![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Some 2021 Hugo Novels
Past form suggests if I wait until I've read all of them, I'll have forgotten what I thought about at least some of the first-read novels from the Hugo shortlist, so, in order of reading:
Network Effect, Martha Wells. Another Murderbot story! I really enjoy Murderbot - a page-turny adventure with a whole load of digs at capitalism and reflection on what it means to be human. There's not much new to the formula in this book but the ART / Murderbot interactions around the killware-Murderbot they make were interesting, and I enjoyed the various reactions to the kidnapping-as-negotiation-strategy incident. If you've not read Murderbot, start with All Systems Red and read the series in order.
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir. I really enjoyed Gideon the Ninth, to which this is the sequel and was really looking forward to reading it as a result. I'm afraid to say that while I found myself compelled to keep reading to find out where the book was going, I didn't really enjoy it, which is mostly because I didn't understand it, even having got to the end. At the end of Gideon, Gideon kills herself to turn Harrow into a Lyctor (and save the remaining survivors from Cytherea). Much of Harrow looks like its pretending this didn't happen (because the bits set in Canaan House are actually a bubble in the River), as it turns out that Harrow arranged with Ianthe to wipe Gideon from Harrow's memory (hence the baroque arrangements of notes to give people and so on). This may (I'm not sure it's clear in canon) be a scheme to prevent Harrow from totally destroying Gideon's soul - hence the second-person narration, which is Gideon describing events as she observes them. How this ties up with The Body (who we think is God's cavalier) remains unclear.
Likewise, what the state of things is at the end of the book is very confused, even by middle-of-trilogy standards - we think God survived by the assistance of Ianthe, and presumably Harrow/Gideon survived (though who is driving that body is unknown), and maybe Ortus' cavalier in Ortus' body? And we are invited to presume that it's Harrow/Gideon who wakes up in a maybe-different-era apartment with Camilla Hect right at the end, but that might well be misdirection.
But much of that is really unclear almost throughout, and I had to refer to the plot summary on WP to put some of it together afterwards. It's structurally very clever, but I'm afraid I'm too stupid to "get" it; maybe once I've read the forthcoming final part of the trilogy I will come back and go "wow, that was actually very neat", but at the moment my inclination is more to say "Read Gideon the Ninth, and leave it at that unless you are smarter than me or like being confused".
The City We Became, N. K. Jemisin. I imagine you get more out of this if you know New York well, but I still really enjoyed it. I like the ideas, the social commentary (which never quite crosses over into feeling preachy), the sense of place in the different boroughs, and the way the various characters and their abilities evolve. Another one I had difficulty putting down! I imagine people from one particular of the five boroughs may feel hard-done-by, mind you...
Network Effect, Martha Wells. Another Murderbot story! I really enjoy Murderbot - a page-turny adventure with a whole load of digs at capitalism and reflection on what it means to be human. There's not much new to the formula in this book but the ART / Murderbot interactions around the killware-Murderbot they make were interesting, and I enjoyed the various reactions to the kidnapping-as-negotiation-strategy incident. If you've not read Murderbot, start with All Systems Red and read the series in order.
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir. I really enjoyed Gideon the Ninth, to which this is the sequel and was really looking forward to reading it as a result. I'm afraid to say that while I found myself compelled to keep reading to find out where the book was going, I didn't really enjoy it, which is mostly because I didn't understand it, even having got to the end. At the end of Gideon, Gideon kills herself to turn Harrow into a Lyctor (and save the remaining survivors from Cytherea). Much of Harrow looks like its pretending this didn't happen (because the bits set in Canaan House are actually a bubble in the River), as it turns out that Harrow arranged with Ianthe to wipe Gideon from Harrow's memory (hence the baroque arrangements of notes to give people and so on). This may (I'm not sure it's clear in canon) be a scheme to prevent Harrow from totally destroying Gideon's soul - hence the second-person narration, which is Gideon describing events as she observes them. How this ties up with The Body (who we think is God's cavalier) remains unclear.
Likewise, what the state of things is at the end of the book is very confused, even by middle-of-trilogy standards - we think God survived by the assistance of Ianthe, and presumably Harrow/Gideon survived (though who is driving that body is unknown), and maybe Ortus' cavalier in Ortus' body? And we are invited to presume that it's Harrow/Gideon who wakes up in a maybe-different-era apartment with Camilla Hect right at the end, but that might well be misdirection.
But much of that is really unclear almost throughout, and I had to refer to the plot summary on WP to put some of it together afterwards. It's structurally very clever, but I'm afraid I'm too stupid to "get" it; maybe once I've read the forthcoming final part of the trilogy I will come back and go "wow, that was actually very neat", but at the moment my inclination is more to say "Read Gideon the Ninth, and leave it at that unless you are smarter than me or like being confused".
The City We Became, N. K. Jemisin. I imagine you get more out of this if you know New York well, but I still really enjoyed it. I like the ideas, the social commentary (which never quite crosses over into feeling preachy), the sense of place in the different boroughs, and the way the various characters and their abilities evolve. Another one I had difficulty putting down! I imagine people from one particular of the five boroughs may feel hard-done-by, mind you...
no subject