Author: David Steffen

David Steffen is an editor, publisher, and writer. If you like what he does you can visit the Support page or buy him a coffee! He is probably best known for being co-founder and administrator of The Submission Grinder, a donation-supported tool to help writers track their submissions and find publishers for their work . David is also the editor-in-chief here at Diabolical Plots. He is also the editor and publisher of The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List series. David also (sometimes) writes fiction, and you can follow on BlueSky for updates on cross-stitch projects and occasionally other things.

Review: Hugo Graphic Story Nominees 2012

written by David Steffen

Since the vast majority of my fiction intake is through audio, while I’m driving or doing dishes or picking up sticks or what-have-you, I have made little effort to keep up with graphic stories, even though I am a fan of the medium . Other than some classic X-Men and Spider-Man comics anyway.

So, here’s my chance to read some of the most popular of the year. Some of these are part of series, in which case I can only judge them based on themselves, not on any knowledge of the rest of the series, so keep that in mind.

Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story

1. Locke & Key, Vol. 5: Clockworks, Joe Hill, art by Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
The main characters of this story live in the present, the children of the Locke family who live in a very strange home in Lovecraft, Massachusetts. They have a strange family history dating back to 1775 (portrayed in the opening chapter of this issue) in which rebels hiding from British soldiers in the Revolutionary War come across a transdimensional door that opens into a world of demons. One look through the doorway, and they snare your mind and twist your intentions. When demons try to cross through they are reduced to hunks of “whispering iron”, a metal which is not obtained through any other way. To save the rebels, the young locksmith and heir of the Locke family forges some of the whispering iron into a lock to hold the transdimensional door shut. Over the years he forges other keys with the whispering iron, each with its own specific magical purpose, and these keys are passed down from generation to generation.

As you might expect, it’s a bit of a learning curve to pick up book 5 in a series of 6. The initial scenes of this one take place in 1775 before anything supernatural is known, but then suddenly in Chapter Two you’re thrown back into the present where there are a bunch of keys which are already taken for granted and used nonchalantly while I tried to figure out what the heck was happening. A couple of strange little nonhuman characters were especially confusing until the main characters see them and explain them in some brief dialog. Obviously this is no fault of the book itself, but at my own reading them out of order. I did eventually figure out everything I needed to understand, and by the climax of the story I understood the rules of the world well enough that I could understand the stakes.

This story was awesome. Very well inked, colored, very well written, scary as hell in parts, and funny in others. This story does a good job explaining who appears to be the main villain, a plotline which will presumably be solved in the next book. I now want to go find the previous four stories in the series, and then read the conclusion in book six.

2. Schlock Mercenary: Random Access Memorabilia Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton (Hypernode Media)
The titular character Schlock is an amorphous alien blob who is a member of Tagon’s Toughs interstellar mercenary troop. They have hired on to run security for a colony of Gavs, a race of people who are all copies of the same person (presumably the reason for this was covered in a previous issue, I don’t really know). Things are quiet. Too quiet. Something is bound to go horribly wrong.

I found the main plot of this pretty entertaining, action packed and fun.

Unfortunately, as far as I’m concerned, that main plot didn’t actually get going in any interesting fashion until page 140 of 294 when things start really going wrong. From then on it was well-paced and interesting. The first 50 pages or so appeared to be slow-paced mop-up of the previous issue, which was hard to follow, all the more so because apparently the previous issue involved many of the main characters’ memories being wiped and rewritten, and now memory restoration is happening. A large portion of the story space was taken up with character development of characters I don’t know or care anything about.

This perceived pacing problem is no big surprise for a series that I started on issue # 13, and really it’s probably no flaw in the comic itself for someone who has followed the series. But since I am judging it by this issue alone, the pacing issues are a major flaw.

3. Saga, Volume One, Brian K. Vaughn, art by Fiona Staples (Image)

Baby Hazel is born into a war-torn region of space where fights constantly rage between the planet Landfall and its moon Wreath. She is the child of a man and a woman who are fugitives from opposite sides of the conflict. Meanwhile, bounty hunters hired close in on them.

This story was okay. It seemed to depend primarily on empathizing with Marko and Alana, the fugitive parents, but they never felt like real people to me. Something about their dialogue just made them seem too artificial to care about. Hazel might be a person to empathize with, but in the story she’s only hours and days old, and so is largely unaware of her surroundings. And the story is narrated by her as a retrospective, so obviously she’s survived and done okay for herself. I didn’t really feel connected to other characters in the story either.

It didn’t help that there were some elements of the story that made if very hard to take seriously, such as the character named Prince Robot IV, who is a part of subset of the population that has CRT monitors for heads for no reason that I was able to discern.

The one thing that had me perked up and paying attention was the character The Stalk. She is badass and it would be fun to see a CG version of her.

That said, the drawings were of good quality, the plot was coherent, and I was interested in The Stalk character. But that’s not nearly enough to carry this story.

4. Grandville BÃ�’ �te Noire, Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse Comics; Jonathan Cape)
“Two hundred years ago Britain lost the Napoleonic War. As with the rest of Europe, it was invaded by France and the members of its royal family were guillotined. It had been part of the French Empire until 23 years ago, when it was begrudgingly given independence after a prolonged campaign of civil disobedience and anarchist bombings. Ten weeks ago, France experienced a revolution following the death of Emperor Napoleon XII and is now ruled by the Revolutionary Council.” This is the introduction to the story, giving you a good taste of its alt-history origins. So far so good, we know the branching point of history, and we have an idea where that’s taken us. The story follows Detective-inspective LeBrock of Scotland Yard and his Watson-esque sidekick Roderick as they investigate the murder of a prominent artist. And he’s just the badger for the job–oh, right, instead of people this world is populated by anthropomorphic animals.

LeBrock seems to be kind of a mix of a Sherlock Holmes kind of detective (complete with his Watson-esque Roderick, a mouse with an over-the-top dialect) and a James Bond kind of government agent. The alt-hist aspect of it is interesting, to see what kind of world the creator imagined from that branching point. Personally, though, I found the choice to mix anthroporphic animals with alt-hist to be distracting and detrimental to my immersion in the story. The two genres just clash with each other, and badly. Alt-hist is generally grounded in plausibility, finding a reasonable branching point and showing us how different things could be. But at no point is there any reason why the animals are there instead of humans. If we were literally replaced by a variety of animals, I can’t believe that human history wouldn’t be MUCH MORE different, certainly not with the same occupations, same cities, etc, that we have today. With the combination of the two I just found it hard to consider the story anything but a big absurd joke. It’s not that humans have just been swapped out for the sake of drawing differently shaped faces either–humans are present in this world as an oppressed minority that the other species call “doughfaces”, who are picketing for rights–this half-inclusion of them just makes things all the more confusing and annoying to me.

