dreemyweird

Hugo homework continues. I'm posting about it real time on the sync read post, but also posting here as I finish things I consider stand-alone books (novellas and longer) and complete categories:

6. Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle – Hm. I don’t think I’ve read anything by Annalee Newitz prior to this, but I've read them and other people talking about their books, which set my expectations pretty low. And then cyanmnemosyne finished this novella and described it as, “If I had been asked to blurb it, my blurb would be ‘Great for fans of the Monk and Robot books’” – and since I HATED the first Monk and Robot book – well, OK, I strongly disliked the book itself and HATED that it won the Hugo – that further lowered my expectations.

But actually I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book, where it’s all getting to know our plucky band of misfit robots, making noodles (I do want some noodles now), and traipsing around future!San Francisco, and getting to hear what NorCal is like post ?the war of secession?. So, I was pleasantly surprised for the first part of my reading journey. But then I got to the parts where there are supposed to be, like, emotional arcs? and maybe themes more serious than “yum, noodles!”, and from here the book worked considerably less well for me. ( More, with spoilers )

7. Naomi Novik, The Summer War – this isn’t new ground for Novik, but she’s doing a thing she does well, and that I enjoy her doing, so, like, no complaints from me. This hasn’t got, for me, the iddy appeal of Uprooted’s central relationship, or the poignancy of Miryem the well-realized Jewish protagonist of Spinning Silver, but I do really enjoy Novik’s fairytales as a baseline, and her fey, with their alien morality that makes them at once laughable and compelling, which is a neat trick. And Novik also just writes prose in a way I really enjoy, which is on display here, and which was a big part of how much I liked this novella. ( Spoilers from here )

Short stories: ( Tia Tashiro, Isabel J. Kim, Thomas Ha, J.R.Dawson, Samantha Mills, Effie Sieberg )

Short stories (6/6): Missing Helen > Wire Mother > In My Country > 10 Visions > Laser Eyes > No Award > Revise You


Novelettes:

( Never Eaten Vegetables, H.H.Pak )
( The Millay Illusion, Sarah Pinsker )
( When He Calls Your Name, Cat Valente )
( Rapport, Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, Martha Wells )
( The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed )
( Kaiju Agonistes, Scott Lynch )

Novelettes: (6/6) Never Eaten Vegetables >> The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For > When He Calls Your Name / Kaiju / Millay Illusion (I keep fiddling with the order... I think the Valente one has more of a point, under the thicket of words, though admittedly I found 'Kaiju' more fun and 'Illusion' less of a slog > the ART one (I liked the additional ART canon, I love ART, but in no way is that worth a Hugo).

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Taskmaster also continues:

Taskmaster s21e07 – Amy looks really cute in her patterned dress and her boots and with her hair like that! ( Spoilers from here )

John Kearns was the Taskmaster Podcast guest and, wow, I really do find him unlistenable. I multi-tasked through most of the episode, because otherwise I would’ve turned it off, and I did want to hear Ed’s thoughts on the episode, which I don’t think I got any of, just pause-ridden unrelated rambling from Kearns, and fell asleep during the last bit, which I’m not going to attempt to repeat. Ah well.


Taskmaster Australia s5e03 – I keep looking forward to Anisa’s outfits and she keeps not disappointing! ( Spoilers )

I have started on the Hugo Homework reading. I'm posting about it real time on the sync read post, but I also plan to post in my usual format, so here's a start:

5. Olivia Waite, Murder by Memory -- this was great! I'm a sucker for sci-fi mysteries, especially ones where the sci-fi and the mystery are integrally intertwined, and that's definitely the case here -- the motive, the method, the investigations, even the type of crime are all neatly science fictional, and I really enjoyed basically learning how mysteries work in this specific universe, which is the great fun of SF mysteries for me. ( SPOILERS including whodunit )

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Taskmaster annex:

Taskmaster s21e06 -- oh man, I laughed so hard at poor Joanna XD ( Spoilers from here )

Taskmaster Oz s5e02 - Anisa is clearly be the person to watch for wardrobe, I liked her dress this time, too. ( Spoilers )

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There are a lot of new things happening in Elis & John land, and I had better catch up. In the present day, John’s book was published (I haven’t read it yet, because my lovely signed copy is being safely looked after by cafemassolit, but I have been following all of the press I could, interviews and podcast rounds and so on), How Do You Cope came back, John ran a marathon, and Elis & John & Dave started a Patreon with some exclusive content (much but not all of it marathon-adjacent). And in the past, I have just passed May 2016, which means I am not caught up on 10 years of the show. There are still ~2 years to go, so it’s not quite the finish line yet – but it seemed like a good place to pause. Looking at just how much stuff there is, I think this is going to have to be two different posts, oops.

( Patreon content )
( John’s book-related interviews and podcast appearances )

How Do You Cope is back (now also with full visual component on YouTube, which I’ve been alternating based on whatever’s easiest and occasionally going to the visuals to see a particular scene, like Richard Osman teasing John that he’s not very good at this interviewing thing). But actually John IS really good at this interviewing thing. I appreciated the episode with Esther Ghey (mother of murdered trans girl Brianna), but more than anything for John’s ability to articulate pithily what Esther was saying in answer to his questions. I did find the episode with Alison Spittle both fascinating and affecting; she was talking from the perspective of someone who was happy at her larger size but then had to lose a lot of weight with GLP-1s after she nearly died – and it’s a really nuanced and complicated perspective that I haven’t heard anywhere else. The most recent HDYC had Anthony Scaramucci, which, I actually have no strong a priori feelings on him either way, but as a number of folks on the FB group pointed out, he was not engaging with the podcast in the spirit of the podcast, he was just monologuing in response to questions that were only loosely related, but presumably the idea is that this will give HDYC exposure to a whole different audience, which I'm in favor of, because it's a great podcast.

But my favorite, of course, was the first episode of the new series, with ( Richard Osman )

And this is not strictly Elis and/or John but adjacent, but ( Isy Suttie and Lloyd Langford on What Did You Do Yesterday )

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Present-day BBC 5Live Elis & John, ( March - May 2026 )