Uncertain Principles

I've never really understood the distinction between "Novellas" and "Novelettes"-- I know it's a length thing, but I don't have a good feel for where the dividing line is, and I can never remember which is longer. And, as far as I can tell, the only place this ever comes up is in SF awards.

Anyway, there are two Hugo categories for really long short fiction, and this is one of them. The nominees are:

• "The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko
• "A Billion Eves" by Robert Reed
• "Inclination" by William Shunn
• "Lord Weary's Empire" by Michael Swanwick
• "Julian: A Christmas Story" by Robert Charles Wilson

This is, on the whole, a much stronger field than the short story nominees. The comments below the fold may include SPOILERS, so read on at your own risk.

"The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko. A well-thought-out alternate universe story, with a pair of protagonists who are really just two versions of one protagonist. The details of the universe-hopping are very well done, as such things go, and there are some nice twists on the obvious schemes for what you would do if you had the ability to hop between universes.

It spends a little too much time hammering home a couple of points, and there's a little too much poetic justice in the ending, but on the whole, it's an excellent story.

"A Billion Eves" by Robert Reed. Another alternate-world story, sort of. It's set in a universe where humans have spread to thousands if not millions of worlds, though the start of the colonization process is rather creepy. He does a really nice job with the atmosphere, even if the religious stuff is a little over the top.

This is probably my favorite of the lot. It got into my head in a much stronger way than most of the others, enough so that I read a whole bunch of it in the car on the way back from a wedding last weekend.

"Inclination" by William Shunn. A story about the Space Amish, more or less. This was the most "enh" story of the lot. The setting is very clever, but the story really didn't do much for me.

"Lord Weary's Empire" by Michael Swanwick. This is very much in the mode of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and might even be in the same world. It's a little hard to tell, mostly because I can't figure out what the hell was going on. Of course, I'm not sure what the hell was going on in The Iron Dragon's Daughter, either. Or most of his other books, for that matter.

It's got some nicely evocative passages, but really, I just don't get it.

"Julian: A Christmas Story" by Robert Charles Wilson. This is hampered by the fact that it feels like the first section of a much longer work. That's deliberate-- it's written in the style of a memoir about growing up with somebody famous-- so I suppose it's an artistic success, but knowing that doesn't really help with the basic problem.

It's very well done, despite being set in a type of theocratic dystopian future that I generally find annoying. If he wants to write a much longer work with this as the first bit, I'll gladly read it, but you knew that already.

At the moment, I'm inclined to vote for the Reed first (which would give the Short Story nod to Tim Pratt's "Impossible Dreams"), followed by Melko, Wilson, Swanwick, and Shunn, in that order. On the whole, this is a much stronger batch of stories than the Short Story field, or at least, they grabbed me much more effectively than the short story nominees did. This might be more a reflection of my preference for longer works than anything to do with the relative quality of the stories, but the difference is great enough that I doubt it.