Summary: The most lacklustre group of Hugo finalists I can remember reading. The only worthy nominee is Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow.
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Editors, Vanessa Rose Phin, Diana Gill, Jonathan Strahan, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Scott H. Andrews, John Joseph Adams
Fiction:1
And Now His Lordship Is Laughing • short story by Shiv Ramdas ∗∗+
As the Last I May Know • short story by S.L. Huang ∗∗
Blood Is Another Word for Hunger • short story by Rivers Solomon ∗
A Catalog of Storms • short story by Fran Wilde ∗
Do Not Look Back, My Lion • short story by Alix E. Harrow ∗∗∗+
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island • short story by Nibedita Sen ∗∗∗
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When the 2020 Hugo nominations were announced a few weeks ago it seemed pretty obvious that the awards (or the main fiction categories, at least) are still broken: for the third year running, the finalists in the novel, novella, novelette, and short story categories are almost entirely women and/or people of colour (this does not reflect the demographics of the genre, nor of those producing the best work).
Whereas previous years’ nominations nevertheless managed to include some reasonable work despite this bias, that is not the case this time around.2
The first of the Hugo finalists is And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9th September 2019). This gets off to a dull—almost attention numbing—start with an elderly Indian woman rising at dawn and working jute to create a doll for her grandson (there are subtle hints that it may have magical properties). However, things don’t really get going until a British officer turns up (at which point we realise we are in colonial India) and pressures the old woman to make one of her dolls for the wife of the regional governor. She refuses, and the officer—after telling her she will regret her decision—departs.
The story then skips forward in time to a period where the grandson is dead, the village fields burnt, and people are starving to death. Then the British arrive and force feed the grandmother. After she recovers, she learns that the British haven’t burnt the fields to pressure her to make the doll, but as a consequence of the wartime Denial of Rice Policy.3 When she learns that all India is suffering, and not just Bengal, she agrees to make a laughing doll for the Governor’s wife.
Later on, the grandmother watches the hanging tree as she makes the doll:
With the fields all gone, she can see further from the verandah than ever before, all the way to the tree. It used to be the sabha sthal, where the villagers congregated for Panchayat meetings under the broad, dangling roots. Now it’s something else entirely. Vultures peck at the swaying bodies hanging from its boughs, rats scurry around its base, gnawing at the bodies on the ground underneath it. It had started out as a place of punishment, where the British hung farmers who dared to hide rice from them. Then villagers took to hanging themselves there as well; the rope is more painless than the slow, pitiless grip of starvation. Parents hung their children, and then themselves; it was just easier that way. That was when the British burnt the jute fields, to ensure no one could make any rope. Or maybe they just enjoyed watching their victims die slowly. So people have taken to cutting down the bodies and reusing the rope. There are now almost as many corpses on the tree as leaves below it.
After the grandmother finishes the doll—the final touch involves her putting some of her blood into it—she insists on accompanying it to the Governor’s mansion to show him and his wife how to make it laugh.
The final scene is a Grand Guignol revenge spectacular that takes place at the Governor’s dinner party where, once she is among the guests (spoiler), the grandmother lets out a maniacal laugh, which causes the doll to do the same. Anyone within earshot—the old woman’s ears are plugged with jute—laughs uncontrollably, and they continue to do so until they die. This is quite an effective scene to start with but it is spoilt by the later addition of pools of blood (initially one victim bashes their head on a table—fair enough—but then the writer can’t help over-egging the pudding by having blood stream out of the Governor’s nose, eyes and mouth). This excess ruins the fantasy logic of the piece—you’d expect continual violent laughing to asphyxiate people to death, not cause blood to come spurting out of them. Why is it that fantasy writers think that they can have anything at all happen in their stories? The best are constrained by their own internal logic.
There is probably a better story hiding inside this simplistic anti-colonial revenge fantasy—one that has a more engaging start, that goes deeper into the historical issues, and which loses the phlebophilia at the end.
As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23rd October 2019) starts with ten year old Nyma talking to her tutor Tej: it soon becomes apparent that we are in a different world, one where this child has the control codes for her county’s “sere weapons” implanted in a capsule lodged in her heart. If their demagogue President wants to use the weapons he must personally cut the capsule out. (The backstory to this involves the founding of the Order Tej serves two hundred years previously, after the first use of sere weapons against their country. The Order’s mission is to ensure that their President faces a personal moral dilemma before using their own weapons against any attacker.)
The rest of the story has Nyma and the president meet and speak; later, a relationship of sort develops between the two. Meanwhile the war rumbles on in the background.
