I have reviews for most works, except the latest additions. You can find more stuff to nominate on my battle page…

Spread the word!! There’s still a few days left to vote. I would’ve posted this sooner, but I tried very hard to find novellas to put on my ballot, with mixed success.

Best Short Story

A very strong category. I could’ve nominated more than a dozen stories!

* Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld)

* The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu (F&SF)

* To Follow the Waves by Amal El-Mohtar (Steam-Powered 1)

* Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son by Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed)

* Pataki by Nisi Shawl (Strange Horizons)

Runners-up: All That Touches the Air by An Owomoyela (Clarkesworld), Shipbirth by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s), Tloque Nahuaque by Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rosas (Future Lovecraft) – and pretty much everything else by Yoon Ha Lee and Ken Liu, I just don’t want to nominate multiple stories by the same author.

Please do not nominate: Movement by Nancy Fulda (Asimov’s) for disability fail

Best Novelette

There were only a handful of bad novelettes I’ve read this year, but I came across heaps of really bland stories. Still, I’ve managed to fill the ballot with  strong works and there was even a little bit of spillover.

* Trickster by Mari Ness (Clarkesworld)

* Held Close in Syllables of Light by Rose Lemberg (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

* Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld)

* Selin That Has Grown in the Desert by Alex Dally MacFarlane (Steam-Powered 2)

* Sauerkraut Station by Ferrett Steinmetz (GigaNotoSaurus)

Runners-up: The House of Aunts by Zen Cho (GigaNotoSaurus)

Best Novella

I’ve read several bad novellas this year and just thinking of all that wasted time makes me gnash my teeth. I’ve read every single eligible novella that was available online free of charge and I’ve only found three I liked. I was very surprised Shtetl Days did not make the Nebula shortlist…

* Shtetl Days by Harry Turtledove (Tor.com)

* The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary by Ken Liu (Panverse 3)

* Dancing the Warrior by Marie Brennan (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

* NONE

* NONE

Runners-up: I know lots of people liked Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne Valente (Clarkesworld), and it has fascinating themes, but I personally do not like the author’s writing style. You might want to nominate it since this is purely a matter of taste…

 Best Novel

I’ve read very few eligible novels this year, so I’m not able to nominate in this category. I should actively solicit for reviewer copies, but I simply don’t have the time to do that. This also means I’ll have to skip the award for novel editors. I’m sorry!

More categories later IY”H, including art, comics and so on (but probably not TV as I watch very little TV). Comment with your recommendations! I haven’t sent in my ballot yet and I’m open to last-minute additions if you can convince me

Another story from the Nebula shortlist. I was sure the stories not available online free of charge would be made available in anticipation of the Hugo nominations; alas, this hasn’t happened so far, so if nothing else changes, I will only be able to review five out of the seven novelettes.

Six Months, Three Days by Charlie Jane Anders (an American queer transgender woman)

from Tor.com

This is another story about precognitive people being in a romantic relationship. Is this a fashionable topic these days? I’m surprised.

The protagonists are both precognitive, but they experience the future differently. They are also straight, white American hipsters – this is definitely the first time I’ve seen microbrewing appear in a short story. *rolleyes*

The entire plot: the main characters fight for no particular reason, because they see they are going to fight in the future. That makes sense how? Also, they are very certain there are no other precognitive people out there. What makes them so special? (I know – it’s the microbrews! Or maybe the Elvis Costello glasses.) They have a surprising lack of self-reflection, and I found it really, really hard to empathize with either of them.

The writing isn’t special in any way – I wasn’t satisfied with John Chu’s similarly-themed story either, but at least that one had a flair to it.

