Battle of the Books, Spring 2012, Championship Round :: The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod vs. The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner

The championship of the Spring 2012 Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books comes down to The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod against The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner. For the finals, I've read through page 200 of both books, and our winner will be the book I most want to read to the end.

The Night Sessions: Pyr trade paperback, April 2012, 261 pages, cover art by Stephan Martiniere. Ken MacLeod is a four-time Hugo nominee among other honors, including a 2009 British Science Fiction Award for The Night Sessions, when it was originally published in England. The Night Sessions was one of our four seeded books for the Spring Battle of the Books. To make the finals, it defeated The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees in the first round then Simon Bestwick's The Faceless in the second round and finally Hell Train by Christopher Fowler in the semifinals.

The Night Sessions is set in a future where Western governments have all become strictly secular, as a reaction to the bloody "Faith Wars," and surviving organized religions are barely tolerated. The story centers on the investigation by Scottish Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson and his leki (robot) assistant of the murders of two Catholic priests, possibly victims of a terrorist conspiracy. We also get glimpses of J.R. Campbell, a Christian fundamentalist from New Zealand, who works with humanoid robots (as opposed to the mechanical-looking lekis), which seem to have some connection to the criminal conspiracy Ferguson is investigating.

The Man from Primrose Lane: Farrar Straus & Giroux hardcover, March 2012, 365 pages, cover photo by Michael Lewis. James Renner is a true-crime writer, making his debut as a novelist with The Man from Primrose Lane. It got here by beating Weston Ochse's Blood Ocean in the first round, then pulling two straight upsets over seeded books, Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon in the second round and The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus in the semifinals. Renner will need to defy the oddsmakers a third time in the finals to win the championship.

The hero of The Man from Primrose Lane is crime writer David Neff, a single father after his wife's suicide, who is investigating the murder of the reclusive Man from Primrose Lane (the "MFPL"). In a series of seemingly bizarre coincidences, we learn that years earlier the MFPL saved David's wife Elizabeth from abduction as a child (but he couldn't save Elizabeth's twin sister) and he also once saved David's current romantic interest Katy, whom the MFPL had been following obsessively until his death. Even more unlikely, David's fame and fortune came from his previous cold case investigation of another child abduction, and now David himself has become the main suspect in the police investigation of the death of the MFPL. And yes, the book also has science fiction, fantasy, and horror elements. We'll get to that.

The Battle: I've often compared the Battle of the Books to the March Madness basketball tournament. I meant that we set the Battle up in a bracket format like the NCAA Tournament. I didn't realize until this championship match how apt the comparison really is. In this championship battle, The Night Sessions pulled out to a comfortable lead, only to see The Man from Primrose Lane make a spirited late comeback, culminating in a desperate long shot at the buzzer. The shot is up, it'll count if it goes, does it have the distance? . . .

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Through page 200, The Night Sessions continues to be a solid, well-executed near-future science fiction mystery. Giving the protagonist detective a robot sidekick invites comparisons to The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, and if this book isn't quite as memorable as Asimov at his best, it's not far off. The mystery is handled well, there's plenty of cool near-future techy furniture, and MacLeod does a nice job of thinking through the implications and difficulties of the transition from a religious to a secular society. The crowning touch is the artificially intelligent robots, who are most interesting and, to my tastes, very funny.

So I resumed The Man from Primrose Lane at page 100, with the bar set high. But MacLeod left one opening for James Renner: The Night Sessions does not feature characterization as strong as that in the first 100 pages of The Man from Primrose Lane. So what happened when I read through page 200 of Renner's book?

The tricky part of writing a cross-genre book is that you have different audiences with different expectations and backgrounds. Early in the second hundred pages of The Man from Primrose Lane, Renner brings in a science fictional element that I think most science fiction readers will find disappointing. But then right at the close of the first 200 pages, he hits us with another SF/F story element that works very well. Whatever your usual reading tastes, this is good stuff.

To explain further, I'll have to discuss some of these plot twists. If you trust my recommendation and plan to read The Man from Primrose Lane, you may prefer to skip below to "END SPOILERS." Science fiction readers can probably safely pass through my first spoiler alert. But continue through the double-spoiler alert at your own peril.

