Technically, the entire Wheel of Time series was also on the ballot this year, but there is no other year in which a complete series (as opposed to the latest book in the series) was ever on the ballot. It seems really weird that they would do that just for Wheel of Time, so I’m going to act as if it never happened. Otherwise, The Wheel of Time would probably get my #2 slot, just above No Award.
I haven’t read Warbound, but I have read enough of Hard Magic, the first book in Larry Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles, to know that I’m going to read the rest. The magic system is a lot more explicitly rules-based than much of his other stuff, but the characters are great, the story is great, the world is fascinating… it’s definitely up there with the rest of his work. Good stuff. Great writer.
Ann Leckie holds the record for the author I’ve DNFed the fastest. Ancillary Justice is the book that put her on the map. The main character is a sentient spaceship, which sounds like a pretty cool starting concept… until you realize that the most exciting thing about this spaceship is that it’s transgender, and views every other human as a “she.” Derp. The whole book is obsessed with leftist gender politics, which is why I believe that No Award is more deserving than this garbage. I predict it will not age well.
I forget why I DNFed Neptune’s Brood. I think it had to do with sex, violence, and drug use that was just too explicit for me. When I was in my 20s, I was willing to do dark and gritty, but these days I have little patience for it. I think this may have been the book that made me decide to skip Charles Stross as an author, so there must have been a lot of it.
As for Parasite, I think the main thing for that one was that I just felt no interest or connection with any of the characters. Glancing over the book, it doesn’t appear that it had any explicitly terrible content, and I vaguely remember getting bored with the story and deciding that it wasn’t worth continuing. But having read and DNFed several other works by this author, I know she has a tendency to veer into crossing my lines (such as building sexual tension between a brother and sister, or throwing in weird occult stuff, or making her main character a transgender child). And running the book through ChatGPT, it appears that the book has an undercurrent of nihilism, which I absolutely cannot stand in any fiction. Perhaps I picked up on that soon enough to DNF it early.
Of the three books from this year that I DNFed, I’d be most willing to give Parasite another try, then maybe Neptune’s Brood. But I wouldn’t be willing to read Ancillary Justice (or anything else by Ann Leckie, for that matter) unless you paid me damn well for it. And even then…
I enjoyed The Aeronaut’s Windlass. It was a fun steampunk adventure, sort of like a mashup between Horatio Hornblower and the Bioshock games. It’s also very unlike most books to be nominated for the Hugo, probably because it was nominated by the Sad Puppies. After this year, the people who run the Hugo Awards rewrote the rules to allow them to disallow “slate voting,” which was how they disqualified the majority of ballots in the 2023 Hugo Awards, including almost all of the ballots cast by Chinese fans. But guys, it’s the Puppies who were totally the racists.
All of the other books were pretty terrible, in my opinion. I’ve already written about The Fifth Season at length, so I won’t go into that rant here. I’ve also written at length about Ann Leckie’s obsession with fake transgender pronouns, and since Ancillary Mercy is basically just another book about pronouns, I won’t waste any more time on that subject.
I wanted to like Uprooted, since I loved Spinning Silver so much, but both times I tried to read it, I ended up DNFing it midway through. Partly that’s because the fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast was not as interesting to me, but there was also a scene where the main character and her mentor randomly started making out after casting a spell together, with a graphic description of digital penetration. The whole thing came so totally out of the blue that it threw me out of the book, and I had no desire to finish it after that.
