Reading the Hugos: John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos: 2019 Edition! Today we're going to look at the writers up for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

I know. I know. The Campbell is "Not a Hugo". It is only "administered" by the World Science Fiction Society. It is sponsored by Dell Magazines. But, beyond those technicalities, I'm not sure I really care much about the distinction. It's not a Hugo. It's totally a Hugo. It's not a Hugo.

The Campbell is an award for a writer whose "first work of science fiction or fantasy was published in a professional publication in the previous two years." See here for eligibility rules, but it mostly follows the SFWA definition of professional publication or professional rates above a nominal fee. With the vagaries of publication, short story writers can be somewhat disadvantaged if they get one story published professionally and then years pass before they are truly noticed or place additional stories. Novels often make larger splashes, even if there is only one published in the eligibility window.

It is not unusual to have some overlap year to year, but a cursory glance through the last several decades of finalists suggests that it is unusual for four of the finalists to be the same from the previous year. With that in mind, I am going to recycle some of my thoughts from last year, making minor changes where appropriate.

Let's see how big of splash everyone has made over the last two years. It's a weird category.

Katherine Arden
S.A. Chakraborty
R.F. Kuang
Jeannette Ng
Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Rivers Solomon


Jeannette Ng: Ng is one of four writers on the Campbell ballot on the back of a single novel, which for a novelist is not necessarily unusual because there is only a two year eligibility window. Under the Pendulum Sun is Ng's debut novel. In Victorian England, a missionary who journeyed to the realm of faerie in order to proselytize and bring the fae to Christ, has disappeared. Catherine Helstone, his sister, undertakes her own search of faerie and the estate of Gethsemane to find him.

Under the Pendulum Sun is beautifully written and atmospheric as hell. The weight and weirdness of Arcadia shines through on every page. The novel feels Victorian without bogging the reader down with faux Victorian prose. The only problem, and this is quite clearly my problem and not Ng's is that there is something about the novel that I struggled to engage with and care about. There was a distance growing between me and Under the Pendulum Sun and it wasn't one I cared enough to overcome. It's a weird dichotomy, understanding the novel is a beautifully written piece of fiction and still not being able to fully appreciate it. Even so, that's where I'm at with this.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Prasad is on the Campbell ballot on the strength of four stories. Two of them, "A Series of Steaks" and "Fandom For Robots" were finalists last year for the Hugo Awards for Novelette and Short Story, respectfully. "Portrait of Skull with Man" (Fireside Fiction, 2017) and "Pistol Grip" (Uncanny, 2018) were not Hugo Award finalists.

It continues to be a difficult and uncomfortable thing to compare and rack and stack writers against each other. The stories, yes, but this is an award for Best New Writer. Are Prasad's four stories stronger than the single novels of Rivers Solomon, Jeannette Ng, R.F. Kuang, and S.A. Chakraborty or the two eligible novels from Katherine Arden?

That's the real challenge here. Both of the Hugo finalist stories are quite good and show an author I want to follow and read more from, the story from Fireside is a trippy bit of goodness, and I really have no idea what to say about "Pistol Grip". The stories are all high quality, but for this award, I'm not sure that they truly measure up to the best of the novels.


Katherine Arden: Arden is eligible for the Campbell following the publication of her novels The Bear and the Nightingale and The Girl and the Tower. Comparatively, it is more similar to Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun in that the prose is more deliberate and beautiful on a sentence level than City of Brass or An Unkindness of Ghosts. That’s the only worthwhile comparison to the other novels because they are all so different in tone and function and story and emotion. The Bear and the Nightingale touches on Russian folklore and is a tight family story mostly set in remote regions of Russia.

I absolutely want to see more from Katherine Arden (and hey, she’s written two more books in the Winternight sequence that began with The Bear and the Nightingale). She’s an author to watch and follow and I’m as excited to read The Girl in the Tower as I am to see what she’s doing ten years from now. The Bear and the Nightingale is the announcement of a major new talent. It’s a slow burn of a novel, but it pays off and it sucks you in.


S.A. Chakraborty: Oh, how I regret having waited so long to read City of Brass. The novel had been on the periphery of my attention since it was published in 2017 and I'm not sure if I would have picked it up if not for Chakraborty making the Campbell ballot this year. I would have missed out. City of Brass is a spectacular debut and is damn near an instant favorite. Chakraborty blends 18th century Cairo with fantasy, the magic of the djinn are very real and there is a culture at war with itself and sometimes with the human world. I don't have the words to describe City of Brass in a way that the beauty of the novel comes across as deeply as it hit me from the start. Chakraborty's writing is smooth as silk and it draws the reader in to one hell of a story.

City of Brass would have been on my Hugo ballot had I read it upon publication, but I appreciate that I have this one more opportunity to recognize Chakraborty's novel. S.A. Chakraborty is a novelist to watch and I'll be there for this year's Kingdom of Copper (not eligible for consideration as part of Chakraborty's Campbell nomination, if you're more fortunate than me and have already read it).


