Interview with Malka Older

The Astounding-nominated author spoke with Nerds of a Feather about her writing process, her preferred readings, and our civilizational moment

Arturo Serrano: First of all, congratulations on the enthusiastic reception for The Mimicking of Known Successes. I must confess that the book's title biased me before I started reading, because romance stories don't typically have such a technical-sounding title. I suppose fans of hard SF don't mind, but did you worry at any moment that the title could scare away romance readers?

Malka Older: I honestly didn't think about it. I finished the book before without a title (the working title was "Rings and Rails," because that initial, vague, how would people live on a gas giant planet predated almost everything else in the book, except the mauzooleum, by literal years), and when I was reading through looking for one, that phrase jumped out at me. I was also in the mood for a slightly complex, enigmatic title, so it worked for me.

AS: In the creation of Mimicking, did you start by building the Victorian atmosphere and then come up with the planetary migration backstory, or did you first have the planetary migration in mind and then gave it the Victorian atmosphere? Or something else entirely?

MO: So as I said above, I had an idea many years ago about a gas giant encircled by rails to make it possible for people to live there, and that some of that space would be used as a kind of zoo. But it was really no more than that, a few sentences in a document. The other part of the book came when I was doing a lot of comfort reading during the early pandemic and thinking about how important that was for me and trying to analyze the elements of comfort reading for me and why I found them so appealing. "Sherlock Holmes retelling" is definitely one of those elements, and when I connected the two ideas it merged so well, and I went on developing from there.

AS: A core theme in Mimicking is the futility of trying to recreate an idealized prior state of affairs, and the consequent need for constant adaptation. What prompted your interest in exploring that idea?

MO: I find our relationship to the past fascinating—also our relationship to the future. When I was a kid, I once wrote a story called "If Memory Serves" about the way a hated despot was transformed into a revered leader over three generations of idealization. But this became particularly urgent to me, as a problematic, during those early days of the pandemic when I was thinking about and eventually writing this story. "Back to normal" was this almost talismanic thing, and it's a very understandable feeling in the midst of uncertainty and chaos and loss and suffering, to want to go back to what is known; but at the same time the "normal" was what allowed all that to happen in the first place, and those moments of disruption are also opportunities for improvement. It's a pretty common dynamic in disaster response, often coming from a place of authority: they'll give people money to rebuild but only to exactly what they had before—even if that leaves them open again to the same sort of damage the next time there's a flood or an earthquake, or leaves them in the same uncomfortable situation as before when it could have been improved. So I wanted to explore that in the book, hopefully in a complicated and nuanced way.

AS: You have frequently spoken of "narrative disorder" as a widespread condition of our century. Have you seen it evolve into different forms, compared to when you first proposed it?

MO: I don't think the disorder itself has evolved much—it's pretty broad and also it hasn't been that long since I defined it (probably most clearly in this essay). But of course the tropes and story patterns and so on have been evolving, almost continuously, if not necessarily in drastic ways (very sorry to see from summaries of recent movies the fridging trope for justifying extreme violence and transferring personal vulnerability to others arrrhhghahghghh). I'm sure, for example, that there is a whole set of conventions to various types of TikTok videos/reels, with expected beats that can be embraced or subverted for effect.

AS: Another frequent descriptor in your writings is "comemierdería." For the benefit of non-Spanish speakers, could you please explain its definition?

MO: "Comemierda" is an epithet that I heard a lot growing up, usually when my mom was driving. Literally it means "shit-eater" (derogatory), but like most such words there's a lot of connotation and shades of meaning. In Cuban, or at least my family's Cuban, "comemierda" is said with a tone of disgust and/or dismissiveness: it's someone who's careless, obstructive, or potentially actually evil and in a really annoying way, who does things that they really should know better than to do, who deserves scorn as well as irritation and anger. It has a very broad application, from minor irritation (cuts you off intentionally while driving) to major wrongdoing (using violence, oppression, and cronyism to maintain control over a country for decades, for example). Comemierdería, then, is the sort of stuff that comemierdas do. Like the appositive, it has a wide range; one of my uncles (qdep) once pronounced "La comemierdería es relativa"), it's relative, meaning that there's really bad comemierdería and less bad, and that might make the less bad seem better but it's still comemierdería. It's bullshit, it's bureaucracy designed to perpetrate evil, stupid rules and the people who use them, and lies and capitalism and communism and petty cruelty by those with power.

So it's a very useful word, but there's another reason that I employ it so much: it's pretty hard to find a personal epithet that doesn't rely on insulting a particular gender, sexual orientation, someone's parents or parentage, entirely blameless animal, or part of the body.

AS: On a related note: what's your position on writers from outside the Anglosphere using untranslated terms from their own cultures in books published in English?

MO: As my books probably attest, I'm totally in favor, both when reading and writing. As a reader, I love learning new words. I love learning them by context, which is probably how I got most of my vocabulary in various languages, and I don't mind looking them up if I have to. As a writer, I have a lot of languages floating around in my head, especially the words that stick and present themselves because they don't have adequate equivalents in other languages, and I want to make use of the best word in each situation, always while keeping the overall text comprehensible.

AS: In the Acknowledgments section of your novel Infomocracy, you describe it as "a global book." Beyond the simple fact that the novel has a protagonist who travels everywhere, and that it was written by an author who also travels everywhere, what do you think makes a global book?

MO: Oof, this question is making me feel like maybe it was too grandiose a claim. After all, there's a lot of globe out there, and a lot of variations within it. But for that book in particular, I was attempting to imagine a global system, something to supplant the fragmentation of our current geopolitics, our current attempts to solve problems that affect everyone on the planet, and so I was trying to present a wide variety of locations and societies to give at least a sense for that. Of course, it was also a way for me to enjoy the memories of some of the places I've been.

AS: Do you see yourself as a global writer, whatever that means?

MO: No, I definitely can't claim that. Like everyone, I come from a certain perspective, and while I've been lucky to have opportunities to expand it somewhat, all of that is still very specific—this influence at that point in my life, this place at that time in history, etc. And as tempting as it is to want something global—and I do think there's value in at least trying to look outside one's perspective of origin—at the same time I'm not sure that it's what we should necessarily be aiming for. When people say some piece of art is "universal," it always worries me a bit, because how can that be? How can any of us possibly speak to everyone, or represent everyone? I usually value specificity, rather than generality.

AS: The idea of centenals in Infomocracy and its sequels relies on a dissolution of the entire concept of nation states. What experiences shaped your skepticism toward nation states?

MO: Both the theory and the practice. When you read about the history of nation-states, and how it played into colonialism, and how, before external colonialism, it played into the sort of "local" colonialism of obscuring minority identities within the imperial nation (e.g., Welsh, Basque, Catalán, Calabrian, etc.), and look at the ways it has driven conflict throughout the last few centuries, it's very ugly. And in my own lived experience, I have worked in, lived in, or visited many countries with active separatist movements based on feeling like it was impossible to fit into the "nation" supposedly aligned with the "state" they had little choice but to belong to. And that's not surprising because it's hard to find a country that doesn't have a separatist movement (although granted some are more active than others).

