This year I have reviewed the BSFA Best Novel Award (thoughts on longlist, shortlist review part one, shortlist review part two, shortlist reviews postscript), the Clarke Award (thoughts on submission list, shortlist review part one, shortlist review part two), and even posted some thoughts on the Locus and Nebula shortlists. The latter post doesn’t include any reviews because I was waiting to see which of the books shortlisted for those awards would also be shortlisted for the Hugo. As we eventually found out, a little bit later than initially expected, three from the Nebula shortlist (Legends & Lattes, Nettle & Bone, Nona the Ninth – with the latter two also on the Locus Fantasy Top Ten) made it on to the Hugo shortlist alongside three from the Locus SF Top Ten (The Daughter of Dr Moreau, The Kaiju Preservation Society and The Spare Man).
As reported in the July edition of Locus, the results of the Locus awards were close (for comparison, I am just including the number of first preferences here rather than the relative total points score): ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi [61 first prefs] won with the smallest winning lead this year, just 17 points ahead of Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel [73 first prefs], which had the most votes and first-place votes, and would have won without the doubling of subscriber points.’ The Daughter of Dr Moreau (58 first prefs) was a close third (and was put first overall by non-subscribers), while The Spare Man was fifth [36 first prefs]. In the fantasy category, R.F. Kuang’s Babel won (104 first prefs; it also won the Nebula award). Nettle & Bone came second (50 first prefs) and Nona the Ninth came third (59 first prefs) but would have been second without the doubling of subscriber points. Legends & Lattes (79 first prefs) came second in the Best First Novel category and would have won that award without the doubling of subscriber points. I’m not sure there is anything to learn from these breakdowns – other than that Locus should scrap the double points for subscribers (and I speak as a subscriber). If Babel had made the Hugo shortlist, I would have mentally awarded it the status of favourite for the award, but I don’t think there is enough between any of the others to pick any of them out. The outcome of the award may well come down to the way the transfers break in the successive rounds of counting.
So, what of the novels themselves?
John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society
Jamie is having a bad pandemic, reduced to working as a ‘deliverator’ for a food app company, when a series of deliveries to a former acquaintance leads to recruitment by KPS, an ‘animal rights organization’, as a grunt who lifts things in ‘the field’. The field turns out to be a parallel universe full of Godzilla-like flying Kaijus, who feed off nuclear reactors. And it’s bright, breezy, entertaining, eminently readable – all as you might expect from Scalzi, who won the Hugo in 2013 with Redshirts. Not really my thing, but many other people’s thing.
Mary Robinette Kowal, The Spare Man
Like Scalzi, Kowal is a previous Hugo winner – in 2019 for The Calculating Stars, the first of the Lady Astronaut series, all three novels (so far) of which I have enjoyed very much. I didn’t like The Spare Man quite so much as those, but it still worked for me on the whole due not only to the story but also to the incidental material. On the surface, it’s a Thin Man-style comedy-of-manners SF mystery. Former robotics engineer, heiress and celebrity from Zero G Dancing with the Stars, Tesla Crane is on a honeymoon cruise to Mars with her retired-detective spouse, Shal, when a spate of murders break out. Cue mayhem, red herrings, the unhelpful unreconstructed antics of the male chief of security, and an exciting and satisfactory denouement. Without giving too much away, there is always a special place in my heart for SF involving stage magic and identical twins.
In terms of what we get incidental to the plot, there are a nice set of cocktail recipes throughout, including a number made up by Kowal (which I did figure out by the time we got to the recipe for ‘Orbital Decay’), as she points out in an afterword, ‘About the Cocktails’. These include non-alcoholic cocktails for those of us who do not, or no longer drink, much alcohol (although I did enjoy a strawberry margherita during the course of reading the novel, as that time period coincided with my spouse’s birthday). There’s also another great afterword, ‘About the Science’ which discusses the spaceship design and also Tesla’s various support systems for dealing with severe chronic pain. She has a DBS (a Deep Brain Stimulator), which she dials up and down throughout the novel, so that it becomes as integral to the plot as it is to Tesla’s life, and she also has a service dog, Gimlet. Kowal also explains in her ‘Acknowledgments’, the lengths she went to move beyond gender binaries. The resulting intersectional mix is fascinating, when also set against Tesla’s privilege as a wealthy celebrity, and the fact that the action is set on a cruise with the obvious disparities between passengers and staff. I struggle to imagine an English-person-authored version of this novel because the relationships would be overwritten by English class identities in a way that would obscure other differences. Even as it is, Tesla came across at times as uncomfortably ‘spiky’ to me but, on reflection, I decided that I liked that, and it led to some interesting political thoughts that I will maybe gather together at some further point (although this is also a thread running through the following reviews).
Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes
Viv, an orc retires from her former life of raiding to settle down and establish a coffee shop. In many ways, the plot is the familiar one of a disparate group coming together and bonding. The main difference is that rather than this being the crew of a beat-up space freighter (as in Firefly and Fireflyesque fictions, such as Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet), in this case it’s as the staff of the coffee shop. This works well and the novel is engagingly written; I enjoyed it. I’d definitely drop in for an (oat milk) latte and a cinnamon roll.
