The Marci Rating System

Tail vs cat, the never-ending battle! Purrcy was fast and fierce, but that darn tail keeps being faster!



Purrcy was being extremely round, so I had to check if he was also being warm and soft. Answer: he was. He was a bit doubtful at being checked out, though, he'd rather just be round.

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Here is my list of Hugo Nominees for Best Novel, alphabetical by author. Those of you who nominate, do you think there's an social stigma against publicly listing your nominees? With pitches?

The Witch Roads, Kate Elliott. Standing in for the Witch Roads Duology. Elliott has become one of my favorite writers because she so resolutely undercuts "[story] status is hereditary", a trope of the majority of fantasy novels that looks worse every week, as I see what nepo kids do in the real world.

The protagonist of The Witch Roads is Elen, a Deputy Courier in the Imperial-China-esque Tranquil Empire who gets caught up in the machinations of princes and demons, when all she wants to do is keep her head down, walk her circuit carrying mail, talking to people, keeping an eye out for deadly Spore infestations and stopping them before they spread, and seeing her beloved nephew Kem on his way in life.

Kem is trans, and though his coming-out struggles are part of his character development (he's just 18, finding identity is complicated) it's neither The Most Traumatic Thing Ever nor is it glossed over as nothing in particular.

One reason I love Elliott is that she often writes from the POV of non-elites who don't think elites (princes, emperors, billionaires, etc.) are that great, and she maintains it, she doesn't fall into the "except for this one" trap. This is *so* rare, even writers who are making a determined, conscious effort to avoid what Pratchett described as our "major design flaw, [the] tendency to bend at the knees" will still fall into it -- e.g. by having crucial non-elite characters we've identified with turn out to be close family members of the leading elite (royalty, rich people, etc.). Which the writers do to add family drama to the mix, but which also falls back into the old, OLD trap of "only the families of the elites count as Real People".

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones. It's structured as a mostly-epistolary story, with an outer 1st-person narration by Etsy Beaucarne, a present-day white woman Communications Prof who's transcribing letters and diary entries written by her ancestor Arthur Beaucarne in 1912. Many of the diary entries transcribe a set of interviews with a Piegan Blackfoot Indian vampire, Good Stab. (Yes, I saw what Jones did there, with interviewing a vampire. I'm sure he meant to do it.) Some of the horror is vampire-related horror, but a fair bit is historical horror, especially related to the Marias Massacre.

For me, a wimp about horror, the epistolary form & the interview within it gave me enough insulation that I could read without being overwhelmed. (The lack of insulation is why visual horror is pretty much always a no-go for me, it gets too far into my brain & won't get out.) I think Jones used this structure to ease the (presumptive) white reader, though tougher than me, into the Indian POV. First we have the present-day white POV, then a blatantly racist, foolish past white POV we can easily treat as an unreliable narrator**, which makes the reader work to figure out what really happened with Good Stab, as we get his story filtered through Arthur. And because we the readers have to do so much work to piece the story together, it acts as an enthymeme: a story or argument that's more persuasive because the audience has connected some of the dots themselves.

I started to write more, but deleted it because so much of the pleasure of a book like this comes from connecting the dots yourself, from following the author's clues to get a picture of their world- (& monster-) building. If I was forced to pick *one* book for Best Novel or at least Book of the Year, this would be it. It won't be the one I re-read the most, but it's the most significant. The fact that it could be part of a matched set with "Sinners" can't be coincidence.


Saltcrop, Yume Kitasei. Post-this-apocalypse story of three sisters. Nora, the eldest, is the idealist who left a decade ago for a big-city education, trying to learn about crop diseases that plague their world, for which the only solution seems to be genetically-engineered resistant varieties from corporations. Carmen is the one with social skills, who takes care of the horrible grandmother they live with. Skipper is the boat-builder and sailor, skilled with her hands but not with people. They all get POVs, they all have problems, they all love each other fiercely even though they're pretty terrible at saying it.

The story begins when Carmen and Skipper get a message saying Nora is in trouble, not doing well after all. They have to work together to go after her, first to the city, then following her across an icy ocean and beyond. They're struggling to take of each other, but also, especially Nora, to build a better world, to use knowledge and community to push back against the corporations and the mess they've made of things. One of the VERY few novels I've read recently that reflects the current moment of crisis AND what actually works to struggle against it: not violent rebellion, not targeted assassination, but community, solidarity, caring for *everyone*.

Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor. A meta-book about writing, story-telling, who's-the-author, who's-the-audience, being Nigerian and American, and disability. I also googled "jollof rice near me", because it made me hungry for home cooking from a cuisine I've never tasted.

The Isle in the Silver Sea, Tasha Suri. I'm glad people who read ARCs recced this one, otherwise I would have skipped it as looking too much like a conventional romantasy, if f/f. Instead it's a book about the stories the English tell and re-tell, who gets to tell them, how they shape imaginations and are shaped in turn. It's about *all* the Matters of Britain: Arthurian, Shakespearean, Dickensian, Imperial, and more.