How I would vote now: 2017 Hugo Award (Best Novel)

The Nominees

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

The Actual Results

1. The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
2. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
3. Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
4. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
5. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
6. Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

How I Would Have Voted

1. No Award
2. Deaths’ End by Cixin Liu

Explanation

If there’s any book on this list that I’m open to changing my mind on, it’s Death’s End by Cixin Liu. enjoyed The Three Body Problem, though it did have a lot of long sections of exposition, which comes across as amateur writing in English (and probably doesn’t in Chinese). But the characters held my interest, and the ideas in the book were absolutely fascinating. Also, there was absolutely none of the wokery that has come to saturate our Western culture in recent years, which made the novel feel very refreshing. So I enjoyed the first book in the series quite a lot.

However, things got really weird in the second book, and I didn’t connect with the characters nearly as much, so when the long sections of exposition began to feel like they were droning on, I decided to DNF it. I’ll probably try this series again at some point, but since I DNFed the second book, I can’t really say that I’d vote for the third book if the awards were held again. But I do need to give this series a second chance.

The book that won this year was the second book in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which I didn’t read because I hated the first book so much. Since it’s going to be a while before I get to the 2016 Hugos (I’m currently rereading Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which I DNFed before, but the library loan for the audiobook expired so I’m back on the waitlist again—just too many audiobooks I guess), I’ll briefly give my take on The Fifth Season and why that book made me DNF not only the series, but N.K. Jemisin as an author.

I believe that abortion is the defining moral issue of our times, just like slavery was the defining moral issue for 19th century America. Future generations will probably look on us the same way we look on the abolitionists and slaveholders of the antebellum era, and I suspect they will judge us just as harshly for failing to stand up for the rights of the unborn. After all, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For the 19th century, the defining issue was liberty, and the good guys won. For the 20th century, it was life, and the good guys lost, but the 21st century is shaping up to be a rematch (though based on the unbridled narcissism of today’s culture, the pursuit of happiness is giving it a run for its money, but on the abortion issue the two are aligned).

N.K. Jemisin is a very talented author. She wrote large sections of The Fifth Season in second person, and made it work. That’s a little like running a three minute mile in an era when most people thought it was impossible. Of course, she knows that she’s talented, which lends her voice a degree of arrogance, but she’s not the first author to have an oversized ego—in fact, you could argue that Orson Scott Card is much more obnoxious when it comes to that, and Card wrote the second-best book to ever win a Hugo (Ender’s Game. The best Hugo-winning book, IMHO, is Hyperion by Dan Simmons).

[Spoilers ahead]

However, it’s not the prose or the writing of The Fifth Season that I take issue with, but the underlying message. The book starts with an infanticide, where the main character comes home to find out that the father of her child has murdered her child and run away. Of course, this creates a massive amount of sympathy for the main character. The rest of the book alternates between flashbacks to the MC’s past, establishing her backstory, and the present, where she eventually acquires enough power to destroy the world. However, at the very end of the book, we learn that the MC’s backstory culminated in her killing another one of her children to prevent that child from becoming a slave. In other words, the big reveal is that the MC committed infanticide herself, on one of her own children, and the whole novel is carefully crafted to not only make us sympathize with her, but root for her when she does it.

I know that there were slaves in places like Haiti who killed their own children for similar reasons. However, there were also many other slaves who took the exact opposite view on the value of human life, such as Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. N.K. Jemisin has ancestors who were slaves, but she herself is a rich, progressive black woman living in New York City who is as far removed from slavery as I am (after all, there’s a reason why my people are called “slavs”).

But it wasn’t Jemisin’s views on slavery that I took issue with, so much as on using it as a justification for infanticide. It’s the same argument that we hear on the pro-abortion side of the issue, how it’s actually more merciful to slaughter an unborn child in the womb than to let that child be born into a life of poverty—never mind that our modern era is so fantastically wealthy that our poor are more likely to be obese than starving. In other words, the message of The Fifth Season is an antithesis to A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is not only a superior book, but is also on the side of the good guys in the defining moral conflict of our times, while N.K. Jemisin is on the side of the bad guys—or as I prefer to call them, the Death Cult.

So that is why I DNFed The Fifth Season and decided to never read anything that Jemisin ever writes (unless, of course, she comes to the light and changes her position on the right to life). It is also why I will always vote No Award on any ballot that includes Jemisin as one of the authors.

I started All the Birds in the Sky but didn’t finish it. To me, it felt like the author was trying too hard to be cutesy and childlike, but I personally found it off-putting. It’s been a while since I read it, and for some reason I can’t find it in my reading journal, but I seem to remember that there were some content issues, too—which would explain why I found it off-putting, given then childish tone.

I didn’t read A Closed and Common Orbit because I DNFed the series with the first book. Here is the entry for it in my reading journal:

This seems like the kind of book that would be right up my wheelhouse, but on closer inspection it really isn’t. The whole thing is one big cultural diversity parade, and the central question of the story half the time is whether the humans are using the right pronouns for the aliens. Also, you’ve got your obligatory super sex positive aliens and your nymphomatic, porn-addicted mechanic who’s played as the adorable one. So yeah, not at all for me.

I’ve written before about Ninefox Gambit, but I might as well include an excerpt from my reading journal on that one as well:

The story never really hooked me, and the action at the beginning felt disjointed without any conflict or characters for me to care about. Also, there were a lot of info dumps… But the thing that made me decide to DNF was when the main character turned out to be a lesbian. I don’t know that this book will follow the “all true love is LGBTQ love” trope, but I didn’t want to stick around to find out.

I suppose I could be convinced to try this one again, though. At the time, I was reading a lot of other award-winning and nominated books, which was why I had little patience for another woke lesbian love story. Seriously, I DNFed 27 books that month, most of them for similar reasons.

Finally, Too Like the Lightning was another book that I DNFed for obnoxious wokery. If I remember correctly, it takes place in a far future where gender is something that everyone intentionally ignores. It wasn’t quite as bad as Ann Leckie’s books, but it was definitely going for the same kind of woke nonsense. Also, there were some religious proscriptions that the author seemed to think would make for a much better society, but that I personally found super dystopian, and not in a good way.