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Doing the Hugos, Part 3e

And finally we have the last of the novellas in this year’s Hugo shortlist: ‘True Names’ by Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum, first published in Fast Forward 2 (published by Pyr and edited by Lou Anders).

This one was a headache to read. If I hadn’t been writing this series of blog posts, I’d probably have given up. Which is not to say that ‘True Names’ is bad. I just found it very annoying. One of my pet hates is sf which appropriates the vocabulary of operating systems and networking (not to mention a bit of OO programming). It doesn’t work for me. It’s not a vocabulary designed for, or suited to, telling stories.

Stories set in virtual realities, whose viewpoint frequently pulls out of those realities, also don’t work for me. It’s not metafiction, it’s not post-modern in the way, say, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is post-modern. It’s not story, and the makings of story. It’s simply two nested narrative universes, with two different vocabularies. And, using those different vocabularies for essentially the same story often confuses. ‘True Names’ adds further confusion through having the point of view leap from character to character without signalling a transition, having multiple iterations of the same characters, and having new characters randomly introduced as the story progresses.

Of course, ‘True Names’ is supposed to be funny, it’s supposed to be gonzo. The references to Pride and Prejudice are clue enough. But I find it hard to find computing terminology witty – I’ve seen so much bad code during my career, I no longer find it amusing.

I wanted to like ‘True Names’. It uses a twenty-first century mode of science fiction. It is full of ideas and eyeball kicks and bits of sensawunda. But none of it is real. It’s all simulated or emulated. Except the level of reality which isn’t simulated or emulated… but the prose isn’t always entirely clear which level that is. Much of the plot is also carried by dialogue, which is a very twentieth century mode of science fiction. And there are lot of indigestible wodges of exposition; like this one:

The Beebean system of tav calculation was a corollary result from the work of classical mathematician and poet Albigromious, who first formulated the proof of the incalculability of the Solipsist’s Lemma.

There’s little doubt that ‘True Names’ is more sfnal, and more contemporary, than the Kress, the Finlay, and perhaps even the Reed. But it’s not as well written as the McDonald, and it’s certainly not as clearly written (McDonald’s ornate prose notwithstanding). ‘True Names’ felt too long, felt too forced in places, and for me ultimately didn’t work.


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Doing the Hugos, Part 3d

I was a bit busy last week, with four deadlines all landing on the last day of the month. So I didn’t get the chance to read, or write about, the next novella on the Hugo 2009 shortlist. Which is ‘The Tear’ by Ian McDonald. This was published in Galactic Empires, edited by Gardner Dozois and published by the Science Fiction Book Club.

I actually have a problem with stories from SFBC-published books being eligible for the Hugo Award. You have to be a member of the club to buy the book. It’s not freely available, it cannot be bought in your local Borders, Waterstone’s, Walden Books, or Internet retailer of choice. Hugo Awards should only be given to fiction which can be purchased or read by all.

Even more worrying, for a novella such as ‘The Tear’ to have been nominated, it suggests that SFBC members cast sufficient votes for it to appear on the shortlist. The intersection of Worldcon members and SFBC members must be therefore be disproportionately large. Or the number of nominations disproportionately small.

But that is all – for the moment – irrelevant. And, I suppose, somewhat ironic, given that ‘The Tear’ is best of the novellas I have so far read from the shortlist.

‘The Tear’ shares it setting with ‘Verthandi’s Ring’, McDonald’s story from 2007’s excellent The New Space Opera anthology. It is baroque space opera, full of big numbers, big vistas, and big ideas.

The water world of Tay has been visited by the 800 shatterships of the Anpreen Commonweal, post-humans who have taken the form of nano-motes. A human from Tay, Ptey, learns that the Anpreen are fleeing an enemy. And when that enemy appears on the outer edges of Tay’s planetary system, he leaves his world aboard one of the Anpreen shatterships. He returns alone millennia later to discover Tay has been incinerated. The story then takes an abrupt swerve as it explains the reason why the Anpreen were being hunted.

