Tag: Hugo awards

How I Would Vote Now: 1956 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein

Not This August by C.M. Kornbluth

Three to Conquer by Eric Frank Russell

The Actual Results

  1. Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein
  • The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov
  • The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
  • Not This August by C.M. Kornbluth
  • Three to Conquer by Eric Frank Russell

How I Would Have Voted

  1. The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
  2. The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov
  3. Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein
  4. Three to Conquer by Eric Frank Russell
  5. Not This August C.M. Kornbluth

Explanation

This was a really good year for science fiction.

I’ve read every one of these books from start to finish, and I love them all. Even the lesser ones I’d put up above most of the Hugo-nominated books from the last couple of decades. And the best—well, let’s go there.

First, Not This August. This was really more of an early Cold War political thriller, with frightening near-future space technology since, at the time this was written, Sputnik was freaking everyone out in a major way. The technology itself is moderately science fictional, but if a book like this were written today, it would probably be shelved as a technothriller—which makes me wonder if the conservative science fiction writers of the 60s and 70s didn’t just migrate to the thriller genre as science fiction was increasingly taken over by the left. But that’s a subject for another blog post.

In any case, Not This August is very much a cautionary tale, kind of like 1984, but set only a decade or two after WWII. Basically, China and the USSR launch a joint invasion of the US that succeeds, but an underground resistance movements works to finish this American superweapon: an orbital military base armed with nuclear weapons that is undetectable by the surface and can bomb anywhere on the planet.

Since it was written in the early part of the 50s, it plays very much on fears that the world wars would shortly resume, and that the US would never recover economically from the wars. Such fears later proved to be unfounded, but at the time, there were very good reasons to think we were caught in a vicious cycle—and in some ways (such as with Eisenhower’s warnings of the Military-Industrial complex), perhaps we were.

In some ways, it was a difficult read, not because of the writing itself, but because of how dark it was. However, like any good thriller, it built up the suspense quite nicely, and I finished the last hundred pages at a sprint. With that said, it hasn’t aged nearly as well as 1984, and reading it from the perspective of the 2020s it seems much more like an historical curiousity than a true cautionary tale. But I enjoyed it.

Three to Conquer was much lighter, and a fun, quick read. It’s about a man who is secretly a telepath, who stops on the side of the road to help a stranded motorist and discovers that some hostile alien body-snatchers have come to Earth after infecting three returning astronauts, and are now trying to takeover all of humanity before we realize that they’re even here. It’s a race against time to find and kill all of the zombified humans before they infect everyone else, with a cute little love story thrown in for good measure, between the main character and his secretary. A fun if somewhat forgettable read. I did really like how the main character had a sharp mind and was quick on his feet.

Now, to the really good ones.

Double Star is a fantastic book, and just because I’ve put it at third place on my ballot, you should not think that means that I thought it was mediocre at all. In fact, I’d put it above probably 60% or 70% of the novels that have won the Hugo. It’s quite good, showcasing Heinlein at some of his best (though I do think Farnham’s Freehold is better). It was a really compelling story about a man who overcomes his prejudices and shortcomings to grow into the role that has (quite literally) been cast for him. It also makes me very, very glad that I’m not an actor. Highly recommended.

The End of Eternity is one of the best time travel novels I’ve ever read. It’s about this bureaucratic organization called Eternity, which exists to shepherd humanity safely through 75,000 centuries of history. Basically, the technicians of Eternity calculate all the best ways to tweak the timeline with “reality changes” in order to avoid all of the worst catastrophes, like pandemics, global wars, etc. But after the 75,000th century, there’s a long period of “hidden centuries” that are somehow inaccessible to them, followed by a world where humanity is extinct. The main character is a technician who falls into forbidden love with a woman in Time, whose existence is going to be wiped out by a reality change. He conspires to save her by bringing her into Eternity, and sets off a series of events that threaten to wipe out Eternity itself.

