2015 Nebula and 2016 Locus Fantasy: UPROOTED by Naomi Novik

Most of Naomi Novik's published work is an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars with dragons, the Temeraire series. I'm intrigued by the setting, though I was always a little afraid that it would pale in comparison to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Based on this book, a standalone fantasy novel, I'm a little more inclined to give Novik's other work a shot. It's a very well-written and imaginative work that often evoked the works of Hayao Miyazaki, which I consider a big compliment.

Establishing settings is one of the great challenges of science fiction and fantasy; lots of works throw the reader into an unfamiliar world in a way that can be alienating for big portions of a book, while others give you a long, unattractive expository infodump before you can settle in. Novik focuses on characters and then skillfully unveils this fantasy setting in a compelling manner; this was probably my favorite aspect of the book. Uprooted takes place in a psuedo-eastern Europe, late medievalish, and with magic. The main character Agnieszka is a young girl from a small village in the country of Polnya (psuedo-Poland bordered by a psuedo-Russia called Rosya). The village faces danger in the form of The Wood, the diabolical forest that sends out creatures to spread its magical corruption. The village is protected by a powerful wizard that the villagers know as the Dragon, who demands in repayment that a young girl come to serve him for ten year periods. Agnieszka gets taken as the Dragon's servant, but she soon finds that she has her own magical talents, which disrupts the gruff Dragon's typical brusqueness.

It's actually a fairly generic set-up for a romantic story, and, of course, there is one, but there's a lot more going on as well. And the real strength is Novik's prose, which is clean and clear but with a fairy tale flourish. Novik is especially adept at describing magic; she always gives both the spells of our heroes and the dark magics of the forest a tactile component. She makes it easy to imagine the feel of magic. And, as mentioned above, she really evokes Miyazaki's animated film Mononoke Hime (one of the great depictions of magical corruption in film) in The Wood's corruption without it ever feeling ripped off. The first half of the book also manages to capture some of the dreamy Miyazaki pacing that make his films so transporting.

I did have some problems with the book, almost all in the second half. After slowly creating a fascinating world, Novik proceeds to blow it all up. The pace picks up quickly and the book gallops to an apocalyptic conclusion. I neither expected nor wanted all of this world's mysteries and problems solved, but Novik seems intent on doing so. Not only does this strip away some of the sense of wonder, it also pushes aside character development for plot development, and the plot just isn't as interesting as the characters. In a way, though, I mean this as a compliment. I wanted to spend more time in the Dragon's Tower, and more time with Agnieszka.

Anyway, another good choice for the Nebula awards. I'm glad I'm catching up, as I missed some great stuff.

Grade: B+

2014 Nebula Winner: ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is the kind of active and well-liked leader in the science fiction community to whom the SFWA often seems to award Nebulas. I've hinted in the past that this seeming emphasis on the writer over the work hasn't always led to the strongest winners, in my opinion, but things worked out well with this choice. Annihilation is a strong and intriguing work of speculative fiction with literary ambitions - in other words, just what I'm looking for in these winners.

The novel is written as a journal of an expedition into a mysterious place called Area X that has a strange ecology and dramatic effects on the minds of any humans who enter it. The biologist of the twelfth expedition narrates, and we never learn her name or the names of the other expedition members (a psychologist, a surveyor, and an anthropologist). Things, of course, go wrong immediately, The results are pretty trippy with a heavy focus on how perception shapes behavior. VanderMeer can accomplish a lot, for instance, with the simple fact that expedition members can't agree on whether to call an artifact they find a "tunnel" or a "tower." I haven't always been a fan of very surrealist sf, but it works well here, as the images offer some great surprises and puzzles that stimulated my imagination, Interspersed with these events are flashbacks to the biologists pre-expedition life that build a very convincing character - she is surprisingly well-rounded despite remaining unnamed.

It's short and fast-paced, and I actually thought the length perfect. For a book that is abstract in many ways and doesn't seem interested in explaining many of its mysteries, spending any longer in this world might have gotten a little tiring. But, it ends on a very strong note. However, this is the first volume in The Southern Reach trilogy (all published in 2014 in an interesting strategy), so I guess there is more to be said about Area X and the efforts to explore it. I'm reluctant to dive into the other books not despite my enjoyment of this one but because that enjoyment was so predicated on its length and mystery. If anyone out there is reading and wants to recommend books two and three, I'd love to hear from them though.

Grade: A-

2014 Hugo and Clarke, 2013 Nebula and BSFA Winner: ANCILLARY JUSTICE by Ann Leckie

A side benefit of my extended hiatus is that I've managed to mostly avoid the Hugos' "sad puppy" stupidity, in which a group of Hugo voters stuffed the nomination ballot boxes with a slate of books that were supposed to celebrate sci-fi adventure over politically-correct messaging.  Look, if you have to game the voting process to get your nominees through, you're an undemocratic movement. Also, bigotry doesn't really make for good democracy either, and the idea that this was a move to eschew contemporary politics is either ignorant or dishonest (as, obviously, an anti-"message" movement sends its own kind of message). If I'd actually had time to read all the nominees, I would have quit doing so when these guys steamrolled through their slate. So, I guess I'm lucky I didn't have time.

One of the ironies of the movement that I think is worth mentioning is that the last couple of years have been exceptionally good for books that resemble an older style of Hugo winner. As I mentioned in my round up of the '00s, traditional forms of science fiction, like space opera, have been in a very rough spot since around the turn of the century, leading to many unconventional Hugo winners, including several fantasy books. If you squint hard and ignore 90% of what people in the movement say (and 100% for the rabid ones), you can almost see a half-decent point that the vast majority of the books from the previous few years didn't fit traditional definitions of mainstream science fiction (hell, I sort of obliquely complained about this is my only posts of 2014).

The problem is, here we have a winner that is absolutely what the Hugos have been missing for the previous decade or so. Ancillary Justice would be right at home in the 1980s, and it draws heavily upon the types of sf (like the works of Ursula K. LeGuin) that did well in 60s and 70s. The fact that a book that represents the best of classic sf won in 2014 really demonstrates the hollowness and sexism of the whole sad puppy "we just miss classic sf" movement.

Breq is an ancillary - a human body that is controlled by the AI of a massive starship of the Radch Empire. Most ships have many ancillaries, which are used as enforcers of colonial rule as the Radchai take over new planets, and these ancillaries share the consciousness of the ship AI. But Breq has lost her ship - she is a lone sliver of that AI consciousness now trapped in human form. She's also on a quest, the nature of which is unveiled over the course of the novel. It has brought her to an icy planet, where she meets one of her former captains, now strung out on drugs, named Seivarden. Much of the novel follows her attempts to fulfill her goals while dealing with her washed-up former commander. Meanwhile, alternating chapters flashback to the Radch conquest of a planet called Shis'urna and reveal Breq's backstory.

