This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse.
The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the stories can be found via the official nominations page) are:
- "Yellow Card Man,"Paolo Bacigalupi
- "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth," Michael F Flynn
- "The Djinn's Wife,"Ian McDonald
- "All the Things You Are,"Mike Resnick
- "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),"Geoff Ryman
Best Novelette is apparently the Official Short Fiction Category of the Third World, with three of the five nominees set in non-Western countries. And a fourth has special bonus embarassing dialect sections! Whee!
"Yellow Card Man,"Paolo Bacigalupi. This is an unpleasant little story about an unpleasant little man in an unpleasant and squalid dystopian future. It's very well written, and the dystopian future is well thought out, but ugh. I didn't enjoy this one at all.
"Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth," Michael F Flynn. Michael Flynn's Eifelheim is up for Best Novel, and turned out to be a lot better than I expected. This story, on the other hand...
The story starts with the disappearance of a commuter ferry in Seattle, which is sucked into some Twilight Zone type dimensional rift in a fog bank, and explores the event and its aftermath from the point of view of a whole slew of different characters. With the exception of the bits done in dialect, which are horrible and embarassing, the individual stories are well done, but the story as a whole doesn't really go anywhere.
"The Djinn's Wife,"Ian McDonald. A story set in the world of his sprawling future India novel, River of Gods, featuring a dancer who falls in love with a diplomat, who just happens to be an artificial intelligence. It's wonderfully atmospheric, and has some good set pieces, but again, it doesn't really add up to much. It might be more meaningful if I had actually read River of Gods, and had a better idea of the context, but I don't think that's the problem. The real problem is that the main character seems to do things mostly because the author needs stuff to happen, rather than as a result of fundamental elements of her character.
"All the Things You Are,"Mike Resnick. The narrator witnesses a suicidal act of heroism by a seemingly ordinary man, and finds that this was the third such event, and that the other members of the man's military unit (who were stranded on a distant planet for a time during the recent war) also died in similar fashion. He sets out to find what it was about that planet that drove them to act in such a strange way, and finds more than he bargained for.
It's a cute Twilight Zone sort of story, but in the end, it doesn't quite work for me. In the end, it's a love story of sorts, and like most such stories, I just don't quite buy the relationship, and that kind of sinks the whole story.
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),"Geoff Ryman. This was actually the first of this group that I read, and at the time, I said "Enh. The others will probably be better," mostly because I started it directly after finishing the last of the novellas. In the end, I think it's the best of the lot-- a sweet fable about memory and redemption set in Cambodia.
This is a tough category to vote in-- "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" is my clear favorite, but I was distinctly unimpressed by all the other nominees.If you put a gun to my head and made me rank order them, I'd probably go with McDonald, then Resnick, then Flynn, then Bacigalupi, but the gap between the first two dwarfs all the other differences.
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Wow, you're tough.
What have you read that you actually /liked/ much?
Doug M.
"Yellow Card Man," Paolo Bacigalupi.
Or, it's a Mystery story set on an alternate Earth.
Either way, I suspect that it must be judged in the context of comparison with our reality or time.
Yes, ugly and clever story. But ugly how? That is, what does it say about the connection between murder, the law, the government, and the family in our space-time?
Science Fiction is not necessarily to be taken literally. What light does it shed on our prejudices, our culture?
Some writing about The Alien is straight exobiology speculation. Some is about the role of the Alien in our culture: the Jew in a Christian world, the Arab-American after 9-11, the gay in a heterosexual society, the polygamist in officially monogamist Salt Lake City.
It's overgeneralization to say that any alient planet is really about Earth, and any alien species really about Humanity. But there's inevitably a grain of truth there. Especially for a work of fiction with satire by intent.
I agree that none of the Hugo nominated novelettes are straight-ahead Hard Science Fiction. That's my favorite subgenre, and my wife's as well. But it's not just that the Science is hard, we (as scientists) find these the hardest stories to write. We keep looking over our shoulders and picking holes in science as we write.
Nothing here of the style of Asimov, Brin, Clarke, Forward, Landis, or the king of Hard SF: Hal Clement. That does throw you to evaluating how well-written the fiction is in control of language, depth of characterization, texture of setting, pacing, and the like.
With no disprespect to the authors listed for the nominees, some of whom I speak with personally and like ans human beings and as writers, I basically agree with Chad.
Doug M.'s "What have you read that you actually /liked/ much?" is legitimate, as it gives Chad a chance to list his favorites and define his taste, and also illegitimate insofar as it undercuts skepticism and rigorous judgment based one xtensive reading and logic honed to a fine edge by science education, research, and teaching.
Teaching: my 2 sections of Algebra 1 had 91 students registered. There were only 56 actually present in my classroom, for my two 140-minute periods yesterday, and some of those are counted twice (in both sections with the same textbook and chapters, in a double-dose, as they've flunked it before). I love teaching; the hard part is getting up at 5:45 a.m., as senior faculty are to be at summer school by 7:15 and all faculty by 7:30. IANAMP (I am not a morning person). But I chose to teach, and it has its own reward. I am deeply gratified that Chad's research and teaching are recognized and honored by his department. Writing hard SF is hard. Being a good scientist and professor is hard. I always hope to learn from those who do it well.
Wow, you're tough.
Well, I need to decide how to rank-order these stories in order to vote for them for a major award. That's going to demand some fine distinctions, and some harsh choices.
None of these stories was actively awful, or anything like that-- "Yellow Card Man" was deeply unpleasant, and I have no desire to read it again, but I can recognize the literary merit in it. There's nothing here that makes me say "Jeez, how did that get nominated?" But I need to decide which of these is the Best Novelette.
What have you read that you actually /liked/ much?
I don't read a great deal of short fiction, so I don't have a list of stories from last year that I would choose to replace these. I think the last short fiction I was really enthusiatic about was in Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, particularly the title story.