Looked at from a great height, ‘The Tear’ appears somewhat thin on plot. Ptey leaves, Ptey comes home again, Ptey works out why it all happened. It’s tempting to compare ‘The Tear’ to a painting by an Old Master, rich in colour and detail, but depicting only an old man sitting in a chair. Some have said there’s too much detail in it for a novella, that it would be better-suited to novel-length. I disagree: the story is the details…

Which in turn leads to ‘The Tear’s one major failing. McDonald has created so rich a background he can’t help but stop his plot every now and again and unload exposition on the reader. In that respect, ‘The Tear’ is even moreso heartland sf than it actually presents: it displays in full the unique vision of the genre, yet fails to overcome its greatest handicap.

In other words, ‘The Tear’ full of eyeball kicks. For instance, in the Anpreen shattership, Thirty Third Tranquil Abode, there is a waterfall: “Feet down to world-sea, head up to the roof, it was a true fall, a cylinder of falling water two hundred metres across and forty kilometres long.” This is not true of the other novellas I’ve read from the shortlist.

There’s also some lovely writing in it – “… the catboat ran fast and fresh on a sweet wind across the darkening water” on the very first page, for example. There is also writing which is somewhat over-ornamented, which only just manages to avoid falling flat on its face. But then that is McDonald’s skill as a writer: taking his prose to the edge of ostentation, and then pulling it back from the brink before it collapses into a jumbled heap of over-written prose.

‘The Tear’ is one of those stories which reminds you why you read science fiction. Not everything in it is convincing – not just the ideas on display, but also the dénouement – but it doesn’t matter. It is as big as the universe and full of fireworks-explosions of ideas, and that’s what good sf is.


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Doing the Hugos, Part 3c

Here’s the third of the novellas on the Hugo shortlist, ‘The Political Prisoner’ by Charles Coleman Finlay, from F&SF‘s August 2008 issue. This is the second time Finlay has been nominated for the Hugo – he was also on the shortlist in 2003 for ‘The Political Officer’, which was set in the same universe and featured the same protagonist.

Maxim Nikomedes is an officer in the Department for Political Education on the world of Jesusalem, which was settled by Plain Christians (some sort of back-to-basics fundamentalist Christians). Nikomedes is also an undercover agent for the Department of Intelligence. The latter stages a coup, and there is a purge against Political Education. Because Nikomedes’ cover is a political officer, he gets caught up in the purge and carted off to a “reclamation camp”. Where he has to survive forced labour until he’s rescued when someone from Intelligence figures out where he is.

I don’t get this story; I don’t get why it’s science fiction. Finlay might as well have set it in Nazi Germany. Or Stalinist Russia. Or any totalitarian regime which slaughtered great swathes of its population in the name of something or other. ‘The Political Prisoner’ may be set on another planet, and the forced labour is supposedly part of the terraforming required to make the world more habitable, but that’s as close as it gets to sf. Setting a story on another planet does not make it science fiction.

And when the third paragraph of the story has the protagonist looking at their reflection so the writer can describe their appearance to the reader… well, that doesn’t bode well. ‘The Political Prisoner’ then dives into paragraph after paragraph of back-history, some of which I’m guessing is the plot of ‘The Political Officer’. I’m all for “not starting the story at the beginning”, but if you have to go back and describe that beginning in the narrative, then you’ve done something wrong.

In my comments on Nancy Kress’s ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ (see here), I mentioned the open mechanism which drives science fiction stories. That mechanism is absent in ‘The Political Prisoner’. Its workings do not need to be laid bare because everything is on the surface. Nikomedes is in the wrong place at the wrong time, Nikomedes can’t reveal his secret affiliation, Nikomedes gets sent to a reclamation camp and his past experiences help him survive, Nikomedes gets rescued. There is no idea which needs to be explicated, no idea upon which the plot is carried, no idea with consequences which can be explored.

I’ve not read Finlay’s ‘The Political Officer’, but I can only imagine that those who liked it voted for ‘The Political Prisoner’. Because on its own, there’s nothing in it that’s strikes me as award-worthy. There are enough examples of one group of people horribly treating another in recent human history, without having to go to all the trouble of writing a science fiction novella on the subject. Especially since ‘The Political Prisoner’ doesn’t actually say anything insightful or worthwhile. Nikomedes survives several months in the reclamation camp, then the head of Intelligence turns up and rescues him. Nikomedes asks that the prisoners he had been bunked with, the ones who had been doing the hardest labour, are released. Because, he says, “There’s been enough killing.” Oh dear.

‘The Political Prisoner’ is definitely the weakest of the three novellas I’ve read so far. And, like the Kress, I can’t quite understand why it was nominated in the first place.