********************SPOILER ALERT********************

The Man from Primrose Lane sets up a number of strange, seemingly inexplicable mysteries, including who was the peculiar Man from Primrose Lane, why did he always wear mittens, and why are there so many connections between the MFPL and our protagonist David, his late wife Elizabeth, and his current girlfriend Katy?

Then at pages 109-128, we get two short scenes that, unintentionally I think, give away the answers to all these questions to most SF fans. One is a passing reference to David interviewing a physicist doing work that would allow objects to pass backwards through time. The other is a scene with a kid in 1985 who sees a strange frog-creature. The scene ends with the line, "He should have blamed a writer named David Neff." But David Neff was himself a little kid at that time, not yet a writer.

Perhaps mystery and mainstream readers won't make much out of these bits, but I think most science fiction fans will instantly know they are reading a time travel story. The MFPL is an older, time traveling David Neff, and that's why he appears out of nowhere to protect the women he will later love (dunno if Renner will try to explain the paradoxes). And by the way, time travel causes some sort of genetic reversion that makes you look like a giant frog at first, and later you'll have to wear mittens to conceal your webbed fingers. (Incidentally, I'm still at page 200, so I don't know if that's all correct, but I will be shocked and will post a sheepish update here if it isn't.)

It is still possible to write a fresh time travel story (I took a stab at it myself, with my story "Random Fire" in Abyss & Apex), but it's not possible to impress science fiction readers by the mere fact that strange happenings are explained by time travel. For Renner to construct his mysteries around this device is like a magician using his impressive stage presence to build up to the final trick of . . . pulling a rabbit out of his hat. It's cool only if you've never seen a magic show before.

So even though The Man from Primrose Lane is well written, with powerful characterization, I read most of the second hundred pages feeling disappointed. After 150 pages, The Night Sessions was going to win this battle. Even after 200 pages, The Night Sessions was going to win. But 200 pages ended in the middle of a scene, and the Battle of the Books rules allow me to finish the scene. And all my perceptions changed.

***************DOUBLE-SPOILER ALERT*****************

Much of the second hundred pages of The Man from Primrose Lane consists of flashbacks to the past, when David became obsessed with his investigation of past child abductions and murders, so obsessed that he starts to imagine the voice of one of the pedophiles in his head. Meanwhile, in present-day scenes, David is battling through withdrawal, because for the first time since Elizabeth died he has stopped taking his medication for depression.

Right at 200 pages we get a flashback that I won't reveal except to say it makes us realize that voice in David's head is not imagined—it is a real, evil presence, which is behind a lot of what's been going on, and which now has designs on Elizabeth. Maybe some horror readers guessed that while I was still assuming the voice in David's head was imaginary, but didn't get the time travel part of the story when I did.

Suddenly I don't mind figuring out one aspect of the story early on, when another aspect completely blind-sided me. And that new aspect immediately adds a layer of irony to much of what's happened. For example, I assumed David started taking his medication after Elizabeth died, but now realize he took it before she died, to try to control what he thinks is his own dark side. Yet sadly she ended up committing suicide anyway, or at least, so we've been told . . .

Now I'm right back in the saddle with this story, and it's a story that was already peopled with compelling characters.

********************END SPOILERS*********************

I find The Night Sessions very interesting intellectually, but The Man from Primrose Lane is the story I care about on an emotional level. No way would I willingly put it down.

THE WINNER: THE MAN FROM PRIMROSE LANE by James Renner

Congratulations to James Renner, who becomes our second Battle of the Books winner, after Elizabeth Bear. We will feature The Man from Primrose Lane in a full review at Fantastic Reviews, and we will also try to arrange an interview with Renner.

Stay tuned for the Summer Bracket of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books, which we will announce in the next few days. I (Aaron) will hand off the judging for that one to my fellow Fantastic Reviewer Amy, and then I will return for the following bracket.

Battle of the Books, Spring 2012, First Semifinal :: Hell Train by Christopher Fowler vs. The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

The first semifinal of the Spring 2012 Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books matches Hell Train by Christopher Fowler against The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod. The book I most want to continue reading after 100 pages will advance to the championship round.

Hell Train: Solaris paperback, January 2012, 319 pages, cover art by Graham Humphreys. Five-time British Fantasy Award winner Christopher Fowler has written some thirty books, most of them horror or mystery. Hell Train got to the semifinals with wins over Greatshadow by James Maxey in the first round and Tempest by Julie Cross in the second round.

