HUGO REVIEW: Novelette Finalists

written by David Steffen

Science fiction award season is here again, and the Hugo final ballot was announced for WorldCon 76 in San Jose.

On to the novelette category, my favorite category of all the Hugo categories, covering stories between 7500 and 17500 words.  This review covers all six finalists.

1. “Wind Will Rove,” by Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s, September/October 2017)

This story is told by a musician several generations into a trip on a generation ship.  The pristinely preserved historic records of entertainment media have been erased by a hacker a long time ago, and people are divided about whether to try to reproduce exactly the art from memory or to try to make something wholly original.

This story took a little bit to really reel me in–I was interested, but not fully invested until I picked up what it was doing with the discussion of generations of adapted music.  The story shows how the new and the old are not necessarily as disparate ideas as they might seem in live music, where new trends are the gradual course of change from old trends as musicians put something new into the familiar.  Much like the setting with the futuristic setting and the instruments that haven’t changed in a long time.

2.  “A Series of Steaks,” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Clarkesworld, January 2017)

“All known forgeries are tales of failure”, the story begins.  Helena of Splendid Beef Enterprises is a forger, not of money, not of art, but of beef, writing patterns for 3-D printers to print beef from raw materials that can’t be told from the real thing–getting the marbling just right, the red of the meat, the white of the fat and bone.  If the government catches wind of what she’s doing, she’ll be in a lot of trouble, but she has a good business going with her established clients.  But when a new prospect calls to arrange her services on a much larger scale than usual with threats, she’s not sure she can afford to refuse.

Riveting story, between the part of the story about the forgery itself and the attempts to make it look real in all its detail, and the other part dealing with the conflict with the anonymous coercing client.  Great use of near-future SF ideas and extrapolating from current trends and technology.

3.  “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)

The bot is woken by the Ship and assigned maintenance task 944 in the queue, which is to deal with an “Incidental”, an unspecified biological pest that has gotten loose aboard the ship.  The task turns out to be a much bigger ordeal than it first sounds like; this isn’t just a rat or a cockroach, this one threatens the very integrity of the ship and if it’s going to have any chance at succeeding it has to use all of the resources at hand.

Action-packed fun story, not a dull moment as this bot that’s really not designed for the task at hand does its darnedest to do it anyway.  Interesting discussion on the strength of intuition vs logic.

4.  “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” by K.M. Szpara (Uncanny, May/June 2017)

Finley, a trans man, is attacked by a vampire while taking a piss in an alley, even though vampires are supposed to go to blood banks instead of attacking people unless those people have applied to become vampires.  Finley couldn’t apply to become a vampire even if he wanted to, because one of the restrictions is that “people who have taken steps to medically transition” are not allowed.  He can’t register because of that, and unregistered vampires, if discovered, are hunted and killed.  So he is stuck with this situation and will be the first to enter the unknown territory of what happens to a trans body as it changes from human to vampire body.

Vampires can be a hard sell for me, but this one at least took a new angle in that I don’t think I’ve seen another story with a trans vampire.  The logical consequences of stereotypical vampire traits extended to Finley’s body made for some new revelations in this area.  I appreciated how the vampire that turned him, after the initial act, was actually generally supportive in helping Finley figure out how to cope and even thrive in this new and unprecedented life beginning for him.

5.  “Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny, July-August 2017)

Thuan and Kim Cuc are descendants of dragons who live beneath the Seine, whose mission is to infiltrate the house of a Fallen angel who claims to rule over much of Paris by applying for entrance into the house, posing as a poor unfortunate houseless.  Hawthorn house has shown an unusual interest in the Seine lately and the dragons want to know why, so they need eyes in the house.  They don’t know what the test is going to be, and they’ll need to avoid revealing their dragon magic in any way that might be noticed.  But something else is going on here besides just the test itself.

This was a very interesting setting, and the mission of infiltration set it up for a lot of tension, especially with the nature of the test unknown and new oddities appearing alongside the test.  This was my first exposure to de Bodard’s world here, and I felt like I was playing catch-up–a magical ability would be revealed at a crucial moment and I hadn’t known that was possible.  This isn’t necessarily bad, but I felt like I had to revise my understanding of the situation pretty often–this might be because de Bodard has released a couple novels in this world already and the story might be written with readers of the books in mind?

6.  “Extracurricular Activities,” by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, February 15, 2017)

Shuos Jedao, a heptarchate commando, is sent on a secret mission to infiltrate Du Station in the Gwa Reality to find out what happened to their former classmate and captain of a warmoth whose last distress call came from there.  To enact this plan, Jedao is put in command of a merchant troop.

I’m not sure why, but I didn’t end up feeling particularly invested in the outcome of Jedao’s mission–I didn’t have anything against Jedao, but I didn’t feel the tension of the mission outcome–I’m not sure if these are characters from novels and so I might be missing background information?  It could also be that I never really felt like the outcome was in question–I felt like Jedao had everything under control from pretty much start to finish; I never felt like there was a point where the outcome hung in the balance.

 

Long List Anthology Volume 3 Kickstarter

written by David Steffen

The Kickstarter for the Long List Anthology Volume 3 is launched as of this morning!  This is the third in a series of anthologies collecting works from the longer list of works that got a lot of Hugo Award nomination votes from the fans.

The art this year is a lovely piece by Amanda Makepeace.

