2012 Hugos: Best Short Story
I noticed John Scalzi's challenge to his readers to read this year's Best Short Story nominees, and thought that this would be as good a day as any to get through them myself. They are all short, they are all available for free online, and three of them are very good. My preferences will be allocated as follows (in traditional reverse order of
( Read more... )
Comments 4
(The comment has been removed)
"It's like a bloody war zone up there - and not in a good way!"
Reply
ETA: Having read all five, I think I agree with your assessment. (I might put the Liu above the Fulda, but that's because it has more personal resonance for me.) The Resnick is just dreadful, both in its anvilicious moral, and the shoddy world-building. When Julia said, “Oh, I wish I could see him!” I thought, “If only there were some futuristic technology that allowed one to make images of things in one place and look at them in another.”
Reply
Oddly enough, though I thought the Resnick was a much worse story, I found the Scalzi unreadable. Couldn't get past the 'it was very dark' bit.
I thought the ending of the wasps one was weak - I didn't understand why the new colony failed. Was it ignorance, bad luck, or the inevitable result of their chosen mode of organisation?
The paper menagerie one was okay, as a story of a second-generation immigrant etc etc and blah blah blah, but the SF element was tacked on. it would have been the same story with regular origami.
Movement I just didn't believe.
Reply
Best Short Story
1. "Movement" Nancy Fulda
2. "The Paper Menagerie" Ken Liu
3. "The Homecoming" Mike Resnick
4. "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" E. Lily Yu
5. "Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue" John Scalzi
Alan Heuer
Reply
Leave a comment