R.F. Kuang: The age of a writer has no particular bearing on her ability to produce outstanding work nor does it say much about the amount of time that writer has put into learning her craft. A writer in her fifties may have only one or two years into developing as a writer while a writer in her twenties may have been writing every day for more than a decade and working to improve and tell better stories. Which is to say that I did a small amount of research to figure out who the youngest winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer was out of curiosity. R.F. Kuang was 22 when The Poppy War was published and when the Hugo / Campbell Award finalists were announced. She is now 23. As near as I can tell, the youngest winner of the Campbell was Lisa Tuttle, who was 21 when she tied Spider Robinson in the voting for the Campbell in 1974 (though I *think* E Lily Yu was fairly young when she won in 2012) . This really isn’t much more than an interesting data point because there is no one path to professional publication and the window for a Campbell nomination is so small for a writer to get noticed. It’s the sort of trivia I find interesting, if not particularly meaningful.

The Poppy War is an extraordinarily accomplished novel. It has echoes of a coming of age story set in a military academy, except that your average coming of age story doesn’t go a fraction as hard as R.F. Kuang goes with The Poppy War. Kuang is unrelenting. When I wrote about the novel in wrapping up my Top 9 Books of 2018, I wrote that “there’s a very real sense of ‘if this is what I did to get here, what do you think I’ll do to stay here?’ It’s brutal from the start.” That also means that even the part of the book that is about training and school is flipped on its head when the hinted war breaks out. At that point The Poppy War almost feels like two different novels, similar to how Full Metal Jacket plays out. It’s a difficult task to decide between R.F. Kuang and Rivers Solomon as the “Best New Writer”, though that difficulty is definitive of how good the new class of writers coming up is and I can’t wait to see what Kuang (and Solomon) have in store for us in the coming years.


Rivers Solomon: Solomon is here on the strength of An Unkindness of Ghosts, a debut that is as much a novel as it is a statement and announcement of arrival. I have long loved the concept and often the execution of a generation ship, but I have never read anything quite like An Unkindness of Ghosts. It is not uncommon to read a generation ship novel that focuses on the divide between the more affluent privileged class and the poor workers living in squalor in the underbelly on the ship. It is uncommon to read a generation ship novel that takes that conceit and drives a knife straight in the gut by running the ship like a plantation. The white overseers are in the upper decks and have significantly greater freedom and luxury. The darker skinned workers are exploited, stigmatized, and brutalized for their very existence.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is a deeply uncomfortable novel to read, but every time I put the book down for the night I immediately wanted to pick it up and keep reading deep into the night. Solomon describes their novel as "a science fiction meditation on trans-generational trauma, race, and identity" and if you take that into the novel, you can see what they are doing. Slavery and trans-generation trauma is central to the storytelling of Unkindess of Ghosts, but so is that idea of identity. Through the generational trauma, so much family and personal histories have been lost. Characters barely know who their parents were, let alone grandparents or farther back. More, Solomon's writing of their protagonist, Aster, is so vital and central to the novel. Aster's voice and characterization of a neurologically atypical narrator is so incredibly well done and distinctive that it is almost impossible to imagine the novel written any other way.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is an almost impossibly accomplished and incredible novel and marks Rivers Solomon as an essential writer to watch.


My Vote
1. Rivers Solomon
2. R.F. Kuang
3. S.A. Chakraborty
4. Katherine Arden
5. Vina Jie-Min Prasad
6. Jeannette Ng


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

Top Nine Books Published in 2018

Some people do a top ten list, others do a top eleven (insert your Spinal Tap joke here), yet others may only do five. My list is 9 books long. Why? Partly to be a little bit different and partly because I want the tenth spot on my list to be reserved for that really great book which I simply did not get the chance to read during 2018. That really great book may also be something I have only heard whispers about and I may not discover for several more years. Whatever that tenth great book is, I’m holding a spot for it on my list.

Also, there is no doubt that this list, like every other list out there is built entirely on the combination of the books I've actually read with my own prejudices, taste, preferences, and the choices I made when selecting books to read across the breadth of 2018. That's really what we're saying when we say we've put together a list of the "Best Books of the Year". It's the best we've read, the best we can remember, the best based on what we appreciate in speculative fiction. One of the other best books I've read this year is Nicola Griffith's latest novel So Lucky (my review), but this is a speculative fiction blog focusing on more nerdy endeavors, so for the sake of theme I'll limit this list to science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between and around the edges. With that said, I adore Nicola Griffith's fiction and everyone should go read her 1993 science fiction novel Ammonite (my review).

This Top Nine List is more or less in order.  The top two slots are a complete lock, but ask me tomorrow and some titles may shift around a bit.  Whichever order the list is in, these are the nine novels published in 2018 which I feel were the strongest titles of the year.

