Best Novella 2021
Nov. 16th, 2021 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
factitiousWhen I talked about Best Novel, I went through the finalists in ballot order and then gave my thoughts on how I'm ranking them. That introduced some redundancy and is part of what made the post way too long. So now I'm combining those and just writing my thoughts on these novellas in the order that I'm ranking them. This means the order of the cut tags is a mild spoiler for the works, in that it can give away how I felt about something you haven't read yet relative to something you have read. If this is a problem for you and you have an idea for how I should address it, please let me know.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo, was my favorite. The format was great, going between listings of objects; the frame story with Chih, Rabbit, and Almost Brilliant; and Rabbit's stories about her and the empress. Good characters on each level of the narrative, plus, fun sneaky ways of sending coded messages. My favorite was interpreting the runes on the lucky sticks through multiple languages, described in just enough detail to give the reader the feel of how it works. The worldbuilding was like that in general, giving a great sense of the setting with carefully chosen details. Easy first place.
Ring Shout is the first thing I've read by P. Djèlí Clark. It made a strong impression on me. Good job repurposing both "destined hero with a magic sword" tropes and "Lovecraftian monster" tropes. Doing either one of those this well could have carried a story; doing them both and making them fit together is real impressive.
I'm an easy sell on stories where the message is that hate is always bad. I liked that the cosmic horrors didn't have an object-level stake in race issues, they're happy to get anyone to commit hateful atrocities, but it's not a "both sides" sort of take in terms of the humans; it's abundantly clear that the people joining the KKK are horrible villains themselves, not unwitting victims of hate rays.
Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi, is close behind Ring Shout. It's also about racism, but very differently. The focus is on the US's racist carceral system, with some near-future sci-fi elements, plus the more fantasy element of Ella's Thing, which had a lack of solid explanations that I appreciated. Getting into detail on that would have been a distraction.
My main complaint, and the reason this is lower than Ring Shout, is that it didn't really stick the ending with Ella's vision of freedom in the future. To be fair, it would have been hard to: the questions of how to dismantle the carceral system and what comes afterward aren't easy! But that's kind of the task the story set itself at the end, and I think it could have done better than a fiery apocalypse followed by grasslands.
I'm not sure I should be taking the worldbuilding especially seriously in Nino Cipri's Finna. Maybe it's not meant to hold up to repeated "but how does that work?" questions, it's more of a magical realism story about corporations being horrible to employees. (Side note: Was LitenVärld being one of the hives that managed to get through a maskhål and take hold on Ava's Earth ever stated explicitly? It seemed pretty clearly implied, but I don't think Ava ever says anything about realizing it.) But the fantastic elements are more detailed than you'd need for that; I get the sense the book wants us to engage with Captain Nouresh's world as a real place, and I don't think it hangs together enough for that.
As an adventure story, it had some nice set pieces, but the characters didn't stand out much for me, and it was hard to sympathize with the mission of bringing back a different person to unconvincingly substitute for a dead grandmother. There's a decent core here, and I could see a rewritten version rising above No Award for me, but as it is, it didn't make it.
Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire, is the fifth in the Wayward Children series. I didn't read any of the others, but that wasn't really a problem, because the first forty percent of the novella is almost entirely recap. I'm not sure where exactly the line was between recaps of things that happened in previous installments, versus things that happened offscreen that Jack recaps as new exposition to the other characters, but it sure added up to a lot of recapping. After all that, the resolutions are weirdly quick and easy. Cora and Kade get claimed by the Drowned Gods, there's some hand-wringing about what a big deal this is, then the Drowned Gods immediately return them and agree to help out. The confrontation with the terrifying vampire villain immediately gets resolved with the statement that he's politically required to not do anything to Jack and friends. It's all very oddly structured.
The characters mostly seemed like opportunities for the author to talk about the importance of respecting people with gender dysphoria, anxiety, and so on. I would have liked this character diversity if more of them felt like actual characters: Jack was the only one who felt fleshed out enough to be memorable. Also, I found the descriptions of ASL uncomfortably exotifying. This isn't the kind of representation I want to read. I do have to say that the illustrations by Rovina Cai were very nice.
Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey, was my least favorite. I'm not opposed, in general, to stories where the author was convinced they were writing about a Very Important Message. (I liked Riot Baby!) It only becomes an issue when that sense of importance gets in the way of writing a good story, or when the message is itself terrible.
Upright Women Wanted is a story about how stories about LGBT people need to have happy endings. It's not subtle about this. Esther has only read the Approved Materials, full of stories where lesbians get "bad ends," and hates herself as a result. She goes out into the world and gets told that actually, she can have a good ending. That's her arc. If you want to read more about this topic from the same author, they have an essay about the mistake they made once of trying to write a story where tragic things happened to queer people, and how they learned to never write things like that. I recommend it if you think my description of their position sounds like a caricature.
I like reading stories with LGBT representation. But I like when there's a variety of stories with LGBT representation, including tragedies. I like reading painful, messy, even depressing stories about trans women. I'm a Torrey Peters fan. I also like stories where everything goes well for trans women, too, but when I read a story like that, I want it to be because that made sense for the story, not because the author thought that was the only story they were allowed to tell about a trans woman. Good ends can be great! Approaching them as a moral requirement drains them of any real joy.
What this means in practice, for this novella, is that Esther is a flat character with an unrealistic lack of grief for Beatriz, and Cye is a flat character with no personality beyond being nonbinary and being valid for being nonbinary. Their stories were predetermined by authorial factors that had nothing to do with them, and as a result had no emotional resonance. And the message the story is designed to deliver is repugnant. This is the opposite of what I would like to see win an award.