It's fairly straightforward, accessible space opera, recalling in world and tone Iain Banks' Culture series and the aforementioned LeGuin's Ekumen books. It doesn't necessarily equal the best works of either of those series, but it's a first novel, and a strong one. And, as a fan of space opera as the quintessential SF sub-genre, I'm happy to see this book gets lots of attention.

It's not perfect. There are plenty of ideas floating around, and not all of them get proper development and attention. The one that seems to interest people the most is the fact that the Radch don't distinguish by gender, meaning that you don't actually know the gender of most of the book's characters (everyone is referred to as a "she"). This is a fun little wrinkle to the world, and Leckie doesn't belabor the point. I think this is mostly for the best, but I did expect a bit more from it. Leckie is more interested in the theme of identity, and what it means to have these distributed consciousnesses. This makes for some crucial plot points, but you rarely get a sense of Breq's personal struggles with identity. Which leads me to my biggest problem with the novel: the prose. Ancillary Justice is written with first person narration, and it is very dry. This does make a certain amount of sense, as the the narrator is an AI fragment, but I think there could have been a more clever and poetic way of conveying this, and I suspect it is as much the result of this being a first novel as it is intentional. I don't want to suggest the prose is bad; it's probably above average for its genre, and it's certainly readable, but I hope for a bit more from Hugo winners (and have gotten it more recently with the likes of Walton and Chabon).

Overall, it's a nice return for space opera to the Hugo novel winners, and I look forward to reading Ancillary Sword (on my to read list thanks to the Locus voters).

Grade: B+

2012 Nebula Winner: 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Alright, I want to try to catch up a little bit this year, including posting my review of this book that I read...um....two years ago. Don't expect regular posts or anything, but I do want to keep my streaks in the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus SF novel awards going.

So, 2312 is pretty typical work from Kim Stanley Robinson, who is a favorite of mine. There's very strong world-building, as we once again get the Accelerando and its colonized solar system with lots of inventive terraforming (see Galileo's Dream and Blue Mars for other examples). There are some interesting ideas about social and political developments, clearly based on Robinson's clear understanding of history and social science. And your mileage with plot and character and prose may vary.

I found this novel especially uneven on the latter three counts. Robinson is a hard sf writer who really seems to put some energy into his style, and here he tries a little experimentation. It's appreciated but not entirely successful, and it stands out awkwardly next to some rather lengthy passages of technical writing focusing on the aforementioned world-building. Similarly, the characters can feel a little flat. Robinson's usual trick is to give his characters universal traits like love and ambition while also placing them in very specific historical and cultural contexts, and I think he's generally better at the latter than most of his peers. Here, the characters have immense longevity and the ability to change aspects of their appearance and identity fairly freely. At times, this is all realized wonderfully, and the best portion of the novel involves a gender fluid romantic arc with the main character Swan. Often, however, the characters just feel distant and cold - there's a lot of telling but not much showing, for instance, about how much Swan was inspired by a deceased character named Alex, whose death drives much of the plot.

Speaking of the plot, this is where the novel fails to realize its potential. It's basically a mystery, as Swan wanders the solar system investigating a series of dramatic terrorist attacks, but the investigations mostly feel engineered to show off the various exotic settlements, including a massive train city that circles Mercury between its light and dark sides - a device Robinson has used before, but he really goes into depth here. The setting is driving the story, not the characters.

2312 was more ambitious and literary than most of its competitors in 2012 (what I would have called a very off year, looking at the nominees), and I liked it quite a bit, but its flaws are evident enough that I'm not particularly bothered that it got beat by the fairly silly Redshirts for the Hugo and Locus.

Grade: B+

2012 Hugo and 2011 Nebula winner, novel: AMONG OTHERS by Jo Walton

For trendspotters, there’s a nice resonance between this book and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.   Both are novels with strong sf elements about young people overcoming rotten childhoods and doing so with the aid of science fiction media. Both novels are extremely nostalgic, and the timing isn’t that far apart (Ready Player One is obsessed with the 80s as a whole, though leaning towards the middle of the decade, Among Others takes place from fall of 1979 to spring of 1980, though it's more nostalgic for the books of the ‘60s and ‘70s). It’d be easy to make some grand pronouncement about generational shifts, or sf eating itself, or memoir bleeding into genre…or something. All that said, Among Others is a very different book from Ready Player One, and I think it’s a nice commentary on the diversity of the genre that Cline and Walton were obsessed with sf around the same time but had very little crossover in interests (Walton’s not so into the video games, the tv, and the movie films, though I’d argue, as a book lover who’s not fond of book snobbery, that Cline’s days in the arcade, and Walton’s science fiction book club probably served a lot of the same purposes for them).

In 1979, a fifteen-year-old Welsh girl named Morwenna runs away from home and finds herself in the custody of a father she has never known. Her wealthy aunts decide to send her to boarding school, where she is the unpopular new kid, though Walton nicely avoids piling on Dickensian melodrama and instead shows us a teenager who is simply not very popular, which certainly makes her relatable to much of this novel’s audience. Morwenna finds refuge in science fiction novels and eventually discovers a cohort of like-minded bookworms. It’s a gentle coming-of-age story peppered with commentary on the popular sf novels of the age. I imagine that there’s a fair amount of autobiography here as well, considering that the author was a fifteen-year-old science-fiction-adoring Welsh girl herself in 1979 (there were echoes of Walton’s Hugo blogging series here – fans of those posts should check out the novel and vice versa).

Oh yes, the fantasy twist. Morwenna is the daughter of a witch, she can see fairies, and she can cast spells herself. I’m very fond of the way Walton works this in. There are some pretty passages that meld fairies with the post-industrial Welsh landscape (check out the first pages for one of the best examples), Morwenna frets a bit about the ethics of magic, and there is something of a fantastic climax, but, for the most part, the fantasy elements are in the background. In fact, the most dramatic confrontation, in which Morwenna’s twin sister is killed in an attempt to stop the evil magic of their witch mother, occurs before the novel starts and is usually referred to only obliquely.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that Morwenna is an unreliable narrator with an overactive imagination. There are subtle clues that suggest this: magic works purely by coincidence, not many people see fairies (you have to believe!). I think I’d need to reread the novel to find more. That said, Walton doesn’t underline that question and avoids the tired “I swear it was real!” fantasy trope. It doesn’t matter if it’s real, because it’s a real component of how the narrator experiences or processes the world around her.