I really enjoyed this book. Toward the end, I wondered if this book would have a happy ending, since I couldn’t think of any way to pull that off without making it kind of sappy and cliche. Then the twist happened, and everything changed… but we still got the happy ending, which fit in perfectly with the world-changing twist. Just a really brilliant book by an all-time science fiction master. Classics like this are the reason why Isaac Asimov hasn’t been canceled yet, and hopefully never will be.

As I said above, I genuinely enjoyed all of these books. But as good as they all were, none of them blew me away nearly as much as Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow.

The Long Tomorrow is a post-apocalyptic story about a future America, after the atomic wars, where cities are a thing of the past, the Constitution has been amended to restrict the size of towns (in order to prevent them from becoming potential targets for a nuclear weapon), and most of the population has reverted back to 19th century tech and an Amish or Amish-adjacent lifestyle. But there are legends about a secret city called Bartorstown, where the old technology hasn’t been lost, and people still live lives full of wonder and wealth, just like the old days.

The story follows two boys who run away from home in order to find Bartorstown, tracing their adventures and coming of age, until they finally learn the terrible truth about what Bartorstown actually is, and grapple with what that means for all of them. It’s a pretty basic plot, but what really blew me away was the depth of character and how brilliantly Brackett’s writing and storytelling drew me into their lives, making them come alive. Consequently, the story really came alive, raising all sorts of questions that left me thinking and wondering long after I’d put it down. There are some really heavy themes in this book, but like the best sci-fi, it doesn’t feel like “message” fiction at all.

It’s a little bit sad, though, because Brackett wrote this book just as the hydrogen bomb transformed foreign policy with the threat of mutually assured destruction, thus making her post-apocalyptic future into something totally implausible. The Long Tomorrow only works in a world where total nuclear war doesn’t result in the utter annihilation of humanity. From what I can tell, that’s the main reason this book never really took off. Also, I’m guessing that Brackett didn’t have as many fans as Heinlein or Asimov, and since the Hugos have always essentially been a popularity contest (these days, among an increasingly narrow and snobbish clique), that’s probably the main reason why The Long Tomorrow didn’t win the Hugo this year, even though I personally think it’s the most deserving book on the ballot.

But as I said above, 1955 (the publication date) was a really good year for science fiction, and all of these books are really good—some of the best, in fact. I highly recommend them all!

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

The state of science fiction is as bad as Australian breakdancing

It seems like most of the internet is talking about the hilariously bad breakdancing performance given by Australia at the Paris Olympics. Apparently, the “athlete” in question is actually a university professor named Rachael Gunn who specializes in breakdancing studies, or some such nonsense, and the main reasons she got the nod to compete are 1) the Australian breakdancing scene is woefully small, 2) she’s (allegedly) an LGBTQ+ woman, with all the right political opinions, and 3) her husband was on the committe that made the decision to qualify her. Taking advantage of those three factors, she’s apparently made a name for herself in Australia, even winning some local competitions—because who would dare criticize such a stunning and brave LGBTQ+ woman? So of course, she went on to compete on the international scene… and made such a mockery of herself and her sport that the judges awarded her straight zeroes, and the Olympics committee pulled breakdancing from the 2028 Los Angelos Olympics. Wah wah.

While this story is rightly hilarious, and proves the eternal truth that wokeness ruins everything, I can’t help but notice the parallels between the state of Australian breakdancing, that someone so inept and untalented could leverage a “studies” degree to dominate it, and the current state of science fiction. Specifically, this is the comment that made me think about this, which is worth reading in full:

The relevant part is this:

Rachael represents so much of what is totally lecherous about cultural studies academics. Pick a subject area that will be under-studied in your context, so you can rise through the ranks quickly (how many break dancing academics will there be in Australia?), and wreak absolute havoc in lives of the people you want to study. There is no limit to the sheer disrespect they will dole out, purely for self-advancement.

Now, I don’t think science fiction was ruined in quite the same way, ie by being dominated and colonized by academia through “studies” degrees. Science fiction was probably too large to be overtaken that way. However, the pattern is still similar, and from what I can tell, it goes something like this:

Step 1: Take over the institutions in the field that are primarily responsible for determining and evaluating excellence.

