Hugo Novel Review (Partial): Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

written by David Steffen

I’ve been reading as fast as I can before the Hugo voting deadline on July 31st, but there’s been a bunch of things competing for my time  and so I haven’t been able to read as many of the nominees as I like.  I am only part way through The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu, published in English by Tor Books, but since the Hugo voting deadline is almost here I wanted to give a partial review–I’ll give a complete review when I have had the time to finish the book.

The story starts in China in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution (a social-political movement started by Mao Zedong whose stated goal was to preserve the “true” Communist ideology from the corrupting influences of capitalist and traditional elements from society.  Ye Zhetai is a physics professor at the time, trying to teach his students without coming under the ire of the movement, but in a debate about relativity he is struck dead.  His daughter Ye Wenjie follows in his footsteps, becoming a physicist as well, and ends up being recruited for a top-secret research project.

In the present day Wang Mao, a nanomaterials researcher, is called into a meeting between top researchers and military officials, where a list of physicists who has committed suicide is revealed, each for apparently the same reason, leaving long essays as suicide notes.  It has something to do with the organization called Frontiers of Science which are considered radical by the rest of the scientific community, to answer the question: “What is the limit of science?”  The implication seems to be that something about what they have found in their research is driving them to kill themselves.  He starts seeing elements pointing to a countdown in impossible places.  A countdown to what?  Wang Mao takes a position at the Frontiers of Science, and he sees fellow researcher Shen Yufei playing a game called The Three-Body Problem, which is based in a fictional world where there is no discernable pattern to the seasons and the challenge of the game is to find some pattern so that a civilization can be established in a stretch where the weather is favorable.

And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten in my reading.

The novel is very slow to begin.  It seems like half of what I’ve read so far didn’t have much relation to the other half, but I’m still in the first quarter of the novel so at this point I’m assuming it all ties together to justify that slow start.  I also figured that there might be some cultural differences about the expectations of story structure so I didn’t want to give up on the story until I’d given it a good long time.  I really felt like I got hooked as he was playing the Three Body Problem game, the details of that game and the strange challenges were interesting and caught my attention.  The problem of the physicists committing suicide has a bit of a Lovecraft feel to it–forbidden knowledge that drives one mad, though in general it feels more science fiction-y than horror-y.

Anyway, I’m interested in how it turns out, I’m enjoying the read, but without more pages consumed, I can’t say overall whether I like it or not.  I’ll let you know soon.

Why do I Value the Hugos?

written by David Steffen

I’ve been following the Hugos closely for several years, trying to read and review as many of the nominated works as I can digest between the announcement of the ballot and the final deadline.  I also follow the Nebulas, and I glance at the results from other SF genre awards, but for me the Hugos take up most of my attention come award season.  With this eventful Hugo year, it crossed my mind to wonder why the Hugos specifically, and whether I might perhaps be better off devoting more of my attention to awards that don’t collect controversy the way the Hugo Awards always seem to do, and in escalating fashion these last few years.

1.  The Hugos are Fan-Based.

Specifically, they are based on the supporters/attendees of WorldCon, which is certainly not an exact representation of fandom as a whole.  But what I mean by this is that the fan-based nature differentiates it from juried awards or the Nebulas which are voted by SFWA members, which gives that award a very different feel.

I do like the concept of the Locus Awards, since those are available for anyone to vote online, so have a broader voting audience–maybe I’ll try to pick them up next year.

2.  The Hugos Have a Long Reading Period

The Nebulas and the Locus awards have very short reading periods (the period of time between the announcement of the ballot and the voting deadline) of only about a month.  If I want to read as much of the fiction as possible, that’s not nearly enough time–I can’t finish all the short fiction, let alone start the novels.  The Hugo ballot is announced around Easter weekend (usually early April or so) and the voting deadline is at the end of July, so there are nearly four months to try to do all the reading.  The Hugo Packet isn’t released right at the beginning of the reading period, but usually enough of the short fiction was published in online venues so that I can fill my reading time with Hugo material.

