Memory Going Backwards

One of the most interesting questions in A Memory Called Empire is whether or not protagonist Mahit Dzmare will turn her back on her native Lsel Station. Will she embrace and adopt the colonial culture of the Teixcalaanli Empire?

(Image via Goodreads)

One of the elements that elevated Arkady Martine’s debut novel above many others is the depiction of Dzmare’s internal turmoil and the interplanetary politics that force the question.

This isn’t a simple decision for Dzmare; not only had she been fascinated with the colonial superpower in her formative years — she had fallen for Three Seagrass, an Imperial bureaucrat. This exploration of a cultural identity is a tender, heartbreaking, and moving series of decisions that reveal the integrity of Dzmare’s character, and perhaps Martine as an author.

For us, this was why Martine deserved the Hugo Award she received for A Memory Called Empire. But it is a source of confusion when assessing the sequel A Desolation Called Peace.

Martine is a fine writer who crafts characters you want to root for and we think readers who want to spend more time in the company of Dizmar, Seagrass, Yskandr Aghavn, and Nineteen Adze will enjoy the book thoroughly. This is a well-written, engaging space opera adventure novel.

The problem is that bringing these characters together again (and returning Mahit Dzmare to the centre of the action) requires no small degree of contrivance. Whether or not a reader finds this construction believable and satisfying will depend on how they understood the relationships in the preceding novel.

This sequel picks the action up just weeks after the end of the first book, with Mahit having returned to her home station to find that she is no longer welcome there. Meanwhile the Empire has become embroiled in a war against an unknowable and mysterious alien race. Three Seagrass strategizes to reunite with Dzmare and drag her into the front-lines of the intergalactic conflict.

Some readers might find the first 150 pages of A Desolation Called Peace serves to undo the resolution of the first book. For example, the will-they-won’t-they romance is restored to uncertainty as if the characters were in a sitcom that needed to return everything to the status quo at the end of every episode. When looking at A Desolation Called Peace through this lens, if feels as though the nuance and meaningfulness of the previous book has been diluted. The final decision that Mahit made at the end of A Memory Called Empire seemed retconned to be not so final. The heartbreaking ending of her romance with Three Seagrass is suddenly not so heartbreaking.

In the novel’s defense, some readers might find the sequel to be a deft examination of the nature of

Colonialism is toxic and has a corrosive effect on
human relationships such as the one between 
Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass. Even if there's
real affection, one cannot help but question the
dynamics of power and appropriation of culture.
(Image via History.com

freedom within the context of colonization. There continue to be strong themes about marginalization of non-mainstream cultures, the erasure of history, and the belittling of an individual’s background or past. When these themes come into conflict with the ideologies of the dominant class, the novel becomes far more interesting. This quote of Dzmare contemplating why she is angry with Three Seagrass makes this tension explicit: “She'd meant, When you understand that there's no room for me to say yes, even if I want to. She'd meant, You don't understand that there's no such thing as being free. Free to choose, or free otherwise.” Ultimately the empire doesn’t change and Dzmare’s story ends the only way it could. This left some readers wondering how the relationship with the empire and the new aliens will evolve.

It’s worth noting that some of the best parts of A Desolation Called Peace feature characters who were not present or not prominent in the previous novel: Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus and Imperial heir Eight Antidote. In these sections, the world of the Teixcalaanli seems as fresh and vibrant as it did in the first novel. The ways in which Imperial power structures and monoculture are corrosive to even those who are in positions of privilege are explored with nuance, and it is shown how internecine factionalism can tear down even those who excel within the system.

But fundamentally, the events of the second book no longer seem to be Mahit Dizmare’s story; she’s written to be the main character, but the story is no longer her own. Rather it seems like a story that was taking place in one corner of the galaxy far from anywhere that an Ambassador from Lsel Station should be. The continued focus on Dzmare seemed incongruous.

In many ways, A Desolation Called Peace succeeds: It’s engaging, sweet, often interesting, and fun. But it also has trouble connecting with and growing from the original story.

Logging Back In To CatNet

One of the concerns we have about the creation of the Lodestar Award is that its existence could prevent deserving books from earning a spot on the ballot for the Best Novel Hugo Award. That is, books written for a certain age group might all be sequestered into the Lodestar by default, when they might also be strong candidates for a Hugo award.

Fans of “adult” science fiction should not ignore Chaos On CatNet.