I’m also really conflicted about Seveneves. I’m not a huge fan of Neal Stephenson generally, especially after the neon orgy scene at the end of Diamond Age, and Seveneves is loooong… like, over 800 pages long. Which would be fie, if Stephenson had the economy of words of a true master like Louis L’Amour, but Stephenson really doesn’t. Around 100 pages or so, I skipped to the last chapter and read a spoiler-filled synopsis just to see if it was worth pressing on, and I decided that it really wasn’t, because 1) it’s apparently never explained why or how the moon exploded, and 2) the Hillary Clinton analog becomes absolutely insufferable, and I really didn’t want to slog through four hundred pages of that. Seveneves has an interesting premise, but if you cut out half the words it would be a better book.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Translation State by Ann Leckie
Starter Villain by John Scalzi
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Witch King by Martha Wells
The Actual Results
(To be determined…)
How I Would Vote
No Award
Explanation
For reasons that should be obvious after last week’s rant, I will not be voting in the actual Hugo Awards this year, principally because there’s no way in hell that I’m going to let these snobby wokescold blowhards have any of my money. But if I were going to vote in the 2024 Hugos, this is what my ballot would look like.
I did not even attempt to read Starter Villain by John Scalzi, because I knew that I would hate it, since 1) it was written by John Scalzi, the most insufferable former SFWA president (an impressive achievement), and 2) Daniel Greene did such a brutal takedown of the novel that I felt no need to read it afterward. But all of the other books I picked up and started, even though I ended up DNFing them all for various reasons.
The one that I feel most conflicted about is Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, a debut novel. It didn’t hook me hard enough to push on past the red flags, but it did have an interesting start that made me want to read more. However, there were a lot of signs that this was the sort of book that I would throw across the room in disgust (“strong” female characters, fascist caricatures, anti-natalist Malthusian vibes (though I may be wrong about that), etc). Even after I read a spoiler-filled online synopsis, though, I still couldn’t tell if that would be the case. The thing that ultimately convinced me to DNF it, though, was the blurb that called it a “queer coming of age story.” A synonymous phrase for that would be “sexual grooming of a minor,” which I have absolutely no desire to read.
The one that I feel least conflicted about is Translation State by Ann Leckie. To demonstrate why, here is everything I read right up to the moment when I decided to DNF it:
Enae
Athtur House, Saeniss Polity
The last stragglers in the funeral procession were barely out the ghost door before the mason bots unfolded their long legs and reached for the pile of stones they’d removed from the wall so painstakingly the day before. Enae hadn’t looked back to see the door being sealed up, but sie could hear it
Yet another novel from Ann Leckie where the fake transgender pronouns are the most interesting and compelling thing about her characters, and also the basis for the entire book. Hard DNF.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi had an interesting start, but like Some Desperate Glory, there were enough red flags to make me reluctant to keep reading, so I read a spoiler-filled synopsis and discovered that one of the characters who is central to the plot decides that she’s a boy instead of a girl, and socially transitions her gender as a major plot point. Which means that Chakraborty, a liberal white woman who converted to Islam, is writing less for a Muslim readership (which could have actually been interesting) and more for a woke white liberal woman readership, which is probably how this book got nominated for the Hugo in the first place. These days, if there are no lesbians, it’s gotta be trannies. Hard pass.
The Saint of Bright Doors is a textbook case of two tropes that I cannot abide in contemporary science fiction: “a profane and vulgar childhood” and “all true love is LGBTQ love.” In real life, childhood innocence is something that should be sacred and pure, but in fiction that purity is often sullied deliberately for purposes of plot and character development. Which is fine if it happens occasionally, or with a nod to the tragedy of it—if all of our characters had perfect lives, there would be no conflict worth writing about. But these days, it seems like every child in every book has a screwed up childhood, to the point where the authors seem to treat it with casual indifference. As for “all true love is LGBTQ love,” homosexual relationships are so overrepresented in fiction these days that the moment it’s casually dropped that the main character has a gay lover, my guard immediately goes up. Call me a homophobe if you want to. I don’t really care.