3.  The Hugos Have Instant Runoff Voting and No Award

The Nebula ballot for each category is a set of radio buttons–you can only choose one winner.  On the Hugo ballot you can give a numeric vote from 1 to N, where N is the total number of nominees (usually 5).  All of the voters first choices are tallied, and the story with the lowest votes is eliminated–all of the ballots which had the eliminated story as the top vote slip down to their second choices, and so on, until there is a winner.   I like this because it’s a very common situation where I like more than one of the nominees a great deal, and this lets me give support for more than one instead of having to choose.  This is also beneficial if the same author has more than one story in a category because they don’t self-compete.

There is also a No Award vote that lets you differentiate between items you don’t care about and items you strongly feel should not win.  If there is a large enough portion of No Award votes, no awards will be given for the category, which gives a recourse in the case that you think a category has nothing worthy.

4.  The Hugos have a Graphic Story Category

I love graphic stories, but I have not been very good at keeping up with them.  The graphic story category gives me a sampler of what the graphic stories that people loved the most so that I can catch up a bit, maybe even consider picking up a subscription.  This year’s category was especially stellar, with three comics that I’d consider picking up–which I reviewed here a few weeks ago.

5.  The Hugos Have WorldCon

I made it to WorldCon 2012 in Chicago, and had a really great experience there.  That was before the launch of the Submission Grinder, so less people knew who I was, but I still knew a lot of people from Writers of the Future and Codex.  There were a lot of my favorite writers and editors there, probably partly due to the Hugos drawing them to the award ceremony.  I also thought it was fun to go to the award ceremony itself.

6.  The Hugos Have the Hugo Packet

A lot of the short fiction is available for free without actually becoming a Hugo voter–a lot of it was published for free online to begin with, other publishers (like Analog) post it there for the readers to see.  But most of the ones that aren’t available for free are in the packet, and most years most of the novels have been included as well.

This is based on kind of an odd dynamic.  The Hugo packet is only a few years old, so it’s a nice convenience.  If the Hugos were less notable, the publishers probably wouldn’t participate.  If the Hugo voting audience was huge, the publishers might be reluctant to give away that many free copies.  So it works in kind of an odd middle space where most science fiction and fantasy readers are aware of the award, enough that pasting the name on a book cover can encourage sales, but not so many actually participate (even though they all can) to deter publishers.

7.  The Hugo Rules/Categories are Chosen By Fans

OK, this one is alternately a benefit or a detriment.  A benefit because as new formats of science fiction and new publishing technologies become popular, the award can expand to include those things, and theoretically phase out those things that are outdated.  A detriment because it can sometimes end up with some long-lasting categories that don’t make a lot of sense, or new categories thrashing out of momentary conflicts.  But I like the idea in theory anyway.

Hugo Novella Review: “Flow” by Arlan Andrews, Sr.

written by David Steffen

“Flow” by Arlan Andrews Sr. was published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.  Analog published it free to read online as part of the Hugo season.

Rist and Cruthar live with their people in the Tharn’s Lands where the world exists in unending hazy twilight.  They make their living by riding icebergs that break off from the greater ice mass to sell them to warmlanders further south.  In this story Rist takes his first berg-riding trip to the south, where the sky is blue and the light burns brightly in the sky.  They are only meant to take the iceberg as far as the ice broker, but Rist gets the idea to ride the iceberg further south, and so he and the more experienced Cruthar go on to the strange lands of the south for an adventure.  People from different lands have lived separately long enough to gain differentiating racial features, including extreme farsightedness so that none can see things clearly up close in favor of far vision.  The people of the Tharn’s Lands used carved figurines for writing, and Rist keeps a journal of everything he does, and everything he learns to share with his family (both on a philosophical level and things that might have applications in their merchant business).

