I would like to file a complaint with science fiction writers. There was not a single good robot in any of the stories I read this year. Normally, I expect three or four good robots. Admittedly, because China hosted the WorldCon this year, much of the short fiction wasn’t available in the Anglosphere and it is possible the good robots were in the stories I couldn’t read. And it’s true that What Moves The Dead had a spooky house, which is almost as good as a robot.
But regardless this is a dreadful omission. Science fiction writers should make up for their neglect of robots in 2022 by writing even more robot stories, so that in 2025 I will have a dozen Hugo-nominated robots to choose from.
Best Novel
Nettle and Bone: A very well-executed Ursula Vernon1 novel. Ursula Vernon novels are so consistently the same thing, and I never know how to describe it. I say “like Diana Wynne Jones” but it turns out that the Venn diagram of “people who have heard of Diana Wynne Jones” and “people who have heard of Ursula Vernon” is a circle.2
Nettle and Bone strikes me as having a very female sensibility (not that a man couldn’t write that way or that all women do, of course). It’s a fantasy novel which takes place in a folktale-ish setting; the protagonist is a princess, she performs three impossible tasks to save her sister, the fae trap people who sleep in the wrong place. Nevertheless, it’s a world where Diapers Have To Be Changed and Meals Have To Be Cooked and This Is A Premodern Society, So It’s Not That Making And Repairing And Cleaning Clothes Is A Sisyphean Ordeal, It’s That Sisyphus Is Performing A Sartorial Ordeal. Food comes from somewhere; children are not brought by the stork; mysterious labyrinths have builders. The protagonist is sensible and practical in a way caused by having to perform endless yet necessary life maintenance work. One of my more second-wave opinions is that women’s stories are undertold because historically men wrote stories, so our entire idea of what a story is is shaped by men. I enjoy stories that seem to be drawing more on the experiences historically associated with women (especially if there’s also a cool fantasy story involved).
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau: Not really a retelling of H. G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau, more of an alternate universe in which Dr. Moreau moved to the Yucatan. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is notable for its intense sense of place: you can almost feel the heat of the Yucatan, see the lush green of the trees, smell the flowers. It plays deftly with the tropes of the gothic horror, with the house in many ways functioning as a shelter and a place of safety from the secrets and danger of the outside world. For Carlota, the world outside her hacienda full of half-human half-animal hybrids is strange and exotic, alluring and frightening: alien concepts like snow and Paris that are like nothing she has ever experienced.
By far the most enjoyable part of the book is the characters. Montgomery and Carlota are well-drawn, realistic, and engaging; their decisions (even those that make you want to scream DON’T DO IT) make sense given their motivations and flaws. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is really the story of Carlota growing up, and you are invested enough in her that it works.
Legends and Lattes: An orc retires from adventuring to run a coffeeshop. This didn’t quite hit the spot for me. I was promised a plotless book, but instead there were constantly mafia dons and powerful magical items and mysterious figures from the orc’s past and so on. I also disliked that all the main characters got along perfectly and that internal conflict was at best gestured at.
Nevertheless, the detailed descriptions of the process of founding a coffeeshop were engrossing. Legends and Lattes is from the Redwall-Dragaera school of fantasy meals, which is always a pleasure. A friend stopped in the middle of reading to bake, which I believe is what the book truly wants. A good fluffy read for a bad day.
The Kaiju Preservation Society: Nuclear bombs thinned the barriers between alternate universes, which enabled kaiju—giant animals whose parasites are bigger than humans and who are powered by their own nuclear reactors—to cross over from the universe where they evolved. That’s right, Godzilla was real and caused by Hiroshima, although he didn’t actually make it to Tokyo; the governments covered him up, but one of the filmmakers heard the rumors and made them into a movie.
One of John Scalzi’s better books, up there with Old Man’s War and Redshirts. He’s not trying to be overly ambitious, but is sticking to what he’s best at: banter and old-fashioned sci-fi action. Scalzi understands the ratio of kaiju science to plot I want in my book: the first 80% is kaiju worldbuilding infodumps, with almost the entire plot crammed in the last 20%. The ecology was well-researched and well-thought-out enough that it didn’t throw me out of the book entirely.
The Spare Man: Locked-room mystery on a spaceship. Didn’t quite work for me. I found the heroine unlikeable because she used her wealth and privilege to stomp on people who are just trying to get their jobs done, and the other characters calling her out didn’t actually make me hate her less. It was generally unclear to me why she was trying to solve the mystery instead of leaving it to her lawyer and the police, like everyone kept telling her to. The twists of the mystery often left me a bit confused, in part because the characters didn’t have much depth so I had trouble remembering who was who. I complain, but I did read it in like two days because I had to find out what would happen next, so take my review with a few grains of salt.
I did like Kowal’s handling of a protagonist with chronic pain and PTSD: it felt very true-to-life to me and was a source of interesting obstacles, and she did a good job of coming up with futuristic medical tech that still left her protagonist meaningfully disabled. Although set in the near future, The Spare Man was very obviously published in 2022 (facemasks! everyone gives their pronouns upon introduction! the title “Mx”!). It worked for me though, I think because Kowal’s world feels genuinely lived-in. It’s not just that many people wear facemasks and gloves in public; it’s that celebrities use this fact to conceal their faces. It’s not just that people give their pronouns; it’s that it’s clearly rude and uncomfortable for a character to mention that another character of unknown gender has “a body stereotypically associated with men.” The experience does make me wonder how much weirdtopian fiction I’ve read is actually just obsessed with the culture-war issues of 1982.
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