching things with language, and mythology, and just drew me in.

Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer · published 2016 · last read 2021-12-06

★★★★★

For me, this was a five star books, plain and simple, but I completely understand why it would be a 0-, 1-, 2-star book for others. It's pretentious at times. It wants you to have classical knowledge of ancient Rome and 18th century France. It plays on that knowledge, and knowledge of literature in 18th century France explicitly. At least it explains lots of the in-jokes, so it's not terribly arrogant in choosing its readership, but the pretentiousness is there. The storytelling is great, full with an apologising, opinionated actor-narrator, with intermezzi by other characters. That said, I loved it. I loved the world, the 24th century world that consits of lots and lots of non-nation based groups (and some nation based ones), and seven major orientations everybody chooses (or becomes a blacklaw, which is fine, too): The Masons who have resurrected ancient Rome, the Humanists who have a flexible democracy, the Mitsubishi super clan who are focussed on land ownership, the Brillists who go ahead and analyse anyone and everyone, the Cousins who are something like the priests of a world that prohibits organised religion, the Europeans, based around a borderless idea of old nations, and the Utopians who are everywhere, especially in space, on the moon, and terraforming Mars. We get a complete, complex world, with penal systems, laws, cultures, capital punishments, regular people, and … special people of all kinds. Emperors, kings, convicts, gods, …Wow. And then it just ends in the middle of it all. sigh

The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin · published 1974 · read 2018-02-12

★★★★★

Anarchist SciFi by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a bit slow, but the content made me forget all about that.

The Obelisk Gate

by N.K. Jemisin · published 2016 · read 2018-10-28

★★★★★

The Obelisk Gate is the second part of N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, and it's brilliant. It continues the heavy character building we got in the first volume. Some characters grow, some change a lot, some change just in our eyes by virtue of being seen through different eyes, for example, our protagonist, Essun, is very different when seen by her daughter. Seeing the kid grow into her own character arc was beautifully done.

The Fifth Season

by N.K. Jemisin · published 2015 · read 2018-09-10

★★★★★

There was nothing about The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin that I didn't like. It's a bit short, but we have two more volumes to balance that.

Embassytown

by China Miéville · published 2011 · read 2019-03-12

★★★★★

Embassytown by China Miéville starts out as okay-if-weird scifi, with decent characters, plausibly weird worldbuilding, and appropriately weird aliens, so everything you'd expect from Miéville. It starts by following a good if generic feeling story arc, and continues like that for quite a while. Miéville continues to be great at writing about cities (Perdido Street Station!), so I felt comfortable, once I had spent the first ~20% of the book figuring out how the world worked. Then, towards the end, both the action and the writing just take off in quality. Man, I wouldn't have thought that an author could get me emotional on the question of if and how the use of metaphors constitutes lies (which is the focal point of the story, in the end). Brilliant, surprising, weird scifi! I will admit that any language sci-fi will have it easy to convince me, though.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones

by Seanan McGuire · published 2017 · read 2019-01-03

★★★★★

I loved everything about Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire. I think I might like it even better than the first volume, and knowing about the future makes the book even better – I bet it works without the added layer, too, though. Seanan shows a lot of empathy for the two very different protagonists, and the language is both relateable and lyrical. The cruel, cruel fairytale world, that still fits the children better than the cruelly boring and narrow-minded reality we live in, hits very close to home.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar · published 2019 · read 2019-09-21

★★★★★

This Is How You Lose the Time War was written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. They must be magic. They can't just write like this without magic. Trust me.

Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis · published 1992 · read 2019-11-20

★★★★★

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is the best book about time travel that I know of, with the notable exception of "This is how you lose the time war". It's started out good, and then proceeded to kick me in the feelings. Repeatedly. Time travel in the modern world (2050s), but it's mostly about one of the main characters traveling to 1340s England. While I appreciated the historical accuracies and the soft snark, I struggle to put into words what made this book so good for me. It is the story, but not the plot, I think. The overal story arc is predictable, but the details are perfect. There is a lot of details, a lot of real life in all its glorious mess, and no Checkov's guns, no too-convenient accidents. Just people, and life, and that's honestly rare in SFF. The tone was so consistent and realistic and warm that it charmed me before I even noticed what it was doing. Great book – and I've heard that the next one is even better, so I'm looking forward to that.

