Review: Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey

It’s not always wrong to love a monster, as long as you love the right one.

Cover illustration and design by Will Staehle

Sarah Gailey is a writer who has undergone a remarkable shift over their career, tilting from a purveyor of breezy, heisty, hippo-filled romps five years ago (NoaF nanoreview here) to someone who has realized that their real strength lies in—whatever the hell kind of monstrous grim horror story we have here in Just Like Home.

I want to pause here to emphasize that when I say whatever the hell kind of monstrous grim horror story we have here, I mean it in the best possible way. I don’t typically seek out horror as a genre, but I’ve deeply enjoyed Gailey’s previous work, and it hasn’t escaped me that the bits I’ve enjoyed best—The Echo Wife (2021) and ‘Bread and Milk and Salt’ (2018) most notably—have been the darkest and grimmest and most monstrous. And it was on the basis of this trust that Gailey has instilled in me that I read this book—a book I absolutely, under no circumstances, would have dreamed of picking up if I had not already trusted Gailey to take care of me.

And they did. I mean, sort of. Wowzers. This is a doozy of a rough ride. It starts out with a dedication--to everyone who has ever loved a monster—and it follows that path all the way down to a surprisingly touching and horrible and satisfying and really bizarre conclusion.

Vera Crowder returns home after a decade away, called back by her mother who is dying and wants Vera to be ready to settle the estate. Once she is back at the Crowder house, the book loses no time in fulfilling the promise of its dedicatory note by introducing three core monsters. The first is Vera’s father, Francis Crowder. He’s no longer around, having died years ago, but it becomes clear quite quickly that Francis was involved in something Very Bad, something that was responsible for the enforced estrangement that has distanced Vera from her family home for her entire adult life. Whatever it was, it made her family into a sort of celebrity among the true-crime loving community. Surfaces are protected with plexiglass to preserve the house in the state it was when the whatever-it-was actually happened. True crime writers and artists and probably rather twisted fans visit the house to spectate on the site of whatever-it-was. But, for all that Vera seems to recognize that badness of whatever-it-was, she is unwavering in her loyalty to Francis. She loved and adored and trusted him when she was a child, and in all the flashbacks to Vera’s childhood he appears as the epitome of a good father. And even now, as an adult, with the perspective of years and maturity and distance, Vera yearns after his memory, treasuring traces of his letters and journal pages in a way that seems quite incompatible with the monster he seems to have turned out to be.

Such a set-up leaves a reader of less skilled narratives expecting that the truth will turn out to be something obvious and predictable—he was actually a sexual predator! Vera must come to terms with the truth of what a monster her father was! Fortunately, Gailey eschews such tedious tropes, and the actual truth of Vera’s father, and Vera’s relationship with him, turns out to follow a much more unexpected path, one that is entirely in keeping with the starting dedication of the book.

The second monster is the house itself, Crowder House. Vera’s relationship with the house is characterized by a kind of childlike, magical trust that goes well beyond nostalgic affection for the times we felt safe and protected as children by virtue of our ignorance of all the things that make us unsafe. When she snaps her fingers four times, anything distressing—strange shadows, unwanted noises—fades. Francis built the house himself, and built it well, designed it to meet his specifications—including the requirements of whatever-it-was that looms over the Crowder family’s downfall. Even when some deeply, unpleasantly weird stuff starts happening—black ooze, moving furniture, traces of monsters under the bed—Vera’s sense of comfort and safety in this house never falters. She’s aware that the house is being weird, but she does not seem as freaked out by the weirdness as the situation warrants, and her desire to get to the bottom of it is connected with her love for her father and her desire to understand the house more than with fear or horror. This was a very good thing for me, as a scaredy-cat reader who doesn’t like to be frightened. If Vera had been afraid, I would have been terrified. Since Vera was not afraid, I was fascinated—and when the true nature of the house is revealed in the final chapter, I was delighted and horrified and comforted in equal measure.

The third monster is Vera’s mother, Daphne, whose monstrous nature is built along much more mundane lines, but no less chilling ones for all that. She has always been a cold and unloving woman, seeming to see Vera as a rival for her father’s love. After whatever-it-was went down, Daphne banished Vera from her childhood home and welcomed the true-crime vultures to Crowder House, capitalizing on the same gruesome whatever-it-was that made it impossible for her daughter to remain there. Even now, as she lies dying in a hospital bed in the dining room, unable to stomach anything except lemonade, she rejects Vera’s attempts at reconciliation, preferring instead the attentions and company of her most recent guest. This guest is an artist in residence, living in a shed in the yard that has been furnished and fixed up for the use of these sorts of guests, leeches who take inspiration from Crowder House to make art that cannot be anything but a truly tone deaf appropriation of sick tragedy. (I suppose a case might be made for viewing him as a sort of monster, a kind of second-hand voyeur whose goal is to titillate the sorts of people who get off on true crime, but his monstrousness, and the kind of love he might inspire, is weak and pale in comparison to the Francis, Crowder House, and Daphne.)

Throughout the book, Vera’s entirely mundane actions—visiting a hardware store, buying a bed frame, heating up frozen lasagne—take on sinister overtones. Everything she does is connected with her childhood, and whatever-it-was that Francis did to turn his family into a pariah, and Crowder House into a magnet for weirdos who fancy themselves artists. Through flashbacks and conversations, we do, eventually learn what that inciting action was, how it is that Vera can still love her father despite his involvement in it, and the secrets that Crowder House holds which she only now manages to uncover. And again, I must hasten to add that Gailey again eschews such lazy, easy narrative tropes as, ‘He had reasons’ or ‘it was all a misunderstanding.’ The revelations make sense, but, as with all of Gailey’s best work, it is a sick sort of sense, that is twisted and dark and weird, and, in the end, equal parts comforting and horrible.

-- 

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, an enjoyable experience, but not without flaws

• Wildly messed up families
• Very well-constructed childhood homes
• All sorts of monsters

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative

Reference: Just Like Home. Sarah Gailey. [Tor Books, 2022].

Adri and Joe Read the Hugos: Novella

Joe: It both feels both weird and a relief not to be writing up another edition of Reading the Hugos, a series that I had been doing under various names for more than ten years, longer than I’ve been at Nerds of a Feather - but I am so very happy to join you for the first of our Hugo chats this year.

Adri: I feel weird because Hugo season doesn’t even feel like it’s started up yet, but we’re practically in the middle of September and the Nebulas have already been announced AND awarded. I have a bunch of fiction to read and I’ve still only watched one movie - and I’ve got several games to go too.