Also, I’ve never been a huge fan of mystery stories anyway, I just don’t get that wrapped up in trying to figure it out, and so with the combination of that and the constant distraction of the weird population, I just really didn’t get into this.

The art of this graphic story was well drawn, though I found some of the anthropomorphic animals to be pretty creepy, especially when they’re naked.

5. Saucer Country, Volume 1: Run, Paul Cornell, art by Ryan Kelly, Jimmy Broxton & Goran SudÃ… �uka (Vertigo)

Presidential candidate Governor Arcadia Alvarado wakes up in her car with her ex-husband, having lost some time. Her recent memories are consistent with alien abduction cases. She must decide what to do in response to this, and how it affects her Presidential campaigning.

I don’t get what this story is supposed to be about. I mean, obviously, about alien abductions on the surface. Alvarado and her staff work toward finding the truth of her experience and the experiences of others, but by the end of the story you just end up with some random images for clues, a handful of competing and conflicting interpretations of what “alien abduction” actually means, and the last chapter is just a rambling treatise detailing one person’s opinion about alien abductions.

To me this reads like an essay written by a UFO enthusiast, shoehorned awkwardly into a story structure with illustrations. It’s not really a story. I guess if you want to hear a person’s opinions on UFO abductions you might enjoy it. But if you’re looking for a story, it’s a disappointment.

This is just volume 1 of the story, but I’d say that any volume of any story needs to have some story arc of its own that is satisfying in its own, just as any book in a series of books. This volume fails at that and I wouldn’t buy a second volume based on this.

Review: Hugo Novella Nominees 2013

written by David Steffen

And here’s the last of the short (ish) prose fiction categories, the almost-a-novel aka Novella, which covers fiction from 17,500-40,000 words. This was a tough category to pick my favorite in, so for this one I’m glad that the Hugo awards use an instant runoff voting system so that if your favorite doesn’t win your lower votes can count towards the result.

Hugo Award for Best Novella

1. The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
The Emperor’s wife has been killed and the Emperor has been injured in an attack by assassins, via a crossbow bolt to the head. The best magic of the legal variety can heal his flesh, but cannot heal his mind, leaving him catatonic. The Emperor’s highest ranking officials are the only ones who know of the outcome of the attack. The official mourning period for the Emperor’s wife is one hundred days, at which the Emperor will be expected to speak in public. If he cannot, the Empire will be thrown into chaos. They have but one chance to salvage the situation with the recent capture of the criminal Forger Wan ShaiLu. Various legal branches of the art of Forgery, which can rewrite the history of an object, can be practiced in the Empire. Shai, however, practices the forbidden branch of art which allows even a person’s soul to be Forged into something else. This criminal, this blasphemer, is their only hope, if she can reforge the Emperor’s soul using only journal entries and interviews with his counsel.

Brandon Sanderson is great at inventing new magic systems. I enjoyed Warbreaker, and I enjoyed this. The details are intricate, but logical, so that the magic is more of an alternate-world-science, something which appeals to my engineer mind. Shai is an expert in certain areas of her craft, and she goes at the work with the zeal and skill of an expert craftsman, all while contemplating how to escape before she is inevitably killed to silence her. The situation maintains constant tension while maintaining intellectual curiosity and emotional depth. The art of Forging depends upon understanding the history of a person or thing completely and then creating a manmade branching point to change that history, so to pull of this most difficult of all Forgeries she has to exercise her powers of empathy like she never has before.

Great story, well written. One of my new favorites. Well done!

2. After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
An apocalypse hits the Earth in 2014, killing most people and rendering most of the planet unliveable. Very few people survived, and those were saved from certain death by boxlike tentacled figures (nicknamed Tesslies) that would appear in a shower of golden sparks, grab the person, and take them somewhere else. These survivors wake up in a building with no doors to the outside, with machinery meant to serve their basic food and sanitation needs. The Tesslies never told them what was happening, but their best interpretation is that aliens have attacked earth and kept some humans as specimens. Many years later a new piece of machinery they call the Grab machine appears in the Shell which periodically makes a window through time to the years before the apocalypse. Whoever goes through, the Grab machine yanks them back to the future with whatever they’re touching, so they use it to grab supplies and to grab children to help repopulate the future (adults die when they pass through). This part of the story follows Pete, a fifteen year old boy who is a child of some of the original survivors.

Meanwhile, back in 2013, mathematician Julie Kahn is working with a police task force trying to determine a pattern to the robberies and kidnappings.

I related completely to both Pete and Julie, even when they did things I didn’t agree with or when their actions were in direct opposition to each other. This story had me interested from beginning to end and it felt neither too long nor too short. Well done, Ms Kress, well done. Unfortunately, I hadn’t finished reading this before the Nebula voting period ended, and Sanderson’s story squeaked past this one for my top vote, but with the instant-runoff system I can still show my love.

3. San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The first outbreak of the zombie epidemic happens during the overcrowded opening night of San Diego Comic-Con 2014. This story is the chronicle of that chilling event, told as a 30-year retrospective.

This story is well-written with believable characters and a strong emotional core. The main reason why this didn’t rank higher on my list is that I didn’t feel that it trod any new ground. Zompocalypse stories have been too common in recent years, probably only second to sexy vampires as overused tropes. I’d rather see an original speculative element, an original setting, or both. This story didn’t vary from the familiar zompocalypse rules, at least not in any significant way, so it’s not an original speculative element. I don’t recall seeing a zombie story set at a convention before, and I suspect that’s why it’s been popular enough to get nominated. But, personally, it just strikes me as lazy, trying to keep the writing in a comfort zone rather than trying something different. Kind of like a Stephen King story about a writer that takes place in a sleepy town in Maine.

Also, the story is formatted as though it’s a documentary, but the story itself admits that much of it is conjecture based on known facts. This in itself wouldn’t be problematic, except that by my reckoning, probably 80% or more of the events have to be either pure speculation on the part of the media because the deathtoll was high enough to make after-the-fact compilation of stories problematic. The story would’ve been better if it had just discarded the idea of using a framing story and just told it as a standard narrative.

4. The Stars Do Not Lie by Jay Lake (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov 2012)
Morgan Abutti, 4th degree Thalassocrete, member of the Planetary Society, has discovered something new in the stars that violates the truths taught by both the Lateran and the Thalassojustity belief systems that rule the world. He has arranged for a public discussion of his findings, which could shake the world. Bilious Quinx, master of the Consistatory Office (aka Inquisition) must find Abutti before he makes his heresy public. Eraster Goins, head Thalossocrete, has very different motives for finding Abutti.

