Urban Renewal

What a great time to read about a city loved by so many.

Three-time best novel
winner N.K. Jemisin's
latest book.
(Image via Goodreads)

For the past year, New York City has been inaccessible to travelers, tourists, and those seeking to commune with its genius loci (though, if Jemisin’s interpretation is correct, this is what the City would prefer). Hardcore urbanists from all over will get a particular thrill from a book like The City We Became, which invokes the boroughs as characters and evokes memories of wanders through their streets.

With a plot kicked off by a young homeless man discovering his destiny as the avatar of New York City, the story involves a larger-scale need to rally the Burroughs to defend urbanism against community-destroying White supremacy in the form of a Lovecraftian horror. This entity lashes out and seeks to destroy New York out of a fear of culturally-rich diverse communities. As with many Lovecraftian horrors, significant elements of the unknown and unknowable are left to the reader’s imagination.

Jemisin’s talent for creating characters we care about surviving and surpassing structural barriers took center stage. Every new superhero needs an origin story and this story provides this by expanding on the creative city hero concept Jemisin introduced in the original short story “The City Born Great.” While a minor quibble, the cameo character Bel seems more Aussie than British to us and no one in our book club remembers seeing a pound sterling note in about three decades. More decisively, the nod to her sensitivity readers in the acknowledgements was appreciated, however some members of the book club felt the characters were reductive and that the narrative occasionally relied on telling the readers rather than showing the heroic status of the protagonists.

This is a novel that is subtly intertextual, paying homage to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and subverting the works of H.P. Lovecraft. In fact, the allusions to Lovecraft are so integral to the text that the occasional forays into Lovecraftian prose became distracting to at least one of our members. Those who dislike the way Lovecraft wrote may find some of the prose difficult. 

But despite being steeped in the ideas behind famous fantasy works, The City We Became sometimes

Given how much this novel is in conversation with
both the city of New York, and the works of H.P. 
Lovecraft, it is worth noting how Lovecraft had
an irrational dislike of New York. 
(Image via NPR)

seems more aligned with the narrative traditions of magical realism; it sometimes isn’t clear where the metaphor ends and what portions of the story are supposed to be read literally. Readers who lean towards more literary novels will likely enjoy this more than those who seek out pulp adventures.

As expected, and true to Jemisin’s style, there's a satisfying through line in The City We Became that illuminates a determinative cultural construction. The divisiveness that we've all seen play out in the US over the past decade or so is simplified to an “urban vs rural” or “white vs non-white” dichotomy in this novel, and we suspect it will play an important role in the next two books. The fact that this tension was not resolved with an unbelievable love-in between the Burroughs (a few of us were dreading that type of ending), and the recognition that spatial and cultural practices, not necessarily political boundaries, provide the glue for urban gestalt provided a graceful end to a fantasy novel focused on character development.

Fantastical stories expect some level of abandon by readers, and for the most part that was easy to do with this book. We were a bit tripped up by a few easy-outs, however, including a pep talk that reminded us of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and a few convenient but sticky plot holes filled in by bystanders inexplicably unable to see things or eagerly accepting dubious explanations. American exceptionalism also peeked around a few corners (The repetitious refrain: “this time is different / never happened in the other cities”) but this will likely support the book finding its audience.

Given Jemisin’s well-earned following and the timely depiction of a much-loved survivor city, we are glad to see The City We Became on this year’s Hugo short list.

The Stone Sky is the echo of a great book

Some reviews of N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky offer ebullient praise and predict an unprecedented

The Fifth Season is a great
novel. We're less convinced
that its sequel deserves
another Hugo Award.
(Image via Goodreads)

third back-to-back Hugo win for Jemisin. While this is a fine book, it is much harder to say it is the most deserving science fiction or fantasy novel of 2017.

The first book in the series, The Fifth Season, was innovative and unique. It offered a refreshing take on science fiction and fantasy that unquestionably deserved the Hugo Award. But The Stone Sky does not stand on its own. It is good, but mostly because it is an echo of a truly great book. 

It might be more appropriate to honour N.K. Jemisin with a Best Series Hugo this year, rather than another Best Novel, because that would recognize how The Stone Sky works as part of a larger whole.