Joe: If this was a “normal” year, we’d be arguing about the winners and crunching the numbers! It’s refreshing, in a way, to not feel stressed about trying to get everything in before voting closes - but also weirdly for me I’ve read a LOT of the finalists - like, I don’t have work to do in Series because I’m pretty much done with the category. I just finished Novel when I got to Black Sun after letting it taunt my from the bedside table for months - and I have thoughts about the Nebulas. But we’re not here to talk about Series or Novel today (or the fact that I’m mainlining She-Ra right now) - let’s talk about the first category we both finished: Novella.

Adri: Novella! A nice category. A friendly category. A topical category, seeing as how we’re doing a Novella Initiative right now. And this year: a Tor.com category.

Joe: It’s a very Tor.com category. That’s been a rapidly growing trend since 2016 when Binti and The Builders were on the ballot after the imprint’s first year and they’ve dominated the category ever since, though this is the first year they’ve taken all six slots on the ballot.

Adri: Given the imprint’s track record, an all-Tor.com category has felt like a possibility for a while, but it is interesting to see it actually play out. I feel a bit bad for the fact that the publisher is getting attention over the works, and of course we will be getting on to the MAIN EVENT very soon, but I do think it’s worth digging into a bit before we start.

There's this oft-repeated comment about the trajectory of shorter fiction categories, that people aren't reading the good work in print magazines any more and that they therefore can't compete with free online work. There's supporting evidence for this in shorter categories (although whether that's really what's happening is a question I don't really want to dive into) but it completely falls apart when you look at novella, especially the strength of Tor.com not just this year but in previous years as well.

Four of the six novellas on this ballot are only physically available in hardback - with both their physical and ebook price points set accordingly - while Finna and

The Empress of Salt and Fortune were paperback releases. That's a pretty significant financial investment if you're buying all six, especially if you prefer not to read on an e-reader. Luckily, Macmillan have stopped their awful policies restricting ebooks for libraries, but not everyone has access to a library that sees SFF novellas as a worthy investment. And, sure, there's a pretty solid overlap between Hugo voters and the kind of people that get ARCs, that also only goes so far in explaining why they are dominant here. In short: Tor.com is getting fans to buy their novellas, at comparable (sometimes higher) prices than one would pay for a novel.

I'm not raising this to suggest that Tor.com is pricing its novellas too high - we don't pay for books by the word, after all. But it does demonstrate that the makeup of the ballot isn't really based on financial accessibility, or people being unwilling to pay for shorter fiction. Tor.com is successfully picking up recognition for novellas it has put its marketing budget and resources behind (and the ratio of hardcovers here suggests the ones getting nominated are the ones getting more of that budget), and while they have never been the only game in town for standalone novella publishing, they're the ones with the most publicity.

Joe: You know, I’ve never quite thought about it like that - though I’ve also bought into the online accessibility argument and you’re right, it doesn’t play with Novella. Now, I’m fortunate, my library system is awesome and they get everything from Tor.com Publishing and there are benefits of accessibility just by the nature of what we do here - but yeah, Novella belies that whole argument.

So - likely, it’s an issue of promotion combined with who is actually nominating and those nominators are not reading Asimov’s and Analog and F&SF as much as they are reading Tor.com and Uncanny. There’s a shift.

And even though we could go on a bit, let’s talk about the actual finalists because they’re pretty great!

I haven’t quite put together my ballot order yet, but I’d like to start by talking about Finna because I did *not* see that story coming and I really liked this one.

Adri: An excellent place to start! Finna can be summarised as “what if Ikea really did have extra dimensions” (a feeling that anyone who has actually walked around an Ikea store will relate to) and it’s got an excellent blend of things going on: adventure, a giant middle finger towards capitalism and the treatment of shop workers within it, and a core relationship between two people who used to be romantically involved and are now right in the middle of breaking-up emotions.

Joe: Frankly, Ikea scares me. They’ve got some good stuff, but I feel an immense pressure and stress every time I go in one. I feel trapped. And there is a sense of being trapped in Finna, what with those extra dimensions - but reading it is absolutely refreshing.

Despite their in-universe breakup, the relationship is great and the writing is just so clean and on point and it’s a damned delight. It’s just a delight wrapped in an Ikea-esque hellscape.

My favorite novella on the ballot, or maybe the one that impressed me the most - if that’s a distinction that matters - is Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune.

Adri: This is one that I also adored and which gave me really strong emotions, although my memory of reading it for the first time is less strong than others on this ballot. It’s a story of empire and political struggle, but it’s told from the margins, by an aging handmaid recounting the challenges of her mistress and lover as she attempts to secure power rather than being dismissed and forgotten in a patriarchal structure.

Shorter fiction is a fantastic way for telling stories from “quieter” perspectives in a way that novel-length stories rarely seem to capture (with exceptions, like Laurie J. Marks’ Elemental Logic series) and this is a really fantastic example of that kind of story working at exactly the length intended.

Let’s move on to some of the distinctly-not-quiet works on here. Both Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi and Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark take on racial injustice and Black experience in the USA, though in quite different ways: Ring Shout as an alternate history that puts the Klu Klux Klan at the centre of a sorcerous plot to destroy humanity, and Riot Baby as a contemporary/near future take on injustice with a use of magic that really heightens the tension.

Joe: Riot Baby was excellent, but I felt absolutely inadequate to discuss it (though Sean Dowie was more than ably up to the task in his review) and I believe that’s tied to how Onyebuchi is examining race in America and the underlying anger seething through the story. It’s tough. It’s tough to deal with. It’s supposed to be tough to deal with, especially for upper middle class white folks who seldom have to deal with or engage with things that other people have no choice but to live with every moment of their lives.

Ring Shout isn’t necessarily any less angry, but it’s somewhat more accessible. There’s more “action” and “adventure” even while the women are fighting off the Ku Kluxes, demons made manifest.

Adri: I agree with this. Riot Baby is a challenge of a book, one that I really appreciated reading and that I think does exactly what it sets out to do, but I find it harder to unpack how it achieves what it does than I do with other works. I’m aware that that’s mostly about the limitations of my experience, not the book's quality, but still. There it is.

I find Ring Shout’s historical adventure setting really compelling (even if it’s grim as fuck and nowhere near as speculative as we might want it to be - real Klu Klux Klan members aren’t literal possessed demons but… well) and while it doesn’t pull its punches, there’s also something quite satisfying about the way the action plays out, even with the human cost.

Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey, is a future dystopia rather than a historical but I want to draw the parallel because I think they share a bit of DNA in how they take a very American setting and bring out the worst elements of prejudice and discrimination within it. In Gailey’s novella, the pain point is gender and sexuality, rather than race, in a Western setting where respectable women are allowed to be travelling librarians, and it turns out that actually they aren’t respectable in the way society expects them to be at all.

