Review - "The Erdmann Nexus", "Shoggoths in Bloom", and "Exhalation"

Well, I'm back. I had a terrific vacation, got to see some family, and experience a whole host of new things. I didn't get to some of the nerdy sites I had planned for my trip since wildfires made other members of my group want to keep out of the area but I can't complain.

And it's time to get started on these long dormant Hugo winners. First up is the short fiction category. You may recall that I liked all of the winners even if none of them were my first pick.

Donato Giancola
2009 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

"The Erdmann Nexus"
by Nancy Kress
2009 Hugo Winner for Best Novella

At a retirement home populated by quirky individuals the retirees have started to occasionally black out and have visions. When these visions appear to come true a physics professor who is at the center of the phenomenon tries to get to the bottom of it.

I appreciated that Kress didn't try to be coy about what was happening; the collective minds are reshaping reality and have drawn the attention of a distant spacecraft who helpfully explains for the reader's benefit what's going on. It grates on my nerves badly when an author tells a completely transparent story and tries to write around certain aspects of it in order to create a "mystery". By cutting straight to the chase Kress turns "The Erdmann Nexus" into something of a procedural with a distinctive cast. The story becomes how they work out what is happening and what they do about it rather than it being about ineffectively hiding from the reader what is happening to them.

I tend to run hot and cold when it comes to the quirky cast. With "The Erdmann Nexus" Kress seems less focused on emphasizing how "zany" they are and instead fills them in as elderly people who have grown into the eccentricities.

It's funny but the longest story to win in 2009 is the one that I have the least to talk about. That's because I found most of "The Erdmann Nexus" to be run of the mill. It wasn't bad but it wasn't terrific. I can't work up any enthusiasm either way on it. It's a decently crafted science fiction story and that's enough reason to give it a look but at the same time it's not really special.

"Shoggoths in Bloom"
by Elizabeth Bear
2009 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

I love the works of H.P. Lovecraft but I'm under no illusion about the man himself. Even by the standards of the 1930's where casual racism was so ingrained that it would pass without notice Lovecraft was a bigot. Personally I think his irrational xenophobia is an inseparable part of his stories; he channeled his loathing of anyone who wasn't Caucasian into unfathomable horrors. Which brings me to "Shoggoths in Bloom" which is all about racism in the 1930's and horrors that we cannot fathom.

Unlike the monsters in Lovecraft the Shoggoths in this story are relatively peaceful. Or as peaceful as freakish, acid secreting, gelatonous monstrocities the size of houses that emerge from the blackest depths of the ocean and occasionally crush small towns can be. In the late autumn they beach themselves on the rocky shore of New England where they bloom for a short period before vanishing into the deepest parts of the ocean again. An African-American scientist travels to a remote fishing village to study them and once there deals with both prejudice against him by the townspeople and his own prejudices.

My original reaction to "Shoggoths in Bloom" was that I liked it but wasn't thrilled and I didn't like the ending at all. I've revised that opinion a bit. I think "Shoggoths in Bloom" is a better story than my original impressions. I think part of my initial response was that I came into it with certain expectations based on the horror genre and while I could recognize what Bear was doing I couldn't reconcile that with my views. With a bit of distance I have come to appreciate her deconstruction of Lovecraft on multiple levels.

Bear places the xenophobia at the heart of Lovecraft on display with human characters, the shoggoths, and international politics. The horrors in Bear's story are comprehendable if a person makes the effort to cross the divide. Evil large enough to swallow mankind whole can be faced and confronted. Answers are out there for those who seek them. "Shoggoths in Bloom" takes the trappings of Lovecraft and turns them all on their ear.

That makes it a good thing that Bear didn't follow the path of far too many authors and did not choose to ape Lovecraft's style. Since Bear is subverting other aspects of his writing it would have been awkward to have to prose be the same.

Getting to the actual story, "Shoggoths in Bloom" is one of the better SF works that I've read about racism. There have been a lot of them and certain cliches seem to dominate them (see District 9 for a good example of one that came out this week) but Bear avoids those cliches. Her scientist is not a virtuous minority figure who does only good in contrast to the wicked and cruel townspeople who hate everyone different from themselves. The scientist has his own prejudices to deal with and the townspeople for the most part don't care a bit about the skin color of their visitor though they'll say some hurtful things not realizing how they'll be taken. It's a more nuanced look at racial problems than the usual simple morality play.

On the surface "Shoggoths in Bloom" is about race relations and our reaction to concepts outside of our worldview. At that level it's a pretty good story that I'd recommend. There's a deeper structure to it as an attack on H.P. Lovecraft and that is a whole extra dimension that I appreciated. Not everyone will come to the story from that same place but it made it work better for me.

"Exhalation"
by Ted Chiang
2009 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

It strikes me that the absolute hardest kind of science fiction to make a good story out of is the scientific principle story. These have fallen out of fashion over the years; they were part of the didactic SF right from the beginning and had their heyday in the early years of Joseph Campbell's editing. When the new wave came along and the full weight of the genre jumped to the other side of the spectrum they nearly completely vanished. These stories are invariably hard SF but they're a subgenre of that subgenre. The basic structure is that the scientist hero discovers some kind of scientific problem (usually involving physics) that is an immediate threat. As they explain the concept to the reader they apply their knowledge of science to the problem and resolve it. The problem with these stories is that they're inevitably more about lecturing the reader than telling a good story. It's phenomenally rare for an author to be able to merge both the high concept of the scientific problem and quality writing. Which is why "Exhalation" stands out.

There is a place populated by machines that are driven by high pressure gas cylinders. One of these intelligent machines is interested in the way that their minds function and so contrives a method to disassemble his own head and watch his mind in operation. However as he examines his own brain he realizes that some recent odd occurrences spell doom for their civilization.

I think it goes without saying that Chiang is master storyteller and he is my favorite author of short SF today. He is exceptional when it comes to devising high concepts for his stories and at the same time he is a verbal chameleon whose style shifts dramatically depending on the demands of the story. "Exhalation" is not his best work. The main character is less interesting than others and the story is almost a lecture. And yet it is still something wonderful to read. This is a story that can easily bring together all SF readers from those who just want big ideas to those (like myself) looking for something more literary. All of this year's winners are good but if you can only read one then this is the one to go for.

Review - "Fountain of Age" and "Always"

Here we are at the end of the Nebulas. Just in time for this year's Hugo award ceremony.

"Fountain of Age"
by Nancy Kress
2007 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

When I read this story as one of last year's Hugo nominees I didn't care for it. So here it is more than a year later and upon rereading it I still didn't like it. Some things do not improve with age.

A retired mobster in the future has kept a lock of hair and paper kiss in a ring as a reminder of a woman he met in his youth. When the ring is destroy he sets out to get replacements. The problem is that the woman is now one of the most important people in the world. A substance harvested from her body stops the aging process and she lives in isolation away from the world. On top of that the government still watches his every move which will complicate any plans. Still he seeks out some old friends and enlists their help.

I think my biggest problem with "Fountain of Age" is the mixed signals that Kress kept sending me. The main character ran a criminal empire that apparently never actually did a whole lot except be vaguely illegal. So she's trying to keep him sympathetic. And then a primary facet of his characterization is how his affection for a prostitute he met when he was twenty made him despise his wife and child. So he's a thoroughly rotten human being. Who we're supposed to care about his wistful dreams of lost love. It's not even a rich characterization; I'm pretty sure that he's supposed to be a charming, sympathetic protagonist on a quixotic quest but he's not charming or sympathetic.



For "Fountain of Age" to work as a story I have to care about the main character and his efforts to get a lost kiss and I didn't.

"Always"
by Karen Joy Fowler
2007 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

On the other side of the coin I enjoyed "Always" and a year's time has not diminished that in the slightest. While it uses a common theme and is completely predictable Fowler does a great job in developing the situation.

A cult leader has an incredible offer that he extends to only a select few people: if you pay him five thousand dollars and live in his commune then he will let you live forever. A pair of young lovers scrape together the money and move into the commune where they deal with the complications of being in a cult of people who believe themselves to be immortal.

From those plot elements you should be able to work out pretty much ever beat that Fowler uses and yet "Always" works out better than that. Mostly I think it is because of the narrator who views things through the eyes of a true believer. So while she's telling a straightforward life story the reader is picking up on the unpleasant truths.

In "Always" Fowler puts belief and faith on display at the center of the story. And not the mushy, feel-good broad concept that you usually see but the outright denial of reality because it disagrees with what the believer "knows" to be true. And in exploring that she took a run of the mill concept and made a very interesting tale out of it.

