Hugo Nominations: Short Story
Jun. 22nd, 2015 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaThe short story is a demanding art form - in just a few thousand words, the writer must develop an interesting theme, weave a satisfying plot, create and flesh out its cast of characters, and in the case of science fiction and fantasy, build a convincing backstory in a believable world. Some writers do this brilliantly, and their works have been recognised by Hugo voters for 60 years. Stories like "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," "Speech Sounds," "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side," "Aye, and Gomorrah," "When It Changed," "A Study in Emerald," "Tideline" and "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" - to mention a few of my favourites - have been nominated in the Short Story Category, and it is against these as much as against other stories written in 2014 that I judge this year's Hugo nominees.
"Totaled," Kary English
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 (presumably the rest of her bits and bobs went for other purposes). But surprise! When her brain is hooked up to the plumbing designs to keep her brain functional for various tests, she's 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... But surprise again! 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... But Surprise! She wakes up again, presumably having had her consciousness transferred into the bionet McGuffin she has been developing. The End.
Decent writing, with some nice touches to demonstrate the slow degradation of Maggie's consciousness. I think English has definite potential and I hope she continues to develop her craft.
“Turncoat," Steve Rzasa
In this story, the future looks like a Galaxy-wide Terminator movie, with Skynet on steroids out to obliterate the humans who created it. Seriously. See, humans went into space, and created the Ascendancy. The people left behind on Earth really got into being cyborgs and developing advanced AIs in a big way, and eventually found a way to upload consciousness into machines, abandoning the flesh altogether. They labeled themselves posthumans and call themselves the Integration. (Gosh, these names are cool and evocative, aren't they?) Then they went out into space with the aim of integrating all the Ascendancy humans. War, of course, ensued.
At the point in all this that the story takes place, the Ascendancy is losing and the Integration, which considers its own cyborgs second-class citizens because they are still part flesh, has decided there's no point in offering them integration any more. From now on, no prisoners will be taken, no human soldiers allowed to retreat from battle, no civilians allowed to escape. All will be destroyed.
Our protagonist is Taren X 45 Delta, an AI inhabiting a battleship, crewed by cyborgs. Taren X 45 Delta is very proud of its battletech, and spends a lot of time telling us about its armaments, but it thinks its crew is weak, smelly and gross. When the new battle orders come through, Taren X 45 Delta has no problems following them. However, after its cyborg crew is taken away to improve its efficiency, it discovers that it misses the goofy things tumbling around inside it, and it starts reading ancient philosophy (including the Bible, apparently, since we are favoured with a verse from Isaiah) as an antidote to boredom and (dare we say) loneliness. It begins to question the new battle orders, and to worry about human souls. It also doesn't like its superior officer, 7 Alpha 7, a condescending and snotty uploaded posthuman.
Not surprisingly, considering the title of the story is a huge spoiler, there comes a time when our buddy Taren X 45 Delta decides it's wrong to fire on a convoy of hospital ships carrying children and uploads itself to one of the Ascendancy battleship escorts, attacking and destroying the other Integration vessels and saving the day. It proudly takes the name Benedict and offers its allegiance to the true humans.
The biggest problem with this story is that so much space is spent on infodumps and geeked-out technobabble that there's no room to show us why and how Taren X 45 Delta comes to the conclusion that the Integration is morally wrong and that defection is the right thing for it to do. I read a review (which I unfortunately did not bookmark and can't find now) that compared Taren's defection with the ineffable experience of religious conversion, and I can see how the biblical verse and the mention of souls could support such a reading, but whatever the process, it's not given enough depth to be believable for me. There is the seed of a really interesting story hidden here, but this isn't it.
"On a Spiritual Plain," Lou Antonelli
Our protagonist is a chaplain posted to a Terran base on Ymilas, a planet with an "energetic planetary core," and "a very strong magnetic field." It seems that this unusual configuration results in the creation of ghosts upon the death of a sentient being. The Ymilans have developed a culture in which these electromagnetic phenomena, which possess the personality and memories of the deceased, are integrated into the family and social structure as "Helpful Ancestors" and many remain with their kin for generations. However, eventually even ghosts grow tired of existence, and so there is a ritual pilgrimage that is taken by the ghosts, in the company of Ymilan clerics, to the north pole of the planet, where the magnetic field "dips down to the surface" and the ghosts can dissipate.