This is a really charming novel, and it’s the type of book that I like more as I write about it, which is always a good sign. Is it Hugo-winner worthy? That’s a tougher question, especially since the speculative elements are so light. I almost wish it could win "related works." I am leaning towards it though - I'll talk more about my pick for winner soon.

Grade: B+

2008 Nebula – POWERS by Ursula K. LeGuin

Reflecting broader trends in the publishing world (mainly, that mostly only kids read books now), two completely different Young Adult books won both the Hugo and the Nebula in the same year.  Of course, this is also a record-breaking fourth Nebula win for LeGuin.  Powers is the third entry in her YA Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, which is very much in the vein of her fantasy classic Earthsea.

Gavir is a slave in the city-state of Etra.  He and his sister were captured from the Marsh people, who are rumored to have special powers.  Gavir, for example, has an incredible memory, and can even, on rare occasions, remember the future.  As he narrates his childhood, he explains his unquestioning loyalty to his owners, who give him an education, but the abuses of the system are apparent from early on.  His sister is given to one of his master’s sons as a concubine, while another of the sons murders another slave without punishment.

Gavir eventually runs away, and we get a series of episodic adventures.  He joins a band of runaways, and, again, we begin to see the inequalities and sexual abuse within their social system. In the book’s most interesting section, Gavir returns to his people’s homelands in the Marshes. In Etra, we get the typical faux-medieval society, but in the Marshes, LeGuin gets to use her anthropological talents.  The Marsh people fish for subsistence and practice strict separation of the sexes.  LeGuin manages to make it seem fairly idyllic while also making it clear that it’s far from perfect and that Gavir does not belong.

A lot of the ethnographic details are nice, and LeGuin’s prose flows as nicely as ever. LeGuin never talks down to her YA audience; the proceedings are very dark and some of the material on gender is fairly subtle.  The novel eschews some of the expected dramatic resolutions.  We don’t get final confrontations between Gavir and many of his oppressors, or a touching reunion with his biological parents.  And, Gavir really uses his powers – the fact that he has a printed book makes more of a difference to the plot than the fact that he can occasionally see the future.  On one hand, I like that LeGuin avoids clichés.  On the other hand, the novel can feel a little aimless, and some of the early characters don’t have much point in the long-run.

I feel like I’m becoming a broken record with these Nebula winners.  Once again, this was a decent book that I enjoyed, but I don’t think it would’ve been my choice for the best novel of the year.  That said, LeGuin’s talents are still clear, and I can’t think of a writer more deserving of the record for most novel Nebulas.

Grade: B

2008 Hugo and Locus, 2007 Nebula – THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is a talented writer, and perhaps the literary establishment's greatest defender of genre fiction.  As a result of a few brilliant essays on the subject, serious-minded sf fans, like myself, have a lot of goodwill for the guy.  His Kavalier and Clay reimagined the creation of Superman by Jewish immigrants in the 1930s with a little bit of magical realism added in for good measure, and won him the Pullitzer Prize.  Thus, when Chabon returned with a novel with some mild speculative fiction elements (an alternate history), the sf awards took notice in a big way. It was a regular occurrence in the ‘70s, but this is the first award since the early ‘90s to get the Hugo, Nebula, and the Locus.

In the world of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the Roosevelt administration followed through with a plan (just briefly considered in our world) to resettle Jewish refugees from the Nazis in an Alaskan colony.  Israel, no longer the sole refuge, was destroyed in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which of course created more refugees.  The Jewish-Alaskan colony of Sitka is semi-automous, but is on the verge of reverting back to U.S. control as a conservative President plans to reassert authority (and possibly expel the Jews).  Like Dick in The Man in the High Castle, Chabon never clearly explains his alternate world.  The reader has to gather clues throughout the book (there are other tantalizing hints: JFK married to Marilyn Monroe?).

The background may be a speculative fiction alternate history, but the plot is pure noir.  Alchoholic homicide detective Meyer Landsman stumbles across the murder of one of his neighbors, an odd chess-obsessed drug addict.  Landsman and his half-Jewish, half-Tlingit partner Berko Shemets investigate, against the best wishes of the new police chief, who also happens to be Landsman's ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish.  The department has higher priorities than a drug addict's murder, as she is trying to close out all open cases in the few months before Reversion to the United States.  The investigation soon brings them into conflict with a Hassidic mafia, and eventually leads to a larger conspiracy that links the dead man with Landsman's recently deceased sister, Jerusalem, and the United States government.

Chabon is a fantastic writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed the novel.  My one complaint is that the plot is a bit byzantine and sometimes feels a little contrived.  There were moments when it felt more like James Bond than Sam Spade, what with the giant conspiracy and secret military training facilities.  The novel is at its best in the quieter moments between Landsman, Shemets and their families, or when its revealing little everyday facets of Chabon's intriguing alternate history.  The action set-pieces and the big mystery reveals felt more like distractions than thrilling plot-movers.  Also, I think the more you know about Jewish culture, the more fun you'll have with the novel.  I probably know a little bit more than the average goy, but I felt like I was still missing some subtle "easter eggs."

Grade: A-

2006 Nebula - SEEKER by Jack McDevitt

It says a lot that I often feel obligated to explore the motives of the SFWA committee that chooses the Nebula winner. In this case, we have a novel that’s about as standard as could be, and I’m tempted to say that the SFWA is rewarding an older author for being a good member of the community…

Seeker is the third novel following the adventures of daring space archaeologist Alex Benedict.  It's narrated by his assistant, interstellar pilot Chase Kopath (I'm not sure if she narrates the other novels or not).  Alex and Chase are space archaeologists and artifact dealers.  They discover a plastic cup that may be a relic of a 9000 year old lost colony, and Chase has to follow a number of leads to track the cup back to its origin - the colony ship Seeker.  If Alex and Chase can find the colony, they'll make a fortune, but along the way they must contend with rival archaeologists, the family of the survey team that found the cup and hid it existence, the brutish robber who last possessed the cup, and the telepathic alien "mutes" who unwittingly have a important clue.

From top to bottom, this novel just screams genre.  There's the simple, propulsive prose with some noir stylings.  There's the formulaic, linear plot, in which each encounter yields a clue that advances the investigation.  There are the required action scenes, that exist for no particular plot reasons.  There are mysterious sub-plots, and even over-the-top villains, whose violent tendencies clash a bit with their staid occupations and idealistic aims.  The setting is simple but rich with possibilities for action and mystery stories; just take an interstellar republic 10,000 years or so in the future, add simple faster-the-light travel, and stir in an alien race and lots of artifacts. It's really right out of the golden age.  And, you've seen all of the plot elements before too.  It's genre fiction through and through.

