April 2025
Want to support your local library but don't know where to start? I've made a guide that walks through steps and pathways you can choose. Feel free to share! bit.ly/3FQixwe
Hugo & Related Awards
The 2025 Hugo, Lodestone, & Astounding Award Finalists have been announced, and it’s an interesting list, for certain values of interesting.
Of the finalists, I’ve read A Sorceress Comes to Call, The Brides of High Hill, Navigational Entanglements, and What Feasts at Night. I enjoyed all of them and I’m thrilled that Nghi Vo and Aliette de Bodard, two of my current favorite writers, were both nominated.
I’m also happy to see that the Lodestone award (for YA SFF) lived up to its potential this year. In the past, I’ve been very cranky about the inclusion of books for adults, or that are by authors primarily known for their adult SFF work. I haven’t actually managed to read any of this year’s nominees, but they’re genuinely YA books, and the authors are a great snapshot of the current YA field.
However.
I still have some grumpy thoughts.
First, can we collectively declare a moratorium on Omelas stories? Personally, I don’t find the original that fascinating, and certainly not the best of Le Guin’s work. And at this point, we’re into the consciously self-referential “Problem of Susan” territory, where every story about Omelas creates more discourse about Omelas, which prompts more stories about Omelas, which get nominated for awards, which cause more stories to be written and published. I am tired. Please.
Speaking of being consciously self-referential, it seems that if you want to be nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo, you mostly have to write about the Hugos. This year, we have not one, but two reports on the 2023 Hugo debacle on the finalist list. Add in “r/Fantasy’s 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge” and the category feels to me like it has lost all sense of SFF beyond a narrow subset of fans who are busy talking about their specific experience as if it encapsulates the entirety of fandom.
Other people have pointed this out, but the fact that every single finalists for the Novella category is published by a Tor imprint sure says something. I’m not sure if it’s more about the state of SFF publishing, or the way the Hugos sometimes feel like they’ve turned into an infinity mirror of the same people being published by the same publishing houses year after year.
And that sums up the heart of my problem with the current Hugo (and associated) Awards. Although I’m happy for individual creators, when we pull back to look at the lists overall, they feel--expected. Stale, almost. I wasn’t truly surprised by a single nomination. And while I know that the difference between popular vote awards (like the Hugos) and juried awards is stark, I can’t help but contrast this list with the Le Guin Prize, where the shortlist has consistently delivered delightful gems that I would never have discovered on my own.
I don’t know what the answer is, if there is one, but I think Renay sums it up perfectly in her own post: “It turns out we don't need a bunch of white supremacists to homogenize our finalist lists with brute force slates. Leave the (likely) majority white folks to their own devices over time, let them fall back into their traditional reading habits, and they'll pull back to their comfort zones.”
How to Suppress Women’s Writing
"To act in a way that is both sexist & racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner." --Joanna Russ
I recently re-read Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which felt as timely and clear-sighted as the first time I read it, back in 2018. I had to request it via ILL at the time, only 7 years after Russ died. I’m glad it’s been released in a new edition and I hope more people read it. Russ identifies a number of strategies--both conscious and unconscious--that result in the history of women’s writing being lost, the lines between women writers being erased, and the authority and incisiveness of women’s writing being diminished.
"When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time."
I’ve seen this first hand, every time I browse the shelves at my local Barnes & Noble. The SFF sections have shelf after shelf of Scalzi and Tolkien and Jordan, and perhaps one or two books by Ann Leckie or CJ Cherryh, if you’re lucky. If they’ve published anything recently. Melissa Scott is nowhere to seen, nor is Russ herself. Le Guin might be present in a copy of Earthsea or Left Hand of Darkness, but rarely are her complete works or her criticism included. It’s not that there are no female authors, but that the lineage of women is not acknowledged.
And even when it comes to influences on writing--how often do we talk about the influence of women writers on other women writers? Or even more rarely, on male authors? When was the last time that a male SFF writer acknowledged the history and tradition of women writing in SFF? Even if you don’t want to go back to Shelley and Frankenstein, what about Bujold, Cherryh, or Scott, or Tiptree, or McKinley, or McKillip, or Diana Wynne Jones, or Le Guin as influences on the world of SFF today or all the other writers who have been left in obscurity, whose names we don’t even know?
I think a lot about the story by James Tiptree Jr., who was also Alice B. Sheldon, that’s titled “The Women Men Don’t See.” It’s startling to me that anyone could read that story, full of suppressed anger and an attempted reclamation of power, of the power of choice and escape, and think it was written by a cis white man. I also think a lot about the dedication of A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold: “To Jane, Georgette, Charlotte, and Dorothy: Long may they reign.” There’s power in that too--in tracing out the lineage, in bringing the history of romance into SFF, in not giving the last names because they should already be known.
I think a lot about the ending of How to Suppress Women’s Writing: “I’ve been trying to finish this monster for thirteen ms. pages and it won’t. Clearly it’s not finished. You finish it.”
Upcoming middle grade SFF
May
Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology by Angela Hsieh (graphic novel)
The Last Rhee Witch and the Nine-tailed Fox by Jenna Lee-Yun (sequel)
June
Seeker Society by Jana Tropper, Kyle Higgins, and Zack Giallongo (graphic novel)
Monsters of Fife: Sea Dragons by Jane Yolen
Rayleigh Mann and the Quest of Misfits by Ciannon Smart (sequel)
July
Recipe
Thai Green Curry Paste
150ml oil
3 heads garlic peeled
9 oz ginger, peeled & chopped into chunks
1 medium onion, roughly chopped
3 ¼ oz lemongrass
¼ oz lime leaves
3 limes, zested & juiced
10 small green chillies
1 oz cilantro
5 T fish sauce
2 T salt
Blend all ingredients together & store in fridge 6 weeks or freezer 3 months. Nadiya Hussain / Time to Eat
Other Things
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