In its third year, the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction presents us with a shortlist of ten authors vying for an award dedicated to “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.” Although Ursula K. Le Guin was not herself particularly excited by awards, her son advocated for the creation of this prize on the strength of Le Guin’s appreciation for authorial uplift.
In its first year, the prize of 25,000 USD went to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust (2021), from an indie press in Minnesota, spotlighting the Kenyan author and her fabulist depiction of Mombasa and Hadrami culture. In the prize’s second year, Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2022), which reflects on climate change and its multigenerational impact in British Columbia, was chosen from a list that included three story collections, five presses that count as indie or small, and one work in translation. (The first year had a work in translation, too.)
This third short list was selected for the 2024 judging panel of Omar El Akkad, Margaret Atwood, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado. It includes two works from larger universes, four novellas, and (as in previous years) at least one text strongly coded as YA—though others bridge reading ranges. Four are from small or indie presses. No texts are in translation this time.
Is the prize settling into a clear sense of itself in its third year? Yes and no. There is a surface sense of “balance” in its range of authors and publishing contexts, but also a strong stylistic overlap in sections of the list that might not work in the authors’ favour when it comes to final selection.
In one case, three texts share such a similarity in theme and voice that it might seem strange if one were to win this excellent prize and the other two were left with “nothing” bar the prestige of being shortlisted at all. Meanwhile, two other texts are significantly impacted by their sequel status: they stand well enough on their own, but their impact is muted by a sense that key characters and concepts will have more weight for those who read the earlier volumes.
Two of the ten also offer only the slenderest of speculative elements. In one, a child is born with blue skin in a world otherwise our own; this skin-tone variance simply offers an excuse to discuss an intricate family history. In another, the slightest of near-future alt-histories underpins an existentialist meditation around the International Space Station (ISS). If either piece were to win the Le Guin Prize, would its victory read as a carry-over of the old, contentious differentiation between “speculative” and “science” fiction, with the latter once notoriously described by Atwood as merely “talking squids in space”? Or would such a win accord well with Liu’s own “The Paper Menagerie,” a 2011 short story that swept SFF awards, using one small magical-realist element to invite readers into a rich domestic backstory?
Such is the trap that awards can set for us—politics, rivalry, hierarchies of value—and this is part of why Le Guin was “suspicious” of them. But what if we put aside the fact that the 2024 Le Guin Prize has such a hefty financial component, distinct in the world of science fiction and fantasy especially? Then we might be able to marvel cleanly at this shortlist, because there are enough resonance points between these ten volumes to suggest many paired readings for those who simply want to enjoy thought-provoking, world-expanding, and invigorating fiction.
In that vein, then, the following two-part review is presented less in the interest of highlighting possible “winners” from these ten finalists. [1] Instead, I want to encourage lovers of SFF to read these books in dialogue with one another, so these summaries are presented to encourage complementary readings: for style, for theme, and for arguments about how best to imagine “real grounds for hope” in our hurting world. Money might make a world of difference for many (most?) of us, but there’s also something powerful and necessary about sitting with a provocative idea for societal reform, well told.
And so. In Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, any questions about today’s Sino-Western relations have been put aside to imagine the International Space Station stably thriving a few years from now. This is the only speculative conceit in the novel, which imagines a near future in which our species is going to the moon again, and Russian and US teams aboard the ISS witness and wonder at the Earth and all its inhabitants from their distorted timescale of sixteen sunrises in a single day. This prose poem of a novella is told through an omniscient third-person perspective that slips not only into the minds of six astronauts ruminating over the existential and quotidian across the course of their day’s labours, but also into some of the scenes down on Earth, which is afflicted by extreme weather events that the crew of the ISS are tasked to record.
This is not a book to be read with the expectation of any greater “plot”; it is an invitation to sit with these astronauts and contemplate the strange miracle of life on a planet from which we humans can only ever barely and briefly take our leave. The death of one of the astronauts’ mothers, earthside, further invites meditation on Earth-as-mother, and other notions of lineage and family as they extend beyond borders (or are supposed to, anyway). If the book can be said to have any limitation, it is the control with which that omniscient narrator is held above individual characters. Even when we slip into and out of each vantage point aboard, the overall effect is holistic and detached. We are experiencing each human as part of an overarching weave set by the guiding voice, and that perspective becomes the ultimate narrative priority in this work.
Another book that expressly refuses to sit with the individual as a distinct entity is Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, though this piece has a more pronounced fantastical element. This is the slender tale of a self-aware zombie. In it, she moves through her post-life in the company of other shambling and confused undead beings, studies and aches for other animals, slaughters and falls afoul of the living, and heeds the call of the sea.
