Campell Award Nominations: Eric S. Raymond and Rolf Nelson

Only three of the nominees for the Campbell Award (Not a Hugo) submitted pieces to the Hugo Voters Packet - Jason Cordova, Wesley Chu, and Kary English. I've read those and made my comments in separate posts.

Rolf Nelson and Eric S. Raymond did not submit any pieces, but as there are samples of their writing in the Castalia House anthology Riding the Red Horse, submitted by the publisher in support of nominations of other pieces in the anthology, I read those in order to gain some sense of Nelson and Raymond's work. I was not inspired by what was available to go searching for any more samples of either author's work.

Eric S. Raymond's first (and and apparently only) foray into writing fiction is the short narrative piece "Sucker Punch," which describes an invasion of Taiwan by the People's Republic of China and its outcome. It's a thoughtful narrative piece about the use of offensive and defensive weapons in an imaginary near-future military operation, but it's not actually a story. The first third is reportage, not storytelling - at such and such a time, these forces launched, or landed, or engaged, or whatever. The remainder of the narrative is told from the perspective of the commander of an American aircraft carrier group near Taiwan as he evaluates the information, discusses his sense that there is something off in the invasionary force with some of his officers, receives his orders and watches his planes shot down by an unknown weapon. One of his officers figures out what's going on, the planes are recalled, And they watch by satellite as Taiwan initiates its own unexpected defense. After it's all over, the Americans discuss how this military action has just changed warfare forever.

It's concise and relatively well written, without a too much unnecessary infodumping, and even a non-miltech sort like myself could figure out exactly what was being illustrated. But it's much more of a thought experiment than a story - science to be sure, but not science fiction. I doubt that Heinlein would have called it a story, though Campbell might have published it.



Rolf Nelson's Shakedown Cruise is set in the same universe as his The Stars Come Back series of novels; in fact, it is set at a specific point in the series. This was somewhat of a problem for me, as the author appears to have assumed that his readers have read the series, and thus he doesn't bother trying to put in enough background for the story to stand alone. A number of political and military factions were mentioned but not explained, leaving me completely in the dark as to the motivations and implications of much that happened in the story.

The story was long on technical and battle description and short on character development. As best as I could tell, the plot went something like this: the captain and crew of a military spaceship with a controversial AI are on a training/shakedown mission when they encounter an unexpected mine field, suspect a trap, take cover and observe for a while, and then capture or disable a bunch of other space vessels. I have no idea why anyone did anything.

The language was awkward at times. I was also regularly thrown out of the story by frequent changes of tense from past to present and back again. While action was more likely to be described in present tense and dialogue more likely to be past tense, this was not consistent and I could not determine any stylistic reasons for the switches.

I was not engaged or impressed.