I managed to sneak in a review of a short story for Short Story Month on Gav’s NextRead blog. I picked ‘A Woman Naked’ by Christopher Priest, from his 1974 collection Real-Time World. I hadn’t actually intended to contribute a guest review to Short Story Month, but when I read the story I felt it was worth writing about. The review is here.
Monthly Archives: May 2010
Readings & Watchings 6
It’s time for another round-up of what I’ve been casting my eyes over. Hold tight, here we go:
Books
Necromancer, Gordon R Dickson (1962), is part of Dickson’s ambitious Childe Cycle, which he failed to complete before his death. Spun out of the Dorsai trilogy, it was intended to consist of three historical novels, three present-day novels, and six science fiction novels – which included the Dorsai trilogy. Only the sf novels were written. Necromancer was the second to be published, but its story is chronologically first. I still have a soft spot for the Dorsai trilogy, but it doesn’t extend to this. It’s one of those sf novels of the early 1960s where the author is more in love with their philosophy – or what passes for one – than they are their story, world or characters. (James Blish’s The Quincunx of Time is another.) And it’s complete tosh. Paul Formain is a mining engineer who loses an arm in an accident. He joins the Chantry Guild, a cult dedicated to the destruction of humanity’s reliance on machines, because they promise to teach him how to use psychic powers to regrow his missing arm. But Formaine proves to have other talents. Or something. This is one of those novels where the writer puts stuff down on the page, and then later dismisses it without thinking through the ramifications. One to avoid.
The Remains of Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989), is the second book by Ishiguro I’ve read. The first was Never Let Me Go, and while I thought that novel was weak as science fiction, I did enjoy the writing. And it strikes me that The Remains of Day suffers from a similar problem. It’s beautifully written, and Ishiguro’s presentation of Stevens, the narrator, remains amazingly in voice throughout. But, let’s face it, Stevens is a bit of a plonker. I seem to remember Anthony Hopkins making the character much more sympathetic in the film adaptation. There’s also some confusion over the actual plot. It’s about Darlington and Nazi appeasement, but on the surface it seems to be about Stevens visiting Miss Kenton in order to ask to come back to work for him. Except that plot goes nowhere. They meet, the subject is never raised, they part. The Remains of Day is an excellent character-study, but I suspect Stevens is not “human” enough a character to sustain a study at such length. All the same, definitely worth reading.
Colours in the Steel, KJ Parker (1998), was April’s book for the Fantasy Challenge. See here.
Blaming, Elizabeth Taylor (1976). No, not that Elizabeth Taylor. The other one, the novelist. Okay, so I’d not known there was a writer with that name until I watched François Ozon’s adaptation of her novel Angel (I reviewed the film here). I enjoyed the film, so I kept an eye open in charity shops for one of her books. And found Blaming. I thought it good, but I’ll not be rushing out to buy her novels. (Although I’d still like to read Angel.) Blaming is a thin novel, only 190 pages. It was also Taylor’s last – she was dying of cancer when she wrote it, and didn’t live to see it published. Amy and Nick are on holiday in Turkey when Nick suddenly dies. An American woman, Martha, attaches herself to Amy and helps her out, accompanying her back to the UK (where Martha also lives). But once back in London, Amy doesn’t feel Martha is the right sort of person to be her friend, although she is reluctantly drawn into friendship with her… which all ends terribly badly. Despite its 1976 publication, this is quite a dated novel – its upper middle class attitudes hark back to an earlier decade. The prose in Blaming was very good, although often it felt more like a pencil sketch than a fully-realised portrait.
The Rapture, Liz Jensen (2009), I reviewed for SFF Chronicle. See here.
