Review of Someday by David Levithan

This is young adult fantasy romance novel published by Knopf and runs 392 pages. It follows Every Day and Another Day, novels with the same characters, a prequel “Six Earlier Days” and the short story “Day 3196.” The novel Every Day was a New York Times Bestseller and nominated for a Lambda Award. It was recently made into a motion picture which is also available for rent/purchase. This review contains major spoilers.

This novel picks up where Every Day leaves off. The protagonist, who calls themself A, is a non-binary consciousness that wakes in a different body each day. They fall in love with the girl Rhiannon, and as a result, reveal too much of themself. This leads to wild accounts of demon possession and the arrival of the fundamentalist Reverend Poole, who turns out to be an evil version of A. Scared by all this, A goes on the run. A means to leave everything behind. They delete their email address and flee the Northeast for the Denver area. But A is starved for affection, and when they find a message to them on Rhiannon’s Facebook page, they are drawn back to her like a moth to a flame. Once in contact, they find the evil and dangerous Poole (also known as X) is holding their friends hostage as a way to get to A. What can they do?

I was really taken by Every Day, which develops a lot of suspense at the end very suddenly, so I’ve been waiting a while for this sequel. It continues a lot of the strong points of Every Day. It’s clear Levithan is interested in the worth of every individual, and a lot of this is about respecting others and treating them well, regardless of who they are. A’s existence is dependent on stealing bodies, but they maintain very strict rules about respecting their hosts and trying to do their best not to make anyone’s life worse during the one-day possession. This novel develops that theme further, including an equality march on Washington D.C. where a lot of the action takes place. Definitely Levithan’s strongest point in this series is how he presents the lives of A’s hosts, a one-day glimpse of each, with all their joys and problems.

On the not so positive side, this doesn’t develop much angst, conflict, drama or suspense. Early in the book A goes through some tough hosts, but this issue clears up once they are back in the Northeast and reunited with Rhiannon. It’s clear that A has to do something about X, and A does come through at the end, but there’s no buildup in the action line to this point. There is a suggestion in the text that A might go over to the dark side, but events don’t support this or provide any discussion of the morality involved. Instead, the book continues to concentrate on the “everybody’s okay” equality theme to the point that it’s intrusive. As a result, Levithan can’t resist making X a sympathetic character. Someone has apparently told Levithan A needs to use the pronoun “they,” too, which leads to the usual grammatical muddle. And last, all these people eventually started to sound the same, which means the author gave up characterization to use his own voice instead.

This isn’t the thriller sequel I’d hoped for, but it is still a valuable book for kids struggling to deal with difference.

Three and a half stars.

Award Winners that Don’t Hold Up over Time

In her 2014 article on literary awards, Barbara Cohen notes: “Cultural prizes notoriously reward the wrong works for the wrong reasons: On the long list of worthies deprived of the Nobel for literature are Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce.” I’ve been discussing influences on the awards over the last few blogs, and of course these issues are likely to result in some winners that don’t hold up over time.

Checking around, I found The Hugo Award Book Club (HABC), which has a page discussing the issue of poor choices. The group awards the “Worst Hugo Award” title to 1973, when Isaac Asimov won his first Hugo for a novel with The Gods Themselves. Here was the lineup of finalists that year. As was standard in those times, there were no concerns about diversity, so the finalists are all white men.

• The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov [Galaxy Mar/Apr,May/Jun 1972; If Mar/Apr 1972]
• When Harlie Was One by David Gerrold [Ballantine, 1972]
• There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson [Signet, 1972]
• The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg [Scribner’s, 1972]
• Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg [Galaxy Jul/Aug,Sep/Oct 1972; Scribner’s, 1972]
• A Choice of Gods by Clifford D. Simak [Putnam, 1972]

The HABC briefly reviews all these works, along with some other worthy contenders that year. Asimov’s winner was a three-part series published in Galaxy Magazine where aliens in a different dimension steal energy from ours, causing the sun to go nova. The HABC notes that the physics is interesting, but that the end result was dull and boring and the book has not aged well in comparison to the other contenders that year. In the comments Steve Davidson mentions that the work was recognized at the time for its risks with sexual content, but that isn’t anything exceptional these days, so the novel’s shortcomings are what stand out.

So what affected the WorldCon membership that year to make this choice? Asimov’s reputation as a short story writer? Frederik Pohl’s reputation as the editor of Galaxy? The ascendancy of hard SF? Promotion? Some kind of groupthink issue? Whatever it was, the vision affected the Nebula and Locus voters, too. The novel also won the Nebula in 1972 and the Locus Award in 1973.

Getting back to the present time, which of recent choices in the awards will hold up best over time? It’s an interesting question, eh?

Analysis of the Nebula Novel Finalists

A couple of blogs back, I mentioned that recently a friend pronounced that the outstanding diversity among the 2017 Nebula finalists indicated a committee had composed the ballot. This was a surprising charge, but my friend is a poet and not a prose writer, so she doesn’t have a dog in the fight. That means her assessment could be fairly objective. The Nebula ballot is supposed to be made up from member nominations rather than by a jury, but one would expect a fairly unorganized result from that kind of process. Not quite random, because taste in books is never random, but at least fairly loose. So, does this result indicate that kind of process? Hm.