To be clear, the concept of nation-states is not just countries as we know them today (although those are certainly problematic in a lot of ways on their own). It's the idea, which still underpins countries, that there is a "nation" of people, unified in some way, that belongs within the geographic boundaries and under the political aegis of a given state. This is, obviously, ridiculous in most if not all cases. There is no innate quality that makes all legal US citizens somehow "Americans," nothing that makes them in any way distinguishable from "Canadians" or "Botswanans" or "Bahrainians." It gets even more ridiculous when you factor in the statisticity of the concept: the idea that populations aren't constantly shifting, moving, changing, making families across borders, reimagining themselves.

AS: Do you wish Infomocracy's centenal system were implemented in real life, or do you have objections to the way it functions in your novels?

MO: I definitely want more innovation and experimentation in how governmental jurisdictions work. I would like everyone to have more flexibility in choosing what kind of government they live under; and I would like immigration to be freer, on principle and also because the international system recognizes that population is more important than territorial size and acts accordingly; and I would like the system to reflect that citizens are more fundamentally important to countries than countries are to people. And I would like lots of other things, like the responsibility to protect (R2P), and a less power-hierarchy-driven international organization, and generally humans being more important to everyone with power, and so on. I definitely do not think that the centenal system is the only way to get there, or even that it would guarantee all these things. I wrote it more as a way to point out that the way we organize government jurisdictions and citizenship is, if not exactly arbitrary (rather, path-dependent), certainly not inevitable.

AS: For your own reading, do you prefer science fiction that warns "let's not do this" or that offers "here's what we could do"?

MO: I tend to like inventive visions of what we could be doing, but that's me—absolutely no shade on anyone who likes to read, or write, other things! We need all sorts of approaches and moods and visions!

AS: What are you reading these days?

MO: I just finished Paladin's Faith, the latest in T. Kingfisher's incredible Paladin series (and actually reread the Clockwork Boys duology immediately afterwards, very worth it), and now I'm reading The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo, which is (so far at least) a very fun alt-history noir. Lately I've also really enjoyed Lavender House—another noir, although not alt-history—; a reread of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong, which held up rather better than I expected; Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall; Grave Expectations by Alice Bell; and Starter Villain by John Scalzi, all of which were very fun.

Thank you, Malka, for taking the time for this interview.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Nanoreviews: Unraveller, The Mimicking of Known Successes, Tread of Angels

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge [Macmillan Children's (UK)/Amulet (US)]

Clara's review of Unraveller already covers most of what makes this book so great: Frances Hardinge always brings intriguing magic and thoughtful moral complexity to her particular brand of YA, and her latest is no exception. Set in a world where humans live alongside the otherworldy denizens of the Wilds, Unraveller focuses on Kellan, a boy from a community of weavers who has been cast out after gaining the uncontrollable ability to unravel both fabric and curses, and Nettle, a formerly cursed girl, as they travel the country of Raddith unravelling the various curses that its inhabitants have placed on each other - ranging from mildly inconvenient to the truly horrible. The curses themselves are gifted by the Little Brothers, spider-like fae inhabitants of Raddith who also take a keen interest in ensuring its technology doesn't develop too extensively. When someone is given a "curse egg", they have the ability to lay a curse on someone they feel has wronged them, but the punishment for even having a curse egg - let alone using it - is extremely steep, even before the emotional cost and stigmatisation for the curser is taken into account.

We follow Kellan and Nettle as they try to discover the source of a curse on Kellan, which appears to be making his abilities stronger and more unpredictable. Along the way, Hardinge sketches out the various impacts that living with this particular brand of otherworldly justice has had on Raddith's society, and what, if anything, can be repaired after a curse has come to pass. As tales of fae morality being imposed on humans go, this is a seriously good one, and Kellan and Nettle's mildly prickly friendship forms a wonderful core around which the rest of the narrative unfolds. If you haven't read any Hardinge before, this is a great place to start.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older [Tor dot com Publishing, 2023]

It feels appropriate to be talking about this book (again, following one of my Nerds of a Feather colleagues, this time Arturo) at a point when many of the genre fans I know are grappling with the definitions and purpose of "cosy" fiction. Perhaps this will become an essay for another time, if this fan ever gets her proverbial shit together. The Mimicking of Known Successes, billed as cosy Holmesian fiction, divides much of its time between university campuses and windswept train platforms and comfy carriages, but perhaps not in the location you'd expect: this is the human settlement on Jupiter, to which the survivors of humanity fled after Earth became uninhabitable, with habitats floating in the, uh, clouds of our biggest planetary neighbour and connected by a planet-spanning train network. We follow Mossa, an investigator looking for a missing academic, and her ex-girlfriend and classical geographer Pleiti, who Mossa approaches to help with the investigation into her colleague. Together, the two uncover a deeper conspiracy surrounding this disappearance, with implications for Earth's future and the people who get to decide on it.

Part of the cosiness here is aesthetic: Older does a fantastic job of creating a colony that seems comfortable and interesting and dynamic, even as we see characters grapple with the historic loss of Earth and the limitations of their current home. The novella opens in a remote settlement at the end of the railway line which Mossa refers to as a "piece of grit", but it's a piece of grit with a surprisingly nice pub and pleasant residents, not some desperate, impoverished outpost. People are doing OK for themselves, and for each other, on Jupiter, even if some are more OK than others, and it makes for a very different atmosphere than the gritty "everyone is one step away from a cold, unpleasant death" aesthetic that pervades most colonisation stories.

Beyond that, though, The Mimicking of Known Successes provides a perfect mix of personal stakes with wider implications for humanity's future, with Pleiti and Mossa rekindling their relationship and grappling with what this case means for their respective careers while also piecing together the answer to the mystery, and its full stakes. At the heart of those stakes is the academic debate for Earth's future, which is introduced to us as an interdepartmental war between different geography disciplines (finally, geography gets the respect and centrality it deserves!), and effectively revolves whether recolonisation of Earth should take place with full understanding of Earth's former ecosystem and its recreation, or whether humanity should be trying to build something new and adjust as they go along. I would read an entire Mars Trilogy-style doorstopper featuring characters arguing about the ins and outs of terraforming along these lines, but here it's just one strand in a much shorter narrative. Moreover, it's inextricably tied to Pleiti's position as a classicist (the "understand everything first" position) working in an academic institution alongside colleagues who, for various reasons (such as "being men") do not give her views the respect she feels they deserve.

Mimicking of Known Successes has a great ending to its mystery and its romance, but it also leaves the door open for more stories in this world - which we are getting! I, for one, am very excited.

Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse [Saga (US)/Solaris (UK) 2022]

I haven't seen as much about this Weird Western as I'd expect given that it's Rebecca frickin' Roanhorse, but if you're looking for a diverting adventure into a frontier town of angels and demons (hey, "angels and demons" is a bingo square for Reddit's r/fantasy bingo this year!) you could do much worse than this novella. The setting here is a mining town where the ostracised "Fallen", descendants of rebel angels are put to work mining Divinity (created from the body of Abaddon, because what else would it be) under the watch of the virtuous "Elect". Celeste is a Fallen, but she has been raised by her Elect father and only recently reunited with her sister Mariel, who spent her childhood with the pair's mother. Now Celeste is trying to keep her head down, but when Mariel is accused of murdering one of the settlement's leaders, her sister is given just 24 hours to prove her innocent, aided only by her demon ex-lover Abraxas.