As you might be able to tell from this brief explanation, there are several religious factions which at least to my mind were never clearly differentiated. Maybe that’s an intentional statement about religious schisms, maybe it could’ve been made clearer, or maybe I just don’t get it. I generally liked the Morgan Abutti character who did not consider his findings a heresy but only wanted to share his findings of the universe to expand their understanding of it, a scientist trying to work within a religious government system. But I just didn’t find the stakes all that riveting. Whether or not Abutti’s announcement becomes public, some other scientist will discover the truth anyway (as the story itself points out), so the events of the story feel pretty moot to me. It doesn’t help that the grand discovery has implications for major future changes, which don’t make it into the space of this story. Those major future changes are what I’m really interested in. If Jay writes a story about the events after this story I will read it eagerly.

5. On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard (Immersion Press)
Cousin Linh has arrived on Prosper Station, seeking refuge from the Emperor, whom she has rebelled against in a token fashion. Quyen, magistrate of the station, allows her refuge grudgingly. Linh’s visit causes no end of trouble.

The world of the story takes traditional beliefs and uses futuristic technology to reinforce them. In particular, people in this society are not only expected to honor their ancestors, they also have memchips implanted in their brains that allow their ancestors to give them advice on everything that is happening around them. Very cool idea. The station’s systems are run by the Honoured Ancestress, a being that is sort of a metahuman, with an altered version of a human mind that allows it to run all of the day-to-day affairs of Prosper, and allowing residents of the station to interact with this mind by entering the trance. There’s something wrong with the Honoured Ancestress of Prosper.

I loved the worldbuilding in the story, but I just wasn’t that interested in the main events that took up the bulk of the story. Linh and Quyen’s conflicts didn’t really interest me. I didn’t particularly relate to either one, and it didn’t matter to me which one succeeded or failed in their goals. The state of the Honoured Ancestress was, to me, my biggest interest in terms of plot, but it did not have as much text devoted to it as I would’ve liked, and the solution to the problem was presented without a lot of interesting development to get there.

So this story just wasn’t for me. It was just too long to justify the parts of it I was actually interested in. It didn’t help that the length was such, and my free time segmented enough, that it took a dozen sittings to get through it.

Review: Hugo Novelette Nominees 2013

written by David Steffen

And on to the Novelette, the awkward older sibling of the Short Story category. Stories from 7,500-17,500 and voted by fans. A decent batch of stories here! And unlike the Short Story category this year, we got a nice round 5 of them (which means it might’ve been less contested than that category, no doubt in part due to the difficulty of getting longer short stories published).

Hugo Award for Best Novelette

1. In Sea-Salt Tears by Seanan McGuire (Self-published)
Selkies live a life that is both blessed and cursed. They love the ocean, but each Selkie is born without the Selkie skin that allows them to turn to seals. This is their blessing, for with a skin they can swim in the ocean as naturally as if they were born there, and be one with the tide and the current. This is their curse, because there are a limited number of Selkie-skins, much more than there are Selkies. You can only have a skin if you are given one by someone else who wishes to give it up. So Selkies are doomed to live a life of longing, wishing for something which they can’t have unless they are given it. This is the story of a Selkie named Liz who has been passed over for Skin inheritance time and time again, and who falls in love with the sea witch.

As the writers of 500 Days of Summer so aptly put it “This is not a love story. This is a story about love.” Which is to say, this is no rom-com where happiness is inevitable after some madcap hijinx involving a last-minute reunion at an airport. This feels like the real thing, because it is not idealized or idolized, it is what it is.

Well done, Seanan McGuire.

2. The Boy Who Cast No Shadow by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Postscripts: Unfit For Eden, PS Publications)
“Look” is the titular boy who casts no shadow. He does not even cast shadows upon himself, so he lacks the shading that gives our face their visual depth. He also does not appear in reflections or video recordings, and he’s become a celebrity due to unphotogenic nature. But overall he’s still just a normal teenager. He makes friends with Splinter, a boy who’s made of glass who is nothing but reflection where Look has no reflection. Splinter’s parents, understandably, are very protective of their boy, because he is so fragile.

It took me a little while to get into the story, while Look monologues about the nature of his condition. But it hooked me a little while later when the focus becomes his bond with Splinter. Really, I thought Splinter the much more interesting character and I thought he should’ve been the one the story was named after. Splinter wants so badly to experience life fully but his parents don’t allow it. Together with Look, he tries to expand his horizons. In a way this reminded me of the type of movie/book (and I’ve seen a few) where a person discovers they have terminal cancer and try to live their life to fullest because they know they don’t have long. This was a little different in that Splinter could live a long life if he’s careful, but he wants to really experience things. This story is about him making that choice for himself.

3. Rat-Catcher by Seanan McGuire (A Fantasy Medley 2, Subterranean)
The year is 1666 and Rand is a prince of the Cait Sidhe (a type of Fae who can shift into cats) who does his best to avoid confrontation with his father and others. But when he hears a prophecy of the simultaneous destruction of London and Londinium (the Fae counterpart to the English city), he must leave his comfort zone and do everything he can to save his family and his people.

This story was entertaining enough, with plot and character and stakes that I could root for. The details of the Fae in this particular universe were interesting and made me want to know more. It seemed like this story was barely get started when everything resolved very quickly in the end. I would like to read a longer story about this character and this place. It’s a good sign when a story leaves me wanting more, but I would’ve like if this story had been a little meaty as well.

4. The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)
Humankind is spread across the solar system, but it doesn’t all look like it used to. The natural human form is not well-suited to long occupancy in space or other planets, so we have developed the technology to make drastic and irreversible body modifications to bodies better suited to the environment. The story takes place around Jupiter. The “Girl-Thing” of the title is an old-fashioned human working among the “sushi” that are body-modded people. She has made the decision to “go out for sushi” meaning that she has decided that she will go through the body mods.

This one definitely kept me paying attention from the beginning because it dives right into future lingo head first. It doesn’t ease you into it, but neither does it go at a pace so fast that it’s incomprehensible. As a linguistic puzzle, it’s very entertaining. By the end I could understand the lingo for the most part.

But, perhaps due to the careful pacing chosen to allow the lingo to be understood, when I think back on the story the events themselves aren’t all that compelling to me. Things happened, for sure, but those things seemed to happen in a rush at the end as if Cadigan were running out of space and just tried to cram them in. I think this one could’ve used a little more room to expand so that there would still be space for the lingo to be explored, but then could go through the events themselves at a pace that let them have more impact. So, while it wasn’t a bad story, it wasn’t spectacular either. Fair-to-middlin’, I’d say.

5. Fade to White by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
Joseph McCarthy has become President of the United States and life is good for everyone. Yes it is good, as defined by the goodness measures laid down by President McCarthy, everything from the war effort to the structure of the family unit. Never mind the radiation and the widespread impotence or the government choosing your occupation. The story is told as alternating propoganda videos by the McCarthy administration and two children who are trying to find their place in this world.