Review - "Magic for Beginners" and "I Live With You"

I'm stepping back here to cover the 2005 Nebula winners. Kelly Link managed to get the incredibly rare double Nebula win that year for both the novella and novelette category with "The Fairy Handbag". Only Roger Zelazny with the first Nebulas and Connie Willis in the 1992 awards have managed to do that.

"Magic for Beginners"
by Kelly Link
2005 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

I have come to the conclusion that Kelly Link is an author that I will never like. When I first encountered her writing what struck me was how she overstuffed her story with random details intended to provide color that they stood out as random, meaningless nonsense. I got the impression of a story background done madlib style where she filled in a few nouns verbs and adjectives. "Magic for Beginners" isn't bad but I found Link's style distracting.

In a metatextually recursive television show a teenager is having trouble sorting out his feelings for the girls in his circle of friends. They're bound together by their love a strange, magical television show. His parent's marriage is in trouble and so when his mother inherits property she is determined to take her son away for several months to examine the inheritance.

Kelly does a good job with her cast of characters. Yes, they're also too conveniently quirky and unique but my feeling is that was an aspect of the characters within a television series conceit. Everyone is memorably strange except the lead and his initial love interest and they play their roles for the camera. Kelly portrays the fumbling missteps (not just sexual) in those teen relationships well and I liked her use of how a common bit of pop culture can tie people together.

My problems with the story is that Kelly spends the majority of it with what amounts to nonsense. Roughly half the story is about the television show that the kids watch which is occasionally metaphorical and too often just random noise. It's a forced attempt at whimsy and while a bit of it is useful for color packing a story thick with meaningless fluff gets on my nerves.

The phrase that comes to mind when I read Link's stories is "bargain basement Neil Gaiman". Gaiman uses many of the same techniques as Link but he typically uses them much more successfully. With Link I just find myself wishing she'd stop telling me about cursed gnomes living in hair and get back to the story.

"I Live With You"
by Carol Emshwiller
2005 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

The narrator of "I Live With You" spotted a lonely aging woman in a book story and decided they looked somewhat alike. They followed the woman home and because no one ever notices the narrator was able to just follow her into the house and set up residence. The narrator (whose nature is never made clear; it's probably not human but it could be) lives in the woman's house and does small things to disrupt her life and gradually make her more uncomfortable within her own home. Eventually the narrator decides that the boring, day-to-day life of this woman has to change.

This story is fantastically creepy. Part of it is the ambiguous narrator shifts gears from pranking annoyance to menacing lurker from moment to moment. The taunting is runs from irritating to cruel and sometimes both. The home invasion aspect of it doesn't hurt either and it takes a particularly nasty turn toward the end of the story.

The harassment are something that every reader will be able to empathize with and at the same time recognize in their own lives. Did you misplace your keys or is something like that living with you and trying to screw up your life for its amusement? I enjoyed "I Live With You" quite a bit since it took that central concept of a complete violation of someone's life and presented it from the perspective of the monster doing it.

Review - "Burn" and "Echo"

I've got a set of admissions to make here. First, I read the wrong set of stories this week and didn't have enough time to read the correct ones. So I'm jumping straight up to the 2006 winners and I'll cover the 2005 winners sometime during the week.

And the reason why I'll being doing those during the week rather than next Sunday is that in two weeks I'll be on vacation. So rather than skipping a week with one last year of Nebula winning short stories to cover I'm going to wrap it up this week.

I'm rushing those because the announcement of the Hugo winners is next week so it'll take me some time to get to this year's winners. If I'm lucky (and I don't expect to be) then I may have just enough time to squeeze in a review of something I've already read before leaving on my trip.

So enough talking about my scheduling conflicts and errors. Let's get to this.

"Burn"
by James Patrick Kelly
2006 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

It's sometimes funny the things that jump out at you. "Burn" is the longest winner of the novella category for either Hugo or Nebulas. It's longer than some works that have won the novel category. The funny thing is that I think it could have been even longer; if anything the story feels a bit compressed.

In a post-human universe a group has bought one planet and dedicated it to a life of "simplicity". Their goal is to preserve unaltered humanity and they live an isolated existence cut off from the rest of the universe. The problem for them is that there were colonists on the planet they purchased; colonists that refused to leave and didn't like how the newcomers were creating a world wide forest for their agrarian life style. So the old colonists fight the new ones by setting forest fires and the new colonists have conscripted men into stopping the forest fires as part of an undeclared war.

"Burn" starts with one of these firefighters recuperating from injuries at a high tech hospital where he has his first contact with the wider universe. A bit of fiddling with the telephone/internet system accidentally puts him in contact with a group of children being groomed for political power. Intrigued by the discussion the children and their guardian come to the culturally quarantined planet to find out how they can help.

There seems to be a streak of Luddism that runs through science fiction authors. There's a reoccurring theme that turns up particularly in dystopian novels that once man abandons his wicked future technologies and returns to a nineteenth century level of development that everyone will be better off. The irony of a Luddite wanting to go back to the nineteenth century is lost in this situations. "Burn" isn't like that. The cultural basis for its world is a sense of moral superiority. Kelly gets this just right; the effect on individuals is subtle while the cumulative effect is major. And at the same time they have a point; their lifestyle is idyllic and gently pastoral. It's just at the cost of losing the wonders of the universe at large and locking themselves away from them.

"Burn" has a lively and interesting cast of characters. I was anticipating a round of "quirky small town life" and Kelly doesn't do that all. His backworld characters do not lead as simplistic of lives as their philosophy implies. The high tech ones have a mixture of worldliness and childishness that comes out as they take wonder in visiting a unique planet and manipulating the situation for what they perceive as the benefit of all.

The only problem I had with "Burn" is that I don't think it explores its themes as deeply as it could have. Kelly works his story with subtlety that I appreciated but at the same time by keeping so much of it low key it feels like he is dancing around topics. There's so much going on in "Burn" that it could have been twice it's length to give room for all of the interesting facets of the story.

I found "Burn" to be enjoyable but not terrific. Kelly subverted all of my expectations in his story which is something rare enough that it deserves mention. Still I think the result is "just" good. When my biggest complaint about a story is that I think it could have been better then it's definitely worth checking out.

"Echo"
by Elizabeth Hand
2006 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

In the not too distant future civilization is collapsing under the weight of terrorism and environmental disaster. On an island off the coast of main a person lives on their own and pines for a former lover who vanished in the chaos.

I understand what Hand was doing in "Echo" and I just didn't care for it. I never got a reason to care about the lonely hermit pining for their love lost somewhere in world wide chaos. The narrator is completely passive to the point that the entire story is just a monologue about them waiting out their life. That's a tough starting point for making me care about the characters and their relationship and Hand didn't help the situation by making their relationship an abstract thing. The reader gets impressions of their life but nothing concrete. The vague cloud of longing that forms the narrative of "Echo" just isn't enough to make me interested.

It's almost as if "Echo" is an attempt to fit love poetry into a story though Hand's prose isn't strong in that regard either. So I was left not caring about "Echo". It isn't even bad enough to make me dislike it; I just didn't care.

Review - "The Empire of Ice Cream" and "What I Didn't See"

"The Empire of Ice Cream"
by Jeffrey Ford
2003 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

"The Empire of Ice Cream" reminded me a lot of Ford's World Fantasy Award winner The Physiognomy. That wasn't because it used the same setting or even that it occupied the same themes. It reminds me of his book because he built a dazzling mosaic of words that left me bewildered but with a general sense at the end that it was pretty good.

Part of that has to with how the main character in "The Empire of Ice Cream" is a synesthetic, a person who interprets information from one sense as something from another. A common form is to associate colors with sound and this character uses that sense to compose music as though creating a painting. Of all the experiences he has the most complex one is that the taste of coffee ice cream gives him a detailed vision of a girl his age. He falls in love with this vision and savors each chance he gets to enjoy coffee ice cream for it.

In an odd way Ford seems to dodge using descriptions over the course of the story. The few that there are tend to be sterile. Everyone once and a while he dips into the synesthetic viewpoint but he seems to save those for more poetic uses. Avoiding dependence on the gimmick of a distorted viewpoint seems to help as it brings the descriptions of auditory paintings and visions into focus.

I found that I didn't care about the main character. As the story progresses he's essentially Gifted But Troubled Young Man Longing For an Impossible Girl #508. The plot for the most part runs an obvious course and if you've seen this once before (and you probably have) then it will feel very familiar.