Standing between Celeste and her sister's freedom are an entire town's worth of deep secrets, not least those of her own sister, and most of the action here is about one woman coming up against an entire system which is stacked against her, not least because of the baked-in presumption of moral goodness in the angelic Elect (their leaders are literally called Virtues!) and the stigma against the Fallen. The adventure here is firmly in "satisfyingly tropey" territory, and while the end result is a story that didn't make a huge lasting impression on me, it's certainly an enjoyable read, with depths of worldbuilding that would lend themselves to further stories in this setting. 

POSTED BY: Adri Joy, Nerds of a Feather senior editor, dog owner, aspiring mermaid, having an increasingly weird time about her own biography

Adri and Joe Talk About Books: The Best of the Decade

As we near the end of a decade we had the highly original thought of looking back at some of the best novels of the last ten years. Ten years is ultimately as arbitrary of a way to divide and group novels as any, but it serves as sufficient reason to reflect back on some of our favorite novels and discuss which have had lasting impact on the genre, on us as readers, and what just stands out as just really damn good books.

Any list of the nine or ten (or fifty, or five hundred) “best” novels is subject to the biases and perspectives of the writers putting the list together. What we find to be excellent may not line up with someone else. We may not have read a book that otherwise would have found a place here. We might not have agreed on a particular book, but this is our consensus of nine of the best novels from the last ten years. And, because we can’t just create a list and let it go, we’ve selected three more novels as our personal honorable mentions. Even then, we still mourn the novels we left off due to arbitrary space reasons.

We don’t expect there to be consensus as to the absolute rightness of our list, but we hope it sparks conversation about some really great books that we loved.

So here we go.

Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear (2012): Elizabeth Bear is something of a chameleon of a writer. Whether it is near future cyberpunk thrillers, urban fantasy, alternate historical vampire fiction, espionage, space opera, steampunk, a Criminal Minds meets the X-Files mashup, or epic fantasy - Bear can write it all.

Eschewing the trappings of the stereotypical European setting, Range of Ghosts is silk road epic fantasy - meaning that the novel has a more Mongolian flavor and has an entirely different cultural grounding than what is so often considered “traditional epic fantasy”. Bear pulls no punches in delivering a full realized and top notch epic with rich characterization and incredible worldbuilding. The magic and religion and battles of Range of Ghosts is handled with a deft touch and the best thing is that all of this is set up for something far larger. Range of Ghosts is Elizabeth Bear at the height of her considerable powers. (G's Review) (Joe)

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie (2013): The story of Breq, a woman who was once the AI of the spaceship Justice of Toren, spread across hundreds of “Ancillary” bodies. Now Justice of Toren has been destroyed, and Breq, the sole survivor, single handedly bent on revenge towards the Emperor who set her and her crew up to die, begins in this crushingly good space opera, full of tea ceremonies and folk songs and the exploration of an empire whose vision of “civilisation” is synonymous with its own culture. The dual narratives of Ancillary Justice, which tell of both Breq’s present and the events leading up to her death as a spaceship. Its a novel which operates with respect and care for the space opera tropes it deploys, while challenging any traditional assumptions about what aspects of human culture might be taken up by a remote spacefaring civilisation - to the Radchaai, gender is not a thing, but gloves very much are, and the ruling consciousness of Emperor Anaander Mianaai is spread across thousands of clones, who may or may not be working for completely common purpose. And, of course, its all driven by pitch-perfect action in both timelines, as Justice of Toren tries to hold it together on what it doesn’t realise will be its final mission, and Breq makes her way across the galaxy on her hopeless revenge mission. (Joe's review)  (Adri)

The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison (2014): The term "hopepunk" might have been coined by Alexandra Rowland a couple of years after the release of Katherine Addison's highly-charged elven political fantasy, but the centering of kindness and decency even in the most lonely and high pressure of circumstances was already a standout feature of this novel back in 2014, giving it an undisputed edge over other contenders in the "young royal out of their depth" field. The Goblin Emperor is the story of Maia, the unwanted fourth child of the elvish emperor, who was born from a political marriage with a woman from neighbouring goblin kingdom (elves and goblins, being in this world, different races of the same species, and elven prejudice against goblins being therefore far more akin to racism than any possibly-justifiable biological taboo). Raised in seclusion with only abusive minders for company, Maia is therefore as surprised as anyone when an assassination of his father and three half-brothers propels him to the throne. What follows is his attempts to develop alliances and figure out who to trust in a court he's barely set foot in before now: a task he rises to with grace and skill, despite the many enemies who would rather not see him on the throne. Come for the courtly intrigue; stay for the way Addison effortlessly includes the characters' ear movements into their facial expressions without it getting weird. (Jemmy's review) (Adri)

The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin (2015), by N.K. Jemisin: We’re not ones to claim that any subjective list of the best of anything is invalid because the list maker did not include our particular favorite, but we would definitely give the side-eye to any list of the best science fiction and fantasy of the last ten years that didn’t at least consider N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.

The Fifth Season was an absolutely brilliant opening novel to Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. When I wrote about the novel in 2016, I had this to say “While the worldbuilding in The Fifth Season is superb and extraordinary, it does not hold a volcano's breath to how strongly written the novel is and just how incredible these three women are. The nature of the terribly oppressive world of The Stillness, really of the Sanze Empire, is examined through the lives, actions, heartbreaks, oppression, heroism, grief, discovery, and amazing characters of Damaya, Syenite, and Essun. Jemisin will rip your heart out.” I have no doubt that not only is The Fifth Season stands out as one of the best of the decade, The Fifth Season will hold up as one of the all time great fantasy novels. (Joe's review) (Joe)

Black Wolves, by Kate Elliott (2015): Do you want an epic fantasy where most of the primary characters are fully mature adults? What about a world that sets up a particular worldview and culture and then spends the rest of the novel deconstructing everything we thought we knew about it? What about a novel dealing with persecuted minority cultures, oppressive religions, and a question about how reliable memory is when considering history? Black Wolves has all that. Highly competent women bringing the excellence in a variety of ways? Black Wolves has that. A very high body count and solid action? Black Wolves has that. Giant eagles? Black Wolves has that, too.

Black Wolves is as epic as epic fantasy can get and it was an incredible start to what should have been one of the best new series of the last ten years, except that we’re not getting the sequel because of publishing. Readers - Black Wolves is as good an epic fantasy novel as any that has been published in the last ten years and beyond, and even though I know that I am unlikely to get the follow up, I still heartily recommend everyone go read Black Wolves. You won’t be disappointed. (Joe's review) (Joe)

Infomocracy by Malka Older (2016) Informocracy is a bold and brilliant thought experiment on democracy, a novel which takes as its starting point a not-too-distant future where many nation states have dissolved in favour of a system of microdemocracy in which "centenal" units of one hundred thousand people elect their governments from a range of globally-active parties. What makes this possible, we are told, is the global system of Information, which provides an augmented reality fact-check to citizens in all parts of their daily lives, providing a particularly important service when it comes to the once-a-decade elections. Of course, with a new global system comes a new global bureaucracy, and Informocracy follows a couple of cogs in that machine - idealistic campaign manager Ken and Information agent (and maybe a spy) Mishima - as they try to keep the system working over a particularly hot election cycle.