And, there's nothing wrong with that.  The plot is interesting enough (though maybe a bit too predictable), and who doesn’t enjoy the archaeologist-adventurer character?  And, it’s got a great structure, where each episode in the plot moves the mystery forward and adds a new hook. On the other hand, the characters are dull as bricks.  Alex is a cipher here, Chase is generic, the villains are awful and inexplicable, and the ancillary characters are straight out of the stock genre file. There isn’t much in the way of ideas either.  We get some discussion of Earth’s dicey political fate over the millennia to come, and the utopianism of the lost colony adds a little spice.  Meanwhile, we also get some simplistic demonization of cultural protection movements in the artifact trade…which seems like a big fight to pick in an adventure novel.  

All in all, I was entertained, but I’ve come to expect more from these award winners.  This might have felt newer sometime before Gateway…but that was thirty years earlier.  I had some issues with Spin, but it’s operating on a whole other level.  The Nebula slate this year (which is, unusually, completely different from the Hugo slate) looks pretty thin anyway, so I guess I'm glad McDevitt got the recognition.

Grade: B-

2005 Nebula – CAMOUFLAGE by Joe Haldeman

An extremely resilient, shapeshifting, immortal alien evolves in a harsh interstellar environment then travels to Earth.  30,000 years ago, it landed and began to observe local life, living for thousands of years as a shark.  Finally, in 1931 it comes ashore and takes human form.  We follow this “changeling” over the following decades, as it takes many different human forms and comes to understand human emotions.  The great cornball sci-fi question, “what is love?” is actually uttered several times in the novel, though at least Haldeman has the good sense to couch it in literary allusions.  While we follow the changeling's history through the years, we also see the excavation of its ship in 2020, led by Russell Sutton, the man who raised the Titanic.

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy this book.  Maybe it’s my love of history, but I’m a sucker for the “immortal experiences key events beyond a single lifespan” gimmick.  Haldeman is as good as anyone at depicting war from the soldier’s point of view, and there’s a very effective section on the Bataan Death March in the Phillippines during WWII.  That said, we’ve seen this before.  In fact, in this age of vampire dominance, we’ve seen it a lot.  I’m also a sucker for the “team of scientists try to understand unfathomable alien artifact” gimmick, which takes up most of the rest of the novel.  Again, we’ve seen it before, and we’ve seen it done better, but combining two basic plots I enjoy is probably not the recipe for a novel I’m going to hate.

It’s not necessarily the recipe for a novel that I’m going to love though.  The novel starts by combing some tried-and-true formulas, but it does go off on some tangents towards the end.  There’s an odd, and rather forced, love story.  Haldeman introduces another, unrelated, alien called the “Chameleon,” and I know he’s trying to draw a contrast between different views of humanity, but it really just feels like the Chameleon is just there so that there can be a fight at the novel’s climax.  There are extended descriptions of the elaborate lengths the Changeling has to go through to establish identities in the modern world. And, there’s a big twist that is so obvious that I was sure Haldeman was going for a fake out.

It’s a mildly entertaining, but flawed, novel.  It certainly doesn’t feel like an award-winner.  I think it’s fair to hold all of these award-winners up to a high standard, and to expect them to have high quality writing and bring new ideas or themes to the table; this one does not measure up.  This is Haldeman’s third Nebula.  Forever War is a classic in the core sf canon.  Forever Peace has some major issues, but it’s asking big questions and has some new ideas.  Camouflage is a workmanlike, derivative sf thriller.  Once again, I have no idea where the SFWA is coming from.

Grade: C+

2004 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Fantasy – PALADIN OF SOULS by Lois McMaster Bujold

Bujold wins her fourth Hugo in fourteen years (only Heinlein has exceeded this feat), and her second Nebula with this fantasy novel.  I tend to have nigh-impossible standards for High Fantasy (it took awhile for Song of Ice and Fire to win me over, after all)…but I liked this book, and its predecessor, 2001’s Curse of Chalion.  Bujold doesn’t exactly overcome the problems I’ve come to have with most high fantasy novels.  She still focuses on Byzantine political conflicts, leaving the central social issues of her faux-medieval society unexamined, and her prose is still stilted.  But she sidesteps these issues with a more personal focus on a smaller cast and setting, and with the general charm that all of her books seem to exude.

These books introduce the small nation of Chalion, which I imagined along the lines of medieval Spain, I think because of the consonants she uses in names and the many political similarities.  In this world, people believe in a nuclear family of gods – the Father, Mother, Daughter, and Son.  Some people, including most of Chalion, also worship “the Bastard” as a fifth god of social deviance and magic, while Chalion’s enemies see the Bastard as a demonic force outside of the pantheon.  The Curse of Chalion follows former general, and former slave Lupe dy Cazilar as he dabbles in death magic to redeem himself and Chalion’s royal family, who are literally cursed by dark magic, and figuratively cursed with corrupt officials.  I actually liked Curse a bit more than this novel; the plot seemed more focused and the characters more interesting.  It was also nominated for a Hugo, but lost in a much tougher field (that included American Gods, Passage, and Perdido Street Station).

Paladin follows a minor character from the first book, the former queen Ista.  Ista had been inflicted with the curse, and had communicated with the gods.  She also did some rather horrible things to try to remove the curse, and most people considered her mad in her grief.  Now, she’s trying to regain some freedom by going on a pilgrimage, but on her way, she encounters an epidemic of demonic possession and raids from Chalion’s enemies, the Roknari.  She comes to a castle that has its own share of curses and conflicts, and she has to deal with new powers from the gods.

Bujold plays some interesting games with magic and religion here, and it is a well-told story with compelling characters, which I’ve come to expect from her.  We do get a few of the plot contrivances that bothered me in the Vorkosigan series, but they make a lot more sense when divine intervention is in play. I still want more out of fantasy novels than this, but there’s no question that this is a very solid entry in the canon.  The phrase “guilty pleasure” seems unfair to Bujold, because she does offer more depth and better writing than most sf, and yet her novels do bring that phrase to mind, because they are so enjoyable, and so focused on simply telling a clear, entertaining story.

I should note that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was nominated for a Nebula this year.  It’s one of my favorite novels, so I’m kind of bummed that the SFWA panel didn’t go out on a limb and give it the award.  The Hugo nominee line-up is quite a bit weaker, and, though I've only read one other nominee, I imagine that Bujold would've been my choice.