In Australia, the breakdancing field was small enough that academia was able to dominate and (for lack of a better word) colonize it, becoming the arbiters of excellence within that art. It certainly helped that the professor who had carved out this academic niche for herself was married to one of the judges in the committee that was tasked with determining excellence. This created an incestuous (and ultimately nepotistic) relationship between academia and the judging panels.

In science fiction, something similar happened with SFWA and the Hugo and Nebula awards. I’ve written before about how SFWA ruined science fiction, so I won’t repeat all that here. But the basic gist of it is this: as science fiction became more established, the organizations and publications that talked about science fiction became more authoritative on the subject of the genre than the actual writers themselves. Because of this, achieving recognition for excellence became less about creating works of actual merit, and more about gaining the approval of the people who had built their careers talking about science fiction, rather than actually creating it. And the best way to gain their approval was to join those institutions yourself, rising up in the pecking order until everyone else was beneath you.

This basically describes the career trajectories of John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal, two insanely woke authors who leveraged their tenure as SFWA president for award nominations. Both of them seem to have spent at least as much time and effort talking about science fiction as they have in actually creating it: Scalzi through his blog, which he leveraged to get his first book deal, and MRK through both her blog and the Writing Excuses podcast.

Step 2: Purge those institutions until they are ideologically pure.

This step is critical. So long as the instutitions are focused on merit, the only way to climb the ranks is by creating something of merit. But once the institution has become ideologically possessed, with all of those who reject the dominant ideology being purged from positions of power, then merit no longer matters, and the way to the top becomes clear. Those who are the most ideologically pure, as demonstrated by their virtue signalling, will rise to the top. This has the added benefit of quelling all merit-based criticism, since those beneath you fear having their own ideological purity called into question.

From what I can tell, this is how Rachael Gunn rose to prominence in the Australian breakdancing scene. After all, once academia had colonized the field, who would dare question the merits of such a stunning and brave LGBTQ+ woman? In a similar manner, Scalzi and MRK rose to the top of SFWA by virtue signaling their own ideological purity and intersectional victimhood status, squelching any criticism by labeling their critics racist, sexist, bigots, homophobic, etc.

Step 3: Redefine excellence in your own image.

In the Australian breakdancing scene, this was accomplished through the combination of Rachael Gunn’s academic work and her husband’s position in the committee that qualified the Olympic competitors. And while it probably isn’t quite so blatantly nepotistic in the science fiction world, the pattern still holds true when you look at what the Hugos and Nebulas have become. This was what the Sad Puppies controversy was actually about, and because the Puppies lost, the Hugo and Nebula awards have been insufferably woke ever since:

Step 4: Use the captured institutions to purge the field of potential rivals.

The final step in this projection is to squash all of those people who represent a threat to your domination, because they have merit and you do not. Ignoring her perhaps overly generous assessment of Australian breakdancing, this is what Hannah Berrelli is talking about when she mentions all the “hundreds of Australian athletes who will have dedicated their entire lives to athletic excellence” whose blood, sweat, and tears were overshadowed and rendered irrelevant by Rachael Gunn’s Olympic stunt.

In science fiction, we see this in the fact that David Weber has never been nominated for a Hugo or a Nebula, or that Jim Butcher’s sole Hugo nomination lost to No Award. Both of these men are far better writers than the majority of award-winning authors, especially in our current era. You could make a solid argument that Dan Simmons or Orson Scott Card were superior, but Scalzi? Jemisin? Kingfisher?

And what about all of the new and relatively unknown authors? At least Weber and Butcher already have large followings, which they have rightfully earned through their merit. But when merit is no longer the determining factor in recognizing excellence within the field, what chance do talented up-and-coming authors have if they aren’t willing to play the ideological purity games? Answer: not a hell of a lot.

So while you laugh at how ridiculous Australia’s breakdancing performance was at the Olympics, understand that the same dynamic has been playing out in modern science fiction for years. And honestly, the results are no less ridiculous.