Eventually the conflict worsens and reaches the city, and the President calls for Nyma so (spoiler) he can use the sere weapons—but he cannot bring himself to kill her. Later, after the situation deteriorates further, Tej comes to Nyma and says that the Order has discovered a way to get the codes without harming her; Nyma refuses, saying that the decision is meant to be a difficult one. Then . . . well, then Nyma just sits there and waits. No resolution, the story just hangs in the air after setting up its moral quandary. It’s a pity the story doesn’t, for example, summarise both sides of the dilemma in the final scenes and force the reader to make a choice. Almost anything would be better than it just stopping.
The only one of the stories I’ve read so far is Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24th July 2019). This one starts with a slave girl called Sully who massacres her mistress and her family. This action has supernatural consequences:
It was Sully’s unsoftened anger in the face of what she’d done that cut a path between dominions. The etherworld spat out a teenage girl, full grown, called Ziza into Sully’s womb. Ziza had spent the last two hundred years skulking in the land of the dead, but she rode the fury of Sully’s murders like a river current back to the world of flesh. Ziza felt it all, wind and sky and the breath of wolves against her skin. She spun through the ages looking for the present, time now foreign to her after being in a world where everything was both eternal and nonexistent.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Ziza called as she descended from the spirit realm down a tunnel made of life. Breathing things, screaming things, hot, sweaty, pulsing, moving, scampering, wild, toothy, bloody, slimy, rich, salty things. Tree branches brushed her skin. Sensation overwhelmed her as she landed with a soft, plump thud into the belly of her new god. Ziza took in the darkness, swum in it. It was nothing like the violent nothingness of her home for the past two centuries. For here she could smell, taste, feel. She could hear the cries of the girl carrying her, loud and unrelenting.
Sully had never been with child before, and she didn’t understand the pain that overtook her so sudden as she shoveled the last gallon of dirt over the graves of her masters. Spasms in her abdomen convinced her she was dying.
Sully wakes after the birth to find that Ziza has put her in bed and cleaned the house. Ziza tells Sully that, as she committed a multiple murder, she will give birth to others from the etherworld and, in due course, a boy of ten named Miles joins them. Two months later a forty-one-year-old woman named Liza Jane is “born” and, a few days later, a twin sister Bethie. Finally, an old man called Nathaniel arrives.
The group later ambush wagon trains and, for every traveller they kill, Sully births another of their kind. Eventually, they are enough of them to take on the town, which they do successfully.
The final scene (spoiler) has Sully cutting out her own uterus, burying it, killing herself, and being reborn from the soil.
This didn’t work for me, partly because Sully is not a particularly engaging central character (aside from the fact that she is a mass murderer, she spends quite a lot of time bickering with Ziza), and partly because the story is just about a lot of people getting murdered.
A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019) starts with a mother and three daughters watching the Cliffhouse, and the people who have turned into “weathermen”—supernatural beings who fight the weather, and take a similar form. As the twin girls squabble, one of them blurts out that she has spoken to a weatherman, and only avoids punishment when one passes overhead and warns of a squall.
Later, this daughter joins the weathermen in the Cliffhouse; the narrator states she will be the next.
The rest of the story further describes the various family relationships (listed as storm metaphors); tells us what the weathermen do (they “name” or fight the storms to stop them); and finishes with a visit to the Cliffhouse (where the remainder of the family find storms that have been turned into brass hinges).
Although this feels somewhat Bradburyesque to start with, the story spins its wheels for the most part and doesn’t really go anywhere. I also found it a bit baffling (even after someone pointed out it is a “magical realist allegory,” I couldn’t finish a second read through). Another aspect of the story I disliked is that it is told in an irritatingly telegraphic style, with lots of one or two sentence paragraphs:
The basket I hold is made of grey and white sticks; my washing basket most days. Today it is a treasure basket. We are collecting what the weather left us.
Mumma gasps when she tugs up a floorboard to find a whole catalog of storms beaten into brass hinges.
We’ve found catalogs before, marked in pinpricks on the edge of a book and embroidered with tiny stitches in the hem of a curtain, but never so many. They sell well at market, as people think they’re lucky.
Time was, if you could name a storm, you could catch it, for a while. Beat it.
If it didn’t catch you first. So the more names in the catalog, the luckier they feel.
We’ve never sold Lillit’s first catalog. That one’s ours.
Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019) opens with Eefa fleeing the city of Xot and her warrior wife Talaan:
Eefa has been a good husband, she knows, but now she is running.
She’s kept their hearth warm and their home clean. She’s prayed each dawn and dusk at the twin temples of Ukhel and Idral, serene and pious as a dove. She’s sent her wife off to war a thousand fucking times, lining the streets with the other husbands and pretending to weep with pride rather than terror.
