bibliogramma | Hugo Nominations: Flow by Arlen Andrews Sr. (Reply)

In Arlen Andrew Sr.'s Hugo-nominated novella Flow, a young man named Risk from a place where the sun never shines and the sky is always overcast travels far enough to see blue skies - among many other differences from the northern land he is from - and is totally freaked out by the theological implications.

Risk's family are iceberg-sellers. They live near a glacier at the head of a river. When the glacier calves, they send word to the iceberg-deliverers, who take the icebergs downstream to a big city that needs lots of ice - why, I have no idea, since after all, it's built on a freaking river and should have lots of water.

Risk is a curious young man, so one day he decides to go travelling with the iceberg deliverers to the big city in the south. Once there, he learn about many things, like the sun and the moon and women (here called wen) who unlike females of his own people have big breasts, and strange technologies that have been dug up and used by the big city people, like monofiber filaments, and reading with one's eyes instead of one's fingers.

I'm not sure if all of Risk's people are far-sighted, or if the lack of sunlight just makes visual reading difficult, or if it's just cultural, but Risk's people store information by carving intricate patterns on a wooden "totem" of some kind and read it by touch. In the big city, he discovers, people do things differently.

Risk decides to steal some of this cool filament stuff and take it home, but he gets caught and has to run for his life - going further south along the river to a massive waterfall. Lucky he has this coil of filament wrapped around his torso, because he's just that curious about what lies beyond...

But the so-called novella ends there, so we don't get to find out what risks Risk will face on the next step downriver.

Since this is clearly not a novella, but a section of a serialised novel, it should never have been nominated in this category and hence I plan to pretend it doesn't exist when I fill out my ballot.