I keep hearing good things about literature.

If you're a sci-fi reader, I second being a Hugos voter. It's a good thing to do, and strongly exposes you to the sci-fi zeitgeist.

Downside is that it assigns a lot of reading in the spring and early summer, and assigned reading is never as fun. Currently I'm tapped out early in the latest Wayfarer book; it isn't as fun or engaging as the previous books in the series. Cheating on the Hugos slightly by reading the latest Expanse novel instead.

Among the novels, I've already read Space Opera and Revenant Gun, and both The Caluclating Stars and Spinning Silver were pretty high up on my hope-to-read-soonish list. I enjoyed A Closed and Common Orbit but wasn't in any great hurry to read Record of a Spaceborn Few. I don't really know anything about Trail of Lightning.

Over in novellas, I've read the first Binti, own the second but haven't read it yet, and this is the third. When I was a Hugo voter back in 2017, I put the first of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children fourth or fifth on my ballot, but maybe the third in the set is better? Somewhere I have a tab open to read a different story by P Djèlí Clark, and absent Hugo-ness The Black God's Drums is probably the novella I'd be most likely to read on my own.

I'm bummed that finances and calendrical warfare are conspiring to keep me from the Dublin Worldcon, I had an amazing time in Helsinki, but so it goes.

The whole thing kind of sounds like reviewing grant proposals, except I don't really know because I have never done either.

I greatly enjoyed Revenant Gun. Space Opera was very good at what it was trying to be: a 21st century Douglas Adams covering Eurovision.

The Binti series doesn't click for me. Which is fine, I'm not the target audience, and I don't begrudge it doing well. The McGuire book from last year was alright but not amazing, but I'll try to keep an open mind for the new one.

Are there any more Murderbot novellas this year? That was so much fun.

4: Analogizing A to B when you don't understand either A or B is like the time I tried to learn Catalan on Duolingo through the medium of Castilian.

Wern't the fascists trying to take over the Hugos a while back? Have they been successfully defeated?

6: I work by a process of pure reason.

7: Pretty much. Among the 24 works in the regular fiction categories (note that there are some repeated authors), a quick glance shows that 22 are authored by non-men, many of color; of the other two, one is by a trans man. Unless the fascists have suddenly embraced gender and cultural diversity, or they have some crazy deep accentuate-the-differences strategy, they're lost this battle.

That's probably different from grant proposals.

Not the lack of fascists. Just the demographics in general.

I just want to say I admire and hope to imitate the idiomization of "calendrical warfare".

"Unless the fascists have suddenly embraced gender and cultural diversity"

I join you from a land where the Widdecombe lumbers unchecked and the Hopkins squawk from every branch to point out that being a horrible fascist isn't completely incompatible with being female...

Seconding 12.

13: Very true. But you're also the land of TERFs. The lists are trans heavy, too. (Relative to the general population, anyway. No clue how so relative to the population of professional speculative fiction writers, but probably less out of line there.) Anyway, demography isn't destiny, but I think it's a reasonable proxy in this case--the diversity of gender, gender identity, and ethnicity combined make it unlike most/all current fascist movements.

Correction: I missed one dude who has two works, so it's 4/24 for men. Still 1/24 for white cis men. Very different from what the Puppies pushed.

5: There were Murderbot novellas on the Nebula ballot. Next year a full Murderbot novel, The Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect, comes out in May. I liked the first Binti novel more than the following two; they were fine as fast reads, but I'm also not the primary target.

3: I recommend The Calculating Stars; it's a good read, with a well rendered protagonist. The writing does telegraph the links out to the short stories, but they're not too annoying.

13: However, these particular fascists were pretty anti-women-in-science-fiction. I would be not at all surprised to see women fascists in other contexts, but when we're evaluating the success of the Sad Puppies, the presence of lots of women writers is a pretty good clue that they didn't win.

I haven't read very many of the Hugo nominees this year - the first year in a while that's happened.