How I would vote now: 1972 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey

A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg

Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny

The Actual Results

  1. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer
  2. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
  3. Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey
  4. Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny
  5. A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg

How I Would Have Voted

  1. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Explanation

Cover art was so terrible in the 70s. Those are all the original edition covers for each book. They’ve all been reworked in later years, and most of them got a significant upgrade.

The Lathe of Heaven isn’t Ursula K. Le Guin’s greatest work, but I did find it to be decently good. The ending was a little too pat, but the set up was good, and the story itself was quite intriguing. In some ways, I feel that it would have worked better as a movie, maybe an animated feature by Studio Ghibli. It definitely had that kind of a dreamlike feel.

The rest of these books are not that great, to be honest. To Your Scattered Bodies Go and A Time of Changes were too pervy for me, with Farmer indulging in some really weird and disturbing treatment of children, and Silverberg indulging in pages and pages of navel gazing, all written very beautifully and signifying almost nothing, which is typical of Silverberg.

Jack of Shadows was confusing: I got about two thirds of the way in before I realized that I had no idea what was happening, and I didn’t really like any of the characters. I wonder if the real reason this book got nominated was because so many people enjoyed Nine Princes in Amber, the first Chronicles of Amber book, which came out in 1970 and was actually quite excellent. But he was writing and publishing the Chronicles of Amber all through this time period, and none of them ever got nominated for a Hugo, which seems really strange to me. With Zelazny, the only books I’ve found that I enjoyed are his Chronicles of Amber, and everything else is a huge miss for me. It’s weird.

As for Dragonquest, I know that the Dragonriders of Pern books have lots of fans, and I don’t find anything too objectionable with them (aside from the naively libertine Boomer attitudes toward sex, which is par for the course for this era and for Anne McCaffrey in general), but I just couldn’t get into this book. I read the first Dragonriders of Pern book in college, when I wasn’t nearly so cynical, and I thought it was okay, but it wasn’t compelling enough to go out and read the rest of the series immediately, and over the years I literally forgot everything that happened in that first book. So I read a synopsis before picking up book 2, and I just have to say that the dragons are way, way, way too OP. Seriously, they can teleport instantly through space AND time? That’s just too much. So I went into Dragonflight without feeling any real sense of peril, and right away, the novel turned into a giant soap opera about the various dragons and dragonriders: who had feelings for who, who was sleeping with who, etc etc. So after a couple of chapters, I just got bored and checked out.

So the only one of these books that I can positively vote for is The Lathe of Heaven, even though I think it pales next to Le Guin’s other work. But I wouldn’t actually put any of these books beneath No Award, since most of it is probably just a matter of my own personal taste. The perviness of To Your Scattered Bodies Go almost makes me want to put it below No Award: there’s a lot of graphic nudity, a lot of innuendo, and some innuendo / torture porn directed toward children, which was why I DNFed it. But it doesn’t cross over into outright pornography, and it’s not ideologically possessed in the way that most of the stuff coming out today tends to be. Also, the premise is pretty interesting: it’s in the execution where it all falls apart.

The 70s was a really weird time for science fiction. I wonder how many of the Worldcon attendees in 1972 were high on drugs—or whether some of these artists weren’t off their gourds when they wrote some of this stuff. I’ve heard stories about some of the orgies that Asimov used to hold in his con suite. It was a very different time.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2016 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

The Actual Results

  1. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
  2. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
  3. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
  4. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
  5. The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher

How I Would Have Voted

  1. The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
  2. No Award
  3. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
  4. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Explanation

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.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2011 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold

Feed by Mira Grant

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

The Actual Results

  1. Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis
  2. Feed by Mira Grant
  3. Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold
  4. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
  5. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis
  2. No Award
  3. Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold
  4. The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Explanation

2011 was the only year in which I actually attended Worldcon and voted in the Hugos. This was, of course, before the Sad Puppies and before I became totally disillusioned with the awards. I have to confess that I didn’t actually read any of the novels, though I did get the free ebooks in the voter packet and tried to read a couple of them. Mostly, I voted based on whether I recognized the author’s name, and whether or not the book descriptions appealed to me. I remember that I voted for Blackout and All Clear in the top slot, but I don’t remember how the rest of the ballot shook out.