Chaos on CatNet is
the sequel to Naomi
Kritzer's award-winning
Catfishing on CatNet.

Set in the very-near future, the CatNet novels centre on a high-school-age girl Steph, who is befriended by a friendly web-based artificial intelligence that goes by the handle Cheshire Cat. The previous works in the series (the Hugo-winning short story “Cat Pictures Please,” and the Lodestar-winning novel Catfishing on CatNet) focused on the good that a highly intelligent AI with access to big data could do, and on battles over control of data. In Chaos on Catnet, Kritzer starts to look at the other side of the same coin.

Picking up within weeks of where Catfishing on CatNet left off, this latest novel introduces a second artificial intelligence — one whose goals and motivations are murkier than a simple appreciation of domestic felines. This major plot-line explores just how creepy and ugly AI-directed behavioural change algorithms can get; both in terms of beguiling people into destructive fantasy-based worldviews, and in terms of turning people against each other. The fact that Kritzer ties these algorithms both to destructive religion and to tribalist Q-Anon style groups is telling, and insightful.

This book is set in the very, very near future. There are self-driving taxi cabs, the General Dynamics quadruped robots are now consumer-ready, but there are no technological advances that are overly fantastical. In many ways, Kritzer is in conversation with several other authors who have been playing in similar sandboxes: people like Karl Schroeder and Cory Doctorow. It is interesting to compare Kritzer’s approach to the future of policing with that of Doctorow’s approach in his novel Attack Surface. Kritzer’s thoughtful, hopeful blueprint for a better system of policing in Minneapolis is a highlight of the book.

One aspect of the novel that helps elevate Chaos On CatNet above the preceding CatNet works is the

Minneapolis - a city rich with
labour history and for many years
the heart of the flour industry
is a terrific setting for this novel.
(Image via PIXY.org)

use of space and place. Kritzer’s near-future Minneapolis is recognizable to those who have spent time in the city, but also offers a constructive and thoughtful framework for how a city might respond to the riots of last summer. Those riots — which she briefly writes about in a terrific afterword — took place as she was in the process of revising and editing her draft. She decided to “write the Minneapolis you want to see.”

In many ways the present is already catching up to a novel whose first draft was probably written just over a year ago: the chaos caused by the AI antagonist has clear parallels to the ways in which social media algorithms helped fuel the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Late in the novel, there are some plot elements that seem to vanish mid-stream (What happened to the big scary robot army? We don’t know!), and the ending is a little too nice and convenient. But despite these quibbles, the novel holds together remarkably well.

Chaos On Catnet should be seriously considered for the Hugo Award for best novel alongside other more “adult” works.

Fleet of Knives: Pacifism Gets Its Due

Overt pacifism is often given short shrift in science fiction, so it is refreshing to see it represented by

(Image Via Amazon.com)

the House of Reclamation that is the central focus of Gareth Powell’s novel Embers of War and its recently released sequel Fleet of Knives.

The House of Reclamation, which operates like a benevolent version of the French Foreign Legion, accepts all those who wish to leave their pasts behind them in order to serve the greater good. The organization operates a network of rescue ships, and dispatches them to various crises with a humanitarian mission to save lives and provide medical support.

This mission and set-up provide an excellent framework in which to tell engaging and personal stories about characters who are atoning for past crimes. One could imagine Powell continuing to mine this premise for numerous novels, much as James White did with his superb Sector General novels.

Much like the Sector General novels, this series seems to be building and strengthening over time.

One of the aspects of the first book that we enjoyed was the way that the universe bled off the edge of the pages. Only those portions of the world that were directly important to the story were fully explained, but there was clearly enough thought given to the setting that there was room in this universe for many stories.

Many have praised Embers of War and its sequel by comparing them to Firefly. However, we think it’s more apt to compare these novels to a different cult television classic: Babylon 5, Much like J. Michael Straczynski’s masterpiece, these novels are set in the wake of a galaxy wide conflict, explore

"Some time ago, Keffer saw or
thought he saw something in hyperspace,
 a ship of some kind." — Lt. Ivanova
(Image via Babylon5.fandom.com) 

how peace is achieved, and feature elder races and ancient interstellar mysteries. In Fleet of Knives, Powell invites this comparison by directly quoting Babylon 5’s tagline “The Last Best Chance For Peace.”

If the first novel was comparable to the first season of B5, then Fleet of Knives offers the narrative bridge of the second and third seasons in which the premise is reinvented, and true dangers are revealed.