And yet somehow Ford pulls me in. I didn't care about how the plot was unfolding or if young love would be found and I still enjoyed the ride. There's something to how he assembles his stories that make them come across as very different than what they suggest at first brush. I'd recommend "The Empire of Ice Cream" just for that; it's a well told story that just happens to be an old one.

"What I Didn't See"
by Karen Joy Fowler
2003 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

This is the first Nebula winner that doesn't even have the pretense of being fantasy or science fiction. There's not a single fantastic element in it. Not even a hint of strange happenings. There have been stories before where there isn't really anything SF in them but the author hints at it; that's not the case here. So even though "What I Didn't See" was an extremely good story it still seems peculiar that it won the Nebula.

In the 1920's a university expedition heads to the heart of Africa with a stated purpose of specimen collection. The actual purpose is only known to the organizer and is revealed once the group is on site. The organizer believes that gorillas are gentle animals and not the rampaging beasts they are portrayed as. He plans to put a stop to the practice of hunting them for sport by removing the glamor from it. And to do that he wants the two women on the expedition to kill gorillas.

That's the plot but the real story is in the break down in the expedition which is exasperated by torrid affairs and the anger regarding the hidden purpose. The main character is one of the women who does not appreciate being used and it, with other factors, strains her otherwise happy marriage.

Fowler does a great job in portraying her characters as conflicted, lost people. This story is in the same mold as Hemmingway and Conrad and yet Fowler finds a way to make it feel distinctive. Part of that is her choice of viewpoint, a woman who is sympathetic and yet just as lost in the ugly social mores of the time as everyone else. The story rarely went where I thought it would and each spin made the whole scenario more terrible.

"What I Didn't See" was a gripping story and so I definitely recommend it. The fact that it's an odd selection for the Nebula doesn't lessen its impact.

Review - "Bronte's Egg" and "Creature"

The theme of this year's Nebula winners is genetically-engineered, human-intelligent lizards as main characters. I know that's an oddly specific theme and yet there it is. Admittedly I don't remember a genetically-engineered, human-intelligent lizard as a main character in "Hell is the Absence of God" but I'm sure that's just an oversight on Ted Chiang's part.

"Bronte's Egg"
by Richard Chwedyk
2002 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

In the not too distant future a company creates talking dinosaur pets. They're supposed to live short lives and be as intelligent as parrots but since it does involve a company genetically engineering dinosaurs something goes wrong. The dinosaurs are sentient and live full life cycles. Rescue organizations form to take in the pets and protect them. Since the dinosaurs can't reproduce humanity is content to just let them live out their days in remote homes. A complication ensues when some of the dinosaurs start laying eggs and word leaks out.

That's the bulk of the story there and it's dabbled with the inhumane treatment of pets, what to do when sentience can be created, and the extended family of dinosaurs. Oh, and there's alien communications. That doesn't really have an impact on the story, it's just there. Since the house that they live in is essentially a rescue shelter most of the dinosaurs have very good reason for being distrustful of people; Chwedyk lets that theme simmer below the surface before finally letting it come up at the end.

The whole story is disjointed. The biggest plot is the laying of a viable egg and what people will do when they find out about it. But there's also another intelligent animal that turns up, a robot superhero, the old wounds and aging, and more. The narrative jumps around from topic to topic like a three year old high on pixie sticks. And that's oddly appropriate since the primary viewpoint character is essentially just that.

"Bronte's Egg" would have been a perfectly average story except for one thing: Chwedyk has created an incredibly endearing cast of characters. It takes the common themes and elevates it to a really enjoyable story. The hyperactive, mentally three-year-old dinosaur dashes about causing trouble and demanding attention which the rest of his large adopted family deals with in their unique ways. The story has a huge cast and they're all very distinctive.

So obviously I liked the story quite a bit. It has a bit too much of a kitchen sink plot but I was left wanting to read more about these dinosaurs. I want a full novel about them and that's definitely a recommendation for "Bronte's Egg".

"Creature"
by Carol Emshwiller
2002 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

A man has abandoned civilization after his wife and child die in a military strike. He has moved to a shack in the mountains far removed from the war. His lonely existence is interrupted when one of the genetically engineered lizard warriors for one of the sides turns up wounded near his home. He takes in the soldier who is still being hunted.

This could have been a straightforward "Enemy Mine" style story but Emshwiller goes in a completely different direction with the themes. Instead of this being a story about two hated enemies coming together to survive it's a story of a lonely man finding someone to love. The mountain man projects onto the lizard warrior a gentle feminine personality and tries to shield it. It's unclear in the story how much of this is reciprocated by the soldier which gives it an ambiguous tone. Is the soldier male or female? Is it trying to be friendly or romantic? Is it compassionate or just passive? Do the answers to any of those questions really matter in the end?

It's that ambiguous treatment of the situation that elevates the story to being pretty good. I'm not sure what I thought about the situation but I know that I'll be thinking about it for a while.

Review - "Louise's Ghost" and "The Cure for Everything"

The Nebulas went back to agreeing partially with the Hugo winner list this year with Jack Williamson's "The Ultimate Earth" winning the novella category. Since these 2001 awards the only time where one story has not also won a Hugo was in 2004.

Also the next update won't be until Wednesday at the earliest. I've had some hardware failures and while I can finish the paragraph and half I have left here I can't rely on having access until parts arrive.

"Louise's Ghost"
by Kelly Link
2001 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

The first thing that any reader is going to notice about this story and the thing that will stick in your mind is that it is about two friends who are named Louise. Link simply calls them both "Louise" in the story with no other identifies so it's filled with sentences like "Louise thanks Louise," and the reader has to try to work out the context. It's such a blatant bit of gimmicky writing that it got on my nerves. I know exactly what Link was attempting to do; she wanted to make the characterization distinctive and let the reader divide them mentally. What it actually did is make me reread passages wondering where she was trying to trick me into thinking of the wrong Louise. Thankfully she never does that but she never does anything else with the fact that they have the same name.

Louise 1 who is the protagonist often meets with her friend Louise 2. Louise 1 has a problem since her new house has a ghost. It's not a threatening ghost; just a naked man who appears in inconvenient places. Louise 2 has a solution to get rid of the ghost; she'll invite over all the cellists that she has had sex with (it's a lot of them) and one of them may be able to lure the ghost into an instrument and take it away.

The real point of the story isn't that plot (there isn't a lot more to it than what I put there) it's in the relationship between the two Louises. Link constantly plays up the differences between them because that's the only reason she has for giving both characters the same name. So Louise 1 has affairs with married men to avoid relationships while Louise 2 uses lovers and discards them. Louise 2 is drawn to music and Louise 1 is tone deaf. Louise 1 can't stand children and Louise 2 has indulged her daughter to a point beyond reason. And on and on.

This is a story that works hard to be metaphorical. It works so hard at it that it draws attention to the fact that it's working hard to be metaphorical. Consequently I had the same reaction I seem to have to every Kelly Link story: she gets so much right but she tries too hard and it ruins the whole thing.

"The Cure for Everything"
by Severna Park
2001 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

An albino woman who is involved in relocating indigenous people in the Amazon rain forest finds a man moving a truck of natives without the propper authorization. The man doing this is forced to tell her that he works for a biomedical corporation that is relocating this tribe that is about to be flooded out by a new dam because their genetic code has the potential to cure nearly anything. With the promise of being able to have children with no risk of fatal traits coming forward she allows him to continue on his way. She winds up having second thoughts about this exploitation and follows in the hope of freeing them.

I'll give Park full credit for taking what is a hoary old SF cliche and spinning it into a new direction. The problem for me, though, was that the new direction wasn't an interesting one. I'm avoiding spoiling the story too much; it's just that when she departs from the usual trails Park doesn't do much with the concepts. And I found the very end of the story particularly awkward as a completely new story element is introduced in the last sentence with no foreshadowing or development; it's the conclusion to a story that wasn't in "The Cure for Everything".

I couldn't care about what happened to anyone in this story. Only the protagonist is developed beyond the level of plot device and most of her character development is heavy-handed. Despite a clever idea in the plotting there just isn't enough to "The Cure for Everything" to make it worth reading.

Review - "Goddesses", "Daddy's World", and "macs"

It feels strange to me when I'm coming into the current decade as I follow my lists. It's one of those odd thresholds like when I start reaching books and stories that I read when they were new. Now I've reached stories that are essentially "current" (at least in my view; I know some people take a shorter perspective on that).