I felt like I should like this story. For those who may not know, Joseph McCarthy was the US Senator who singlehandedly started the Red Scare, lying his ass off to convince people that Communists were infiltrating us, thousands of spies acting as normal American families. Anyone could be a Communist spy, and you had to keep vigilant and report the slightest odd behavior. But McCarthy never showed any evidence of this in our world, and eventually was disgraced because everyone came to the conclusion he was lying.

McCarthy as President is a great premise for a dystopian future. Even I (who generally doesn’t have interest in politics) can’t help but extrapolate from that basic premise to something really terrible.

I generally liked the sections of this story that were told as editing notes on propoganda tapes. I’ve always liked stories that felt like “found” documents, and this had that feel. The propoganda feel gives an uneasy overpatriotic ring to this part of the story, very creepy.

But the “honestly” told parts of the story bothered me. I mean, bothered me in a way that meant I didn’t like it rather than the seat-squirming involvement in the propoganda sections. I’m having trouble putting my finger on exactly why, but it meant that I didn’t like the story in the end. The closest I’m able to put it to words at this moment is that the “honestly” told parts of the story felt somehow even less genuine than the things that were clearly meant as propoganda. The over-the-top propoganda videos seemed to have been meant as a cautionary tale, and these other sections were meant to show the real life behind the propoganda, a life that isn’t so great. But to me these other sections didn’t ring true, to the point that they feel like propoganda directed at me and authored by Valente, using the obvious propoganda to try to drive me toward believing the other part is authentic when it really just felt like a more subtle propoganda to me. And, I mean, the main message I can detect there isn’t a bad one, that McCarthyism is a scary thing and that it’s a good thing that it didn’t sweep the American mindset and stay there. But the way that it’s told makes me want to distrust every part of the story as more propoganda, and that means that everything is so disingenuous to my gut feelings that there’s nothing of meaning here to me. In the end, this story just ended up just leaving me irritated.

Review: Hugo Short Story Nominees 2013

written by David Steffen

And, my favorite award category of the SF award season, the Hugo Award for Best Short Story. The Hugos are my favorite bunch of awards since they are meant to represent the tastes of fandom itself (albeit the portion of fandom that has the money and time and inclination to register and read to vote). And the short story length in particular because that’s the length that I prefer to do most of my reading.

Interesting this year that there are only three nominees for this category, due to a requirement that all stories on the final ballot must have received at least 5% of the overall vote. On the downside, there are less nominees to read and review. On the upside, it seems like a good sign that there is a good portion of quality speculative fiction being published regularly that there were no clearer standouts for the votes!

Hugo Award for Best Short Story

1. Immersion by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, June 2012)
A very interesting setting, set in Longevity, a world which has been recently conquered by a galaxy-spanning Empire. The war is over, but the conflict continues as the Empire sends tourists through to absorb the culture. The biggest element of this absorption is a technology called an immerser, which all of the Imperials use heavily to interact with their world, acting at its most basic level as a translator but altering perceptions of reality in everything you do. To deal with Imperials at all, the locals have to user the immersers as well. It’s a battle to maintain your own beliefs and perceptions in the face of reality overlays.

This was published in Clarkesworld, where I first heard it on their podcast. It’s a solid story, well written. The worldbuilding in this one was especially good.

2. Mono No Aware by Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)
Hiroto is one of the survivors of the end of the world, riding on a solar sail away from the earth that has been rendered unlivable by a meteor. The story is written as a recollection of interactions with his father who was not one of the survivors, who taught him many lessons about life and what it is to be Japanese.

I’m rather torn on my opinion for this story. I wanted to like it, there were characters, there was good basis for emotion and a plot, a definite speculative element. For me it walked the line between effective emotional writing and being a wee bit sentimental. I like a story that makes me feel, but there’s a fine line that separates that from being able to see the author pulling the strings.

3. Mantis Wives by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
Eventually, the mantis women discovered that killing their husbands was not inseparable from the getting of young… It was believed that mantis men would resist their deaths if permitted to choose the manner of their mating; but the women learned to turn elsewhere for nutrients after draining their husbands’ members, and yet the men lingered. And so their ladies continued to kill them, but slowly, in the fashioning of difficult arts. What else could there be between them?

This excerpt from the first section of the story pretty much sums it up. The rest of it is the same, but more so. It’s written like a lovingly-written Kama Sutra style book for Mantis Wives to read to think of new ways to torture their husbands to death. That is all it is. No characters. No plot. Just descriptions of torture written as if they were descriptions of sex. That’s not a story. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a story.

This is one of those nominees that really frustrates me because I don’t understand what anyone could see in it it, let alone the minimum 5% of the nominating population picking this as one of their 5 favorite short stories of the year. I have no idea what people found appealing about this. If you are reading this and you liked it, perhaps you could leave me a comment and clue me in.

SFWA: To Join Or Not To Join

written by David Steffen

NOTE: Coincidentally, there is a row going on right now about SFWA and things that Mike Resnick and Barry Maltzberg have said in their editorials in the SFWA Bulletin publication. I’m not here to comment on that argument one way or the other, and I haven’t taken great pains to follow it, but I have seen uncivil responses on both sides. I wrote this article several months ago and have only altered it to add this note at the beginning. I scheduled it to coincide with my SFWA membership renewal month, but that just happened to be about the time of this argument. If you want to know more about that argument, Google for it and I’m sure you’ll find plenty to chew on. But that’s not what I’m commenting on here.

Since I started writing SF, one of the long-term milestones I’d set for myself was to become eligible to join SFWA. SFWA keeps a list of markets that meet their criteria for professional markets, including pay rate, circulation level, regularity of publication, longevity, and variety of authors published. To become a SFWA member with short stories you have to sell three stories to qualifying markets.

In mid-2012, five years after I wrote my first word of fiction, I finally reached that goal, securing a sale to Escape Pod to add to my prior sales to Bull Spec and AE. I decided to go ahead and pay the $80 membership dues and find out what membership was all about.

Now my membership renewal is due this month, and the rates have gone up to $90. I am a pragmatic person and I don’t intend to pay that kind of money without considering the cost-benefit tradeoff. So, I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the money to renew my membership or whether I should just let it lapse. So I’m going to list out what I’ve seen as the benefits, to decide whether or not those are worth $90 to sign up again.

Note: This list is based only on my own experience of what I found to be potential benefits to being a member of the organization. Michael A Burstein mentions in the comments, for example, a print directory and the SFWA Handbook, neither of which I recall having seen.

Benefits

1. Support of SFWA
Before I get any further, let me make it clear that I’m not questioning that SFWA does work that is of value. They do a lot of great things, acting as a writers’ advocate to point out when a publisher is offering questionable contracts, keeps a list of professional markets that have to meet certain criteria, provide lists of information for beginning writers to get their start and many other things. They run the Nebulas, which are one of the two big awards of the SF community.