The Hunt for Zero Point, Nick Cook (2001), I read as research for a story I’m working on. But I will admit to some small fascination for the subject. According to Cook, the Nazis were experimenting with anti-gravity in the years leading up to WWII, and even managed to build some prototype flying saucers. These were snapped up by the US – all part of Operation Paperclip – and have been “ultra-black” defence projects ever since. Apparently, the B-2 stealth bomber uses some of this technology. I don’t believe a word of it. Cook claims the Philadelphia Experiment, which has been comprehensively debunked, was deliberate misinformation designed to hide the US military-industrial complex’s successful research into anti-gravity. Cook’s evidence is anecdotal, or third-, fourth- or even fifth-hand, or just wild supposition presented as fact. Some of the basic laws of physics are just plain ignored. If the B-2 really used secret anti-gravity technology, there’s no way it would still be secret. Its workings might be, but not the fact of its existence. It’s like those people who think the Moon landings were faked – it would have cost more to fake them and keep it secret for 40 years than it would have done to send astronauts to the Moon in the first place. Plus, as Charlie Duke says at the end of In The Shadow Of The Moon
The Damned Utd, David Peace (2006). I happily admit it: I am not a football fan. In fact, I hate the game. But I’d watched and enjoyed the television adaptation of Peace’s Red Riding quartet, so I wanted to read one of his books. I saw The Damned Utd going cheap in a charity shop, and decided to try it. But, despite hating football, I enjoyed this fictionalisation of Brian Clough’s 44-day stint as manager of Leeds United. The story is told from Clough’s viewpoint, with italicised sections covering Clough’s career at Derby County. Peace uses a very muscular repetitive prose style, and it works well for this story. Apparently, one of the Leeds footballers sued the publishers over his characterisation in the novel, and won; and the book wasn’t well-received by Clough’s surviving family, or many others who are named in it. I subsequently picked up 1974 by Peace in a Waterstone’s “3 for 2” promotion.
The Steel Crocodile, DG Compton (1970) is the third or fourth of Compton’s novels I’ve read, and if they have one thing in common it’s that they seem a bit thin on plot. They’re essentially well-drawn studies of the viewpoint characters. The Steel Crocodile is a case in point. It’s set in a 1970s-style über-nanny state run by sociologists, with a lack of privacy not unlike that we have today in the UK. Matthew Oliver is a psychologist, married to Abigail. He is offered a position at the Colindale, a not-so-secret establishment, although no one knows what goes on there. Oliver is then contacted by the Civil Liberties Committee through an old university friend, and asked to report on the Colindale to them. He agrees. He learns that the Colindale project is simply a Giant Computer Brain, which sifts through huge amounts of data in order to predict imminent scientific or technological discoveries. The committee running the Colindale then decide whether or not to prevent those discoveries in the interests of world harmony. But there’s also a secret project: the director of the Colindale is using the Giant Computer Brain to find a new messiah for the age. Oddly, each section of the book is written from the viewpoint of either Oliver or Abigail, but the sections overlap – giving two, often different, views on the same scene. Compton’s writing is excellent, and I could imagine this book being made into a film with some great 1970s visuals – all Brutalist architecture and huge antiseptic data-centres…
Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Brian W Aldiss (1960), was the 1985 Granada edition, and the actual proper edition Aldiss had always envisaged for this collection. It is, bluntly, Aldiss doing Stapledon. He tells the history of human civilisation over several million years through short stories interspersed with italicised info-dumps. It’s very much a product of its time, although the writing’s not bad. But it’s an early collection by someone who went on to write some very good stuff indeed, and so not much more than a historical curiosity.
City of Dreams and Nightmare, Ian Whates (2010), was another book I reviewed for SFF Chronicles. See here.
Diamonds are Forever, Ian Fleming (1956). Forget the film, this novel shares only its title, the characters, and the setting of Las Vegas. In the novel, Bond takes the place of a mob courier, carrying diamonds smuggled out of Sierra Leone to New York. He is accompanied by Tiffany Case, who works for the gangsters, the Spangled Mob (after the brothers who run it, Jack and Seraffima Spang). In New York, Bond is meant to be paid off by betting on a fixed race at Saratoga. His old pal Felix Leiter, now a Pinkerton detective and missing an arm and a leg (from Live and Let Die), is investigating the race-fixing, so they join forces. Felix bribes the bent jockey to throw the race, Bond doesn’t get paid, so is sent by the mobsters to Las Vegas to meet Serrafima Spang. Even for books written sixty years ago, the Bond novels are sexist and racist. Bond may have a little more depth as a character in the novels, but his typical response to any solution is violence. Often deadly. Fleming’s details never quite ring true – he labels all the clothes worn and food consumed during the story, but the workings of the US mob feels like it bears no resemblance to an actual criminal gang. I don’t know why I continue to read these.