"Goddesses"
by Linda Nagata
2000 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

The opening to this story is very promising. A young executive for a corporation in the distant future of 2012 is given control of a state in rural India. His given goal is to improve the quality of life in the province and consequently earn a percentage of its revenue. What this western man finds is a culture that's resistant to change even though their own decisions are creating a looming crisis: thanks to the abuse of birth control implants almost no women are being born. The population disparity is already causing problems and there is no simple solution.

These problems come to a head for the executive when he encounters a fifteen year old girl cowering on his doorstep. She has been turned out by her family because her husband died of AIDS. In trying to help her the executive triggers a confrontation with the patriarchs of this community.

That sounds like a pretty good set up for the complications of the first world imposing on the third. The gender disparity in Asian countries is a problem that I haven't seen confronted in SF. Not to mention the exploration of how private industry management could try to elevate a state instead of run it into the ground as most SF posits. It's a complex, morally ambiguous situation that's established and it could go anywhere.

Where it goes, unfortunately, is straight into a lot of preaching. The story isn't just heavy handed, it pounds its points into the ground and then keeps beating on them apparently because Nagata assumed that the reader wouldn't be able to pick up on the subtle hints. The theme of the land that the poorest people live on being poisoned is fine. Making the point again with illegal dumping of toxins in broad daylight in the middle of a city street with many witnesses in the United States during the 1990's is wrong. The pollution is a regular occurrence and a real problem (China shoving their pollution problems out to underdeveloped areas is a timely example) but not in the United States in the 1990's. If someone rolled a tanker of toxic waste up to a playground in South Central LA in the 1990's and dumped it out in front of children it would be on the national news by 5 o'clock. That's the problem with "Goddesses"; Nagata didn't know when to stop.

The characters exist mainly to preach to the reader on the necessity of more social services in developing nations. Or how microlending inherently makes everything better (Muhammad Yunus has done some great work but he'll be the first to tell you that it's not a magic wand). About the only thing that Nagata doesn't pound into the reader by having a character show up and explain it in small words is the resentment of those in developing nations against outsiders coming in and trying to enforce changes in their culture. Since she simply paints those attitudes as the villains of her story she just skips over the difficulties of cultural imperialism.

Consequently "Goddesses" is an unpleasant story to read. You'll get more out of reading your favorite in depth news magazine than you will from this. I wanted more from the story than preaching and there just isn't anything else to it.

"Daddy's World"
by Walter Jon Williams
2000 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

A young boy has an idyllic life in a fantasy land where his education and needs are cared for. Eventually he learns that it isn't real; he's a back up copy of a dying boy's mind running as a simulation to keep his family happy. With that knowledge his begins a rough adolescence.

I think the real point of this story is "What if your perfect world was actually made as the perfect world for someone else?" Taking it from that perspective and the family dynamic Williams explores "Daddy's World" is terrific. It gives the story a cruel edge that most "mind inside a computer" tales lack.

Williams also keeps a very tight focus on the growing boy. The only other human who plays a major on stage roll is his sister who goes from playing along to trying to help. The perspective of a child who can never escape from under his parent's thumb just makes it more effective. He acts out just as someone of his mental age should which helps make it heartwrenching.

In the copy I have there is an afterword where Williams says that he wrote this story to be about the downside of living as a mind in a computer. I personally think of it as the problem of living in a controlled world run for someone else's benefit. He creates an atmosphere of oppression in "Daddy's World". I can't recommend it highly enough just for that.

"macs"
by Terry Bisson
2000 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

There's this thing that gets on my nerves in SF. It's used a lot by bad writers though it turns up from time to time from better authors. I don't like that thing because it results in awkward sentence construction and circular paragraphs. It's also predictable once the reader recognizes what is occurring (usually by the end of the first page).

I'm talking about stories where a vital piece of information that everyone in the story is aware of and is talking about is withheld for a plot twist. It results in strange dialog where people dance around the subject for the benefit of the unseen reader.

I can't even say much about this story because it's backward construction makes nearly everything about it a spoiler. There's this fellow who is following a trail of punishment and that's about all I can tell you without giving away some aspect of the "twist".

I did like Bisson's concept and following this story around could have been very effective. But by turning it into a guessing game for the reader I think the concept gets undermined. It's not a bad effort, I just found it to be told poorly.

Review - "Story of Your Life", "Mars is No Place for Children", and "The Cost of Doing Business"

I've had a really strange week with online retailers. The worst of it was an omnibus comic that I ordered from Amazon had an RFID tracking tag permanently affixed over the artwork in the middle of the book and set so that it was pushing against the spine. I don't know if Amazon or the original distributor did it but I've never seen a new book treated worse.

Another retailer that I ordered a used book from offered a "free gift" with every purchase. Since I'm not a complete fool I knew that "free gift" from a used bookstore actually meant "a copy of some piece of garbage that we can't get rid of". Still it was the cheapest copy I could find in decent condition so I ordered it. Here's my free book:

For those keeping score at home that's a novelization (-1 point) of Harmony Gold's (-1 point) worst show (-1 point). And that's without reading a single word. I suspect actually trying to read the novel might prove fatal.

So let's get to some good things:

"Story of Your Life"
by Ted Chiang
1999 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

I really enjoy Ted Chiang's stories and that's why I had been saving this one. I wanted there to be one last story of his that I had not read as I was working my way through these award winners. So with "Story of Your Life" done I have read everything that Chiang has published. It's not the best story that he ever wrote in my view but it's close. It demonstrates exactly what I love reading his stories so much: he took a used up SF concept and carefully constructed a beautiful story around it about how it affected the people involved.

Aliens have come to Earth and they don't speak any local language. So a team of linguists work to grasp their language while teaching them enough of ours so that communication is possible. At the same time physicists and mathematicians try to connect through universal concepts. The story is told by a woman on one of these linguists who spaces the discussions of the aliens with her daughter's life story from conception to early death. Her daughter's story, however, is told in the future tense.

Chiang is not the first person to tell a story about how language affects thinking. What he does is bring those concepts down to a personal level. This isn't a story about aliens, it's about the connection between parent and child and all of the triumphs and tragedies that accompany it. The aliens are there to lend perspective to the whole thing. Chiang draws the focus of his story to just three characters and they're all human. The aliens may talk but they're off stage for the most part so that they can act as mysterious plot devices.

The whole effect is an exceptional story about a family where tragedy is inevitable. It's terrific and not even overly sentimental. I highly recommend checking this story out.

"Mars is No Place for Children"
by Mary A. Turzillo
1999 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

Here is another story about parents losing children. The Nebula voters must have been pretty bitter that year.

Colonists on Mars have to deal with harsh conditions including a high amount of radiation exposure. While the adults who immigrate manage to survive the rate of leukemia in their children makes it nearly impossible for any to survive through their teen years. One smart child develops cancer as her brother did and her parents prepare to send her away for a treatment that is not likely to work. A far better treatment is available but it costs too much money so the child runs away from home hoping to find the Mars Pathfinder.

I found that the child in this story was a bit too smart and precocious to be reasonable; the adult sensibilities of the author resulted in a schizophrenic view of the character whose understanding of adult things depends on if it's convenient for that scene. Her awareness depends on what is necessary for the plot and her willingness to harm her family makes her unsympathetic.

Though I might not have been fond of the main character there is quite a bit to recommend in the story. Turzillo did a better job when the child didn't understand something since she used that as a device to slowly expand the scope of loss that Martian parents endure. The story that Turzillo was telling was far more interesting than her lead character and for that reason I think it's something worth reading.

"The Cost of Doing Business"
by Leslie What
1999 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

I have to say that What's story is the weakest of the three Nebula winners in 1999. It's also pretty good which makes this into an exceptional year for the awards.

A woman sells her services as a "professional victim": if someone is going to harm you then you call her up and she stands in for the treatment. "The Cost of Doing Business" is all about what kind of person could do this how people would react to someone selling themselves like that.

I can't say that I believe for a moment that a professional victim would work. It doesn't work for victims targetted for personal reasons since there's no motovation to take out their frustrations on a third party. And it doesn't work in situations like the carjacking that's in the story since if they're kidnapping the person then the criminals won't get as much for a substitute victim.

Still allowing for the story's premise it is about masochism and society's reaction to it. I liked the professional victim in the story since she dealt with the conflict between having to actively choose to be passive. In fact I'd say there was too little to this story; I want to see how What would handle a broader exploration of the premise. It might not hold together over the course of the novel but I think there's more that could be done.

Review - "Reading the Bones", "Lost Girls", and "Thirteen Ways to Water"

"Reading the Bones"
by Sheila Finch
1998 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

I was genuinely looking forward to reading this story. I had only known it by its reputation for kicking off a trend of linguistic SF. From that I figured it might be a story where the elements were familiar to me from reading the stories that followed it but it would still contain the fire that launched many other authors' imaginations. What I found was a tale that was as close to generic as possible without it being retitled "STORY".