Grade: B

(I’d give Curse of Chalion a B+)

2003 Nebula – THE SPEED OF DARK by Elizabeth Moon

It seems like one way to get the SFWA’s attention is to be an established sf writer (Moon had long-running sf and fantasy series under her belt), and then to step out of your comfort zone (this book is much more grounded in the present and tackles a serious issue of mental disability)

There are some books that I have a hard time writing a less-than-positive review for.  In this case, we have a daring novel that dives into some intriguing issues of bioethics, has a character with autism as a first person narrator, and is based in part on the author’s own experiences with an autistic child.  There’s hardly a sentiment here that I disagree with, and I’m very intrigued by the subject matter, but, unfortunately, those qualities alone don’t make for a great book.

We don’t get a lot of the details about the world, but it’s a few decades in the future.  There are mentions of global warming and economic disaster (though not until the latter half of the book) as well as biological advances that have brought about old sf canards like personality modification for dangerous criminals, therapies for serious medical conditions, and life extension treatments.  Our narrator, Lou Arrendale, was born autistic at the turn of the twentieth century before treatments were developed for the condition, though he is very high-functioning.  He analyzes data for a corporation with a team of other autistics, and he manages a social life with fencing classes and church.  He faces two major conflicts in the novel: 1) his dastardly boss, Mr. Crenshaw, wants to coerce all of the autistic employees into serving as guinea pigs for a new, highly invasive, autism therapy, and 2) he’s fallen in love with one of his fencing buddies, Marjorie, but another fencer, Don, resents this, and resents Lou in general.  They are fairly simple plotlines, but we get a lot of Lou’s different perspective on things.  This ranges from fascinating, as in the descriptions of how he sees and seeks patterns in his life, to mind-numbingly tedious, as every line of dialogue has to be analyzed by Lou to uncover the emotional content and decode non-literal speech (like metaphors).

This is the most basic problem with the novel.  It’s not long, but it became a trudge through the middle third for me as we go through the same elaborate routines again and again.  Hearing how fixed Lou’s environment has to be is really interesting the first time, but it gets old after a few dozen descriptions.  Wathcing Lou decode dialogue is intriguing the first time, but do we need it for EVERY. SINGLE. LINE?  In other words, the narration didn’t work for me.  Which is not to say it couldn’t have worked.  I hate to review by comparison, but another novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, came out at about the same time and explored similar ideas.  In both novels, there is a narrator on the autism spectrum investigating a mystery.  Haddon’s book is brisk and the prose is elegant and quick-moving while still putting you inside the narrator’s head.  He also manages to show us how wrong the narrator is about the mystery of the dead dog without ever breaking format.  Moon’s book, on the other hand, can be plodding.  The mystery of who is sabotaging Lou’s car is painfully obvious to everyone – including Lou! – but then he is too nice and reserved to solve it.  And, she breaks format and slips into third-person omniscient at times for no internally consistent reason.  She blows a great chance to challenge the reader with a limited, unreliable narrator and dumbs the prose down in the process.

There are other issues as well.  The best characters are Lou’s autistic coworkers, but they don’t get nearly enough pagetime.  The other characters are two dimensional – Lou’s “normal” friends are truly good people with infinite patience and intelligence.  Lou’s enemies…well, I called them dastardly before, and that pretty much sums them up.  I’m sure that disabled people deal with antagonists on a day-to-day basis, but I think antagonism out of ignorance would be a lot more real, and interesting, then these diabolical nutjobs who really hate autistics to the point of doing very illegal things and risking everything to mess with one.  This also goes hand in hand with a lot of moralizing.  There are some interesting bioethics questions here, including the fundamental question of should we “cure” someone of a “disorder” that is the basis of their personality and identity?  Lou’s attempt to answer this question for himself is the best part of the book by far, though even that gets a bit repetitive.  But, it seems like we spend even more time on obvious issues of respect and understanding.  I agree with everything Moon is saying here…but I sure got tired of hearing about it.

The book has its moments, and the premise is strong, but the characters are too black and white, the prose is too repetitive, the pace is too slow (though the final two chapters move far too quickly through major events), and Moon fails her narrator by spelling things out too clearly.  I will say that it made me appreciate Flowers of Algernon even more.

Grade: B-

2002 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Fantasy - AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman made his name writing the Sandman series for Vertigo comics through most of the '90s. That series followed the adventures of Morpheus, the god of dreams, and wove together a wide variety of myths and legends to create a really fascinating setting for some innovative-yet-archetypal storytelling. Gaiman continued along the same lines with his novels, and he really broke through with this, his fifth, which dominated the major sf awards (and helped start the trend of fantasy's dominance in the '00s).

Gaiman usually comes off as the quintessential Brit in his writing, but he moved to the US (actually to my current neck of the woods) before this novel. Perhaps as a result, American Gods actually feels a lot like good Stephen King to me. Gaiman's works are usually about normal people thrust into magical worlds and given a destiny (In King's works, the people are a bit more blue collar, and they're less likely to get a destiny and more likely just to be trying to survive). In American Gods, the central character is a Minnesotan named Shadow, who begins the novel in prison. His wife dies, leading to a slightly early release, and Shadow ends up employed as the bodyguard of a strange man named Wednesday. From Wednesday, Shadow learns that gods are real, but they are created by human beliefs - America is overcrowded with gods because of its immigrant past, and the gods from the Norse, Greek, Hindu, and Egyptian pantheons (among others) must compete with modern technology for their survival. Shadow has all sorts of surreal encounters with these beings (both friend and foe) and most of them are extremely interesting. There are also a few very nice twists along the way (the best twists are the sort that make you exclaim "of course!" but that you still never see coming - the identity of the central villain here fits that description perfectly).

Gaiman does dodge Christianity for the most part, which seems odd considering the book's conceit and the nature of faith in the United States. I don't particularly blame him for dodging that can of worms, but it could have added another layer to the novel.

So, it's a fun novel, and just enough of a departure from his previous work to explain (and, I'd say, to warrant) his sudden wide recognition and mainstream success. Neverwhere is my personal favorite, but I'd still recommend American Gods first, especially to a fellow American. Great stuff, and a worthy winner from the fantasy side of the tracks.

Grade: A-

2001 Nebula – THE QUANTUM ROSE by Catherine Asaro

I often try to explain my frame of mind going into a novel.  In  this case, between the Nebula awards’ consistent inconsistency, the fact that this is an entry in a sprawling space opera epic that I’ve never heard of, let alone read, and the harlequin romance cover and cover description…well, I wasn’t looking forward to this one.   But, it kind of surprised me. Emphasis on "kind of."

In Asaro’s Skolian Empire books, ancient humans, with some mysterious alien intervention, colonized large segments of the galaxy.  This empire was ruled over by genetically engineered psychics.  It eventually collapsed, and by the time Earth caught up to it, the whole thing was reeling in the midst of an interstellar war.