After an initial scene in 1966, in which a screenwriter is asked to write a new horror movie for Hammer Films involving a train, the story of Hell Train has settled into a World War I setting. British con artist Nicholas Castleford has persuaded Isabella, an Eastern European beauty, to run away with him, and they have escaped the locals on an ominous train. Also catching the train are an English vicar and his shrewish wife (I can say "shrewish" without fear of being accused of gender bias, since Fowler actually describes her with that word), a fortune-telling countess, and a young man wracked with guilt over his role in the start of the Great War.

The Night Sessions: Pyr trade paperback, April 2012, 261 pages, cover art by Stephan Martiniere. Ken MacLeod is a four-time Hugo nominee among many other honors, and The Night Sessions won the 2009 British Science Fiction Award for best novel. The Night Sessions reached the second round of the Battle of the Books by defeating The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees in the first round and Simon Bestwick's The Faceless in the second round.

The Night Sessions is set in a future where the bitter "Faith Wars" have turned most folks in the West against organized religion. While much of the first 50 pages followed J.R. Campbell, a Christian fundamentalist from New Zealand, pages 51-100 exclusively track Scottish Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson and his leki assistant (the robot on the cover) as they investigate the murders of two Catholic priests. They collar a suspect, but the clues against the man are so obvious—he delivered the package containing the bomb that killed the first priest, and he was spotted with a rifle in the area where the second priest was shot—that anyone who has read many mysteries must doubt he's the real culprit.

The Battle: These two books are a hoot, and based on the first 100 pages, I strongly recommend them both. Each delivers exactly what it promises to readers. This battle will come down to which book adds an extra unexpected element.

Hell Train is a pitch-perfect literary homage to the Hammer Studios horror films of the 1950s and '60s. I'm not sure yet if Peter Cushing should play the rogue Nicholas, but the train's conductor is all Christopher Lee:

The figure slowly turned to stare at him, as he might peer at an insect. He had a pair of lethal-looking silver clippers in his right hand. 'I am the Conductor of the Arkangel,' he replied in perfect English. He was as pale as ivory. The low timbre of his voice resonated from somewhere deep and far away. Although deeply set in the caves of his skull, his shining black eyes missed no detail.

'Well, what is our destination?' asked Nicholas sharply.

'That must depend on you.'

'Perhaps you didn't understand the question. Where does the train terminate?'

'We need to stay on board until we cross the border,' asked Isabella. 'Is that possible?'

'You will finally come upon a border, yes.'

Hell Train isn't all that frightening so far, but the mood of the piece is just right.

Meanwhile, The Night Sessions presents a most interesting future in which there has been a backlash against organized religion. Many science fiction novels assume that society will move away from religion in the future, but fail to consider the turmoil that shift would entail. MacLeod does a wonderful job of showing the uneasy new equilibrium in his secular future. What's more, the murders of two of the remaining Catholic priests suggest that some of the anti-religious forces are just as fanatical and intolerant as any religious fundamentalist. All this is presented in a future with interesting extrapolations of current political and technological trends. Very nice near-future SF from one of the top writers in the field.

So what's the tie-breaking extra element? I absolutely love the artificially intelligent robots in The Night Sessions. Piltdown, the humanoid robot stuck playing an ape-man in a creationist park, was a star of the first 50 pages, and now in the second 50 pages, we start to see the personality of Skulk, Detective Ferguson's tripedal leki assistant, as in this scene where he analyzes some threatening anti-Catholic literature:

". . . Taken together, the broadsides are—to use an old term—a fatwa, a legal ruling by a competent religious scholar. Consequently, if we were to find someone who did accept these premises we would have a prima facie suspect."

"Sometimes," said Ferguson, "I suspect the expression 'No shit, Sherlock' was coined with lekis in mind."

"It was not," said Skulk. "The earliest examples of the usage pre-date—"

"I was joking," Ferguson interrupted.

"So was I," said Skulk. "I appreciate your humour." 

His robots' dry wit put MacLeod over the top.

THE WINNER: THE NIGHT SESSIONS by Ken MacLeod

The Night Sessions advances to the championship match, where it will face either The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus or The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Spring 2012 :: Final Four

We are down to the Final Four in the Spring 2012 Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books:

Hell Train by Christopher Fowler vs. The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus vs. The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner

We will announce the Christopher Fowler / Ken MacLeod winner on Thursday, the Ben Marcus / James Renner contest on Saturday, then crown a champion next week.