Films
Hellbride
GI Joe – The Rise of COBRA
King Lear
Duck Soup
The Fall
The Reader
Frozen Land
There’s Always Tomorrow
Night Dragon
Review
I have a review of Ian Whates’ debut novel, City of Dreams and Nightmare, up at SFF Chronicles. See here. Expect to see more reviews appearing there.
The Ten Best Science Fiction Books… Ever
Everyone loves lists. Contentious lists are even better. So here’s one: the ten absolute best science fiction novels ever published – written by sf authors, published by sf publishers. These ten books show what the genre is capable of when it aims to be more than mindless escapism. They are fiercely intelligent, beautifully written, meaningful, inventive, rigorous, and sf from the first word to the last. They are, in chronological order:
The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe (1972). A collection of three novellas – but not a cheat, as the three are linked and form a novel together. This is the sort of science fiction that can be read and enjoyed, and then carefully puzzled through to determine what was really going on. Wolfe is a tricksy writer, and in The Fifth Head of Cerberus he’s at his tricksy-est.
The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin (1974). Donald Wollheim once claimed that the benevolent dictatorship was the government of choice of sf fans. That’s clearly what comes of reading too many space operas with interstellar empires and the like. And yet sf also has a history of documenting the road to utopia. All that benevolent dictator stuff is nonsense, of course – it’s as much fantasy as the Competent Man as hero. Thankfully, not everyone subscribes to it. The Dispossessed is a political book – it’s even subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” – and it’s political in a way that makes you think, that shows you what sf is really for.
Dhalgren, Samuel R Delany (1975), is definitely science fiction – it’s in the relaunched SF Masterworks series, for a start – even though it’s proven extremely popular outside the genre. Sometimes it reads like a novel of its time, sometimes it seems almost timeless. But every time you read it, it’s different. It is also the most profoundly literary book in this list, and from an author who is steeped in genre.
Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland (1990). Yes, so Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas arguably kicked off the whole New British Space Opera thing in 1987, but to my mind the movement didn’t really gel until the appearance of Take Back Plenty three years later. I remember the buzz the book caused – and I remember on reading it discovering that it was as good as everyone said it was. I reread it a couple of years ago, and it’s still bloody good. So why is it not in the SF Masterworks series, eh?
The Martian trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson (1992 – 1996), is a bit of a cheat as it’s three books. While many are full of admiration for the first book, Red Mars, but not so keen on the sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars, I maintain that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You need to read Green Mars and Blue Mars after you’ve finished Red Mars because the first book only poses a small handful of the questions the three books ask and attempt to answer.
Coelestis, Paul Park (1993), was once described by John Clute as “Third World sf”, but I prefer to think of it as “post-colonial sf”. But not “post-colonial” in the same way as Ian McDonald’s River of Gods. I was an expat until only a few years ago, so it’s no surprise I’m drawn to fiction which documents the British expat experience abroad – hence my admiration for Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. While Park is an American, Coelestis is infused with that same atmosphere. Plus Park is one of the best prose stylists in this list. Why has this book been allowed to go out of print? Someone publish a new edition, please.
Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle (2000). This is the biggest book on this list – it contains nearly a million words. It is, with Red Mars, one of the most rigorous too. Rigour is important in sf – you can’t just make shit up as you go along (but you can, of course, as Iain Banks is fond of putting it, “blow shit up”). The bulk of the story may be set in an alternate mediaeval Europe, but it is not fantasy. It is clever, it is visceral, it is also physically heavy.
Light, M John Harrison (2002). They say Harrison is a writer’s writer, and the prose in Light certainly suggests as much. Light is also one of those novels that’s often described as one which “redefines” science fiction. Which it does. Sort of. But not by coming up with something new, only by shedding new light on those genre tropes being over-exercised at the turn of the century. They say that sf is a genre in conversation with itself, which makes Harrison one of sf’s sharpest conversationalists.
Life, Gwyneth Jones (2004). I need only repeat David Soyka from his review of this book on sfsite.com: “You can stop reading right now and go out and buy the book. Otherwise, you’ll have to endure yet another one of these diatribes about how science fiction doesn’t get any respect from the literary mainstream. Because you can’t read this book and not reflect on the fact that had this been written by, say, Margaret Atwood, Life would be receiving more of the widespread attention it deserves.”