One of the Nebula-nominated novellas. This time I could not resist adding TVTropes links…

Kiss Me Twice by Mary Robinette Kowal (an American woman)

from Asimov’s

This is a police procedural and murder mystery set in the near future. The protagonist is a police investigator who uses a set of augmented-reality glasses that help crime scene investigation – familiar much? If you’re a gamer, then you’ve probably realized that’s one of the main plot threads of Heavy Rain, a video game hit from 2010. The occasionally eerie similarities are probably coincidental, but in any case, this shows the idea is not particularly novel. The only difference is that in Kiss Me Twice, there is also a departmental AI who communicates with police officers using the glasses. The main character, a Chinese-American man, builds a friendship with the AI, who appears to him as a Mae West lookalike, and often quotes West’s famous lines.

The story failed to hold my attention and it took me several tries to get through it; if not for the Nebula shortlist, I would’ve given up on it altogether. It was simply boring, and the Mae West references were totally lost on me. The stereotyped immigrant parent who spoke broken English also made me groan. There was also The Illegal, who had a Basque name and spoke Rwandan…?!

I figured out well in advance who was the murderer – the solution was extremely tropey (warning, spoilers beyond the link). Was that supposed to be funny?

We resume service after the announcement in the previous post…

The Old Equations by Jake Kerr (an American man)

from Lightspeed, July 2011

This is a homage (an homage?) to The Cold Equations, a classic novelette that’s now in the public domain. Feel free to read The Cold Equations, though it’s not necessary to understand Kerr’s story, and to be honest it hasn’t aged all that well – most of its plot hinges on ‘OMG A WOMAN, A REAL ACTUAL WOMAN’ and the woman in question just acts doe-eyed and stupid.

Unfortunately, Kerr’s take on the old theme isn’t much better. We are spared the genderfail, but we have some really bad physics instead. I don’t have any academic background in physics (I’m a psycholinguist), so if I’m bothered by something, it has to be… especially bothersome.

The premise is that relativity is not discovered before people actually launch a faster-than-light spacecraft with a human in it. This is completely unbelievable – first, noticeable relativity effects occur in Earth orbit. Second, in the history of space travel, robotic and test-animal flights have always preceded human flights, and for good reason. That’s plenty of occasions to notice that the measurements are off.

There is also another major issue related to the spaceship’s communication system – quantum entanglement cannot be used to pass a faster-than-light signal. This means even a completely made-up device is a better fictional solution for FTL communication than a pair of entangled particles. Also, entangled pairs don’t remain that way after the measurement, so the entire “I can’t reply more than twice due to lack of stability of the quantum entanglement” thread in the novelette is somewhat ridiculous.

So this is a bad hard-SF story. But is it good purely as a story? The editor tried to defend it in the comments section with “basically, the story is character-driven, not plot-driven, but you seem to have read it as a plot-driven piece” (that was not a comment to me; I haven’t commented there). Unfortunately, the story fails to succeed on this count as well: the characters are so bland and the writing style of their messages is so similar that I for one kept on confusing the male characters with each other.

I’d advise people to skip this novelette…

Misc lol: A homage versus an homage on Googlefight. Both look quite well-attested to me…

Two stories from this year’s Nebula shortlist. Both feature disabled characters, but I’m not particularly enthused about either, to put it mildly. There’s plenty of other good stuff on the shortlist, though.

The Axiom of Choice by David W. Goldman (an American man)

from the New Haven Review, Winter 2011

This is another pseudo-choose-your-adventure story which reads in a linear order. I complained about the exact same thing related to one of Rich Horton’s “year’s best SF/fantasy” picks. Goldman’s story feels less vacuous and dumbed down than Howard’s, because there’s an actual story in there – involving a guitarist who loses some of his fingers in an accident, stops playing and becomes a homeless drifter -, but it’s still not what I’d call the year’s best, not by a long stretch.

There is a speculative element, but it takes a long time to appear, and the literary side of the story is also underwhelming, with an amount of groan-inducing fourth-wall stuff. Postmodernism did all this in the 1960s, and did it better…

At least there is a brief mention of Django Reinhardt, the famous jazz guitarist who also did not have full use of his fingers… so now I can share some music! Here is a short documentary about Django Reinhardt’s life with lots of photos and some video footage (jawdrop moment at around 4:05):

Note: is Goldman Jewish? I couldn’t find anything about his ethnicity.

