2010 Hugo Nominees - Novella round-up

This was a very strong category with some excellent entries. The only novella that I’d throw out of contention was Stross’s "Palimpsest," which does a great job of using time travel to push the boundaries of reality, but does so at the expense of character and narrative. I didn’t love it, but it’s still an interesting experiment. The other 5 novellas break down nicely into two camps for me – Kress and Morrow use sf set-ups to explore a few select characters in depth. McDonald does the same, but he also has the advantage of using a world that he’s already established in a longer novel. Baker and Scalzi both establish fascinating worlds, but these works feel mostly like set-up, and they sacrifice character to concept to some extent. Of all of these, the work that came closest to giving me the well-rounded exploration of character and story that I was looking for was Morrow’s. It’s probably not a coincidence that Shambling was also the closest to novel length.

The trend in other awards seems to be towards Nell Gwynne’s (it’s already got a Nebula and a Locus). To some extent, this might be a tribute to Kage Baker, but it’s also a strong enough work that I can’t complain. If it had pushed its concept just a little further in that second half, it could have been something really special, and I have no doubt that Baker is deserving some recognition for a great career (and life) that ended far too early.

My vote did go to Morrow though. He really established the atmosphere of Hollywood’s golden age B-movies while also taking on the big issue of the American use of weapons of mass destruction. The novella was humorous, dark, and moving, and Syms Thorley was a very rich character. It affected me as much as anything I read for these awards, so I had to give it the nod.

2010 Hugo nominee (and Nebula winner), novella: The Women of Nell Gwynne's by Kage Baker (Subterranean)

Kage Baker’s been one of the most highly regarded sf writers of the past decade, and her Company series has been on my reading list for some time. Unfortunately, she died earlier this year of cancer at the age of 57.

The Women of Nell Gwynne’s was one of her last works. It’s a limited edition illustrated novella, and it’s already won the Nebula. Wikipedia has it as a standalone Company story, but I have no idea how it connects.

Basically, it’s a story of steampunk cyborg superspy Victorian prostitutes. How’s that for a pitch? We begin with the origin story of one of the operatives, the aristocratic Lady Beatrice. After being raped and brutalized in the Afghan War, Beatrice is cast out of her family as a fallen woman. She turns to prostitution to survive, and, since she’s fierce, resourceful, and educated, she’s recruited by the brothel called Nell Gwynne’s, which is really an intelligence gathering operation of the mysterious Gentlemen’s Speculative Society. The Society has a lot of steampunk spying technology, which they share with the girls in a scene straight out of James Bond. The rest of the novella focuses on a single mission concerning more steampunk super-technology.

It’s a very entertaining story, though I’m not sure it quite lives up to its potential. The mission itself is a bit routine – again, it’s straight Bond or Avengers material, despite the unique setting, and the girls don’t get to make that much use of their special equipment and talents. There’s also not as much exploration of sex and class as the beginning seems to promise. The relationship between the Society and Nell Gwynne’s seems rather exploitative, for instance, and I’d like to see more on that dynamic. It’s good, and I’d recommend it to steampunk fans especially, but I can’t help thinking that it could have been more. I look forward to reading more of Baker’s work though.

Since it was issued as a limited edition book, it’s not easy to get hold of at the moment (I’ve becoming a supporting WorldCon member, so I got a .pdf copy as a voter). It will receive a larger print run this fall though.

Grade: B

2010 Hugo nominee, novella: SHAMBLING TOWARDS HIROSHIMA by James Morrow (Tachyon)

This book is the perfect companion to Adam Roberts’ Yellow Blue Tibia, reviewed here last week. That novel saw Soviet sf writers brought together in the wake of World War II to create a story that would pay off in the 1980s. This novel, also narrated from the perspective of the 1980s, is about the US government bringing together Hollywood horror legends in 1945 to create a monster movie that would frighten Japan into surrender. It’s really a mirror-image of Roberts’ book, and I’m trying to figure out why this idea of blending fiction and reality in the wake of World War II/Cold War is in the zeitgeist all of the sudden. Or is it just pure coincidence?

The narrator is a fictional (to my knowledge) Hollywood actor named Syms Thorley who has starred in a series of monster films in ‘40s Hollywood. He’s tasked to play a fire-breathing lizard and wreck a scale-model of a Japanese city (the set-up to get to that point is pretty ridiculous, but believability is not Morrow’s central objective here). Thorley is joined in this plot by a host of real Hollywood legends like director James Whale (Frankenstein) and early special effects wizard Willis O’Brien (King Kong). There are plenty of hints in the framing narration that this plot has something to do with the popularity of kaiju (giant monster) films like Godzilla in Japan.

The plot is fairly rudimentary – there are a few obstacles along the way, but Morrow's focus here is more on conveying the atmosphere of B-movies during Hollywood’s golden age. Morrow does a great job of it, and the novella is worthwhile for the setting and prose alone. But, as the title hints, the novel is really about the atom bomb, and the way it haunts – or maybe how it should haunt – America as well as Japan. Just like Yellow Blue Tibia, Shambling point out that the horrors of the atomic age can be stranger and more terrible than anything the science fiction of the era produced.

This was a well-written and engaging book that was both funny and haunting. Very nice stuff, and I’m looking forward to more Morrow coming up when I get to the ‘90s.

Grade: A-

2010 Hugo nominee, novella: THE GOD ENGINES by John Scalzi (Subterranean)

John Scalzi is one of the hottest sf writers out there. His first novel was published in 2005, but he had already racked up three novel nominations by 2008. He’s also the President-elect of the SFWA. As with most of the writers who hit in the 00s, I hadn’t read any of his work until now.

