Aaron's Hugo Recommendations :: Novelette

Here are my nominations for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette of 2009:

Daniel Abraham, The Curandero and the Swede (F&SF, March '09)
Gemma Files & Stephen J. Barringer, each thing I show you is a piece of my death (Clockwork Phoenix 2)
Eugie Foster, Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast (Interzone, Jan-Feb '09)
Rachel Swirsky, Eros, Philia, Agape (Tor.com, March '09)
James Van Pelt, The Radio Magician (Realms of Fantasy, February '09)

(Note that the publications listed are the original publications -- several of these stories have already been reprinted.)

Novelette is often my favorite of the short fiction categories, and this year is no exception. This is an outstanding list of stories, and I would dearly love to see some of these on the final Hugo ballot.

Aaron's Hugo Recommendations :: Novella

I didn't get to read that many novellas from 2009, but the small number I read included some outstanding stories. I plan to nominate these five for the Hugo Award:

Nancy Kress, Act One (Asimov's, March '09)
John Langan, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky (By Blood We Live)
Ian McDonald, Vishnu at the Cat Circus (Cyberabad Days)
James Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Tachyon)
Jason Sanford, Sublimation Angels (Interzone, Sept-Oct '09)

With the exception of "The Wide, Carnivorous Sky," which is more likly to appeal to horror readers than SF fans, all of these have a reasonable chance of joining John Scalzi's The God Engines on the Hugo ballot. (I haven't yet read The God Engines, but given Scalzi's popularity with the Hugo voters, I am confident he doesn't need my help.)

Good luck to all of these deserving authors!

Aaron's Hugo Recommendations :: Best Novel

If I had to submit my Hugo nominations today, these are the novels I would nominate (in alphabetical order by author):

Daniel Abraham, The Price of Spring
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
China Miéville, The City and the City
Ken Scholes, Lamentation
Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

I fully expect the Bacigalupi and Miéville novels to make the final ballot, and I would love to see any of the others recognized as well.

Obviously, there are many great novels from 2009 I have not yet read. Given what I know of the authors and what I've heard about the books, these are the five I suspect have the best chance of moving into my list, in the unlikely event I am able to read them in the next ten days:

Daryl Gregory, The Devil's Alphabet
Malinda Lo, Ash
Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia
Jeff VanderMeer, Finch
Walter Jon Williams, This Is Not a Game

I will update if my list changes before the 13th.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie Foster

This week's story recommendation is "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster, a novelette from the January/February 2009 issue of Interzone, reprinted here in the August 2009 issue of Apex Magazine. This is Foster's second SROTW, joining Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, Aliette de Bodard, and Leah Bobet as two-time recommendees. Perhaps even more significantly, "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" was nominated last week for the Nebula Award.

"Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" is set in a world whose residents don a different mask each morning, abandoning their individual personalities (a concept utterly foreign to them) in favor of the role represented by that day's mask. Perhaps inevitably, our viewpoint character(s) encounters a person who challenges this way of life.

A story with a premise like this can easily be swallowed by its own metaphors, but Foster manages to keep the tale moving forward, using elegant but not flashy prose. This is a fascinating, absorbing story, even if I have mixed feelings about the resolution, and I will certainly be including it in my Hugo Award ballot.

Aaron's Top Five Neglected Stories

Jeff VanderMeer asks: What are your top five underrated short stories of all time? This naturally had me looking through my list of favorite stories, where I spotted eight that had not received major award nominations or similar accolades. Two were by the same author, so I culled out one of those, then I dropped the two stories that were later expaned into novels to get my list:

Walter M. Miller, Jr. - Crucifixus Etiam (1953) Most of my favorites from the Golden Age are on the usual suspects list, "Flowers for Algernon," "The Star," etc., but "Crucifixus Etiam" has been largely forgotten. In a way, that's appropriate; the story is about brave pioneers whose heroic efforts will surely be forgotten by the later generations who benefit from them.

Orson Scott Card - Holy (1980) Card is known for Ender's Game and sequels, but much of his best work is in his early short fiction. Some of his best short stories were well received at the time, such as "Unaccompanied Sonata" and "Lost Boys," but "Holy," from Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions series of anthologies, was almost entirely ignored. Card must have written it on a dare -- the story is about a man trying to get to a particular rock to smear human feces on it, and by the end Card actually has you caring about whether that happens.

Connie Willis - Chance (1986) For all the awards Connie Willis has won, "Chance" somehow slipped through the cracks, but it's one of her very best, emotionally powerful albeit not as funny as, say, "Even the Queen."