What makes Informocracy special is not just the world it creates, but the book's ability to engage and invest us in the agency of its main characters, while still showing their relative helplessness in the face of the global political system they operate in. By introducing the concept of narrative disorder - a compulsion to fit objectively unrelated or coincidental occurrences into a satisfying but misleading single story - Older's series presents a political thriller that questions the very foundations that allow it to exist, while still delivering something that satisfies on all the levels that matter. Like many books on this list, it's here because its stayed with me well beyond reading, and I hope it's a book we continue to associate with our own political moment when we're looking back on genre in future decades. (Charles' review) (Adri)

Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (2016): Reading Every Heart a Doorway was like coming home again to a story that I didn’t know that I had lost. It is a beautiful and heart wrenching story of kids who don’t belong anywhere except perhaps the one place they can’t get back to. Every Heart a Doorway is a portal fantasy where all of those kids who went through a wardrobe or a secret door and had adventures and a place to belong had to come home to a world that didn’t believe them and couldn’t understand them. What happens to those those kids when they come home? What happens is that Seanan McGuire writes a beautiful novel that seared itself so deep into my heart that it touched emotions I’m still not able to fully talk about almost four years later.

I wrote about the novel, “Perhaps moreso than any other book I am likely to read this year, my emotional response to Every Heart a Doorway has everything to do with who I am now and who I was when I was a teenager. I wish this is a story I could have discovered when I was twelve. I love this book with a warm and full heart as an adult, but I would have lived in Every Heart a Doorway as a child. I would have made friends with these children even though their experiences were so alien to mine. I can't imagine that I would have noticed that Nancy is asexual and that Kale is trans, or that I would have understood either concept. That part of the story wasn't for the child I was, but each of those elements are very much for other kids who would never see who they were in a story like this one. It matters that it doesn't matter for the story, if that makes sense.”

It is a beautiful, beautiful novel and I am so glad that it exists in the world. (Joe's review) (Joe)

Jade City, by Fonda Lee (2017): You've never read epic fantasy quite like this. The opening volume of Lee's Green Bone saga introduces readers to the island of Kekon, a culturally Asian island shrugging off decades of occupation and now ruled by rival gang families trained up in using bioreactive jade to power feats of martial arts prowess. The narrative follows various members of the No Peak clan - clan leader Kaul Lan and his siblings, the loyal but vicious Hilo and reluctantly repatriated sister Shae, as well as Anden, a cousin in his final year of training to be a Green Bone - as they try to see off challenges from the rival Mountain clan, as well as responding to wider geopolitical factors shaping the destiny of Kekon. Lee's writing is nothing short of outstanding in the way it brings the world of the Kauls to life, whether it's depicting regular scenes of Janloon street life or cinematically showcasing the supernatural powers of the Green Bone warriors. And, of course, it's all in service of a story that had me absolutely hooked from beginning to end, as we watch (possibly through our fingers) as the Kauls and their allies fight, torture, murder, get murdered, fall in love, make business deals (sensible or otherwise), fail to impress elderly parents, fight some more, and otherwise make difficult choices in service of family, honour and jade. (Adri's review) (Adri)

The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (2019): It is a bold move to describe a book from the current year as one of the decade’s best, but The Light Brigade is a bold novel in the tradition of Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and Old Man’s War - which is not an opportunity to simply list the titles of significant military science fiction novels but a recognition of where The Light Brigade should be considered in a larger science fiction conversation and as to which novels get to be held up of classics of the genre which revitalize and engage with its past. The Light Brigade does all of that while telling a strong story about a soldier in the middle of an absolutely messed up war that is messed up even further when her combat drops sometimes place her in the wrong battle at the wrong time. Dietz is often not when she is supposed to be, and Hurley ties together all of the complicated timelines and fits it together perfectly. (Paul's review) (Joe)


As we discussed in the introduction we couldn't leave well enough alone and just live by a list of 9 novels which we believe are some of the best of the decade. And even after putting together our honorable mentions, there are still novels we feel like were just on the cusp of making the list. Joe nearly included The Calculating Stars and An Unkindness of Ghosts, and Adri regretfully left off Monstress and Ninefox Gambit. There have been so many excellent novels these last ten years, and here's a few more that we thought were pretty great.

Adri’s Honourable Mentions

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (2015): Zen Cho's Sorcerer Royal books are set in an alternate regency world where magic and faerie are everyday parts of life for many people, but magic in Britain is considered entirely the province of elite white men, closeted away in an academy while elite young women with magic attend special academies to repress their powers and people outside the elite are left to their own various devices. It's only when the position of Sorcerer Royal falls, through an accident of bonded familiars, to Black former slave Zacharias Wythe, raised by the former holder of the post as part son and part racist curiosity, that the rest of the establishment finds itself confronting the realities of their own changing society. Meanwhile, Zacharias' attempt to hold on to the post brings him into contact with Prunella Gentleman, mixed-race ward of a women's "magic" school and a powerful, irrepressible force of nature in her own right. Racism and elitism in the British empire are heavy subjects, but Cho is able to use the conventions and wit of a Regency novel to eviscerate the white supremacist assumptions and the ridiculousness of the characters upholding them, all while offering a brilliant, hilarious adventure in a compelling alternate world. I loved it. (We missed reviewing this, but here's Adri's review of Book 2, The True Queen)

After Atlas, by Emma Newman (2016). Because of the time at which I read Planetfall, Emma Newman's series of a dystopian Earth - and the various factors and faiths that cause people to leave it - is embedded in my brain as a foundational example of science fiction. From the troubled, grief-stricken extrasolar colony of Planetfall itself, to the claustrophobic, unsettling mysteries of the Martian colony in Before Mars, the series combines a challenging vision of a future under technologically advanced capitalism, with a realistic but always compassionate look at what happens to people trying to survive, and their own personal traumas and mental health challenges. For this list, though, my pick has to be After Atlas, the story of Carlos Moreno, a corporate indenture investigating the murder of the leader of a religious cult - who also happens to be a figure from his own difficult childhood. Carlos' journey to figure out the truth leads him to uncover secrets both past and present about the Atlas mission, and the powerful figures attempting to control it, and humanity's access to the stars. It's a compelling mystery, but what really brings After Atlas to life is its vision of future life: where people and their rights can be bought and sold by corporations, "real" food is an unimaginable luxury to the majority of the population, and intrusive AR advertising is a reality for anyone not wealthy enough to turn off the algorithms that control it. Terrifying in its real-world implications, and compelling in its treatment of characters, After Atlas is by far my favourite "dystopia" of the decade, and a book that everyone should check out. (Sorry, we don't have a review of any of the Planetfall novels, but they're delightful)