This narrative might have felt too insular if not for the addition of a dead crow, which our protagonist binds inside her chest and converses with, in a fantastical register we’re left to interpret for ourselves: Is this a world of real talking birds, or simply undead beings who think they talk to birds? Told in a patchwork of episodes imagining the thought processes of a being who loses body parts and tries to fill up her hollowness with other dead things, the story’s poetic strength comes from the questions it poses about the relationship between a sense of self and broader systems of life (and unlife?) on Earth.
Like Orbital, this work is an invitation to reflect on the value we place on living, and to cultivate wonder for the world to which we somehow belong. A third prose poem of a novella, Alissa Hattman’s Sift, completes an excellent triptych of works in this thematic and stylistic register. This piece depicts a two-person journey across a terrain desertified by climate change and war, in search of fertile land. Our protagonist, Tortula, sets out with a more egocentric perspective and an ache to love and be loved, but in her conversations with a character initially known only as The Driver, also navigates questions of trauma, coping strategies, and disassociation, approaching a deeper appreciation for the scale of their mother in nature.
The Driver also keeps growing, to become Lamellae for the last of their trek to and through a mountain, while their vehicle is itself a fantastical MacGuffin: a device that effortlessly changes to suit the author’s needs at different points along the journey. These narrative elements highlight how much the science-fictionality of this tale is itself merely a plot vehicle: a useful medium through which to create an opportunity to think and talk existentially.
Another of the slender works in this year’s list, Nghi Vo’s Mammoths at the Gates, is already in conversation with other fiction: three preceding novellas in The Singing Hills Cycle, which follow Cleric Chih in travels that see the nature of memory and storytelling become fiercely important to moving forward. This world depicts animality in some stark, folkloric absolutes—tigers in one way, mammoths in another—and features a hoopoe-adjacent species of bird with the power of absolute memory, making them excellent record-keepers. One “neixin” is bonded to Chih and another to Chih’s mentor, whose death has brought Chih back to the Singing Hills abbey.
As with other novellas in this series, the narrative arc here involves a delicate building of different positions that will culminate in a resolution that affirms the power of story itself. In this case, the core tension arises when royal kin of the dead cleric wish to claim his body—and with it reassert a vision of the deceased as he was before he entered the abbey. Chih hopes to find a way to honour the memory of the man their mentor chose to become instead, without bringing the family’s wrath down upon them. The solution comes from another source—and not one that would be easy for our world to replicate. Nevertheless, one strength in this work is its meditation on how to find a third way through stark binaries.
This is an attribute shared by The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed’s wartime alt-world populated by animal forms in lieu of major characters. Descriptions of this world invoke a World War One battleground, but with a few animal advances—like engineered wasps that can sting a patient to transfer medicine for their wounds—that keep the whole of the universe a little “weird.” The strength of Mohamed’s prose comes through more often, though, in visceral details that are very much of our world: depictions of pain and bodily injury, or cooking meat on an open fire, that provide a striking and memorable intensity to travels through this realm.
Our protagonist is viewed as a dull-witted monster by many—and not just because of the size and shape of his body, but also because he is a passivist. And not just any passivist: Alefret wrote the Articles of the Pact, a declaration of nonviolence that insists upon a better way out of war. This is why a soldier of Varkal, who holds him in contempt (viewing Alefret’s passivism as cowardice), is taking him to a city of the Meddon: Alefret’s own countrymen plan to use this “monster” as a military asset, leveraging passivist connections to slip in and assassinate royalty.
Along the way, Qhudur’s brutality—his utter inability to imagine how one’s worth to society could be measured save through a commitment to violence in its name—is contrasted with Alefret’s philosophy. But the real question of the volume lies at its journey’s end: Which outlook will triumph? Will Alefret be made to compromise? Can Qhudur’s brutality be softened in the least? Or is life messier than such simplistic notions of one idea winning and the other losing? Is brief respite from the question the very best that we strange beasts can ever hope for?
In Part Two, we will hold these five pieces in conversation with five more. All of the aforementioned can be read on their own, and discussed in light of the parameters set for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction—but what’s the fun in not taking the opportunity, as Le Guin surely taught us, to step between worlds as well, and broaden our outlooks even more?
Endnotes
[1] And, for accountability’s sake, I’m probably not the best “judge” of what the judges are thinking, in any case: The book I felt was most in need of stronger editing in the 2022 list was its winner. But I also think The House of Rust represented the kind of work Le Guin would have wanted most to uplift, so all’s well that ends well. [return]
This review was edited on October 17 2024 to reflect more accurately the shortlisting process of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. The judging panel of Omar El Akkad, Margaret Atwood, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado does not select the shortlist; it is chosen for them by a reading panel at the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, which draws the shortlist from public nominations. The judging panel then select the recipient of the prize.