Joe: I read Upright Women Wanted so long ago that even knowing that it’s on this ballot I keep forgetting it was a 2020 publication. With that said, Upright Women Wanted was a pretty rad book - to the point that my wife (not a big SFF reader) recommended it to a number of people. Solid recommendation.

Adri: I also like Upright Women Wanted a lot, although it gets a bit lost among the competition for me. I also know people with mixed feelings about its portrayal of gender: there’s a character who goes by they/them pronouns but appears to pass in civilisation with “she/her”, and there’s not much exploration of dysphoria or even a concrete explanation that it is about passing and not just someone who uses both pronouns (side note, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with a character who properly uses multiple pronouns and I think it’s overdue!) Still, Upright Women Wanted is now the book I think about when I consider whether SFF still has room for gender dystopias, and the answer is yes.

Joe: The last novella we haven’t talked about was Come Tumbling Down and listen, it’s Seanan McGuire and she doesn’t miss. If you’re in on this series, you’re going to love revisiting Jack and Jill and you know what’s up. If you’re not, there is a barrier to entry. McGuire generally does a good job setting the stage for new readers but even so, this is NOT for new readers and that’s fine but you really need to have read somewhere between one and three of the previous novellas for this one to really land - which is fine, we do series work with the Hugos but how Come Tumbling Down holds up really depends on your experience with the series. I was all in from the first page of Every Heart a Doorway (a previous Hugo winner in this category) so this is a book for me.

Adri: Alas, here’s where we come into conflict, because after a solid-to-strong four books in the Wayward Children series, Come Tumbling Down frustrated the heck out of me. The lessons felt contrived, the characters didn’t land at all (even the returning ones) and for a novella set in a world of gothic peril, everyone sure did get away without any significant (i.e. permadeath) consequences. I know that some of those consequences are set to play out in later books, as next year's release is about one of the characters who has an Encounter in Come Tumbling Down, where the fallout isn't dealt with. But as an individual story, this was a serious letdown for me - especially because, as you say, Seanan McGuire is not normally an author to miss the mark.

Now we’ve been through the list, we have to get to that all important but all-painful ratings. What’s up there on your list?

Joe: My top three are The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Ring Shout, and Finna - in that order. Notwithstanding our slight disagreement on the McGuire, there’s not really a weak novella on this ballot - but I *really* like the top of my ballot. Those three novellas are something special. What do you have?

Adri: My top three are the same as yours! In another excellent year for novellas, Finna, Ring Shout and The Empress of Salt and Fortune all stand out as exemplars of the genre, and it’s Nghi Vo’s quiet but powerful storytelling that wins the day. Still, I’d cheer loudly for a win for any of these three, and I wouldn’t be truly unhappy with any of the others (even Come Tumbling Down) either.

Joe: Excellent! I think we both have great taste!

I think that’s a wrap for novellas. Next Time: Novels!

Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 5x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him

Adri, 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

New Books Spotlight: March 2021

Welcome to another (slightly belated) edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 new and forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about?

Chambers, Becky. The Galaxy and the Ground Within [Harper Voyager]
Publisher's Description:

Return to the sprawling, Hugo Award-winning universe of the Galactic Commons to explore another corner of the cosmos—one often mentioned, but not yet explored—in this absorbing entry in the Wayfarers series, which blends heart-warming characters and imaginative adventure.

With no water, no air, and no native life, the planet Gora is unremarkable. The only thing it has going for it is a chance proximity to more popular worlds, making it a decent stopover for ships traveling between the wormholes that keep the Galactic Commons connected. If deep space is a highway, Gora is just your average truck stop.

At the Five-Hop One-Stop, long-haul spacers can stretch their legs (if they have legs, that is), and get fuel, transit permits, and assorted supplies. The Five-Hop is run by an enterprising alien and her sometimes helpful child, who work hard to provide a little piece of home to everyone passing through.

When a freak technological failure halts all traffic to and from Gora, three strangers—all different species with different aims—are thrown together at the Five-Hop. Grounded, with nothing to do but wait, the trio—an exiled artist with an appointment to keep, a cargo runner at a personal crossroads, and a mysterious individual doing her best to help those on the fringes—are compelled to confront where they’ve been, where they might go, and what they are, or could be, to each other.

Why We Want It: Chambers has said this will be the final Wayfarers novel and we can't pass up one last opportunity to visit this galaxy full of very different people trying to do right by each other.

Gailey, Sarah. The Echo Wife [Tor]
Publisher's Description:

I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married.

It took me so long to hate him.

Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be.

And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband. Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.

Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

Why We Want It: Well, first and foremost, it's Sarah Gailey. It's also one of the best sci fi thriller concepts I've seen in years. Did I mention that it's Sarah Gailey? There's no way we'd be passing this one up.

Martine, Arkady. A Desolation Called Peace [Tor]
Publisher's Description:

A Desolation Called Peace is the spectacular space opera sequel to Arkady Martine's genre-reinventing, Hugo Award-winning debut, A Memory Called Empire.

An alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options.

In a desperate attempt at diplomacy with the mysterious invaders, the fleet captain has sent for a diplomatic envoy. Now Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass—still reeling from the recent upheaval in the Empire—face the impossible task of trying to communicate with a hostile entity.

Their failure will guarantee millions of deaths in an endless war. Their success might prevent Teixcalaan’s destruction—and allow the empire to continue its rapacious expansion.

Or it might create something far stranger . . .

Why We Want It: A Memory Called Empire was an incredible debut (see Adri's review), winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel - it's a significant science fiction novel that will be read for years. There was a larger story set up in that first novel, plus the hope that Martine could write a follow up that lived up to the promise of A Memory Called Empire. Spoilers, it does. Adri has reviewed A Desolation Called Peace here and I've read it as well. It's excellent.

Polk, C.L. Soulstar [Tor.com Publishing]
Publisher's Description:

With Soulstar, C. L. Polk concludes her riveting Kingston Cycle, a whirlwind of magic, politics, romance, and intrigue that began with the World Fantasy Award-winning Witchmark. Assassinations, deadly storms, and long-lost love haunt the pages of this thrilling final volume.

For years, Robin Thorpe has kept her head down, staying among her people in the Riverside neighborhood and hiding the magic that would have her imprisoned by the state. But when Grace Hensley comes knocking on Clan Thorpe’s door, Robin’s days of hiding are at an end. As freed witches flood the streets of Kingston, scrambling to reintegrate with a kingdom that destroyed their lives, Robin begins to plot a course that will ensure a freer, juster Aeland. At the same time, she has to face her long-bottled feelings for the childhood love that vanished into an asylum twenty years ago.

Can Robin find happiness among the rising tides of revolution? Can Kingston survive the blizzards that threaten, the desperate monarchy, and the birth throes of democracy? Find out as the Kingston Cycle comes to an end.

