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Reading the 2018 Hugos: Paper Girls, Vol 3

Paper-Girls-Volume-3

One of the challenging aspects of trying to read all the noms in the Best Graphic Story category is that many of the works are later volumes. So, if you’re not keeping up — like me — that means you need to first read the previous volumes before reading the actual nominated work just to follow the storyline.

Which is what I did with Paper Girls, Volume 3, and no regrets on that front, because this is a fun story. Shortly after Halloween in 1988, four young paper delivery girls find themselves confronted with a litany of bizarre occurrences — including futuristic teenager rebels, odd spaceships, and dinosaurs flying through the sky — that lead them on a series of time traveling adventures.

Volume 3 reunites the four girls after the events that separated them in previous volumes, and they find themselves trapped in a past highly affected by tiny rips in space. The people there collect the multitude of future technologies that come through. As the girls try to help out a young woman with an infant, a time traveler pops through, offering a few more fragments of insight into what’s really going on.

I’m a sucker for a good time travel romp (which I’m sure I’ve said a dozen times before) and this one is solidly loopy and fun,, but what really makes this story great is that each of the paper girls interesting in their own right. Each deals with the adventures in their own way, revealing their own strengths and perspectives — while also addressing issues of first periods, family concerns, and questions of what it means to grow up. I totally dug this one.

Paper Girls, Volume 3 — written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Cliff Chiang, colored by Matthew Wilson, lettered by Jared Fletcher — is nominated for Best Graphic Story. All my Hugo related posts are under the 2018 Hugos tag and you can check out the complete list of nominated creators and works here.

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Reading the 2018 Hugos: Provenance by Ann Leckie

Provenance by Ann Leckie

Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books, starting with Ancillary Justice, is at the top of my list best trilogies that I’ve ever read. I loved the intricate intergalactic universe she created along with the characters who roam it.  I’m pretty much down to read anything Leckie writes at this point.

Provenance is set in the same universe (an instant draw for me), but it’s focused on a different region of the galaxy, primarily set on a planet called Hwae, which has their own unique conflicts and cultural values. There is a strong focus on family as a political construct, as well as a passion for “vestiges,” or cultural artifacts that provide a level of prestige on the owner.

Driven by the need to impress her politically motivated mother, she embarked on a dangerous and desperate scheme — to bring a criminal out of imprisonment so that e can reveal the location of some stolen vestiges. Of course, nothing goes according to plan. The person she broke out claims to be someone else entirely. She quickly devises a new plan, but her ship home gets stopped by an ambassador with a gripe and once she does make it home, she’s greeted by political turmoil. Things only get stranger and more dangerous from there.

I don’t want to say much more than that — vestiges play a large role in storyline, as does the question of whether they are valid or forgery It’s twisty story with many, many threads from seemingly dissimilar occurances that all somehow come together in the end.

Ingray, at first, seems a bit frivolous. Her plan is absurdly risky and has cost her much in it’s execution to only have it fail. However, she’s a person who proves herself capable of thinking her way through just about any crisis (with only a little panic in the interim). Her plans are wild and sometimes foolish, but they also tend to work. She’s also really compassionate toward other people, helping who she can despite the risk to herself. It makes her lovable.

She makes some interesting allies throughout her journey — most notably, Garal Ket, the prisoner who may or may not be who she was seeking, and Captain Tic Ulsine, who ran away from his life on Geck by making off with a few of their ships. Both of these characters are clever and entertaining in their own unique ways.

On the whole, I would say that Provenance is a lighter romp than the Radch trilogy, the elements driving it more down-home with several iterations of family and family conflict being at center. A lot of the characters motivations are the result of the desire to fit in with family or the rejection of family along with the formation of new families. It’s impressive how Leckie is able to bring so many threads together into such an interesting story. It’s brilliantly done.

Provenance is nominated for Best Novel. All my Hugo related posts are under the 2018 Hugos tag and you can check out the complete list of nominated creators and works here.

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Reading the 2018 Hugos: Best Novelette Noms

“Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny, July-August 2017) — Thuan and Kim Cuc disguise themselves as houseless in order infiltrate and spy on House Hawthorn, a mission that is complicated when a magic curse begins to attack the house in which they are being tested. That’s the simple description anyway, since there are many layers to this story, which hints at a wide, well-detailed world — not surprising as this story fits into the Dominion of the Fallen series. It’s excellent on its own, and definitely has me itching to read more of this world.

“Extracurricular Activities,” by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, February 15, 2017) — Jedao is an operative in the Kel military, with a long list of successes in his mostly classified battle record, who is assigned a mission to investigate the disappearance of another operative and his ship that have disappeared. The story is as much about how Jedao relates to the crew of the ship he’s assigned to as it is about the investigation. He’s clever and capable in his work, which is always fun to read, and the story comes together in a thoroughly satisfying ending.

“The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017) — A group of humans are on a mission to save Sol using an old derelict starship — problems abound with all available bots working to repair the ship. In this midst of this Bot 9, the oldest on the ship, is brought online to hunt down an biological entity, which is all well and good except Bot 9 has some its own ideas of how things should be handled. As the story continues we get insight into the inner lives of the bots’ existence when they’re not working. This story is charming and I am so in love with Bot 9.

“A Series of Steaks,” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Clarkesworld, January 2017) — Helena is a forger of beef, with a careful artistic attention to detail. Her work is going smoothly until an anonymous caller places a demanding order for 200 T-bone steaks — a job she might have refused, if the caller didn’t insist on blackmailing her into the work. This story is great fun and I loved the unique idea of using 3D-printing to forge meat. It also has great characters in the form of Helena and Lily, both of whom are smart, capable women, and an ending that made me smile with glee.

“Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” by K.M. Szpara (Uncanny, May/June 2017) — Finley, a young transgender man, gets bitten by a vampire while having a night on the town. Facing death, he elects to become a vampire himself. Exploring what it means to transition from a number of angles — emotionally and biologically (with a look at how vampirism might specifically affect someone who is transgender and taking hormones) — this story is compelling. It’s also rather sexy, with the relationship between Finley and Andreas (the vampire who bit him).

“Wind Will Rove,” by Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s, September/October 2017) — A history teacher and fiddler on a generation starship comes into conflict with one of her students who believes learning the history and stories of the world they left behind is pointless when he will never visit that world. This is an incredibly beautiful  story of fiddlers, music, and the value of memory keeping. I love this story and was so absorbed that when I finished, I found myself blinking in surprise that the real world was still here.

My personal and entirely subjective ranking:

  1. “Wind Will Rove,” by Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s, September/October 2017)
  2. “A Series of Steaks,” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Clarkesworld, January 2017)
  3. “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)
  4. “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” by K.M. Szpara (Uncanny, May/June 2017)
  5. “Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny, July-August 2017)
  6. “Extracurricular Activities,” by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, February 15, 2017)

All my Hugo related posts are under the 2018 Hugos tag and you can check out the complete list of nominated creators and works here.

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Reading the 2018 Hugos: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

I’ve been hearing about An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon  for a while now, someone or another popping up in my twitter feed to announce how wonderful the book is. Having read it, I am in complete agreement with the praise it’s received.

Description:

“Aster lives in the low-deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, who they consider to be less than human.

When the autopsy of Matilda‘s sovereign reveals a surprising link between his death and her mother’s suicide some quarter-century before, Aster retraces her mother’s footsteps. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer and sowing the seeds of civil war, Aster learns there may be a way off the ship if she’s willing to fight for it.”

Aster is a fascinating character, an adept healer, as well as a scientist with an avid curiosity for how things — machines, the ship, the universe — work.  She’s also brilliant, obsessive, and somewhat solitary due the way many in the community treat her, calling her ogre and freak. She’s The ways she interacts with other people is complicated by her being  aneurotypical. She has difficulties with parsing out meaning behind people’s words, has difficulty recognizing sarcasm, and tends to have difficulty understanding the emotional undertones in her interactions with others.

The few people she is close to — Giselle and Theo — are each hard edged and complicated in their own ways. Giselle, her closest friend, is violently self destructive. Theo, the Surgeon General of the ship, is an ally and friend who helped to educate Aster in medicine and health care. Both act as a kind of foil to Aster, providing pushback and counter perspectives to the way she perceives the world.

It’s Giselle who provides the key Aster’s obsession with discovering more about her mother’s past, providing the key to unlocking her mother’s journals. As she dives more and more deeply into that history, hoping to understand herself, she begins to see how the some of the stories she’s been told may not be what they seem and that the ghosts of the past provide no easy resolution.

This novel provides many layers that could be unpacked.  It’s a stunning and beautiful accomplishment — and I’ll be keeping my eye out for more work from Solomon in the future.

Rivers Solomon is nominated for theJohn W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, an award associated with the Hugos. All my Hugo related posts are under the 2018 Hugos tag and you can check out the complete list of nominated creators and works here.

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Reading the 2018 Hugos: My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris

My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris

Written and illustrated by Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters is a masterpiece of the graphic novel form. Set in 1960s Chicago, the story is told by Karen Reyes a young girl with a passion for pulp horror stories. In her spiral bound journals, she draws out her life in a mix of sketches, journal entries, and comic panels — presenting the interconnected stories of her mother, brother, and the people who live in the community around her. When her neighbor, Anka, dies under mysterious circumstances, Karen begins an investigation into her death that reveals how Anka survived and escaped Nazi Germany.

The art is some of the most stunning that I’ve seen, with it’s crosshatched style and selective use of color. Some pages are present full portraits, while others are broken up into comic book panels to move the story forward. The art provides beautiful depth to the characters, who are given greater depth and humanity through the detailed art presented. The colors selected —bright reds, blues, and the like — highlighting specific aspects of their

Also, recreated covers from pulp comics are spattered throughout, breaking up the story like chapter heads. They also continuing reiterate Karen’s passion for the horror genre, as she is the one recreating the covers to practice her drawing skills.

One of the particularly interesting aspects of Karen’s character is how she perceives humans and monsters. She draws herself in her journals as a half-werewolf — understandable considering both her love for monsters and how she is treated as a freak by other students at school.

In general, the people she has the most sympathy for are those who she presents with some kind of monstrousness. Her friends take up roles as ghosts, vampires, or other monsters to her werewolf. In a world full of human beings capable of performing monstrous acts, Karen relates more closely to the fantastical monsters in the stories she reads.

I was also thoroughly moved by Karen’s relationship with her mother and brother. There’s such love and compassion between them, even when things are not perfect. Deeze, her artist brother, shares with her his passion for art, introducing her to the classic paintings at the museum and how they speak to him, as well as sharing the work he creates on his own. It’s a lovely relationship.

This is an astounding, complex, gorgeous book — one I’ll be recommending to every human being even vaguely interested in graphic novels. It’s amazing work, and I’m eagerly awaiting the opportunity to read the second concluding volume, and I plan to follow Ferris’ career closely from here on out.

All my Hugo related posts are under the 2018 Hugos tag and you can check out the complete list of nominated creators and works here.