There are shadows in hyperspace, and tensions between more established and newer Human settlements. There’s also the question of who created the Marble Armada and what happened to them. Several of those tantalizing hints receive more focus in Fleet of Knives — though to say too much about this would spoil half of the fun.

The character of Trouble Dog — a sentient warship that resigned from the military — continues to be one of the real highlights of the series. Designed and bred to be efficient and task-focused, Trouble Dog’s personality does not correspond to what we would describe as a neurotypical human, and in this she reminds us somewhat of another recent popular SF creation: Murderbot.

Powell clearly knows the genre inside and out, and this deep knowledge helps the work become more than a sum of its parts.

More problematic is the narrative arc of war criminal turned poet Ona Sudak, which almost serves to undermine her character development in the previous novel. The inconsistency of Sudak’s reform and lack of self-awareness did not sit well with us. She might have better served readers if her story had ended.

That being said, the strong narrative arc, the pacing and engaging prose all add up to one heck of an adventure novel. Given our strong penchant for avoiding sequels on our Hugo ballots, we likely won’t have this work on our 2020 nominations list. However, it is almost guaranteed that we’ll be advocating strongly for this to be recognized in the series category in 2021.

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. 

Death’s End - Book Club Review

This is our third review of Hugo Nominated novels in 2017. The previous reviews were Closed and Common Orbit and The Obelisk Gate.

It would be difficult for any sequel to live up to Cixin Liu’s Hugo-Winning The Three Body Problem. The immediate sequel, The Dark Forest was an uneven and flawed book that had some merit. But the much-heralded conclusion of the trilogy, Death’s End, completely misses the mark.

At least the cover art is pretty cool.
(Image via Amazon.com) 

The plot is meandering and unfocused. Protagonist Cheng Xin is first introduced as an engineering student and object of desire, and later as the swordbearer — a person tasked with protecting humanity through mutual deterrence — but then becomes a time traveller observing various eras of civilization as humanity faces one massive world-ending crisis after another.

The End Is Nigh Again

One of the recurring themes in “big” science fiction is the impending end of the world. In Death’s End, the end of the world is nigh on no fewer than six occasions, only to be averted suddenly through deux et machina each time.  The frequency of these calamities within the book, and how precipitously they are forgotten devalues them, and left our book group struggling to care.

The character of Cheng Xin is one of the weakest parts of the book, as none of us were really able to understand her motivations or her personality. She’s faced with conflict after conflict throughout the book, and presented with a wide variety of moral dilemmas, but through it all she remains a cypher.

In the previous two books the author wrote from several points of view other than the main character.

Cixin Liu is China's most
popular SF author.
(Image via Tor.com)

Death’s End focuses almost solely on Cheng Xin, with just a brief portion from Tianming’s perspective. This leaves other interesting characters — like Luo Ji and Wade — on the sidelines. The omission of their perspectives is a missed opportunity that points to the lack of depth in the book.

Everything And The Kitchen Sink

Characters, however, do not seem to be what Liu is interested in as an author. He is a writer who likes to tackle ‘big ideas,’ and this book is jammed full of ‘big’ science fictional ideas: the weaponization of space-time geometry; societally determined gender selection; interstellar mutual deterrence; manipulating the speed of light; and the inevitable heat death of the universe.

If Liu had focused on one of these ideas instead of jumping from one to the next, the book might have been stronger. Both concepts and plot elements are suddenly dropped and never mentioned again. A whole chapter is dedicated to a black hole, which turns out to be entirely irrelevant. Human civilization is on the brink of war, but Cheng Xin miraculously stops the war in less than a page, at which point it becomes irrelevant.

Men Are From Mars Or Wherever

Some of us were troubled by the sexist assumptions that underpin portions of Death’s End’s plot. During a peaceful era that Cheng Xin explores, men are 'feminized' and indistinguishable from women, because according to the author, men are only needed for conflict. It’s an attitude that is demeaning to women, because it’s suggested they cannot deal with conflicts without men, and it’s demeaning to men because it suggests that all they are good for is fighting.

Because the book lacks any focus, and because Liu’s ideas are never fully explored, Death’s End ends up being less than the sum of its parts. The scattered plot, the scant development of these ideas, and the lack of human characters make this an unworthy nominee. Two years ago, most of our group voted for The Three Body Problem. This year, none of us are likely to rank Death’s End very high on our Hugo Ballot.