The premise of this novella is original and a bit odd, but it’s also quite straightforward: starships are powered by imprisoned deities. The gods are of the Lovecraftian variety – they’re immensely powerful and arcane beings who don’t necessarily fit into our ideas about conventional reality, but they’re not necessarily divine. People worship and fear them, but, as far as we know, they’re just mind-blowing aliens. At some point, humanity encountered these gods and became involved in a war between them. One of the gods vanquished and enslaved the others – humanity became servants of this god, and bound the others in iron chains, forcing them to transport human ships about the universe so they could prosthelytize for their Lord.

We focus on one ship, the Righteous, and its captain Tephe. Tephe must navigate the tensions with the priestly class that shares power aboard ship, and he’s in love with one of the Rooks (priestesses/harem girls) that “comfort” the ship’s crew.

It’s a fairly fantastic set-up, but, and maybe this is the result of its length, it’s all set-up. The characters tend to speak in exposition, and spend all of their time telling explaining their world and roles to each other (though they should obviously already know these things). The characters fall a bit flat as well, and they tend to slot into generic roles (heroic officers, incompetent priests, hooker with a heart of gold). The ideas are great though, and I’d consider reading more novels set in this world (though the horror ending doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room open for sequels).

Grade: B

2010 Hugo (and Nebula) nominee, novella: "Act One" by Nancy Kress (Asimov's 3/09)

It probably should not be surprising that a lot of current science fiction deals with genetic manipulation. Nancy Kress, who already has several Hugo and Nebula nominations and wins for short fiction, offers a fairly subtle version of the story in this novella that serves more as a character study than anything else.

The novella is set in the near future, and the narrator, Barry, is the manager of an out-of-work actress named Jane Snow. Jane is set to make a big come back with a film about someone genetically engineered to have something called Arlen's Syndrome, which grants a sort of hyper-empathy. To research the role, she lives with a pair of young twins with Arlen's, and she becomes somewhat embroiled in the machinations of a pro-genetic modification group (genetic modification is extremely unpopular in this future, so the group has to live underground and the twins face a future of discrimination). Most of the drama of the story actually comes from Barry, who is a dwarf, and thus has his own distinct, but ambivalent, views on genetics.

The result is a refreshingly complex take on the issue. While the twins initially seem a bit Stepford, we instead see the role of unintended consequences and nurture-over-nature in genetically modified people. The story is somewhat less than satisfying though. The title refers to the typical structure of scripts, and the story really does feel more like a beginning. A lot of the subplots, the twins especially, seem to go nowhere, and the novella has an intentionally ambiguous ending. And, while Barry's voice and perspective are the best part of the novella, his situation fits just a bit too perfectly, and it does feel a bit contrived. There's good material to chew on here, but setting up clever ethical and character dilemmas seems to overshadow simple storytelling.

Available to read for free at Asimov's.

Grade: B

Hugo nominee, novella: "Palimpsest" by Charles Stross

Palimpsest is a popular word this year for some reason, as we have a novella and a novel sharing the same name. The term refers to a parchment that has been used, scraped clean and reused (as often happened) so that multiple layers of documents exist. Both of the present works seem to use it as a metaphor for parallel universes or timelines, though Stross's novella takes a science fiction approach and Valente's is fantasy.

I'd not read any Charles Stross yet, though I have one or two of his novels on the agenda for when my review gets to the '00s (probably next year). I do know that he's known for big ideas and high concepts, often using the concept of "singularity" that's dominated science fiction through the last decade and which we'll get to eventually. At it's most basic, the idea of the singularity extrapolates rapid improvements in computer processors to postulate a new technological development that leads to a massive acceleration in human capabilities, and, quite literally, changes everything. In this story, Stross sticks with the Big Ideas. In "Palimpsest" we have time travel technology, which allows a group of time displaced "Agents" to control history to maximize the survival of the human race for the Stasis. The problem, and the interesting innovation, is the recognition that history is finite - gates can only be opened to a specific moment once, and in the long run, the Agents risk using up all of time.

The story opens with a bit about killing your own grandfather. It's an attention-grabber, but it felt gimmicky to me, especially with the use of second-person (which always rubs me the wrong way). From there, it settles down to a relatively straightforward narrative, despite the non-linear action. Agent Pierce trains, meets a couple of love interests, gets involved in some action sequences, and uncovers a conspiracy that may or may not involve future versions of himself and/or the women in his life (lives?). Stross includes interludes that depict the ruthless and paradoxical training of the time agents (eg, killing your own grandfather) and broad sweeping histories of the Earth that proceed down dramatically different paths in timescales of billions of years. It’s all incredible grand, and we’re often reassured that Pierce has some agency in all of this.

That’s a hard pill to swallow though. The settings are so broad and the nature of this universe so flexible, that it’s hard to care. I can see why authors enjoy carrying technologies to the point that anything, no matter how mind blowing, goes, but I don’t particularly enjoy reading about it. If there are no rules, there are no stakes. Therefore, the challenge of the sf writer who wants to write about these kinds of Big Ideas is to convey an internally consistent logic that clearly relates the challenges and pitfalls that the main characters face. We don’t get that at all here, and I can’t say that I would care about the generic Pierce anyway.

This is a dense mess without a strong character at its center. There were ideas here that piqued my interest, but generally I didn’t care. After complaining on Wednesday that “short fiction is too short,” I found this story too long.

Stross has posted the story here for the duration of the Hugo voting. I wasn’t too fond of it, but I can see why others would be. There are certainly intriguing ideas in this story.

Next Wednesday and Friday: some dramatic presentations!

Grade: C+