The Hugo Awards committee has announced its nominees for 2009, and I have to agree with Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi: I pity the awards voters this year!
The nominees for Best Novel are:
* Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
* The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
* Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
* Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross
* Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi
This is the first year I can remember when I've already read almost all of the nominated novels. (The only one I haven't read yet is Saturn's Children, although it's on my stack.) Yay, me!
Some thoughts:
Anathem
This book is a huge literary accomplishment. I was amazed by its scope and reach, and floored by the way that Stephenson continues to tie all of his books together. After reading Anathem, it behooves the reader to go back and re-read both Cryptonomicon and System of the World (which I consider to be one massive novel, instead of three big novels, much less nine regular-sized novels). The way that Anathem reflects, refracts, and re-interprets the characters and events of his previous novels is nothing short of breath-taking.
That being said, Anathem is very very dry, and very very long, and the opposite of "action-packed." If you were frustrated by the lengthy asides of Cryptonomicon, then Anathem is not the novel for you. It's at least 80 percent "asides," and 20 percent "actual things happening."
The Graveyard Book
I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, although his fiction for younger audiences has typically failed to move me. I enjoyed Coraline well enough, but only barely made it through The Wolves in The Walls without losing interest entirely. There's nothing wrong with them - they just weren't for me.
I was therefore greatly surprised by how much I enjoyed The Graveyard Book. It sucked me right in, and I read the entire book in one slurp. I used to do that kind of thing all the time when I was young, but the realities of adult life prevent me from reading for more than an hour or two at a time.
The Graveyard Book is not just a captivating story about a boy being raised by ghosts. It's about love, and loss, and growing up, and what it means to grow up, and why. Who could ask for more?
Little Brother
I didn't make it through Cory Doctorow's latest chunk of shrill sociological criticism disguised as a novel. I find his authorial quirks grating (Cory's never met an adverb he didn't like), and I find the resulting fiction to be indigestible. Blecch.
Zoe's Tale
This is a wonderful novel in all respects. Scalzi "Rosencrantz and Guildensterns" himself by returning to his novel The Last Colony and retelling the events from the perspective of Jane Sagan and John Perry's teenage daughter, Zoe.
The result is a thousand times more wonderful than I (a Scalzi fan) would ever have imagined. Scalzi's previous novels have been set squarely in the center of "space opera," and I enjoyed them despite the fact that they classify as military fiction. The mere fact that he returned to one of them and suffused that world with a story about emotions and feeling and heart is award-winning, even aside from the writing itself. Which is great.
All I can say to the voters is... yeah, good luck with that. Tough choices, all!