Why We Want It: After Stormsong, we'll follow Polk anywhere (and Witchmark was pretty darn good as well!) and Robin's story is one we're excited to read.

Wagers, K.B. Out Past the Stars [Orbit]
Publisher's Description:

Gunrunner empress Hail Bristol must navigate alien politics and deadly plots to prevent an interspecies war, in the explosive finale to the Farian War space opera trilogy.

When Hail finally confronts the Farian gods, she makes a stunning discovery. There are no gods—only the Hiervet, an alien race with devastating powers who once spread war throughout the galaxy long before humanity’s ancestors crawled out of the sludge of Earth’s oceans.

But this knowledge carries with it dire news: the Hiervet have returned, eager to take revenge on those of their kind who escaped. And they don’t care who gets caught in the middle of the battle—Shen, Farian, or Indranan.

Once again, the fate of the galaxy is on the line and Hail will have to make one final gamble to leverage chaos into peace.

Why We Want It: Wagers is a particular favorite of several of our writers and we have adored her Indranan War and Farian War novels. Out Past the Stars wraps up the story of Hail Bristol. We've been following Hail since Behind the Throne and this has been a killer series.

Yu, E. Lily. On Fragile Waves [Erewhon]
Publisher's Description:

The haunting story of a family of dreamers and tale-tellers looking for home in an unwelcoming world.

Firuzeh and her brother Nour are children of fire, born in an Afghanistan fractured by war. When their parents, their Atay and Abay, decide to leave, they spin fairy tales of their destination, the mythical land and opportunities of Australia.

As the family journeys from Pakistan to Indonesia to Nauru, heading toward a hope of home, they must rely on fragile and temporary shelters, strangers both mercenary and kind, and friends who vanish as quickly as they’re found.

When they arrive in Australia, what seemed like a stable shore gives way to treacherous currents. Neighbors, classmates, and the government seek their own ends, indifferent to the family’s fate. For Firuzeh, her fantasy worlds provide some relief, but as her family and home splinter, she must surface from these imaginings and find a new way.

This exquisite and unusual magic realist debut, told in intensely lyrical prose by an award winning author, traces one girl’s migration from war to peace, loss to loss, home to home.

Why We Want It: On the strength of "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" Yu won the John W. Campbell Award (now Astounding) for Best New Writer back in 2012 and we've been reading her ever since. We're particularly excited to read her debut novel.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Microreview [Book]: The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

The Echo Wife showcases clones that don't feel like bland copies but vibrant anomalies. 

Flaws are often inherited. Those who make and/or raise children push forward their strengths and weaknesses, partly preforming who they are. It’s an endless echo that is heard from generation to generation and burrows itself deep into one's psyche. That burrowing can prompt people to commit misdeeds that scar their children, as their monstrosities migrate to kin. But The Echo Wife proffers that while some might always hear that echo and be tempted to mimic it back, they have the choice to resist it. Because they are not clones of what came before, but wholly different people with nuances of their own.

If The Echo Wife just tackled that theme, it would already be a powerful novel, but it’s more than that. Sarah Gailey writes with exacting prose to deliver an engaging story with a wide web of threads and ideas, all coming together in a way that should please both readers of mind-bending sci-fi and popular thrillers. It balances incisive character moments, the ramifications of cloning, and twists that should still pack a punch whether you predict them or not.

I will give a brief, withholding synopsis because I want to avoid spoilers. Evelyn is a researcher designing clones. She’s also dealing with her husband, Nathan’s affair and separation. Things become thornier when she realizes the woman he’s in a relationship with, named Martine, is a clone of herself—only, parts of the clone have deviated from Evelyn's personality to turn her into Nathan’s ideal woman. And that clone is inexplicably pregnant, a thing that Evelyn thought was a biological impossibility for clones. Murder shortly ensues and complex, highly-charged interactions are offered aplenty.

This is a very insular novel, and that’s a compliment. It’s difficult to deliver a story with such grand ideas, and only center a handful of characters. But The Echo Wife pushes all of the characters to the extreme, as we see the breadth of emotions from them all—some characters who start off rocky methodically transition into steady and vice versa. Whether it’s Martine’s growth of openly expressing a wider array of emotions, even ones that are stigmatized, or Evelyn’s detachment from the parts of her past rotting her insides, every story and character beat is skillfully maneuvered. Only Nathan has a slower character arc, but by the end, there is some development, albeit more miniscule and nuanced.

Nuance is an important word in this book. The Echo Wife posits the flaw of humans to either focus on the macro of people, or just the micros that are pertinent to them. And it pushes its readers to dig deeper for rewards--not only because human connection is most satisfying with genuine bonds and not self-interested ones, but because there are little morsels of information that reveal the novel to be greater than the sum of its part. Missing nuances is unfortunate both in real life and in the reading of this novel.

In some people’s - including Nathan's - head a person as anodyne as possible is ideal. But ideals in the head are often better than reality. Sarah Gailey has highlighted how characters are best when jagged, only willing to smooth over the parts of them that are truly harmful, leaving a lot of roughness behind. For that and many other reasons, The Echo Wife is an excellent novel, and I wouldn’t change much of it even if I could.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 For skillfully following through on all of its plot threads.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, stand-up comedian, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!"

Gailey, Sarah. The Echo Wife [Tor Books, 2021].

Reading the Hugos: Novelette

Welcome back for another edition of Reading the Hugos, 2020 Edition. Today we're going to take a look at the six finalists for Best Novelette.

Novelette is inherently a weird category. There's not really a substantial difference between a short story and a novelette, except that a novelette is just a little bit longer (but not as long as a novella, which really is a different form).

I would mention that only one work from my nominating ballot made the final ballot, but I only had one work on my nominating ballot - that being "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye". I did not read much shorter fiction last year, but I'll always stop for one of Sarah Pinsker's stories.

Let's take a look at the rest of the stories on the ballot, shall we?



“The Archronology of Love”, by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed, April 2019)
“Away With the Wolves”, by Sarah Gailey (Uncanny Magazine: Disabled People Destroy Fantasy Special Issue, September/October 2019)
“The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye”, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2019)
Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin (Forward Collection (Amazon))
“For He Can Creep”, by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, 10 July 2019)
“Omphalos”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador))


For He Can Creep: I go into every story with the hope and the expectation that is going to be something special and that it is going to knock my socks off even if I'm not wearing socks. Basically, I'm looking for a story to de-glove my feet. The problem, and I fully recognize this is a deeply personal problem, is that "For He Can Creep" is a cat story. I am at best deeply ambivalent about cats and cat stories.Tell me a dog story, and you've got me. Tell me a cat story and I'm just not there. "For He Can Creep" is a story of cats fighting the Devil. There's more to it than that, but other than appreciating Nighthunter Moppet, this just isn't a story for me.


