Locus, July 2014

by Locus Publications

  Klages continued to entertain the audience while further technological issues were dealt with, before admitting to the “worst segue in the history of anything” and requesting a moment of silence to watch a slideshow of the in memoriam list, saying that “the hardest thing at a yearly banquet is to notice the people who are not here and will never be with us again.”

  Once the slideshow was completed, Klages formally welcomed the audience to the 49th annual Nebula Awards and spoke movingly about the evolution of the genre and its writers since SFWA’s founding in 1965, and the importance of the community. She also screened photos of a young Samuel Delany, an adorable baby Andy Duncan, a teenage Nancy Kress in a prom dress, and others, to highlight the transformation, as well as the great equalizing power that the genre holds to bring together all different kinds of people, “from a dazzling variety of backgrounds. [SFWA] is an organization that since 1966… has embraced the other, the outsider, the astonishing new voice.”

  Nancy Kress & Jack Skillingstead; Adam Rakunas, Heather Shaw, Jenn Reese

  Stephen Gould presented the Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA Award to Michael Armstrong for his behind-the-scenes work within SFWA since the late 1980s, and in particular for his work on the grievance committee. The Damon Knight Grand Master Award was then presented to Samuel R. Delany by Connie Willis. Delany accepted the award after receiving a standing ovation, saying, “I write the stories, I do… I write them as well as I possibly can. And that you have chosen to honor me for that is very warming. Thank you so much.” The Ray Bradbury Award for outstanding dramatic presentation was presented by Chuck Surface. The award went to Gravity, written by Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Stephen H Silver accepted the award on their behalf.

  Madeleine Robins presented the Andre Norton Award for young-adult science fiction and fantasy. The award went to Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson. Hopkinson was floored, saying “this was the last thing I expected. The field of authors on this ballot was amazing. Have you read this book? Thank you to the people who shepherded me through writing this thing as I was recovering from five years of hell, and that’s pretty much everyone here. This is wonderful.”

  Linda & Ron Nagata; Kate Baker, Liza Groen Trombi; Christie Yant & John Joseph Adams; David Findlay & Nalo Hopkinson

  The award for Best Short Story of the year was presented by Pat Murphy to Rachel Swirsky, for “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”. Swirsky thanked Cat Rambo for her “flash class and her prompt” which inspired the story, as well as her editors Lynn and Michael Thomas, and her parents, both in attendance that night.

  The award for Best Novelette was presented by Amy Thompson. The award went to Aliette de Bodard’s “The Waiting Stars”. Sylvia Spruck Wrigley accepted on behalf of de Bodard. “I am honored and vaguely shocked that I get a repeat performance at the Nebulas this year. Many thanks to everyone who voted for me and helped spread the word. And to my co-nominees who all made this category such a difficult one to vote in.”

  Salem Evans, Alan Beatts & Jude Feldman, Chris Hsiang, Carl Ueber; Paul Goodman & Erin Cashier

  Patricia Diggs presented the Best Novella Award; the winner was “The Weight of the Sunrise” by Vylar Kaftan. Kaftan accepted, thanking “Sheila Williams, the editor who believed in me…[and] my darling husband Shannon Thomas Prickett who believes in me when I don’t believe in myself and has helped make me who I am.”

  Stanley Schmidt presented the award for Best Novel, which went to Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Leckie accepted, saying “I looked at the slate of novels this year, and they are all amazing. I can’t tell you what an honor it is just to have a book of mine on that list. I have to thank the folks at Orbit… my super fabulous agents at Fishman… my Clarion instructors and classmates… and thanks to my family… I could not have written this book without their love and support. It’s an astonishing thing to find out that something you have written has connected with other readers. I am beyond delighted and amazed.” Frank M. Robinson was slated to receive the Special Honoree award. Due to an error in the ceremony schedule, the presentation didn’t happen; however, SFWA apologized profusely and offered to fly Robinson and Robin Wayne Bailey to next year’s ceremony for a do-over on the presentation. After the ceremony there was much talk of the all-female fiction slate this year, and also that, as Klages pointed out, there was an LGBT person nominated for the award in every category.

  The 2015 50th annual Nebula Awards Weekend is currently planned to take place in early June in Chicago IL.

  A selection of photos from the convention follows.

