Aaron's Take on the 2012 Hugo Nominees :: SHORT STORIES

Kudos to the folks nominating for the Hugo Awards this year. All of this year's Hugo-nominated short stories are well written, and the nominees include my two favorite short stories of 2011, either of which would be a most deserving winner.

Working my way up, "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu features some beautifully constructed sentences, which are especially impressive from such a young author. But I confess I reached the end without understanding the point of the exercise. The fault may be mine as a reader, but people who nominated this piece for the Hugo plainly got something out of it that I missed.

John Scalzi's "The Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue" is a very funny parody (and I believe Scalzi ties Connie Willis for most colons in a Hugo-nominated title). I particularly love the first three sentences. I don't begrudge the story's nomination—it's not easy to write something this funny—but to me there's not enough substance for this one to win the award.

"The Homecoming" by Mike Resnick is a strong tale of a father's reunion with his son, who is estranged in more than one sense. The father-son dynamic put me strongly in mind of Resnick's story "One Perfect Morning, with Jackals," which received a well-deserved Hugo nomination in 1991.

That brings us to my two favorite short stories of 2011, and I'd be happy if they tied and both won the award. Forced to pick one, I'm going to make Ken Liu's "The Paper Menagerie" my #2 choice. The story is simple yet moving, presenting basic themes—an immigrant's alienation; how children often don't appreciate their parents until they're gone—in an original and powerful way. Great work by a fellow Writers of the Future winner.

My personal favorite short story of 2011 (and it was from the time it first came out) is "Movement" by Nancy Fulda. Like "The Paper Menagerie," this is a powerful and moving tale, with the added element that it successfully tells the story from a nearly-alien point of view. Most impressively, Fulda uses her protagonist's condition to craft the story's sad and poignant ending. This is a unique and outstanding piece.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Short Story
1. Nancy Fulda - Movement
2. Ken Liu - The Paper Menagerie
3. Mike Resnick - The Homecoming
4. John Scalzi - Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue
5. E. Lily Yu - The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees

Aaron's Take on the 2010 Hugo Nominees :: NOVELLAS

Best novella is a strong category this year. Even though this is certainly the fiction category with the fewest eligible works published, the voters managed to find six worthy nominees. All of the nominees will have their supporters——several of the nominated authors are popular with the Hugo voters, plus Kage Baker will have a sympathy vote due to her untimely death——but my guess is John Scalzi will win a Hugo for the third straight year, his first in a fiction category.

Kage Baker's "The Women of Nell Gwynne's," a steampunk mystery with a group of prostitute/spies as lead characters, is mostly light entertainment but does have an appropriately dark edge when showing us why some of our heroines would choose this life. The tale features some wonderful dialogue and is great fun to read, but the whodunit does not satisfy and the story feels less complete than the other nominees. My guess is "The Women of Nell Gwynne's" was meant as the first in a series of stories about these remarkable ladies——see for instance my recommendation for The Bohemian Astrobleme——which sadly will now never be completed.

"Palimpsest" by Charles Stross is a time travel story on a very large scale. While it begins with the cliché of a time traveler killing his own grandfather, the tale quickly moves on to grander and more original issues about the fate of humanity over the next billions, even trillions, of years. The folks directing human destiny control time travel technology, although oddly their grand plans mostly involve moving planets around, not time travel. Stross throws plenty of interesting ideas at us, but fails to include strong enough characters to provide the emotional hook to carry us through this type of Stapledonian epic. The main character has very little personality, and his two girlfriends have none at all.

"Act One" by Nancy Kress, a former story recommendation of the week, explores the morality of an attempt to impose genetic modifications on humanity to give everyone a greater sense of empathy. This is a near-future story on a much smaller scale than "Palimpsest," but the superior characterization makes "Act One" more successful overall.

James Morrow is the best satirist in our field, and one of the two best ever along with John Sladek. "Shambling Towards Hiroshima" exemplifies his trademark dry humor. The protagonist is a Boris Karloff-style creature-feature actor, called on during World War II to give the Japanese a demonstation of the damage that will be inflicted, if they don't surrender, by a fearsome weapon the United States has developed: monstrous fire-breathing lizards. Morrow has great fun writing of the B-movie culture of 1940's Hollywood, but he doesn't quite manage to combine this with his serious point as seamlessly as in his best work. The goofy monster movie material takes over the story, while the endnote as to the morality of weapons of mass destruction feels tacked on.

Ian McDonald's "Vishnu at the Cat Circus" is the fascinating life story of a genetically engineered slow-aging super-genius who was instrumental, along with his unmodified brother, in the radical transformation of India. In contrast to "The Women of Nell Gwynne's," which suffered because it felt like the opening chapter of a larger unfinished work, "Vishnu at the Cat Circus" is impressive because it stands alone very well yet also is a terrific capstone to Ian McDonald's series of stories (as well as the novel River of Gods) set in a future India.

While all the nominees in this category are very good, my favorite is John Scalzi's "The God Engines," the thought-provoking story of Ean Tephe, captain of a starship powered by an enslaved god, captured and harnessed by the god Tephe worships. Not surprisingly, Tephe comes to doubt his faith in his own god, but from there matters do not play out as you might expect. The tale is an interesting blend of science fiction, fantasy, and horror elements.

