Rewards I Will Give Myself For Getting Through This Reading Assignment

 Best Novel: Nnedi's has some interesting characters but there's a "you're nothing without family" theme running through it, and the whole family has to weigh in as to whether a disabled member can use an assistive device, so I'm seeing it as an interesting look into an alien culture, with some interesting nuance compared to a lot of these other anti-tech stories that people wrote on computers. Like "well what if it helps a disabled person have a better life?" These are interesting people from a parallel world and Nnedi makes them come alive but I'm not sure if I'll make it to the end. 

If I finish the others I might check out some of the other novels, but as of now, I'm tempted to leave Nnedi's novel unfinished yet still vote for it on that basis, although if I finish the rest of it in time I'll check out all the cozy mysteries or whatever else is on the slate and see if any voices grab me. I think that warrants a self-reward of at least one concert ticket. 

Best Lodestone/YA novel: upon completion of this category I intend to gift myself one of those new Labubus wearing a sailor hat. 

Best Novella: I used to use food as a reward, just like my parents used to do whenever they wanted to distract me, but these days I am trying to substitute healthier rewards, such as things that give me incentive to get off my ass and go outside. Therefore, if I slog my way through this category, I am allowing myself one trip to Stonestown for some fried shrimp (which is way healthier than fried ice cream) and a bath bomb from either Lush or Sephora. 

The whole shebang: a copy of one of Matt Dinniman's books that I haven't read yet. That should incentivize me to turn some pages and grind some levels in reading books. Plus if I pull off all this reading before I go to Las Vegas to see BTS again, I am allowing myself some bonus lilikoi Hi-Chews from the ABC Store in addition to other treats not determined as of yet. 

Best Novelette – Halfway Between Never Eaten Vegetables and No Award

 In today's episode of "former aspiring writer whose blunt opinions inspired so much gatekeeping she decided she didn't really care as much about getting through that gate as much as sharing her obnoxiously unfiltered consciousness streams and blowing up bridges," we are torn.

One option is to vote No Award, just to say that I don't think any of these stories belong in a "best stories" collection although they are all perfectly adequate on their own terms. I'm not seeing any exciting future trends (the way I once did with Murderbot stories) or finding any voices likely to keep me awake and turning pages until 2:00 a.m. 

Another option is to just omit this category from my ballot and pretend it doesn't even exist. And a third option would be voting for Never Eaten Vegetables as a middle finger to someone who once told me that 3D printing human embryos to seed planets was a disgusting sexist concept that nobody should ever write about. I might just do that, since it’s always a great day when you can bring happiness into another person’s life while also rehashing an old grudge.

Yes, yes, I probably shouldn't have read these stories after having an intense monthlong relationship with the Carl books, but what's done is done. I don't want to hurt any of the authors' feelings and wish them much luck writing for a subculture I shall continue to mostly avoid except for the platinum outliers to which my cheap commercialized aesthetics gravitate. 

EDIT: After a friend suggested I just find pictures of them all, and vote for the cutest one, and flat out state that was how I was basing my decision, I started to do that. And I discovered they are all cute, but Cameron Reed seems to be avoiding the spotlight. So I abandoned this plan just in case they turned out to be so staggeringly cute that I was forced by my own logic to vote for them. H.H. Pak, meanwhile, is represented by a cartoon, and I thought that was super cute, and all the rest are at least cuter than me, although probably nowhere near as mouthy. As of this current moment I'm inclined to vote for H.H. Pak because we both thought Giving Tree was a crock and so was Cold Equations. And also if this wins I kinda want to do a whole series about robot nannies. 

“When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente

 Dolly Parton’s hit Jolene done up as a Lovecraftian tale with way more domestic drama than I felt inclined to enjoy. Now do Amos Moses. 

Review - “The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker

Plucky girl illusionist has sapphic romance with mysterious and pixieish dream girl while musing about transformation. I disliked the ending. 

Re-Review – “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak

I went back into the fray to give this story a second chance. It’s kind of Cold Equations meets The Giving Tree and I didn’t like either of those stories, and neither did the author apparently, which is one of the few things we have in common.

Review – Rapport Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy

This is it? This is what I was looking forward to? An action-free tale about a petulant adolescent AI that needs to be gently scolded just like a human adolescent because it’s having its first crush? Currently tempted to No Award this whole category, but I’m going to power through those last two stories I bounced away from first.

Review – Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Science fiction is a genre that loves to speculate about first contact with alien minds. Science fiction is also a subculture that traditionally has a difficult time with inclusion of minds that belong to women, non-westerners, minorities, neurodivergents, and other sources of non-mainstream thought – without even getting into contemplating intelligence found in species right next to us, like octopi. 

The last thing I wrote before burning out on science fiction had to do with first contact and the last science fiction I loved – the Dungeon Crawler Carl series – is basically an extrapolation on first contact, in both instances with aliens that are greedier colonizers than we ever were. It’s an interesting subject, and I can’t quite figure out why I couldn’t engage with Tchaikovsky’s latest version, even though I’ve enjoyed his writing in the past and have felt for a long time that he deserves acclaim. 

Shroud is the story of some humans I couldn’t really tell apart, aside from one is a fat mean bastard who doesn’t survive first contact, and the alien hivemind then goes “whoops, these things might actually be smart” and gets friendly with the humans. 

I had to dive into various reviews for the summary. Interspecies misunderstandings occur until the corporates determine the aliens – who are from a lightless place and have a truly alien lightless culture – are not extractable enough and tries to take them out; the aliens outsmart them; humanity is mostly screwed but in the end it looks like communication is starting to happen.

In the Wikipedia entry, reviewer Zorica Lola Jelic summarizes this one as “whether we should create more sophisticated AI machines when we are morally so corrupt that we do not recognize the responsibility that goes with such an endeavor." Which makes it sound a lot like Dances With Wolves in space. 

Compare and contrast with Project Hail Mary, a current big hit that is seeding my social media feed with reactions, including people getting tattoos of the alien at the center of the “should I be selfish or should I go out of my way to help a space alien?” plot. I could even compare and contrast with my own novel, Star Language, which has history repeating itself in a completely predictable way while humans babble about inviting the aliens to A-list parties and demand they solve our problems centered around partisan politics. 

The novel itself is not a heavy-handed essay about moral corruption along the lines of the Wikipedia entry. It reminded me a little of Jeff VanderMeer’s work, and it’s definitely got the Tchaikovsky touch – his main interest seems to involve depicting hypothetical alien minds, which is something I very much enjoyed in a D&D romp he wrote where one party member was a magically enhanced spider. 

It didn’t grab me though. I didn’t get any particular impression of the two female lead characters, and only a fleeting one of their fat obnoxious boss. I didn’t want to keep turning pages, it was more like required reading. 

While I still kind of hope it wins just as encouragement to Tchaikovsky, who is a very good writer, and while I think the message about “we should think about inclusion as it relates to space aliens who are unlike us as scientifically plausible” is a decent one, I kept finding my thoughts returning to DC Carl, where altruism related to bizarre aliens is a winning strategy. 

I’m going to read Nnedi’s book next, Death of the Author (the only one I actually purchased before the nominations came out), and will get to the other novels time permitting. I had really high hopes for this one but maybe I’ll like Nnedi’s more.