If there hadn’t been so much astonishingly good science fiction and fantasy published in 2017, we might have been rooting for N.K. Jemisin to complete her Hugo Award hat trick. But there are numerous novels at least as good.

The third book in the series picks up immediately on the conclusion of the second, and despite the brief recap those of us who hadn’t looked at The Obelisk Gate since last summer had difficulty picking up the narrative threads.

This volume is the story of a mother doing whatever it takes to save her daughter, willing to sacrifice herself and the entire planet if necessary. Over the course of the novel, we learn the origin of orogeny, roggas, stone eaters, and Guardians. Jemisin reveals the history and mystery of the world in a way entirely believable for the all-too-human motivations. This background and world building is what was most enjoyable about the book, but also what made it so dependent on the previous works.

That being said, Jemisin is in fine form as a wordsmith. This novel may be her most quotable, with

The quality of NK Jemisin's
prose is outstanding.
(Image via Wired.com)  

lines such as “For a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress,” and “If you love someone, you don’t get to choose how they love you back.”

As the final book in a trilogy, The Stone Sky ramps up the tension and the stakes, and serves as a fitting conclusion to the story. It’s a good book that satisfyingly concludes the story of Essun, Nassun, and an alternate Earth.

As a trilogy, The Broken Earth’s environmental metaphors, cautionary tales of hubris, and racial allegories are powerful. And while this book reveals the history of the broken Earth and nicely wraps up the various plot lines, it retreads and develops the ideas introduced in the first two books without presenting anything groundbreaking. The metaphors are made more obvious, but not more incisive.

It seems inevitable that Hugo voters will nominate The Stone Sky, but with so many other strong novels written in 2017 it will likely not make it to the top our ballot.

Too Many Sequels

It's worth noting that the majority of this year's Best Novel Hugo Award shortlist is comprised of books that are either the first part in a series, or the sequel to another work.

In fact, only one of the six novels on this year's shortlist (All The Birds In The Sky) is a standalone work.

This is not the first time in recent memory that the shortlist has been dominated by sequels, prequels, or works in a shared universe. But it is part of a larger trend, and it's one that worries us. 

In the 1960s, 88 per cent of the Hugo shortlist was comprised of standalone novels. From 2001 to 2010, 56 per cent of Hugo shortlisted novels were standalone works. In the first seven years of this decade, the statistic has fallen to 27 per cent (ten of the 36 novels shortlisted).

The problem with sequels

There's a place for sequels: perhaps a story has too large a scope to be contained in one volume, or perhaps the author has created a universe in which multiple ideas can be explored. Some fine

Some sequels tackle new
ideas and new conflicts.
(Image via Amazon.ca)

examples of this are Vernor Vinge's Deepness In The Sky and Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead. 

But it could be suggested that the idea of a series of templated sequels is philosophically antithetical to what Science Fiction is about, and therefore what we think the Hugos should celebrate: new ideas. 

With few exceptions, sequels are not about new ideas. By the time Lois McMaster Bujold wrote Captain Vorpatril's Alliance in 2012, was there ground left to cover in the Vorkosigan Saga that hadn't been explored in the previous dozen books?

More troubling is the fact that sequels, prequels and series make works less accessible to new readers. Anyone can pick up and read Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man without feeling that they've missed something important. The same cannot be said for Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, which is an excellent novel, but one that we have qualms about having been honoured with a Hugo because it is not accessible to new readers.

Without pointing fingers at anyone in particular, sometimes, for some authors, producing endless populist sequels can be a crutch. And these sequels will get nominations because of a small, dedicated, fervent group of fans. 

Books written as the first part in a trilogy, or a series, are more defensible as Hugo nominees, but can still have their issues - how can we judge a story that is left incomplete? If the first book in a trilogy does not stand on its own, can it still be Hugo worthy?

All awards systems have biases

One of the things that gives the Hugos legitimacy, prompts so much great discussion, and engages so many fans is how democratically the awards are run and juried. But the open and democratic system we have for the Hugos should not blind us to the structural biases of the awards, including this

In retrospect, should
Becky Chambers' self-
published debut have
made the shortlist?
(Image via Amazon.ca)

increasing bias towards sequels.

