nonelvis | 2017 Hugo nominees: best novella (Reply)

As before, if you follow me on Goodreads, none of this will be a surprise except for the rankings. I will say this: I think this is a stronger field than the novels. You can't really go wrong with any of these options, so it's just a matter of which I preferred more than the others.

This Census-Taker, China Miéville
I'm honestly not sure where Miéville was going with this one, even though it works as a character study of a damaged and dissociated young boy with a distant and terrifying father. (In fact, it reminded me a little of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, although the protagonist there is much more difficult to love.) I'll always love Miéville's writing style, but it alone isn't enough to hold together a book, and there are several significant mysteries left unsolved before the book ends quite suddenly. A hundred more pages to resolve those mysteries would have made a big difference here.

Penric and the Shaman, Lois McMaster Bujold
My impression of the first 20-ish pages of this I read last night were, "Eh, generic fantasy, competently written." But not long after that, the plot really kicked in, and Bujold's breezy style drew me along for an engaging story about a potential murderer whose mystic powers might solve an entirely different mystery. I was also pleased at how easy it was to follow along without having read the first book.

Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire
This started off a bit generic Special Children Attend Boarding School, but wow, did it go places I did not expect, and that's why I liked it even though I successfully guessed the villain well before the reveal. It's a novella, so there isn't a lot of time for character development, but McGuire draws her leads deftly: goth princess Nancy; Delirium-like whirlwind Sumi; calm and steady Kade; and my favorite, morbid, practical Jack. "Every Heart a Doorway" sets up a terrific conceit for a series of books, and I'm looking forward to the next one (which was just released) as soon as I'm done with my Hugo reading.

A Taste of Honey, Kai Ashante Wilson
There's a lovely male-male romance here, and a loving father-daughter relationship as well. I was also fascinated by the Afro-futurist society and am delighted to learn that this novella is part of a broader series I'd be happy to read once I've got the Hugo reading out of the way.

But. The end. It's very hard to pull off this particular clichéd plot twist well, and here it just annoyed me (as it often does) to the point where I couldn't fully enjoy the otherwise happy ending – and to the point where what had been a 3.75 or 4-star novella for me suddenly dipped down to 3.

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Kij Johnson
I've enjoyed the few Johnson short stories I've read, so I figured I'd like this, too, and in fact, it's now my #1 pick for the 2017 Hugo novella award. It's a stunning adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," not a Lovecraft story I've read, but you don't need to have read any of his work to follow along. Johnson expands on Lovecraft's dream-world and imagery, and centers the story on women (something Lovecraft didn't and would never have done), and this one was a hero's journey that grabbed me from the first few pages and held my attention all the way through. As I said on Twitter, Johnson is the sort of writer who makes me despair of ever getting my own fiction published; she's just that much better than nearly everyone else.

The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle
This is the second Lovecraft-inspired entry in the Hugo novella category, and it grabbed me immediately and didn't let me go until it was done. Kudos to LaValle for taking Lovecraftian horror and turning its racism on its head, instead developing a revenge tale for a young black man who's been victimized by white society one too many times (and in one of the worst possible ways). I'm going to have a hard time deciding whether this one or Kij Johnson's "The Ballad of Vellitt Boe" takes the top spot.

Final ranking: