2015 Nebula Award Winners

June 8, 2015 9:18 AM

The 2015 Nebula Award Winners have been announced.

The Nebula Awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

The winners in lead of the lists, with the rest of the nominees:
Novel:
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (Winner)
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
Coming Home, Jack McDevitt

Novella:
Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress (Winner) (Excerpt)
We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Excerpt)
“The Regular,” Ken Liu (available for download here)
“The Mothers of Voorhisville,” Mary Rickert
Calendrical Regression, Lawrence Schoen (available for download here)
“Grand Jeté (The Great Leap),” Rachel Swirsky

Novelette:
“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (Winner)
“Sleep Walking Now and Then,” Richard Bowes
“The Magician and Laplace’s Demon,” Tom Crosshill
“The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado
“We Are the Cloud,” Sam J. Miller
“The Devil in America,” Kai Ashante Wilson

Short Story:
“Jackalope Wives,” Ursula Vernon (Winner)
“The Breath of War,” Aliette de Bodard
“When It Ends, He Catches Her,” Eugie Foster
“The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” Matthew Kressel
“The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family,” Usman T. Malik
“A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” Sarah Pinsker (Please note that the author put this up for consideration, she asks that you consider purchasing the issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction that is appears in)
“The Fisher Queen,” Alyssa Wong (No legitimate web source found, the issue it appears in can be purchased here)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation:
Guardians of the Galaxy, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman (Winner)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Edge of Tomorrow, Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth
Interstellar, Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
The Lego Movie, Screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy:
Love Is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Winner)
Unmade, Sarah Rees Brennan
Salvage, Alexandra Duncan
Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, A.S. King
Dirty Wings, Sarah McCarry
Greenglass House, Kate Milford
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, Leslye Walton

The Nebulas have been considered one of the big two of SFF genre awards, along with the Hugos. Given the current state of the Hugo awards (previously) and the desire of some readers to find works that were nominated for purposes other than political, the Nebula Awards can be seen as a good place to start.

posted by Hactar (64 comments total)

Well-deserved for Jeff VanderMeer. Annihilation is one of the most uniquely creepy things I've ever read.
posted by something something at 9:22 AM on June 8, 2015 [6 favorites]

Really glad that Annihilation won for best novel. Great book.

Also cheered by Alaya Dawn Johnson's double win. (I actually liked her book "The Summer Prince" more than I liked "Love is the Drug", but "Love is the Drug" was quite good.) And I'm always pleased to see Nancy Kress get recognition.

Haven't read any Ursula Vernon, but based on responses I've seen online, she has a *lot* of enthusiastic fans. :)
posted by kyrademon at 9:25 AM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

And yet another trophy graces the trophy deck of Larry Niven's star yacht.
Although I suppose he could screw it onto one of the unadorned bar taps upstairs.
posted by clarknova at 9:28 AM on June 8, 2015

Oh man. So much new stuff to read and check out.
posted by Kitteh at 9:29 AM on June 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

kyrademon, she won a Hugo for Digger in 2012. Digger is fantastic and should be read by everyone (even if it is only so I can make vampiric squash jokes and people understand them).
posted by Hactar at 9:30 AM on June 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Loved Annihilation. The second and third parts of the series didn't quite have the same effect on me, but overall it was one of the most enjoyable reads I've had recently.
posted by synecdoche at 9:30 AM on June 8, 2015

I thought "Love is the drug" was very fun but intensely stupid and don't understand how it won. Then again I don't think it was a strong field. Unmade got me angry, Salvage was a well written "loday's misogynistic religions IN SPACE" story, this was the first King story that didn't really do it for me, I can't read Sarah McCarry for some reason, didn't like the Big Twist in the Milford, and thought the Walton didn't entirely hold up. I would have chosen Walton to win, but I am sure I could find YA SFF I preferred from last year.

I'm a huge fan of Ursula Vernon (though Jackalope Wives isn't my favourite of her stories, I do like it), I would not have minded if the Eugie Foster won instead. She was a great talent.

I've really got to read Annihilation and the other books in that series. And catch up on a bunch of the shorter works. Interesting that YA is the only one I read all of.
posted by jeather at 9:34 AM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Haven't read any Ursula Vernon

Oh, you have so much to look forward to. I read Bryony & Roses over the weekend. She published it as T. Kingfisher, and it's a variation of the Beauty & the Beast story, wonderfully subversive and actually pretty creepy. Totally excellent, as is The Seventh Wife, which is even more creepy.

But I think that Digger is her best work, partly because of the lead character, who is a cranky super-competent areligious female wombat engineer named Digger of Unnecessarily Complicated Tunnels.
posted by suelac at 9:35 AM on June 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Good news, lots of Ursula Vernon's shorts are available online here. (Others are collected in Toad Words.)

Her recent middle grade novel, Castle Hangnail, is a near-perfect book which I am trying to convince everyone to read.
posted by jeather at 9:41 AM on June 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Annihilation is so good and weird, and the second book so draggy and weak, so much so that I didn't even read the third one.
posted by escabeche at 9:59 AM on June 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

jeather, I did kind of wonder if "Love is the Drug" won this year because "The Summer Prince" didn't last year (in a MUCH stronger field.) On the other hand, I didn't think it was intensely stupid ... none of the not-very-bright plans actually worked or achieved anything, for anyone, as far as I could tell, which made me tend to think that everyone blundering around, teens and adults alike, was part of the point.

But I can definitely think of books not nominated for the Norton that perhaps should have been -- "Cuckoo Song" by Frances Hardinge, or "The Unbound" by V. E. Schwab.
posted by kyrademon at 10:00 AM on June 8, 2015

Yay for Jeff Vandermeer! I love his stuff. I have a special love for Veniss Underground for whatever reason (I think it's the meerkats) but the Ambergris books are amazing too. Haven't gotten around to reading more than Annihilation in the Southern Reach series but it's good to see him getting recognition.
posted by selfnoise at 10:00 AM on June 8, 2015

I really love New Weird, don't get me wrong, but The Goblin Emperor is a master class in how to write a fantasy novel that contains almost no swashbuckling whatsoever but is still incredible and engaging and immersive. It's also one of those books with an inspiring moral center: not that it has A Message, but just an example of how often human (or goblin) morality comes down to Be Kind in Difficult Circumstances. I was really hoping that Addison/Monette would snag it this year.
posted by WidgetAlley at 10:03 AM on June 8, 2015 [10 favorites]

jeather: didn't like the Big Twist in the Milford

That was a perfect example where I felt "this must be amazing for its target audience, the literarily-inexperienced child reader." But I figured it out early on -- after idly flipping back through the book to check "who else has Meddy talked to?" -- and then it was just 100 pages of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The setting of Greenglass House is so cool, though, that I want her to write more books there -- what a fascinating world to live in! It probably says something that Milo's parents can be so blasé about the wonders they live among in this story.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 10:03 AM on June 8, 2015

Love the links! Just quickly looked at Pinsker's "A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide." and saw the line where the father bluntly says to his amputee son, "You don't have a stump [of your arm]. You're lucky you have a head." and thought how does she know my father?
posted by Mogur at 10:05 AM on June 8, 2015

Also is this thread where I can say that if you like Jeff Vandermeer you should read the overlooked poet of New Weird, KJ Bishop? Because you should.
posted by WidgetAlley at 10:07 AM on June 8, 2015

Annihilation is so good and weird, and the second book so draggy and weak, so much so that I didn't even read the third one.

I was disappointed in the second also, but the third returns to a similar style as the first. It's worth reading, for sure.
posted by something something at 10:10 AM on June 8, 2015

Tom Pollock deserved to win. Or be nominated, anyhow. And The Story of Owen.Sarah Beth Durst's Chasing Power. Maybe the Janet Edwards Earth Girl book that was published last year. Maybe Rosamund Hodge's book.
posted by jeather at 10:16 AM on June 8, 2015

I am a little disappointed that Guardians of the Galaxy beat Birdman for the Bradbury award. Guardians was great and all, but Birdman was a masterpiece.
posted by shmegegge at 10:17 AM on June 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

What, no Vox Day?
posted by Theta States at 10:20 AM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wow, interesting to hear people's opinions of the Southern Reach trilogy. I enjoyed the first, LOVED the second, and thought the third was good but overly long. I just really liked the wry-er Kafkaesque tone of the second one and loved seeing more about the interactions between the Southern Reach and the outside world.
posted by raisindebt at 10:20 AM on June 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

I just read "Jackalope Wives", and it was shockingly, incredibly, good.
posted by jamjam at 10:27 AM on June 8, 2015

I liked Annihilation, although when I got to the end I felt like I'd read a book where nothing happens. I quit about a third of the way into the second.

Goblin Emperor is on my list.
posted by rtha at 10:29 AM on June 8, 2015

What? No John Scalzi?

Aside from the fact that he signed a contract less than a month ago for 13 books in the next ten years, possibly not counting his upcoming new OMW book, that boy is slackin'!
posted by Sunburnt at 10:31 AM on June 8, 2015

Yay Ursula Vernon!

I was going to link to her Irrational Fears webcomic, which was how I discovered her work back in 2002 (!) but the server seems to have been hugged to death already.

I'm so glad that she's finding so much success at the moment, as there's not many artists or writers that have been around for as long as I've been on the internet. She's so old-school she posted about the award on her Livejournal :D
posted by Eleven at 10:40 AM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

but just an example of how often human (or goblin) morality comes down to Be Kind in Difficult Circumstances

The protagonist's slow building of allies over the course of the novel is such a treat. I particularly like how his kind treatment of the dowager (I think?) results in an unexpectedly strong ally. How?Just by 1. being a kind person, and by 2. being smart enough to value the counsel of a woman who has had a lifetime of Royal court experience but who was considered (and who had seen herself) as a cast-aside, dismissed by everyone else as unimportant.
posted by leotrotsky at 10:52 AM on June 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm impressed by the nominees for best dramatic presentation - Speaking only for myself, I didn't care for Birdman but picking the best out of the other contenders would have been very difficult.
posted by doctor tough love at 10:54 AM on June 8, 2015

"What? No John Scalzi? "

I CAN'T WIN EVERYTHING YOU KNOW.

It looks suspicious when I do.

(Moves eyes shiftily, hides cabal membership card)

Speaking as the former president of the organization which gives out the Nebulas, I'm deeply pleased with the outcome this year. Very good nominees, very good winners. 2014 was a high water mark in recent years for SF/F and I think the Nebula ballot reflected that, as do the Locus and Campbell/Sturgeon lists.
posted by jscalzi at 11:45 AM on June 8, 2015 [29 favorites]

I have never heard of most of these. Are they good, folks who read more than me?
posted by corb at 12:02 PM on June 8, 2015

Can I just say that it's weird that THE PERIPHERAL wasn't even nominated? After several William Gibson books that were perhaps less than the sum of my expectations for them, I am loving his latest book.

That said, I don't think the slate for Best Novel is weak at all this year. Very glad to see ANNIHILATION win.
posted by newdaddy at 12:09 PM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

“The Fisher Queen,” Alyssa Wong (No legitimate web source found

It's linked from her home page and available here.

Very good it is too. One of the highlights of Monsieur Caution’s list of notable 2014 sf&f from a while back.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:24 PM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Speaking as the former president of the organization which gives out the Nebulas, I'm deeply pleased with the outcome this year. Very good nominees, very good winners. 2014 was a high water mark in recent years for SF/F and I think the Nebula ballot reflected that, as do the Locus and Campbell/Sturgeon lists.

Yeah, the SFWA really has gotten its act together this year. There was a long stretch in the nineties and noughties that the Nebulas were dull and going to not very interesting books or stories, but it has improved a lot in recent years.

Now it just needs to stop the people who keep insisting on nominating Jack McDevitt year in year out.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:31 PM on June 8, 2015

Wow, crazy. I don't think Ive ever read a full Sci Fi novel that was published later than the early 80s.
But I decided to read a new sic book recently...Annihilation, and now it's officially the Nebula winner.
posted by Liquidwolf at 12:36 PM on June 8, 2015

So pleased that Annihilation won. It was my favorite novel-published-in-2014 (I loved the Biologist dearly, and I loved that ending), and the entire trilogy was one of my favorite reading experiences, ever ever. The second book felt like a bit of a slog to get through at times, but I thought it did some interesting things with creeptastic and bureaucratic horror. Like, MAJOR REVELATIONS were hidden in unassuming sentences in the middle of unassuming paragraphs, and the slow build-up of uncertainties and inarticulate terror just kind of eventually collapsed inward in a strange and immersive way. I didn't love that book and its style, but I thought it was worth it to get to the urgently elegant final book.

Lots of fantastic short fiction recognized, too! Yay, SFWA!
posted by mixedmetaphors at 12:44 PM on June 8, 2015 [4 favorites]

I have never heard of most of these. Are they good, folks who read more than me?

Friends have reported well of the Vandermeer, and you can read several of the winning stories online for free.

I cannot speak highly enough about Ursula Vernon or her (open) pseud T. Kingfisher. Her stuff is great, and varies from silly well-characterized fluff to fairy tale deconstructions to heartbreaking epics. She's fabulous.
posted by suelac at 12:48 PM on June 8, 2015

I'm also thrilled Annihilation won.

I can understand how some wouldn't like the second book as much. It's an abrupt change in tone from the first. But I particularly liked it because it grounded the events of the first book into the real world and how people, especially government people, would react to it and try to make sense of it.

And it also felt like a callback to Roadside Picnic and its government agencies, scientists, and stalkers making an industry out of the weirdness of the zone. How such a place would attract those looking to make a name for themselves, those looking to hide, and those looking for something they can't find in the normal world. Also reminiscent of Lem and how he wrote about bureaucracy dealing with the unknown and unknowable while ensuring every form was filled out perfectly.
posted by honestcoyote at 1:18 PM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

I can understand how some wouldn't like the second book as much. It's an abrupt change in tone from the first.

Yeah, but that's sort of Vandermeer's thing. I mean, I can't think of three less stylistically related books that tell a cohesive story arc than the Ambergris trilogy.
posted by Gygesringtone at 1:29 PM on June 8, 2015

Has anyone listened to Annihilation in audiobook form? Debating which is best. I like audiobooks these days for reasons but if it's super weird and needs to be read, that's fine. Just curious since it sounds different than normal.

Oh hi, John Scalzi. I'm enjoying Lock In! Which is a fantastic audiobook you somehow tricked me into buying twice, you clever bastard. (One version is read by a male narrator and one by a female narrator if anyone was curious why.)
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 1:30 PM on June 8, 2015

But I particularly liked it because it grounded the events of the first book into the real world and how people, especially government people, would react to it and try to make sense of it.

Indeed. And when the payoff finally comes, it's fantastic.
posted by effbot at 1:35 PM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Has anyone listened to Annihilation in audiobook form? Debating which is best.

I read both Annihilation and Authority in audiobook form. Paradoxically, I hated the reader for the first book but preferred that story; Bronson Pinchot read the second book, and he was really great, but I nearly gave up about two-thirds of the way through it. I really stumbled over a character being named/called "Control," I don't care how much backstory one invents for it. I'm not sure I'm going back for the third volume, at least not for a while.
posted by gladly at 2:34 PM on June 8, 2015

I enjoyed Annihilation, but after decades of reading Mieville, Murakami, Harrison, and the like, I was never really surprised by anything. It's been great watching VanderMeer up his game from fungal boundary issues to more deeply strange stuff, but I've mainly felt even with this new series that he's still mostly just adopting tricks invented by some of the earlier Weird folks (both New and old) rather than crafting new ones. Which is not to say that it wasn't a wonderful story with surprisingly sympathetic characters, just that the climax felt a bit familiar in its efforts at the unheimliche. And the second book really wasn't delivering the novelty I need, much less anything in the way of plot. I haven't seen anyone here really arguing for slogging through the second (for those of us who find it a slog) in order to get to the third. Does the third really go beyond the first in new strangeness, or is it mostly in the same vein? Note that from my personal point of view, the more that was explained -- either at the end of the first, or in the second book -- the less good everything got. So merely discovering what is really going on is not an incentive to continue -- in fact much the opposite, for me, in this case.
posted by chortly at 3:04 PM on June 8, 2015

> "I have never heard of most of these. Are they good, folks who read more than me?"

My take on the ones I've read:

You would probably like Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy (which starts with Annihilation) if you would like --
Very well-written, very creepy and weird atmospheric fiction, and --
You are not fussed too much about a lack of lots of things happening, or a lack of straightforward resolutions or neat answers to questions raised.
(I loved it, and think it is a very appropriate winner.)

You would probably like Ann Leckie's Ancillary Trilogy (of which Ancillary Sword is the second one) if you would like --
Extremely good space opera with a strong focus on the exploration of invented cultures and --
You would enjoy a book with a fairly original approach to linguistic gender.
(I also love these, and am eagerly awaiting the final book of the trilogy.)

You would probably like The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison if you would like --
Court intrigue fantasy that deliberately avoids standard "action hero" tropes to explore questions of justice and injustice in a different way, and --
You would not be put off by a great many characters with hard-to-remember names who are sometimes referred to by their titles instead.
(I liked this book a great deal.)

You would probably like Alaya Dawn Johnson's "Love Is The Drug" if you would like --
Near-future coming-of-age YA political intrigue with a dystopian flavor, and --
You do not mind that the characters actually achieve very little and the plot is largely driven by one character's nearly pointless obsessions.
(I liked this book in general, but think another book by this author, "The Summer Prince", which was nominated last year, is truly excellent.)

You would probably like Sarah Rees Brennan's Lynburn Legacy Trilogy (of which Unmade is the third) if you would like --
Modern day YA fantasy with snappy, snarky dialogue and an especially nice twist at the end of the first book, and --
You are not completely sick of 1 girl 2 boys love triangle YA where you kind of wonder why she's interested in either of them, really.
(I liked these OK but by the end I was mostly reading because I was interested in what would happen to a couple of side characters. Once again, however, I would also strongly recommend another book of hers, "Team Human", which is very, very good.)
posted by kyrademon at 3:21 PM on June 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

It's just so damn strange. Nebulas are things far-off people win, not things on the mantlepiece of someone who hung out with me on Yerf back in the 90s and invited me to her secret wedding.

(Very few people at the wedding knew it was a wedding before hand. The bride and groom wore matching Utilikilts, and instead of a ring, Kevin gave Ursula a pendant made of fossilized walrus penis bone. Absolutely nobody was surprised by this.)

I mean, you would think I would be used to this by now what with Ursula having a Hugo. And maybe I am. I was delighted to say "woo congrats!" when she tweeted about this. I guess it's just kind of the new normal for me now; my friends can win major awards like that. I must be an adult or something.

For those wondering if they should bother reading her: I haven't read the short story at hand, but in general, the feel of her work is similar to late Pratchett. Sensible people facepalm their way through a minefield of the idiocy traditional fantasy and fairy tales are full of; sometimes it is comedic, sometimes it is not.
posted by egypturnash at 4:37 PM on June 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Hot take: The Goblin Emperor is more Ruritanian Romance than Fantasy. It's good, but I get why it didn't take the Nebula and doesn't seem to be favored for the Hugo, as it's barely a genre piece (the genre under consideration, anyway).
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 5:05 PM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Goblin Emperor is more Ruritanian Romance than Fantasy.

Oooo. That makes it sound extra-appealing. It's getting moved up on the TBR list. I mean, yeah, not really fantasy-as-we-currently-think-of-it, but I sure do love that genre.
posted by asperity at 5:09 PM on June 8, 2015

Ursula Vernon's post about her win.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:44 PM on June 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

I really stumbled over a character being named/called "Control," I don't care how much backstory one invents for it. I'm not sure I'm going back for the third volume, at least not for a while.

