The Parliament of Beasts and Birds

Well, here's an early indication that this year's Hugo nominees will be different from past years'. I just read "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" by John C. Wright (it's short; you can, too). The writing is stilted and awkward, inconsistently jumping between levels of tone and diction (high-level, multi-claused sentences are mixed in awkwardly with things like all-caps "NO DOGS ALLOWED"). The story is told with the timelessness of a parable (each animal represented by one capitalized example: Fox talks to Lion talks to Worm, etc.) but with some weird references that break the tone and make it seem modernish. A few things stand out as weird burrs of writing, which I would prefer to see sanded smoother: the past tense of "shine" is "shone" (esp. to match the fancy tone of the rest of the story; the technically-acceptable "shined" really stands out as awkward); Google tells me that gopherwood is the substance of the ark, but why bring it up so specifically? It doesn't serve any purpose but to make the story more Bible-sounding.

The entire story comes off as a heavy-handed parable, although an unclear one; the morals are scattershot all over the place, up until the oppressive series of rhetorical questions that finishes the story. Overall, I'd say this story is not unredeemable, but it is a prime example of showing-not-telling and needs rework to become more engaging and purposeful. Maybe this is what other nominees' stories looked like, before editors and other advice-givers helped to reshape them.


This post's theme word is atavism, "tendency to revert to ancestral type (or something ancient)". The atavistic format of the story did not belie its apparent moral.

Voting systems and the Hugo awards

The ciiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiiiiircle of life! It turns! The stars wheel around (as do we), and another year has passed: welcome back to the announcement of Hugo nominees! As in past years (2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009) I am going to try to read all the fiction (novels, novellae, novelettes, shorts stories) and think about them. (You'll notice that my extensive retroblogging project continues with these lists.) No promises how far I'll get through posting my thoughts this year, but links will follow.

One note before we begin. A fortuitous confluence of events means that I recently heard a seminar by Rida Laraki, on the subject of voting systems. It was a fantastic seminar, and I am certainly going to read some of his research. The takeaway points were these:

1. All voting systems are "wrong" for some scenario of voters and gaming the system. (We just have to decide which flaws we prefer to other flaws. Thanks for the pessimism, Arrow's theorem and similar.)
2. Most of the time spent making a decision should be spent selecting the voting mechanism and explaining it to voters, not campaigning.

How does this relate to the Hugo awards? Well, there's a giant kerfuffle happening right now over a campaign ("Sad Puppies") which produced a voting bloc and dominated the nominations in several categories. It is political, and social, and polarizing in some corners of the blagoweb. My main reaction is that I am sad that this strategy has been so effective, because it quashed the dispersed-voice-nomination-effect which brought me so many wonderful reading lists in past years. I'll still try to read the list below, but I'm appending another list of books I suspect might have made it onto the ballot in the absence of bitter canine whelps.

I feel that (1) trumps (2), since any adjustment to the voting system now will be reactionary, and if we change the voting system every time it produces a result we don't like, that doesn't seem too far (in theoretical terms) from simply weighting certain votes as "better" than others. It's meta-gerrymandering.

Best novel:

• Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
• The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson
• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
• Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos
• Skin Game by Jim Butcher

Best novella:

• Big Boys Don’t Cry by Tom Kratman
• “Flow” by Arlan Andrews, Sr.
• One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright
• “Pale Realms of Shade” by John C. Wright
• “The Plural of Helen of Troy by John C. Wright

Best novelette:

• “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart
• “Championship B’tok” by Edward M. Lerner
• The Day the World Turned Upside Down by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
• “The Journeyman: In the Stone House” by Michael F. Flynn
• “The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale” by Rajnar Vajra

Best short story:

• “Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet
• “On A Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli
• “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” by John C. Wright
• “Totaled” by Kary English
• “Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa

Suggestions I've gleaned from elsewhere:

• Echopraxia by Peter Watts
• The Peripheral by William Gibson
• Lock In by Jon Scalzi
• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• My Real Children by Jo Walton
• Annihilation / Authority / Acceptance (trilogy) by Jeff Vandermeer
• The City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennet
• Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey
• Defenders by Will McIntosh
• The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
• The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
• Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
• Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
• Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon
• Coming Home by Jack McDevitt

... and now I am out of time to look for more possible-nominees, so I will certainly not have the time to read this entire list. The fun is in the attempt, of course.

This post's theme word is febrile, "of, relating to, or characterizing a fever; feverish." She entered a state of febrile reading.