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019): This Is How You Lose the Time War is perhaps the weirdest book on this list - an epistolary romance between two rival agents for immensely powerful future factions ("techy-mechy" Agency and "viney-hivey" Garden), charting their travels through dimensions as they try to nudge futures in the direction of their respective overlords, and the letters they leave each other in various ephermeal forms throughout the timeline. In my review for Strange Horizons, I said that This Is How You Lose The Time War's greatest strength is "its exquisitely pitched story of romantic connection and its ability to bring all other aspects of the novella—its epistolary form, its expansive and yet understated worldbuilding, its themes of connection and agency and change—into the service of that emotional core. It's a romance whose portrayal of human connection is all the more powerful for the fact that it takes place between two beings who are otherwise not comprehensible to us, leaving their hopes, fears, and longing as the only elements left for a reader to cling to, and thus turning the love between Red and Blue into the most important thing in an unimaginably large multidimensional time war." I also mentioned it was the only book of 2019 to make me cry, and while that's not quite true any more (but that's a story for next decade's roundup) it still stands out as one of the most pure emotional experiences I have had reading a book - all the more incredible for the fact that it packs such a punch in novella length. (Paul's Review)

Joe's Honorable Mentions

 

Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer (2014): I find myself at a loss as to how to talk about Annihilation. There’s an expedition into Area X, the location doesn’t exactly matter but it’s in the American South presumably somewhere in Florida. What we know is that we don’t know anything. Area X is weird, it is unexplained - nobody knows exactly how or when it appeared and took over the land - and it is largely unexplored even though there have been eleven previous expeditions to do so. They haven’t gone well. This is the twelfth expeidtion.

Annihilation is weird, a little obscure, thrilling, occasionally claustrophobic, terrifying, and absolutely fantastic. I’m not sure there’s another novel like it, not even Authority or Acceptance - the two follow up novels to Annihilation. There are also few other novels this decade that have stuck with me for as long as this one has. I find myself thinking about the novel again and again, never quite getting anywhere with my thoughts but just wondering and letting the atmosphere of my memory wash over me. Even that is unsettling, just like everything is in the book. It’s an exceptional novel. (G's Review) (Joe)

 

Uprooted, by Naomi Novik (2015): Readers of childhood fairy tales will find so much that is familiar in Uprooted, but Naomi Novik is holding up a twisted mirror to those fairy tales while still holding tightly to the heart of what we so love and remember. Novik may not be completely deconstructing fairy tales here, but she is definitely playing with the form.

The star, driving force, and shining heart of Uprooted is the character of Agnieszka. The more conventional fairy tale that Novik appears to be telling in the first chapter is not necessarily the one that we get as the novel progresses. Agnieszka appears to be a wilting character, shrinking back from the anger and ubruptness of the dragon. This is not who she becomes. Through her own strength of character and intelligence, Agnieszka begins to grow into the person she never would have dreamed she could or would become. The concept of this Agnieszka would have been as alien and as foreign to her as the reality of life at court. Though still raw and impulsive, the progression of the novel begins to give her the seasoning required to not only help in the fight against The Wood, but also to become the sort of character parents will want to use as an example to their children.

Fairy tales are for kids, right? Uprooted straddles that line. It is both very much a novel that adults can, should, and will appreciate. Adults will recognize many of the things that Novik is doing in tweaking some of the conventions of fairy tales, but will also enjoy the novel simply for what it is. Older kids will enjoy Uprooted for simply being a kick-ass book with an awesome heroine and an exciting story for which they simply must know what happens next. Naomi Novik has a little bit for everyone in Uprooted. (Joe's review) (Joe)

Into the Drowning Deep, by Mira Grant (2017): If I told you that this was a novel about mermaids, you’d probably have visions of Disney and The Little Mermaid and maybe some vague sense of unease if you have recollections of historical depictions and sirens. Mira Grant’s mermaids are terrifying, compelling, and all too plausible. Grant herself said that the novel “does for mermaids what Jurassic Park did for velociraptors” and that’s entirely true. Into the Drowning Deep is a true page turner of the highest quality - you might not be able to sleep after, but you’ll want to stay up for one more page, one more chapter. (Joe's review) (Joe)



Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan

Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy. 

Questing in Shorts: October 2019

Greetings and welcome back to Questing in Shorts! After a month off I'm back to bring you more highlights from my journeys in short fiction. For some reason, September and October were months for proliferation in my subscription ebook folder, and the situation got a bit intense in there for a while. I've now caught up but at the expense of having any hope of catching up with actually logging all the stories I've read from 2019 for Hugo purposes. There are two ways things could go from here: either I get really into reading admin for a few hours between now and December and spend it on that, or I just hopelessly flail at my nominations and recommendations as I have in previous years. I'm trying so hard for the former, friends, for all our sakes - but time will tell.

Anyway, on with the stories:

... and other disasters by Malka Older

Malka Older's first short fiction collection is a chapbook-length affair from Mason Jar Press, bringing together both fiction and poetry into one beautifully curated package. Older's work particularly appeals to me because we're in not-dissimilar careers, so she brings a lot of experience to her fiction that I recognising and find illuminating. This came through strongest for me in stories which lay bare the expectations and power dynamics which travellers to other cultures bring with them - "The Rupture", about a young woman coming to study on a dying earth despite the protestations of her family about how dangerous it is, and "Tear Tracks", about the first diplomatic visit to an alien culture and one traveller's attempt to match up her communication, her perceived role and the very different situation in which she finds herself. Both are stories which, despite living in the perspective of their transient visitor protagonists (and maintaining sympathy for them), avoid othering the cultures being visited, and the result is something beautiful. There are a couple of more on-the-nose political explorations here too, including "The Divided," a story in which the USA literally becomes surrounded by an impenetrable barrier and the impact it has on those left outside, and "The End of the Incarnation", a piece whose parts are scattered through the rest of the collection and chronicle the break-up of the United States and speculate on what might come next.

What I found challenging about the stories in this collection are the lack of recognisable endings to most stories; most of the time, the focus on putting forward an experience for a set of protagonists rather than delivering a neatly-wrapped storytelling experience. On a craft level its an understandable choice for the kinds of narratives these are, and I appreciate the resistance to easy story beats and the nuance this adds to the scenarios in many of the stories. Unfortunately, when put together in a collection where this keeps happening, the frustration does linger from piece to piece, and I suspect I'd have had a better time if I'd broken up my reading of individual stories with other writing styles. Regardless, ...and other disasters is a great achievement, and well worth picking up for anyone interested in Older's writing.

Rating: 8/10

The Trans Space Octopus Congregation by Bogi Takács

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: titles don't come much better than this. Takács' debut short fiction collection (I believe e has also released a poetry collection this year) is the very best kind of "does what it says on the tin": the kind where the tin has an exquisite purple octopus on the front and the word "space" in a cursive font and queerness front and centre in the title. Its a cover holding a dense and varied set of stories, ranging from near-future slice of life to magical space speculation, all wound through with some fascinating thematic resonance and centring characters whose nuanced identities require no explanation or excuse, regardless of whether the characters experience marginalisation in their own contexts (and often they do). Themes of marginalisation and difference in all their forms are ever present, whether they are front and centre of the narrative or just another consideration for characters to work in, and there's a nuanced treatment of how characters communicate across experiential divides, usually handled with sympathy though not always with success, that makes for some great interpersonal arcs packed into the small packages here.