For me this story brought a lot of the good old “sense of wonder” of golden age science fiction.  Both the Tharn’s Lands and the warmlands are foreign and interesting, and because the character is learning about the warmlands as the story goes on and contrasting it with his home, the story gets a lot of this comparison in.  As the story goes on Rist keeps his journal, and I find his insights about the other world interesting, to reinforce his worldview that is very different from mine–even considering the sun and the moon to be foreign concepts because of the haze of the Tharn’s Lands.

The only part that got a little bit annoying was that Rist repeatedly went on about the breasts of the women of the warmlands–it makes sense in some fashion because apparently the Tharn’s Lands women don’t have prominent breasts (another genetic differentiator like the eyesight, though it wasn’t clear why this particular thing would differentiate while leaving the two races sexually compatible) but it felt rather random and distracting in a story that I otherwise thought was quite solid.  It also struck me as unimaginative in an otherwise imaginative story that, of course a man who has never seen breasts would find them attractive, when really there could be a variety of reactions that would be more interesting–concern about her health, wondering if they hurt all the time, or being put off by their strangeness since to him they may not seem natural.  But, really, that was the only sour note in the whole thing for me, and a pretty minor one at that.

A note at the beginning of “Flow” indicates that the characters were first seen in “Thaw, which was previously published in Analog.  I could definitely see the shape of that other story, with some references to past experiences together in this one, but I thought this story stood well enough on its own, and I always felt like I had enough information.

I quite enjoyed this story and I recommend it for those who like a little longer stories with a sense of adventure and exploration of one fictional culture from the perspective of another fictional culture.  It has my top vote in the Novella category.

Hugo Novelette Review: “The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale” by Rajnar Vajra

written by David Steffen

“The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale” by Rajnar Vajra, published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, is nominated for the Hugo Award this year in the novelette category.  Analog has posted this story for free for the voting period.

The protagonists of this story are a trio of Exoplanetary Explorers: an earthling, a silver Venusian, and a golden Martian.  They get in a bar fight, which puts them on thin ice with their commanding officers.  Their punishment is to be assigned to a mission doomed to fail–there is a planet on which they wish to establish a colony, where they have learned that the residents are intelligent but have failed to establish true contact with them.  Priam, the Martian, raises the stakes by promising that they can establish contact and offering up their jobs if they fail.

I am not the audience for this story.  It does evoke a sense of golden age SF, but not in a way that I found appealing.  The conversational tone of the narrator only came across as irritating to me, right from the first lines: “A silver Venusian, a golden Martian, and an Earthling walked into a bar. Sounds like a joke, right? Nope. Actually an unfunny blunder the three of us made that Friday evening.”  I didn’t care about the fate of any of the characters, and Priam who is portrayed a the smartest of the trio, I found particularly annoying in his thoughtless raising of the stakes for all three of them based on his own arrogant assessment of his own intelligence which, because this harkens back to golden age SF, is of course completely justified in the end because the smart character always wins the day.  It was kind of interesting to try to figure out the mystery of the intelligence, but as tends to happen when a story tries to put together a puzzle that is set up as being unsolveable by most people, it didn’t actually succeed in convincing me that it wouldn’t’ve been solved before this point.  The stakes of the story were entirely unimportant to me, or rather I was more rooting for them to be kicked out of the Exoplanetary Explorers but also had no doubt whatsoever that smart Priam would save the day because the shape of the story was so familiar.

So, as I said, I’m clearly not the target audience for this tale.

 

 

Hugo Novelette Review: “Championship B’tok” by Edward M. Lerner

written by David Steffen

“Championship B’tok”, written by Edward M. Lerner, published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, is nominated for this year’s Hugo Award in the Novelette category.  Analog has posted this story for free online as part of this Hugo season.