If I had to do it again, I would still put Blackout and All Clear at the top of the ballot (which are two separate books, though they form a duology and were published in the same year, which is why they appear together). However, I ended up DNFing all of the other books, and because Feed and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms struck me as being horrible enough to warrant a No Award vote, I couldn’t merely abstain from voting positively for any of the others.

But first, Blackout and All Clear is a delightful time travel story from Connie Willis’s Oxford University Time Travelers series. Unlike The Doomsday Book, the story is quite a lot of fun with an upbeat and hopeful ending, and unlike To Say Nothing of the Dog, the time travelers find themselves in some very real peril when their time machine breaks down. The first book was okay, but the second book was fantastic, and wrapped things up very nicely. A fun and uplifting read.

I DNFed Feed for a number of reasons, but the main reason was that I couldn’t stand the sexual innuendo between the brother and sister. Yes, I know that technically they’re supposed to be step-brother and step-sister, and yes, I know that meaningless and gratuitous sex is supposed to be a trope of zombie fiction, but still. Yuck. I could be wrong about this, but the vibe I got was that the author is addicted to pornography, and that’s just not a mind I want to spend any time with. Also, the world makes no sense: the zombie apocalypse has brought our country to a state of collapse, but 1) basic infrastructure like electricity and internet still operates without any problems, and 2) bloggers need to get a permit from the federal government in order to blog? Sorry, but I just can’t buy any of it.

I don’t remember much from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, since it’s been several years since I first tried to read it, but I think the main reason I DNFed this one was because all of the characters struck me as being terrible people, and I frankly didn’t care what happened to any of them. For the same reason, I didn’t read A Song of Ice and Fire past book one (though there were other reasons I DNFed that series, most of them content related). And I think there were some content-related issues in this one too, which is also why I would place it under No Award, as opposed to merely abstaining.

I really wanted to like Cryoburn, since I enjoyed many of the other Vorkosigan Saga books, especially Young Miles and Barrayar. But this one takes place when Miles is middle-aged, and powerful enough that he’s not really threatened at all. Instead, we follow the story of a misfit street urchin who’s trying to earn his freedom, or something like that, and I frankly didn’t find his story or his character all that interesting or compelling. About four or five hours into the audiobook, I just got bored of it, which I wasn’t expecting at all.

The Vorkosigan Saga is different from most other series, in that all of the books are basically standalones linked only by the recurring characters, and the fact that Bujold has written it completely out of order, basically dropping books randomly into the chronology however it suits her fancy. The latest book, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, was such a disappointment to my wife that the way she described it to me made me feel totally disillusioned. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, so I can’t say for sure that it’s terrible, but it definitely took the series in a direction I wish it had never gone. I suppose that the lesson from all this is that it’s possible to draw out a series way too far, especially a non-linear one. The early Vorkosigan books are great… the later ones, not so much (and by “earlier,” I mean the ones that Bujold wrote earlier, not necessarily the earlier ones in the chronology).

As for The Dervish House, it was fine. Very pretty and well written, I guess. It just wasn’t for me. I got bored about a hundred pages in and dropped it. I suppose I could be convinced to give it another shot, but from what I can tell, it’s not really my kind of book.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2024 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

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

  1. 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).

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2015 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson

Skin Game by Jim Butcher

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans.

The Actual Results

  1. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans.
  2. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
  3. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
  4. No Award
  5. Skin Game by Jim Butcher
  6. The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Skin Game by Jim Butcher
  2. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu, trans.
  3. No Award
  4. The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson
  5. 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.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2012 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Deadline by Mira Grant

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

Embassytown by China Mieville

Among Others by Jo Walton

The Actual Results

  1. Among Others by Jo Walton
  2. Embassytown by China Mieville
  3. Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
  4. Deadline by Mira Grant
  5. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
  2. No Award
  3. Among Others by Jo Walton
  4. Embassytown by China Mieville

Explanation

Leviathan Wakes was a fantastic book. Really awesome space opera. I’ve only read the first three Expanse books so far, but they’re all really great, and I do plan to work my way through all of them. My favorite aspect of the series is probably how the Latter-day Saints build the most freaking awesome generation ship ever… because of course, that is totally something we would do. Mormon pioneer trek to the stars!

