May 2025
Hello, everyone! Happy May!
Some news--the title story of my collection, "Lake of Souls," is a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette! It's super exciting to see my story on that list, and you should check out the other finalists because they are awesome.
This month I've been thinking about folks who expect--demand even--that there be no ambiguity or missing parts in a story or a show. I can't help but connect this with expectations that the world will be not only purely logical, but also entirely understandable by anyone with sufficient smarts. I also can't help but connect this with the assumption that science is a set of unchangeable, absolutely true facts, instead of a method for finding things out (and sometimes what we find out is that a fact is not actually factual).
Cards on the table, I am absolutely a materialist. I believe that there is a logical explanation for everything, if we only knew it. As it happens, though, the universe is huge and incredibly complicated and as much as we know (and we know a lot!) we only have the barest beginnings of an understanding of how or why things happen, even (particularly) within our own bodies. It's a bad idea to get arrogant about how much one (any one of us) knows about the world.
I don't want to yuck anyone's yum--if you like stories where everything fits together like carefully cut puzzle pieces and all the edges are straight and there's nothing blurry in the picture, that's cool! Heck I enjoy those sometimes. Like a lot of us I love Sherlock Holmes stories, and those are actually a decent example of what I'm thinking of. Holmes' deductions are always exactly right. The man whose hat had candle wax on it, his wife had indeed ceased to love him (it totally couldn't have been that she didn't have time to fuss with his hat because she was supporting the household with some other occupation, or she was just not a great housekeeper to begin with, or…I could spin off possible reasons all day). No, the world only works one way and Holmes knows the way the world works).
But people, and societies, and biology, and physics, and, well, everything, are way more complicated than that. And while, yes, it's "realistic" if everything in a story is easily explainable or superficially consistent—some things we do understand! Some things are in fact entirely consistent!—it's just as "realistic" for a story to be full of things that are just weird, that happen for unexplained reasons, that are mysterious or strange. Because the real world is weird, unexplained, mysterious, and strange.
I've mostly been reading academic books, or else re-reading things I know I enjoyed the first time.
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee Look, this book is awesome. You've just got to let the first few chapters wash over you until you see how things work. If you're reading this, you likely have already read the book, but if you haven't--well, do.
Not a re-read, but A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennet I really enjoyed The Tainted Cup, and you should start there (if you're a Hugo voter, I think the whole novel is in the voters' packet). Just a personal peeve--I've seen lots of people say this is a fantasy Holmes and Watson, but tell me you haven't read Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries without telling me you haven't read Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. Ana and Din are not Holmes and Watson, they are Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. (Start with Fer-de-Lance if you're interested, keeping in mind that the series begins in 1934 and some things will not have aged well.)
The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein This is the first book of a series that began in the nineties and is unfinished as yet. (The author is reportedly working on the next installment.) But if you can deal with that (not everyone can, which is totally understandable) these books are super fun.
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine Yes, you have likely already read this. But if you haven't, what are you waiting for? You'll love it.
Oh, a new one! The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner I listened to the folks at Wizards vs Lesbians talk about it and it sounded delightful. Which it absolutely was.
Anyway, have a lovely May, and take care!
Ann