Witch King frankly just bored me. There was nothing about the main character that I found interesting or compelling, which is a shame, because Murderbot from Martha Wells’s series of the same name is one of the most interesting and compelling characters I’ve read in recent years. Also, there was just too much worldbuilding information dropped in the first couple of chapters, before I was really hooked to the story, that I found it difficult to follow. I had the same problem with Wells’s early fantasy novels, where it felt too much like work just to read them. If I’m going to do the work to get invested in a complex fantasy world, I want to know that there’s going to be a payoff at the end, and if the initial hook is weak, I have very little faith that the author can pull it off. Granted, Wells did pull off a satisfying ending with her murderbot novel, Network Effect, but the last two installments in the Murderbot series have disappointed me.
So who is actually going to win the Hugo Award this year?
Probably not Scalzi, because he’s a straight white male.
Vajra Chandrasekera has a much stronger position, given that 1) he’s brown, 2) he edited Strange Horizons for several years when it was a contender for the Hugos, and 3) The Saint of Bright Doors won the Nebula Award last year. However, his LGBTQ characters are of the vanilla variety, which works against him, and he’s not openly LGBTQ on any of his bios.
Martha Wells can probably pull a lot of votes from her Murderbot fans, but she’s also straight and white, which works against her.
Ann Leckie is also white, but she’s really inovative with those fake transgender pronouns, which gives her an edge… I suppose it depends on whether our current transgender moment is waxing or waning. And even if it is waning in the culture generally, science fiction has been so thoroughly captured by the wokescolds that it may still be enough to push her over the top.
S.A. Chakraborty is a straight white woman, which works against her, but she’s also a convert to Islam, which may give her an edge if she can play to the anti-semitic pro-Palestinian hysteria that’s the Current Thing right now. Even that might be a bit of a stretch, though, and I don’t see anything else that gives her an edge.
As for Emily Tesh, she’s more or less the dark horse in this race: an author so new that she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page yet, and she’s already won the Astounding Award and a World Fantasy Award. If her bio declared that she’s a lesbian, I would bet that she’s the favorite, since Arkady Martine pulled the same dark horse trick in 2019. But if she’s just another straight white woman, that dampens her odds considerably.
My prediction is that the Hugo will go to Vajra Chandrasekera for The Saint of Bright Doors, just because it’s already won the Nebula, and the same people who vote for the Nebulas also vote for the Hugos—even more so as the Hugos become increasingly irrelevant. Also, he’s the only non-white author on the ballot, and there’s probably going to be a lot of virtue signalling angst after the obvious racism that happened with the Hugos last year.
But the book with the best cover art is definitely Some Desperate Glory, followed closely by The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi. The other covers are either mediocre or garbage (especially Translation State, which looks like 70s diarrhea).
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans.
The Actual Results
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans.
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
No Award
Skin Game by Jim Butcher
The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson
How I Would Have Voted
Skin Game by Jim Butcher
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans.
No Award
The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
Explanation
All right, I’ve read enough books now that I’m back to doing these “how I would have voted” posts for the Hugo Awards. And to kick things off, I thought I would start with one of the most infamous years in the history of the Hugos, the year of the Sad Puppies. Of course, I was around back then—in fact, it’s when China Mike Glyer of File 770 discovered me, and has been cross-linking to my blog ever since (I guess whenever the sci-fi news week is slow, or whenever he thinks that my posts would make good chum for his own readers—all twelve of them, not counting the Chinese bots).
The main reason it took me so long to get to 2015 was because I had never read any of the Dresden File books, up to this point. And I still haven’t read books 1-6 yet; in an interview on the Writers of the Future podcast, Jim Butcher said that book 7 is actually the best place to start the series. So I did that a few months ago, and I have to say that it’s been an amazing whirlwind read so far. Really great reading experience. Every one of these books has been either a 4-star or a 5-star, especially Changes, which is probably the best urban fantasy book I’ve ever read.
I haven’t finished Skin Game quite yet, but I’ve already read enough of it to know that I definitely would have put it at the top of my ballot if I had been stupid enough to give the snobby asshats and petty wannabe tyrants who run Worldcon any of my money. Sadly, I wasn’t so smart in 2011, but I have since repented, and I can tell you right now that these blowhards will ever see another cent from me. But more on that later.