I've only read the first Yoon-Ha Lee novel, which I disliked the first time through because I found what I took to be its politics pretty shallow and flawed. (It had been reviewed Very Seriously Indeed with lots of "an important story about values" stuff, I guess because Any Book By A Trans Person Must Be Very Deep Because Of Our Marginalized Identities) But I was at an event with the author (who is really nice! And very funny! Highly recommended!) and he talked more about how he intended it to be more of a fun/exciting space opera with villainous villains, intriguing semi-villains, math and battles drawn from Korean history than a profound statement for our times, and I ended up feeling much more enthusiastic about it. Also he basically said that calendrical warfare was "space magic", which it is.

I've also read "The Only Harmless Great Thing", which was Very Upsetting. Don't read it unless you're looking to read something Very Upsetting in both tone and content.

I did like Bolander's "The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters and The Prince Who Was Made of Meat" - not a surprising plot but very engaging.

Aliette de Bodard is great and I would gladly give a lot of awards to her Xuya Universe stuff, but I haven't read the one that's nominated. I really like Scattered Along The River of Heaven, the first Xuya story I ever read, if anyone wants a recommendation for a starting point. I wish they'd print an anthology.

I, alone among social justice oriented science fiction fans, do not really like The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet and its sequels. I feel like a terrible person saying this because they're so beloved, but I find their "moral lessons" extremely facile and poorly thought through, and that really kills them for me.

Best science fiction/fantasy I read this year: Monday Begins On Saturday, by the Strugatsky Brothers. Surprisingly light-hearted, all things considered, and has lots of making-fun-of-scientists stuff.

Monday Begins On Saturday
That right there is Upsetting enough for me.

Talk about calendrical warfare!

Here's a book. It's good.

We're supposed to steal it, right?

17: "he talked more about how he intended it to be more of a fun/exciting space opera with villainous villains, intriguing semi-villains, math and battles drawn from Korean history than a profound statement for our times, and I ended up feeling much more enthusiastic about it. Also he basically said that calendrical warfare was 'space magic', which it is."

I endorse all of this about Ninefox Gambit. I'm less enthused about Revenant Gun because I'm way, way less interested in Jedao than Lee seems to be.

I was going to say that any parent of multiple children is familiar with calendrical warfare (in my case, summer-vacation-worldcon will take place after Berlin schools have already started the new year) but then a little more thought showed that basically anyone with commitments involving other people is fighting those battles.

7, 9: I would also say they were, through a combination of technical changes and voter mobilization. The technical changes included having six finalist slots but allowing each nominator to only nominate five works, and a system for tallying nominations called "E Pluribus Hugo." The upshot is that it's technically harder for a slate to dominate nominations.

Voter mobilization included massive participation in the year that the Puppies got so many works nominated, leading to No Award winning five categories and the Sad Puppies slate nominees finishing behind No Award in many more categories. Following that repudiation, fascist interest waned and, I think, regular voter participation has picked up a bit.

"I, alone among social justice oriented science fiction fans, do not really like The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet and its sequels"

Yeah I'm with you on that one. They just don't seem very innovative or exciting and I don't really care about any of the characters.
The Ninefox Gambit was better, but still didn't leave me with the urge to seek out any other Lee.

The Murderbot stories, though, are really good - the narrator's voice is their strongest point. Would read more.

Further to 17: I liked A Closed and Common Orbit mainly because I like stories in which the whole universe is not shaped around the main characters, and I think there ought to be more of those in F/SF. I understand the urge to write stories about the Most Important People (for whatever values of "people") In The Universe; I mean, you've gone an thunk up whatever setting and you're asking yourself why tell this particular story of someone merely in the universe when you could tell the story of someone shaping the whole shebang. I imagine publishers often ask that question, too.

Anyway, I'm glad that the Wayfarers are out there, and really hope they don't turn out to be the Skywalkers of that universe.

I like stories in which the whole universe is not shaped around the main characters, and I think there ought to be more of those in F/SF.