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Doing the Hugos, Part 3b

Next up is ‘Truth’ by Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008). I think I might have read this before, but since I don’t subscribe to Asimov’s, or buy copies of the magazine, it must have been online. And yet, as I became more convinced I’d read it before, I still couldn’t remember the ending.

Ramiro is a terrorist kept in a super-secret Gitmo in a Kansas salt mine. He is from 140 years in the future, and he travelled back in time as part of an army of 200 bent on conquering the world. He was caught in 2002 – the car he was driving skidded on black ice and crashed, and the police discovered Uranium-235 hidden under the car’s spare tyre. For twelve years he has been interrogated and imprisoned. As a result of the intelligence gained from him, the US invaded Iraq. And then Iran. Terrorists then set off nukes in the US. Now billions are dead. Ramiro’s original interrogator has committed suicide, and a new one – the narrator – has been sent to make sense of the suicide, and to finally break Ramiro….

I really wanted to like ‘Truth’ but the fact that I’d read it before, and forgotten it, bothered me. Surely a good novella, a Hugo-nominated novella, should be more, well, memorable? And there is plenty to like in it. The central premise is good, and the final twist on that premise is satisfying.

Unfortunately, the narrator is unlikeable – admittedly, she’s a torturer, so it’s not really fair to expect her to be sympathetic – but she’s also too obtuse. It feels like she’s withholding information from the reader simply in order to extend the story. The novella seems longer than it needs to be. I suspect this is partly in order to ramp up the effects of the “temporal jihadists”. The earth has to suffer increasingly worse attacks in order to set up the final pay-off.

‘Truth’ does have something important to say and I consider that a point in its favour. It makes clever use of recent history, commenting on both the invasion of Iraq and the US’s criminal use of torture. It feels a tiny bit out-of-date now that Obama is president, but of course it was originally published before the presidential election so it’s hard to hold that against it.

There’s little doubt in my mind that ‘Truth’ is better than ‘The Erdmann Nexus’, but I still can’t quite love it. Possibly because it feels too long for its contents.


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Doing the Hugos, Part 3a

I had intended to write a single post covering all of the novellas on the Hugo shortlist but, well, a novella is pretty much a short novel. So I’m going to split it into a post on each.

First up is ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008).

I quite like that branch of science fiction which uses the quotidian to explore the extraordinary. But it has to be done right. Sf operates using an open mechanism: the workings of its plot are visible to the reader. Unlike in a crime novel, which must hide those workings so that the final reveal is satisfying to the reader. So for sf, the explanation for the extraordinary has to be presented up front, and then the story should show – or ramp up – the consequences.

In ‘The Erdmann Nexus’, a group of residents at an old folks’ home have been experiencing odd “events”, moments of what seems to be merged consciousness. The story hops between those involved, one of the helpers, a neurological researcher working on a project at the home, and a pair of detectives investigating the mysterious death of the helper’s legally-separated husband. The search for an explanation is led by Henry Erdmann, one of residents, a brilliant physicist who now teaches at a nearby university. It is not until the end of the novella that the reader learns what the events were and what caused them.

Unfortunately, hiding the extraordinary’s explanation, and only revealing it at the end, doesn’t work because it makes for an uninvolving narrative. And, for all its many viewpoints, ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ is pretty dull. (For an example on how to do it properly, see Ted Kosmatka’s ‘Divining Light’.)

Kress throws in a framing narrative, describing a sentient spaceship approaching Earth, but it seems entirely gratuitous. The plot certainly doesn’t require it. And the mentions of split photons, quantum entanglement and emergent complexity just obfuscate. When an author holds the explanation close to their chest, it has to be a damned impressive explanation to redeem the story. Kress’s isn’t. We’ve seen it before, in both science fiction and fantasy. In that respect, it’s not very different, truth be told, to Mike Resnick’s terrible ‘Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders’ on the novelette shortlist (see here); and not just because both feature OAP characters.

The single-note characterisation in ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ doesn’t help either – gossipy granny, bible-basher, ex-ballerina who pines for her past, blue-collar retiree out of his depth…. And detective Geraci – Kress might as well have named him Goren since he’s plainly based on Vince D’Onofrio’s character in Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Kress has appeared on Hugo ballots an impressive number of times – 11 nominations and one win, according to the Locus Index to SF Awards. This should not have been one of them. I have to wonder if it was another choice driven by nostalgia….