Once again the bracket as a whole has contained a great many interesting and well-written books, with not many clunkers. In some cases I've felt guilty about having to drop good books after only 25 or 50 pages, but the upside is we've gotten to help spread the word about many more new books than I could possibly have reviewed under our old format.

Three of the four "seeded" books made it to the Final Four; the only upset was James Renner over Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon. I am a bit surprised that two of the four semifinalists, Renner and Ben Marcus, are not genre names—I sometimes think I have a prejudice against mainstream writers dabbling in our genre, but it hasn't manifested in the Spring Battle of the Books.

Thanks again to all the authors and publicists sending us great books to consider. If you're an author or publicist, click here for the rules and an address to send your book if you'd like to be included in a future bracket.

We have had a tremendous response to the Battle of the Books format; indeed, we seriously need to pick up our pace over the next couple months—we already have enough new books to fill out three more brackets! My fellow Fantastic Reviewer Amy has offered to start judging some contests to help us catch up.

Everybody remember to check back here over the next week for the Final Four results!

Battle of the Books, Spring 2012, Second Round :: The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod vs. The Faceless by Simon Bestwick

We continue the second round of the Spring 2012 Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books with The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod versus The Faceless by Simon Bestwick. The book I most want to continue reading after 50 pages will move on to the semifinals.

The Night Sessions: Pyr trade paperback, April 2012, 261 pages, cover art by Stephan Martiniere. Ken MacLeod is a four-time Hugo nominee among many other honors, and The Night Sessions won the 2009 British Science Fiction Award for best novel. The Night Sessions reached the second round of the Battle of the Books by defeating The Demi-Monde:Winter by Rod Rees in the first round.

The first 25 pages of The Night Sessions introduced us to J.R. Campbell, a Christian fundamentalist from New Zealand, in a future when Western governments have turned very solidly secular after the devastating "Faith Wars." In the next 25 pages, we see Campbell tending to the intelligent robots in a creationist park. Meanwhile, in Scotland, Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson and his robot sidekick lead the investiation of an apparent terrorist bombing that killed a Catholic priest. We've also briefly met Dave Warsaw, a night club disk jockey who combines music with virtual reality imagery.

The Faceless: Solaris paperback, February 2012, 470 pages, cover art by Luke Preece. Simon Bestwick is a horror and crime fiction author who has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. The Faceless got here with a first round win over Shadow's Master by Jon Sprunk.

The Faceless is set in northwest England, where strange masked figures are wreaking havoc. In the first 25 pages, Anna Mason was left to care for her young niece after the mysterious figures killed her sister-in-law, leaving her brother severely depressed. Anna had her own bout of mental illness years earlier, during which she saw the same (imaginary, she thought) masked figures. Much of the next 25 pages follow Detective Chief Inspector Joan Renwick, who is investigating a series of disappearances, which she hasn't yet connected to the masked people. Several short flashbacks suggest that all this is somehow related to men who were badly injured in World War I.

The Battle: We have here two well-written novels, both of which are engaging from the outset. I have nothing the least bit negative to say about either, but the Battle of the Books forces me to choose only one to continue, so which one do I like that little bit more?

I like each book's central concept. They both involve police investigations related to an interesting genre premise. I enjoy a good creepy story, and The Faceless nicely ties in the horrors of World War I and a local legend about the masked "Spindlies." The Night Sessions has a lot of good science fictional scenery, and I find the future after a religious war involving fundamentalist Christians intriguing. Solid marks for both books, but I'm a bit more interested to see where The Night Sessions is going with its story concept.

The characterization is excellent in both books. In the second 25-page section, The Faceless had some charming and witty banter between Chief Inspector Renwick and a grizzled but kind-hearted Sergeant Stakowski. I'm slightly less interested in the cops in The Night Sessions, except I like their intelligent robot assistants. But I love the interplay at the creationist park in New Zealand between Campbell (who is a creationist), park guide Vermuelen (not), and an AI robot named Piltdown, one of the park's attractions. In this scene, Vermuelen comes upon Piltdown's detached head as Campbell tinkers with the robot's body:

"Back problem?" he said.

The head moved as if trying to nod. "Yes," it said. "Stripped a gear in my lumbar hinge. Fucking baraminologists."