Away With the Wolves: Sarah Gailey's story of identity and transformation is absolutely lovely. It deals with friendship and pain, it's sort of a werewolf story but that's not really the point of it all. The physical and unrelenting pain that Suss feels is only relieved when she transforms to a wolf, but the heart of the story is so gentle, so perfect and welcoming. I haven't read all of Sarah Gailey's fiction, but much of what I've read has an edge protecting that heart. "Away With the Wolves" wears its heart on the sleeve.


The Archronology of Love: Yoachim was a previous Hugo Award finalist in 2018 for her short story "Carnival Nine" and while that has no bearing on "The Archronology of Love", I enjoyed and appreciated "The Archronology of Love" more than Yoachim's earlier story. As can be guessed by the title, this is a love story - though a doomed love story. To a point, the love story happened before the story and this is just the desperate search to find the last moments of a dead love - but that love is so infused in the story that it works.


The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye: This is the second time I've read "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye" and it holds up to multiple readings, which isn't much of a surprise given the mastery Sarah Pinsker has shown over the past eight years (has it only been eight years?). There is perhaps less tension in the re-read, but Pinsker's storytelling and reveals are top notch. I mentioned earlier that this story was on my nominating ballot and I am pleased that it holds up so well in comparison to a ballot full of excellence.


Emergency Skin: Some fiction is intensely tied to the moment and "Emergency Skin" is absolutely a reaction to the now. It is ultimately a hopeful story, though it begins with a mission to a presumably ruined Earth to mine the planet for a desperately needed resource to help prolong the lives of those who are now living in some distant utopia. These are the people who were able to escape. Little by little Jemisin reveals the truth about who left, how they left, and and what then happened when the wealthiest and greediest oligarchs left a dying Earth. This is a reminder of just how good a storyteller N.K. Jemisin is. It is also a statement of the hope that can be brought by ultimately positive science fiction.


Omphalos: An omphalos is "a central point, a hub, or focal point", which is a useful thing to know going into the story lest you go through the opening of the story wondering about how Ted Chiang was going to play off of the idea of Omelas as N.K. Jemisin did with "The Ones Who Stay and Fight". He doesn't. "Omphalos"isn't that story.

I dig the anthropology of the story, the examination of this human society and the backgrounding of history and religion and science and how it is intrinsically tied up into a created universe and how, in such a universe, faith can be the most fragile thing of all.  When Ted Chiang is at the top of his game there is nobody better. "Omphalos" is top shelf Chiang.


My Vote
1. Omphalos
2. Emergency Skin
3. The Blue in the Corner of Your Eye
4. The Archronology of Love
5. Away With the Wolves
6. For He Can Creep


POSTED BY:  Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Reading the Hugos: Short Story

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos, 2019 Edition! Today we are talking a look at the six finalists in the Short Story category.

Three of the stories here were on my nominating ballot (the Pinsker, Clark, and Gailey) and all of the writers here were familiar to me with the exception of Alix E. Harrow. Harrow was a revelation and now I'll be looking for more of her stories and for her debut novel later this year.

I'll mention this again later, but this is an absolutely stacked category. Wonderful stories. Let's take a look at them, shall we?


“The Court Magician,” by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, January 2018)
“The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society,” by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine 25, November-December 2018)
“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” by P. Djèlí Clark (Fireside Magazine, February 2018)
“STET,” by Sarah Gailey (Fireside Magazine, October 2018)
“The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat,” by Brooke Bolander (Uncanny Magazine 23, July-August 2018)
“A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies,” by Alix E. Harrow (Apex Magazine, February 2018)


The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society: This is an absolutely delightful and charming story of a group of supernatural males (selkies. faerie, pooka, etc) getting together for their annual meeting to discuss and pine for one Rose MacGregor, a human woman who was supposed to fall for their charms and instead left each of them heartbroken in turn. Stories from T. Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon are consistently excellent and this is no different. Lined up next to the other stories on this ballot, though, "The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society" is comparatively slight.


The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters: One gets the sense that this is a story which could only be written by Brooke Bolander. Fierce, smart, and driven, "The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat" is a strong story and Bolander captures as much as could be captured about getting into a raptor's perspective.


The Court Magician: Only in a category as stacked as Short Story is this year would it be possible for a Sarah Pinsker story to be this far down my ballot, but this an incredibly strong category filled with stories which could conceivably be a winner in any other year. It is a story of a desire to understand how magic works overpowering wisdom and like every story I've read from Pinsker it is impeccably written.


The Secret Lives of Nine Negro Teeth: I've long heard of George Washington's wooden teeth and for almost as long I've heard that that particular story might not be true. What I didn't learn about was that George Washington had purchased nine teeth from a dentist who took them from enslaved people. There is no evidence whether Washington wore the teeth in his own dentures or if they were used by someone else in his family, but Clark offers up nine stories of where those teeth originally came from.

There is power and pain in "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington" that is inherent in the story being told and P Djeli Clark leans into that, bringing aspects of the fantastic into what is, at its core, a brutal subject. There's no softening here, nor should there be. Simply excellent.


A Witch's Guide to Escape: In a different year, a year that didn't have "STET", "A Witch's Guide to Escape" would be my pick for the best short story of the year. I also think it is a story that might hold up better in ten to twenty years than "STET", but the question here is what story is the best of 2018 and that is a nearly impossible conversation to have, except that we have it every year and try to figure it out.

"A Witch's Guide to Escape" reminds me a bit of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series in that it features a boy who desperately doesn't belong and so desperately needs to escape somehow. Except the story here is of a librarian who works to get kids the books they need, but except in those most extreme cases, perhaps not the book they really need.

I've never been the child in desperate need of escape. My life was never that hard. But I'm drawn to those stories because, like so many readers, I can identify with the edges of that child and it's what gives the story that extra bit of punch to really get the heart.


STET: I'm not as much of a historian of the Hugo Award as I think I'd like to be, but I'm not sure there has ever been a finalist on the ballot quite like "STET", one where the form of the story is as much a part of the conversation as the content of the story. Technically, this is a technical document with footnotes, but the story is in the footnotes and the back and forth further comments between the writer and the editor. "STET" is simmering with emotion and bubbling over rage and grief.

The format could be viewed as a gimmick, but there is so much (broken) heart here and while "STET" would likely work as a more conventional narrative, it is so much more vital because of the format. "STET" would be a different story without the format and it is stronger because of how Gailey chose to tell this story. It works. It is wrenching. It is the best thing I read last year.