Movement by Nancy Fulda (an American woman who lives in Germany)

from Asimov’s, March 2011 – reprint and audiobook version from Escape Pod

I realized people had already notified me of this story when it came out – knowing that I’m always interested in fictional depictions of autism -, but back then there was no free version available, and I forgot about reviewing it altogether. I’m pleased to say Escape Pod now has not only a podcast of the story, but the actual text as well. Let’s see…

The protagonist has a fictional condition: “The word they have made for my condition is temporal autism.  I do not like it, both because it is a word and because I am not certain I have anything in common with autists beyond a disinclination for speech.”

First, “autist” as a noun is very much out of fashion and some people might even find it offensive. (For the past few years, the big debate has been centered around “autistic person” versus “person with autism”.)

Second, autistic people are not necessarily disinclined to speak; I’m surprised by this statement because the author herself has a son on the autism spectrum who is verbal.

Third, if temporal autism is nothing like autism, why name it after autism? To ride the publicity wave? (…in the fictional world or in the real world?) Even the character herself does not like the term.

Ultimately, the story is a not very convincing depiction of autism (or, rather, an autism-like condition which is not actually like autism) from the inside. I’ve also resented the cure theme – actually, I have a rant brewing about how a lot of stories about oppressed groups written by outsiders are focused on oppression, and this is a somewhat similar issue. Could we please see stories with autistic characters centered around something other than a cure for autism? This is completely regardless of whether a work takes a pro or a con view – I’m personally happy the author took a position against “cures”.

Even with the autism-related issues abstracted away, I still found the paper-thin plot kitschy. Ballet dancing in a historical cathedral? Not my thing. The Amazon ebook cover is a lot like the story, so I suppose I’m just not a member of the target audience.

I have no idea how this work made the Nebula ballot. Some friends of mine seemed to be of the opinion that people wanted to express their support for neurodiversity, or just diversity in general, by voting for it. I think the story completely fails from any diversity/representation standpoint, so people interested in advocacy should just vote for something else.

The Gardens of Landler Abbey by Megan Arkenberg (an American woman)

from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, issue 83 (Dec 2011)

This is a novelette about war crimes and the industrialization of warfare, set in a pseudo-English fantasy milieu. The topic is very important – I think – and not as frequently seen in fantasy as in science fiction, but here I felt there was a mismatch between the ambience and the content.

The burgeoning 19th-century style and the depictions of rich socialites really distracted from the plot. It is possible to write about fake-European fantasy nobility and serious issues of warfare at the same time – Lois McMaster Bujold’s space-opera Vorkosigan saga is the proof. But it’s a delicate affair, and this particular novelette didn’t hit that sweet spot of balance, for me at least. (I wonder if the Vorkosigan saga served as direct inspiration, seeing that the author runs a webzine named after one of the Vorkosigan novels, Mirror Dance; or is that a coincidence?)

The pacing also seemed off – I found myself skimming the long, meandering descriptions (and had to force myself not to do that), then when the protagonist had a conversation with the owner of the gardens, the story sped up, only to slow down again. The ending was abrupt at best, and the horror elements seemed tacked on and introduced all too late.

Arkenberg is a prolific and adventurous writer, so maybe I should try something else by her…? Readers interested in the topic of war crimes in speculative fiction should try Ken Liu’s The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary instead.

Again, three reviews to catch up with myself.

Shipbirth by Aliette de Bodard (a Vietnamese-French woman)

from Asimov’s, February 2011

A transgender protagonist! Another first for 2011. Someone told me they did not expect to see any trans characters in this year’s crop, so this was a pleasant surprise. This is not a token mention, either; the character’s gender identity is a major part of the story.

In the future, Aztecs rule space (can I say YAY?). Their society is strongly gender-segregated, but it’s relatively easy for people to change their gender if they so desire. The main character was born female, he presently identifies as male, but he constantly feels out of place. I read it as a story about a gender-fluid or possibly androgynous person in a very much binary-gendered world, but the author might have had something else in mind (note: spoilery discussion after the link). I’m a bit confused by the author’s explanation of the main character having made the wrong decision – to me it looked like choosing either gender would’ve been a wrong decision.