"Language," chided Campbell, not looking up.

"From the Hebrew," explained the robot head, wilfully misunderstanding. "Bara min, meaning 'created kind,' a very flexible taxon indeed."

"I don't quite follow," said Vermuelen. "What have creationist taxonomists got to do with your back?"

"A few weeks ago," said the head, "they reclassified my kind from 'fully human post-Diluvial local variety' to 'extinct large-brained ape.'. . . So suddenly I've got to start shambling around like a half-shut knife, swinging my arms and grunting. It's demeaning, I tell you. And it's done my back in. I expect my neck will be next."

"Your neck's fine," said Campbell. "Just keep applying the WD-40."

It's nice to know that the ultimate answer to any engineering challenge remains the same well into the future!

As much as I'm enjoying The Faceless, it's The Night Sessions that I really don't want to put down.

THE WINNER: THE NIGHT SESSIONS by Ken MacLeod

The Night Sessions advances to meet another creepy book from Solaris, Christopher Fowler's Hell Train, in the semifinals.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Spring 2012, First Round :: The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod vs. The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees

Our third match of the Spring Bracket of the 2012 Battle of the Books features Ken MacLeod's The Night Sessions against The Demi-Monde: Winter by Rod Rees. Once again, random chance has paired similar books in the first round -- these are both first American editions of near-future science fiction novels by British authors, previously published in England (The Night Sessions in 2008, Demi-Monde in 2010). As always, the winner will be whichever book I most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

The Night Sessions: Pyr trade paperback, April 2012, 261 pages, cover art by Stephan Martiniere. Ken MacLeod is a four-time Hugo nominee, has been nominated for the Nebula and Clarke and a host of other awards, and three times has won the British Science Fiction Award, including a best novel award in 2009 for The Night Sessions. Given MacLeod's stellar record and the strong reception The Night Sessions received when published in England, we named this one of our four "seeded" novels for the Spring 2012 Battle of the Books.

The opening prologue of The Night Sessions follows John Richard Campbell, a Christian fundamentalist traveling from New Zealand to Scotland to meet some like-minded people. His trip takes him past highs and lows of the future: an amazing space elevator, and a sea of glass where Los Angeles used to be. We have also just met Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson and his robot sidekick, who (the book cover suggests) will be investigating a terrorist bombing, possibly carried out by militant atheists.

The Demi-Monde: Winter: William Morrow hardcover, January 2012, 505 pages, cover design by James Iacobelli. This is Rod Rees's first novel and the first in a projected tetralogy of Demi-Monde books. I've seen it billed as steampunk, but as far as I can tell the steampunk elements all take place within a computer-generated virtual reality, so to me that's science fiction.

The Demi-Monde: Winter opens with Norma, daughter of the POTUS, trapped within a dismal virtual reality world, peopled with cyber-duplicates ("dupes") of awful tyrants from history. The game runs on a quantum computer system regrettably called "ABBA"--I had to read this with "Waterloo" and "Mamma Mia" running through my head--which functions rather too well. The Army created this simulation to train soldiers in urban warfare, but the villains in the game possess artificial intelligence, and they apparently have designs on the real world. For reasons only hinted at so far, the Army has recruited a young musician named Ella to go into the Demi-Monde to rescue the President's daughter.

The Battle: When we started the Battle of the Books, I expected that the format would favor books that begin with an action sequence. So far that's not proving the case. Instead, the first round is largely about building credibility, getting me to trust that I'm in the hands of a gifted storyteller.

Nearly all of the first 25 pages of The Night Sessions consist of a low-key prologue, with no action at all. But in those pages, MacLeod accomplishes two very important objectives: first, he presents an interesting future, in which a religious war in the Middle East has triggered a backlash against any religion in politics in the West:

Campbell could see more clearly than ever why people in Britain, the US, and their former allies used the expression "Faith Wars" for what everyone else referred to as the Oil Wars. Calling the catastrophes of the first two decades of the century the Faith Wars was the only way the former coalition countries could kid themselves they had won. They'd certainly defeated militant Islam, with secular republics now implanted throughout the Middle East. The Israel-Palestine issue could be regarded as solved, at least until the radiation dropped to a level that made the territory worth fighting over again.