Another theme that jumped out of me while reading was the many stories that deal with how people maintain community and tradition: whether it be the octopus protagonists of "Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus" or "A Superordinate Set of Principles", the deeply affecting refugee/alien invasion story of "Given Sufficient Desperation", or the many stories centring Jewish communities (spacefaring and otherwise). Takács makes an art form of offering up windows into worlds which don't feel the need to overexplain or overcomplicate their specific, nuanced traditions, while still ensuring that everything feels deliberate and well-placed within the story contexts. Particularly in more overtly science fictional stories, it feels like there's a deliberate rejection of the dichotomy between the behaviour of "rational" human behaviour and the traditions of myth, belief and ritual which often get left at the door as soon as there's a spaceship involved. It helps that the prose is so consistently beautiful, offering an otherworldly quality even to more straightforward tales. I came out of The Trans Space Octopus Congregation feeling like in many ways I'd only skated the surface of what Takács had to show me in this collection, and I'm keen to see what e comes out with next.

Rating: 9/10

Beneath Ceaseless Skies (284, 287)

Beneath Ceaseless' Skies "two stories every two weeks" format has been posing an unfortunate challenge to my particular review capacity - individual issues feel like there isn't enough to talk about, but by the time I reach critical mass I've forgotten what stories are in which issues, and probably fallen behind on individual issues as well. A couple of issues have stood out over the past couple of months, though, hence the slightly eclectic issue selection in this roundup.

Issue 284 brings together a pair of stories which work beautifully together: both are tales told through an academic lens of dubious interpretive value, dealing with narratives within narratives and the unreliability of mirrors. If those feel like quite specific similarities, what's even more impressive is how different each story feels within those constraints: "The Mirror Dialogues" by Jason S. Ridler is a series of fragments which cover the relationship between a "mirror scribe" and their sovereign, and the way the relationship between the two shapes the world around them. It's a story which keeps the reader guessing as to what's real and what's really going on, and the academic lens really allows that uncertainty to shine, letting us look back at a fictional history as uncertain as our own and to make our own judgements about the external interpretation and the events themselves. In contrast, M.E. Bronstein's "Elegy of a Lanthornist" offers up the story, in her own words, of Isabel Hayes-Reyna, a scholar herself who is recognised for a groundbreaking interpretation of an earlier text, whose dark magical elements she herself starts to experience, with grim and apparently tragic consequences. Of course, because we are engaged as readers of fantasy, we are far more inclined to take Isabel's path of discovery seriously than her contemporaries, whose dismissive and pitying attitudes towards her apparent disappearance come across more as condescending than as an interpretation to be taken equally seriously. An impressive pair made stronger by the pairing.

Of equal note is the double Issue 287, with four original stories - all quite long - for our reading pleasure. We start off with a darkly humorous entry from K.J. Parker, "Portrait of the Artist", about a young woman who has discovered a rather unpleasant way to try and raise the capital for an investment that should bring her feckless family out of (relative) destitution. Its a story whose protagonist is deeply engaging despite not exactly being sympathetic, and the recurring motif on the value of money - and other things - is darkly entertaining and also plays with our sympathies in interesting ways. The issue follows that up with "Sankalpa", a time-skipping reincarnation story from Marie Brennan, drawing on Indian myth to tell the story of a woman engineering a revenge that's lifetimes and huge wars in the making.

"One Found in a World of the Lost" weaves together the story of two very different twins, Pavitra and Gayatri, living in a community increasingly struggling to survive against the will of the ground they live on. When Gayatri, the far better hunter of the two, is killed unexpectedly, Pavitra has to deal with her loss and with her own feelings of self-worth and the skills she feels she lacks in comparison to her sister. Its a story that deals well with self-worth and coming into one's own in an intriguing setting. Finally, there's "The Witch of the Will" by Aaron Perry, about a witch who, having removed free will from a King, is asked to do the same thing by a young man who then forces her to deal with the consequences of his predictable actions. It's a story whose lighthearted, matter-of-fact tone hides a really dark core, and it packs a hefty punch into the decades of events it covers in its short length.

Rating: 8/10 for both of these standout issues.

The Dark, Issue 52

Three quarters of the stories in this issue of The Dark deal with women looking, in some way, for better lives, but that's basically the only thing they have in common. In "Brigid Was Hung By Her Hair From the Second Story Window" (original), Gillian Daniels tells the story of an immigrant from Ireland to Boston, who accepts an offer of marriage from the man who brought her over as a maid, only to have to give things up for a magical escape when his abuse becomes too much. She's given a second chance in the form of a better second marriage, but the feeling that there will be a reckoning for the "magic" which enabled her escape is borne out in a twisted way in the story's final words. The title is a great stylistic choice here, drawing attention to a turning point that otherwise could feel matter-of-fact in the everyday abuse of Brigid's first marriage, and underscoring her lack of agency and draws attention to the lengths she feels she has to go to in order to have even the most basic choices about her life. The issue's second story, "Our Town's Talent" (reprint), is told from the nameless collective perspective of a traditional modern town's wives, on the occasion of their childrens' school's annual talent show. After all the effort which goes into preparing their children to showcase their talents, a newcomer to the town rocks the boat by holding a show of her own in which a winner will be chosen, and upsets the balance of the town in a way that's unexpected and yet wholly fitting for a tale of this kind. Its a story which ends up being about agency, challenging our assumptions about the value of the undifferentiated feminine chorus at its heart and their complicity in their own mundane oppression. The result is something that, while not exactly uplifting, offers a form of escape that I found surprisingly satisfying.

Providing the second original story in this issue is Ruoxi Chen, with "The Price of Knives": a Chinese take on the Little Mermaid that ties elements of the myth to the historical practice of foot-binding. Its a story that could end badly for its mermaid protagonist, who makes a choice between giving up her voice or the sensation of walking on knives as the "price" for transformation (she chooses the price of song), only to discover a society on land that she has no chance of fitting in to, with a Prince whose professed affection for her ends up being as hollow as we'd expect. When foot binding takes away her autonomy and ability to walk, the mermaid finds an escape that will allow her to regain what she's lost, at a price that this time she's very willing to pay. Like "Our Town's Talent", the voice of the collective which tells this story is a great device, this time adding to the growing threat as we wonder who the second-person narrative, with all its asides about what the listener already knows, is aimed towards. Rounding out this month's offering is “All My Relations” by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada (reprint), an own voices Hawai'ian story about how annoying disrespectful divers with cameras can be. I mean, no, it's not really about that, but I definitely relate to the "monster" here for that and many other reasons, and its a brilliant, dark story with teeth that made me add the anthology series its drawn from onto my Christmas list for this year.

Rating: 7/10

Clarkesworld Issues 155 and 156

I've had back issues of Clarkesworld piling up for the past few months as well, and in making the effort to catch up I read through August and September in quick succession. August turned out to be a great point at which to pick things back up, with some stories that run the gamut from fun slice-of-life (Harry Turtledove's scenes from an alternate-ice-age-Yorkshire vet employing an ingenious solution to a local mammoth's broken tusk) to heartbreaking human moments (Rachel Swirsky's "Your Face", about a mother visiting a "backup" of her daughter several years after her death). The story that took me most by surprise was Chen Qiufan's "In this Moment, We Are Happy", translated (seamlessly) by Rachel Kuang, which takes the form of a three-part documentary script on childbirth and technology over a period of decades. It's a surprisingly evocative format, and I found I could really follow along with not just the narratives themselves, but the descriptions of videography used in different scenes, the way things were cut together, all adding up to something that felt really tangible as the "intended" medium as well as the medium we actually have. In the three parts of the documentary, Chen weaves together a surrogate mother and a parent-to-be seeking to use a surrogate; followed by a man who has become pregnant for an artistic stunt and a same-sex female couple giving birth using only their genetic material; and finally a far-future fertility cult which is apparently developing a controversial transhumanist approach to a further-future reproductive crisis. Its all handled in a way that's deeply sympathetic to all of the characters, normalising queerness and offering agency and respect to characters from marginalised identities; even the male artist, whose motives are interrogated as selfish and bizarre, is offered a humanising arc, although it's the bluntest tool in a generally quite subtle toolbox. As is often the case in documentaries, there's no answers or single narrative line here - just windows into the lives of people whose different experience add up to something which resonates on a broader level. I found myself tearing up at the end of this story, having felt that I really had watched a window into these different peoples' lives through a camera lens.