Spoilery quote that should sway you toward my own position : “In the end, he was a man–unable to bear the shame of killing an unarmed woman. In the end, he was a woman–made to give life, to yield life, but never to take it.”

The main plot is about women giving birth to spaceship components. I kid you not. I like body horror, so I read with rapt attention.

What I’m concerned about is how I don’t seem to agree with anyone on how to interpret this story, including, apparently, the author? Many people say it is a good portrayal of a transgendered person – which I disagree with, and which the author explicitly disclaims. But the concept of non-binary gender did not even enter the equation…?

Princess Courage by Nadia Bulkin (an Indonesian-American woman)

A high fantasy story where the empire-builders are presented in an unfavorable light. A nice deconstruction of subgenre tropes – tropes which should be stomped on and ground into dust as far as I’m concerned, I’m not a fan of high fantasy to say the least. So that’s great so far, but unfortunately the story itself is not very engaging beyond that.

I think this is a case of preaching to the choir: I don’t need to be convinced that classic high fantasy is racist and colonialist, so I found the story didactic and the fantasy elements somewhat boring. I confess I have no idea how the general readership would react…

At Livia’s Bar by Pierre Mejlak (a Maltese man) – also available in Maltese

from Words without Borders (Dec 2011, “The Fantastic”), translated by Antoine Cassar

This story is about worldbuilding. Quite literally! I think one can interpret it in an entirely non-speculative manner, but I’m also OK with calling it speculative fiction. In any case, it’s short, poignant and beautiful, so you should read it right now!

There was no update yesterday, so today I offer three reviews – read about stories by women authors from all over the world!

The Map by Nazli Eray (a Turkish woman) – also available in Turkish

from Words without Borders (Dec 2011, “The Fantastic”), translated by Robert P. Finn

This is one of those hard-to-categorize stories – you can call it magical realist, slipstream, or you can even pretend it’s regular literary fiction. Two young women buy “a General Map of Man with a special interpretation” from an old bookseller, and then proceed to use the map to figure out their boyfriends. Strangeness ensues.

It’s a quick fun read, but one that stays with you. The general idea of “interpretative maps” of continents, countries and even people really charmed me, I wish there was a similar map of Hungary *chuckle* – the only thing I can think of along those lines is the Subjective Atlas of Hungary, unfortunately the official website seems to be down at the moment… but even that’s not exactly the same. Probably good for all of us – “interpretative maps” seemed quite dangerous in the story!

(By the way – Lamb by Elham Eshraghi and The Mirror by Soheila Beski from the same issue of the magazine are also interesting reads, but I think they do not contain any speculative element, so I’m not reviewing them.)

The Fox by Malinda Lo (a Chinese-American lesbian woman who is also an immigrant)

from Subterranean Press (Summer 2011, YA special issue)

Malinda Lo has two novels out – and more forthcoming -, but this is her first published short story. The protagonist also appears in her novel Huntress, which I haven’t read yet – the author says this story should stand on its own, but it might contain minor spoilers.

It is a lesbian romance story featuring a shapeshifter. The setting is kind of bland and nondescript – maybe it’s better fleshed out in the novel. There is a human king, a fairy queen, a chosen one, a magical object… all well-trod high fantasy terrain, except with lesbian romance.

The Fox might possibly be the only lesbian YA SF story available for free in the Hugo 2012 crop – it’s definitely the only one I’ve seen, comment if you know of others -, but beyond that it’s not particularly interesting.

Tloque Nahuaque by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas (a Mexican woman)

from Future Lovecraft

The Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world as we know it – we’ve heard this from alarmists the world over, but finally someone wrote a good story about it too. In sharp contrast to the alarmists, García-Rosas knows what the LHC actually does, and she can also write in sweeping Lovecraftian style. The end result is much appreciated.

