BSFA Short Fiction nominees

[nwhyte]

While waiting for my copy of Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia to arrive, I worked my way through the short fiction nominated for this year's BSFA awards. (I have been a BSFA member since the 2005 Worldcon, and am now kicking myself for not doing this in previous years.) I list the six stories below, in my reverse order of preference. NB that the two I

Comments

[raycun]

I thought the Watson/Quaglia story was very funny - not failing at cute, taking the piss out of cute.
The Whates was generic. Unusual setting (cleaners?!?! does not compute?!), peril, wrapped up with babble.
The Lakin-Smith I zoned out from. In fairness, I've had half a bottle of wine by now...

[steve_mollmann]

The only one of these I've read is "The Assistant", but it was one of my favorites in volume 3 of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. I thought the cleaner setup was good fun, if nothing else.

[nwhyte]

I thought the clunkiness of Whates' writing began in the very first sentence - "As usual by the time we arrived, the underground car park was a desert of asphalt, faded white lines and inadequate lighting " - where I would have put a comma after "usual" and probably not after "arrived".

Later on:

"I would love to put what happened next down to my lightning-quick reflexes or a nebulous sixth sense, but in truth it was more a case of surprise and alarm mixed in equal measure" - well, actually that means it was because of his quick reflexes.

I think "franticly" is not a normal spelling of "frantically", and there is a weird capital "s" in "botS" near the end.

Perhaps those problems were corrected in the book publication; I can only go by what's online.

[londonkds]

I was similarly bemused by the Lakin-Smith when it was first published in IZ. I think that it may have been an attempt to put some literal "punk" into steampunk.

I mainly liked the Foster but was not keen on the ending at all.

[ecbatan]

I agree pretty much 100% with your comments and order except that I would switch the Hutchinson and McDonald stories, the while wondering whether I haven't missed something about "Vishnu ..." because I kind of suspect I should have liked it more.

The Whates story and the Lakin-Smith both simply puzzle me -- why nominate these? There is simply nothing special about them. I agree that the Lakin-Smith is better written (though the idea behind the Whates, albeit not brilliant or particularly new, interests me more).

And the Watson/Quaglia story, as with all their collaborations, I found repulsive. I concede that it might strike others differently, so in a way I'm less surprised by its nomination than the Whates or Lakin-Smith -- there's more going on their, more "difference", even though the "differentness" of the W/Q story didn't work for me.

[hutch0]

I just stumbled across this while ego-surfing by accident, and I'd like to thank you for your kind words, but I think the best story won. Certainly I voted for it. Although the way the shortlist turned out, there was always a fifty percent chance that somebody called Ian was going to walk away with the award...