In every other respect, the US and UK had been defeated: armies destroyed, economies bankrupted . . . The main internal political consequence was the Great Rejection, in which the religious factions who'd pushed for the war had had the unwelcome experience of seeing a nasty gleam in the eyes of the returning veterans, a little glint that said: You're next!

Second, MacLeod shows me some nice characterization. The first thing he tells us about Campbell is his belief in young earth creationism, a quick way to make him contemptible in the eyes of most science fiction readers. But in the following scenes, we find Campbell remarkably good-natured and scrupulously honest. I don't know if he will continue to be an important character, but even if not, MacLeod's even-handed treatment of him bodes well for the novel as a whole.

In contrast, The Demi-Monde: Winter opens in media res, with a character racing from fierce dog-like creatures and evil villains. The story seems promising enough, but Rees does not instill confidence that he is going to tell it especially well. For instance, even through action sequences, he overloads his prose with linking verbs:

The guy was obviously mega-tense, which was odd because it was Ella who was being interviewed for the gig. It was Ella who had exactly twelve dollars in her pocket and rent of fifty dollars due tomorrow. It was Ella who would be living on air pie for the rest of the week.

And more to the point it was the general who was asking all the questions. But oddly he was the one who was uptight.

Rees's sentences rely heavily on adjectives and adverbs, often pairing two at a time, or simply repeating the same one: "that hideous, hideous man"/"totally, totally wrong"/"evil, evil bastards"/"she really, really needed the gig." But writing is not blackjack--doubling down adds no impact.

To overcome these stylistic quirks, Rees has to convince me his story involves strong characters in a very interesting future conflict. But in contrast to the nuanced presentation of Campbell in The Night Sessions, through the opening pages The Demi-Monde's characters come across as black-and-white, particularly the cartoonishly evil villains inside the simulation.

Moreover, the opening sequences do not show us the virtual reality technology at the heart of the story in a convincing way. We see the President's daughter running through the Demi-Monde, which she is aware is a VR construct, but strangely she doesn't treat it that way. She seems to think of the villains chasing her as real people, not as computer simulations. She allows exhaustion and a series of scrapes and bruises to stop her, when she must know her real body is not injured or fatigued. Most importantly, we are told she is literally racing for her life, because if you die in the Demi-Monde, your real body dies as well. Huh? In a VR system supposedly developed to train soldiers, that seems like a pretty serious bug. Maybe Rees explains this later, but it's such an unlikely but important plot element, he should have taken a couple lines to justify it from the outset.

The Demi-Monde: Winter has been generally well-received, so I suspect it develops into an interesting story. But after 25 pages, I have much more confidence in where Ken MacLeod is taking The Night Sessions.

THE WINNER: THE NIGHT SESSIONS by Ken MacLeod

The Night Sessions advances to face either Simon Bestwick's The Faceless or Jon Sprunk's Shadow's Master in the second round.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Aaron's Take on the 2008 Hugo Nominees :: SHORT STORIES

As is often the case, the short story Hugo nominees are a weaker group than the novelettes, I suspect because it is difficult at such a short length to draw the reader in deeply enough to create the impact one expects of an award-caliber story. As a result, the Hugo short story ballot typically contains an unfortunately high proportion of fluff pieces.

This year, that includes Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359? by Ken MacLeod, a fun far-future romp that had entirely passed out of my mind one day after reading it, and A Small Room in Koboldtown, a silly little SF mystery that I found well short of the level of Michael Swanwick’s best work. (Apparently many others liked it rather more than I did as it just won the Locus Award, although that may just reflect the asinine decision by Locus to change how they counted the votes after the ballots were cast -- note that Koboldtown had fewer total votes and fewer first-place votes than Tideline.)

A half-notch above those two for me is Mike Resnick’s Distant Replay, the simple but charming story of an elderly gentleman who meets a young woman remarkably similar to his late wife, and Last Contact by Stephen Baxter, in which the human race learns that the end of the world is nigh, with understandably sad results.

My favorite of the short story nominees is Tideline by Elizabeth Bear, the poignant story of a derelict but intelligent war machine struggling to find meaning in its final days. Even if the short story category is not terribly strong overall, Tideline would be a worthy Hugo winner.

Aaron's Ballot:
1. Elizabeth Bear – Tideline
2. Stephen Baxter – Last Contact
3. Mike Resnick – Distant Replay
4. Ken MacLeod – Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?
5. Michael Swanwick – A Small Room in Koboldtown