Saph

Obviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.

Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.

Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear

Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it

Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience. rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile, genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.

Last week I was on vacation at Beth's family cottage, which normally would mean that I'd be reading a battered paperback. HOWEVER instead I was racing to finish Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets due to the unfortunate fact of it being triply overdue at the library.

A useful and worthwhile book; a compelling and depressing book; not, perhaps, an ideal vacation book, but so it goes. The book is composed of oral histories conducted by Alexievich in the years between 1991 and 2012 with various inhabitants of the Former Soviet Union. Alexievich is particularly interested in suicides, and several of the interviews/chapters circulate around people who knew or were close to people who took their own lives after the fall of communism; several others focus on people who were living in areas of the former Soviet Union where the end of the USSR led immediately to ethnic or nationalistic violence.

Many of the oral histories follow a pattern that goes

a. [recounting of an absolutely horrific personal-infrastructural tragedy or example of human cruelty that happened under Stalin]
b. but at least we had ideals
c. And Now We Have This Fucking Capitalism Instead And It's Not A Good Trade

and many others go

a. under socialism in [location] they said we were all brothers and I believed it
b. and suddenly overnight that changed and I will be forever haunted by the things I've seen since

Alexievich recounts the oral histories more or less as if they're dramatic/poetic monologues -- usually monologues of despair -- removing herself and the circumstances under which they were conducted almost entirely, except for a very occasional and startling interjection to make a point. (One oral history, of the horrific-things-happened-but-we-believed variety, is intermittently interrupted by anekdoty from the interviewee's son; Alexievich comments that no matter what she asked him, he only ever responded with a joke.) Some sections are compendiums of conversation gathered in a location, at a party or in a marketplace, sliding past each other montage-style. As a literary conceit, it's very effective, but I found myself wishing sometimes that it was a little less literary. It's rare that I read a nonfiction book and want the author to be putting more of themself into the narrative, rather than less, but I wanted to know what questions she was asking. That said, for various reasons, I'm considering buying a copy.

I think I did The Tainted Cup a bit of a disservice in reading it For the Hugo Awards. It's a very competent book that is hitting all its beats at being both Fantasy Novel and Mystery Novel -- the world is detailed and well-realized (if a bit Attack on Titan-ish) and the plot hangs together in a sensible and logical way. In every way it is doing its job. Unfortunately in my heart I never want to give awards to things that are doing their job competently, I want to give awards to things that are trying to do something weird and interesting and ambitious even if they don't entirely succeed at it, so I kept squinting at The Tainted Cup like 'are you going to get weirder?' and the answer was, no! It continued working very reasonably through its fantasy mystery plot in an interesting and well-realized world!

The Tainted Cup follows Din Kol, a young man who has been magically altered to have perfect memory recall in order to act as an assistant to a highly-placed investigator, Eccentric Detective Ana Dolabra. genarti tells me Ana Dolabra is not a Holmesalike but a Nero Wolfe-alike, which I have to take her word for since I've never experienced any Nero Wolfe; anyway, I admit her Eccentric Behavior did not always really land for me, but I can't deny it's in the Tradition and I do like Din, who's very polite.

This dynamic duo live in an Empire that is constantly under threat from Extremely Large Beasts that live outside the Big Wall and wreak massive destruction whenever they breach it. The existence of and need to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts justifies the rule of the Empire; the center of government exists in the center of the country and then people live in sort of concentric rings of safety around it, with the least safe of course being the area right next to the Big Wall. In order to defend against the Extremely Large Beasts, the Empire is constantly pushing forward experimental magical bioresearch projects that do things like 'alter people to have perfect memories' or 'grow very large and scary vines very very fast.'

When an important nobleman turns up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very very fast through his entire body, this is an interesting little murder problem. When a bunch of other people also turn up dead by way of having very large and scary vines grown very fast through their entire bodies -- in a way that also causes the vines to damage the structural integrity of the Big Wall -- this immediately becomes a large and scary murder problem which Din and Ana have to truck out to the absolute least safe bit of the country to try and solve.

As you can hopefully tell from this summary, the logic of the mystery and the logic of the world are very well-integrated with each other. The beats make sense as they land, and at every point you're given enough information to go 'ah, this clicks perfectly with what I already know about this world, and now I've learned a little more.' It's a good fantasy-mystery novel! I would like to see more fantasy-mystery that does this sort of thing well! The murder by exploding vines is very creepy!

I don't think it's a particularly spectacular novel for character -- there are Din and Ana, and there are a bunch of people who are required to make the mystery go, and there's a sort of flash-in-the-pan love-interest-shaped fellow for Din -- and I don't think it's much of a novel of ideas. Which absolutely not all books need to be, and which would not have been looking for it to be, had it not been multiply award-nominated. But that brings us right back around to the beginning of this post again.