My votes:
The Empress of Salt and Fortune > Ring Shout > Riot Baby > No Award > Finna > Come Tumbling Down > Upright Women Wanted
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo, was my favorite. The format was great, going between listings of objects; the frame story with Chih, Rabbit, and Almost Brilliant; and Rabbit's stories about her and the empress. Good characters on each level of the narrative, plus, fun sneaky ways of sending coded messages. My favorite was interpreting the runes on the lucky sticks through multiple languages, described in just enough detail to give the reader the feel of how it works. The worldbuilding was like that in general, giving a great sense of the setting with carefully chosen details. Easy first place.
Ring Shout is the first thing I've read by P. Djèlí Clark. It made a strong impression on me. Good job repurposing both "destined hero with a magic sword" tropes and "Lovecraftian monster" tropes. Doing either one of those this well could have carried a story; doing them both and making them fit together is real impressive.
I'm an easy sell on stories where the message is that hate is always bad. I liked that the cosmic horrors didn't have an object-level stake in race issues, they're happy to get anyone to commit hateful atrocities, but it's not a "both sides" sort of take in terms of the humans; it's abundantly clear that the people joining the KKK are horrible villains themselves, not unwitting victims of hate rays.
Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi, is close behind Ring Shout. It's also about racism, but very differently. The focus is on the US's racist carceral system, with some near-future sci-fi elements, plus the more fantasy element of Ella's Thing, which had a lack of solid explanations that I appreciated. Getting into detail on that would have been a distraction.
My main complaint, and the reason this is lower than Ring Shout, is that it didn't really stick the ending with Ella's vision of freedom in the future. To be fair, it would have been hard to: the questions of how to dismantle the carceral system and what comes afterward aren't easy! But that's kind of the task the story set itself at the end, and I think it could have done better than a fiery apocalypse followed by grasslands.
I'm not sure I should be taking the worldbuilding especially seriously in Nino Cipri's Finna. Maybe it's not meant to hold up to repeated "but how does that work?" questions, it's more of a magical realism story about corporations being horrible to employees. (Side note: Was LitenVärld being one of the hives that managed to get through a maskhål and take hold on Ava's Earth ever stated explicitly? It seemed pretty clearly implied, but I don't think Ava ever says anything about realizing it.) But the fantastic elements are more detailed than you'd need for that; I get the sense the book wants us to engage with Captain Nouresh's world as a real place, and I don't think it hangs together enough for that.
As an adventure story, it had some nice set pieces, but the characters didn't stand out much for me, and it was hard to sympathize with the mission of bringing back a different person to unconvincingly substitute for a dead grandmother. There's a decent core here, and I could see a rewritten version rising above No Award for me, but as it is, it didn't make it.
Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire, is the fifth in the Wayward Children series. I didn't read any of the others, but that wasn't really a problem, because the first forty percent of the novella is almost entirely recap. I'm not sure where exactly the line was between recaps of things that happened in previous installments, versus things that happened offscreen that Jack recaps as new exposition to the other characters, but it sure added up to a lot of recapping. After all that, the resolutions are weirdly quick and easy. Cora and Kade get claimed by the Drowned Gods, there's some hand-wringing about what a big deal this is, then the Drowned Gods immediately return them and agree to help out. The confrontation with the terrifying vampire villain immediately gets resolved with the statement that he's politically required to not do anything to Jack and friends. It's all very oddly structured.
The characters mostly seemed like opportunities for the author to talk about the importance of respecting people with gender dysphoria, anxiety, and so on. I would have liked this character diversity if more of them felt like actual characters: Jack was the only one who felt fleshed out enough to be memorable. Also, I found the descriptions of ASL uncomfortably exotifying. This isn't the kind of representation I want to read. I do have to say that the illustrations by Rovina Cai were very nice.
Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey, was my least favorite. I'm not opposed, in general, to stories where the author was convinced they were writing about a Very Important Message. (I liked Riot Baby!) It only becomes an issue when that sense of importance gets in the way of writing a good story, or when the message is itself terrible.
Upright Women Wanted is a story about how stories about LGBT people need to have happy endings. It's not subtle about this. Esther has only read the Approved Materials, full of stories where lesbians get "bad ends," and hates herself as a result. She goes out into the world and gets told that actually, she can have a good ending. That's her arc. If you want to read more about this topic from the same author, they have an essay about the mistake they made once of trying to write a story where tragic things happened to queer people, and how they learned to never write things like that. I recommend it if you think my description of their position sounds like a caricature.
I like reading stories with LGBT representation. But I like when there's a variety of stories with LGBT representation, including tragedies. I like reading painful, messy, even depressing stories about trans women. I'm a Torrey Peters fan. I also like stories where everything goes well for trans women, too, but when I read a story like that, I want it to be because that made sense for the story, not because the author thought that was the only story they were allowed to tell about a trans woman. Good ends can be great! Approaching them as a moral requirement drains them of any real joy.
What this means in practice, for this novella, is that Esther is a flat character with an unrealistic lack of grief for Beatriz, and Cye is a flat character with no personality beyond being nonbinary and being valid for being nonbinary. Their stories were predetermined by authorial factors that had nothing to do with them, and as a result had no emotional resonance. And the message the story is designed to deliver is repugnant. This is the opposite of what I would like to see win an award.
My votes:
The Empress of Salt and Fortune > Ring Shout > Riot Baby > No Award > Finna > Come Tumbling Down > Upright Women Wanted