This is an interesting point. Lois McMaster Bujold said about ten years ago at a con:

In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency. All three genres also may embody themes of personal psychological empowerment, of course, though often very different in the details, as contrasted by the way the heroines "win" in romances, the way detectives "win" in mysteries, and the way, say, young male characters "win" in adventure tales. But now that I've noticed the politics in SF, they seem to be everywhere, like packs of little yapping dogs trying to savage your ankles.

https://www.tor.com/2008/10/06/bujoldspeech/

And Jo Walton rephrased that as "SF is the literature of changing the world" which seems fair enough as well. And it's difficult to write about the world changing while refusing to write about the characters involved in that change.

Even SF that deliberately focusses on the marginalised ends up quite often with them having major effects - Case in Neuromancer comes to mind.

I suppose the opposite would be an SF story like "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in which the main characters have no effect on the world, and that's the point - but it isn't normally classed as SF and perhaps that's part of the reason why.

"Animal Farm" was science fiction before they took out the part about the radioactive human who bit the animals and gave them the proportionate political abilities of a human.

I'm not really up to speed on a lot of recent SF award winners and nominees. I don't recognize most of the nominees and their works, and the authors do I recognize I haven't read much of. This gives me a sad.* I read and liked N. K. Jemison's "Stone Sky" trilogy, ditto Ann Leckie's "Ancillary" trilogy, and Ada Palmer's "Terra Ignota" series. Anyone have any suggestions based on my liking those?

I think "fantasies of political agency" is an interesting idea, but there must be something more or it's too broad. Are Tom Clancy, "House of Cards," and "Veep" SF?

* The sad is partly because I'm more or less out of room for new books, and I don't particularly like ebooks, so my book-buying has slacked off lately.

27: And Jo Walton rephrased that as "SF is the literature of changing the world" which seems fair enough as well.

Which is ironic because the vast majority of her books that I have read (Thessaly is the exception) are not about characters changing any more of the world than what is immediately around the characters, if that much. The characters in the Small Change series are trying to get by as best they can. Change may be coming to the setting of Tooth & Claw but only after the story is done, and maybe not even then. My Real Children and Among Others are not so much about changing the world as the world changing around the characters.

30: Among Others isn't SF, is it? A memoir-fantasy hybrid?

29: Anyone have any suggestions based on my liking those?

Maybe some selected John M. Ford? The Dragon Waiting, Growing Up Weightless, or The Last Hot Time. All three a bit pulpier than what you listed, and probably less Bechdel-compliant, but also sidelong and ambitious. Weightless is clearly in dialog with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, as is Ian McDonald's recently-concluded Luna series, of which I have only read the first. You might also like his country-based set: River of Gods, Brasyl, and The Dervish House. Francis Spufford's Red Plenty which is not, strictly, SFnal, but inhabits a similar territory. Peter Higgins' Wolfhound Century trilogy. Dave Hutchinson's Europe series of four books. All male authors in that batch, I am afraid, but it could keep you busy for a week or two.

(You can also follow the URL attached to my name to a bunch more reviews, not all F/SF.)

31: Among Others is SF/F, sorry if I was unclear; I meant to say that it's not SF about changing the world.

Although it might repay a re-reading to find out if anyone other than the narrator (and the boy who wants to get into her pants and is thus likely to fib here and there) directly experiences the fantastic elements.

5: Yes, "Artificial Condition" is the latest Murderbot novella, and is part of the packet this year.

32. I read Ford's The Dragon Waiting a long time ago, and liked it. Will look up the others. Haven't read Ian McDonald's Luna series (which I keep seeing in my Amazon recommendations), but I've read River of Gods, Brasyl, and The Dervish House; good but not great. Read Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, which I liked a lot. Haven't read Peter Higgins' Wolfhound Century trilogy (his "Bookshelf" page is about 3/4ths books I've read). Haven't read Dave Hutchinson's Europe series. Very few of these seem to be very new, though.

I have read books 1 to 3 of Ian Tregillis' "Milkweed Triptych" which has WW2, Nazi supermen, and British demons. Pure pulp, for the most part, but it moved right along and had some genuinely creepy moments. (Only noticed there's a "Book 0.5" when googling to find the series title.) I suppose one could call it similar to Stross' "The Laundry Files" but it's less ... umm ... cute. Ken McLeod's "Corporation Wars" books have been collected into a trade paperback you could easily stun a rhino with, but useful for a quick and fun read as well.