Greg Egan - The Moral Virologist (1990) Originally published in Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, this is a great thought experiment story. What if you tailored a virus to kill people who commit adultery?

Susan Palwick - Sorrel's Heart (2007) This is one of my favorites of this century, from Palwick's collection The Fate of Mice. It didn't get the attention it deserved, although Jonathan Strahan picked it up for his year's best anthology.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance by Paul Park

This week's story recommendation is "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance" by Paul Park, a novella from the January/February issue of F&SF.

"Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance" is a highly fictionalized (one hopes!) history of the past several generations of Paul Park's family. Early in the story, Park tells us one of the pitfalls of this kind of chronicle:

It occurs to me that every memoirist and every historian should begin by reminding their readers that the mere act of writing something down, of organizing something in a line of words, involves a clear betrayal of the truth. Without alternatives we resort to telling stories, coherent narratives involving chains of circumstances, causes and effects, climactic moments, introductions and denouements. We can't help it.

But perhaps we can help it, for Park proceeds to do none of these things. "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance" is not a coherent narrative, nor does it ever accede to the notion of cause and effect.

Instead, it is a jumbled set of weird anecdotes from various periods of history, with a connecting framework from the point of view of Paul Park in an unhappy future, for whom the whole thing may be an elaborate escape from reality. Park tells the story with tongue planted firmly in his metafictional cheek, as in this confrontation with a fellow professor, who invited Park to visit his class on meta-fiction to discuss Park's "early novel" A Princess of Roumania but is unhappy that Park emailed the class a draft of a work in progress:

"Did you think I'd be jazzed about this?" he complained, indicating the phrase "whispered drunkenly" in the text. "Did you think I'd want them to think I'm an alcoholic? Though in a way it's the least of my problems: Right now they are reading this," he whispered drunkenly, conspiratorially, "and they have no idea why. Right here, right here, this is confusing them," he said, pressing his pudgy thumb onto the manuscript a couple lines later, a fractured and contradictory passage.

Park tells us he advises his writing students "to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told," but if you are looking for such a story, stay away from "Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance." If, however, you are open to a tale rather less linear and more offbeat, replete with phildickian reality shifts and self-deprecating humor, you should greatly enjoy this.

Eventually, the disparate elements of the story do circumscribe a plot, although for most of the narrative one can't be sure if it is a tale about ghosts or alien visitations or a jewel heist or merely the prevalence of schizophrenia in the Park family tree. All we are certain of is this fellow Paul Park is an extremely unreliable narrator. Kudos to the author for creating such a fun character.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Bohemian Astrobleme by Kage Baker

This week's story recommendation is a somber occasion. My recommendation is "The Bohemian Astrobleme" by Kage Baker, who passed away this week at the age of only 57.

"The Bohemian Astrobleme" is a delightful steampunk novelette from the Winter 2010 issue of Subterranean Online, the quarterly e-zine from excellent small publisher Subterranean Press, which routinely prints short fiction from some of the top names in the genre.

Kage Baker is best known for her "Company" time travel stories, but she has written in many styles. "The Bohemian Astrobleme" is lighthearted steampunk, set in the same universe as her recent novella The Women of Nell Gwynne's (which obliquely ties into the Company sequence), with an appearance by the heroine of that tale, the intelligent and admirable prostitute Lady Beatrice.

In "The Bohemian Astrobleme," the Gentlemen's Speculative Society discovers a material with strange and useful properties, possibly of extraterrestrial origin. Two of its members, along with a less-than-trusty assistant, set off from England to find more of the material, making use of a remarkable array of equipment most of us did not realize was available in the Victorian era. They proceed into Eastern Europe for the hunt, which ends up turning on an amusing but convincing point of chemistry. "The Bohemian Astrobleme" makes for highly entertaining reading, and what a shame it is we cannot look forward to much more of the same from Baker in the future.

Incidentally, I do not intend to turn the Story Recommendation of the Week into an obituary column (the "obit" effect contributed to the current hiatus of the Book of the Week, which became depressing), but by coincidence I came across "The Bohemian Astrobleme" just before Baker's death, and what better way to honor the memory of a departed author than by enjoying her work?

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Mister Oak by Leah Bobet

My story recommendation of the week is "Mister Oak" by Leah Bobet, a short story from the February 2010 issue of the recently revived Realms of Fantasy. Leah Bobet becomes only the fourth author to receive two different story recommendations on this blog, joining Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, and Aliette de Bodard.