She’s been a good healer, too, and delivered each of her wife’s four children: three great, howling daughters who latched like wolf pups to the breast and one sweet, sloe-eyed son. All of them healthy and strong, all of them given their bloody promise-scars at birth. Soon they will be marching to war alongside their mother and Eefa will be praying and weeping and waiting for them, too.
This opening limns the personal conflict that is at the centre of the story, and we learn much more about the pacifistic Eefa, her hatred of the warlike culture that pervades her society, and the conflict that takes Talaan—the people’s hero—and her near-daughters away from her.
When Eefa finds out that Talaan is pregnant once more, she forces her to agree that this new child will be a healer, and not a warrior like her near-daughters and son. Of course, the Emperor eventually visits Talaan, and insists that the sixth month pregnant Talaan goes to battlefront to help with the war. Tallan’s son (spoiler) dies there, and Eefa suffers another reversal after the birth of her near-daughter when other family members interfere in its destiny.
There is a lot of interesting world-building and character interaction packed into this engaging piece but, if it has a flaw, it is that it goes on for too long at the end; the imagined sequence where Talaan fights the Emperor after Eefa flees with the new born daughter also raises unanswered questions (if Eefa thinks Talaan is going to win the fight and change society, why would she flee?)
The only worthy finalist here.
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019) consists of, as the title suggests, ten extracts from various books and academic journals, etc. These tell of the discovery of a female tribe of cannibals on a remote island and the shocking incident that occurs when one of the children later goes to Churchill school in Britain (spoiler: one of the English girls carves off strips of her own flesh to give to the visitor).
Most of these extracts view the incident through a particular political or cultural lens and, at times, this is mordantly amusing—as can be seen from the some of the titles (“A Love That Devours: Emma Yates and Regina Gaur,” “The Subaltern Will Speak, If You’ll Shut Up and Listen,” “Dead and Delicious II: Eat What You Want, and If People Don’t like It, Eat Them Too,” etc.). Parts of the text also raise a smile as well:
“[. . .] the problem is that we have everyone and their maiden aunt dropping critique on Ratnabar, but we’re not hearing from us, the Ratnabari diaspora ourselves. If I have to deal with one more white feminist quoting Kristeva at me . . . [. . .] No, the real problem is that our goals are fundamentally different. They want to wring significance from our lives, we just want to find a way to live. There’s not a lot of us, but we exist. We’re here. We don’t always quite see eye to eye with each other’s . . . ideology, but we’re not going anywhere, and we have to figure out what we are to each other, how we can live side by side. So why aren’t we getting published?”
Although this is clever and occasionally amusing, it’s also a slight and very short piece (1400 words), and not Hugo finalist material.
In conclusion, a poor selection of stories—mostly a mixture of the lacklustre, broken, or minor. I’ll be voting for Harrow’s story and then No Award.
As to the question of what story will actually win in this category, who knows? Harrow has the best and most reader friendly story, and the advantage of being a Hugo winner last year (this sometimes gives finalists an inertial advantage);4 if the voters decide on Buggins’ Turn they may give it to Fran Wilde, who is three-time finalist;5 alternatively, and maybe more likely given the political/cultural voting bias of some of the Hugo voters, there may be a Black Lives Matter moment which sees Solomon Rivers as the winner (as well as Jemisin in the novelette category, and Clark or Rivers in the novella). ●
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1. Story links:
And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019)
As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019)
A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019)
Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)
2. This was another of the group reads in my Facebook group. Very few people commented on the stories, and nearly all the comments were negative. While this may be the result of the small sample size and demography, I also note a recent longer thread in a much bigger FB group (5000 members plus) that had considerable amount of negative comment about last year’s The Calculating Stars (a lot of it from women, surprisingly). I’m beginning to wonder how much overlap there actually is between the Hugo voters and the the wider SF readership.
3. You would think, given the way the Denial of Rice policy is presented in Ramdas’s And Now His Lordship Is Laughing, that the British were idly practising their Evil Villain skills. The causes of the Bengal Famine were considerably more complicated than shown here (the reason for the scorched earth policy in Bengal was because of the anticipated Japanese invasion in the east of the country, for one thing). Wikipedia on the Bengal Famine.
4. By inertial advantage I mean, for example, Joe Haldeman receiving a Hugo for his short story Tricentennial after getting one for The Forever War the year before, etc. There are a number of these double tap award winners.
5. Wilde placed fourth in the 2017 Hugo novelette category with The Jewel and Her Lapidary (after receiving 160 nominations), and sixth in the 2019 Hugo short story category with Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand (after receiving 69 nominations). So there is a small group of Wilde enthusiasts—but perhaps, it would seem, not widespread support. ●