There are several interesting things to note about Legends & Latte. One of these is that it began life as a 2021 NaNoWriMo project and was then self-published in February 2022. The book then took off on social media, print-on-demand copies were ordered by bookshops, and it was then picked up by Tor. So, in this sense, it is a product of fan culture, although Baldree was an established creative, being a games developer and audiobook narrator. Furthermore, the novel is actively labelled and marketed on Amazon as a ‘A Heartwarming Cosy Fantasy and Tik Tok Sensation’. According to Wikipedia, the subtitle is A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes, but the UK kindle edition I read doesn’t include this but does include on the cover: ‘High Fantasy, Low Stakes, Good Company’. ‘Cosy’ can be praise or criticism, but here it is clearly being marketed as a selling point and I can see the advantage of knowing that it will be suitable if you just want something to relax with (for whatever reason).
Reading it did make me think about the politics of fantasy novels. Formerly fantasy was seen as inherently reactionary (at least, by highbrow SF critics) and all about, for example, the ‘Return of the King’. Legends & Latte doesn’t reach that level of commentary; we are entirely concerned with the running of a coffee shop. There is a kind of rudimentary economics in play in terms of how much cash Viv has saved for this venture and how she expends it, but we’re basically in D&D land: there are jewels and various denomination coins. In other words, we are not concerned with political economy. Hence the ‘low stakes’. However, one could also argue that the themes of Legends & Lattes – friendship, romance, finding a safe place in the world – are the things that really matter. Therefore, the ‘cosiness’ of the novel does not make its politics necessarily small ‘c’ conservative. Indeed, on one level, it is as implicitly anti-patriarchal as The Spare Man, in that it identifies the nature of toxic masculinity as manifested by certain characters, who are shown to be out of step with a better society (and who get punished for this).
Moreover, I’m wondering if Legends & Lattes captures the core of fantasy. LOTR is not actually as much about the ‘Return of the King’ as it appears, and much more about companionship, friendship, and bonding as a group. Moreover, these processes are often directly linked to food and drink; mealtimes are a recurrent and essential feature of Tolkien’s universe. The pub, which is a similar space to a coffee shop, is also important in LOTR. I recently read the first volume of The Wheel of Time for the first time and the really striking thing was that it was almost all pub and one of the key determinants of good society within that novel is the moral character of the landlord or innkeeper. Legends & Lattes takes this to the logical extreme of focusing almost entirely on the moral character of Viv; it is a novel about her living up to the courage of her convictions (with some help from her friends) and in the process creating a refuge of community against the wider world (and that is a political action; one that is pretty much essential for most people in 2023).
T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone
This is a really enjoyable revisionist fairytale, complete with princesses, fairy godmothers, dust-wives, bone-dogs and various other weird elements. Princess Marra, who lives in a convent but is not quite a nun, realises that only she can save her older sister from the evil prince, and thus sets off on a quest that gradually rewards her with an unlikely set of accomplices. The narration is beautifully weighted, combining an understated matter-of-factness with dry humour. Marra is an engaging protagonist, anxious, unsure of herself but possessed of determination. In particular, I liked the way she copes with her sense of being slow for her age. This is a nice point of identification with readers because I think many of us have the feeling that we are slow at grasping life itself: taking until thirty to grasp things that others seem to grasp at sixteen sounds about right. However, I think it’s also the truth that once readers do grasp things, they retain that grasp. In other words, Marra’s self-understanding is earned, as is that of her companions, and this gives the novel more weight than a straightforward adventure yarn.
Like Liz Bourke, who reviewed Nettle & Bone for Locus, I was reminded at times of Pratchett’s witches but, as Bourke notes, with updating for current sensibilities. In the main, I think this was because I felt the presence of certain kinds of wisdom that are particular to only the best genre storytelling. For example, when Marra finds herself assisting the Sister Apothecary at the convent in midwifing duties, she is initially surprised to find that the whole business is the same for common people as it was for her sister the Queen, until she comes to the realisation that (as 34 people have highlighted on kindle):
… peasants and princesses all shit the same way and have their courses their same, so I suppose it’s no surprise that babies all come out the same way, too. Having thus accidentally anticipated a few centuries’ worth of revolutionary political thought, Marra got down to the business of boiling water and making tea.
However, Marra also comes to the important realisation, which is better understood by some genre writers than revolutionary theorists, that you can only save people who want to be saved.
As the protagonists acknowledge to themselves on several occasions, their quest to save Marra’s sister is a ‘fool’s errand’ and I think there is a particular power in this structure, which I’ve previously published an academic essay on (the best bits of which can be found in my post on ‘The Generic (SFF) Formula of the Fool’s Errand’). Hope and courage are found at the wayside. It is unlikely that everything is going to result in a completely happy ending, or the establishment of a perfect utopian order, but sometimes things do work out messily as they do in a dream (and part of the way this works is due to finding the right community or found-family of companions).