The Three-Body Problem was the book that actually won the award, and I have to say that I sincerely enjoyed it. There’s a lot of really amazing science fiction coming out of China these days, which makes it an absolute shame that so many Chinese writers and fans were arbitrarily blocked and denied in 2023 for the high crime and misdemeanor of “slate voting,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Seriously, the Hugos need to die. But I digress.
The Three-Body Problem was a fascinating book. It was a little heavy on info dumps, but that’s probably because Chinese fiction has slightly different conventions than English fiction. In any case, it was fascinating enough to keep me reading, and the story itself was terrific. Also, as an American reader, I found it particularly refreshing to read a book that was written outside of our woke cultural moment. There were a lot of references to Chinese communism, especially the Cultural Revolution, but none of the insane wokeness that permeates our American culture.
Those were the only two books that I managed to read to the end. All of the other ones I DNFed, though for different reasons.
I wanted to like The Dark Between Stars, not the least because Kevin J. Anderson is a great guy, and a deserving writer—his Star Wars books were some of the first science fiction I ever read, and definitely influenced my decision to become a writer. But after the first chapter, which had an interesting set up with some characters I felt genuinely interested in, I felt like the book started throwing new characters at me, and lots and lots of boring information about the universe, as if the story itself had stopped cold and I was suddenly reading a history book. Way too many info dumps. Maybe I’ll try reading it again at some point, but I just couldn’t get into it.
The Goblin Emperor had a similar problem, though it wasn’t necessarily the info dumps that got to me, so much as sheer boredom, and the fact that the only fantasy element in the book was that the characters were all goblins—though the author could have said they were humans, or elves, or aliens, and it wouldn’t have changed the story hardly at all. Also, the political intrigue was not very intriguing. I’ve played games of Crusader Kings 2 where the political machinations were more interesting. And since the story itself was entirely focused on the political intrigue and machinations, I didn’t finish it.
As for Ancillary Sword, I DNFed that series with the first book, which follows the adventures of a sentient space ship who is obsessed about what its pronouns are. Seriously, that’s about 80% of the book right there, and the reason why Anne Leckie is a favorite of the Hugo crowd. Pronouns. Give me a break. For the 2024 Hugos, another one of her books in the same universe is on the ballot, and it took me all of one paragraph to give it a hard DNF. Pronouns, pronouns, pronouns. What are your pronouns? Did you know that you can make up a word and call it a pronoun? Let’s make up some pronouns together, kids! Just remember to vote as many times as you can in the upcoming election, otherwise Literally Hitler will blow up the world—never mind that our current leader is a nasty old dimentia patient whose face is a public service announcement for the side effects of botox, and his heir apparent is a cocksucking DEI hire who likes to cackle about school buses and Venn diagrams. It’s amazing how far you can get in today’s world with a pretty face and some high-quality knee pads.
It is impossible to mock these people too much. If they had the power to do so, everyone who opposes them would be rounded up in a cattle car and buried in an unmarked grave. The Sad Puppies were basically a prelude to the Trump revolt, just like Gamergate the year before. And what did we learn from it? That the people who control the institutions—in this case, Worldcon and the Hugo Awards—hate us. They knew that all the accusations of “racism” and “white supremacy” were all false. They knew that all those dirty smear tactics were just a means to an end. It’s not about good and evil, it’s about power, just like that line from the Acolyte, which is a perfect example of how they deliberately vandalize everything, especially a beloved franchise like Star Wars. Everything that’s happening in the broader culture right now, with multi-billion dollar entertainment companies like Disney that are going woke and broke, happened in science fiction first. The Puppies tried to push back against the rising tide of woke insanity, but the rot was too deep, and the cancer had already metastasized. All they managed to do was prove was that the Hugos are beyond saving.