Anyway, I was actually looking for recent books that are by the recent influx of female authors (beyond the ones I listed in 29), or by new male authors.

DLMA is a TERF!

35: "Very new" is one of my weak points. Jo Walton's Lent is so new you'll have to wait another five days, though some copies have probably already escaped into the wild.

36. I didn't say "newly male." I'm not even sure what a TERF is, though*. I thought it was feminists who thought trans women were invading their terf turf. Am I wrong?

* "Intersectionality is hard." -- Barbie

It's short for "trans exclusionary radical feminist". So I guess you're right about the meaning, but not the etymology.

Do hormones suppress mansplaning?

35: If you liked Ada Palmer's series, you might want to check out Malka Older's The Centenal Cycle trilogy, all three of which are in this year's packet in the Best Series category (Infomacracy, Null States, and State Tectonics). Like Palmer, she's exploring politics beyond the modern conception of the nation state. She posits a world in which nations no longer need to be contiguous, but instead each centenal (group of I think roughly 100,000 people) gets to vote periodically on which party/nation it wants to be running things locally for the next cycle. There's a post-election period in which people can move around if they want to live under a different government, and a worldwide information network and a bunch of international agreements that control the election rules and how these nations will interact to keep things running relatively civilly in between elections, so that you can still get to work if you need to pass through another jurisdiction. The first two are political thrillers centered around a couple of election campaigns - I haven't read the third yet. A lot of it seems to feel like the European Union writ large, but with much more flexible national boundaries.

because I read fast I am assisting my husband on a research project. I got waylaid by being drafted for another research project which in part had me reading the four to ten or so pages before and after each instance of the word uncanny in the works of henry james (there are 68 ha ha ha) and synopsizing the context (additionally there were like four other authors). now I guess it's back to the sf grind in reading all five short stories nominated for the hugo and nebula awards for a 10-year period, and considering whether they are thought experiments in some important sense, or nah. 1) I have agreed to a lot of reading in the past 8 months so these books better be dedicated to me or there will be unrest in the home 2) dammit, a lot of these stories are just terrible. I can't violate the soobc but one of our commenters writes sf short stories better than roughly 85% of this stuff.

before and after each instance of the word uncanny in the works of henry james

But what about instances of "irrelevant" in The Princess Cassimassima?

42: Hi, Al. One thing I learned from reading Jo Walton's An Informal History of the Hugos (covering 1953-2000, and yes, it is another packet entry this year) is that the short story category was somewhat hit or miss over a number of those years in terms of recognizing those stories that appear best (or best representative) in hindsight. There are a number of good stories there, but also a number now recognized as classics that didn't even make the finalists. She was surprised to find that the Best Novella category was consistently the strongest, year after year. Of course, if you are looking at the last ten years, a lot of the shorter fiction finalists in 2015 and 2016 were a complete dumpster fire because of the Puppies. Of the ten short story finalists in those two years, only one (the non-Puppy "Cat Pictures Please") ranked above No Award in the final vote (and it is a quite delightful and charming story).

44. the short story category was somewhat hit or miss over a number of those years in terms of recognizing those stories that appear best (or best representative) in hindsight.

That's really pretty much true in all the categories, isn't it? In fact, let me be expansive here: it's true in almost all annual award traditions. Look at the history of Best Picture Academy Awards compared to what we would now consider the Best Picture of a given year.

Ada Palmer's first book was amazing. She was so playful with cultures and languages in a way I hadn't seen before. I haven't read the rest because they're so information dense that they're hard to get back into if you aren't binging them. Thankfully, the last one comes out next year.

41.last: I really liked how the third Europe book ended, enough that I went back and read the first two immediately after to make the connections. Other than that, I fit blog consensus. Didn't like Small Angry Planet, though the next sequel was decent and I haven't read on. I only read and disliked the first Binti. Thought things went downhill after Ninefox Gambit but read them all anyway. I haven't been reading as much these days but I was sick this weekend and read four books (though mostly ones meant for kids) and I felt so much better emotionally, though still exhausted. I should probably throw money at the Hugo membership just because it's a good value for that many books.