Here’s the description of the nominations from the Nebula Website:
• The official NOMINATION PERIOD will open on November 15th and continue until February 15th. Nominations will be accepted via a secure web-based form.
• Only Active and Associate members in good standing shall be eligible to nominate works for the FINAL BALLOT.
• Nominations shall be treated as confidential information and only the names of the works and numbers of nominations will be available for viewing by eligible members after the awards ceremony.
• Each eligible member may nominate no more than five different works per category and may not nominate any work more than once.
• The nominations will be counted by the Nebula Awards Commissioner, who shall compose the FINAL BALLOT.
• The FINAL BALLOT shall be comprised of the top six works in each category that receive the most nominations.

And here were the 2017 novel results:
• All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
• Borderline, Mishell Baker (Saga)
• The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
• Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
• Everfair, Nisi Shawl (Tor)

The diversity here really is staggering. These five finalists represent two trans authors, two black authors, an Asian author, three LGB authors and three disabled authors. There are no average plain-vanilla writers here at all. So is my friend right? What are the chances that the active/associate membership of the SFWA would produce this lineup from all the books out there this year?

More on Awards Pressures

Following up on award pressures, here’s an article in the Guardian that claims British literary fiction is actually being undermined by a handful of powerful book prizes. You’d think that high-profile prizes would be good for the industry, as they recognize excellence and point readers to where the best fiction is. Winning the prize generally gives a big boost to sales for the book. However, this article suggests that the costs associated with entering a lot of books into the larger competitions tend to limit the submissions to publishers with deep pockets. That means small, independent publishers that might actually be publishing the most cutting-edge work are sidelined and the larger publishers set the standard for what the public reads.

According to literary agent Jonny Geller in this same article, “Literary fiction is under threat…due to a combination of factors – reluctance by major houses to take risks; a bottleneck in the distribution chain [and] diverse voices being ignored by a predominantly white, middle-class industry.” Geller goes on to note the pressures on the prize juries. “Every major literary prize is under the same pressures – the balance between picking books that break new ground, challenge readers and those books that will be popular.”

There are other issues, as well. Past literary judge Tom Leclair notes in another article that the different tastes, criteria and loyalties of judges mean that disagreements can lead to horse-trading type compromise. He also relates experiences where fellow judges tried to give awards to their friends or to other authors represented by their own literary agent.

These people are talking about large, national awards, of course, which are normally juried. However, one can draw parallels with the SFF industry awards. We’ve seen the recent move by the Puppies to promote Hugo slates. This is very visible promotion, but how much does less visible promotion affect who wins? And what effect does author/publisher reputation have?

Brandon Kempner at Chaos Horizon notes the tendency of award winners to be re-nominated. In a similar vein, Natalie Luhrs recently completed her annual “slice and dice” of the influential Locus Reading List and commented on repeat appearances. Her review notes that white men continue to dominate the list, while the same small group of women and people of color appear year after year. Is this a tribute to their reputations, or just a form of tokenism?

Why Are Literary Awards so Popular?

A recent article by Deborah Cohen cites James English The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. According to English, the number of literary awards has more than doubled in the UK since 1988 and tripled in the US since 1976. Not all these are for SFF, of course. Some of them are big competitions for national recognition and some are only small prizes for local authors. Still, there’s been that explosion. So why are awards so popular?

The answer appears to be economics, which is the answer to a lot of questions about human behavior, i.e. there’s money tied up in the awards process. First of all, many of the prizes charge an entry fee, which means it’s a money-making proposition for the organization offering the award. The Newbery is free. The Pulitzer charges $50. But other smaller contests often have higher fees. The Florida Authors and Publishers Association, for example, charges $75 for members and $85 for non-members to enter their contest. These small organizations tend to cater to independent publishers and authors who hope to gain some of the advantages a literary award can offer, meaning you can add “prize-winning author” to your bio.

The second way money enters the equation is that the more prestigious awards generally give a big boost to the winner’s sales. There are press releases and a big awards ceremony and a sticker that goes on the books so book stores can set up displays. This means it’s important for an award to become prestigious so it can influence sales, and important for big publishers to control the prestigious awards, if at all possible. There are pressures, and corruption may creep in. For example, recently published diaries of a former French literary judge apparently allege that the French publishing houses illegally influence the major awards. Accordingly, the three biggest publishing houses always win the biggest prizes for their authors.

Because of the prestige and sales that well-known awards can provide, there are other pressures, as well. Readers might recall that the lack of recognition for popular literature is one of the Sad/Rabid Puppy complaints. Underrepresented groups of authors lobby for recognition, and diversity in particular has recently become a point of contention. An interesting question: Does more diversity in the awards lead to more diversity in the publishing industry?

David Levithan’s Every Day, take two

A couple of days into thoughts about the Hugo nomination process totally missing fringe publications, I’ve come up with a good example. David Levithan’s Every Day is a book I reviewed on the blog a little while back. I gave this one five stars, which is hard to get out of me. I think it is totally and awesomely brilliant.

Every Day was published in 2013 and received the Lambda Award for Best LBGTQ Children’s/Teen Book. It went on to feature on the New York Times Bestseller List. This means my opinion isn’t unusual, either from the literary community or the fan community. However, this book never made a ripple in the SF&F community because SF&F isn’t something Levithan normally writes.

I’m seeing quite a bit of activity out there just now in trying to work out a better system to locate award-worthy works. Let’s not forget the fringes, folks. That’s where genius really lies.