I generally start these stories with a synopsis, to give a sense of what the story was about.  For me to be able to write a meaningful synopsis I need to be able to get some cohesive sense of what the story was about.  I had trouble discerning that for this particular story, so this is not so much a synopsis as a list of story elements.  The story starts with pilot Lyle Logan playing chess against his ship AI, and then the scene ends very abruptly in a way that’s never adequately explained and these characters never appear again in the story, nor have any other appreciable effect.  We’re introduced to an alien race known as Snakes, among other things.  There are also a mysterious race of beings (Interveners) that can apparently mimic the appearance of either humans or Snakes–these beings are not at all well-understood but they believe that the beings sparked the explosion of life in the Cambrian Era and that they steered the social/technological development of the human race.  The story mostly circles around two characters: a snake named Glithwa and a human named Corinne, and a human Carl.  Glithwah represents the ruling Snakes, digging for information about what might be human sabotage.  The titular game, b’tok, is played during the story, which is supposedly as much more complicated than chess as chess is more complicated than rock-paper-scissors.

As you might’ve gathered from the scattered, rather long and directionless synopsis, I apparently did not really get the point of this story.  What was that first scene there for?  What do the Snakes have to do with the Interveners?  Who am I supposed to root for?  Why do I care about any of this?  I found some references on the Internet that this might be part of a series of stories involving the InterstellarNet. If so, maybe I’m just missing some important information, but there was no information attached with the story that suggested it wasn’t a standalone, so I’ve got to judge it on its own merits.

One of the issues with the story was that it claimed that B’tok was so incredibly complicated, but it seemed like a pretty straightforward battle simulator, something we have many variations on even now.  Not only that, but some of the reals were just nonsensical, that rather than making it incredibly impressively complicated like it was apparently meant to be, it just came across as a poorly designed war sim.  That’s the trouble with trying to write a story about a game that was so complicated humans wouldn’t grasp it well, I guess.

I thought this story was all over the place.  I was not interested in any of the characters, or what happened to them, and the point of major reveals was often not particularly clear–the throwaway initial scene certainly did not help any of this.

Hugo Novelette Review: “The Journeyman: In the Stone House” by Michael F. Flynn

written by David Steffen

“The Journeyman: In the Stone House” by Michael F. Flynn, published in Analog, is nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novelette.  Analog has posted this story as a free read as part of the Hugo season.

This is part two of the Journeyman series of stories.  I have not read the first part of the story, so I am extrapolating a bit.  Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand and Sammi o’ th’ Eagles are in the midst of  a journey that began in the previous story, where they were sent on a quest by a ghost that resided in a crashed vessel from the sky (presumably an AI residing in a starship) to find particular settlements for the star-men to salvage from the remains.  As well as the quest, they are also trying to stay ahead of Kalakaran Vikaram who is looking to avenge his brother that Teodorq killed.  As they are trying to cross a territory toward their destination, they stop to examine a stone building and they wonder how it was constructed (the technology level of the setting is mostly like a Medieval level, but with the remains of higher tech scattered about it’s clear that this occurs in the future after a technological collapse of some kind).  They, as well as their pursuer, are captured.  To continue their quest they must somehow escape their imprisonment.

The most interesting thing about this story was the use of language.  The two protagonists are from different cultures that speak different languages.  This means that to communicate directly with each other they have to speak in a broken pidgin dialect.  Each has vastly different views of life and death and everything that surrounds it, and this comes out in various conversations throughout the story.  At the same time I found some of the dialect rather distracting because, well, I just wasn’t all that interested in the outcome of the story, and the dialect was more absorbing than the events.

Maybe I would feel more absorbed if I had read the first story in the series.  Maybe if I had seen the conversation with the AI I would have a clear idea of the stakes at hand here, and I’d be more emotionally invested.  As it was, I was never confused by what was happening, I didn’t feel like it left out too much detail at least to explain events, but I didn’t really care what happened either and the story dragged as a result.  The characters could succeed, they could give up and go home, they could die in the attempt, and it wouldn’t make much difference to me–not that I really had any doubt that they’d make it through this alive.  When I read a story I want to feel connected to it, either an emotional connection with the characters, or at least some kind of thematic or intellectual connection.  I want to understand the stakes, what will happen if they fail in their mission, and I didn’t really feel like I got any of that.