You probably wouldn't like John le Carre, then, gladly. Or Get Smart, for that matter. It's a spy thing.

It may have been Mefi's own cstross who made the explicit link between espionage thrillers and cosmic horror, and I really thought Authority nailed the bureaucratic infighting of the classic le Carre Cold War novels as well as the creeping squamous rugosity of cosmic horror in a way that works. The only effort that's scared me more is Tim Powers' (rightly lauded) Declare. The key to the awfulness isn't the horror - or rather it's not just the horror, it's that these dreadfully flawed people are our only bastion between existence and annihilation. It's so dreadfully human to unleash the End Times for the sake of getting the corner office.

I've enjoyed almost every Vandermeer I've read - he's one of those clever genre writers who uses tropes and references from within and without the genre itself and really breaks the boundaries of what is imaginable. I adored The Goblin Emperor for the same reason, and it's what makes me so furious about the whole Hugo debacle - it's the perfect novel to read and enjoy for what it is, to get lost in and imagine its world around you. There's such a long history of 'heroes' who use their wits and their intellect instead of raw brawn that by demanding lunkheaded heroic fiction you're cutting off a whole galaxy of wonderful books.
posted by prismatic7 at 10:04 PM on June 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and it's...interesting. A big hit in China, it's a big, sprawling SF work set against the background of China's Cultural Revolution. It reminded me very much of Neal Stephenson's Anathem; both of which are simultaneously fascinating and frustrating books. Stephenson because of his odd prose style; The Three-Body Problem perhaps because it doesn't really translate to English and to Western culture in quite the same way as the original Chinese works? But there are actually plot and thematic elements shared by both stories. Long passages (in both) are actual and theoretical physics, with no fiction to be found at all, so if that floats your boat, give it a try. It's long but it's actually a fast read.

It's the first in an apparent trilogy, but I don't think I'll bother with the sequels.
posted by zardoz at 1:26 AM on June 9, 2015

I really stumbled over a character being named/called "Control," I don't care how much backstory one invents for it.

Then you need to avoid Scalzi's latest as well.
posted by effbot at 4:46 AM on June 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

I recently finished The Three-Body Problem and it's...interesting. A big hit in China, it's a big, sprawling SF work set against the background of China's Cultural Revolution. It reminded me very much of Neal Stephenson's Anathem; both of which are simultaneously fascinating and frustrating books. Stephenson because of his odd prose style; The Three-Body Problem perhaps because it doesn't really translate to English and to Western culture in quite the same way as the original Chinese works?

I don't think the translation is the problem, but it's no coincidence so many people think of it as a callback to Isaac Asimov's work. Its prose style is somewhat reminiscent of Asimov's, utilitarian and nothing more, there's the same sort of Golden Age science fiction preference for ideas over stories and of course the last part of the story is one big As You Know, Bob.

Overall it has severe pacing problems and there are several points where it seems to veer course abruptly, throwing some readers for a loop. It does work out in the end, but I can understand it reads strange to people, especially because of its status as a translation.

One of those books where it's easier to admire the concept than the execution.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:24 AM on June 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

I haven't seen anyone here really arguing for slogging through the second (for those of us who find it a slog) in order to get to the third.

I loved all three books as individuals, and as a set. I would argue that all three do better as a set than any one of them does individually. The series of reminds me of some Lem stories: They find completely alien, some stuff sort of gets explained (maybe), and the main characters are left without being able to do much about it.

That said, if your main gripe is that too much stuff gets explained, you're not going really enjoy reading the rest of the books. Not every question gets answered, but you do get to see events from more viewpoints. I mean, if you don't like the books, you don't like the books. No amount of listing why others like the books is going to make you change your mind.
posted by Gygesringtone at 6:26 AM on June 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Have added Annihilation to wish list. Thanks, MeFi!
posted by languagehat at 8:08 AM on June 9, 2015

Hot take: The Goblin Emperor is more Ruritanian Romance than Fantasy. It's good, but I get why it didn't take the Nebula and doesn't seem to be favored for the Hugo, as it's barely a genre piece (the genre under consideration, anyway).

