I downloaded this audiobook because I was hoping for a fun ride. I mean, how could it not be? Feral hippos have overtaken parts of the Mississippi and there is a gang of gunslingers running around on hippos. This should have been like a B-movie creature feature! I wanted blood and revenge and dismemberment by hippo! Unfortunately that is not what I got. 

This is a pretty short novella, the audiobook was only 4 1/2 hours. But honestly it felt like I was listening for 45 hours. The first three hours are a long and tedious introduction to the members of Houndstooth's gang. One or two of the characters also use non-binary pronouns for some reason. I am not opposed to this being used in a book but since it wasn't explained or introduced it was very confusing. And the character's name is Hero, which isn't really a name at all. I had a really hard time following that because you have a not-name and a not-pronoun being used constantly. The history was tedious, I really want to get to something interesting and it seemed like it was never going to happen. It took three hours just to find out what job the gang had been hired for!

When we finally did get to the action it was abrupt and didn't make much sense. The author shows a very strong lack of knowledge about how dams and rivers work. The lack of knowledge about hippo physiology I can excuse since it was a creature feature. But you don't know that water naturally runs downhill? And that dams are built upstream to create larger, still bodies of water? Dams don't have gates for boats to travel through, that is a loch. All of these questions quickly took me out of the story. It all ended with not much blood, not much gore, and a shocking lack of hippos. This was supposed to be about hippos and I feel like we hardly saw them in action.

Also, there was a short history of how hippos came to be so rampant in Louisiana at the end of the book. It explained what "The Harriet" was, which frankly I was not able to piece together through the whole novella. It might have been better to have that at the beginning. This history says that in this alternate history that Lincoln never got around to the Emancipation Proclamation because he was busy with hippo legislation. So, if the Civil War never happened and the slaves were not freed, then how did you have so much acceptance of such a wide array of people in Louisiana (which was a slave holding state)? We have Hispanic people, African American people, non-binary people, bisexual people, feminists...all in this gang and everyone accepts it, doesn't mention it, and remembers everyone else's pronouns flawlessly. That is a head-scratcher right there. Slavery is still a thing but we're embracing non-binary pronouns. It was weird and nonsensical. The best alternate histories need to make sense.

This is part of a series of posts reviewing categories in this year's Hugo ballot. I'll be discussing the entries, the voter packet, and my ballot. I've nominated and voted most years since 2011, when I figured out that all I had to do was join Worldcon to get to do so.

Novella is a length I tend to struggle with as a reader. Often I find them either rushed, or stuffed with filler. This year has several I enjoyed, though.

• All Systems Red, by Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing) - 4 Stars. Top of ballot, one of my favorite novellas ever. The narrator is excellent.

• “And Then There Were (N-One),” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, March/April 2017) - 4 Stars. A murder mystery at a convention where everyone is the same person. Another excellent example of the right amount of plot for the length. This works really well. I didn't even mind being ahead of the narrator in solving the crime.

• Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com Publishing) - 3.5 Stars. Well written, but has some of my usual issues with serialized ficiton.

• The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing) - 3.5 Stars. Great worldbuilding, but not as solid across all elements.

• Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing) - 4 Stars. I am surprised by how much I liked this given how underwhelming I found the previous novella in this series.

• River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing) - 3.5 stars. Great characters, but this felt incomplete. Like the first 30% of a great book, but not quite enough content to be satisfying.

So, obviously All Systems Red will be at the top. Followed by And Then . . and Sticks and Bones. Black Tides next, then Home, and River of Teeth. This is a very solid selection of novellas.  

Man-eating hippos, some truly fucked up characters, and a bloody, bloody tale of revenge?   Basically, this hit a ton of my literary kinks, in a fabulous alternate history setup: what would you think about cowboys who were hippoboys?   Instead of cows, America depends on hippos to get around - and yes, for meat. 

Except the feral ones who depend on Americans for meat. 

The cast of characters is outrageously charming, with one exception - and that's on purpose.    The world building is a nasty little mirror of our world, which is charming in and of itself.   The plot propels this forward. 

Just love this. 

Read a bunch of Provenance, finished this, and mostly felt too sick to do much more. 

Changing my Shabbat habits.   It will be about relaxing, but I relax online a lot - so I will be doing that. 

I'll try to limit stress, though. 

My new medication did... not work.   That's kinda an understatement: my chest felt tight after walking, like my heart rate wanted to go up, couldn't, and was fighting against that.   

I had to lie down for a long time, and am not using it again until I can talk to my cardiologist on Monday. 

That being said, I am also exhausted: I need a break from longer works so I'll be reading novelettes and short stories until I go to sleep.