To do this, they need money. I understand that. I think it’s worthwhile to give them some money for the things that they do. Some smaller donation per year? Definitely. $90? Well that seems pretty steep to me. Although I’ve made more than that in writing income each of the last few years, I’m not guaranteed to make that, and it would be very frustrating to me if I spent more on writing organizations than I made in writing.

2. Nebula Voting
The Nebula awards are one of the two big awards in the SF community (the other being the Hugos). The Nebulas are voted by active members of SFWA, which means you need to make qualifying sales and pay that membership fee.

There’s some satisfaction to knowing that you’ve contributed toward the award that fandom watches, but I personally have little enough influence over the result and am often surprised at the stories that actually get nominated (though not always) that it’s not something worth paying anything for.

3. Nebula Award Packet
Related to the last one is something new provided in recent years–the Nebula Packet. It’s still in kind of an experimental state, but every Active SFWA member can download all nominated works as part of the Nebula packet. They provide it so that voters can be more informed about the works that they’re voting for, but you could see the membership fee as paying for a collection of published works, including half a dozen novels and as many young adult novels.

This is certainly something of value, and it can help keep a pulse on the Nebula community, seeing what kind of stories they nominate. It’s certainly worth something, but not the full membership by itself by any means. Especially since the Hugo awards provide a similar packet for their nominees, that award is more interesting to me, there tends to be overlap between the awards, and the Hugo membership costs less money.

4. Forum
SFWA has a members only forum. Various levels of SFWA membership have access, including associate members who are not writers but who have other involvement in the community like editors. There are several benefits to the forums.

a. Interacting with industry professionals
There are plenty of recognizable names about the SFWA forums, such as Jerry Pournelle and editor Gordon Van Gelder. If you want a place to interact with them, this isn’t a bad place to do it.

But I’ve been spoiled by Codex forum, which costs nothing, has interesting and active conversations, and has both rising stars and some very recognizable names. A lot of the big names that would be on the SFWA forum are already reachable in some other online presence, Codex or Facebook or Livejournal or elsewhere. And, well, the SFWA forum is not particularly well moderated–an argument can escalate into something very unpleasant and not much is done about it. If you come across one of those conversations it makes for a very unpleasant experience. So while these conversations are of some value, there are perhaps better and free places to get similar things.

Note: Cat Rambo pointed out in the comments below that there is a new moderation team in place led by Cat

b. venue for sharing your published stories for award consideration
There is a section of the forum specifically for sharing your stories with other members for them to consider for Nebula nominations. In theory this is a handy way to spread the word about your stories.

I say “in theory”, but since others only read what they feel like, work by a relative no-name like me is probably not going to be read by most people. Again Codex has spoiled me, because they have something similar on that forum, and when I participated in that on Codex I got feedback from many people who actually did read the story as a result. I expect this has to do with establishing rapport with the Codex people because I’ve been in closer contact with them.

c. free fiction from industry professionals
In the same forum where you can share your award-eligible work, of course others are sharing theirs. The work posted there varies from various levels of experience, but there is plenty of good work to be read there and from more renowned sources. For instance, Gordon Van Gelder seems to post most F&SF stories there, so if you like that magazine enough you might consider the SFWA fee more reasonable as providing something like a F&SF subscription.

This would be a perk if I had more time than I knew what to do with. But I already have way more fiction to read than time to read it, so adding more fiction posted by its writers isn’t a huge perk.

d. Nebula suggested reading list
This is definitely a neat feature, a list of stories sorted by the number of recommendations given for it. Unlike the self-posting of stories, the result is more meaningful (authors are not allowed to recommend their own stories). This is very neat because you can get an early pulse of what people like before the award results are out. If you care about such things it can guide your reading or just give you a list of well-liked fiction.

This is a neat feature, but essentially only because it gives you a peek at what the Nebula results might be before the Nebula nominations are announced. That’s not something worth money to me.

5. GriefCom
This is the grievance committee available only to SFWA members. If you have a problem with a contract they will help you sort it out. SFWA is a large enough and visible enough organization in the fandom community that they do have some clout to clear up contract conflicts when they arise.

I can see how this would be hugely beneficial for higher stakes contracts, like with novels. However, at this point I write short stories pretty much exclusively. Short story contracts are generally very straightforward, and most of those that I have managed are low enough yield that paying a membership fee to get help with potential problems would be counterproductive. If I did sell a novel I might consider starting a membership in case I needed help.

6. Emergency Medical Fund
This fund provides interest-free loans to Active members in emergency medical situations

This seems to be mostly beneficial to someone who doesn’t have health insurance. I do, so that’s not a draw.

7. The SFWA Bulletin
The SFWA bulletin is a quarterly nonfiction magazine that provides writing advice articles, reviews, market rundowns, and other information about the SF publishing field. You can subscribe to the Bulletin if you’re not a member, but it costs as little as $32 for a year in the US, to $90 a year for outside of North America, or $10 per single issue.

If you find this content valuable, this would be a big draw of membership, justifying a great deal of the cost since you don’t have to pay for the subscription then. But none of the information in the magazine issues that I’ve seen so far has struck me as anything that I couldn’t find elsewhere, and generally I don’t find writing advice all that helpful because each writer really has to find their own way in any case.

In addition, by what I’ve heard the production of this magazine takes up a large portion of the SFWA budget. Why, I’d like to know, is it deemed worth that kind of expenditure? If this magazine weren’t taking up a bunch of the budget, the money could be spent elsewhere and perhaps rates could lower.

8. The SFWA Member Directory
Active members have access to a member directory in which each member can provide whatever contact information they want, addresses, phone numbers, emails or whatever.

While this is a convenience, I don’t see this as a big value. Most anyone who is a writer these days who would respond to contact from me is going to have an online presence anyway. It would make more sense, in general, for me to contact them via those publicly available routes than to cold-call them. Maybe there will come future work that I will be involved in for which this kind of contact information would be useful, at which point I may need to reconsider this opinion.

9. SFWA Convention Suites
SFWA hosts a convention suite at some convention. WorldCon for sure, I’m not sure what other ones. Members can come, as well as bringing a guest. There is food and drinks, sometimes meals or other times snacks. Other SFWA members come and go. Sometimes there might be specific events in the suite, like release parties or retirement parties.

So far I haven’t been very active on the SF convention circuit. I am very frugal by nature, and especially since I have a family to which I would need to justify the travel and the expense, I haven’t done it much. I did go to WorldCon 2012, however, which was a really great experience. Even once I decided to go I wanted to keep down my expenses as much as possible, sharing hotel room and other cost-saving measures. One of the things that I at first found was hard to be frugal on was food, since the hotel convenience store had the most expensive and most disgusting wrap that I’ve ever eaten, the cheapest thing they had available, and going out to restaurants always adds up quickly. Soon I realized, though, that I had access to (at least) three sources of free food: the convention suite (available to everyone but mostly only very simple cheap food like peanut butter, cereal, etc), the green room (available to program participants, somewhat nicer food), and the SFWA suit (pretty good spread, even with some meals). So the availability of very good spread at certain times was huge perk and a huge money-saving measure. Also, whenever I came to the suite I would scan the nametags for people I’d like to talk to or people I’d met online, and even if I didn’t recognize anyone I met some very cool people chatting with whoever was about.