I’m sure that background is apparent in the other novels, but in The Quantum Rose we start on the backwards planet of Balumil, where no one is aware of any of this.  Kamoj is the beautiful young ruler of Argali, and she is betrothed to the cruel, older Jax Ironbridge.  However, the strange masked foreigner Vyrl Lionstar makes a better offer and wins her away (brides on Balumil are more or less bought by the highest bidder).  Kamoj is initially horrified, but she soon learns that Vyrl is not merely a rude foreigner, but a heroic exile from another planet.  His clashes with the local culture are misunderstandings, and he is kind, handsome, and wants to treat Kamoj as an equal.  He introduces Kamoj to technologies from computers to advanced medicine to spaceships.  He does have his own troubled background; he’s been caught up in a conflict with the Earth Alliance, and it’s left psychological scars that have driven him to alcoholism and a distrust of his Skolian allies.  Meanwhile, Ironbridge still fights for Kamoj, and she has to balance her sense of duty to her planet with her love of Vyrl and complex interstellar politics.

It does have some of the trappings of romance novels that the cover and description imply; I don’t have any particular problem with a romantic storyline, but the genre does have a set of tropes, some of which I find somewhat offensive, and others are just worn out.  Here we do get the beautiful, damaged man, and the initial fear and roughness in a relationship that quickly turns to abiding love.  There’s all sorts of sexual coercion here, and Kamoj is often a victim.  We’re told that her people have been genetically engineered as compliant slaves, but watching her allow herself to be trampled for duty or love for most of the novel can get annoying.  Also, the characters are a little too perfect in their beauty, heroism, self-sacrifice, and love for each other, not to mention their superhuman abilities.  Hey, Vyrl can even dance like a god among men!  Is their a term for this sort of romance-novel, perfect mate Mary Sueism? 

All of this grated, but there was also plenty to like in the novel.  Contact between advanced and primitive societies is old hat in sf, but Asaro handles it quite well here, slowly unveiling the Skolians to us at the same time she reveals them to Kamoj.  The overall plot has a lot of momentum, and the scale of action gets bigger as the novel goes on, eventually moving to another planet.  Despite their unrealistic perfection, the main characters are solid and interesting, and some of the side characters, especially the crew of the ship that brought Vyrl, are even more intriguing.  Asaro has a PhD in math herself, and she keeps the technology interesting and familiar, while also drawing bigger metaphors from mathematical processes (“couple-channeled quantum-scattering”).  I can’t say that I ever really grasped this aspect of the novel’s structure, but I do appreciate that Asaro tried something different.

All in all, I'd call this a mixed bag. When I wasn't rolling my eyes, annoyed by cliché, I was usually caught up in the book and enjoying myself. It gets a middling grade from me, but I'm rather glad that Nebula went with something different this year.

Grade: B-

2011 Hugo and Locus SF, 2010 Nebula: Novel - BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR by Connie Willis

Well, I managed to finish this 1140 page monstrosity. I think the Hugo nominators were right to combine these two books as one volume, and that’s how I’m going to talk about them. It’s clearly one story, and the dividing point between the volumes is rather arbitrary. I’ve seen some criticism of the division as a result, but it seems unfair to Willis, who apparently didn’t have much choice. The way the economics of book publishing are these days, I don’t necessarily blame Ballantine either. An 1150 page print-job has to cut into their profits, and Willis isn’t necessarily a New York Times bestseller. I don’t blame them for keeping All Clear out of the Hugo Voter’s Pack initially either (I got my copy for free using an old-fashioned, analog version of bittorrent called the St Paul Public Library).

So, the question isn’t "should this 1140 page book be divided into two volumes?"…it’s “should this book be 1140 pages long in the first place?” My answer: Hell no. That said there is a lot to like here. I’ve been dreading this book since before it was nominated, because of the length and the fact that Willis has covered much of this ground in novels and stories I’ve already read. I guess I forgot how charming a writer Willis can be, because she did suck me into this novel at several points. Unfortunately, there are just as many points when I wondered how the novel could possible still be meandering on.

For the third time on this blog, we’re in twenty-first century Oxford, where historians literally travel into the past to do their research. Mr. Dunworthy is still desperately trying to protect his students from past dangers, and he’s still failing miserably. Willis adds a time travel wrinkle by arbitrarily switching settings and protagonists. The three main characters are Polly, Merope, and Mike, and all of them travel to Britain in 1940, at the beginning of World War II. When their scheduled method of return fails, they must try to find each other and another way out, all while avoiding death in the Blitz, while also worrying about possibly altering the future and causing Britain to lose the war, which may or may not be the reason they’re stuck. We also get occasional chapters in 2060, as the Oxford crew investigates some anomalies in travel to that period, and this includes young Colin Templer, last seen in Doomsday Book. Then we have a set of nurses during the V-1 rocket attacks in 1944, and the attempt to create a fake invasion of France to distract the Nazis from Normandy in the same year. These are the main stories (though there are a few more), and it’s only very slowly that Willis reveals how they all connect together.

I enjoyed this basic storyline, and some of the resolutions, quite a bit, especially since Willis’s prose is clear, light, and clever, and her research is impeccable and richly detailed. The last hundred pages or so especially sparkle as the puzzle pieces get together and the relationships between the characters pay off. Getting there can be a real chore though. Willis likes to wring drama from delaying the passage of information. A character vitally needs to know x, but loud noises, air raids, other characters making speeches, dull wittedness, mixed signals, rocket attacks, limps, sudden marriages, secrecy, etc., all prevent the straightforward conveyance of x. End chapter on cliffhanger. Rinse and repeat. Very quickly, this becomes less dramatic, and more annoying. In fact, I was still annoyed about this from the last Connie Willis book I read (Passage, review forthcoming soon) going into this book, so I had little patience. Considering that it’s these constant interruptions that do the most work in stretching the novel’s length, those 1100 pages were pretty unbearable a lot of the time. Everyone’s so damned passive-aggressive (fittingly, in Willis’s model of time travel, the whole damn space-time continuum is also highly passive-aggressive). Just communicate!

As I’ve said before, as a historian, the Willis books were among my most anticipated when I started this project. While they’re certainly given me their fair share of entertainment, they’ve frustrated me just as often. Reading Blackout/All Clear, I’ve decided that one of the things that’s most disappointed me is that they’re not really about history, they’re about historical settings. The research is admirable, but we never get more than hand-waivey discussion of how history works (in these books, it’s a mixture of coincidence and individual heroism). Her historians don’t ask the sort of questions that any real-life contemporary historian asks about the why and how of things, and that’s where my biggest disappointment comes from. If you want good science fiction that explores the themes of academic history, check out Kim Stanley Robinson. If you want well-researched and charming historical fiction with an sf twist, Willis is for you. Unfortunately, I’d been hoping for the former.