Eventually, a Terran dies on Ymilas, and sure enough, he survives as a ghost. Our chaplain consults a Ymilan Cleric, who tells him about the pilgrimage and offers to take him and the ghost of the dead man - Joe MacDonald - to the pole. For protection against the magnetic fields, our protagonist decides to travel in a Segway, which for me creates an image that rather undercuts the spiritual seriousness of the story's themes (though this could just be a refection of my weird sense of humour).
So, they go to the pole along with a bunch of other ghosts and clerics, all the ghosts including Joe (at least his last name wasn't Hill) are dissolved, and the clerics go hone to wait for more electromagnetic revenants who want to give up the ghost.
Antonelli makes it clear that these ghosts are separate from what both the chaplain and the Ymilan clerics think of as the soul - "a spark of an eternal extra-dimensional over-arching consciousness that is imbued in each of them at birth and ultimately returns to a higher dimensional plane when the physical form is no longer viable." And while conditions on Ymilas give proof of the existence of ghosts (which may or may not be able to form on earth, with its lower magnetic fields), there's still no evidence one way or the other for the reality of the soul.
It's an entertaining science fiction ghost story, and an interesting choice to "prove" the existance of ghosts while leaving a belief in the soul up to faith.
"A Single Samurai," Steven Diamond
So, we're in Japan and this monstrously huge kaiju that's been dormant for so long that soil and trees and even villages have grown on its back wakes up and decides to take a stroll, destroying everything in its path. And this samurai who has special swords that contain parts of his soul climbs to the top of the kaiju-mountain and finds a cave there that's probably the thing's ear or something, because when he goes inside he finds a big green mass that seems to be the critter's brain. So he stabs the brain with his katana, but all that does is create some kind of psychic connection between the samurai and the kaiju. Oops. Initiate Plan B. Remembering how his father committed seppuku in a noble cause, he pulls out his wakizashi and guts himself, which kills the kaiju too because magical sword bonding.
The story was written for publication in an anthology called The Big Baen Book of Monsters, and I think Diamond did manage to write one of the biggest monsters in the book, which is sort of cool if you're a size queen. So that's one achievement of a sort. Unfortunately, I was underwhelmed by the story. The narrator keeps telling us how awful he feels that the kaiju is killing his countrymen and devastating the countryside, but somehow I just didn't feel it. He also keeps telling us what a struggle it is to climb the spine of this mountain-sized monster, but I didn't feel that, either. Nor did I feel from the description of what the samurai was experiencing that he was actually riding on a mountain-sized monster. To be honest, I didn't even get much of a sense that he was a real samurai rather that a stereotype, or that he was in Japan.
The writing was flat, and I simply did not engage with the character or his situation. A neat idea, but a bland execution.
“The Parliament of Beasts and Birds," John C. Wright
A steaming hot mess of heavy-handed Christian allegory so self-consciously mannered that ten million sea snails died for the purpleness of the prose. Scrape away the layers of vapid verbal encrustation and one finds a fable of salvation - the day of Man has come and gone, and the beasts of the field and birds of the air ponder on His fate. Cat, the only one of them neither tame nor wild, goes into the empty City of Men where she finds herself clad and shod as a Man, and freed to speak - and there she demands of the great Voice why animals were condemned to mortality by the fall of Eve. And when she returned to those without the walls, two messengers came and the gifts of speech and upright stature, of the likeness of Man, were offered unto the beasts and birds there assembled. And some did take what was offered and walked into the empty City of Man to wait for the time of their Redeemer, but others denied these gifts and fled, to live another age as beasts. (Oh dear, purple prose seems to be infectious.)
As bad as the bloated descriptive passages and stilted dialogue was - some people have apparently compared Wright's overblown attempts at antique language with Tolkien and Dunsany, which only goes to show that they can't tell when language is being used organically and when it's not - the most annoying bit was the Owl's repetitive reference to the date - which of course is Easter Sunday, but he can't just come out and say that.