10. The secret handshake that will make editors buy your stories. Joining SFWA will make editors buy your stories.

The last sentence was a lie, but it is the kind of thing that seems intuitive from many beginners’ point of view. You can put your membership in your cover letter if you want, but it’s not going to make a lick of difference. It might be a point of mild interest, but isn’t going to make a difference in your sales. Having a marketable name can influence a sale, but your SFWA membership has nothing to do with that. Some big names aren’t members, some no-names (like me) are. It doesn’t matter. If you don’t have a marketable name, your story just have to kick enough ass that the editor wants to buy it despite your lack of notoriety. In either case, your SFWA membership does not matter.

The Verdict

So, what does it all come down to? At this point, I am not going to renew my membership. I mightpay something like $40 a year for the Nebula packet alone. I would pay some larger amount (maybe a few hundred dollars) for a lifetime membership, but $90 a year (which will certainly go up periodically as it did this last year) is just too much for me at this point in my career.

I think that at this point I’ll renew my membership whenever I am planning to go to WorldCon that year, because it is such a good place to meet people and also to save money on food expenditures that it is well worth the membership fee to do it. In the years when I do that I’ll happily read the Nebula packet and actively participate. But otherwise I probably won’t unless something big changes to convince me of the worth of a membership. With a newborn at our house, I’ll be skipping WorldCon this year. Next year it’s in London, too far of a jaunt for me. So for at least the next couple years I am out.

For those who choose to maintain their SFWA membership, I am curious to hear other points of view on the subject. What is it worth to you? Why do you do it? Do you consider cost-benefit as I have? Is it more a point of pride than a monetary value? Please share!

Review: Nebula Novella Nominees 2012

written by David Steffen

On to the next category for Best Novella. I find this one another awkward one, covering word counts from 17,500 to 40,000. I like novels because they have room to spread out and really make you care about a broad range of characters in an intricately woven plot. I like short stories because they can really hit you with a story, worldbuilding, or other elements, get in and get out while you’re still excited. Novella I find is kind of awkward length, like a story that wants to be a novel but somehow just doesn’t have the stamina to make it all the way up there.

But, if I’m going to read novellas, I may as well start with the ones that others consider the best of the year, so here goes.

As soon as the Nebula nominees were announced I started reading through each category from Short Story up, intending to get as far as I could before the voting period ended on March 30. Since each category covers fiction that is progressively longer, the rate at which I can read them drops as I move on to each category. Unfortunately, I’m a pretty slow reader, so I didn’t have time to finish them all, and then I’ve moved on to Hugo-nominated works.

There were six nominees in total. I was able to read five of the six nominees, but I ran out of time before I could finish them all, and then the Hugo nominees were announced, giving me another load of stories to read. Katabasis (F&SF 11-12/12) by Robert Reed is the story that I didn’t get to read. Sorry about that, Mr. Reed! I’m a pretty slow reader and the Nebula voting window just wasn’t long enough.

This will be my last of the Nebula nominee reviews for this year, because it’s all that I had time to read in the scant time between announcing the stories and the voting deadline. Coming soon will be the Hugo nominees (some of which overlap with these)

Nebula Award for Best Novella

1. After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress (Tachyon)
An apocalypse hits the Earth in 2014, killing most people and rendering most of the planet unliveable. Very few people survived, and those were saved from certain death by boxlike tentacled figures (nicknamed Tesslies) that would appear in a shower of golden sparks, grab the person, and take them somewhere else. These survivors wake up in a building with no doors to the outside, with machinery meant to serve their basic food and sanitation needs. The Tesslies never told them what was happening, but their best interpretation is that aliens have attacked earth and kept some humans as specimens. Many years later a new piece of machinery they call the Grab machine appears in the Shell which periodically makes a window through time to the years before the apocalypse. Whoever goes through, the Grab machine yanks them back to the future with whatever they’re touching, so they use it to grab supplies and to grab children to help repopulate the future (adults die when they pass through). This part of the story follows Pete, a fifteen year old boy who is a child of some of the original survivors.

Meanwhile, back in 2013, mathematician Julie Kahn is working with a police task force trying to determine a pattern to the robberies and kidnappings.

This is one of the very few novellas I’ve ever read that worked effectively at its published length. I related completely to both Pete and Julie, even when they did things I didn’t agree with or when their actions were in direct opposition to each other. This story had me interested from beginning to end and it felt neither too long nor too short. Well done, Ms Kress, well done. Unfortunately, I hadn’t finished reading this before the Nebula voting period ended, but there’s a good chance that it will garner my Hugo vote for the same category.

2. All the Flavors by Ken Liu (GigaNotoSaurus 2/1/12)
Elsie Seaver is the daughter of a business owner in Idaho City in 1865. Much of the town, including her father Jack’s store have been burned down. Needing the money, Jack rents houses to Chinese miners despite his wife’s misgivings about their unfamiliar way of life. Elsie befriends the miners, especially a distinctive man named Lao Guan who tells her stories about a Chinese god who bears a very close resemblance to Lao Guan himself. They learn a great deal from each other in the time they spend together.

I ranked this story at 2nd because I liked the characters the most of the three that I read. I really liked Elsie and I enjoyed very much her interactions with Lao Guan. The story switches back and forth between Elsie’s time and Lao Guan’s stories, drawing some parallels between Lao Guan and the god in the story but never making the connection entirely concrete. The stories took up so much of the story space I wanted them to mean something, to tie into the main story in some way that was significant. So this story as a whole was either way too long, because it could’ve been split up into two component stories and the one about Elsie and Lao Guan would’ve been all the better for its conciseness. Or the story is way too short, lacking the space to really tie together its halves and making me really care about those other stories.

3. Barry’s Tale by Lawrence M. Schoen (Buffalito Buffet)
This is the story of Conroy, an interstellar businessman and his buffalito companion. Buffalito look just like buffalo but are the size of a dog, they can eat literally anything, and they fart oxygen. he has traveled to a planet called Colson’s World where a single family lives, all the adopted children of Colson himself. Most of the visitors to the planet are there for the barbeque cookoff, but Conroy is there to make a business proposition to Colson, to convince him of the value of buffalito that are Conroy’s business. While he’s there he meets Bethany, a little girl who has dangerous powers that have prompted her mother to keep her sedated for the safety of everyone. Only now the medication isn’t working anymore.

Hey, good to see what the buffalito thing is about–I know Lawrence Schoen was giving away buffalito plushies at his WorldCon reading, and I saw them on people’s shoulders throughout the weekend. Apparently two of his books have been published around buffalito, and this was part of a short story collection.