The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling (2009). I’ve never believed sf should be predictive, but if any sf writer could be called an “architect of futures” then it would be Bruce Sterling. And in The Caryatids he has produced his most inventive and meaningful conversation with the future yet. It is the best book he has written. So why hasn’t it been published in the UK? Why is there only a US edition of this excellent book?
These are not “seminal” sf novels, they are not “classics”, they are not even especially popular. But they are “best” in the true meaning of the word – i.e., “of the highest quality”. If you haven’t read them, you should do so immediately.
Now tell me which books I’ve missed off my list. No mainstream authors slumming it in the genre, please. And I don’t care what impact a book had in, or outside, the genre. It has to be, in your eyes, one of the best-written science fiction novels ever published. And that doesn’t mean the “most entertaining”, or any other excuse used to justify flat writing, cardboard characters, or simplistic plotting. I’m not talking about fit for purpose; I’m talking about excellence in writing, in prose, in literature, in genre.
Another review of ‘Killing the Dead’
Gav at NextRead has reviewed my story ‘Killing the Dead’ from Postscripts 20/21 ‘Edison’s Frankenstein’ as part of his Shorty Story Month.
He says it’s “a quick clever tale that asks a serious question about what is important to humanity when travelling across the stars for journeys that will take unknown generations to complete”.
See the full review here.
A Booktastic Haul
It’s been a while since I last did one of these, so here’s a nice photograph of the books which have arrived at my humble abode over the past week or so:
Quite a mixed bag. There’s the second of Mike Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire space opera trilogy, The Orphaned Worlds (and no, they don’t orbit Barnardo’s Star…); a new collection from one of my favourite short story writers, Helen Simpson, In-flight Entertainment; and a signed edition of Lucius Shepard’s latest Dragon Griaule novella, The Taborin Scale, from the excellent Subterranean Press (the novella is already sold out). There’s a bunch of graphic novels – two by Alan Moore: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (I had Volume 2, but had never read Volume 1), and Promethea Book 2. Plus the latest of the Black Widow collections from Marvel, Web of Intrigue; and a back-issue of Spaceship Away!, a magazine dedicated to Dan Dare. The huge book to the left is The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80, edited by Ian S MacNiven. That’s Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller. And yes, Miller appears to be naked on the cover. To the right is The Twist in the Plotting, a rare numbered chapbook of twenty-five poems by Bernard Spencer, published in 1960 by the University of Reading. Lastly, there’s a book for work: Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals, which I plan to read when I’m having trouble sleeping…
Something else arrived a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d include it in this post because, well, because it’s damn cool. It’s the signed limited edition of Postscripts 20/21 ‘Edison’s Frankenstein’. It comes in a nice slipcase:
… which looks like this inside:
And here’s my story, ‘Killing the Dead’:
The first few paragraphs go like this:
Inspector Dante Arawn stepped out of his house, pulled the door carefully shut behind him, and looked up at the sky. The dark had spread. He had expected as much, but it still pained him to see it. Each day, the lit areas of the sky shrank. There was nothing to be done about it. Nothing, at least, for many decades yet. As the population aged and died, so the sky grew darker. It was a fact of… life.
Not everyone accepted that fact. Constable Amrit Supay waited impatiently beside a police cart in the lane for that very reason.
“What do we know?” asked Arawn. He clambered into the cart and settled into the passenger seat.
“South Green Necropolis, sir,” replied Supay. “Another dead body.”
“A bomb?”
“Yes, sir.”
By Jove!
Issue 28 of Jupiter SF is now available, containing another one of my Euripidean Space stories, ‘A Cold Dish’. Go on, you know you want a copy…
Fantasy Challenge #4: Colours in the Steel, KJ Parker
I just managed to squeeze this book into April so I am, for the time-being, back on track. Although, I have to admit, I’m starting to regret my choice of reading material for this year’s challenge. Probably because I’m asking too much of the books I selected.
Happily, April’s book, Colours in the Steel by KJ Parker, proved to be a good read. It’s Parker’s first novel, and the first book of the Fencer trilogy (followed by The Belly of the Bow and The Proof House). It was first published in 1998, but it doesn’t read like a fantasy that’s more than a decade old.