And then the story just kind of ends at a pretty much arbitrary point, clearly just leading on into the next one, but without any kind of satisfying tying off.  Maybe these stories as a whole make a compelling story when combined together, but when a story is up for a Hugo as a standalone I’ve got to judge it based on what I see, and to me this is a not-very-compelling story fragment with some interesting dialect.  Maybe I would’ve liked it better if the Journeyman series as a whole were nominated for a novella or novel award, rather than this segment being nominated for the novelette award (that’s no longer possible with this nomination, a part of a whole cannot be nominated and then the whole also be nominated).  So this one was a miss for me.

 

Hugo Novelette Review: “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

written by David Steffen

“The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelte (translated by Lia Belt) was published in Lightspeed Magazine.  It appeared both in text and on the Lightspeed podcast.

Toby’s world turned upside down, figuratively speaking, when his girlfriend Sophie left him, with only a promise to pick up her goldfish the next day.  But, before she can fetch the fish, the world turns upside down, literally.  No one knows why or how, but gravity suddenly reversed.  Many people don’t survive, many from head injuries, many others from falling down into the endless sky.  Toby survives.  The goldfish survives.  Did Sophie?  He has to find out.  And also give her the fish back.  And maybe, just maybe, they can reconnect in this world gone wrong.  As Toby makes his way across the dangling undersurface of the Earth, he meets other people trying to survive.

I enjoyed this story.  It was on my nomination ballot because I thought it was fun (admittedly, I don’t read nearly as many novelettes as I do short stories so the pool of my potential nominees is quite a bit smaller).  When I was a kid I played games like that, imagining how I would get around if the world turned upside down, so probably part of my like is that it tapped into that childhood sense of wonder about reimagining everyday scenarios.  Some of the dialog felt a little bit odd, but I’m assuming that’s an artifact of the translation, and only lent to the dreamlike quality of the story.  I can’t say that I entirely related to the quest in the story to return the goldfish and try to rekindle the relationship, because she had made it pretty clear she wanted it to be over, it didn’t seem likely that was going to change, but I found the overall scenario and the interactions with other characters along the way to be plenty to keep me interested.  I gave this my second-rank vote for the Hugo novelette category.

Hugo Novelette Review: “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart

written by David Steffen

“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart was published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.  The story is posted here for free to read.

Alluvium is the name of a human settlement and the planet its on, a place close enough to Earth in habitat that colonists can live with just nano-infusions to balance out the few chemicals that are toxic to humans.  Life is as good as it can be, until the Peshari (a lizard–like alien race) landed and conquered the human settlements.  Cerna is one of the settlers still living under their oppressive rule.  His friend, Keller, has become sick, since the Peshari took away their all-important nano-fabbers.  Keller has taken an interest in the death rituals of the Peshari and how it differs from human death rituals.

This story was slow to start.  The beginning scenes didn’t grab my attention very strongly, but I wanted to give the story a chance, to see if it picked up.  I’m glad I did, because a scene or two later it did grab my interest, when the death rituals start to take more of a focus.  I’ve said before that I would like to see more science fiction that features religion but neither preaches nor demonizes it, and so admittedly this story hit a sweet spot for my personal tastes with its focus on human and alien death rituals and how the effect of ritual and symbol can have on the world.  After the slow beginning, the rest of the story held my interest to the satisfying end.  Usually I go for stories that connect to me more on a personal level than this one perhaps did, this had more of a golden SF feel to it, but I thought the social and religious ritual aspects of it more than made up for that.  This story has my top vote in the novelette category.

Hugo Short Story Review: “On a Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli

written by David Steffen

“On a Spiritual Plain” by Lou Antonelli, published in Sci Phi Journal, is nominated for this years Hugo Award in the Short Story Category.  Sci Phi Journal has posted the story for free for the voting period, which you can find here.