  –Patrick Wells and Francesca Myman

  Andrew Trembley & Kevin Roche with the Robot Bartender; Sarah Pinsker, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Laurel Amberdine, Bennett Madison

  Kyle Alsteach, Deborah J. Ross, Ron Davis, Robin Wayne Bailey; Shahid Mahmud, Andrea Stewart, Jerimiah Honer

  Sofia Samatar, Lynne M. Thomas; Cat Rambo, Ann Leckie; Vylar Kaftan & Shannon Prickett; Valerie Green Schoen & Lawrence M. Schoen

  Sandy Swirsky, Rachel Swirsky, Lyle Merithew, Johanna Hoyt, Ken Liu; Pat Diggs, Ysabeau Wilce

  Steven Gould, Scott Edelman, Stanley Schmidt; John Klima, Jaym Gates, Jim Minz; Anne Leonard, Emily Jiang

  Helen Pilinovsky, Veronica Schanoes, David G. Hartwell; Carl Engle-Laird, Trevor Quachri; Jennifer Hsyu, Gregory Norman Bossert

  Andy Duncan, Jennifer Brehl; Sheila Williams, Jill Roberts; Francesca Myman, David Edison

  Michael A. Armstrong, Vincent Jorgensen, Tom LeFevre; Rudy Rucker, Daniel Marcus

  Andrew Penn Romine, Sunil Patel, Caroline Ratajski, Jaym Gates, Barry Goldblatt; Carrie Sessarego, Helene Wecker

  Alyc Helms, Cat Rambo, Henry Lien; Jacob Weisman, Cecelia Holland; Jim Fiscus, Lee Martindale

  Eileen Gunn, Lee Konstantinou, Sandy Beadle, Rachel Holmen; Andrew Penn Romine, Chaz Brenchley

  Ellen Datlow, Matthew Kressel, Jennifer Hall; Liz Argall, Jack Skillingstead, Amy Sundberg, Daryl Gregory

  Lynne Thomas, Beth Meacham; Jeremy Erman, Deborah Beale, Cordelia Willis; Jed Hartman, Liza Groen Trombi

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  Asimov’s 4-5/14

  Asimov’s 6/14

  F&SF 5-6/14

  Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons, Tom Purdom (Fantastic Books) February 2014.

  The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2, Gordon Van Gelder, ed. (Tachyon) July 2014.

  The April/May and June issues of Asimov’s are uneven, although both have some good stuff, even if probably not anything you’re going to see on next year’s award ballots. The two strongest stories in April/May, one SF and one fantasy, are James Patrick Kelly’s ‘‘Someday’’ and Michael Swanwick’s ‘‘Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown’’. Kelly’s ‘‘Someday’’, the SF story, is, to me, strongly reminiscent in tone and mood of something by Ursula K. Le Guin, no small compliment in my book. It examines the peculiar courtship customs and divergent biology that have developed on a lost colony that has drifted out of touch with the rest of humanity – with a final clever twist waiting at the end. The fantasy stories in Asimov’s are usually weaker than the SF stories, but Swanwick’s ‘‘Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown’’ is one of the good ones, taking us to a deeply cynical and scathingly satiric version of Hell for a variant of the classic Orpheus story, as a young girl struggles to resist the Devil’s sly lures and rescue her father; it even has, for Swanwick, a relatively upbeat ending. Matthew Johnson’s ‘‘Rules of Engagement’’ and Will McIntosh’s ‘‘Scout’’, two interesting variations on the standard military SF story, are also good here, as is K.J. Zimring’s ‘‘The Talking Cure’’, a clever take on the memory-viewing theme where memories of the past turn out to not be quite what the subject thought they were, going in to the process.

  The rest of the stories in the April/May issue are weaker, although most are still worth reading. Robert Reed turns in a rare disappoint
ment with ‘‘The Principles’’, a chunk of a novel in which the major interest is in trying to discern (not entirely successfully) how the world of the story differs from our own timeline, but the story is rather static, mostly talking heads talking to each other, with not much of significance actually happening. William Preston’s ‘‘Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key’’ is another in his series about the Old Man, a thinly disguised version of old-time pulp hero Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, and is well-enough crafted, but I’m getting a little tired of them. M. Bennardo’s ‘‘Slowly Upward, the Coelacanth’’ features an ingenious but highly unlikely method of surviving a worldwide apocalypse. Joe M. McDermott’s ‘‘Delores, Big and Strong’’ is a rather dispiriting story of how bitterly hard farm life can be, thinly rationalized as SF by a medical device that I don’t think could work the way that the story says that it does.