In the Triple City of Perimadeia, the outcome of court cases are determined by the two advocates fighting each other with swords, often to the death. Bardas Loredan is one such fencer-at-law, and the fact that he’s been practicing his profession for more than ten years indicates that he’s good at it. Temrai is the son of the chief of the plains people, Perimadeia’s on-and-off enemies, and he has come to the Triple City to make swords in its arsenal. Alexius is the city’s Patriarch, the head of the Order which studies the Principle, which is sort of like magic but much more like philosophy. Then there’s Venart and Vetriz, brother and sister traders from the Island, who keep on bumping into Loredan and Alexius…
Out of these characters, and a handful more, Parker sets up a chain of coincidences which eventually lead to the destruction of Perimadeia. While most plots are only fuelled by coincidence, in Colours in the Steel Parker has made the nature of the coincidences themselves a part of the plot. This all begins when Alexius tries to curse Loredan at the behest of a young woman. Which somehow drags Vetriz, who has a natural and unconscious ability in the Principle, into the story. The various cast-members keep on running into each other at fortuitously opportune moments, and they remark on it. Things seem to happen in just such a way as to lead to a specific outcome, and the characters discuss this. But they don’t know why it’s happening, or indeed how it’s happening. The explanation is, I assume, given later in the trilogy. It makes for an original alternative to the vague hints and snippets of back-history most secondary-world fantasies use to drive a series’ story-arc.
On the whole, Colours in the Steel is entertainingly-written. Admittedly, somewhere inside its 503 pages (in my Orbit paperback edition) there’s a 300-page novel fighting to get out. Parker has a tendency to go off on long discourses on subjects which do nothing to advance the plot, and little to flesh out the world. One example is a lecture given by the city’s Chief engineer to Temrai on the construction of trebuchets. True, he uses that knowledge later, but does the reader really need so much detail? And, to be honest, I was never entirely convinced by much of the detail Parker pours into Colours in the Steel. But it sounds plausible. There’s also a description of a typical courtyard in Perimadeia, where one of the characters is sitting, which stretches over several pages and in which nothing actually happens. There are other areas where the prose bogs down like this and the story is in danger of losing all the momentum it has built up to that point: Temrai explaining how he imagines the city cavalry will attack his army, for example; or Athli, Loredan’s clerk, comfort-shopping for stationery.
And yet the plot of the book is a little… odd. The more you read, the less you understand what’s driving the plot. The characters are the ones powering the story, but Parker keeps the engine itself hidden, revealing only hints and clues as the book progresses. For instance, the young woman who wants to curse Loredan – everyone conveniently forgets her name when they encounter her. This makes no sense, and feels whimsical. Even when her actual identity is revealed, knowing her name would have made no difference.
Despite the prolixity and the secretiveness at the heart of the plot, there’s an amusingly sly cynicism to Parker’s prose and world-building. This is perhaps best exemplified by Loredan’s “career” after being made commander-in-chief of Perimadeia’s defences – he’s alternately cast by the city’s leaders as hero, then traitor, then hero again, then traitor…
There’s no doubt that Colours in the Steel is the best of books I’ve so far read for this year’s reading challenge. And yes, if I see the remaining two books in the trilogy I’ll pick them up. I’d like to know how it all pans out. But even more than that, Colours in the Steel is Parker’s debut novel. She has written two more trilogies, and several other novels since. They can only be better than this one. I wouldn’t mind reading them, either.
DVD reviews
This month’s VideoVista is up with my reviews of 1960s UK potboiler Maroc 7
Doing the Hugos 1
I did this last year, so why not again this year? Once again, I’m not a member of the Worldcon, so I didn’t nominate any of the works which appear on the various shortlists, nor will I be able to vote on them. But the shortlists are public, many of the novellas, novelettes and short stories are available online to read, and I have opinions which I am happy to share.
First up, the short stories. These are stories of less than 7,500 words, previously published in the US or online in the preceding year. The 2010 shortlist looks like this (click on the titles to read each story):
‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ (PDF), Mike Resnick (Asimov’s December 2009)
Nope. I don’t get it. After John Kessel’s clever Austen / Frankenstein pastiche, ‘Pride and Prometheus’, appeared on last year’s Hugo novelette shortlist, this year we have another entry riffing on Frankenstein. But this time it’s a simplistic short story by Mike Resnick. The narrator is married to Victor Frankenstein, but it is not a loving marriage. But, with the help of the monster, Frankenstein’s wife undergoes a change of heart. It’s hard to know when the story’s set – the narrator is married to Victor Frankenstein, but complains the castle has no electricity. So not the early 1800s, then. It’s implied that Gone with the Wind has just been published, so the story could be set in the late 1930s. Except the narrator uses the term “family unit”. ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ works as a lightweight throwaway piece – and it’s a little better than last year’s dreadfully old-fashioned ‘Article of Faith’ – but are we seriously supposed to believe it’s one of the two best stories published in Asimov’s during 2009, and one of the five best stories published anywhere in 2009? I refuse to believe that science fiction is so moribund.