In all seriousness, though, I’ve actually been quite impressed with how the writing duo behind James S.A. Corey handles religion and philosophy throughout the series. Lots of sci-fi writers tend to take an overtly materialistic or atheist point of view, even if they don’t come out and admit it, and for a religious reader like myself it gets super annoying after a while. But the second (or third?) book really impressed me with its depth, even though the religious authority figure in that book is also a lesbian. As a conservative, believing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I tend to get really wary when things start to get queer, but it actually worked for her character, and I thought the writers handled it very well—not in a woke or a heavy-handed way at all.

Among Others is a lengthy essay about the history of science fiction and fantasy dressed up as a rather forgettable story of a misfit girl going off to a boarding school, and maybe running into some fairies or something. Like I said, the frame story is forgettable. But Jo Walton’s take on the SF&F classics is very interesting, though personally I preferred reading it straight with her essay collection What Makes This Book So Great, which apparently consists of a bunch of blog posts from her column over at Tor.com. I don’t always agree with her tastes, of course, and the fact that she’s a boomer makes her very short-sighted when it comes to some aspects of the culture, but I do really enjoy getting her perspective on the genre, since she is so incredibly well-read. If not for some other books that I felt deserved to be placed below No Award, I probably just would have left Among Others off of the ballot.

Same with Embassytown, which I didn’t finish. There wasn’t anything particularly terrible about it, other than the fact that I was pretty dang confused from the first page. Mieville tends to be very hit or miss for me, perhaps because I’m just not a fan of literary fiction in general. I prefer a good, pulpy adventure story, which is probably why I’ve never read a Louis L’Amour book or a Robert E. Howard story I didn’t like. I suppose I could be persuaded to give Embassytown another try.

The last two books are the reason why I voted No Award. I’ve written at length about George R.R. Martin, but the short version is that I really don’t like the direction that Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire has taken the fantasy genre, and the fact that he hasn’t finished the damned series yet has done far more harm to the rising generation of fantasy authors than anything else he’s accomplished with these books. In particular, I find Martin’s obsession with the victimizer/victim dynamic to be both pathological and toxic, and I really don’t care for his particular brand of nihilism either. Perhaps it’s a good thing that no one talks about this series after the shitshow that was season 8.

As for Deadline, I didn’t read that one because I DNFed the series with the first book, Feed. The main thing that turned me off to that one was the sexual innuendo between the brother and sister. Yes, I know they’re technically supposed to be adopted or whatever, but it still felt very icky, and made me wonder if Seanan McGuire doesn’t have a weird porn addiction, because that was the vibe I got from that book. Also, the premise was totally unbelievable. The SHTF has already gone down, but the government is still handing out “blogging licenses,” something that they can’t even regulate right now during the good times? Also, how the heck is all that infrastructure still functioning in the midst of the zombie apocalypse? Those fiber optic cables don’t repair themselves.

…and now I’m going to have to take a break from this series for a while, because I haven’t read enough of the books in the other years to know how I would have voted. I’ve read (or DNFed) all of the winners, and for several years, I’ve read all but one of the books, but it’s still going to take me a while to do another retrospective. I’m currently prioritizing 2024 and the years where I only have one more book to read (1972, 1974, 1989, 1992, 2005, 2011, 2014, 2015, and 2016), though some of them are proving difficult to find. Just because a book was once up for all the big awards doesn’t mean it has any staying power.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2017 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

The Actual Results

  1. The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
  2. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
  3. Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
  4. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
  5. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
  6. Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

How I Would Have Voted

  1. No Award
  2. Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

Explanation

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.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years

How I would vote now: 2018 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

Provenance by Ann Leckie

Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

The Actual Results

  1. The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin
  2. The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
  3. Provenance by Ann Leckie
  4. Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
  5. Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee
  6. New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

How I Would Have Voted

  1. Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
  2. No Award

Explanation

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.

How I Would Vote Now: All Years