  •

  The most entertaining story in the June Asimov’s is probably Lavie Tidhar’s ‘‘Murder in the Cathedral’’, a flamboyant steampunk melodrama related to the author’s Bookman series. Also good here, and ultimately rather optimistic and life-affirming despite its drastic circumstances, is Kara Dalkey’s ‘‘The Philosopher Duck’’, which features a novel method of surviving through a deadly typhoon that might actually work; in the end, the family not only survives disaster, but, undaunted, immediately start rebuilding their lives, a lesson all of us might usefully learn in a climate-challenged world. Suzanne Palmer’s ‘‘Shatterdown’’ contains most of the tropes that prospectors-diving-into-gas-giant stories usually have, but handles them well in service of a tale of vengeance and obsession; this is the second story by Palmer I’ve read recently in which the protagonist destroys her enemies by destroying herself, so we may be seeing something of a theme developing here. James Van Pelt’s ‘‘The Turkey Raptor’’ is a delicious little tale of the revenge of a bullied high-school kid, although I didn’t like the injection of a second fantastic element late in the story. One prehistoric survival in a small mountain town I can swallow, but two stretches credulity. Nancy Kress’s ‘‘Sidewalk at 12:00 P.M.’’ features an oddly specialized and personal use for a time-viewer, and one that the protagonist knows going in is pointless – although Kress adroitly dodges a definitive answer to whether it’s had the desired effect or not, leaving the door open for a smidgen of hope that it has.

  •

  It was a weak May/June issue of F&SF. The most briskly entertaining story here is Naomi Kritzer’s ‘‘Containment Zone: A Seastead Story’’, but as has become clearer with each installment (and is probably admitted to by the new subtitle, which the others didn’t carry), this is really a de facto novel serialization, and this chunk doesn’t stand particularly well on its own feet without reference to the earlier stories, and if you haven’t read the earlier stories, you won’t get the full measure of enjoinment out of this one – which is too bad, as it’s nicely done near-future stuff, with an engagingly spunky and resourceful protagonist somewhat reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s Podkayne. The most substantial story here is Pavel Amnuel’s ‘‘White Curtain’’, a story which first appeared in Russian in Kiev in 2007, translated by Anatoly Belilovsky, and appears here for the first time in English; this plays in an intelligent, elegant way with the existence of myriad Alternate Possibility worlds, and describes a man who can select between them – at a cost.

  Everything else in May/June is weaker. David D. Levine crosses the hardboiled PI story with a retro-SF story set on a habitable Venus in ‘‘The End of the Silk Road’’; it’s competently handled, but the problem with it is that the mystery part follows the classic hardboiled PI story formula in too slavish a point-for-point manner, and the SF part is unimaginative, with a not-terribly-evocative Venus that is pretty much just like Earth, except that they call it Venus, something substituting amphibian frogmen for the traditional gunsels doesn’t really help all that much. Tim Sullivan’s ‘‘The Memory Cage’’ is about a man who goes to unlikely technological extremes to have a series of conversations with what amounts to his estranged father’s ghost. It would probably have worked better as a fantasy, with the ghost an actual ghost rather than an unconvincing ‘‘quantum-entangled signal’’ that is somehow able to talk and respond to the protagonist in real-time. Katie Boyer’s dystopian drama ‘‘Bartleby the Scavenger’’ is set in a little mountain town that has survived as an autonomous unit after a period of social upheaval has torn the rest of the US apart. It’s crafted well enough, but I found the whole setup unrealistic, especially that people would stay in town and die when the dictatorial Mayor decides that their time is up, rather than lighting out for someplace else. After all, they’re not the only people left alive in the country; you know there are others elsewhere, probably other communities, and you’d think that heading out to possibly find a place in one of them would be a chance worth taking. The rest of the stories include a somewhat distasteful mermaid story, a Lovecraftian pastiche, a broad and overlong farce, and another in a long-running fantasy series that I’ve never been able to warm to.