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Doing the Hugos – an update

Asimov’s have finally put their Hugo nominated story and novellas on their web site. So here’s my thoughts on:

‘From Babel’s Fallen Glory We Fled’, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
An interesting story. I can’t decide if it’s taking the piss or a little bit lazy. The meta-fictional framing feels like an afterthought, and the typographical tricks for the alien’s speech feel like Swanwick is having a sly laugh at his readers. There are some nice ideas in the story, but it feels too thin a treatment, as if it should have been longer and more detailed. It’s a great deal better than Resnick’s story, and not as inconsequential as the Kowal, but the Chiang and Johnson still have it beat.

As four of the five novellas are now available, I’ll work my way through those. It might take a while – they’re the longest of the “short” lengths, as long as an old-style novel in fact. Sadly, the missing novella is the one I really wanted to read. For the record, the shortlist is as follows:

The Erdmann Nexus’, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
‘The Political Prisoner’, Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008)
‘The Tear’, Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
‘True Names’, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)
‘Truth’, Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)

Incidentally, a point of order. Mike Resnick’s ‘Article of Faith’ was first published in Postscripts #15 in September 2008. According to the Hugo shortlist, it was published in Jim Baen’s Universe in October 2008. But that would be a reprint. At the very least, the Hugo committee should correctly attribute the magazine in which the story was first published.


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Doing the Hugos – an interlude

I was planning to read and write about the novellas on this year’s Hugo shortlist. But only two of the five are currently available online, so there isn’t much point at this time. Asimov’s are being a bit crap for some reason – the Swanwick is still unavailable, as are two of the novellas. Of the novelettes which were originally published in Asimov’s, one has been posted online because it’s on the Nebula shortlist, another is on the author’s web site, and the third only appears to be up as a sample of the magazine’s 2009 contents….

I suppose I could have a go at the other Hugo categories. But I’ve not read any of the Best Related Books, nor the Best Graphic Story.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form…. I have seen The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Iron Man and WALL-E, but not listened to METAtropolis. I’d sooner the Hugo went to something that was, well, you know, science fiction or fantasy. Not a superhero film. So that means WALL-E, I suppose; which I thought quite good, if a little inconsequential. Were there no good genre films in 2008? Apparently yes – see Jonathan McAlmont’s “Alternative Hugos for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form” on Blasphemous Geometries.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form…. Don’t watch Lost, not seen season 4 of Battlestar Galactica (I’ll wait for the DVD), not much of a Whedon fan so I gave the Dr Horrible thingymabob a miss… and then there are the two Dr Who episodes. I remember the two-parter ‘Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead’ having some good bits but being somewhat over-egged. ‘Turn Left’ was, I thought, better. Both were probably the best stories of series 4.


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Doing the Hugos, Part 2

Now it’s the turn of the novelettes. The Hugo Award for Best Novelette is “awarded for a science fiction or fantasy story of between seven thousand five hundred (7,500) and seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) words”. This year’s shortlist looks like this:

‘Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders’ by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s Jan 2008)
Sigh. Another Resnick. He’s one of those authors who regularly appears on the Hugo and Nebula shortlists, but I can’t for the life of me understand why. Clearly he’s popular, but when an award is given for the “best” of a category that’s what I expect it to be. This is a tired old Crumbly Fantasy – two old codgers reminisce about a magic shop they used to frequent as kids. They go looking for it and – big surprise – they find it and…. I think people have been writing variations on this deal-with-the-devil / youth-regained story since Poe. Its appearance on this shortlist is, well, baffling….

‘The Gambler’ by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
At least this is 21st Century science fiction. It’s also very good, with a clever extrapolation of some aspects of current technology. But, more than that, it’s relevant. It’s about our world and our future. It’s not some rosy-tinted reminiscence about the dead past. Science fiction is neither predictive nor didactic, but it should certainly look forward. This novelette does exactly that. And it’s very well-written. It belongs on the shortlist.