1. The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor): From my review: "More than just achieving a sense of wonder, the science of The Calculating Stars is magic. Kowal brings the dream of spaceflight beyond the page and into readers' hearts."  Most years there is at least one book that becomes a novel of my heart, that engages the core of who I want to be as a reader, that thrills and delights me, and that showers me in the warmth of its wonder. This year that novel is Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars.

Also from my review: "It's not just Elma overcoming everything stacked against her that makes The Calculating Stars such a fantastic read, it's the completely thrilling mundanity of a countdown towards a launch. It's the checklists and the waiting. It's tremendous and exhilarating. We've been on this journey with Elma for some four hundred pages and The Calculating Stars is beyond a sense of wonder. I'd say that it's magic, but it's science. It's near perfection." (my review)

2. The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager): Similar to Full Metal Jacket, The Poppy War is a novel split in two. The first part is Rin's arrival at Sinegard, her nation's highest military training school. She's an outsider, a nobody from nowhere with no family name. Kuang brings us through Rin's training, her singular drive to sacrifice anything, even herself, to survive and excel at the Sinegard. There's a very real sense of "if this is what I did to get here, what do you think I'll do to stay here?" It's brutal from the start. Kuang goes hard.  The second part  of the novel is the rumored war that everyone is training for. Kuang does not relent and it is simply excellent. (Adri's not quite a review)

3. Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga): From Paul's review: "There is plenty to love in Trail of Lighting, and Maggie as a main character is front and center the heart of the novel and she makes the novel sing. An indigenous woman granted supernatural powers that are complicated and make her an outsider by their very nature, Maggie’s life as a newly solo monster hunter is a fraught one."

Also: "The worldbuilding is top notch and a leading light of the power of #ownvoices. There is an authenticity to the myths and legends made supernatural manifest fact within the Sixth World that the author presents here. This is a post-apocalyptic world whose suipernatural denizens, threats and features felt like the author was truly delving deep into her own culture, understanding it and presenting it to us in context and the richness of what is on offer. And much of it is new to most readers and rich with details and ideas that I was very happy to have the author explore.  I particularly liked her interpretation of Coyote, the Trickster, who has an agenda for Maggie that only slowly becomes clear as the novel unfolds. But it is the things that go bump in the night, the entities that Maggic must encounter and fight, that shows the author’s invention the best." (Paul's review)

4. Beneath the Sugar Sky, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing): From my review: "Beneath the Sugar Sky is filled with wit and biting commentary on how children are perceived and all too often squeezed into boxes they don't belong in order to fit the ideas and dreams of their parents and other adults, and how pervasive that can be. It's also a delightful adventure story filled with charm and wonder and it's a book I did not quite want to end because I wasn't ready to say goodbye." (my review)

5. Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey): From Adri's review: "Despite its uncomfortable undertones, however, there's no question that this is one of the best books I've read in 2018 so far. As a technical accomplishment, it's excellent (except for the awkwardly stereotyped autistic-presenting character), hitting a perfect fairytale tone that weaves multiple character's lives together in a compelling way. There's plenty of kindness and positive relationships, especially between women and across cultures, to keep a reader company even during the story's darker turns. I recommend picking up Spinning Silver with eyes open and critical faculties engaged: much like that dark forest at the edge of the town, its not a place to be taken lightly, no matter how lovely it may look from the outside." (Adri's review)

6. Temper, by Nicky Drayden (Harper Voyager): I thought Prey of Gods was an excellent debut that showed Drayden's promise as a writer. Temper is Drayden leveling up. Everything that was good in Prey of Gods is better in Temper. In her review, Adri wrote that Temper was "a more focused story which instead channels its energy into a plot that soars precariously, like a skyscraper made out of playing cards holding up despite gravity saying otherwise. I came away from Temper entertained, impressed and more than a little confused, and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes their high tech fantasy with a heavy dose of inventive unpredictability." (Adri's review)

7. Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris): Set the third volume of a trilogy ten years after the second and have the primary viewpoint character be the resurrected famous genocidal general Shuos Jedao, except it is the significantly younger Jedao who has no memory of why he is famous, feared, or the strategies he might be expected to employ against Kel Cheris and adult Jedao with full memory. It's an interesting choice made by Yoon Ha Lee that fully pays off and makes Revenant Gun a satisfying conclusion to the Machineries of Empire space opera trilogy.

8. The Fated Sky, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor): I questioned myself whether to include The Fated Sky here. It is an exceptional novel, there is no question of that, but with The Calculating Stars already topping this list I didn't know if a second novel from the same series should take up another spot on the list.