  •

  Tom Purdom made his first professional sale all the way back in 1957. It’s hard to think of any other member of his generation whose current work is frequently mentioned in the same breath with that of writers such as Charles Stross, Greg Egan, and Alastair Reynolds, many of whom weren’t born when Purdom started his professional career. In fact, for sweep and audacity of imagination and a wealth of new ideas and dazzling conceptualization, Tom Purdom not only holds his own with the New Young Turks of the ’90s and the Oughts, he sometimes surpasses them, especially in stories such as ‘‘Fossil Games’’, ‘‘Canary Land’’, and ‘‘A Response from EST17’’, all featured in what is, amazingly enough after all these decades, his very first short-story collection, Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons.

  Purdom also specializes in writing his own unique brand of military SF, in stories such as ‘‘Legacies’’, ‘‘Sheltering’’, and ‘‘Research Project’’, which are much more concerned with tactics and strategy than with the bloody details of combat, with hard moral and ethical choices, and, almost uniquely (although not at all surprisingly, considering that Purdom himself was an Army brat) with the psychological effects and consequences that military service has on families. Just to add some variety, the collection also features a rare fantasy by Purdom, although one still concerned with military tactics, ‘‘Dragon Drill’’, which introduces living dragons as a complicating tactical feature to the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars, and a compelling time-travel story, ‘‘The Mists of Time’’, which is also concerned with military matters, here the British Navy’s campaign against slave ships, and with hard ethical and moral choices; there are rarely any easy or facile choices in Purdom’s work, and everything has consequences. This is a collection that should appeal to anyone who likes core science fiction, and it’s a sad comment on the dwindling of the mid-list that this is appearing from an ultra-small press rather than as a mass-market paperback from Del Ray or Ace or Tor, as it probably would have 40 years ago.

  •

  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, usually referred to as F&SF, is the second-longest continually operating genre magazine in the world (Astounding/Analog is the oldest), founded in 1949 and still being published regularly here in 2014. As demonstrated by the stories in The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 2, edited by Gordon Van Gelder (27 stories covering a span from 1952 to 2011), throughout all those decades F&SF has frequently been the most reliable place in the genre to find quality speculative work written to a high literary standard.

  It’s hard to pick favorites here, as nothing in the anthology is bad and most of the stories are memorable, but if pressed to single my favorites out, I’d mention ‘‘The Country of the Kind’’ by Damon Knight, ‘‘‘ – All You Zombies – ’’’ by Robert A. Heinlein, ‘‘A Kind of Artistry’’ by Brian W. Aldiss, ‘‘Green Magic’’ by Jack Vance, ‘‘Narrow Valley’�
�� by R.A. Lafferty, ‘‘Sundance’’ by Robert Silverberg, ‘‘Salvador’’ by Lucius Shepard, ‘‘The Lincoln Train’’ by Maureen F. McHugh, ‘‘Maneki Neko’’ by Bruce Sterling, ‘‘Winemaster’’ by Robert Reed, and ‘‘Have Not Have’’ by Geoff Ryman. The anthology also contains good work by Jack Finney, C.M. Kornbluth, Zenna Henderson, Robert Sheckley, Kit Reed, Jane Yolen, Harlan Ellison, George Alec Effinger, James Patrick Kelly, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, M. John Harrison, Paolo Bacigalupi, Elizabeth Hand, Stephen King, and Ken Liu. As many of these stories are classics, this is a good reading bargain.

  –Gardner Dozois

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  SHORT FICTION REVIEWS BY RICH HORTON

  Analog 7-8/14

  F&SF 5-6/14

  Asimov’s 7/14

  Lightspeed 6/14

  Rogues, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Bantam) June 2014.

  Analog’s big July/August double issue has a novella and a passel of novelettes, but the best story by far (and one of the best stories of the year) is one of the shortest: ‘‘Sadness’’ by Timons Esaias. Esaias published some impressive stories for a decade or so starting in 1993, and then fell relatively silent for a few years, at least in our genre, so it’s nice to seem his name show up again. ‘‘Sadness’’ is set in a future dominated by the New Humans, what we call posthumans, though the story effectively maintains their strangeness and never tells us what they are or how they came to be. Evor Bookbinder is a baseline human who is contemplating killing his lover when he is summoned to meet with a New Human. They talk – to the extent they can talk – and we learn in passing a little bit about this strange future. We come to a shocking end, as the story has it, and sadness prevails. A beautiful, dark piece.