Grade: B-

2000 Nebula – DARWIN’S RADIO by Greg Bear

Greg Bear becomes the second author to win two novel Nebulas without having won any novel Hugos. Samuel Delaney was the first, and he makes a lot of sense. He was the New Waviest of the New Wave, who won at a point when Hugo was still handing statuettes to old schoolers like Heinlein. I think Bear’s success demonstrates how the Nebulas have changed. They’ve moved from rewarding “writers’ writers” of edgy sf and begun to favor character-based works that are light on the sf. In the ‘90s at least, I think they’re so focused on expanding the definition of science fiction, that they haven’t always been recognizing the best works. Of course, the big science fiction successes of the ‘90s (neither of which make an appearance on my masterlist of award winners for this blog) are The X-Files and the works of Michael Crichton, and, as in Robert Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment, that’s the model we’re working with here.

Darwin’s Radio has a fantastic pair of opening sequences. Anthropologist Mitch Rafelson discovers an unusual pair of mummified Neanderthals amidst a thrilling climb in the Alps. Evolutionary biologist Kaye Lang investigates a mass grave in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Both of these discoveries (whose simultaneity is only extremely contrived) connect to an emerging epidemic of a miscarriage-causing virus called SHEVA. Mitch and Kaye both come to the conclusion that this virus, which has emerged from non-coding remnants of ancient viruses locked in our DNA*, is actually prompting a rapid evolution in the human genome. Then the government chases them.

I had two major problems with this novel. First of all, it’s a novel about scientific ethics that is entirely without an ethical center. Mitch hates that he has to respect Native American interests under NAGPRA when dealing with ancient remains. Kay’s instincts tell her that her baby will be okay, so she shouldn't submit to the epidemic-fearing CDC, who are portrayed as tyrants for trying to halt the spread of what looks like a deadly virus. The day after pill is….something. Patenting parts of the genome is right, unless it’s wrong? Bear seems confused about those last two. At the end of the day, the novel is not about creating a reasonable ethical framework to deal with a novel problem (which could have been exciting to read about), it uses ethics to create artificial conflict. The final arbiter of right and wrong comes down to Bear’s protagonists: if they believe it, it’s probably right. If the smarmy, interfering government antagonists believe it, it’s wrong.

An even bigger problem is that I just didn’t enjoy the novel. It moved slowly and focused on the characters’ miserable lives. I went to the novel’s Wikipedia article to double-check the spellings of the characters names, and I found a fairly detailed summary that manages to go on for three paragraphs without mentioning any characters. That’s kind of telling. It’s not that Bear doesn’t spend time on the characters; as in Benford’s Timescape or Sawyer’s Terminal Experiment, most of the novel is spent on detailing their tawdry lives and petty politics. But, if the Wikipedia author is anything like me, she didn’t care about or like the characters, so I don’t blame her for skipping them and sticking with describing the book’s fake science.

The most interesting part of this novel for me was the question of what would emerge from this evolutionary infection. Turns out that I have to read another book called Darwin’s Children to get into that. After this one, I’m not gonna, especially since the last few pages were rather discouraging on that front. Communication by scent? Didn’t our ancestors drop that trait several millions of years ago?

My ‘90s recap is up next, and I predict that I’m going to say mean things about the state of the Nebula awards in this decade.

*These remnants really do exist; the rest of the science in the novel felt like pure bs. Bear needlessly complicates evolutionary theory to a ridiculous degree. You’d think genes as a networked intelligence might be an interesting concept. Here, unfortunately, it is not.

Grade: D+

1999 Nebula – PARABLE OF THE TALENTS by Octavia Butler

The Nebulas have been sort of rough of late, but I really enjoyed this novel, and its predecessor, Parable of the Sower. Together, they form one continuous story that follows a young woman named Lauren Olamina Oya in the crumbling United States of the 2020s and 30s. The novel is told mostly through Olamina’s journals (though this volume includes a few other excerpts from first person narrators, especially her husband and daughter), and much of it involves her attempts to create a new religion, called Earthseed.

Parable of the Sower begins in Southern California, which is bone dry due to climate change, and is being picked apart but bandits, drug addicts, and even cannibals. Olamina’s modest walled community eventually falls apart, and she and a few survivors must hike north along dangerous interstates in search of better climes to the north. Parable of the Talents picks up with Olamina more settled in northern California, but she must continue to contend with the United States’ fall, this time in the form of a fascistic Christian fundamentalist President.

There’s a lot of high concept science fiction material here. There’s a drug that turns people into pyromaniacs, and another drug causes a birth defect (which Olamina suffers from) that grants near-psychic levels of empathy (more a disadvantage than anything else in a world so full of pain). There are also high tech slave collars, and virtual reality “dreamasks.” And, Olamina’s religion, Earthseed, is all about the dream of interstellar travel as a way to unite humankind in troubled times (as well as the idea that “God is change,” a refrain which did get a little old to be honest). Yet, the books’ real strength is in how grounded they remain. The characters and their relationships feel incredibly real and immediate. As a result, this is one of the best post-apocalyptic works I’ve read. Butler’s prose is folksy and engaging, and the books are consistently dark and yet somehow never despairing. It just feels real.

My only problem is with some of the pacing of this book. Butler throws a lot of material in, and things begin to move very quickly towards the end (including a half-century jump at the very end). I’ve heard that Butler had considered making this a trilogy, and it might have been nice to fill these later years out. Sadly, Butler died suddenly in 2006. I’d recommend these two books, and I plan to seek out more of her work when I finish this project.

I actually liked this a little bit more than To Say Nothing. I thoroughly enjoyed both, but it has been a while since a Nebula-winner won a match-up against a Hugo-winner.

Grade: A-

1998 Hugo and Nebula – FOREVER PEACE by Joe Haldeman

1977’s Forever War won both the Hugo and Nebula and is one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time. I wasn’t sure it lived up to the hype, but I did like it, and it’s stayed with me since I read it. This novel is not a sequel to that earlier book – it takes place in an entirely different world; in keeping with the times, it’s much less space opera and much more cyberpunk – but it’s at its best when it evokes the same sense of war and world weariness that seems to have come from Haldeman’s experiences in the Vietnam War.