There's a small human outpost on an alien world where two intelligent species developed. These two species do not interact except at certain rare times and the ones that the humans are in contact with have a dark secret that they'll kill to protect once it has been uncovered. If you can't guess what the "secret" is already then you probably haven't read a lot of SF. Anyhow, a xenolinguist attached to the consulate flees the surprise attacks by the aliens along with a generically antagonistic teenager and they're forced to make their way through an alien landscape to find assistance.

The cliches run far deeper than just that but to go through them all would take too much time. I have to mention one more: when the prime directive turned up out of nowhere three-quarters of the way through to provide a conflict for the climax of the story I nearly threw the book across the room. Not only was it completely out of place, it didn't even make sense in the context of the story.

I do have a few nice things to say about "Reading the Bones". Something that Finch does very well in the story is demonstrating the difficulty in alien communications. The complications in conveying intent when half the words used have a different cultural context for the individuals involved is handled very well. The interspecies dialog is rough, almost pidgin in nature.

Also Finch drops in a mind-catching idea about the development of language and it plays a role in story. The problem is that she seems to think that language is something that can be dropped whole onto an existing culture. Esperanto is a good real world example of how that doesn't work. Languages evolve and develop; successful ones do not spring fully formed from the mind of a creator. Even allowing for differences between humanity and aliens there is no connection between the development of language in "Reading the Bones" and its use.

Once you strip aside the big idea you have a particularly weak story underneath. The xenolinguist is a man ruined by the death of his wife and driven to drink. The children who accompany him completely forget about their parents' deaths within hours. These aren't characters, they're stock paper cutouts who exist to ride the plot to the end.

Needless to say I was very disappointed in "Reading the Bones". I can only guess that people were driven to write more xenolinguistic stories because after reading this every author out there thought that they could take the ideas and tell a better story with them. Just avoid this one, it's not worth your effort.

"Lost Girls"
by Jane Yolen
1998 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

I am aware of more than a dozen "darker and edgier" versions of Alice in Wonderland including two that are in development at this moment. Piling adult themes onto that book is like shooting fish in a barrel and about as satisfying. On the other hand I know of only three attempts to make a more adult Peter Pan despite the fact that J. M. Barrie's children's book has much more sinister undertones. Even though the idea is fresher what really made Yolen's take on the uglier side of Peter Pan was the gender politics; it adds a whole new layer of creepiness when you look at how Wendy was treated.

A young girl who was familiar with Peter Pan is pulled to Neverland where she encounters Peter, the lost boys, and "the Wendies" who are dozens of girls who do the cooking and cleaning for the boys. Peter keeps them in line with the threat of Captain Hook but the new girl is not tolerant of the Victorian gender identities and stirs up the Wendies against the Lost Boys.

Despite my talk about this being a "darker and edgier" Peter Pan "Lost Girls" is still a light-hearted story. It reminds me a lot of Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Both are about young girls drawn into fantasy worlds due to dissatisfaction with their parents. Both have protagonists who are clever enough to see the sinister nature of it and both girls are clever and bold enough to try to do something about it. It's a broad outline admittedly but both Yolen and Gaiman are clearly working from the same sources.

Yolen tells her story very well by using the viewpoint of her young protagonist. She reacts as a child would and consequently misses some things that readers can pick up on. Yolen captures that perspective expertly.

I would not hesitate to give "Lost Girls" to a child to read; they might not pick up on the sexual references that help drive the problems home for the reader but it is written in a way that they would enjoy it. And as for me I liked the story as a deconstructionist take on the original. I'd definitely recommend it.

"Thirteen Ways to Water"
by Bruce Holland Rogers
1998 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

Speaking of stories reminding me of other ones, "Thirteen Ways to Water" reminded me a lot of Joe Haldeman's "Graves". Both are stories about Vietnam and some superstitions and both are so slight on any fantastic element that they could have been removed without losing a thing. I get the impression with "Thirteen Ways to Water" that the fantasy element exists mainly to sell the story.

Decades after the war has ended one Vietnam veteran has fallen into a funk. His wife locates the only person she knows who is also a veteran and asks him to intervene. The depressed veteran has saved soil from each place where he killed someone and is concerned that it is losing its effectiveness in keeping ghosts away.

Rogers does suburb work in defining his characters. One returned from the war a broken man who hid his brittleness and the other returned with a new sense of purpose. They disliked each other before the war and they still hate each other but they have something terrible in common.

The story is oddly formatted by being broken in the "Thirteen Ways" and I felt it was unnecessary and clumsy. I couldn't find a thematic reason for it and so it came across as just strange formatting for the sake of being different.

This is a pretty good story by Rogers about the Vietnam war, superstition, and what people do to go on. It might be extremely slight as fantasy but that isn't a negative except in context of it winning an award for best SF or fantasy short story. I'd recommend reading it if you get a chance.

Review - "Vanishing Point"

Mike Sterling at Progressive Ruin made me aware this morning of the science fiction career of C. C. Beck. Beck is best known to comic fans as the co-creator of Captain Marvel and artist who devised the whimsical style that made the book distinctive.

Beck never wrote many comics; his work was as an artist. As for science fiction stories he only wrote one: "Vanishing Point". It appeared in the July 1959 issue of Astounding and has never been anthologized or reprinted. Fortunately Project Gutenberg is currently distributing copies of the story and SFFaudio.com has an MP3 audiobook of the story.

So I read the story and I can see why it didn't make a splash. 1959 was a time of shifting tastes and a push for more mature science fiction and Beck's story feels like it's solidly out of the 1930's. It would have fit in perfectly with the pulp tales of that era. On the other hand it is a decently told pulp story and I found it to be pretty good for a first effort.

"Vanish Point" is told from the perspective of an artist whose roommate was obsessed with capturing things exactly as were on the page rather than representative art. To that end this man began tracking the vanishing points of perspective and devised a machine to pull apart that perspective. Needless to say things go badly.

The plot is a common one and Beck didn't do anything particularly distinctive with it. He did trend more toward the Lovecraftian "tampering with malevolent things man was not meant to know and will drive anyone mad" which helped but the tone of the story was light-hearted. Beck didn't take advantage of that disconnection and so all the reader is left with is a familiar plot.

The best thing in the story was the writing itself. Beck was almost certainly pulling in his own experiences when he wrote "Vanishing Point" and the narrative voice of the first artist who just didn't care about the experiments his roommate was conducting was extremely well done. It captured the character very well in a small amount of space. The story is told as a monologue but it's a somewhat believable one; it feels like a story being recounted rather than just someone handing out exposition.

The artist that was experimenting with perspective was not particularly fleshed out and I feel that is mainly due to the point-of-view that Beck chose for his story. He exists almost entirely as a plot device

What I found in "Vanishing Point" was a good effort but flawed in a few ways that harm the whole thing. It does make me think that if Beck had stuck with it he could have been an impressive voice in science fiction, especially with the change in emphasis the New Wave brought in just a few years later. If he could have gotten his plotting into the swing of things then he could have been terrific. Instead we have one decent but not brilliant story from him. I'd recommend checking it out if you enjoy any kind of pulp SF; it'll only take a few minutes of your time and it's likable enough.

2009 Hugo Nominees - Best Novella

The last of the best professional artists nominees is picture book illustrator Shaun Tan:

Once again in a category there is one nominee that is unavailable to me. Ian McDonald's "The Tear" has only been published in an Science Fiction Book Club anthology. I'm not a member so I haven't read it. It also has not been made available online like the other nominees have (though one other of them is currently unavailable). As for the rest:

“The Political Prisoner” by Charles Coleman Finlay - The phrase that comes to mind about this story is "average". An intelligence officer is swept up in a coup and finds himself locked away in a prison camp by his own side. There he's treated badly and left to die. Finlay takes this basic story of survival (which you can find plenty of real world parallels easily enough) and tells it well. He captures the feeling of a gulag well. The downside of doing this kind of story is that I was wondering why I was reading it as science fiction; I'd rather read a non-fiction account which would have the same themes and carry more weight. I never connected with Finlay's spy that is at the center of the story and without that it's mainly an account of life in a prison camp. It's not a bad effort; if "The Political Prisoner" was truly bad the real-world resonances wouldn't have bothered me as much.