Memory

by Lois McMaster Bujold · published 1996 · read 2019-08-07

★★★★★

In Memory, part of the Vorkosigan saga, Lois McMaster Bujold shows off what character development can look like. Talk about emotional payoff! Without spoiling too much, we see Miles, our somewhat-hero, change his life in many ways, and go through the dark passages, darker thoughts, and inevitable pains this change brings. My only criticism might have been that ignoring the somewhat obvious(?) solution to the whodunnit is not very Miles like, but when I thought about it, I realized that this blind spot has a perfect explanation in Miles' character, so there is that. A very impressive book, that let me keep my high opinion of the Vorkosigan series (because improving it would be close to impossible).

The Mountains of Mourning

by Lois McMaster Bujold · published 1989 · read 2018-11-23

★★★★★

The Mountains of Mourning is a very touching Vorkosigan novella by Lois McMaster Bujold. It's deeply impressive to me how very emotional and touching this novella gets in under 150 pages, while still maintaining the character and tone of the overall series. Our favourite hero, Miles, confronts a backwater village while investigating a child murder. The crippled man confronting a society where killing crippled children is more than just tolerated – and at no point Bujold goes for the easy way out. No good vs evil here, oh no, just heartbreak.

Barrayar

by Lois McMaster Bujold · published 1991 · last read 2020-08-19

★★★★★

Update: This book is a perfect read after Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. Sadly, Gentleman Jole is also the perfect read after Barrayar, somebody send help, please?

Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany · published 1966 · last read 2023-07-30

★★★★★

It's been a long time (apart from Too Like The Lightning) that I've read a novel that felt so tailored to me like Babel-17. I mean, it's a queer polyamorous scifi novel where linguistics are key, even to winning space battles, which there are plenty of. I have no words. It's also been the first time in a while that a novel brought me to tears. This is absolutely what scifi is supposed to be like. It's rapid, and fun, and deep, and thoughtful, and introduces alien concepts and human behaviour, and …. I can absolutely see why it won the very first Nebula Award – even though I was very surprised to hear it's as old as 1966. It doesn't feel aged at all. On re-read: I had forgotten the wonder that is Rydra. The brilliance. The empathy. The poetry. I had remembered some of the crew, but not the sheer wonder I felt at every little sentence. Just like in Empire Star, Delany draws entire worlds in hidden clauses, and makes me feel and see entire persons in two sentences. Two sentences! And imagine what he will do when he uses more than that. There's a heart-wrenching paragraph about being poly in a mono world in there, and that's an obvious one. But there's so much more, in every little sentence. Intermission: Imagine how Marilyn Hacker felt, being portrayed like that. Or used as a blueprint, at least – he wrote this while being in a relationship with her, the poet, and another guy, and … Oh, what do I know! Some people claim the four poems opening the four chapters are hers, and those people are the kind of old and knowledgeable that they are probably right – and the poems were taken out for later editions, which is a shame – (correction: those people are right, I found some of them, but the best one, the very best, I can't find published anywhere …) And the worldbuilding details. There are aliens sailing deep space in a triple yolked huge egg, and it's barely worth a mention and yet also deeply integrated with the story. The description of the language challenges in creating a treaty with them …! I put all those beautiful details into the plot summary, because it's too hard to pick out the spoilers. But man, the space ship crew on its own would make this a five-star book. And then there's the fact that he just sat down and wrote poems that made it plausible for his protagonist to be a star poet renowned in five galaxies.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Miller Jr. · published 1959 · read 2022-03-28

★★★★★

Damn, rating this book is hard! The first part had me thinking that it was just standard (though not standart then, of course!) far-future post-fallout sci-fi where humanity lives in its own ruins. And then the second part was alright, eh. And then the last part was suddenly really fucking intense and painful in a good way. So there's that. Look, I have a tag called "Space Monks", of course I'm a fan. It goes without saying. What doesn't go without saying? The description of quasi-medieval monks holding on to knowledge and literacy in a post-fallout world (picturing the Fallout as a monster lurking in shadows of history) is drawn so well I took it for granted at first. This book is sci-fi that understands religion and treats it with both respect and humour, and I can count the books that manage both without losing integrity on one hand. There is actual Latin in there (I'm an asshole about bad Latin). There's an O Antiphon for the fallout. And that's just backdrop, of just the first part! Along with clever observations about ("pre-Deluge") English, and Dominicans fighting New Rome on questions of not even theological significance, and orders trying to wrangle a beatification or even canonisation for their own. (And the Wandering Jew, tantalising, in between all this.) I didn't remember much of the second part, with its politics and its people rediscovering electricity. It was alright, but didn't amuse me (like the first part) or punch me in the face (like the last one). The last part was great. Painful, and great. The believable modernity, with the eye for detail shown in the other two parts. The consequences. The humans with actual human feelings. I got full on shivers and a Pale Blue Dot kind of feeling from the things that happened there. … And then I wished the book had ended a bit earlier, on account of the Big Yikes. When I first read Josef Pieper's theological work, I loved it. Later on I read his autobiography, which tainted his entire work with a shadow, and I haven't been able to enjoy it fully since. The same thing happened here: When towards the end of the third part the topic of assisted dying comes up, Miller reveals parts of his soul that I cannot quite forgive, and that made me re-think the book in its entirety. (This weighs even more heavily on my mind thinking of Miller's life, and death.) (You'll notice it's still a five star read, but now it's a grudging, uncertain rating rather than a fiery, convinced one.) This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.

