Hugo packet

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

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Started: 10/28/21
Finished: 11/7/21

First in a series, YA, some of it was predictable, and some of it was very not predictable, and I liked it a lot.

The only thing I wasn’t crazy about it a thing that a lot of YA books do: the characters, teenagers all, never act like teenagers. Or, not never, but even kids faced with a ton of responsibility are still going to act like kids sometimes. I don’t think these kids did. So I was occasionally taken out of the story when I remembered that, hey, this character who said he made a super-serious decision “years ago” is only 18 right now, and then it turns out he made this super-serious decision when he was 12. Uh huh.

That aside, I really liked it, and I LOVED where it took the plot.

A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde

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Started: 7/22/20
Gave Up: 7/22/20

I tried to read this one, and it had an interesting premise, but the writing style got to me.  I stopped reading Fran Wilde’s second book – maybe I finished it, and I don’t care to the third? – and this short story had a similar style.

And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas

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Started: 7/22/20
Finished: 7/22/20

SO GOOD.  It’s fantasy, it’s horror (even though I heard on a horror panel that the author doesn’t think of it as horror, so maybe I should just say it has an element that depending on what you’re afraid of, you could absoLUTEly think it’s scary), it’s historical fiction, and it’s emotional (I cried).  SO.  GOOD.

The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye by Sarah Pinsker

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Started: 7/19/20
Finished: 7/19/20

Sarah Pinsker can do no wrong.  This story was a roller coaster, speeding downhill, all fun and great, and then BAM we ran into a wall and fell into pieces and then what?  And no.  No!  Oh god no!  It’s fantastic and you should read it.  Except not you, Mom.  Or Margaret.

The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye

The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim

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Started: 7/19/20
Finished: 7/19/20

I don’t think I fully understood this story.  I mean, I get the overall plot and everything, I understand what happened and what the characters learned, but the details of the big tech thing and how (or why) things get erased…I spent too much time (for a novelette I finished in less than an hour) puzzling over it.  Don’t dazzle me – just tell the story.

Omphalos by Ted Chiang

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Started: 7/19/20
Finished: 7/19/20

I liked the style of this story more than the content, I think.  It’s about an archaeologist who reads about an astronomical discovery that upends her views on everything.  The setting is an alternate reality where the science really does uphold the beliefs of the young-earth creationists, so that’s the accepted view of the world and physics and everything.  The story is told from her perspective as she relates her days and thoughts to God, via prayers that feel like letters or diary entries.

Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang

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Started: 7/19/20
Finished: 7/19/20

Fascinating near-future story with tech that allows you to communicate with yourself in a parallel universe, which is really cool, but it’s about free will and how people use that tech to make decisions, to justify their actions.  The tech is just the next thing (but it’s a very cool next thing to consider).

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes

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Started: 7/18/20
Finished: 7/19/20

This novella was inspired by the song The Deep (by clipping.), which I haven’t listened to yet.  The premise is that the pregnant and going-into-labor slaves who were thrown overboard midocean (true) gave birth to mer-people (probably not true) who built a whole civilization and society around a historian who remembers everything so that the rest of them don’t have to.  The story is mostly about the current historian who is having difficulties with this burden, but it also goes back into the memories.  It’s very good.