This story took way too long to get going. The first hook for me was about halfway through, which is entirely too far in a novella length work, where the stakes are finally revealed to try to save the girl from those who want to kill her to prevent her killing others accidentally (stakes that I can care about) that give our protagonist something more interesting to do than trying to sell buffalito breeding rights (about which I don’t give a damn). The second half of the story was action packed and interesting, but it was buried behind that first half.

It seemed, too, like I was supposed to be enamored with Reggie the buffalito and how irresistibly cute he’s supposed to be. And yes he is cute. But not enough to carry thousands and thousands of words on his own. It’s very possible that this story was targeted at people who’ve read Lawrence’s buffalito books, in which case I’m just not part of his target audience.

4. The Stars Do Not Lie by Jay Lake (Asimov’s 10-11/12)
Morgan Abutti, 4th degree Thalassocrete, member of the Planetary Society, has discovered something new in the stars that violates the truths taught by both the Lateran and the Thalassojustity belief systems that rule the world. He has arranged for a public discussion of his findings, which could shake the world. Bilious Quinx, master of the Consistatory Office (aka Inquisition) must find Abutti before he makes his heresy public. Eraster Goins, head Thalossocrete, has very different motives for finding Abutti.

The Best of Clarkesworld 2012+

written by David Steffen

Clarkesworld Magazine has been growing! Some time after my last Best of Clarkesworld post, they did a subscription drive where they promised to go from providing two stories per month to providing three stories per month. That drive was a success, and so they’ve been providing stories at the new rate for more than a year.

And now they’re working on yet another expansion. If they can get another push of subscribers in the near future, they’ll go up to 4 stories per month, which includes a podcast for each one. If you like the stories you read here, consider getting a subscription to help them produce even more! And, on top of that, they’ve brought in Gardner Dozois for a reprint division, which will be yet another story every month.

In September I had the pleasure of meeting Kate Baker, their podcast producer, host, and primary narrator at WorldCon. It was one of the highlights of a great week. She’s just as nice in person as she sounds on the podcast, and it felt very surreal to hear her voice when it wasn’t coming out of my iPod.

On to the list, which covers 53 episodes published since my last list in May 2011.

1. All the Painted Stars by Gwendolyn Clare
This is one of my Hugo/Nebula nomination picks for the year, with a shapeshifting alien POV that I found very enjoyable.

2. The Womb Factory by Peter M. Ferenczi
In the future, our products will still be made in 3rd world countries, but instead of being built by hand they will be grown in the wombs of the women who work their.

3. The Wisdom of Ants by Thoraiya Dyer
Great worldbuilding here with metal-eating ants.

4. What Everyone Remembers by Rahul Kanakia
Another great nonhuman POV story.

5. Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop by Suzanne Church
A story based in the club scene of the future.

Honorable Mention

Pack by Robert Reed

Immersion by Aliette de Bodard
One of this year’s Nebula nominees for Short Story category

Robot by Helena Bell
Another of this year’s Nebula nominees for Short Story category

The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Podcast 2012+

written by David Steffen

Beneath Ceaseless Skies continues to be a great source of fiction set in a secondary world. This list encompasses all of their podcasted stories since my last list in March of 2011, about 38 episodes. Keep in mind that they only podcast about half of their stories, so check out their text if you want to get the full backlog.

On to the list!

1. The Three Feats of Agani by Christie Yant
My favorite short story for several years, my definite #1 pick for award season. The story of a girl going through rites of passage of her culture’s religion while coping with the death of her father. Great philosophy, and a good story well told.

2. Mr. Morrow Becomes Acquainted with the Delicate Art of Squidkeeping by Geoffrey Maloney
So much fun, this reminded me of a Drabblecast episode. Interacting with alien squid creatures in Victorian period.

3. Worth of Crows by Seth Dickinson

4. The Ascent of Reason by Marie Brennan
Another story set in Driftwood, where dying worlds go as they disappear.

5. A Place to Stand by Grace Seybold

Honorable Mention

Cursed Motives by Marissa Lingen

The Best of The Drabblecast 2012

written by David Steffen

The Drabblecast is still as awesome as ever, and continues to be my favorite source of short fiction, bar none. I particularly look forward to Lovecraft month every August when they solicit brand new Lovecraft-style stories from established authors.

This year marked a milestone for me, the first time I’ve sold a story to the Drabblecast. You can read “Constant Companion” here as part of one of their trifecta specials.

On to the list!

1. Betty Flesh and the Meat Man by Damon Shaw
This story is super weird in the best of ways. It throws you for a few loops, and my favorite thing about it is that it never goes where I expect it to. A story about a butcher’s daughter meeting the last available suitor, but you have to read it to really get a sense of it. This is one of my Hugo nominations this year.

2. Jagannath by Karen Tidbeck
People act as the internal components of some bizarre hybrid creature.

3. The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi
A future where the earth can support very little normal life, and the people who’ve been modified to live there who almost don’t seem like people at all.

4. The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward Part 1 and Part 2 by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
The third installment of the same world that Mongoose and Boojum were set in, both great stories. This one is a Drabblecast original, as part of their Lovecraft month. Another story set in this Lovecraftian-esque space opera universe.

5. How I Crippled a World for Just 0.01 Cents by Michael W. Lucht
A scientist manages to travel into a parallel universe where scientific principles are covered by patent law, and the consequences of that law, he is put on trial for violating these laws when trying to create a device to send him home.

Honorable Mentions

My True Lovecraft Gave to Me by Eric Lis
Apparently I am not the only one who thinks the song “A Partridge in a Pair Tree” must be the product of a fevered mind.

The Elder Thing and the Puddle People by S. Boyd Taylor
One of the Lovecraft month stories, about a little girl who seems like an elder god to little creatures living in the pond.

Transfer of Ownership by Christie Yant

Review: Hugo Dramatic Presentation, Long Form Nominees 2013

written by David Steffen

You may notice that four of the five nominees here are also nominees for the Ray Bradbury award this year, which I also reviewed. So, yes, I did just move my review of those four into this article. If you read that previous article and you want to just read the new stuff, The Hobbit is the only nominee that was nominated for Hugo but not for Ray Bradbury, so you can skip ahead to that part.

Anyway, this was a very enjoyable batch of movies this year!

1. The Cabin in the Woods
When I saw the previews for this movie I didn’t know what to make of it. The vague impression I got was that it was tortureporn, of the same ilk as Saw and Human Centipede. So I didn’t see it theatres. But then I kept getting recommendations for it from people who have similar taste as me. And it got a Ray Bradbury nomination–surely my fellow SF writers would have better taste than to nominate something of that variety, I figured. So I decided to give it a try.