My Vote
1. STET
2. A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies
3. The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington
4. The Court Magician
5. The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters
6. The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society


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

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Adams, John Joseph. Wastelands: The New Apocalypse [Titan]
Publisher's Description

The new post-apocalyptic collection by master anthologist John Joseph Adams, featuring never-before-published stories and curated reprints by some of the genre’s most popular and critically-acclaimed authors.

In WASTELANDS: THE NEW APOCALYPSE, veteran anthology editor John Joseph Adams is once again our guide through the wastelands using his genre and editorial expertise to curate his finest collection of post-apocalyptic short fiction yet. Whether the end comes via nuclear war, pandemic, climate change, or cosmological disaster, these stories explore the extraordinary trials and tribulations of those who survive.

Featuring never-before-published tales by: Veronica Roth, Hugh Howey, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Tananarive Due, Richard Kadrey, Scott Sigler, Elizabeth Bear, Tobias S. Buckell, Meg Elison, Greg van Eekhout, Wendy N. Wagner, Jeremiah Tolbert, and Violet Allen—plus, recent reprints by: Carmen Maria Machado, Carrie Vaughn, Ken Liu, Paolo Bacigalupi, Kami Garcia, Charlie Jane Anders, Catherynne M. Valente, Jack Skillingstead, Sofia Samatar, Maureen F. McHugh, Nisi Shawl, Adam-Troy Castro, Dale Bailey, Susan Jane Bigelow, Corinne Duyvis, Shaenon K. Garrity, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Darcie Little Badger, Timothy Mudie, and Emma Osborne.

Continuing in the tradition of WASTELANDS: STORIES OF THE APOCALYPSE, these 34 stories ask: What would life be like after the end of the world as we know it? 

Why We Want It: The first two volumes of John Joseph Adams' Wastelands anthologies brought together classic stories of apocalypse, legendary stories of the field. Both volumes were spectacular. I love apocalyptic fiction, and John Joseph Adams is a master anthologist. This third Wastelands volume brings together brand new apocalyptic stories as well some more recent stories that may well stand the test of time. 

Brooks, Terry. The Stiehl Assassin [Del Rey]
Publisher's Description

After The Black Elfstone and The Skaar Invasion comes the next chapter in the Fall of Shannara, a saga more than four decades in the making. 

The Skaar have arrived in the Four Lands, determined to stop at nothing less than all-out conquest. They badly need a new home, but peaceful coexistence is not a concept they have ever understood. An advance force under the command of the mercurial princess Ajin has already established a foothold, but now the full Skaar army is on the march—and woe betide any who stand in its way.

But perhaps the Skaar victory is not quite the foregone conclusion everyone assumes. The Druid Drisker Arc has freed both himself and Paranor from their involuntary exile. Drisker’s student, Tarsha Kaynin, has been reunited with Dar, chief defender of what is left of the Druid order, and is learning to control her powerful wishsong magic. If they can only survive Tarsha’s brother, Tavo, and the Druid who betrayed Drisker Arc, they might stand a chance of defeating the Skaar. But that is a very big if . . . as Tavo now carries the Stiehl—one of the most powerful weapons in all the Four Lands—and is hellbent on taking his revenge on everyone he feels has wronged him. 

Why We Want It: I've been a Terry Brooks reader from my earliest days of being a fantasy reader and though the novels have gone through various peaks and valleys in terms of quality and also of my engagement, but we're in the final push to the end of the Shannara chronology. There is only one more novel after The Stiehl Assassin and I am on board for this journey.

Ford, Jackson. The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind [Orbit]
Publisher's Description

Full of imagination, wit, and random sh*t flying through the air, this insane adventure from an irreverent new voice will blow your tiny mind. 

For Teagan Frost, sh*t just got real. 

Teagan Frost is having a hard time keeping it together. Sure, she’s got telekinetic powers — a skill that the government is all too happy to make use of, sending her on secret break-in missions that no ordinary human could carry out. But all she really wants to do is kick back, have a beer, and pretend she’s normal for once.

But then a body turns up at the site of her last job — murdered in a way that only someone like Teagan could have pulled off. She’s got 24 hours to clear her name – and it’s not just her life at stake. If she can’t unravel the conspiracy in time, her hometown of Los Angeles will be in the crosshairs of an underground battle that’s on the brink of exploding . . . 

Why We Want It: The title. Honestly, it's just the title.

Gailey, Sarah. Magic for Liars [Tor]
Publisher's Description

Sharp, mainstream fantasy meets compelling thrills of investigative noir in Magic for Liars, a fantasy debut by rising star Sarah Gailey. 

Ivy Gamble was born without magic and never wanted it. 

Ivy Gamble is perfectly happy with her life – or at least, she’s perfectly fine. 

She doesn't in any way wish she was like Tabitha, her estranged, gifted twin sister. 

Ivy Gamble is a liar. 

When a gruesome murder is discovered at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, where her estranged twin sister teaches Theoretical Magic, reluctant detective Ivy Gamble is pulled into the world of untold power and dangerous secrets. She will have to find a murderer and reclaim her sister—without losing herself. 

Why We Want It: Gailey's debut novellas (River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow) were delights, riffing of the real world idea of bringing hippopotamuses to America and taking it much farther so that feral hippos are extremely dangerous and "tame" hippos can be used for transport like horses. After those novellas, we were always on board for whatever she did next.

Lord, Karen. Unraveling [DAW]
Publisher's Description

In this standalone fantasy novel by an award-winning author, the dark truth behind a string of unusual murders leads to an otherworldly exploration of spirits, myth, and memory, steeped in Caribbean storytelling. 

Dr. Miranda Ecouvo, forensic therapist of the City, just helped put a serial killer behind bars. But she soon discovers that her investigation into seven unusual murders is not yet complete. A near-death experience throws her out of time and into a realm of labyrinths and spirits. There, she encounters brothers Chance and the Trickster, who have an otherworldly interest in the seemingly mundane crimes from her files.

It appears the true mastermind behind the murders is still on the loose, chasing a myth to achieve immortality. Together, Miranda, Chance, and the Trickster must travel through conjured mazes, following threads of memory to locate the shadowy killer. As they journey deeper, they discover even more questions that will take pain and patience to answer. What is the price of power? Where is the path to redemption? And how can they stop the man—or monster—who would kill the innocent to live forever? 

Why We Want It: Each of Karen Lord's three previous novels have been very highly regarded, but for no particular reason, I haven't read any of them. It's past time to rectify that.

Solomon, Rivers. The Deep [Saga]
Publisher's Description

The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society—and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award nominated song “The Deep” from Daveed Diggs’ rap group Clipping. 

Yetu holds the memories for her people—water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners—who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one—the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities—and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.

Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past—and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity—and own who they really are.

Inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping for the This American Life episode “We Are In The Future,” The Deep is vividly original and uniquely affecting. 

Why We Want It: After the absolutely searing debut of An Unkindness of Ghosts it was clear Rivers Solomon was an important writer and that we needed to be there for whatever they did next. While we didn't expect that "expanding Clipping's song into a novel" was what was next, we're down for this.


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

Reading the Hugos: Fan Writer

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos, our regular summer series covering as many Hugo Award categories as possible. Today we're looking at the Fan Writers. If you're not familiar, those are the writers doing exactly what I'm doing here (only better) - writing about science fiction and fantasy and the various intersections with real life and politics and awards and with other works and with absolutely anything connected to the genre at all - except that we're all doing this work and this writing because it's a conversation that we value and the writing is meaningful to us. Hopefully it is meaningful to others. 

This is somewhat difficult category because the award is for a person, not for an individual work. Like the Campbell, we're trying to compare a body of work against a body of work and figure out which has the most weight and which has the most importance. I doubt it is possible, but here's my look at the six finalists for Fan Writer.

Camestros Felapton
Sarah Gailey
Mike Glyer
Foz Meadows
Charles Payseur
Bogi Takács

Mike Glyer: I find File 770 a valuable resource for fannish news within and around science fiction and fantasy. Glyer’s Pixel Scroll roundups are a quick daily check to see what’s going on, what I might have missed, what I want to miss, and what I should consider paying attention to. While there is writing involved in setting up the Pixel Scroll posts, it’s not what I look for out of fan writing. There is value in the writing of the news roundups, and I value those but it’s not “fan writing” in the sense of what I want out of a fan writer.

For his actual fan writing credits, Glyer does strong work in eulogizing the passing of notable fans. He brings out stories and lives that many readers may not have known of those who have been important in the building of fan convention community over the decades. As a whole, though, Glyer’s fan writing does not appeal to me. The most notable bits of writing are those where he engages with the Sad and Rapid Puppies (in previous years, but occasionally addressed in 2017) as well with Jon Del Arroz, who seems to be an offshoot of those campaigns. It’s not enough to push Glyer’s fan writing farther up the ballot or above No Award.


No Award.


Bogi Takacs: I’ve seen Takacs pop up on my twitter feed commenting on various aspects of genre, but I had never read much of their writing. Based on the writing samples including in the Voter’s Packet (and suggestive from their Twitter bio), Takacs is focused on marginalized communities intersecting with science fiction and fantasy. To be quickly reductive, Takacs is Hungarian, Queer, and Jewish – all of which comes through in the focus of the included writing samples – it is a case where identity is part and parcel of the writing. Bogi Takacs’ voice is vital and important.


Camestros Felapton: I was most familiar with Camestros from his commenting over at File 770 and the occasional link back to his own blog. Here, he has included a much more robust Voter Packet entry than most. Half of his fan writing is the stuff I would be looking for from a contributor to Nerds of a Feather. The other half really annoys me. The annoying half is stuff like Timothy the Cat, Ask a Triceratops, A Cat Reviews La La Land – the stuff that isn’t straight up essays and reviews and is more Felapton playing around. I’m being a little harsh here and I’m probably stretching the truth when I say that half annoys me. The truth is it just isn’t my thing and I think it detracts from the stuff that I do appreciate and do like. It’s a small knock down compared to some of the other very strong writers on the ballot.


Sarah Gailey: Years ago Jo Walton was writing fantastically compelling essays at Tor.com. Whether she was revisiting her favorites like Steven Brust and CJ Cherryh, looking at the Hugo Awards, or whatever else struck her fancy, she was killing it. She was killing it to the point there was some chatter about nominating her for Best Fan Writer. I can’t source this, but I remember her writing, telling people not to nominate her because she wasn’t eligible – because this was paid writing (though not well paid) and Tor.com was a professional publication, if mostly for fiction. I’ve since struggled with that idea in other categories, not nominating the lamentably mothballed Rocket Talk podcast because it was hosted at Tor.com as one example. I still struggle, though I think that fan / pro ship has pretty well sailed regarding whether the fan writer gets paid and whether a podcast is hosted on the website of a professional entity (see 8-4 Play in 2016 for Fancast).

I bring all of that up here because the three contributions from Sarah Gailey in the voter packet are from Tor.com and Uncanny Magazine (a semiprozine, which is an entirely separate discussion). Is it fan writing or is it paid professional writing? I’m still not sure where the line is, and I’m not sure it is a battle I have in me to fight today.

Whether you view her writing as fannish or professional, Sarah Gailey’s essays are superb. With clear eyes and clear writing, Gailey gets to the heart of whatever she is writing about, digging deep below the surface to hit a point of view that perhaps isn’t as talked about as often in wide open spaces.

Foz Meadows: It's no secret that Foz Meadows is smart as hell as a fan writer. She has twice been a finalist for Fan Writer (2014 and 2017) and that's no mistake. She writes deeply incisive commentary on all the fannish stuff that I enjoy, but brings a perspective that I both appreciate and need. Whether she is writing about Star Wars or Final Fantasy or Godzilla or digging into why someone who wants "realistic" rather than "diverse" books might have a problem with perspective, Meadows brings nuanced truth and understanding.

There are many ways that I appreciate fan writing because there are many shapes that fan writing can take, and Meadows is among the best.


Charles Payseur: Out of all of the writers on the Fan Writer ballot, I was the most familiar with Charles Payseur. After all, for three years he was an important contributor to Nerds of a Feather. He was our short fiction reviewer. We were sad to see him leave at the end of the year, but recognized he was moving onward and upward. He’s been doing his own thing at Quick Sip Reviews and was branching out to other venues, including The Book Smugglers (a Hugo finalist this year for Semiprozine). Any time I’ve needed to get a quick take on a short story, I went to Quick Sip Reviews to see what Charles had to say. Charles is sharp, incisive, sensitive, considerate, passionate, and thoughtful reviewer and essayist. If I ever wrote (and published) a story, I would want Charles to review it. He’s one of the best and most prolific short fiction reviewers out there.


My Vote
1. Charles Payseur
2. Foz Meadows
3. Sarah Gailey
4. Camestros Felapton
5. Bogi Takacs
6. No Award
7. Mike Glyer


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Short Story
Related Work
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Fancast
Fan Artist
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer


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

Reading the Hugos: Novella

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos: 2018 Edition! Today we're going to take a look at the stories up for Best Novella.

For those keeping score at home, two of the short listed stories were on my nominating ballot (Down Among the Sticks and Bones, "And Then There Were (N-One)"), though similar to the finalists for Best Novel, this is an outstanding category from top to bottom. It's a damn shame that something needs to be ranked last, but that's how the voting works. They can't all win, but there are no weak stories here.

