Friday short fiction #25: the 2011 Sturgeon Award
Renato Guerra More Than Human 2006
The eleven 2011 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalists were announced a couple of weeks ago, with the winner being revealed sometime around the 7 July. Only five of them are online, with Peter Watts's 'The Things' gaining yet another award nomination (and which I very briefly covered here). The other four:
Damien Broderick, 'Under the Moons of Venus' (SUBTERRANEAN PRESS, SPRING 2010)
A physician believes most of humanity has been suddenly and unexpectedly relocated to Venus (along with our Moon and Ganymede), while he and his female psychiatrist try to verify each other's perception of reality. It's Ballardian in feel in several ways: the langourous decay of the abandoned world Broderick describes, the echo of Ballard's intolerance of pseudoscience, and also in the way that Broderick cleverly accommodates multiple realities in the same story. However given the level of sophistication on show here the ending may seem a little oversimplified, but there is probably a layer or two of deeper meaning to it that I've yet to discern. A worthy finalist.
Yoon Ha Lee, 'Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain' (LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2010)
A complex story of future timelines and time paradoxes, all concerning the creation of a set of guns that have extraordinary properties and purposes. This far future tale is interesting but also probably too brief - if it was expanded to at least a novelette I'd probably have understood far more of what was going on; as it is, it's a 'think' piece with a little too much teasing going on.
Lavie Tidhar, 'The Night Train' (STRANGE HORIZONS, 14 JUNE 2010)
Set in a post-human, future Bangkok, a transgendered assassin is hired by one of her targets to fend off the next attack on him. This story is all about accepting - and indeed embracing, literally - The Other, be they post-human or alien, and it's interesting that Tidhar has positioned the kathoeys in this story as being an early marker of post-humanism, and doesn't deny them their humanity. The story seems to go off at a tangent in the end, though, in a way that dissipates the energy it has built up, but indeed it's still a good read.
Favourite short story of the week: Elizabeth Hand, 'The Maiden Flight of McAuley's Bellerophon' (NEIL GAIMAN, AL SARRANTONIO, eds., STORIES: ALL-NEW TALES, 2010)
Three cranky retired men, all ex-staff of the Washington Museum of American Aviation and Aerospace, reconstruct the lost footage of what may have been the first piloted flight in 1901, two years before the Wright Brothers. This story is built around a dash of science-fictional weirdness obviously thrown in to preserve the mystery, but that's just the icing on the cake because this is a lucid story with impressive characterisation and a memorable atmosphere. Of these four it's closest to the spirit of Sturgeon in storytelling terms, and while I haven't read all the shortlisted stories I'd be pleased as punch if this one were to win as by far it's the story that's made the biggest impression on me this week.