‘Bridesicle’ (PDF), Will McIntosh (Asimov’s January 2009)
In the future of this story, those who have died and been frozen are revived by lonely people looking for love. Which could be considered a neat commentary on immigrant brides. But McIntosh adds more. He makes his eponymous Mira gay, so even if a man does fall in love with her and pay for her to be brought back to life, she’s never going to return his sentiments. And, in this future, the personalities of dead people can be uploaded into living people’s minds – these are known as “hitchers”. Mira is woken at intervals over a couple of centuries, makes friends with a man who later admits he could never afford to revive her, and also learns that her lover is a corpsicle in the same facility. I wanted to like this story more than I did. It’s well-written – although one or two phrases were a tad too much: “her jaw squealed like a sea bird’s cry”, for example – and Mira is a well-drawn protagonist. But it feels too busy. Either the “bridesicle” idea or “hitchers” alone would be enough. Having both seems to me to weaken the story, and so it turns into a future romance. ‘Bridesicle’ is not an embarrassing choice for the shortlist, but it doesn’t feel strong enough to win a Hugo.
‘The Moment’, Lawrence M Schoen (Footprints, Hadley Rille Books)
I’ll admit to being surprised at seeing this on the shortlist. But only because it appeared in a themed anthology from a small press. I wouldn’t have thought such a book would have received a wide enough readership to generate enough nominations for one of its stories to be shortlisted. But it did. And the story is… Well, it’s not bad. It’s a series of linked vignettes, showing the history of the galaxy through visitors to a human footprint on the Moon. Given the last line of the story, I don’t think the footprint is meant to be Neil Armstrong’s (and, of course, the famous photograph was taken by Aldrin of his own bootprint), or indeed made by any of the Apollo astronauts. The story is a bit of smeerp overdose, full of silly made-up words. It’s also somewhat over-written. Having now read it, I’m still surprised to see it on the shortlist. I don’t actually think it’s good enough for an award.
‘Non-Zero Probabilities’, NK Jemisin (Clarkesworld September 2009)
This story is so much better than the preceding three that it feels like a much better story than I initially thought it was. In fact, prior to the Hugo nominations being announced last month, this and the Johnson story from Clarkesworld were the only two of the shortlist I’d actually read. Adele lives in a New York in which wildly improbably events – disasters, mostly – happen regularly. It’s a slice-of-life sort of story, with some lovely writing and a clever central conceit. It’s not the sort of genre fiction I normally choose to read, or enjoy all that much, so I wouldn’t have nominated it myself. But yes, it’s good enough to be on the shortlist.
‘Spar’, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld October 2009)
And you’d think this story would be the sort of genre fiction I would read since it has aliens and spaceships in it. But. It’s a mood piece. It has no rigour. It feels like a writing exercise, not a story. I didn’t like it when I first read it, I don’t like it on rereading it. And I can’t understand why it was nominated, never mind received enough nominations to make it onto the shortlist. Johnson, of course, was on the Hugo short story shortlist last year – for ’26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’ – so she clearly has her fans. I’m not one of them. Nor am I fan of the type of genre fiction she writes.
I thought last year’s Hugo shortlist for short stories was poor, and I’d hoped this year’s would be better. It isn’t. Two authors are back again – Resnick and Johnson – which only shows how incestuous the Hugo Awards are. I mean, there are a huge number of people writing genre short fiction, so I find it really sad that the same old names keep on appearing. This year, I think the Jemisin should win, with the McIntosh as runner-up. I expect the Johnson will win.
My take on the novelette shortlist will follow soon. It at least looks better than the above shortlist. Um, the same was true last year. Perhaps the best sf now being written is at novelette-length…
It Doesn't Have To Be Right... 