"Totaled," Kary English
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 (presumably the rest of her bits and bobs went for other purposes). But surprise! When her brain is hooked up to the plumbing designs to keep her brain functional for various tests, she's 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... But surprise again! 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... But Surprise! She wakes up again, presumably having had her consciousness transferred into the bionet McGuffin she has been developing. The End.
Decent writing, with some nice touches to demonstrate the slow degradation of Maggie's consciousness. I think English has definite potential and I hope she continues to develop her craft.
“Turncoat," Steve Rzasa
In this story, the future looks like a Galaxy-wide Terminator movie, with Skynet on steroids out to obliterate the humans who created it. Seriously. See, humans went into space, and created the Ascendancy. The people left behind on Earth really got into being cyborgs and developing advanced AIs in a big way, and eventually found a way to upload consciousness into machines, abandoning the flesh altogether. They labeled themselves posthumans and call themselves the Integration. (Gosh, these names are cool and evocative, aren't they?) Then they went out into space with the aim of integrating all the Ascendancy humans. War, of course, ensued.
At the point in all this that the story takes place, the Ascendancy is losing and the Integration, which considers its own cyborgs second-class citizens because they are still part flesh, has decided there's no point in offering them integration any more. From now on, no prisoners will be taken, no human soldiers allowed to retreat from battle, no civilians allowed to escape. All will be destroyed.
Our protagonist is Taren X 45 Delta, an AI inhabiting a battleship, crewed by cyborgs. Taren X 45 Delta is very proud of its battletech, and spends a lot of time telling us about its armaments, but it thinks its crew is weak, smelly and gross. When the new battle orders come through, Taren X 45 Delta has no problems following them. However, after its cyborg crew is taken away to improve its efficiency, it discovers that it misses the goofy things tumbling around inside it, and it starts reading ancient philosophy (including the Bible, apparently, since we are favoured with a verse from Isaiah) as an antidote to boredom and (dare we say) loneliness. It begins to question the new battle orders, and to worry about human souls. It also doesn't like its superior officer, 7 Alpha 7, a condescending and snotty uploaded posthuman.
Not surprisingly, considering the title of the story is a huge spoiler, there comes a time when our buddy Taren X 45 Delta decides it's wrong to fire on a convoy of hospital ships carrying children and uploads itself to one of the Ascendancy battleship escorts, attacking and destroying the other Integration vessels and saving the day. It proudly takes the name Benedict and offers its allegiance to the true humans.
The biggest problem with this story is that so much space is spent on infodumps and geeked-out technobabble that there's no room to show us why and how Taren X 45 Delta comes to the conclusion that the Integration is morally wrong and that defection is the right thing for it to do. I read a review (which I unfortunately did not bookmark and can't find now) that compared Taren's defection with the ineffable experience of religious conversion, and I can see how the biblical verse and the mention of souls could support such a reading, but whatever the process, it's not given enough depth to be believable for me. There is the seed of a really interesting story hidden here, but this isn't it.
"On a Spiritual Plain," Lou Antonelli
Our protagonist is a chaplain posted to a Terran base on Ymilas, a planet with an "energetic planetary core," and "a very strong magnetic field." It seems that this unusual configuration results in the creation of ghosts upon the death of a sentient being. The Ymilans have developed a culture in which these electromagnetic phenomena, which possess the personality and memories of the deceased, are integrated into the family and social structure as "Helpful Ancestors" and many remain with their kin for generations. However, eventually even ghosts grow tired of existence, and so there is a ritual pilgrimage that is taken by the ghosts, in the company of Ymilan clerics, to the north pole of the planet, where the magnetic field "dips down to the surface" and the ghosts can dissipate.
Eventually, a Terran dies on Ymilas, and sure enough, he survives as a ghost. Our chaplain consults a Ymilan Cleric, who tells him about the pilgrimage and offers to take him and the ghost of the dead man - Joe MacDonald - to the pole. For protection against the magnetic fields, our protagonist decides to travel in a Segway, which for me creates an image that rather undercuts the spiritual seriousness of the story's themes (though this could just be a refection of my weird sense of humour).