‘Pride and Prometheus’ by John Kessel (F&SF Jan 2008)
This one is very good, this one I like. Austen meets Shelley; one of the Bennetts meets Victor Frankenstein. The Pride and Prejudice pastiche is not pitch-perfect (ugh, too much alliteration), although the modern cadences do make it a more contemporary read. And the ending is rushed. But the writing is very good, and Kessel captures the flavour of Regency England quite well. (I’m not so convinced Mary Bennett would have been quite so willing to meet privately with the various men, but that’s a minor quibble.) Frankenstein is a bit wet, but the monster is handled well. Perhaps the story’s impact has been a little spoiled by the recent publicity for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but never mind.

‘The Ray-Gun: A Love Story’ by James Alan Gardner (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
There’s something a little old-fashioned about this novelette too – its style rather than its subject. A boy finds a ray-gun, it changes his life; but not in the way you’d expect a ray-gun to do so. He could have found a leprechaun’s hat or a magic dog turd, it would not have substantially changed this story. Which does make you wonder what the point is. It’s well-written and very engaging, but it’s a little worrying to have so many stories driven by nostalgia on the shortlist this year.

‘Shoggoths in Bloom’ by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)
I wanted to dislike this story. There seemed to be too much in it – 1930s race relations, Nazi persecution of Jews, WWI, and a sudden swerve towards slavery at the end – and I couldn’t decide if the central conceit, the shoggoths, was cleverly done or mishandled. I’m still not sure. But the story grew on me, and by the end of it I did think it was quite good. Not as good as the Kessel or the Bacigalupi, but better than the Gardner.

Definitely a stronger category than short stories. While I prefer stories with a more literary treatment of science fiction tropes, I’d sooner there had been such treatments of tropes closer to the heartland of the genre. You know, like spaceships, or aliens, or AIs, etc. Perhaps that’s because three of the five are from Asimov’s. More variety – in subject, style and source – would have been better, but this is a (mostly) not embarrassing shortlist.

Novellas to follow soon.


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Doing the Hugos, Part 1

First, I have to confess I won’t be attending the Worldcon in Montreal, nor am I a supporting member. So I didn’t nominate the shortlisted titles, nor will I be voting on them. Nonetheless, I have decided to read the shortlisted novellas, novelettes and short stories, and give my thoughts on them.

So. Short stories first….

’26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’ by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Jul 2008)
While this is clearly a good story, it’s not the sort of genre fiction I normally enjoy. The premise is whimsical, the treatment is whimsical, and I’m not a big fan of whimsy. Nevertheless, it’s one of the stronger stories on the shortlist.

‘Article of Faith’ by Mike Resnick (Baen’s Universe Oct 2008)
I thought this was appalling: dated, dull, and wholly predictable. A new robot joins the staff of a small-town church and ends up wanting to worship. Cue arguments on whether robots have souls. Yawn. And who writes stories featuring these sorts of silly pulp sf robots – because, let’s face it, if the robot is a stand-in for a foreigner, i.e., not-one-of-us, then why not actually use a foreigner and give the story more impact?

‘Evil Robot Monkey’ by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2)
What is this? The Year of the Monkey? Er no, it’s actually the Year of the Ox. But the story. The title is a silly joke – the monkey in the story is a live Chimpanzee. A “smart” chimp, in fact. Who makes pots out of clay. The story is around four pages long in the mass market paperback Solaris anthology. It is mildly amusing and mostly inconsequential. It’s not even the best story in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2.

‘Exhalation’ by Ted Chiang (Eclipse 2)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Chiang is one of the best writers of short science fiction currently being published. Which means every Chiang story is not only judged against all others published around the same time but against every other Chiang story. Which does him no favours. Especially in this case. ‘Exhalation’ is pretty much a thought experiment, with very little in the way of plot. It’s well-written, but it failed for me in several aspects. It lectures the reader… and the explanation for this doesn’t quite justify the up-front info-dumping. Further, the central premise isn’t actually that interesting, and all the story does is provide a slow and cumbersome vehicle for the narrator to figure out that entropy exists.

‘From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled’ by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
This story is not yet available online, and I don’t subscribe to Asimov’s.

It is, overall, quite a poor selection of short stories, and I find it hard to believe they were the best last year had to offer. While I wouldn’t have nominated Kij Johnson’s, it’s clearly the strongest of the bunch. Having said that, I’ve yet to read the Swanwick, so perhaps I should reserve judgment until I have done. All the same, the Chiang is a bit dull, the Kowal is inconsequential, and the Resnick is embarrassingly bad.

Now to read the novelettes….