“Truth” by Robert Reed - I didn't care for Robert Reed's story but I do have to give him credit for one thing: rather than simply giving the reader a "treating prisoners wrong is bad" message he builds a scenario where the more extreme techniques are hard to ignore. A man is found just across the US border with several pounds of uranium. In interrogation it comes out that the terrorist is a time traveler who came back with dozens of infiltrators who are waiting for the right moment. The story is about a replacement interrogator who takes up the job after the previous one committed suicide. I think from those details you can conclude where the story goes. The battle of wills between prisoner and interrogator is a powerful theme that could have overcome that but Reed just isn't able to portray it well. The prisoner is a cipher, the interrogator isn't really that interesting and the bulk of the interaction occurs away from the reader. Instead Reed fills the time in his story by telling the reader how terrible the world is. It's makes for an uninteresting story.

“The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress - Something strange is happening to elderly people around the world. In one retirement home in particular a physicist finds himself having strange attacks and flashes of other people's memories. Eventually he finds that their idle thoughts are changing the world. Kress doesn't bother playing with "What's happening?" to build up tension; she reveals that through an omniscient space intelligence early on. Instead she presents it as a situation where things will get worse and the human characters need to work it out before it is too late. I enjoyed the characters she created to populate the retirement home since none of them were precisely what one would expect.

“True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow - This is the one story out of the novella category that I thought was genuinely terrific. It's the tale of three colonies of self-replicating quantum computer based nanomachines that each have their own design for the universe. One is a fragmented social intelligence that wants to replace all matter with colonies of itself and since those fragments might be considdered personalities they act as the protagonist. Then there is their direct adversary who acts as an solitary mind by only allowing one path of reasoning and how it wants to limit the consumption of the universe to just one percent of its mass. Finally there are a voratious swarm who consume all matter in its path and exist only for that purpose. The high concepts in the story are a lot of fun. The biggest problem with "True Names" for me was that it comes across as two stories jammed together. The climax to the first plot line is a strange deus ex machina that involves not only the reader not being provided fundamental information about the logic systems but for the logic systems themselves to not be aware of this fundamental aspect to their society. Since the story continues on past that point and the rest of it is completely engrossing I can forgive that but it was a stumbling block.

So my ballot for the novella category would be:

"True Names"
"The Erdmann Nexus"
"The Political Prisoner"
No award
"Truth"
"The Tear"

Naturally "The Tear" is only at the bottom since I haven't read it. I happen to like Ian McDonald's work and I want to read it though I suspect it will be a while before I get that chance.

Review - "Abandon in Place", "The Flowers of Aulit Prison", and "Sister Emily's Lightship"

This time around all three of the stories awarded the Nebula had something distinctive about them that made them all interesting to read.

"Abandon in Place"
by Jerry Oltion
1997 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novella

NASA is being haunted by the ghost of the dead space program. Ghostly Saturn V rockets are appearing at abandoned launch pads and firing themselves to the moon where they vanish. To end this public embarrassment NASA has an astronaut commandeer the rocket before it launches so that it can be disabled in orbit. Once there the astronaut changes his mind and decides to fly it to the moon.

Oltion has made a "scientific ghost story" for lack of a better term. A lot of this story's emphasis is on the technical challenges of flying an Apollo era craft. Along with that is a lot of explanation on the nature of ghosts. This ghost in particular provides a unique challenge to the travelers on board. It gives the story a strange tension that helps elevate it above its common roots. The ghost's nature (which is a plot point from about half way through so I can't go into too many details) also shifts focus from the mission to the characters.

The hook of the space program's ghost plays very well nearly fifteen years after the story was written. We're still dealing with the same problems and there's no change in sight. "Abandon in Place" is a pretty good story as it stands but that resonence helps make it even more interesting.

"The Flowers of Aulit Prison"
by Nancy Kress
1997 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novelette

In an alien culture where belonging to society is the most important thing to them they punish people by declairing them "dead" and ignoring them. They don't let the most violent offenders wander the streets; they stick them in Aulit Prison and let them rot. A woman who murdered her sister in a fit of jealousy has been given a rare chance at recovering her life by acting as a spy and informant for the government. She is sent into the prison to convince a human locked away to tell her about who from her people were assisting the human with experiments on children's brains.

What made this story particularly effective is how well Kress uses an alien culture. Rather than bogging the reader down with explanations about the culture she mentions things in passing and implies details. Kress doesn't drop in a lot of made up words where English would work fine. The way that the culture is used is not alien they just different.

I wasn't really impressed with the plot twist in the middle of the story. It seemed unnecessary to me and added themes that were not as well developed as the punishment and redemption one. It's not that Kress does a bad job with that new direction; it's that it feels like there's a disjointed break in the story when it shifts.

Still that's the worst thing I can say about "The Flowers of Aulit Prison". The protagonist's journey in search of redemption in a society that thinks of her as dead is terrific. It's well worth your effort to seek out this story.

"Sister Emily's Lightship"
by Jane Yolen
1997 Nebula Award Winner for Best Short Story

Emily Dickenson was having a quiet life as a recluise and poet when she starts spotting a strange light in the sky after midnight. She watches for that light and eventually meets a visitor who has been using it.

This story is a wonderful example of how to use a historical setting well. There are no infodumps where Dickenson explains details of her life to people who should already know them. Yolen smoothly integrates her into the story as a character.

The biggest problem with this story is nothing really happens. Dickenson avoids company, feels unwell, and sees the light but there isn't really much of a dramatic arc. If you changed the title to "Emily Dickenson Sees a Spaceship" you could sum up the story right there. I liked how well Yolen presented Dickenson as a character but at the same time wished that she had found something more interesting for Dickenson to do. In the end the story is a bit of fun fluff for those who like Dickenson and anyone else is going to have the story just bounce off of them.

Review - "Da Vinci Rising", "Lifeboat on a Burning Sea", and "A Birthday"

Before I say anything else I need to point out that my absence for the past few days did not have anything to do with the fact that one of the Nebula winning stories being reviewed has a tragic connection to an event recently in the news. That's just one of those coincidences that color life.

"Da Vinci Rising"
by Jack Dann
1996 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

Instead of remaining on the drawing board Leonardo with the assistance of a young Niccolo Machiavelli build a glider to impress the rulers of their city. After a nearly disastrous first test where Leonardo finds out that it's easier to go up than to land safely the artist and engineer becomes obsessed with making it safe while Machiavelli and the Medicis push for other applications.

I've got to get this out of the way first. In my copy there is an introduction by Dann where he mentions the vast research that he did on Leonardo da Vinci's life. Somehow he managed to miss one of the big things that drive historians nuts: "da Vinci" was not Leonardo's last name. Vinci was the town he was from so "Leonardo da Vinci" means "Leonardo from Vinci". It's not a family name or title. If you ever want a ten minute diatribe out of a historian just call him "da Vinci" and stand back.

So despite Dann missing that detail this is an interesting historical story. There's still a lot of name dropping and throwing out irrelevant factoids but it never becomes overwhelming. Once you're past the opening where all the major historical figures in Florence at the time were thrown into the mix things improve dramatically. Dann focuses in on the development of a flying machine given renaissance technology and a distractable genius and that was an effective story.

On the other hand I didn't really get a feeling for the characters beyond their broad historical roles. Leonardo is brilliant but prone to flights of fancy. Machiavelli is a conniving social climber (not entirely fair to Machiavelli, of course, but that is most people's perceptions). Relying on the weight of history for characterization is not effective.

Consequently I'm left with a slightly negative impression of "Da Vinci Rising". If you're interested in the period or Leonardo then you'll probably find more in this story to enjoy. Without that connection there isn't anything in it to draw a reader in.

"Lifeboat on a Burning Sea"
by Bruce Holland Rogers
1996 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

A pair of researchers are looking into developing machine intelligence to the point where it can replicate human intelligence. One is desperately seeking a means for immortality while the other is seeking knowledge. Despite the fact that they play off each other for research their spiritual beliefs bring them into conflict. When the knowledge seeker dies the other is pushed into creating a computer simulation of him and finds some anomalies.

Rogers does a great job of establishing the tension in the philosophies of the main characters: one who feels he is racing death itself in order to find a way to transfer his mind to a computer and the other who believes in an immortal soul that cannot be contained in this way. Its a classic scenario and it plays out very well because there are not even hints of something beyond the philosophical arguments. There are no ghosts or indications that the computerized copy is more or less than what it is presented as since those would disrupt the theme.

I did have a problem with some of the characterization in the last portion of the story. It felt to me that Rogers wanted (to continue this theme) a philosophical ending and consequently some of the motivations get muddied. This isn't really a problem with the story since it is one of those messy situations that life can get into, it's just that I think that the concepts could have been presented more clearly.