At the beginning, the main thread of the movie may seem familiar, stereotypical even. Five college students go to visit an isolated cabin in the woods for a vacation, each student a different archetype of such movies. A classic horror setup for anything from monsters to serial killers. But there are other scenes interspersed with this main plot that show scenes from what could be a typical dull government office, except that these guys in ties are controlling the events at the cabin in the woods and steering them toward some outcome. In the end it’s all explained and is extremely entertaining.

It’s full of action. It has some gore, but I thought the amount was reasonable considering the content–I trust Whedon to use gore effectively. Personally I found it more often funny or just plain awesome, but rarely scary, but I don’t think the classification of this movie as horror is inaccurate. It is meant specifically as a response to the stereotypes of horror film and there are gory parts and things that might be scary to other people but the way that it was presented put it in a completely different light for me.

2. The Avengers
I saw this one in theaters. I haven’t kept up with all the Marvel movies, but my favorite superheroes are all Marvel and it was such a fun idea to have a movie that takes all the recent big-hit Marvel movies and combines them with all the same actors. I’ve never seen anything put together quite like that, with Iron Man, Thor, Captain America already having their own feature films in their own right.

Although the Avenger Initiative has been canceled before the movie even begins, the group is brought together to counter a threat to the entire world. Thor’s brother Loki is trying to open a portal to another dimension to bring through an army to conquer Earth. The group must come together to try to stop them: Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Hulk, Hawkeye, Thor, all organized by Nick Fury. My concern with the premise was that either just a few of the heroes would get the focus and the rest would be background characters, or they’d spread the attention so thin that you never felt like any character really got their chance to shine. But Whedon (again!) did a superb job balancing the characters in such a short period of time, while leaving me satisfied. Each character got plenty of chances to show their skills (though Hawkeye seems a little ludicrously unpowered in such a group). Each character brought something to the group, both in abilities and in dialog/character. Iron Man got all the best lines, while Captain America was the straight man, Banner was the skeptic, and so on.

Admittedly, much of anticipation was waiting for the next time that Bruce Banner would Hulk out, but that anticipation just made the smashing time all the more fun.

3. The Hunger Games
Heather and I heard the hype about this movie about a year before it came out, and we both read The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins–this movie is the first of the three adaptations.

The story follows Katniss Everdeen of District Twelve, one of the twelve districts that is little more than a prison colony of the totalitarian government of Panem, occupying the territory now occupied by the United States. The districts have risen up against the capital before, but the rebellion was crushed. To punish and remind them, every year the capital randomly chooses two tributes (a boy and a girl) under the age of 17 to fight in an arena. These 24 young people are put in a strictly controlled arena with limited resources, and they stay in there until all but one of them are dead–the district of the winner is showered with prizes (mostly extra food). Katniss’s 12-year old younger sister Primrose is the one taken in the random drawing, and Katniss volunteers to take her place. She is the sole provider for her sister, and she must find a way to survive to keep her sister alive. The game involves not just action, and wilderness survival, but politics as the games are watched by the public and controlled by the government to ensure the audience is satisfied.

I’d recommend the book to anyone. The movie is one of those rare movie adaptations that does its book justice in tone and content, though the book of course contains more of what you see in the movie. Being able to see the opulence of the capital is the best part because that was one of the parts of the book that I was looking forward to seeing the most.

4. Looper
Heather and I watched this one together before the Bradbury nominees were announced based on recommendations from friends.

Time travel is invented 30 years in the future, but it is primarily used by criminals. Other technologies will have progressed by that time, including technology which makes it almost impossible to dispose of a dead body without evidence of it being discovered by the police. So criminal organizations have developed a system using time travel to solve this problem. They hire people from 30 years before (a time before time travel was invented) to act as “loopers”. Their job is to wait at specific places at specific times for murder victims. The victim will come through with a hood over their head and their hands bound behind their back and all the looper has to do is kill the person and dispose of the body. Since neither the forensic technology nor time travel has been invented at this time, it’s much easier to dispose of the body. With each victim is a payout in silver. The looper continues this work, until eventually a victim comes through that looks like any other, and is to be killed in the same way. This victim comes with a gold payout, enough to make a person filthy rich. This victim is the looper from the future time, and the murder of that person “closes the loop”, destroying any chance for the future authorities to interrogate this older person, hence the name. Complicated, but interesting premise, for sure.

The protagonist, Joe, is a looper, but when his golden payout comes through, something goes wrong and his future self escapes. This makes them both fugitives from the criminal organizations that run the system. The young Joe wants only to kill the older Joe so that he can live normally again. Older Joe isn’t so keen on this plan, but he has to try to keep young Joe alive because killing him will make old Joe disappear.

It’s really a sign of the quality of the nominees that this is #4. This movie is great, and I’d highly recommend it. It’s action packed from start to finish. I was skeptical that Joseph Gordon-Levitt would seem plausible as a young Bruce Willis, but they managed to pull it off with the use of some facial prosthetics to change the shape of his face. It looks really real, though it’s disconcerting if you’re used to Joseph’s face from his other acting work. It’s not just a mindless action movie; they did a great job plotting it, putting foreshadowing in place that’s not too blatant but which makes sense in retrospect and the ending resolution totally makes sense while not being too obvious.

5. The Hobbit
I’ve been waiting for this one to come out for quite some time. I enjoyed Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies more than the books that they are based on because I’ve found Tolkien’s writing style to be rather impenetrable. When I first heard that Peter Jackson would also be working on The Hobbit, I was very excited. But my excitement dampened a bit when I heard that The Hobbit was being made into a trilogy of movies. And by the look of it they’re going to be long movies. I can understand why The Lord of the Rings needs to be turned into nine hours of feature film (okay I know the uncut trilogy is more like twelve, but you get my point). The one-copy collection I have of them is more than a thousand pages. Really, he had to cut out a lot of material to fit that in the way it was. But The Hobbit is a children’s book, is a very quick read. Where The Lord of the Rings needs to be cut drastically to fit into the space, The Hobbit really needs to be embellished to fit in the space.

And that was my main complaint about the movie is that it’s been expanded so much, shoehorning in characters from The Lord of the Rings that never graced the pages of The Hobbit, adding in fight scenes, side plots, lots of extra stuff. There are lots of fun special effects, good acting all around, I just felt it was too long for the actual content. The Lord of the Rings got away with it because the stakes are so much higher–Sauron is threatening to conquer the world. Here the stakes are not all important to the world as a whole–the dwarves want their home back, and the area surrounding the mountain would rather do without a dragon, but really they’re going and picking a fight that they don’t really need to pick. For a movie that’s fine, but an epic trilogy is a bit much for this, I thought.

But, if you liked The Lord of the Rings movies, and you want more, you’ll probably want to check this out. I thought Bilbo’s interaction with Gollum was very well done especially.

So, I liked it, but in general I thought it was rather over-embellished for its content.