Ancillary Justice

by Ann Leckie · published 2013 · read 2018-03-13

★★★★★

Wow wow wow.

Ancillary Sword

by Ann Leckie · published 2014 · read 2018-04-14

★★★★★

Ancillary Sword was an exceedingly worthy successor to Ancillary Justice. We get a deeper look into the culture of the Radch and (most importantly) the characters we got to know in the first book. Understanding how all of them felt, especially Breq, even while they were navigating treachery, improper (!) annexations, war, and crisis, was a treat. This exploration of characters comes at the cost of action and pace, but the slower pace is made up by the frequent and fast changes of scenery. The book is more linear than the first one, but at the same time the consistent multi-focus storytelling is a different (and great) challenge altogether.

Ancillary Mercy

by Ann Leckie · published 2015 · read 2018-07-13

★★★★★

Wow! A worthy ending to the Imperial Radch trilogy ba Ann Leckie. The actions and decisions of the previous volumes find their somewhat logical conclusion in a complicated struggle for independence in an empire that has forgotten what independence even is. This book was a truly amazing mix of fast-paced action (lots of fun and creativitiy in there, too), and deep, deep character development. This series hit my tastes in every way, balancing action, character development, humor, serious issues of personal growth, society, and politics. Wow.

I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter

by Isabel Fall · published 2020 · read 2020-01-12

★★★★☆

Original review: I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter is just very, very good. You are cringing from the title? Good, that means it works as intended. This piece is really good scifi – and not transphobic in the least, quite intentionally spiting the title. Read it here. Update: So the internet happened and the story got taken down with a long explanation by Neil Clarke (of the publishing Clarkesworld) himself. I think this is a shame, and the behaviour of the people forcing the takedown (often from within the queer community) is atrocious. This story was, in my opinion, an excellent form of processing gender in a sci-fi frame. That the author is trans herself was not disclosed when the story was published and should not matter anyways. I have always been slightly contemptuous of the "oh no I'll get cancelled" attitude, and the opinion that liberal and queer opinions in social networks tend to become harmful. The reaction to this story has led me to reconsider my attitude here and has left me deeply disappointed with our community. I thought we did better. For more context: The title of the story refers to an anti-trans meme, and the story takes this "my gender is an Apache attack helicopter" meme and runs with it, in a scifi scenario where it is a valid sentence. I love this approach to phrases, I love it even more when it is scifi with more than a cheap gimmick thrown in, and I particularly enjoyed the take on gender and human processing in this story. It reminded me of the vampire in Blindsight who got his data in the form of human faces in agony, because his species was particularly good at processing data that way. But even if you dislike the use of this meme or the form it took in this story, bullying the author and the publication into taking it down is unacceptable and turns you into a person – and, by extension, a group and political front – who's not safe to talk to. If you want to feel really heart-broken, read the Vox interview that came out a year later. Jesus.

Saturn’s Children

by Charles Stross · published 2008 · read 2017-11-19

★★★★☆

Post-human world sexbots vs post-human world butlers, man. It's so much better than it sounds.

Overtime

by Charles Stross · published 2009 · read 2015-07-18

★★★★☆

Light reading. Bob has to deal with Christmas terrors from beyond. Very Charly, Much Stross, Q'thulhu.

Equoid

by Charles Stross · published 2013 · read 2015-08-04

★★★★☆

Of course Unicorns are terrifying when CStross himself writes about them. Short, but enjoyable, if a bit gory.