John Scalzi has emerged in the past five years as one of the field's most capable authors, but at times he relies too heavily on snappy dialogue, rather than attempting something with more depth and emotional impact. "The God Engines" is thus a breakthrough work for him. Scalzi sets aside his usual sardonic humor in favor of original, intricate world-building and a compelling protagonist caught in the teeth of a dilemma from which there may be no way out. All of Scalzi's fiction is entertaining, but "The God Engines" is his best yet.

Aaron's Ballot for Best Novella
1. John Scalzi - The God Engines
2. Ian McDonald - Vishnu at the Cat Circus
3. James Morrow - Shambling Towards Hiroshima
4. Nancy Kress - Act One
5. Charles Stross - Palimpsest
6. Kage Baker - The Women of Nell Gwynne's

Aaron's Take on the 2008 Hugo Nominees :: NOVELS

Of the five novels nominated for this year’s Hugo, one is easily my favorite, one is far-and-away the worst, and the other three are difficult to rank.

Starting with the good news, I thoroughly enjoyed The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. For me, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union worked on every level. It is an excellent alternate history, cleverly following through on the implications of a single alteration of history – that the Jews who settled in Israel after World War II were driven off and relocated in Alaska – while at the same time using that variation on history to illuminate aspects of human nature and Jewish culture. The novel also works well as a murder mystery. Most importantly, it is an outstanding character study of Meyer Landsman, the detective seeking to solve the central mystery. Based entirely on the novel’s own merits, I would love to see The Yiddish Policemen’s Union win the Hugo Award. The fact that the author is a Pulitzer Prize winner yet would actually be pleased to win a Hugo is merely a nice bonus.

Moving to the bottom of the list, sometimes a singer writes a song that requires a voice stronger than his own, and he would be better off handing the song off to someone else to perform. That is what happened to Robert Sawyer with Rollback. In Rollback, an octogenarian couple undergoes rejuvenation therapy, but it only works for the husband, so he is suddenly sixty years younger than his wife physically. This would make for a heart-wrenching story, in the hands of a writer skilled in conveying complex human emotions. Robert Sawyer is not. His strength is scientific speculation, not human drama. His dialogue is wooden and dull, his characters so one-dimensional that it is obvious even Sawyer does not conceive of them as real people. Then again, perhaps it is best that the protagonist is such a non-believable character, otherwise I would have been very annoyed with him for moping through most of the novel over his terrible misfortune of being given an extra sixty years of life. A further disappointment with Rollback is that Sawyer's future year 2048 is terribly unimaginative, indistinguishable from the present day but for a few housecleaning robots and passing references to the weather being a little warmer than it used to be. Nothing else has changed, or if it has, the main characters are oblivious to it. They go around quoting Seinfeld and Star Trek and Lost in Space, but never make a reference to anything past the turn of the century. I hate to think that there are any people, even at the age of 87, so detached from the world around them; if there are, you wouldn't want to make them the viewpoint characters of a futuristic science fiction novel.

Ranking the remaining three novels is a close call for me. In the end, I’m going with Halting State by Charles Stross as my second choice, because it is successful as entertainment but also has something interesting to say. Halting State starts with a premise that sounds silly, the investigation of a crime that occurred within an on-line role-playing game. But the novel goes at it with such gusto that I found myself drawn in completely, and was easily able to suspend my disbelief even when the initial crime broadens into intrigue and espionage of global import. The novel is fun to read, and (in sharp contrast to Rollback) also has a lot of interesting speculation and commentary on our near future.

For me, the remaining two nominees suffered from opposite deficiencies. Ian McDonald’s Brasyl is an interesting novel. I like the concept of a science fiction novel about Brazil, alternating between past, present, and future timelines, interconnected through the device of quantum physics. Yet I found Brasyl rather difficult to get into. It takes the story too long to get moving, and the writing style of the present and future threads is off-putting. The entire novel is loaded with Portuguese terminology and the present and future scenes add an ultra-hip sensibility that I gather is meant to convey the feel of Brazilian culture, but for me made the novel too difficult to read.

Conversely, John Scalzi’s The Last Colony, about efforts to establish a new human outpost on a faraway world, is easy to read and quite entertaining but rather less ambitious than the other nominated novels. It is the third in Scalzi’s series begun with Old Man’s War, and suffers from Scalzi's determination to resolve various loose threads from the previous two volumes. The story does not present its individual characters with the kind of internal conflicts that were a strength of the prior novels (for example, Jared Dirac's identity crisis in The Ghost Brigades). The Last Colony has an enjoyably fast pace and some snappy dialogue, but a bit less to say than the earlier two Old Man books, notwithstanding all the galactic politics that come into play in the second half of the novel. Scalzi has a strong following and will surely get more shots at the Hugo; I would like to see him win it for a work with more depth.

Aaron's Ballot:
1. Michael Chabon – The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
2. Charles Stross – Halting State
3. Ian McDonald – Brasyl
4. John Scalzi – The Last Colony
5. Robert J. Sawyer – Rollback