Championship B'Tok by Edward M Lerner
I'm glad that Analog has decided to make all its Hugo Nominees available online. Before the development of the Hugo packet, it was always one of my favorite things to read all the stories that people thought were best of the year (both on the Hugo and the Nebula ballots.) I'm sad that the practice of letting all SFF fans read them for free has fallen away.
Ah, the old science fiction apostrophe, how I have missed you. Between that and the super chess, you know what sort of story you are getting here. Old school. Kind of felt like Larry Niven.
"Championship B'Tok" is organized into chapters. Which makes sense as this is in no way a stand alone story-it's an excerpt from a novel. All we get is buildup, and then it stops without any sort of resolution. That alone would normally be enough to keep a story off the ballot.
It opens with the sort of scene you typically get in a police procedural - a shot of the crime in progress with the likelihood that we will never see that character again except as a corpse. So let's forget about the guy who might have died on an asteroid.
On team evil we have Glithwah, a Snake - an alien species that basically reads like a cross between Klingons and the Ferengi. They invaded human space and were badly beaten and are now kept in a detainment camp on the moon Ariel. Glithwah has a plan. Can you guess the plan? Yes, it would be KILL ALL HUMANS. The story ends with the reveal that she has amassed an army of killer robots.
On team good we have Carl, who runs the detainment camp and Corrine, a journalist. They both have history with the Snakes. Corrine has made a trip out to the detainment camp to brief Carl on a the "Interveners" who have been interfering with the development of a number of planets. Well, maybe they have, no one has any real evidence that they actually exist.
On team cannon fodder we have Lyle, the dude who was probably killed in the opening scene. Also on team cannon fodder is Danica, a spy who is investigating the Snakes. And the last member of team cannon fodder is Banak, a spy for the Interveners (probably) whose tactical suicide takes out Danica. (He suicides because the Snakes were taking too much interest in him.)
It's readable but the prose ranges from workmanlike to clunky. A number of the chapters start with infodump excerpts from the "Internetopedia." It seems completely out of place that they have AIs and yet still have an internet encyclopedia. Heck, I'm not convinced the internet as we know it now will still be around in 20 years. Probably everything will run through the facebook app.
On plot and characterization, there simply isn't enough there to judge. A large number of characters are introduced, some who become cannon fodder (or are obviously ones that are not central to the plot, like Grace the spaceship pilot.) and the ones that are important aren't fleshed out enough to make me care about them. I was glad to see there were women characters who were actual characters - skilled and valuable for what they do, not how they look. No ladyprizes.
As for the plot, it reads like the first few chapters of a novel - not deep enough in to decide how I feel about it, but not so obviously bad that I would have put it down already. The truth is I probably wouldn’t have picked it up based on the title, but is does pretty much what it says on the tin.
Except for being an actual novelette.
Ah, the old science fiction apostrophe, how I have missed you. Between that and the super chess, you know what sort of story you are getting here. Old school. Kind of felt like Larry Niven.
"Championship B'Tok" is organized into chapters. Which makes sense as this is in no way a stand alone story-it's an excerpt from a novel. All we get is buildup, and then it stops without any sort of resolution. That alone would normally be enough to keep a story off the ballot.
It opens with the sort of scene you typically get in a police procedural - a shot of the crime in progress with the likelihood that we will never see that character again except as a corpse. So let's forget about the guy who might have died on an asteroid.
On team evil we have Glithwah, a Snake - an alien species that basically reads like a cross between Klingons and the Ferengi. They invaded human space and were badly beaten and are now kept in a detainment camp on the moon Ariel. Glithwah has a plan. Can you guess the plan? Yes, it would be KILL ALL HUMANS. The story ends with the reveal that she has amassed an army of killer robots.
On team good we have Carl, who runs the detainment camp and Corrine, a journalist. They both have history with the Snakes. Corrine has made a trip out to the detainment camp to brief Carl on a the "Interveners" who have been interfering with the development of a number of planets. Well, maybe they have, no one has any real evidence that they actually exist.
On team cannon fodder we have Lyle, the dude who was probably killed in the opening scene. Also on team cannon fodder is Danica, a spy who is investigating the Snakes. And the last member of team cannon fodder is Banak, a spy for the Interveners (probably) whose tactical suicide takes out Danica. (He suicides because the Snakes were taking too much interest in him.)
It's readable but the prose ranges from workmanlike to clunky. A number of the chapters start with infodump excerpts from the "Internetopedia." It seems completely out of place that they have AIs and yet still have an internet encyclopedia. Heck, I'm not convinced the internet as we know it now will still be around in 20 years. Probably everything will run through the facebook app.
On plot and characterization, there simply isn't enough there to judge. A large number of characters are introduced, some who become cannon fodder (or are obviously ones that are not central to the plot, like Grace the spaceship pilot.) and the ones that are important aren't fleshed out enough to make me care about them. I was glad to see there were women characters who were actual characters - skilled and valuable for what they do, not how they look. No ladyprizes.
As for the plot, it reads like the first few chapters of a novel - not deep enough in to decide how I feel about it, but not so obviously bad that I would have put it down already. The truth is I probably wouldn’t have picked it up based on the title, but is does pretty much what it says on the tin.
Except for being an actual novelette.