The Nominees
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
The Actual Results
- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
- Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
- Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
- The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
- The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
How I Would Have Voted
- No Award
Explanation
The wokery was strong this year.
I have a list of tropes that I cannot stand anymore, to the point that I will usually DNF any book that uses them. All of the nominated books this year fell fell into at least one of those tropes, including:
- All true love is LGBTQ love
- A profane and vulgar childhood
- Death is chic
- Life is not worth saving
- Badass woman warrior, slay!
One of these days, I’ll write a blog post describing all of these tropes. If they weren’t so common in fiction these days, I would have more tolerance for them, but I’ve seen them all so much that they get an immediate “nope” whenever I see them.
The City in the Middle of the Night was like something written by a mental patient, and not in a good way. If I wrote a parody of a book written by a leftist, it would read no differently than this book.
I forget why I DNFed The Ten Thousand Doors of January, but I think it was because of the trope I call “a profane and vulgar childhood,” where children lose (or are never really allowed to experience) their innocence before they grow up, and the author doesn’t treat this like the tragedy it truly is. There may have also been an anti-racist / anti-colonialist bent that turned me off, if I remember correctly.
I wanted to like The Dark Brigade, because I enjoy reading Kameron Hurley’s op-eds in Locus Magazine, but the book was way too dark and profane. Also, it suffered from “all true love is LGBTQ love” and “badass woman warrior, slay!” which I am just so tired of reading.
A Memory Called Empire is one of those sprawling space operas about a massive galactic empire, but it read too much like something written by an English major with little to no understanding of how geopolitics actually works. Also, the “all true love is LGBTQ love” was strong with this one.
Finally, Middlegame and Gideon the Ninth are both prime examples of “death is chic,” a trope which plays right into the death cult that currently dominates our culture. But even if the macabre obsession with death is just an aesthetic, it’s one that I personally cannot stand. With that said, though, I think it goes beyond the aesthetic for both of these books—but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.
For all of these books, the characters fell completely flat for me. One of the things I need in order to connect with a character is to get a sense right off the bat that they’re a good person—or, if they’re a bad person, that needs to be lampshaded clearly as a flaw. But in so many books that are published these days, the characters are just downright awful people who care only for themselves, and rarely is this pointed out as a flaw.
Increasingly, it seems that we live in a world where the culture tells us that nothing is true and everything is permitted. Screw that.