2015 was a watershed year for science fiction, not because two of its most prolific and beloved authors lost to No Award, but because Worldcon lost the plot and the Hugos were revealed to be a farce. Jim Butcher is bigger than the Hugos, and so is Kevin J. Anderson. So are most of the Chinese authors who were excluded in 2023 (but guys, it’s the Puppies who are the racists). The reason I’m doing these “how I would have voted” blog posts has less to do with any respect I might have for the Hugo Awards, and more to do with the fascination of watching a massive pileup on a frozen interstate. I want to go back and rewatch it from the moment it all began—which, so far as I can tell, was sometime in the late 60s. But I’ll save that rant for another time.
If there’s any book on this list that I’m open to changing my mind on, it’s Death’s End by Cixin Liu. enjoyed The Three Body Problem, though it did have a lot of long sections of exposition, which comes across as amateur writing in English (and probably doesn’t in Chinese). But the characters held my interest, and the ideas in the book were absolutely fascinating. Also, there was absolutely none of the wokery that has come to saturate our Western culture in recent years, which made the novel feel very refreshing. So I enjoyed the first book in the series quite a lot.
However, things got really weird in the second book, and I didn’t connect with the characters nearly as much, so when the long sections of exposition began to feel like they were droning on, I decided to DNF it. I’ll probably try this series again at some point, but since I DNFed the second book, I can’t really say that I’d vote for the third book if the awards were held again. But I do need to give this series a second chance.
The book that won this year was the second book in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which I didn’t read because I hated the first book so much. Since it’s going to be a while before I get to the 2016 Hugos (I’m currently rereading Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which I DNFed before, but the library loan for the audiobook expired so I’m back on the waitlist again—just too many audiobooks I guess), I’ll briefly give my take on The Fifth Season and why that book made me DNF not only the series, but N.K. Jemisin as an author.
I believe that abortion is the defining moral issue of our times, just like slavery was the defining moral issue for 19th century America. Future generations will probably look on us the same way we look on the abolitionists and slaveholders of the antebellum era, and I suspect they will judge us just as harshly for failing to stand up for the rights of the unborn. After all, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For the 19th century, the defining issue was liberty, and the good guys won. For the 20th century, it was life, and the good guys lost, but the 21st century is shaping up to be a rematch (though based on the unbridled narcissism of today’s culture, the pursuit of happiness is giving it a run for its money, but on the abortion issue the two are aligned).
N.K. Jemisin is a very talented author. She wrote large sections of The Fifth Season in second person, and made it work. That’s a little like running a three minute mile in an era when most people thought it was impossible. Of course, she knows that she’s talented, which lends her voice a degree of arrogance, but she’s not the first author to have an oversized ego—in fact, you could argue that Orson Scott Card is much more obnoxious when it comes to that, and Card wrote the second-best book to ever win a Hugo (Ender’s Game. The best Hugo-winning book, IMHO, is Hyperion by Dan Simmons).
[Spoilers ahead]
However, it’s not the prose or the writing of The Fifth Season that I take issue with, but the underlying message. The book starts with an infanticide, where the main character comes home to find out that the father of her child has murdered her child and run away. Of course, this creates a massive amount of sympathy for the main character. The rest of the book alternates between flashbacks to the MC’s past, establishing her backstory, and the present, where she eventually acquires enough power to destroy the world. However, at the very end of the book, we learn that the MC’s backstory culminated in her killing another one of her children to prevent that child from becoming a slave. In other words, the big reveal is that the MC committed infanticide herself, on one of her own children, and the whole novel is carefully crafted to not only make us sympathize with her, but root for her when she does it.
I know that there were slaves in places like Haiti who killed their own children for similar reasons. However, there were also many other slaves who took the exact opposite view on the value of human life, such as Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. N.K. Jemisin has ancestors who were slaves, but she herself is a rich, progressive black woman living in New York City who is as far removed from slavery as I am (after all, there’s a reason why my people are called “slavs”).
