2022 Hugo Nominees for Novelette – Discussion Panel

8 thoughts on “2022 Hugo Nominees for Novelette – Discussion Panel”

1. Ok Seth I started the novelettes, I am notoriously slow reader so it will take me a while.
   I started the Bots story which everyone one one the panel thought was the best, I am about a third of the way through it and it had better get better in a hurry to get my vote. Too many long sentences and not a lot seems to be happening.

   So I stopped and went to a Nebula nominated not novelette Just Enough Rain by P.H. Lee only because it had a great opening line and I could not stop. It was very funny and terrific and some might find it quite blasphemous.
   Anyways back to the Hugo nominated novelettes.

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2. I mean my hypothetical retroactive vote.

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3. I read all the novelettes today and can now rank them.
   I only liked two and did not like four.
   1. Bots of the Lost Ark- ok you guys were right. I had to read this twice at least. I am still not in love with the style- too many paragraphs that consist of one very long sentance. Too many technical Info-dump
   descriptions for me. Any yet it was the most inventive sci-fi story of the year for me. I enjoyed bot 9s long travel through the ship, loved the part about the other bots trying to become the human crew members and fighting each other, really enjoyed the interplay between ship and bot9. My favorite bit is when ship told bot 9 it would take more than 20 years to explain why bot 9 was the perfect example of not understanding obedience. It really picked up when the Humans were woken up because there was more contrast between them and the bots. Oh and can’t forget Ratbot controlling the situation literally.

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4. 2. Unseelie Brothers Ltd- I was not looking forward to this because 1) I was 0 for 2 on Fran Wilde Stories- Clearly Lettered in an Open Hand was just a description of a room and I did not like a Catalogue of Storms even though I don’t remember what it was about, and 2) there is no subject in the world which I care less about than clothes and dress making. Paul Thomas Anderson is a genius but I hated Phantom Thread and I did not even like Designing Women. But this was great! I like stories about magical shops that come out of nowhere and then disappear. There was a Hugo winning story about a magical DVD shop, Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt, here was a memorable Northern Exposure episode and there’s Stephen King’s Needful Things and other things that I can’t think of. But this had great characterization and an air of mystery that I really liked. The descriptions of the magical dresses were really well done and it had a feel-good ending. I just wish we found out what happened to the girl’s mother. So these were my top 2- I guess I am going with Bots because I prefer science fiction. Interesting there were nominated stories that dealt with butterflies- The Sin of America, this, and another which I have forgotten.

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5. 3. O2 Arena- this was a mixed bag, it won the Nebula award, My choice for that award and for the Hugo had it been nominated is Just Enough Rain by P.H. Lee, A writer who I am unfamiliar with. As for 02 I liked the discussion of global warming and the access or lack thereofto 02 among the various classes. It opened up well I thought the University orientation was interesting, I would have preferred to have stayed there in the academic environment and seen how the main character navigated it. To me the devotion by the protagonist to his friend seemed cliched. She was coveted by all men but he just liked her as a friend, there was some indication he was gay but when his friend made pass at him him he was surprised, so I wondered about his orientation. Maybe he didn’t know himself. More importantly I did not like the gladiator fight- in listening to the panel I thought it would be more about that but I was glad it wasn’t, even though the fight as brief it got gross. That was also overly familiar to me- the rich getting off on poor people fighting to the death. I didn’t buy that
   by winning just one fight he would get a lifetime of 02 credits. Also a character passing out and still winning the event is too much of a sports cliche. The implication in the end is that he became a vigilante doling out justice to the rich. While of course it wasn’t right for the professor to promise grades for sexual favors, it also wasn’t right for his students to take him up on that. Getting murdered for that seems a bit extreme. So while an interesting idea, I found some of the writing in this rather amateurish.