We suspect this bias exists through no ill intent, but mostly because it can take a while for readers to hear about a standalone work, or something from a new author, or a book that becomes a word-of-mouth phenomenon. So these types of works are sometimes overlooked. A good example of this is Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, which Becky Chambers self-published in 2014. We would argue that it missed the shortlist in part because it didn't reach a wide audience of Hugo Award voters until it was republished the subsequent year. 

These biases are understandable — the books we're likeliest to nominate are the ones we've read prior to the nomination deadline, and that is in turn driven by which ones we're likeliest to have run out and bought on the day they hit the shelves. 

We already know that we want the sequel to a book we've already read, and we know we're going to enjoy the latest book by our favourite author. And so the same Hugo voters will reward books by the authors they already know. This probably contributes to the fact that there hasn't been a Hugo shortlist of all first-time nominees since 1963. 

As with all biases, we're better off when we acknowledge their existence, try to mitigate their effects, and act with intentionality.

Trends in publishing

Clearly, these biases have existed since the dawn of the Hugo awards. But I suspect that trends in publishing are exacerbating the issue. 

Fewer novels are being published in mass-market paperback than in previous decades, as publishing

In my opinion, the first
book of Mission Earth
would have been a less
offensive nomination.

houses focus on the pricier (higher profit margin) trade paperbacks instead. The gap in time between hardback publication and either format of paperback has grown from an average of 12 months in the 1990s to approximately 18 months today (for those works that ever even see a paperback publication). This makes newer works purchased in book stores less accessible than in previous decades. 

And of course, publishers *like* sequels because they're easily marketable. I would wager that there are significantly more serialized and sequelized books that are hitting the shelves today than there were in previous decades. 

Compounding this trend is the rise of electronic publishing, which might have reduced costs for consumers looking to buy a new volume, but doesn't provide the same opportunity to browse bookshelves to discover new authors and new works. Although we don't have any data to back this up, we suspect that one is less likely to try out a work from a new author on a Kindle than while browsing at the local book store. It is easy, however, to choose and download a sequel. 

It's easier to be a passive consumer than it is to seek out new works. 

Where do we go from here? 

Lets be honest about it, Hugos 2018 starts right now with the books that people are reading this summer. 

If you are someone who has a ConJose membership, or if you are likely to get one in time to

Does the Fifth Season
trilogy need another
Hugo nomination?
(Image via Amazon.com)

nominate works, we would encourage you start figuring out your ballot. 

Give some thought to accessibility, to sequelitis, and to which worthy authors have *never* gotten a Hugo nod. And maybe pick up a standalone novel you might not otherwise give a chance to — try Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion or Omar El Akkad's American War. 

N.K. Jemisin's Fifth Season was a worthwhile winner last year, and most of our book club voted for it. But does the trilogy deserve getting a third book nominated for essentially a continued exploration of the same ideas? We'd suggest that the space on the 2018 Hugo ballot might be better served with an author who has yet to receive this kind of recognition. 

Hugos 2017 — Short Stories

This year’s shortlist of short stories is varied, offering a plethora of interesting and diverse work. Almost all of these stories are worthy of winning a Hugo — this was a difficult category in which to pick a favourite nominee.

The most perplexing nominee — A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa

We found Wong's work
more perplexing than
entertaining.
Image via Tor.com. 

Wong — is a frenetic time-hopping story about a girl and her sister who have magical (electrical?) powers. The story may be about suicide, or it may be about the end of the world. There’s very little overall narrative thread to hold onto.

In portions of the text, it feels like Wong is stringing words together into paragraphs without the traditional intermediary step of sentences. We can appreciate the artfulness of this style of writing, but it is not to our tastes.

Brooke Bolander’s Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies is a short story about an incorporeal being that takes human form, is murdered, and then returns for revenge. There was some debate amongst members of the book club about whether the protagonist is an alien energy being, a spirit, or an angel. Although the language is entertaining, the story is extremely thin. There just isn’t enough substance to the story to vote for it.

An Unimaginable Light is probably the best John C. Wright story that we’ve read — in no small part because it’s based around a couple of interesting notions about the ability of robots to interpret Asimov’s Three Laws in ways that their creators never intended. Although the ‘twist’ ending seems to come out of nowhere, that ending is at least built around an interesting idea concerning what it means to be human.