Compared to August, September was slightly more subdued, although there's still some fun stuff here. "Dave's Head", by Suzanne Palmer, features a road trip with the titular object, who also happens to be a sentient animatronic dinosaur from an abandoned theme park. The story itself is just as weird and wonderful and surprisingly poignant as that sounds. I also greatly enjoyed the long novelette "To Catch All Sorts of Flying Things" by M.L. Clark, a mystery about interspecies cooperation and rights to life on a planet colonised by multiple species with more to it than initially meets the eye. While I struggle to keep up with Clarkesworld, and not all of their stories hit the spot for me, there's still a lot to enjoy in the kind of meaty short-form science fiction they publish, and the continued commitment to translated works is also a huge bonus.

Rating: 8/10 for August, 7/10 for September

POSTED BY: Adri Joy, Nerds of a Feather Co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reading the Hugos: Series

There are a few Hugo Award categories for which I like to look up the actual category description in the WSFS Constitution. Best Series isn’t so much a weird category like Related Work, but it does have a particular set of requirements that cause it to operate differently than the other fiction categories. In general, a short story only has one shot at winning a Hugo – the year after it is published. The exception is when a shorter work is expanded into a longer work and is “substantially modified”. For example, “Beggars in Spain” (Nancy Kress) won a Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1992 and was a finalist for Best Novel in 1994. Best Series is a different animal altogether because long running series may have multiple opportunities at the ballot provided the new material meets the wordcount of an additional 240,000 words (and at least two new installments, but that part seems to be the easier to achieve).

3.3.5: A multi-Installment science fiction or fantasy story, unified by elements such as plot, characters, setting, and presentation, appearing in at least three (3) installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words by the close of the previous calendar year, at least one (1) installment of which was published in the previous calendar year, and which has not previously won under 3.3.5.

3.3.5.1: Previous losing finalists in the Best Series category shall be eligible only upon the publication of at least two (2) additional installments consisting in total of at least 240,000 words after they qualified for their last appearance on the final ballot and by the close of the previous calendar year.

This is worth mentioning now because 2019 is the third year of the Best Series category and the second appearance of Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series because McGuire has published two additional novels (The Brightest Fell, Night and Silence) as well as some short fiction set in that universe. I wouldn’t be shocked to see McGuire’s InCryptid make a second appearance next year, and I also expect to see The Expanse to have its own second crack at the ballot, though with The Expanse I hope readers wait one more year for the ninth (and final?) volume to be published so that The Expanse can be considered as a completed work.

I’m curious what this says about the long term future and health of the category if we see some of the same series make repeat appearances. Of course, we can (and do) say the same thing about a number of “down the ballot” categories like Fanzine (we do appreciate being on the ballot for the third year in a row!), Semiprozine, and the Editor categories.

This doesn’t speak against any particular finalist on this or any other year. As you’ll see when you read through my commentary, October Daye is my pick for Best Series this year and may well be my pick if it doesn’t win this year and makes another appearance in two or three years. What is interesting to me is that the rules for Best Series allow for a really solid cross section of the sort of series work being published each year. There are completed trilogies, a very loose series of shorter stories, and ongoing series for which the author may not have a fixed end point in mind. I am very interested to see how Best Series may evolve in the coming years.

Before that evolution happens, though, let’s take a look at this year’s finalists for Best Series.

The Centenal Cycle, by Malka Older (Tor.com publishing)
The Laundry Files, by Charles Stross (most recently Tor.com publishing/Orbit)
Machineries of Empire, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
The October Daye Series, by Seanan McGuire (most recently DAW)
The Universe of Xuya, by Aliette de Bodard (most recently Subterranean Press)
Wayfarers, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)

The Laundry Files: I’m in an interesting position with The Laundry Files. I read the first two novels (The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue) as they were published and generally enjoyed them, as I did the novellas published around that time. I had a copy of the third volume, The Fuller Memorandum, for a number of years and I could never quite muster up the interest to actually pick the book up and read it. I’m curious about the progression of the series, the shifting viewpoint character moving off of Bob Howard.

Charles Stross is a writer I’ve long struggled with. The works for which he is most recognized for in regards to the Hugo Awards (Accelerando, Saturn’s Children, Halting State) are also the works I bounce the hardest off of. The Laundry Files bridges the gap between his Merchant Princes series which I generally enjoy and the harder science fiction which I generally do not. Though I can’t speak to how the series evolves over the course of the nine main sequence novels, those first two novels did feature some of those stylistic choices which grate on me. When discussing cases or things of a military nature with codenames, we get CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN in all caps, which on its own is fine, but when coming up in a conversation about multiple missions we get pages laced with phrases in all capital letters. It’s a small thing, but it’s a small thing that makes me cringe as a reader. As a whole, The Laundry Files has story beats and ideas that I think are fascinating, but they are laced with aspects of Stross’s writing that I just don’t appreciate.

It is worth noting that two of Stross’s three Hugo Award wins have come from Laundry Files novellas (“The Concrete Jungle” and “Equoid”).

The Universe of Xuya: There is nothing on the ballot quite like Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe, nor has there been in the relatively short three year existence of the Best Series category. The fiction of The Xuya Universe is an alternate history leading into an alternate future where Xuya (a significant Chinese colony in North America) and Dai Viet (Vietnam) are major players in interstellar colonization (what a gross simplification) and all of the Xuya stories are set within that Chinese and Vietnamese influenced universe. Xuya is comprised of a small number of novellas and a larger number of short stories, but unlike the other ongoing series on this year’s Hugo ballot, Xuya is telling discrete stories within a larger universe that doesn’t necessarily have any connections to each other than being part of that larger universe. Aliette de Bodard is building a past and future history of the world and the galaxy and these stories are the building blocks.

What that means is that there is much less of a sense of a unified story being told because this isn’t that sort of universe. The events of On a Red Station, Drifting have nothing to do with those of The Citadel of Weeping Pearls which have nothing to do with The Tea Master and the Detective, let alone the shorter stories. Some of those stories are available online for free, others are spread across magazines and anthologies – which does mean that a reader needs to be reading widely in the field (or actively following Aliette de Bodard) to have a chance at reading them all. A sampling of works were included in the Voter Packet. Individually, the stories have the high quality readers have come to expect from de Bodard. Taken together as the foundation for a wider universe alternate history / future, this is an impressive feat of worldbuilding. Taken as a “series” in comparison to the other “series” on the Hugo ballot, I’m not sure it stands up quite as well – but that may just be my personal bias for more tightly connected series speaking.