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6. 4. This story isn’t the story- I really liked John Wiswells’s other nominated stories-Open House on Haunted Hill and For Lack of a Bed, but this didn’t work for me. The characterization is pretty good, the story not as much. It seems to be about abuse and how difficult it is to get away from one’s abuser. It was interesting that Mr. bird is an important character although he never appears in the story. One the one hand that is kind of novel, on the other hand it is disappointing that he didn’t get to confront his abuser. Until the end I wasn’t even sure that this is a supernatural story. For one thing no one else seemed to ever see the blood that was spurting from him, I wondered if that part was all in his mind. I know you were wondering why he didn’t bandage himself- maybe it was because there was no blood at all. At the end Mr. Bird’s
   House imploded so I thought that proved the supernatural element of course his boyfriend just heard something, so maybe it just happened in his mind and the boyfriend heard something else, so I am still not sure. It could have just been a story about escaping from a Manson-like cult. It is an important subject abuse and escaping from the abuser, I would have liked a scene where the abuser accuses the abuser of being the actual abuser, something that seems to happen. The more interesting part of the story was how the new housemates got along and worked jobs for the rich people, again having nothing to do with the supernatural. So nicely written but not enough story for me and I found the lead character too depressing.

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7. 5. L’Esprit de L’Escalier- thank goodness I finally learned how to copy and paste. I really disliked the last two stories on my list. So I am 0-2 on Valente this year. Her novella The Past is Red seems more my cup of tea so I will still try that. I suppose if you have more knowledge of the Orpheus myth you will enjoy this more. I saw the Cocteau version years ago but I don’t remember it. This was really hard to get through, after a while I just couldn’t wait for it to end. There is story by Robert Bloch about an old man who dies but he doesn’t know it and keeps rotting away. Finally he sneezes and blows his nose off and accepts it and goes back to his coffin. Or maybe that just happens in the Tales of the Darkside episode with Eddie Bracken. Anyways that story was mercifully short, this one just goes on forever- it must be the longest of the nominated novelettes, 02 didn’t even seem more than short story length to me. An

   Yes some of the writing of Euripides rotting away was impressive but it grew tiresome after a while. I did like some of the description of the house rotting too, especially the stream in the middle of the house, I always wanted one in my house, just not like that one. So Valente’s prose is very good, although not as good as in The Sin of America, where she did a better job describing the townspeople. As a panelist mentioned, Orpheus is such jerk, I didn’t want to spend any time with him, then his family members come over and they are jerks too. I kind of liked the scene with the psychiatrist and what she

   Euripidis writes on the crossword puzzle but I keep wondering what the point was, he had another girlfriend so why bother. I didn’t think his musical career was worked into the story very well. I didn’t understand the stuff with the dogs, although the emotional support Animal is a timely, although somewhat annoying, idea. Again I think one needs to be more familiar with the Orpheus and Euripides and Sysiphus myth. So Valente took an ancient myth in this story and Sin of America and I didn’t enjoy either story. Maybe I don’t like those types of stories in general. There was a story last year called Stepsister about Cinderella that I rather enjoyed but I need to read more. It seems that one of the nominated novellas is a variation of Snow White.

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8. 6. Colors of the Immortal Palate-I am not that interested in painting, although I am much less interested in dress making. I am usually interested in immortality stories ever since Long Live Walter Jameson with Kevin McCarthy on the Twilight Zone. However
   kind of like with This story isn’t that story, I think with a few minor changes this story would have been the same without the immortality element. The painter could have been her muse and she could have just outlived her girlfriend and her husband.
   I liked the beginning with the snooty models, the discussion of time- how much effort and time both the abuser painters and models put into the process both before and during the act of painting and the image of the Immortal male painter travelling as mist. But I didn’t like the main character and her whining about being a woman in a man’s world and not being accepted by the Japanese or European cultures or by America, yes these things are true by I grew tired of it and I wasn’t that interested in her relationships with her girlfriend or husband. I wanted more discussion of the immortality element, how the non- immortals felt about the immortals etc. This seemed to be the second choice of most of the panelists but it didn’t work for me, not even the different colors as chapter headings.
   So as mentioned the nebula nominated Just Enough Rain was my favorite novelette, its hilarious. I couldn’t get a hold of the Nebula nominated Emet which was in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction, I need to read that for completion.

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