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughter of Dr Moreau
This is a lovingly constructed neo-Victorian novel, loosely based on H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) but with the action transposed to the Mexican part of the Yucatán peninsula and set against the backdrop of the long Caste War waged by the native Maya people against the European-descended Mexican people. The novel is narrated in chapters alternating between the point of view of Carlota, the titular daughter of Dr Moreau, and Montgomery Laughton, the washed-up, alcoholic Englishman that her father has employed as a kind of overseer and assistant. As anyone with knowledge of the original Wells novel will know, Moreau is a vivisectionist and scientist, who has created human-animal hybrids. In Moreno-Garcia’s version, Moreau is being funded by regional landowner Hernando Lizalde in the hope he will be able to supply a pliant, sturdy workforce to work on Lizalde’s plantations and haciendas. We can tell from the novel’s brooding gothic atmosphere that the uneasy balance that holds at the start will not last and tension builds steadily throughout until the point when it eventually comes to a head both sexually and in a series of violent bloody shootouts. As a fan of both westerns and gothic sexual tension, I really loved this book.
In his biography of Wells, Adam Roberts provides an interesting reading of the animals in The Island of Doctor Moreau in which he suggests that what is attractive about animals to people is their simplicity, which also provides an eerie glamour ‘because the intrinsic richness and complexity of human existence throws the truly simple into a starkly lovely but inhuman contrast’. This explains, for Roberts, the ‘elvish quality’ of Wells’s dog- and pig-men. There is something of this glamour in Moreno-Garcia’s hybrids (although it is not clear they are all more simple) but it plays out to different effect. While Roberts sees Moreau’s (tragic) downfall as lying in the ‘unleashed female potency’ of the escaped puma-woman (making it a sexual downfall), the whole point of Moreno-Garcia’s novel is the possibility of escaping from the patriarchal order represented by Moreau and Lizalde. In this respect, there is a feline sexual subtext as in Wells’s novel but in this case the reference points are the older jaguar myths of the Maya people and a radical anthropological sense of the jaguar as resistant to male sexual violence. Therefore, in terms of reworking the patriarchal structures of classic SF texts, The Daughter of Dr Moreau is absolutely right up there with novels like Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade in the ongoing transformation of the field.
Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth
(This is an extract from a longer review that was published in ParSec). The third volume in the Locked Tomb series, Nona the Ninth takes up the story directly from Harrow the Ninth’s rather enigmatic epilogue (newcomers to the series are recommended to read the books in the order of publication). Nevertheless, the novel is quite different to both its predecessors, as is apparent even from its visible appearance. Compared to the gothic signifiers (skull face paint, blackness, multiple skeletons) of the first two novels, the cover of Nona exudes positively new-age peace-and-love vibes and even features a six-legged dog gambolling alongside the fresh-faced titular heroine (admittedly, there are still a number of skeletons lying around). Nona might look like a nineteen-year-old, but she has only been in existence for six months and therefore requires a lot of looking after from Pyrrha, Camilla and Palamedes, the latter two of whom are sharing a body. Far from living in the feudal world of the Houses, they occupy a recognisably modern, dysfunctional capitalist society, with jobs, cars, schools, and streets that are not safe after dark. This is revealed to us by Muir through a more conventional science-fictional world building than anything we’ve encountered in the previous novels, but with the important constraint that everything that happens is focalised through Nona’s naïve worldview. In practice, this means that once again we are subject to authorial misdirection through the device of an unreliable narrator. On the other hand, the ups and downs of Nona’s friendship with the group of children at the school she attends, nominally as a teacher’s assistant, allows Muir to explore social dynamics that radiate throughout the wider society. Nona’s rise to consciousness, as familiar characters reappear and the action kicks off in the final third, is beautifully conveyed.
Nona provides an interesting contrast to some of the other novels on the shortlist in that the novel begins from within the refuge of found family, expands to encompass a wider political analysis of the surrounding society and then climaxes, like The Daughter of Dr Moreau, with extended scenes of violent confrontation.
Afterthoughts
Streaming of the ceremony has started, so I’ll keep this short. The first thing to say is that I enjoyed the shortlist. The second thing is that reading across the list, rather than highlighting individual works, shows interesting political dynamics at work (which I’m going to have to expand on at a later date). Generally, though, I think the shortlist is in keeping with the general trend of the last ten years or so, which is the establishment of a non-patriarchal imaginary order for fiction. This is explicit in some of these novels, such as Nettle & Bone and The Daughter of Dr Moreau (which directly breaks with the ‘law of the father’) and implicit in others, such as Legends & Lattes. Nona the Ninth is set mostly beyond this break, but it is still a subplot being retrospectively narrated throughout the series. On that point, I think series are in many ways the real landmarks of change in this regard. I don’t think the Locked Tomb series (which is also up for best series) could have been written much earlier than it has been (I think this is also the case with another favourite of mine, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s Monstress, the relevant volume of which is up for Best Graphic Story). In contrast, novels like Nettle & Bone and The Daughter of Dr Moreau have been writable over a longer period of time but can perhaps be said to have come into their moment. I like all of these three novels but if forced at gunpoint to choose the best, I’d go for The Daughter of Dr Moreau. We’ll find out very shortly if it wins.
Edit: In fact, the Hugo Award for Best Novel was awarded to Nettle & Bone, so I’m happy with that.
Prospective Cultures 