"The Fated Sky may not have the same newness and sense of wonder that only a first book in a series can have, but it delivers in all the ways that matter. The raw joy of being in space is there. The amazement of landing on a new planet is palpable, where it doesn't matter if you are the first man or woman to place your foot on that soil. The simple fact of being there is wondrous and Mary Robinette Kowal manages to convey that emotion so perfectly the reader experiences it.  The Fated Sky stands well on its own, but when coupled with The Calculating Stars it is a masterpiece." (my review)

9. Taste of Wrath, by Matt Wallace (Tor.com Publishing): Attentive readers of Nerds of a Feather will remember how much I've loved Wallace's Sin du Jour novellas. Taste of the Wrath is the culmination of the seven volume journey that Matt Wallace has taken us own. It began with the "catering event of the week",  but built into a story of deep and wrenching emotion. Wallace has earned the ending here and Taste of Wrath is a truly satisfying conclusion to one of my favorite series. (my review)



As I mentioned in the introduction, for as many books as I read in a year, there is always something amazing that I missed and that I just didn't have time to get to. Or, as plugged in as I try to be, that I just haven't heard of (or heard enough about). As much as I wanted to, I did not read Red Moon (Kim Stanley Robinson), How Long Til Black Future Month (N.K. Jemisin), Semiosis (Sue Burke), Blackfish City (Sam J. Miller), Friday Black (Nana Adjei-Brenyah). The list of highly recommend and presumably stellar novels that I just didn't get to read this year is long and distinguished. That's the reason for the tenth spot on the list. 

Also it is worth noting the six books that just missed the list but were in serious contention: Space Opera (Catherynne M. Valente), Record of a Spaceborn Few (Becky Chambers), Armistice (Lara Elena Donnelly), Consuming Fire (John Scalzi), Mem (Bethany C. Morrow), State Tectonics (Malka Older),


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.  

Musings on The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang

A grimdark fantasy with distinctly millennial undertones.

This post won’t be so much a review as some musings since others, particularly S. Qiouyi Lu’s review, capture the cultural and historical nuances of R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War better than I could. Even so, the book moved me enough I want to write about it, and as it gains more and more readership, I’m not alone in my championing of the book.

The novel opens with a test. The Keju determines the limited placement of students at the academies, and war orphan Rin totally aces the exam, meaning she’s destined for military greatness if she doesn’t wash out Sinegard, the premiere military academy. Everything gets in her way from her lack of family connections, childhood of poverty, and gender. She catches a break when the eccentric master Jiang takes special interest in her. While his shamanism seems too mystical to be useful, Rin changes her mind when she’s visited by a god.

This description covers very little of the book, but I don’t want to give too much away. One of the things I loved is Kuang’s pacing. As suggested by the title, this book isn’t only focused on Rin’s early training but expands into the war that comes afterward. If reading that description reminded you of the most famous modern fantasy Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, then good. Kaung plays with many of the same beloved tropes from the eccentric mentor to Rin’s academic struggles. That being said, Kuang brings a different point of view to these moments, such as what happens when Rin menstruates for the first time (Kvothe never had to deal with that).

While I love fantasy novels like The Poppy War, Kuang’s story has taken a special slot on my shelf because, as a millennial, I connected to the novel on a generational level. No, Kuang did not include avocado toast. From the voice to history to worldbuilding, the novel captured how I so often feel as a millennial. While the USA school testing systems are vastly different than Chinese systems, I remember the pressure of the SATs and GREs--and the relief at performing well. Like Rin, millennials grew up in the shadow of a terrorist attack and hearing the propaganda surrounding a war. Due to income inequality, those millennials that made it into “the good schools” found a cultural gap caused by wealth. Like Kuang’s worldbuilding around opium and other hallucinogens, so many millennials have watched their hometowns and families destroyed by opioids while simultaneously voting for the legalization of marijuana. These issues have marked the millennial generation, and Kuang captures them on the page.

A final element worth mentioning is Kuang’s voice. Now don’t get me wrong, I love me some fantasy language. I will fight anyone who complains that Tolkien is “stilted.” The Poppy War walks the line of traditional fantasy language but with updates, such as this line from Rin’s mentor Jiang when another master suggests Jiang should consider what people would say about him training Rin alone: “Probably that a master of [my] rank and standing could do much better than dicking around with female students.” I’m pretty sure most 500+ page fantasies do not use the word “dicking.” Of course Kuang’s voice expands beyond slang to the dialogue, humor, pacing, and sentence structure.

The Poppy War is the modern fantasy I’ve been wishing for. As a fantasy reader and writer, I believe in the genre’s power to provide a new lens to view and explore societal issues. R. F. Kuang uses the genre to capture the struggles of millennials in a grimdark book that any reader of modern fantasy will enjoy.  

Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is a writer and PhD student living in the high desert. She can be found on Twitter @pheebs_w or at phoebe-wagner.com

References: Kuang, R. F. The Poppy War [Harper Voyager, 2018]