The Concrete Jungle

by Charles Stross · published 2004 · read 2015-07-03

★★★★☆

I love Detective Inspector Josephine Sullivan. And Basilisks. And everything cstross thinks about firmware, public sector management and Angleton.

The Graveyard Book

by Neil Gaiman · published 2008 · read 2015-04-15

★★★★☆

I would have loved this book as a child, and I still love it as a grownup (Gaiman tends to write like that). It is paced well, written wonderfully and rings true (in a very similar way American Gods does, but a bit toned-down to the way children see the world). Technically it is a coming-of-age story. I spent a long afternoon reading it and feel a lot better for the time spent.

A Study in Emerald

by Neil Gaiman · published 2003 · read 2017-11-28

★★★★☆

Sherlock + Cthulhu is a very Gaimanishly Gothic mix.

The Word for World is Forest

by Ursula K. Le Guin · published 1972 · read 2018-02-21

★★★★☆

I enjoyed it a lot. While I would have liked to get to know the alien culture (and its language!) even better, I was given a lot of context. Also, the story is told as seen by an alien, a nice human anthropologist, and a horrible, vicious, self-righteous human soldier, which was well done.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

by Ursula K. Le Guin · published 1973 · read 2018-02-02

★★★★☆

Infinitely referenced.

Have Space Suit—Will Travel

by Robert A. Heinlein · published 1958 · read 2020-06-01

★★★★☆

I usually avoid classic sci-fi: I've had mostly negative run-ins, where books had aged badly and either didn't interest me or felt off-putting. So, like Zelazny and Clarke and a bunch of others, I've been postponing Heinlein.

The City Born Great

by N.K. Jemisin · published 2016 · read 2018-12-01

★★★★☆

Short story on sentient cities. I liked it.

The Stone Sky

by N.K. Jemisin · published 2017 · read 2019-02-13

★★★★☆

The Stone Sky is a great ending to a great trilogy. I dislike books where the ending is clear ahead of time, but the amounts of good storytelling and additional context we got made up for it. Nassun's development felt a bit heavy-handed at times, but she still makes a good character, and contrasts well with her mother Essun. I enjoyed getting the true backstory for the breaking of the earth!

Speaker for the Dead

by Orson Scott Card · published 1986 · last read 2022-08-29

★★★★☆

I prefer this book to the first, more famous one. It's deeper, and more powerful, and doesn't rely on one cheap trick.

Ender’s Game

by Orson Scott Card · published 1985 · last read 2020-08-01

★★★★☆

Rereading Ender's game six years later, I found it better than I remembered it. Sure, you'll never see the twist coming the way you saw it the first time, and when I read it the first time I didn't know about OSC's personal politics. But regardless: The book sucked me in, dragged me through a story as relentlessly cruel as it was enjoyable, and then spit me out three hours later, not without delivering a last minute kick straight to the feelings.

Among Others

by Jo Walton · published 2011 · read 2020-05-10

★★★★☆

Among Others worked super well for me, especially considering that there is little-to-no plot and the whole book is a well-dressed bibliography. But the protagonist's (diary author) voice is super strong and realistic, and … okay, let's be honest here: I felt very pandered to in the best way. This book is in some way a modern equivalent to Gaudy Night, intellectual+atmospheric pandering to an in-group, and I'm in the in-group, and that's all there is to it.

Blindsight

by Peter Watts · published 2006 · last read 2020-11-26

★★★★☆

Re-read notes: I love a couple of things about this book. I love that it is well-written, particularly for sci-fi, particularly for hard sci-fi. It reads well, if you're into sci-fi in the first place. I love that it is clever, and that it is also not stupid. There is a lot of clever sci-fi that is also very stupid. I love the vampires.

I love that the protagonist becomes human. Some of the best sci-fi books follow this arc – the Ancillary trilogy, for example, if you squint a little. It's like Pinocchio, in space, with horrible tentacle monsters.

Original review: Through most of Blindsight, I thought this was a typical scifi novel – better than most, sure, because the aliens were truly alien, and incomprehensible, and the humans had real characters, and futuristic modifications, and were clever, while engaging with this unknown and potentially unknowable alien, far from home, to save/represent Earth. But then, Peter Watts had to go and pack a final twist, sending me thinking about the correlations of intelligence and awareness, and the consequences of his novel, for the next days. This book packs a punch, and it's only in the very end that you spot it. I loved it. (Not least due to the appendix, where he lists all the recent science and studies that influenced his book, and which parts of it might feasibly be possible soon.)