Locus Just SNUBBED Project Hail Mary!

It's that time of year again - time to select the best of the previous year and serve it up to be considered for a Hugo Award in 2022.

Essential to the selection process is reading Locus Magazine's edition for February. If you don't subscribe to Locus (and if you're reading this blog, why aren't you?) you should at least understand that nearly every single Hugo Award winner makes the list on Locus Magazine first. There are always dizzying amounts of candidates to consider, and Locus helps to whittle down the huge, huge pile to a manageable size for people who do not review sci fi novels and short stories for a living. It's a vital service which helps to kick-start every Hugo candidate who makes that list.

Except this year, there is a huge oversight major fuck-up.

Ask any casual reader what the best novel of 2021 was and they'll tell you right away: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. It was amazing. It was awesome. When I'd finished reading it, I felt privileged to be alive at the time it was written. I felt as though I'd read a first edition of Frankenstein, or 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I knew - I just KNEW - that generations of people would be talking about this book forever. No classics shelf in the 2300's would be complete without this volume.

Locus doesn't even think it's worth considering.

Locus listed 30 sci-fi novels in its year in review. 30! And of those 30, Project Hail Mary was , not even listed as an honorable mention.

That's 30 sci-fi novels. Fantasy and Horror gets listed in a different area.

Twelve staff members contributed their best-of 2021 articles, describing the year's trends, and which novels they loved the most. Again, Project Hail Mary didn't make the list for any of them.

Double-you, tee, eff!

Okay, I understand the power that Mary Robinette Kowal wields these days. Her negative review of Project Hail Mary carried a huge amount of weight. But as I pointed out in my blog post on June 21st, one needs to have the technical expertise equivalent to someone like Mary Robinette Kowal to even catch such errors!

Was that the only reason PHM failed to make the Locus list?

Maybe not. But those other reasons are also trivial. There are other things about the story which bugged the critics. Things like Rayland Grace doing a space walk when operating the rover would have been perfectly adequate. Except that Grace was working alone, and was not an experienced astronaut. (Hell-LO!) Or the fact that Grace, as the main character, began the story waking up, which most literary critics hate, and dismiss out of hand. Andy Weir not only used this trope, he got away with it smelling like a rose! And professional literary types HATE the fact that he did!

I'm not afraid to say it: You NEED a M.A. in English Lit. to hate Project Hail Mary!

Project Hail Mary won the Goodreads poll for best science fiction of 2021 with 92,831 votes. The next runner-up, Klara and the Sun, had 56,284 votes. That's a margin of 36,547 votes! Higher than the combined totals of the third and fourth runners-up COMBINED!

Look, I get it that people who demand literary excellence might not like PHM. That's a good reason to not include it among the top 10. 

It is NOT a good reason to exclude it from the top 30!

Seeing Locus screw this one up is like seeing a star athlete flub an easy play: like seeing the greatest centerfielder drop an easy fly-ball; like seeing Michael Jordan blow an easy lay-up; like seeing Aaron Rodgers choke against the injury-addled San Francisco 49ers (grrrrrrrrr!).

Locus, I love you. I subscribe to your magazine, and probably will continue to do so until the day I die (and likely a little bit after that). But come on! Get your game faces back on! You BLEW this one!

Or, as "The Commish" (played by John C. McGinley) would say in those old commercials, "Blew it? You typhooned it!"

This novel does not deserve to be treated like airport literature.

Eric

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