 

The stories lined up are:

Short Stories (base goal)

  • “Lullaby for a Lost World” by Aliette de Bodard
  • “A Salvaging of Ghosts” by Aliette de Bodard
  • “Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands” by Seanan McGuire
  • “Things With Beards” by Sam J. Miller
  • “Red in Tooth and Cog” by Cat Rambo
  • “Terminal” by Lavie Tidhar
  • “Razorback” by Ursula Vernon
  • “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” by Caroline M. Yoachim

Novelettes (stretch goal)  

  • “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” by P. Djèlí Clark
  • “Red as Blood and White as Bone” by Theodora Goss
  • “The Venus Effect” by Joseph Allen Hill
  • “Foxfire, Foxfire” by Yoon Ha Lee
  • “The Visitor From Taured” by Ian R. MacLeod
  • “Sooner or Later, Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker
  • “Blood Grains Speak Through Memories” by Jason Sanford

Novellas (stretch goal) 

  • “Runtime” by S.B. Divya
  • “Chimera” by Gu Shi, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu and Ken Liu
  • “Forest of Memory” by Mary Robinette Kowal

 

I hope you are as excited as I am!  Thank you for your support!

 

Long List Anthology Kickstarter: The Home Stretch!

written by David Steffen

A City On It's Tentacles (1)It occurs to me 20 days into a 26 day Kickstarter campaign for the Long List anthology that I have not actually mentioned the Kickstarter campaign on my own website.  It has been a crazy 20 days and so much has been happening this particular thing has been postponed while I was working on other factors related to the campaign.  Well, better late than never, and with 6 days left in the campaign there is still some time for those who are interested to back the project to get their rewards and to help push toward the couple of remaining stretch goals.

You can read more detailed information on the Kickstarter page, but I’ll give a brief rundown here.

Purpose

Every year the Hugo Awards celebrate short stories (and other content) related to SF fandom as nominated and voted by supporters of WorldCon.  The works on the ballot receive a great deal of attention as they are distributed in a packet to voters and the voters discuss them.  Every year after the awards are given out, the Hugo administrators publish a longer list of nominated works which receive much less attention though they are also works that were greatly loved by the voting fanbase.  The purpose of the Long List anthology is to publish as many of the works from that longer list as possible.

Goals

The campaign’s base goal was relatively modest–only covering the purchase of nonexclusive reprint rights for the stories in the short story category, with stretch goals to add novelettes and novellas.  The campaign got off to big start with the base goal being reached just 2 days into the campaign, and the stretch goals being reached only a few days later.  Since the stretch goals were reached so early in the campaign I got to work making ever larger and ever more exciting stretch goals.  This added up to three stretch goals to produce an expand an audiobook of those stories for which audio rights could be acquired, produced by Skyboat Media who you may know as the folks who produce the excellent award-winning Lightspeed Magazine podcast.  The first of those goals has been reached, so there will be an audiobook which will contain 8-9 of the short stories.  There are two stretch goals remaining to add novelettes and novellas to the production.  I am very excited to have the opportunity to work with Skyboat Media–they have produced many of my favorite podcast fiction recordings and I am very excited to hear their productions.

Table of Contents

The following is the list of the table of contents of stories that will be part of the anthology.

Note that there will be 3 formats of the anthology:
1.  Ebook:  Will contain all of the stories (180,000 words of short fiction).
2.  Print book:  Will contain all of the short stories and all of the novelettes. May contain novellas depending on printing constraints. (around 140,000 words for short stories and novelettes)
3.  Audiobook:  Will contain at least 8-9 of the short stories (close to 40,000 words, which I think comes out to perhaps 4 hours of produced audio?), and if higher stretch goals are reached may contain novelettes and novellas which will add more content.

The following is the full list of stories:

Short Stories

  • “Covenant” by Elizabeth Bear
  • “This Chance Planet” by Elizabeth Bear
  • “Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet
  • “The Breath of War” by Aliette de Bodard
  • “The Truth About Owls” by Amal El-Mohtar
  • “When It Ends, He Catches Her” by Eugie Foster
  • “A Kiss With Teeth” by Max Gladstone
  • “Makeisha in Time” by Rachael K. Jones
  • “Toad Words” by T. Kingfisher
  • “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family” by Usman T. Malik

Novelettes

  • “The Magician and LaPlace’s Demon” by Tom Crosshill
  • “The Litany of Earth” by Ruthanna Emrys
  • “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i” by Alaya Dawn Johnson
  • “The Bonedrake’s Penance” by Yoon Ha Lee
  • “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane” by Scott Lynch
  • “The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado
  • “We are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller
  • “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy” by Xia Jia, translated by Ken Liu
  • “The Devil in America” by Kai Ashante Wilson

Novellas

  • “The Regular” by Ken Liu
  • “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)” by Rachel Swirsky

 

Rewards

There are a variety of backer rewards left for those who might be interested, listed briefly here.

  • Copies of ebook, print book, audiobook or combinations thereof.
  • A sonnet or sestina written by Ruthanna Emrys
  • A question for Rachel Swirsky which she’ll answer in a blog post
  • A “Women Destroy Science Fiction” (Lightspeed Magazine special edition) audiobook autographed by Gabrielle de Cuir
  • Special thank you within the audiobook
  • 11×17 poster prints of the wonderful cover art for the anthology “A City On Its Tentacles” by Galen Dara)
  • Custom digital art by Sam J. Miller in which he will sketch an animal of your choice in the occupation of your choice
  • Studio recording copy of the Long List anthology with director notes and narrator autographs
  • Audio recording of your story by voice actors Stefan Rudnicki, Wilson Fowlie, or Graeme Dunlop
  • Voice mail recording by voice actor Stefan Rudnick (of Skyboat Media)
  • Story critiques by Yoon Ha Lee, Anaea Lay, or me
  • Consultation with Skyboat Media regarding suitability of book for audiobook format
  • Lunch with Skyboat Media at WorldCon 2016 in Kansas City
  • Breakfast and watching recording session at Skyboat Media in Los Angeles
  • Audiobook co-producer credit