"Mister Oak" is the whimsical yet bittersweet story of a tree who falls in love with a woman. It is certainly the best story told from the point of view of a tree I have read since "Direction of the Road" by Ursula K. LeGuin. Actually, it's the only story from the point of view of a tree I have read since "Direction of the Road," but I just put Bobet's name in a sentence with Ursula LeGuin -- is she likely to complain?

It's nice to see Realms of Fantasy has come back strong under its new ownership. In addition to "Mister Oak," the February 2010 issue features a new Harlan Ellison story and tales by several up-and-coming authors including Bobet and de Bodard.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: By Bargain And By Blood by Aliette de Bodard

My story recommendation for the week is By Bargain and by Blood by Aliette de Bodard, a short story from the January 3, 2010 issue of British e-zine Hub Magazine. This makes Aliette de Bodard only the third author to receive two different story recommendations on this blog, joining Paolo Bacigalupi and Catherynne M. Valente. (Rumor has it this exclusive club will soon offer membership to Leah Bobet.)

Since 2007, Hub Magazine has been posting fiction, reviews and features on nearly a weekly basis. It only publishes one piece of fiction per issue, but it has topped one hundred issues already, so that adds up. In 2009 alone Hub published such notable authors as Colin Harvey, Mari Ness, Philip Palmer, Sarah Pinborough, Andy Remic, and Ian Whates, among many others.

Set in what seems to be a future or alternate version of India, "By Bargain and by Blood" is the compelling story of Daya, a woman who has given up everything to raise her niece from infancy, since Daya's sister Aname died in childbirth eight years earlier. The girl's stone-faced father, a mysterious "blood empath," suddenly appears and demands the girl, who is his by bargain and by blood. Daya knows she should have foreseen his arrival:

When Aname told me about her child to come, she spoke of a bargain struck. And thus I should have known someone would come to honour it--that someone would walk through the rice paddies and the forests until he reached our jati, our small community isolated from the affairs of the world.

But, just as you know about death but do not think about it, so I did not think about him.

Daya resolves to defy the blood empath, believing she acts out of protective instincts toward the child. The girl has been tormented all her life as "fatherless" by their jati, and finds it difficult even to accept a small gift from her father, for fear someone will take it from her. But ultimately it is Daya who cannot bear the thought of a gift being taken away.

In the past few months I have read four stories by Aliette de Bodard, all of which are beautifully written. De Bodard clearly has a marvelous writing career ahead of her, and I am greatly looking forward to her first novel Servant of the Underworld, recently published in the UK and forthcoming in the US from Angry Robot Books. But the oddity to me is that of her four stories I have read recently, the two I found most powerful were published in small e-zines, "By Bargain and by Blood" in Hub and "Blighted Heart" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The two stories that appeared in major print magazines, "The Wind-Blown Man" from Asimov's and "Mélanie" from Realms of Fantasy were also well-written but to me carried less impact.

I do not know if de Bodard offered "By Bargain and by Blood" and "Blighted Heart" to the major print magazines (they would be too heavily weighted to fantasy for Asimov's, and it's possible she wrote them while Realms of Fantasy was out of commission), but it seems odd that two such superb stories did not find a higher profile home, and I suspect it may be because they are more understated in their use of genre tropes than Mélanie and The Wind-Blown Man. I am beginning to wonder if the major SF/F print magazines have become too concerned with finding fiction that fits a certain marketing niche, rather than just printing the best stories they can.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Marya and the Pirate by Geoffrey A. Landis

This week's story recommendation is "Marya and the Pirate" by Geoffrey A. Landis, a novelette from the January 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.

Some readers complain that nobody publishes the kind of fun space adventure that was the bread and butter of science fiction in the 1950's. The trouble is that all those stories were published in the 1950's, and it is awfully difficult to write a story like that today that doesn't feel stale.

Geoffrey Landis pulls it off in "Mary and the Pirate." Like a Murray Leinster story of old, it begins with a space pirate closing in on a transport ship carrying a very valuable cargo into Earth orbit. Later, the pirate and his captive face a problem of inexorable celestial mechanics, reminiscent of Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations." But Landis manages to add enough new twists and details and modern sensibility to keep it all fresh, and not just a pastiche of old-style skiffy.

Among his many awards, Geoffrey A. Landis has garnered two Hugos and a Nebula. His output has declined in quantity the past few years, but not at all in quality.