I mean, I totally agree about the Ruritanian Romance thing, but this raises an interesting question: what is fantasy as a genre? It obviously encompasses things as disparate as Tolkien and Cook (who are good examples of the two opposite ends of the spectrum of high and low fantasy), but also Vandermeer and Susannah Clarke. In light of all that, I think there is-- or should be-- plenty of room for a Ruritanian Romance about elves and goblins. Addison is writing in the footsteps of a fantasy grandfather in some ways.

(Also for some reason The Goblin Emperor reminded me a lot of another frequently overlooked treasure, Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief series. Maybe because of how, in both stories, somewhat naive young men learn how much it really, really sucks to be king.)
posted by WidgetAlley at 10:02 AM on June 9, 2015 [4 favorites]

> "The Goblin Emperor is more Ruritanian Romance than Fantasy ... it's barely a genre piece (the genre under consideration, anyway)."

The first contention is interesting (although I'd argue there's no reason it can't be both), but I find the second baffling. How does it not solidly qualify as fantasy? There are wizard bodyguards from the wizard school who do wizard stuff. There's a mystic investigator who investigates things mystically with his mystic powers. Those strike me as kind of being genre giveaways, you know?
posted by kyrademon at 10:27 AM on June 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

They all felt very replaceable with mundane concepts though (you could swap the investigator with a pathologist and change almost nothing in his arc, for example) and virtually all of it is background. There's nothing straight-up fantastical that really drives the plot or the world to my mind.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:45 AM on June 9, 2015

Those strike me as kind of being genre giveaways, you know?

Reminds me of the "I thought Ancillary Sword was fantasy because it had snow and a tavern" argument that popped up briefly. (I agree that TGE is fantasy, but I am big tent in my definition of fantasy.)
posted by jeather at 10:47 AM on June 9, 2015

... I cannot help but feel there is a difference between Paulk saying "Any story with a tavern in it is signaling that it is a fantasy story" and me saying "A book with an actual wizard in it who casts actual magic spells is signaling that it is a fantasy story."
posted by kyrademon at 11:02 AM on June 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to group you with Paulk, it was just reminiscent of the "This book has the wrong tropes for the genre" discussion, not that your comment was like hers. (It was so, so weird. I legitimately do not understand the "but tavern!" argument, like you can't purchase alcohol in science fiction or something.)
posted by jeather at 11:06 AM on June 9, 2015

Oh, gotcha. No prob.

(And yeah, the "but tavern!" argument was a special kind of WTF.)
posted by kyrademon at 11:09 AM on June 9, 2015

Yes, that's bananas (it's got loads of big fucking spaceships in it and galactic empires and aliens and AIs and shit, and that's what the book is about). To be clear, I'm not turning my nose up at TGE: it's a good novel, it just struck me while reading it that the genre elements are very subdued and arguably non-essential to the story being told.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 11:25 AM on June 9, 2015

Since I'd be curious:

The initial worldbuilding signals were all fantasy-adventure, so the sudden inclusion of classic space opera elements threw me – and this in the first few pages.

There were a lot of adventure (of which space opera is a subtype) signals, but the rest were pretty agnostic between what kind of story it was. (Which was, of course, the point, though the second paragraph talks about it being an isolated planet, which is pretty much sf-only.) And of course if you looked at the cover it had spaceships.
posted by jeather at 11:43 AM on June 9, 2015

> "I have never heard of most of these. Are they good, folks who read more than me?"

The incomparable podcast has a decent spoilery free conversation about the novel nominees - i wouldn't have looked into The Three-Body Problem if not for it (haven't read it yet though)
posted by motdiem2 at 7:48 AM on June 15, 2015

Um. I don't see how The Goblin Emperor can't be both a Romance and a Fantasy novel. Genres aren't mutually exclusive.
posted by AdamCSnider at 9:39 PM on June 16, 2015

I'd like to thank jeather for recommending Castle Hangnail. My family is currently reading it and enjoying it immensely.
posted by mogget at 9:35 PM on June 29, 2015