Campbell Award Nomination: Brian Neimeier

[bibliogramma]

When I'm reading a book I wouldn't ordinarily pick up on my own accord, I like to check out a few reviews first, so I know something of what I'm getting into. So before starting Campbell Award nominee Brian Niemeier's debut novel Nethereal, I looked for reviews and read a few. It was a little disturbing to note that the majority of reviews I located were written by people situated within one degree of internet separation from a Rabid Puppy. Nonetheless, I embarked on the novel.

There is a way to plunge right into the manners, politics, history and culture of a secondary world without leaving the reader with so many questions that the text is frustrating in its opaqueness. Good science fiction and fantasy writers do it all the time, dropping just enough clues, giving just enough exposition, that the story and the characters' actions make sense. Neimeier, unfortunately, does not do this.

In addition to being frustrated and confused, this lack of incluing [1] left me feeling very little interest in the fates and fortunes of the characters.

I gave the novel a decent chance to grab me - but by the time I'd read ten percent, I was still uninterested and unimpressed. And I certainly would not consider an author for a Campbell award on the strength of it.

However, the other two works of Niemeier's that I located were a rather different story. The first is a novelette, Strange Matter, that was published in Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors, edited by S. L. Huang and Kurt Hunt. A variation on the Groundhog Day theme, a mechanic finds himself reliving over and over again the last ten minutes and seventeen seconds before the end of the world. It's a competantly crafted story, and it kept me reading to the end.

The second is a short story Izcacus, which is posted on his website. [2] Told in an epistolary format, it's the account of a mountain-climbing expedition in a uncharted region of the Caucasus mountains gone horribly wrong. It's a very much a Lovecraftian story, all about horrors hidden in places where humans should not go, and what happens to them when they come up against the powers of an ancient evil, though it draws on Christian mythology rather than Lovecraft's, or one created for the story. It was decently structured and written, and I rather enjoyed it.

On the basis of my reading, I wonder if perhaps Neimeier's strengths are better suited to short fiction. While both pieces of short fiction are somewhat derivative, they are quite readable. Still not Campbell calibre, but decent work.



[1] Incluing is a technique for world building, in which the reader is gradually exposed to background information about the world in which a story is set. The idea is to clue the readers into the world the writer is building, without them being aware of it. http://fritzfreiheit.com/wiki/Incluing

[2] http://www.brianniemeier.com/p/izcacus.html