The Centenal Cycle: The idea of being hopeful about democracy and elections is refreshing and has only become more so since the publication of Infomocracy in 2016, but Malka Older presents a vision of a global “microdemocracy” with the world divided into “centenals”, groupings of approximately 100,000 people. Nations are (mostly) no longer a thing. There are still political parties, but many of them are global parties striving for the most centenals in order to gain a “super majority” for the world government. There is still corruption and shady dealings, but the idea of Information (think Google on steroids, and truly operating with “don’t be evil” as a core tenant) as a force for knowledge and election security is a welcome one. Of course, what Older introduces in Infomocracy gets subverted and suborned by the events of Null States and State Tectonics. As with anything presumably utopian, the question should always be “utopian for whom?” and it is worth interrogating if that utopia is built on the back of something else or what gets left out of that utopia, whether by choice or force.

Older plays with some of those ideas while still maintaining the hopeful aspect of microdemocracy and elections throughout the three volumes of the Centenal Cycle. Infomocracy was one of my favorite novels published in 2016, with the perfect melding of set up and execution. If all three novels hit me in just the same way as Infomocracy, this would be a nearly perfect trilogy. As it stands, I was disappointed with Null States. This may be more to do with my particular expectations going into Null States and Older told a much different story than I might have expected. Realistically, I should re-read the trilogy (and Null States in particular), but so much of what worked for me in Infomocracy was missing in Null States. Legitimately, the novel focuses on what happens in those regions which choose not to engage in microdemocracy and are left out of Information. State Tectonics brings the story back inside of Information, and considers whether Information and the current centenal system is perhaps only a step in a process towards a more equitable future and not the end goal itself. There are threats (both internal and external), conspiracies (likewise) and it is a thrilling look at one possible future of democracy.

Each volume of the Centenal Cycle is quite different from the others, but together they work to form a fairly coherent whole that in some ways is greater than the individual parts (as great as I found two of those parts). If nothing else, these novels offer hope in the echoes of a contemporary political arena that seems to offer none. Older offers a way forward, and that is something valuable and worth holding on to.

Machineries of Empire: Machineries of Empire is one of two completed series in this category (the other being The Centenal Cycle, of course) which both makes it easier and more difficult to consider in comparison to the other finalists because unlike previous years, the other four finalists are true ongoing / episodic series rather than a part of an unfinished whole (see The Expanse in 2017 and The Stormlight Archive in 2018). Also notable, each of the three novels comprising Machineries of Empire have been Hugo Award finalists for Best Novel.

What I find interesting is my reaction to Machineries of Empire in this category. Each of the three novels are superb, one of the best of their respective publications years. And yet…I don’t get the feeling that the novels truly coalesce into a whole series, though each novel is informed by the one before and it builds as does any series. It does build an overall story of Kel Cheris and Shuos Jedeo and the working against the calendrical system of the Hexarchate, but I wouldn’t recommend Machineries of Empire to someone as a series. I’d tell them to go read Ninefox Gambit right away because it’s awesome, though give it a bit of time to get your mind right reading it. All three novels are fantastic, and strangely it feels as loose of a series as Wayfarers.

Wayfarers:  One of the things I find interesting about the Wayfarers series is that, like Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe, Becky Chambers is building a universe rather than building a particular story arc for characters. Seanan McGuire’s October Daye novels are focused on the character of October Daye, and while McGuire expands our understanding of that setting and of various backstories and relationships, the series moves Toby Daye forward. Becky Chambers does not do that, though we’re comparing a series of three novels so far to Seanan McGuire’s twelve October Daye novels. Things could change down the line and Chambers may well elect to return to the crew of the Wayfarer. Until then, each of the three (so far) Wayfarers novels features a different set of characters in a different part of that universe, though A Closed and Common Orbit spins off one character from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Record of a Spaceborn Few, however, takes something only previously mentioned (The Exodus Fleet) and expands on that hint as a standalone story.

Chambers has been rightfully lauded for her positive science fiction. That’s not really a sub genre classification, but does get to the lighter tone of the novels and while Chambers is not attempting to tell a utopian story, the protagonists are generally good people trying to do their best and live decent lives. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet has been described as reminiscent of Firefly with perhaps less dickishness in the crew. The novel does have the feel of the show, only with yet more optimism. The other two novels tell very different sorts of stories, but the overall light touch of Becky Chambers is welcome and refreshing. Two of the three published novels in this series have been finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel (and I suspect The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet would have been a finalist had it not been previously been self published and lost its eligibility window by the time it was published by Harper Voyager and gained wider visibility).

October Daye: When I read Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue in 2013 I was not impressed. It was fine, but something about it just wasn’t for me and I didn’t put anymore thought into the series except that McGuire was writing some really great books that I loved as Mira Grant (the Newsflesh novels) and under her own name (Every Heart a Doorway) and I thought maybe I should give October Daye another chance. The series was first a Hugo Award finalist for Best Series in 2017, the first year of the category, and that solidified my plan to make a serious push on the series (as did winning the first nine novels in a giveaway and having them sit on my shelf and taunt me). I was told that I needed to read at least the second, if not the third novel, because *then* the October Daye novels get really good and if I’m not hooked by that point, I might as well let them go. So, five years after reading the first book, I read A Local Habitation. Readers, I was hooked, though it took me *another* year to read An Artificial Night because I took a detour into McGuire’s excellent InCryptid novels when *they* made it onto the ballot for Best Series (and I love InCryptid dearly), but now I’m back, I’m in, and I’m going to read a lot of October Daye this year.

At this point, I’ve read through the first four novels of the series having recently finished Late Eclipses and I am here and I am ready. I find it interesting that Toby Daye is explicitly described as a “hero” in these novels, suggesting that it might almost be a formal role in faerie (her liege, Sylvester, noted that he was once a hero himself). Four novels into the series, McGuire seems to be exploring what it means to be a hero and what it costs. Toby’s job, her responsibility is to be a knight in Sylvester’s court, accomplishing tasks he sets for her. But “hero” is also a state of mind that has nothing to do with purity of body or necessarily being inherently special. Here, it is a driving desire to do the job, to save those who need saving no matter what the personal cost. October Daye isn’t a hero who rides in on a horse, and she seldom truly goes it alone to solve what needs solving, but she is a hero who almost recklessly risks herself. It’s what heroes do.

The October Daye novels are exactly the sort of thing the Best Series category can and should recognize. As good as they are, any individual novel in this series is extraordinarily unlikely to make the final ballot for Best Novel. The Hugo Awards tend not to recognize this sort of urban fantasy for Best Novel. The series as a whole, however, is where October Daye shines. The novels are fantastic and they build a world readers want to come back to time and time again without any slacking off on the part of Seanan McGuire. This is top notch fiction and I hope to see McGuire bring home the rocket for October Daye.


My Vote
1. October Daye
2. Wayfarers
3. Machineries of Empire
4. The Centenal Cycle
5. Universe of Xuya
6. The Laundry Files


Our Previous Coverage
Novel
Novella
Novelette
Short Story
Related Work
Graphic Story 
Professional and Fan Artist 


Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.