What Rogers does really well with his story is bring those arguments about minds and souls into simulations. It's not unique but he told it very well and for that reason I think "Lifeboat on a Burning Sea" is worth reading.

"A Birthday"
by Esther M. Friesner
1996 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

In the not too distant future the conflict between pro-choice and pro-life with abortion is effectively over. A law was passed that made abortion available to women who wanted it but when they had an abortion a recording of the genetic code of the fetus was made. Once that was done for the next seven years the women would be confronted by images of the child they never had on any digital screen they used. One woman is on the last day of this sentence and she spends it helping at a women's center where she encounters many facets of the consequences to this.

The idea that the two sides of the abortion debate could come to an accord is a huge stretch. Setting aside religion for the moment (which is difficult to do given how it entrenched it is on one side) you have the question of when a fetus transitions into a human being weighed against the question of when is it acceptable to restrict self-determination and it is impossible to resolve those two cleanly (I expect that the abortion debate will be with us for a long time to come). Still I'll accept it as the premise of the story and Friesner does a great job of making that the only major assumption. Human beings are still human beings; twisted up and conflicted despite the accord.

The story obviously exists to explore the details of this world though in this case Friesner emphasizes the personal story of the woman seeing the child who has haunted her for the last time over the talking with all of the people who have been impacted by abortions. Friesner keeps it personal and that's the best way to deal with a story that is really about the setting.

This isn't a perfect story; it might still be a bit too exposition heavy for some. I think that Friesner managed to overcome that problem and write a story that manages to show the qualities and flaws in both sides of the argument. I've read far too many stories along these lines that can only demonize the side that the author disagrees with and while I think I've felt out Friesner's actual opinion I wouldn't bet money on it. That makes "A Birthday" a mix that could anger any reader and that makes it a bit more interesting.

2009 Hugo Nominees - The Novelettes

Before going on to the novelettes I wanted to include the Hugo nominated professional artists in my look at the nominees. As I did when I went through the past winners I won't review the art; I don't have an eye for it. All of the pictures were created in 2008 since that is the period that they're nominated for. Finally all of the images are taken from the artists' own websites so you'll notice their watermarks on most of the images. Since I'm behind by one nominee there's two paintings today. First, from Dan Dos Santos:


And from Bob Eggleton:


If the theme of the short story category was "monkeys" the theme here is "old horror pastiche". As before the links will take you to the text of the story. This is also the first time in looking at nominees where I didn't actively dislike any of the nominees in the category. A couple of the stories approach the borderline and none cross it.

“Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel - I've already reviewed this story as the 2008 Nebula winner. For those who d0n't want to look back: I enjoyed it as a cute mash-up of Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice. I can't call it brilliant work though if you like that kind of literary game then you'll enjoy it.

“The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner - The first thing that any reader is going to notice about this novelette is the quirky voice. It's all short, declaritive sentences with almost no description. Once you get into the story about a boy who finds a ray-gun and learns about love and responsibility from that voice helps keep things from being too personal. Gardner takes the story in a few directions I didn't expect right up to the ending which has its own strange twist. One thing I appreciated was just how naturally the story progresses; it might have a ray-gun as the driving factor but all of the reactions are reasonable. Gardner does a wonderful job in capturing the changing attitudes of the boy as he matures and that carries the story well.

“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi - In the newsroom of the near future a Laotian reporter concentrates on important stories that don't attract interest. He is threatened with being fired if he cannot get more readers and one of his coworkers helps him hook up with a starlet that can raise his profile. The newsroom of tomorrow is an interesting theme to work with and I felt that Bacigalupi just didn't quite get the concepts down. Reading the story it felt like he knew the buzzwords and problems facing media organizations but not how everything connects together. Consequently he has a news cycle and reactions that are measured in seconds; the media is certainly going to be cycling faster in the future but there is a limit of human response. Getting beyond that it becomes just another story of a crusading journalist versus the people who just want fluff. Personally I would have rather read the story about the people working to fill those incredibly fast news cycles.

“Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear - I was expecting more of a Lovecraft pastiche from this story than what it is. Instead Bear's story feels more like a response to Lovecraft's attitudes regarding race (those attitudes were solidly planted in the mid-nineteenth century despite the fact that Lovecraft wrote in the early-twentieth). In "Shoggoths in Bloom" the threat of a second world war is in the air as an African-American college professor attempts the first significant examination of the shoggoths in the wild. The giant, acidic, tentacle-sprouting monstrocities ooze onto shore in the late autumn where they flower for a brief time before returning to the ocean depths. While examining them the professor deals with the casual racism of New England, his own automatic responses to innocent remarks, and concerns for what is happening in Nazi Germany. The first two thirds of the story are interesting but the last portion where all of the answers are handed over on a deus ex machina left a bitter taste in my mouth. The ethical delema that replaced the questions wasn't interesting enough to make up for the shift.

“Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick - Resnick has done it to me again; he wrote a story where I'm not sure what to make of the ending. If the man wrote endings that were any more ambiguous they'd trail off into random text. This time around two very old men reminisce about a a magic shop where they first met as children nearly eighty years before. On a lark the two of them look for the shop and find it with the same proprietor who introduced them still running it. The proprietor now agrees to show them some new things. Unfortunately for this story the ending comes down to a confrontation between some weak homilies and vaguely sinister supernatural forces. That made it much less involving for me than some of Resnick's other stories. Still it's a solid piece of work despite the fact that strange shops of wonders and reclaimed youth have been overused.

My ballot for the novelette category would look like:

“The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner
“Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel
“Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick
“Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear
“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi
No Award

Review - "Last Summer at Mars Hill", "Solitude", and "Death and the Librarian"

"Last Summer at Mars Hill"
by Elizabeth Hand
1995 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

There's a psychic colony in Maine where would be psychics go and spend a summer along the coast. Two of them bring their children along with them and these two are a woman dying of advanced breast cancer and a gay man dying of AIDS. Most people go for a good time but a few people who go can see beings of flickering light who appear briefly and vanish.

I can say some nice things about Hand's story. It's reasonably well plotted, the characters avoid the obvious cliches even when they touch on them, and she understands how to pace her central mystery. For some reason that I can't put my finger on her prose bored me. It wasn't anything that I could point to and say, "That's the problem!"; no long descriptive passages, no clunky grammar, no tin earred dialog. It's just that reading this story made my eyes glaze over. I am prepared to say that my inability to get into this story is completely my own problem.

Perhaps part of the issue I had was the viewpoint. The story is told mainly from the perspective of the children one of whom is angry with her dying mother and the other is accepting of his dying father. That's almost the entire sum of their characterization. I couldn't connect with them at all and the impact of that may have been masked by the rapidly shifting viewpoints.

The plot does move in a predictable fashion though in this case I think it's more fair to call it inevitable. The peices are all there and obvious to anyone who has read a bit of SF and the story is more about the characters dealing with death.

Despite my own problems with reading "Last Summer at Mars Hill" I can't say it was a bad story. It someone was looking for a bit of light modern fantasy then they might enjoy it.

"Solitude"
by Ursula K. Le Guin
1995 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

I've got some mixed feelings about "Solitude". On one hand it's a perfect example of why Le Guin is considered to be a good writer. On the other I suspect this is an attempt to lull me into a false sense of security and the next Le Guin story I read is going to be so terrible that it makes my eyes bleed.

In "Solitude" an anthropologist wants to study a lost colony of humanity that has developed a culture of isolation. As an adult this anthropologist cannot get anyone from the colony to communicate with her but she has a clever plan. She brings her two children along since any culture must pass on its values to children.

Le Guin draws on personal experience for this story since her parents were anthropologists who took her along into the field. I'm not sure how much of the story is drawn from her life but the whole thing feels very natural. In general I've found that when Le Guin sticks to anthropology she does a much better job of telling stories and that's the case here.

The real core of the story is a mother and daughter growing apart as the daughter is absorbed into another culture (I'm not spoiling anything there since it's clear what has happened from the start). This conflict is exceptionally well handled with the mother being unable to handle the social isolation and her daughter being grown into it. These are some characters who will inevitably hurt each other and the collision is fascinating to read about.

One problem with the story is that several plot points depend on the reader being familiar with the settings of her Hainish stories. Especially how they lack faster than light travel but have faster than light communications though there are other aspects where it helps to know the setting. As a result I could not recommend this as a story for someone completely new to Le Guin despite the fact that it touches on several of her major reoccurring themes. If you've read The Left Hand of Darkness or other books in the setting then this is a prime example of Le Guin doing what she does best.