But it wasn’t Jemisin’s views on slavery that I took issue with, so much as on using it as a justification for infanticide. It’s the same argument that we hear on the pro-abortion side of the issue, how it’s actually more merciful to slaughter an unborn child in the womb than to let that child be born into a life of poverty—never mind that our modern era is so fantastically wealthy that our poor are more likely to be obese than starving. In other words, the message of The Fifth Season is an antithesis to A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is not only a superior book, but is also on the side of the good guys in the defining moral conflict of our times, while N.K. Jemisin is on the side of the bad guys—or as I prefer to call them, the Death Cult.
So that is why I DNFed The Fifth Season and decided to never read anything that Jemisin ever writes (unless, of course, she comes to the light and changes her position on the right to life). It is also why I will always vote No Award on any ballot that includes Jemisin as one of the authors.
I started All the Birds in the Sky but didn’t finish it. To me, it felt like the author was trying too hard to be cutesy and childlike, but I personally found it off-putting. It’s been a while since I read it, and for some reason I can’t find it in my reading journal, but I seem to remember that there were some content issues, too—which would explain why I found it off-putting, given then childish tone.
I didn’t read A Closed and Common Orbit because I DNFed the series with the first book. Here is the entry for it in my reading journal:
This seems like the kind of book that would be right up my wheelhouse, but on closer inspection it really isn’t. The whole thing is one big cultural diversity parade, and the central question of the story half the time is whether the humans are using the right pronouns for the aliens. Also, you’ve got your obligatory super sex positive aliens and your nymphomatic, porn-addicted mechanic who’s played as the adorable one. So yeah, not at all for me.
I’ve written before about Ninefox Gambit, but I might as well include an excerpt from my reading journal on that one as well:
The story never really hooked me, and the action at the beginning felt disjointed without any conflict or characters for me to care about. Also, there were a lot of info dumps… But the thing that made me decide to DNF was when the main character turned out to be a lesbian. I don’t know that this book will follow the “all true love is LGBTQ love” trope, but I didn’t want to stick around to find out.
I suppose I could be convinced to try this one again, though. At the time, I was reading a lot of other award-winning and nominated books, which was why I had little patience for another woke lesbian love story. Seriously, I DNFed 27 books that month, most of them for similar reasons.
Finally, Too Like the Lightning was another book that I DNFed for obnoxious wokery. If I remember correctly, it takes place in a far future where gender is something that everyone intentionally ignores. It wasn’t quite as bad as Ann Leckie’s books, but it was definitely going for the same kind of woke nonsense. Also, there were some religious proscriptions that the author seemed to think would make for a much better society, but that I personally found super dystopian, and not in a good way.
I liked Six Wakes. It was a fun murder mystery on a spaceship, with cloning technology that led to some interesting twists (for example, everyone wakes up to discover their dead bodies floating everywhere, and the murderer doesn’t actually remember know who he/she was, because those memories weren’t uploaded to the database in time). It’s not up there with Dune or Hyperion, but it was a good read, with interesting world building and better-than-average attention to detail. There were a couple of passages that a conservative reader might consider woke, but it wasn’t enough to bother me.
Everything else from this year is pretty much terrible, in my opinion. I skipped The Stone Sky,Provenance, and Raven Strategem because those were all series that I had already DNFed. I could probably be persuaded to try Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series again (the first book was just too confusing and absurdly violent), but I have no desire to go back to Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy or Leckie’s Ancillary Justice universe. Short version: Leckie’s entire career at this point seems to be premised on creating fantasy genders and playing to our culture’s current transgender moment, while Jemisin’s trilogy is the most anti-life (anti-pro-life?) thing I think I have ever read. Also, she’s suuuper anti-racist, which makes me think of this:
The Collapsing Empire was where I decided to give up on reading any more Scalzi. It’s basically an inferior clone of Star Trek, with random meaningless sex thrown in, which Scalzi somehow manages to make boring. I haven’t read Starter Villain and I don’t intend to, but many of this BookTuber’s criticisms of Scalzi’s writing apply to The Collapsing Empire too:
As for New York 2140, I DNFed after the first couple of pages when Robinson began to wax political, and not in a good way. I know that Kim Stanley Robinson is supposed to be one of the great SF writers of our time, but the only book of his that I’ve managed to get through was Red Mars (and that was over a decade ago). He’s one of those writers who wears his politics on his sleeve, and preaches more than he entertains. Also, he will occasionally throw in stuff that’s uncomfortably weird, like the Mars colonists having secret sex cult orgies in the farm modules. There was a time when the sex and the politics didn’t bother me as much, but it does now, so I’ve put him on my “skip this author” list, along with Ann Leckie, John Scalzi, and N.K. Jemisin.