So, they go to the pole along with a bunch of other ghosts and clerics, all the ghosts including Joe (at least his last name wasn't Hill) are dissolved, and the clerics go hone to wait for more electromagnetic revenants who want to give up the ghost.
Antonelli makes it clear that these ghosts are separate from what both the chaplain and the Ymilan clerics think of as the soul - "a spark of an eternal extra-dimensional over-arching consciousness that is imbued in each of them at birth and ultimately returns to a higher dimensional plane when the physical form is no longer viable." And while conditions on Ymilas give proof of the existence of ghosts (which may or may not be able to form on earth, with its lower magnetic fields), there's still no evidence one way or the other for the reality of the soul.
It's an entertaining science fiction ghost story, and an interesting choice to "prove" the existance of ghosts while leaving a belief in the soul up to faith.
"A Single Samurai," Steven Diamond
So, we're in Japan and this monstrously huge kaiju that's been dormant for so long that soil and trees and even villages have grown on its back wakes up and decides to take a stroll, destroying everything in its path. And this samurai who has special swords that contain parts of his soul climbs to the top of the kaiju-mountain and finds a cave there that's probably the thing's ear or something, because when he goes inside he finds a big green mass that seems to be the critter's brain. So he stabs the brain with his katana, but all that does is create some kind of psychic connection between the samurai and the kaiju. Oops. Initiate Plan B. Remembering how his father committed seppuku in a noble cause, he pulls out his wakizashi and guts himself, which kills the kaiju too because magical sword bonding.
The story was written for publication in an anthology called The Big Baen Book of Monsters, and I think Diamond did manage to write one of the biggest monsters in the book, which is sort of cool if you're a size queen. So that's one achievement of a sort. Unfortunately, I was underwhelmed by the story. The narrator keeps telling us how awful he feels that the kaiju is killing his countrymen and devastating the countryside, but somehow I just didn't feel it. He also keeps telling us what a struggle it is to climb the spine of this mountain-sized monster, but I didn't feel that, either. Nor did I feel from the description of what the samurai was experiencing that he was actually riding on a mountain-sized monster. To be honest, I didn't even get much of a sense that he was a real samurai rather that a stereotype, or that he was in Japan.
The writing was flat, and I simply did not engage with the character or his situation. A neat idea, but a bland execution.
“The Parliament of Beasts and Birds," John C. Wright
A steaming hot mess of heavy-handed Christian allegory so self-consciously mannered that ten million sea snails died for the purpleness of the prose. Scrape away the layers of vapid verbal encrustation and one finds a fable of salvation - the day of Man has come and gone, and the beasts of the field and birds of the air ponder on His fate. Cat, the only one of them neither tame nor wild, goes into the empty City of Men where she finds herself clad and shod as a Man, and freed to speak - and there she demands of the great Voice why animals were condemned to mortality by the fall of Eve. And when she returned to those without the walls, two messengers came and the gifts of speech and upright stature, of the likeness of Man, were offered unto the beasts and birds there assembled. And some did take what was offered and walked into the empty City of Man to wait for the time of their Redeemer, but others denied these gifts and fled, to live another age as beasts. (Oh dear, purple prose seems to be infectious.)
As bad as the bloated descriptive passages and stilted dialogue was - some people have apparently compared Wright's overblown attempts at antique language with Tolkien and Dunsany, which only goes to show that they can't tell when language is being used organically and when it's not - the most annoying bit was the Owl's repetitive reference to the date - which of course is Easter Sunday, but he can't just come out and say that.
Owl said, “It is the first Sunday after the full moon following the equinox of March. Alas! The skies will never be open to me again!”I'm not at all averse to good stories based on Christian or biblical themes - I still love C. S. Lewis' Narnia books and his Cosmic Trilogy, and Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Blish's A Case of Conscience, and the AngeLink novels of Lyda Morehouse, to mention just a few. But I do demand that they be coherent and well-written. Obfuscation and verbosity that tries to mimic the King James version of Revelations does not do the job for me.
Owl said, “It is the first Sabbath after the Paschal moon following the Equinox of Spring! Not only Man, but all nature is redeemed! Rejoice!”