"Death and the Librarian"
by Esther M. Friesner
1995 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

Wrapping up the common themes of the week this is a story about a dying woman having a final conversation with the personification of death. Friesner doesn't really explore new ground with this theme though she does use it well.

The librarian in this case is a woman who made a few troubling choices (I can't really call them bad) early on in life and has spent decades trapped by them. Death this time is a constantly shifting form who wants to politely whisk people off to their final reward with as little fuss as possible.

The story is a slight bit of fluff; a tiny thing where not a lot happens beyond the librarian explaining her life to death and a revelation toward the end. As characters go they're okay but not really memorable. With such a common plot I needed something more special to make it stand out for me and for that reason I can't recommend hunting it down. Though if you find it someday as you're reading an anthology then you won't be disappointed if you read it.

2009 Hugo Nominees - The Short Stories

Last year I only discussed the three short fiction categories for the Hugo nominations. I'm going to expand things a little bit more this time around. I'm not going for all of the nominated novels or related non-fiction. I'm also not planning on the short form dramatic presentation category since I'm intentionally behind on two of the shows nominated (maybe as the summer progresses and I catch myself up on Lost and Battlestar Galactica). I have however read four of the six nominees in the graphic story category and have easy access to the remaining two. So I'm going to cover all of the short fiction nominees, the long form dramatic presentation, and graphic story categories.

First up are the short stories which demonstrate to us that if your story starts with any letter greater than "F" people just won't reach it when they're reading for nominees. All of the links will take you to a copy of the story. Here they are in the order which I read them:

“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson - This story is from that school of urban fantasy where something strange happens to give someone's life meaning. In this case it's a set of strange monkeys who perform an impossible disappearing trick. Their owner purchased the act for one dollar from the previous owner when her life was at its lowest point. There are two things that make this story more effective than most along these lines. First the style that it's written in is a disjointed set of notes that carries quite a bit of information. Also the reader gets some answers that add a touch of charm to its conclusion. I enjoyed the story quite a bit.

“Exhalation” by Ted Chiang - This might be my least favorite Chiang story which puts it on the level of good but not spectacular. In it there is a strange world filled with compressed gas driven automatons. One of them recognizes that something is changing within themselves or the world and undertakes extreme measures to understand. Once he does he finds that the nature of the universe is far more cruel than he could imagine. There's some direct global warming parallels in the story but this is not a story about environmentalism beyond the biggest of the big picture. Instead Chiang focuses on how understanding a small thing can change the fundamental understanding of the universe. The problem with this is that it means that the reader gets a lot of exposition. And when I say a lot I mean metric tonnes of it. The concepts raised are intriguing and the narrator's voice carries it well enough but this is not a very tight story and that's due to the quantity of data that has be thrown at the reader.


“Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal - This is an astoundingly short story; I haven't done a word count on it but I'd be surprised if it exceded a thousand. Still it's not imposssible for a good story to be told in that space; unfortunately "Evil Robot Monkey" isn't a very good story. There's a smart monkey who scults clay and swears at children who make fun him. That's almost the entire story right there. It comes across as one-tenth of a story rather than something complete. Characters exist only as the broadest outlines and plot is non-existant. There's not even an interesting prose style to give it some strength.

“Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick - For this short story a cleaning robot at a church is inadvertantly converted to Christianity by the reverand. For the first half of the story I thought that Resnick was going someplace interesting with the difference between faith and knowledge. I suppose I should say that I was surprised by the second half but the surprise was that anyone would write a story where robots were standing in as objects of human prejudices today. Those stories were stale in the 1950's when they were socially relevant; today it's just clumsy. Despite being a decent storyteller Resnick can't do much with such a worn out story. I found the initial philisophical questions raised much more interesting than the flat characters and when they vanished for a quick lesson that "Prejudice is bad" they couldn't carry it.

“From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick - Swanwick's story also uses an ancient SF theme: two seperate aliens that cannot trust each other are forced together by circumstances to join together in order to cross dangerous territory. In this case it's a human from a libertarian distopia joining with an alien from a society that holds trust as the highest virtue. Together they're on the run from the destruction of the alien's city which was betrayed and they carry with them a library containing information beyond calculable value. What makes this story work is the ambiguousness of it; while both character's hold their society's values in great esteem they also recognize the limitations of it even before the story begins. So while it plays with the "learning about other cultures" theme there is an undercurrent that both already know those lessons. It also helps that the story has a unique viewpoint: a ghost AI that runs one a spacesuit. It's a subtle story that has some interesting layers and I appreciated it for that.

So my ballot would be:

“26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”
“From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled”
“Exhalation”
No award
“Article of Faith”
“Evil Robot Monkey”

Review - "The Night We Buried Road Dog", "Graves", and "A Defense of the Social Contracts"

There's one oddity that's worth noting before I get started. The 1994 Nebulas were the last time that the Hugos and Nebulas for short fiction shared two or more awards. In addition it would take until the 2001 Nebulas for the two awards to agree on any story. At the same time in the novel category there was a ten year long disagreement. So after here it is territory where the SFWA and SF fandom didn't agree.

1993 was a year for light fantasy; both of the unique winners that year could have easily dropped the fantastic element in the tale and still had most of the same concepts...

"The Night We Buried Road Dog"
by Jack Cady
1993 Nebula Award for Best Novella

On the lonesome Montana plains during the early 1960's lived eccentric men who swear by their automobiles and pass rumors between them about a legendary wanderer who is only known by the name "Road Dog". One of these men starts an auto graveyard for burying beloved cars. When another has a strange face to face encounter with the Road Dog he flees the region but finds himself being drawn back for a confrontantion.

The plot itself in this story isn't much but Cady does a great job with character and mood. Instead of just being a collection of quirks Cady doesn't forget that they need to be interesting characters first. So while one of them may love cars so much he sets up memorials to them that isn't the only thing there is to him.

As for mood a big part of that is how well Cady establishes his own kind of Americana folklore. The souls of those who died at the roadside appear just off the headlights to distract weary drivers. Ghost cars roam the lonely highways late at night appearing from nowhere and vanishing in the distance. The mysterious Road Dog communicates through obscure messages left on rest stop toilet stall walls. The story borrows liberally from urban legends and uses them to good effect.

For a story about fast cars this is a very leasurely story. I think that works for its purpose, though. It's about men leading a lonely existance in the wilds of Montana where time passes slowly. Cady was so evocative in "The Night We Buried Road Dog" that I think it easily overcomes the less interesting plot. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

"Graves"
by Joe Haldeman
1993 Nebula Award for Best Short Story
Tied for 1993 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Short Fiction

During the Viet Nam was there was a soldier assigned to body recovery and identification. An officer too flush with his own power demands that he go into the field to a firebase for immediate removal of corpse. Once there the soldier finds two bodies, an American and a strange looking tribesman and before he can investigate further he becomes caught in a firefight.

I know that he's just drawing on his experiences but Joe Haldeman captures the feeling of the military better than any SF writer out there. "Graves" puts that on full display and though it uses a lot of familiar cliches Haldeman can tell those and make them interesting.

This is a very short story and in this case it barely qualifies as fantasy. In fact the fantasy element is so light that I suspect it was applied just to sell the story to a magazine. Still it is well integrated; it doesn't feel like a bolted on monster thanks to the resolution in the last few paragraphs. I have my own theory about the nature of the story and since it would spoil things I won't go into it; I will, however encourage you to read "Graves".

"A Defense of the Social Contracts"
by Martha Soukup
1994 Nebula Award for Best Short Story

In the future civilization has changed so that everyone registers their preferred sexual habits. The idea is so that there could be no deception when, for example, a polyamourous person meets someone looking for a committed relationship. When one woman falls in love with a man registered for in discriminant sex she schemes to force him to be monogamous.

This is classic SF in the "posit a strange thing about a society and explore the consequence" mold. I've got to say a society where sexual behavior is both incredibly open and enforced is an interesting one. The concept includes how the story is told; it is done as a cautionary tale that is remote and passionless. It results in one of those interesting situations where things the problems of our world are replaced with a new set of complications.

I understand what Soukup was doing with the style she chose for this story, I just found that it made it hard to be interested in the characters. I suspect that she wound up doing this because that main character is fairly unpleasant and disconnecting the reader from them would avoid "taking sides" in her argument. Either way the prose wound up being technically interesting but dull to read.

For that reason I cannot just recommend "A Defense of Social Contract". If you're like narratives with unique styles then you may enjoy the story but I think that it will fall flat for most readers.