It is also worth noting this category is incredibly heavy with Tor.com Publishing stories, even more so than last year (which only had four out of six from Tor.com Publishing). The good news is that they put out a LOT of excellent fiction with a focus on the novella length and they're making those novellas very affordable and accessible. The bad news is that this sort of publisher dominance is probably not a good thing for the health of the category or the field. There are other publishers putting out high quality novellas (Subterranean, Tachyon, and PS are three book publishers that come to mind), but it's a harder length of story to place. I'd like to see a wider variety of publishers make the short list in coming years.

On to the finalists!


All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)
“And Then There Were (N-One),” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017)
Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing)
The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.Com Publishing)
River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

River of Teeth: From my review: "Um, did you know there was a serious plan to bring hippopotamuses to America to alleviate a meat shortage? I didn't either, but Sarah Gailey did. I'm so happy that she knew this because it grew into this insanity of a novella that delivers a fantastic story that feels like the wild west as seen from hippoback. River of Teeth is glorious, but it is more than just the wonderful idea of using hippos as beasts of burden and transit (and oh, this idea is so well excuted) - it is also filled with striking characters like Winslow Remington Houndstooth and Regina Archambault, but the whole cast, really. It's great." The fact that this is my least favorite of the finalists does not denigrate River of Teeth at all, but rather it shows just how high the bar is in this category.

Binti: Home: It's not entirely fair to set one's expectations for what the story was going to be against what it actually is. My expectation was that after Binti left Earth to study at Oomza University, more time would be spent there and that perhaps the "Home" in the title would be Binti finding a new home. That is not the case. Rather, Binti returns home fairly quickly to visit and go on a pilgrimage. Okorafor digs deeper into Binti's family, the cultural reactions to her bringing back her alien friend, Okwu (this is a gross oversimplification, but go read the first novella, Binti, for context and nuance). In the end, the story that we get is absolutely fantastic, but it is also so clearly incomplete. That's not too much of a surprise since it is setting up a third volume, but where Binti (the first novella) told a complete story, Binti: Home tells the first part of a larger story and it calls for the payoff in Binti: The Night Masquerade. As a bit of advance spoiler, that has no bearing in how Home stands on its own, The Night Masquerade is outstanding and is the best of the trilogy.

All Systems Red: The lead character calls itself "Murderbot" and it is a partly organic artificial intelligence security unit murder machine. Which, if I stick with that description, makes me think of a deadpan witty Terminator. That's not exactly accurate, because Murderbot would rather watch what passes for television that interact with a human. There is action and drama a plenty here, but the real joy of All Systems Red is the characterization and personality of Murderbot. The novella entirely hangs on how successful Martha Wells is in pulling off the character of Murderbot. She nails it and the novella is an absolute delight to read.

“And Then There Were (N-One)”: What a cool concept for a story. Sarah Pinsker wrote a story where Sarah Pinsker was invited to Sarah-Con, a convention of Sarah Pinskers from across the multi-verse. Pinsker (the author) is incredibly effective at getting across the disorientation of arriving at a hotel where everyone looks like you, just subtly different (and, in some cases, substantively different). You all have (mostly) the same mannerisms, it’s just that everyone took subtly different paths in life. The points of divergence in the lives of the Sarahs Pinsker are another fascinating aspect to the story. The most poignant moment getting that point across is at a conventional panel where a story is told about a particular horse and when Sarah helped save a young girl. Protagonist Sarah is following along, remembering, hearing the other Sarahs snap their fingers in agreement that this was also their story – until the story changed. It’s still a story about a horse, but it wasn’t Protagonist Sarah’s anymore. And other members of the audience diverged at an earlier part in the story. It was moving as hell.

That’s not really the story of “And Then There Were (N-One)”, though. That’s just the cool stuff that gives shape to the story. The story here is that one of the Sarahs is found murdered and Protagonist Sarah, who is an insurance investigator, is half-tasked to help find the murderer / solve the crime. Essentially, “And Then There Were (N-One)” is a giant locked room mystery in a really big room (the hotel is on an island, but police and EMS services can’t arrive for another day). On its own, the murder investigation aspect to the story is just kind of there – but Author Sarah Pinsker’s storytelling is absolutely top notch when combined with the hook of the story (a multiverse of Sarah Pinskers). That’s where “And Then There Were (N-One)” really shines, the idea that Sarahs who couldn’t imagine having committed a murder must have committed a murder – and how all of the interactions come together. It’s really good, as is everything Author Sarah Pinsker writes.

Two last cool things: the murder weapon may well have been Author Sarah Pinsker’s actual Nebula Award, and one of the other Sarahs at the convention has a well worn paperback of Parable of the Trickster, which is (presumably) the famously unfinished novel from Octavia Butler. I love that there may have been a universe in which Butler lived to finish that novel.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones: As I wrote in my review,

"Down Among the Sticks and Bones is soaked with blood and science and alienation and brutal acceptance. The novella turns into a starker, darker, and more painful story once Jacqueline and Jillian travel down those stairs and step through a doorway with a sign stating "Be Sure".

The only ones actually sure are the readers that yes, this is absolutely a door we want to enter and a journey we want to embark on.  Down Among the Sticks and Bones is not soaked with that same nostalgia as Every Heart a Doorway. It's not supposed to be, though I admit it is difficult to talk at all about this novella without also thinking about the one. Every Heart a Doorway tells the story of what happens when the fairy tale is over. Down Among the Sticks and Bones tells the story of the fairy tale itself. Like the truest fairy tales, it's not for children. It's for all of us."

This is a standout piece of fiction that could be at the top of any ballot and would be here, except for just how incredible The Black Tides of Heaven is.

The Black Tides of Heaven: JY Yang's exceptional novella is the benchmark is an incredibly strong category featuring no disappointments. I'll just quote my full review from mid April:

"Have you ever read a book and midway through you're actively angry at yourself for not reading it sooner? That was me after maybe twenty pages of The Black Tides of Heaven. By the end of the book my jaw was on the floor in amazement at just how spectacular this novella is. Told over the course of more than thirty years, The Black Tides of Heaven is not quite the story of revolution, but it is more a story of politics, of family, of personal choice, with a bit of revolution in the mix. All of that, and more, is woven together to something that is far superior than any facile description I could possibly give. I'm not sure I am up to the task of properly reviewing thie novella. I can only give The Black Tides of Heaven my highest possible recommendation."


My Vote
1. The Black Tides of Heaven
2. Down Among the Sticks and Bones
3. "And Then There Were (N-One)
4. All Systems Red
5. Binti: Home
6. River of Teeth


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