Hugo voting: part 2
I've become a voting and attending member of Anticipation SF, the 2009 Worldcon in Montreal. As part of my membership, I received an electronic packet of most of the nominated works, including all of the short fiction and all of the novels save one (which I happen to have also read). I am going to post about how I'm voting and why -- a little review of each fiction category. Today, novelettes.
Best Novelette:
* "Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders" by Mike Resnick
* "The Gambler" by Paolo Bacigalupi
* "Pride and Prometheus" by John Kessel
* "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner
* "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear
This category was a bit more difficult because the stories were closer in quality -- in the short stories, there were two clearly outstanding pieces, IMHO; that's not the case here. Still, nice judgments are necessary when giving awards; I present them in ranking order.
Resnick's story was the one I liked the least (and I seem to be picking on him as I didn't think much of his short story entry, either). "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" is a take on that hoariest of tropes: the magic shop that sells real magic. It's told from the perspective of an old man (Nate Silver), talking about his encounter with the Magic Shop and how it changes his life and that of his friend (Maury Gold). The voice of the narrator is pleasant and the story flows, but the too-cuteness of 'Gold' and 'Silver' is emblematic of why I don't like this story much: it shows how much it is contrived and that makes it hard for me to appreciate it. The dialog clunks a bit, and it kind of meanders to a philosophical question of whether it's better to have eternal life with strings, or die naturally. It doesn't have the interesting characters or prose that I would have enjoyed, even with an overused premise.
"The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" is okay. It has some nicely flat prose, especially the way it begins: "This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, "It shoots rays."" The story -- of the transformation of a boy into a man; specifically a heroic man who can learn about and wield the ray gun -- is interesting, although not particularly insightful, and the characters never really caught fire for me. I guess I was looking for a little more psychological complexity. There's an interesting contrast with a Daniel Clowes story in comic-book form called 'The Death Ray' -- with a similar premise (boy receives ray gun of enormous power), it's a work with a lot more depth of characterization.
"Pride and Prometheus" is a pastiche of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (as such, it's sort of on the borderland of SF/Fantasy; tonally, there are hardly any SF or fantasy elements). I enjoyed it, although I don't have the deep recall of the source material that might have enriched my experience. A friend whom I sent this to--and who is a scholar in the period and doesn't read SF at all--quibbled with some vocabulary and thematic choices, but did like it overall. I thought the story was interesting, but not particularly audacious -- when I think of some of the more successful pastiches (Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" springs to mind), I think of the reversals and strangeness and consequences that made that story so amazing; this story is a little bit safe, by those standards. Still good.
Bacigalupi's "The Gambler" is good, solid near-future cyberpunk-influenced SF of a multi-cultural kind (the lead character is Lao) that is pretty popular this decade from Ryman's "Air" to MacDonald's "Brasyl" and "River of Gods". It's a story of keeping one's culture and integrity up front in the face of a future where Twitter and Facebook and Google Ads have reached their logical singularity and journalism is reduced to nothing but counting clicks -- so gossip and scandal get all the attention while hard news (the province of our narrator) is relegated to the margins. (There are some who might say this has already happened; but then, sf is always in dialog with the present.) The story is solid and the future it describes is all too real.
And overall, I think Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" is the best of the lot. It's not quite a pastiche -- we're in Lovecraft's world, and yet, instead of vivid creatures from space, we're in our own horrible times: the setting is in the mid 30s, and a black professor has come to study the Shoggoths off the coast of Maine. There is a vivid sense of place, keenly observed characters and an eye for the historical moment -- Maine in early winter, a black man in a racist society on the eve of a World War. It also takes the Lovecraftian Shoggoth and gives it some interesting twists, in a science fictional way. It's a peculiar story to try and balance so many strands--and I think the bones are showing at some points--but it does make an interesting, thematically-tight whole. My vote for the richest story, the most interesting, the most thought-provoking, and where I'll put my Hugo vote.
You can read almost all of the nominated short fiction and one of the novels for free... available at:
http://www.anticipationsf.ca/English/Hugos
Best Novelette:
* "Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders" by Mike Resnick
* "The Gambler" by Paolo Bacigalupi
* "Pride and Prometheus" by John Kessel
* "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner
* "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear
This category was a bit more difficult because the stories were closer in quality -- in the short stories, there were two clearly outstanding pieces, IMHO; that's not the case here. Still, nice judgments are necessary when giving awards; I present them in ranking order.
Resnick's story was the one I liked the least (and I seem to be picking on him as I didn't think much of his short story entry, either). "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" is a take on that hoariest of tropes: the magic shop that sells real magic. It's told from the perspective of an old man (Nate Silver), talking about his encounter with the Magic Shop and how it changes his life and that of his friend (Maury Gold). The voice of the narrator is pleasant and the story flows, but the too-cuteness of 'Gold' and 'Silver' is emblematic of why I don't like this story much: it shows how much it is contrived and that makes it hard for me to appreciate it. The dialog clunks a bit, and it kind of meanders to a philosophical question of whether it's better to have eternal life with strings, or die naturally. It doesn't have the interesting characters or prose that I would have enjoyed, even with an overused premise.
"The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" is okay. It has some nicely flat prose, especially the way it begins: "This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, "It shoots rays."" The story -- of the transformation of a boy into a man; specifically a heroic man who can learn about and wield the ray gun -- is interesting, although not particularly insightful, and the characters never really caught fire for me. I guess I was looking for a little more psychological complexity. There's an interesting contrast with a Daniel Clowes story in comic-book form called 'The Death Ray' -- with a similar premise (boy receives ray gun of enormous power), it's a work with a lot more depth of characterization.
"Pride and Prometheus" is a pastiche of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (as such, it's sort of on the borderland of SF/Fantasy; tonally, there are hardly any SF or fantasy elements). I enjoyed it, although I don't have the deep recall of the source material that might have enriched my experience. A friend whom I sent this to--and who is a scholar in the period and doesn't read SF at all--quibbled with some vocabulary and thematic choices, but did like it overall. I thought the story was interesting, but not particularly audacious -- when I think of some of the more successful pastiches (Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" springs to mind), I think of the reversals and strangeness and consequences that made that story so amazing; this story is a little bit safe, by those standards. Still good.
Bacigalupi's "The Gambler" is good, solid near-future cyberpunk-influenced SF of a multi-cultural kind (the lead character is Lao) that is pretty popular this decade from Ryman's "Air" to MacDonald's "Brasyl" and "River of Gods". It's a story of keeping one's culture and integrity up front in the face of a future where Twitter and Facebook and Google Ads have reached their logical singularity and journalism is reduced to nothing but counting clicks -- so gossip and scandal get all the attention while hard news (the province of our narrator) is relegated to the margins. (There are some who might say this has already happened; but then, sf is always in dialog with the present.) The story is solid and the future it describes is all too real.
And overall, I think Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" is the best of the lot. It's not quite a pastiche -- we're in Lovecraft's world, and yet, instead of vivid creatures from space, we're in our own horrible times: the setting is in the mid 30s, and a black professor has come to study the Shoggoths off the coast of Maine. There is a vivid sense of place, keenly observed characters and an eye for the historical moment -- Maine in early winter, a black man in a racist society on the eve of a World War. It also takes the Lovecraftian Shoggoth and gives it some interesting twists, in a science fictional way. It's a peculiar story to try and balance so many strands--and I think the bones are showing at some points--but it does make an interesting, thematically-tight whole. My vote for the richest story, the most interesting, the most thought-provoking, and where I'll put my Hugo vote.
You can read almost all of the nominated short fiction and one of the novels for free... available at:
http://www.anticipationsf.ca/English/Hugos