The story is set in Mexico, where some people have an unsettlingly clear idea what to do if a sleeping Aztec deity awakens… There are some juicy Mythos parallels in there. I wonder about my own religion (BTW – there is a Lovecraftian Bible story in She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Horror, but it’s not really what I have in mind here.)

I’m sorry there was no update on Thursday – I had connectivity issues. There was a change of ownership at our ISP, and we’ve been seeing more downtime than usual.. let’s hope I manage to post this one!

A Prince of Thirteen Days by Alaya Dawn Johnson (an African-American woman)

from the June 2011 issue of Fantasy Magazine

This is a novelette from the Borderlands anthology, reprinted in Fantasy. (Yes, it’s eligible for this year’s Hugos – the reprints cycle is faster and faster!)

It’s an urban fantasy story, maybe a bit too urban-fantasy-ish for my tastes… does every work in this subgenre have to do with the characters having sex? That and vampires. There are no vampires in this one, but it’s all about sex. I didn’t really understand how the protagonist went from receiving a prophecy of love to “I must have sex with a statue”. It’s not graphic at all, but very sex-centered nonetheless, and in a rather forced way.

I’m all for thoughtful or deeply felt explorations of sexuality (for example see my glowing review of Amal El-Mohtar’s lesbian steampunk story), and this story had all the potential, with a multigenerational family setup, teen pregnancy, etc., but ultimately the sexual theme felt like a gimmick. As if the whole novelette was written just so that in the opening paragraphs, the heroine could ask a statue to have sex with her.

I also found the first-person / third-person transitions slightly distracting… when I’m thinking “look, a literary device” while reading, that’s not a very good sign. I prefer to enjoy the work as a whole, not its form by itself, unless the form is very very inventive. This wasn’t inventive, just distracting.

On the plus side, I really liked the casual mentions of everyday magic (cooking magic, minor prophecies, etc.) and the interactions of the family members. I wished there was more of that and less of the main plot… maybe I’m just not sexual enough!

This is going to be a semi-regular feature if all goes well. Here is my weekly roundup of links of interest.

* Demonstrate! If you’re an EU citizen, join a Stop ACTA protest in your neighborhood on Feb 11! One-sentence summary from Reddit: “ACTA is an international intellectual property enforcement treaty with far-reaching implications for freedom of expression and human rights.” Here’s the central site with a nice map and all. You can also read about the protests on FSF.org.

(for fellow frummies: several demos end well after motzei Shabbat, so we can join in the fun this time…)

Read:

* Hugo-eligible works by people of color published in 2011 – a really helpful crowdsourced list! I’ve found lots of stuff to review there.

* Best LGBTQ works of 2011 – also includes non-SF (Note: I’m not sure I’d recommend Cage of Zeus, it was interesting, but it had several aspects I found really problematic. I’ve been meaning to write a review for ages now…)

* Errors in Mass Effect: Deception – Tie-in novel series gets a new writer (William C. Dietz), who then proceeds to rewrite minority characters as majority characters. Choice quote: “While this list may seem nit-picky considering some of the errors, there are a handful worth mentioning that have very legitimate reasons for being upset over.  This includes a character ‘growing up’ from being autistic, turning Mass Effect’s only gay male character straight and then killing him, and being literally impossible to reconcile with the timeline made by the games, comics and other books.” There was such fan uproar that the publisher vowed to fix these issues in upcoming editions. We’ll see…

* The Hey Sweetheart Scenario: Deconstructing How Role-Playing Games Talk to Women – Accurate and insightful. After 20-30 hours of playing Fallout 3, I came across the first such “oh look you are a woman” conversation, and I realized that one of the features that contributed to my enjoyment of the game was that it did not constantly push this on me when I was playing a female character. The linked article explains the issue very eloquently!

See:

* Kilian Eng, Selected Works + Interview – Kilian Eng is a Swedish SF artist whose work is absolutely, mind-numbingly awesome. If you’re a Moebius fan, you’re  especially going to love his style. For more great art, check out Eng’s portfolio!