Perennial Hugo nominee
John C. Wright's story is
built around an interesting
idea, but his prose is too
didactic for our tastes. 

That being said, Wright’s slightly didactic prose and aggressive thesaurus use isn’t to our taste, nor is the way he seems to delight in the sexual degradation of one of the characters. This won’t be at the top of our ballot, but we can understand why some fans chose to nominate it.

For us, there were three very different works vying for the top of our Hugo ballots: Seasons of Glass and Iron, That Game We Played During the War and The City Born Great.

The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin is an interesting urban fantasy that is partway between Jane Jacobs and Jim Butcher. The theme of potential and the metaphor of birth speak to a hopefulness that was uplifting.

But for some of our book club members, The City Born Great wasn’t didactic enough. N.K. Jemisin’s story of a youth becoming the magical avatar of a city seemed to be working toward a grand statement about the death and life of great American cities (or something similar), but never really committed itself to an idea about urbanism. There’s no indication in the story about the forces that the youth is struggling against and the ending left some of us wanting a bit more meaning to the work.

In Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar weaves together two Norwegian folk tales into a story of empowerment and problem solving. An Ottawa-based poet, El-Mohtar’s dexterously uses

El-Mohtar deconstructs
Norwegian Folk Tales
in interesting ways.
Image via Blue Fairy Book
illustrated by H.J.Ford
& G.P.Jacomb Hood, 1889

language to draw readers into a rustic mythology and to interrogate the assumptions of the folk tales she’s playing with. Her two protagonists are given motivations and personalities, and instead of needing some prince to save them, the two women save each other from their curses.

This is a very likable short story with some depth, offers a satisfying conclusion, and might bear re-reading.

Out of all of the nominees, That Game We Played During The War by Carrie Vaughn is the one that we found the most enjoyable to read. It’s a clear, straightforward story about former prisoners of war from two very different factions finding common ground after a long-running conflict. Vaughn’s tale feels like something out of the golden age of SF — concise, spare, and precise in its language. The relationship between the two central characters is touching and thoughtful.

She leavens the story with observations about cultural understandings and misunderstandings, as well as some interesting notions about how telepathy might influence a society.

The medium of the short story is a particularly difficult one to master; balancing brevity with profundity and balancing artfulness with clarity are not easy tasks. Three nominees this year achieved a level of excellence that is worth celebrating.

The Obelisk Gate – Book Club 2017 – First book discussed

The Obelisk Gate is a worthy nominee for the Hugo Award, but most of us didn’t feel that it was as good as Fifth Season.

True to form, N.K. Jemisin’s writing is strong, her characters are well crafted, and the world building is interesting. And yet the book falls somewhere short of what we had hoped for. 

Although it sounds a bit strange, many of us tried to figure out what had actually happened in the book. As it turns out, not all that much. While interesting context is provided for the events of the preceding book and information is offered about the challenges to come, the characters didn’t actually do very much or move the plot along in any significant ways.

Second-Book Syndrome

Perhaps the book suffers from being the second in a trilogy. As such, it can’t have the originality and vigor of a first book and also can’t have as epic a conclusion as a third book.

Jemisin’s strength as a writer and deft social commentary make this a worthwhile read. Questions of race, class and gender are explored thoughtfully and with nuance. The characters speak with their own voices, and grow.

Alabaster’s slow decline as he tries to pass along knowledge to Essun, and Essun’s growing control of her magic could have been nothing more than a Hero’s Journey ™ like that of Obi-Wan and Luke. But Jemisin’s more nuanced character building elevates this relationship to something more touching and poignant.  Again, she raises the readers’ expectations as they progress through the book.

N.K. Jemisin
Photo from SFWA

The book’s final 50 pages are where the second-book syndrome really comes to the forefront, because nothing is resolved other than knowing that there are significant actions to come. Needing to read the next book to have a dénouement is not a satisfying ending. 

Back-To-Back Hugos?

The Hugo Awards have often honoured multiple books in a well-loved series, but usually not in back-to-back years, and usually only when the author has taken the series in new directions. The Obelisk Gate is unlikely to buck this trend.

None of us would be upset if Obelisk Gate won — and some of us are likely to vote for it. At the same time, we're all hoping that one of the other nominees astonishes us.