Campbell Award Nominations: Kary English

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In addition to her Hugo-nominated short story "Totaled," English submitted two short works for the Hugo Voters Packet in support of her Campbell nomination.

"Departure Gate 34B" is a short, bittersweet story about love, memory and letting go. In a story told through dialogue, a married couple meet in an airport lounge and slowly reveal the truth about a catastrophic event that prevented their planned vacation. There's some skill here, and some surprise, and for a very short story it packs an emotional punch.

"Totaled," the story which received a Hugo Nomination, is a somewhat sentimental but reasonably interesting story about a research scientist who ends up as the subject of her own research. As we all know, in the future, either the costs of healthcare or the shortage of organs or some other reason will result in people's bodies being harvested for all sorts of things. English's variation on this has protagonist Maggie's brain shipped off to a research lab when she dies in a car accident. When her brain is hooked up to the plumbing designed to keep her brain functional for various tests, she finds herself conscious - and in her very own lab. She finds a way to convince her former associate that it's really her in that lump of grey goo. In a scene that feels both awkward and cliched, we learn that their boss arranged for her brain to be collected for the express purpose of completing their research before her brain decays. And what a trouper she is, working as hard as she can to finish the job before she dissolves into grey soup. Some genuinely touching moments, such as when her associate, having wired her for sight and sound, takes her jar out to see her children getting awards at a school assembly. Job done, she asks for an end as her consciousness begins to blur in her disintegrating brain - a process that was nicely portrayed in the text. But after the coup de grace, she wakes up again, presumably having had her consciousness transferred into the bionet McGuffin she has been developing. The end.

"Flight of the Kikayon," the third of English's submissions, is like the other two in that it features as a protagonist a woman (of unmarked race) whose identity is strongly (though not exclusively in one case) based on being a wife and mother. One might have wished to see more variety.

This is the most complex of the stories in terms of plot and number of significant characters. In this story, the protagonist (Lydia) is married to an abusive husband (Donnie) and has one child, a daughter who is primarily cared for by one of the genetically engineered humanoid servants developed by the husband's company (Cara, who looks exactly like Lydia and was developed from her DNA). The protagonist sees her chance to escape when her husband insists that the family take a "universe cruise" and leave the nanny behind. Lydia smuggles Cara aboard the starliner and makes plans for them to swap identities, at which point Lydia plans to vanish. But Donnie's insistence on a daytrip to a proscribed planet changes everything. Some unexpected plot twists and an open-ended conclusion helped to make this an interesting piece.

English has some definite writing chops, but I felt that there wasn't a lot of variety in the pieces offered, which weakens my overall assessment of her as a Campbell nominee. I have already noted the similarities in protagonist choice. There are also structural similarities in the pieces, and I was irked in that I wanted to use the word "bittersweet" in describing all three stories. I think English has definite potential and I hope she continues to develop her craft.