The story takes place on the alien planet Ymila, devoid of any useful resources apart from being close to a wormhole.  Ymila has a single sentience species who practice a single religion based around the journey of the soul.  The biggest thing that’s different about Ymila is that it has a much stronger electromagnetic field which keeps dead souls from dissipating quickly as they apparently do on Earth.  Another major thing is that the Ymilans have developed specialized sensory organs that allow them to see and communicate with dead souls.  A human dies for the first time on the planet, and his soul visits the human chaplain–visible only under certain conditions but unable to communicate clearly.  The chaplain sets out on a pilgrimage to the pole of the planet where the magnetic field is weaker to allow the soul to dissipate.

I thought the core idea here was interesting, the concept of a intelligent-life-supporting planet which has different properties that will keep a soul in place, and the intelligent lifeforms there evolving with sensory equipment to communicate with them.  I can see how that sensory equipment would give an evolutionary advantage–allowing a multigenerational learning/mentoring culture.  I would love to see more stories that include religion as an important element without either preaching nor demonizing them.

But I never really felt any tension as I was reading.  At the beginning of the story they set out on a journey, they take the journey with no significant obstacles, and then the journey is over.  A lack of tension might be made up for by some interesting philosophy, something deep to mentally chew on, and that would certainly make sense in a publication that styles itself a journal of philosophical science fiction.  The chaplain had the opportunity to speak to Joe (the dead soul) through native translators, yet for most of the journey Joe is not aware of what the purpose of the trip is.  Why is the chaplain undertaking this journey without even speaking to Joe about it?  Does he think that he knows what’s best for Joe better than Joe himself–why not just ask Joe what he wants to do?  It seems to me that a chaplain’s role in such a situation would be to be a counselor for the dead, to help Joe come to terms with what has happened and to help Joe come to his own decision about what Joe wants to happen next.  The impression I got, which is probably not what the author intended, is that the chaplain wanted Joe’s ghost to go away because it would raise awkward questions among the congregation to have a ghost hanging around.  If he simply wanted Joe to go on to the afterlife, why rush it?  The pilgrimage could be taken at any time whenever Joe felt that he was ready–the native souls usually moved on after six generations, as a natural progression of their relationship to the living populace, so I would expect Joe to eventually decide to do the same if he weren’t rushed into it.  If the answer to these questions wasn’t the rather negative conclusion I jumped to, then I felt the story could’ve supported whatever was intended more strongly.

 

Hugo Short Story Review: “Totaled” by Kary English

written by David Steffen

“Totaled” by Kary English was first published in Galaxy’s Edge magazine, edited by Mike Resnick.  Galaxy’s Edge posted the story for free after the announcement of the Hugo ballot so you can read it for yourself if you like.

The story is told from the point of view of a disembodied brain extracted from a woman’s body after her body is “totaled” in a car accident.  Before the accident she had been a member of the research team that made this possible.  A rider on her insurance dictated that if she died or got totaled her tissues would be donated to her research lab–including her brain.  At first she can only sense from the outside nerve by feeling vibrations in the vascular tissue, but as the experiment advances she is connected to more peripherals, including sensory apparatus, and she can find ways to communicate outward as well because they are scanning her brain.  She tries to communicate with her research partner Randy, who doesn’t know that the brain he’s using was his partner’s.

I enjoyed this story.  The character is thrown directly into a difficult situation where she literally has only her brains as an asset and has to figure how to get through this situation with nothing on her side.  To me it felt kind of like a golden age science fiction story where it’s all about a scientist pitted against a brain problem, but with the un-golden-age characteristic that the protagonist is an intelligent woman scientist, so that’s a bonus.

There were high stakes and a difficult problem to solve, but although the stakes have plenty to keep the tension up, I didn’t feel emotionally connected to it the way that I really want to connect to a story.  I don’t know exactly why that was–perhaps the focus on the intellectual problem over other factors, or I just wasn’t feeling the personal stakes for personal reasons, I’m not entirely sure.  So, in the end I enjoyed the story but it didn’t blow me away the way I really want from an award story.