47: The fourth of Hutchinson's Europe books ends even better than the third, in my view.

47: That's what I meant! I'm so used to trilogies I mentally miscounted. Yes, the final one.

49: Fractured trilogies. Such a satisfying ending, though. Every now and then, it's nice to be squarely in the target audience. This time, very squarely. From what I wrote about Europe in Autumn back in 2015:

Reading Europe In Autumn was more disorienting than usual for an alternate history. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the protagonist of this story set in a slightly-alt near-future Europe could easily have been a slightly-alt me, and not just in the sense that the author had created a sympathetic figure for readers to identify with. One of the book's episodes takes place in an Estonian manor house where I nearly spent my summer vacation a couple of years back. Another takes place in mountains along the present Polish-Czech border, whereas my episode (which fortunately featured less drama) was in mountains along the present Polish-Slovak border. The protagonist starts off as a chef in Krakow and is rumored to be doing other things. I was doing other things in another Polish city (fortunately (again) not the kind of other things that the protagonist gets up to) while rumors circulated among friends that I was a chef. Or maybe the rumors went around while I was in Budapest; it's been a while. The protagonist is inspired to become a chef by television shows featuring a chef who is the son of a Polish politician. I've met the politician. (Though not the son, who, in our time line, passed away suddenly in 2008.) Yet another episode takes place in Potsdam, not 10km from where I live now, and I've been to practically every location he goes to in Berlin. Fortunately (yet again), I've never found what he finds in a left-luggage locker at Zoo Station. I'm not sure how many of Hutchinson's readers will have as many points of similarity as I did, but I found it all just a tad uncanny.

" think "fantasies of political agency" is an interesting idea, but there must be something more or it's too broad. Are Tom Clancy, "House of Cards," and "Veep" SF?"

Someone or other did describe a techno thriller as "a SF novel in which one of the characters is the President of the United States" and that rings pretty true.

That definition comes pretty close to including Harry Potter.

So in answer to the question about what happened to the Puppies (7, 9, 23), Doug is basically right in 23. I had a ringside seat for some of this, because I was one of the people who self-mobilized in response to the Puppies in 2015, had a very minor role in developing one of the two nominating reforms (E Pluribus Hugo, abbreviated EPH) and a much bigger role in helping push the reforms through at Worldcon Business meetings from 2015-2017. I've written some stuff up related to this at my LiveJournal (linked through my name in this thread), including my one-slide summary of EPH (and EPH+, a stronger reform that got voted down in 2017) that I used to help lead the Q&A session on EPH at the 2016 Business Meeting. It takes two years to change the rules (changes to the WSFS constitution that defines the Hugo voting and nominating procedures need to be passed at one Worldcon Business Meeting and then ratified the next year, going into effect the year after that), so 2017 was the first year with the new reforms in effect.

Short summary timeline:
2015 - Vox Day weaponizes the Sad Puppy partial slate by filling it out to a complete slate with pet authors from his publishing house, inviting in a bunch of GamerGaters, and urging his followers to nominate exactly the entries he proposed without variation (the Rabid Puppy slate). He takes over five entire categories on the Hugo ballot and significant parts of several others. Hugo voters respond by voting No Award in the five categories that had slate-only finalists, and voting the rest of the slates (except Dramatic Presentation, where he nominated stuff that probably would have won anyway) below No Award in their various categories. Prior to 2015, there were only five times when voters had rejected all the entries in a category over the entire history of the Hugos. 2015 doubled this in a single year.

2016 - VD changed up his strategy, nominating a mixture of mainstream authors and some really offensive works, daring Hugo voters to reject everything on his slate including some mainstream works. Hugo voters prove capable of distinguishing between the decent stuff and the crap. Two more categories with nothing but slate entries are voted below No Award this year. Leaders of the original Sad Puppies mostly stay on the sidelines this year and try to distance themselves from VD.