My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.
I had expected to DNF a lot of these books, but I was a little dismayed at how terrible they are. Or rather, how some of them can be so well-written and yet so idelogically possessed.
For a while, I worried that I was pre-judging some of these books too harshly, based on my opinions of the author. After all, shouldn’t art be treated separately from the artist? But then I decided that it would be better to lean into that bias, and trust my intuition. After all, it’s impossible to approach reading without a personal bias—and even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be advisable.
One of the key things I’m hoping to take away from reading these books is a better understanding of my own personal tastes. Toward that end, it’s much better to DNF early and often, since that tells me something valuable about my own tastes. I’ll get much more out of this exercise if I pay attention to that than whether or not I’m being “fair” to a particular book or author.
As for how my bias against an author might prejudice me against a book, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem so long as I’m aware of those biases. Yes, it makes it more likely that I’ll read a book with a critical eye, and not in the way that I typically read for enjoyment, but that goes both ways, since if I do enjoy a book, that’s going to improve my opinion of the author (or at least make me reconsider my opinion). So long as I’m aware of my biases and make sure that they aren’t set in stone, I think it should be fine
Besides, it’s not like I have anything to prove. Sure, China Mike Glyer might pull out an excerpt from this post to use as content (hi China Mike!), but I couldn’t care less what that particular corner of fandom thinks about my public ruminations. I will know if I’m being too “unfair” to a book or an author, and the only criterion that really matters is whether I have a clear reason for DNFing the book, separate from my biases about the author.
And honestly, what I’ve found so far is that my biases are pretty spot on. Authors who behave insufferably in public or on the internet tend to write some pretty insufferable books, especially if they’re woke.
Fortunately, I have found a few new-to-me books and authors who are really fantastic. And my decision to DNF early and often is helping to keep it from becoming too much of a slog, which is good. It also means that I may complete this resolution a lot sooner than I’d expected, at which point I’ll probably move on to the Dragons or the Prometheus awards.
In any case, here are all the Hugo and Nebula awared-winning novels that I read or DNFed in January 2022:
Books that I read and plan to / have already acquired:
Way Station by Clifford D. Simak (1964 Hugo)
Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov (1983 Hugo)
The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (1991 Hugo)
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2015 Nebula)
Books that I read and don’t plan to acquire:
None
Books that I did not finish:
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (1958 Hugo)
A Case of Conscience by James Blish (1959 Hugo)
The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1965 Hugo)
The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany (1968 Nebula)
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (1969 Hugo)
Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin (1969 Nebula)
Man Plus by Frederik Pohl (1977 Nebula)
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1979 Hugo and Nebula)
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (20000 Hugo) (My wife recommended this one, and I will probably try it again, since I took a break midway through and forgot who all of the characters were. But for now, I’m counting it as a soft DNF.)
Camouflage by Joe Haldeman (2006 Nebula)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010 Hugo and Nebula)
Redshirts by John Scalzi (2013 Hugo)
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (2014 Hugo and Nebula)
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2017 Nebula)
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (2019 Hugo and Nebula)
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (2020 Hugo)
A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker (2021 Nebula)