2017 - First year that the two nominating reforms proposed in 2015 go into effect (EPH, and expanding the number of finalists to 6 in each category while limiting each voter to the traditional 5 nominations). Stronger reforms for future years get voted down at the Business Meeting. Any remaining Puppies from 2015 would have to pay for new memberships to be eligible to nominate this year. Puppies are still present in the nominations, but in reduced numbers, and generally only got one nominee on the ballot per category. (There is some debate over how much of this is a result of EPH directly, and how much is the result of VD adopting a new strategy of concentrated "bullet voting" for one option in response to EPH. There was one category (Best Fancast) where the Puppies supported two different nominees in the top 15, one of whom was eliminated by the anti-slating action of EPH before reaching the finalists. We don't know if any other categories had additional Puppy nominees who were eliminated before reaching the top 15.) In any case, with at least five good nominees in each category, voters could ignore the slate entry and treat the rest of the ballot like a pre-2015 Hugo ballot.

2018, 2019 - Remaining Puppies appear to give up and go in search of softer targets like the Dragon awards. With six good nominees per category, and some new categories like Best Series, the Hugos have a richer set of finalists than ever before. It's possible that a group like the Puppies might return at some point in the future, but for now, the Puppy wars appear to be over for the Hugos, with the good guys (from my perspective) prevailing.

EPH may play a small role in the amount of diversity of the nominees this year - it is based on some voting theory about how to allocate positions on the ballot roughly proportionally to the size of each constituency in the electorate. So if 2/3 of the nominators love stories about spaceships and hate dragons, and 1/3 love dragon stories but dislike spaceships, you would expect there to be roughly 4 spaceship stories and 2 dragon stories on the final ballot under EPH. (Actual results can vary from this depending on how people's ballots actually break down between the various options.) On the other hand, in the absence of slates, EPH is supposed to give results pretty close to the old (pure plurality) system. Looking over the published results on the top 15 nominees from 2017 and 2018, it looks like EPH may give a work a boost of up to 1-4 positions in the rankings if it is supported by a bunch of people who don't overlap much with the supporters of the rest of the nominees, but probably not more than that. So it might boost diversity a bit if there were a bunch of diverse authors in the #7-10 positions under the old system who might now get a boost into the finalists, but otherwise it probably wouldn't affect it too much.

I suspect that some of what we are seeing is the result of a more diverse crowd being drawn into Hugo voting in response to the Puppies, and some of it may be a bunch of Puppy-sympathetic voters abandoning the Hugos for now in response to the rejection of the slates (and in the process, cutting down on some nominations for cis white dudes). While I'm not personally unhappy with that result, we explicitly designed EPH to be politically neutral and to respond to the stated concerns of the Sad Puppies before VD got involved. If there really were a bunch of outstanding conservative writers who were being overlooked because of their politics, it wouldn't be bad if a group of their supporters were able to get some of them on the ballot from time to time, as long as the results weren't grossly disproportionate to their numbers in the overall electorate. If the works were good, they might win over some other voters in the future. But that's not what happened in 2015-17. Given a chance to put stuff on the ballot in disproportionate numbers, VD and his supporters chose to support trolling liberals over a search for overlooked quality. It's a relief not to have to deal with that crap any more.

If anyone is interested in the theory (and early analysis) of EPH, the key academic paper is "A Proportional Voting System for Awards Nominations Resistant to Voting Blocs" by Jameson Quinn and Bruce Schneier. The system they call SDV-LPE is what became EPH. SDV-LPE-SL is EPH+, an extra-strength version of EPH that got voted down in 2017. Table 1 shows how many slate nominations would have been finalists in each category if EPH/EPH+ was in effect for 2015 (compared with the actual results in AV); Figures 1 & 2 show how many slate nominees would have gotten on the ballot if slates of various sizes had been added to the 2014 results (under slightly different assumptions about how slate voters would have voted).

Another set of reviews of the short stories this year (all of which are online for free at the link in JJ's article): http://www.jcreid.net/blog/2019/05/25/hugo-awards-extravaganza-2019-short-story/