It’s 2043 and nanotechnology provides everyone in developed countries with all of their basic needs…though not always particularly well. Another common technology is mental ”jacking” which allows people to link their minds to others’ or to machines. The novel’s narrator, Julian Class, is an African-American man who uses his jack to remotely control a “soldierboy” fighting robot, deployed in an intractable war with most of the southern hemisphere (Julian spends most of his time fighting in Central America and Colombia). A linked group of rebels under the banner of “Ngumi” provide the ubiquitous enemy there, and they have also managed a nuclear attack on Atlanta (though there are suggestions that elements within the US government have worked to continue the war). Between missions, Julian is able to fly back to his home in Texas and observe the media coverage of the war, which most Americans follow like a sport. You could say that the Ngumi War is a kind of “War on Terror,” and Forever Peace shows excellent foresight on this front.

Piloting a soliderboy, and fighting the Ngumi terrorists, causes a great deal of mental stress, and Julian is especially tormented by the experience. He’s often on the verge of suicide. The first half of the novel allows us to see Julian in military actions, effectively portrays his own unhappiness, and establishes a richly drawn future America. In the second half, his older girlfriend Amelia Harding takes on a larger role as her own scientific research raises the stakes of ongoing war. The titular “forever peace” refers to a sort of pacifist revolution that Julian joins, as well as the possibility of death or even the end of the world, which Amelia’s research shows to be a real possibility. I found this second half much weaker. Actually, it’s flat-out bad. There are a lot of contrivances in how the bigger threats and possible resistance emerge; Julian knows exactly the right people to move the plot along. And, as the plot gets bigger and crazier, it simultaneously becomes a by-the-numbers thriller with some rather generic villains (a sexy fundamentalist-Christian super-assassin, in particular, is very over-the-top, and she takes over the novel in the last hundred pages).

The novel does fall down because of these second-half problems. It’s certainly no Forever War. It is very well-written though, and there’s an interesting trick with the narration, which occasionally switches to third person-omniscient rather suddenly (though I did think this kind of gave away the ending). More importantly, just like Forever War, it’s a very wise cautionary tale that relates closely to the world of today. Haldeman knows war, and he knows how to convey its horrors. Throw in an excellent first half and a host of interesting ideas, and I would recommend this novel, despite its weaknesses. Maybe quit around page 150…

Grade: B-

1997 Nebula – THE MOON AND THE SUN by Vonda McIntyre

It’s been a while since Dreamsnake, but McIntyre becomes the sixth author to win a second Nebula for best novel (only LeGuin has more than two – she has four). This is a historical novel set in 1693 in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, but with one major sf element.

I’ve gone off on historical fantasy before (Gloriana, Dragon Waiting); in short, I love it in theory, but usually dislike it in practice. This novel represents one of my greatest pet peeves about historical fiction in general – characters with a modern mindset who condemn the prejudices of the past. That’s not to say that the prejudices of the past shouldn’t be depicted in historical fiction, but exempting a pet character from said prejudices damages believability and precludes subtlety. Here we have the beautiful, young Marie-Josephe de la Croix, who hates the racism and sexism she sees at court, is sensitive to the idea that an animal may be sentient, openly questions the Pope and King, corresponds with Newton and van Leeuwenhoek, falls in love with an atheist dwarf, and frees her Turkish slave. Her one limitation is a prudishness instilled in her at a convent, which she overcomes fairly quickly and easily. She has a thoroughly late-twentieth-century mind and thus sticks out in McIntyre’s seventeenth-century setting like a sore thumb. I much prefer to see the author let the attitudes of the past speak for themselves – show us the unfairness of sexism and racism, don’t invent an implausible character to tell us about them.

I never really got over this aspect of the novel, and it didn’t help that I was never that drawn into the plot. Marie-Josephe’s brother Yves, a Jesuit priest, discovers a twin-tailed sea monster that seems to be part manatee, part mermaid. He brings it to Versailles in the hopes that the Sun King can gain immortality by eating its flesh. Marie-Josephe befriends the creature and learns to communicate with it through song. Then we get several extended scenes where she pleads that others accept the “sea woman” as an equal and free her. Nobody listens because she’s a girl. It’s all so unfair! But, she manages to convince the right people, and we get a very unlikely happy ending out of the whole affair. We get some fairly typical courtly intrigue (hint: everyone is a bastard, and everyone is related), and some fairly dull descriptions along the way. There were amazing, “Renaissance Women” in reality (Suor Maria Celeste, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Anne Bradstreet), but no man or woman of the time was as perfect and forward thinking as Marie-Josephe. We’ll see a much better-executed version of this concept with Eliza in Stephenson’s Baroque cycle towards the end of the year.

There’s potential here. I liked Dreamsnake well enough, and McIntyre is a decent writer with some good ideas. The “sea woman” is the one really compelling part of the book. But, her approach to the historical material and overly-perfect protagonist just turned me off. It’s not terrible, but it was not for me.

Grade: C

1996 Nebula – SLOW RIVER by Nicola Griffith

The world of Griffith’s Slow River reminded me a lot of some of the work of Paulo Bacigalupi. Its world is not entirely unlike ours, but corporations are more powerful, exploitation of the Third World has continued unabated, pollution is rampant, fossil fuels are rare, individual freedoms are circumscribed, and there’s an overall sense of decay. We see all of this in Windup Girl, although the focus on a water treatment plant also made me think of Bacigalupi’s great story, “Pump Six.” Slow River obviously predates these works by more than a decade, so I wonder if it was an influence on Bacigalupi.

Despite this very interesting take on the future, Griffith’s real focus here is on character. The novel unfolds in three different timelines, which all tell the story of a young woman named Lore. We get a brief biography that chronicles her youth in the very wealthy, but very troubled, van de Oest family, which has a monopoly on genomes crucial to the polluted, post-fossil fuel world economy. The central story tells of her separation from this family and her relationship with Spanner, who has many issues of her own; she's a small-time criminal and an an addict. In the first-person-narrated “present” storyline, Lore works undercover in a water treatment plant and experiences firsthand the plight of the working class. Griffith skillfully interweaves these stories so that they comment on and inform each other, and they give us a full picture of Lore, including some pretty dramatic low-points.

The writing is strong, and Lore is a very compelling character. The novel also has a lot to say about power dynamics – Lore is often manipulated and controlled by her parents, her siblings, and Spanner. A pair of kidnappers brutalize and control her. With Spanner, Lore finds herself victimizing others. The class dynamics in the water treatment facility mirror these relationships as Lore meets a workforce that also feels powerless. The novel’s multiple “rivers” symbolize these power dynamics in the inexorable driving of their currents. In other words, it’s a richly drawn novel that does have something to say. In some ways it’s actually quite similar to its big competitor of the year, The Diamond Age, which also uses its vision of the future to explore issues of class and power but focuses more on the technology and the world, while Slow River focuses on character. I like good, character driven work, but, in this case, The Diamond Age is so rich that I’d have to give the Hugo winner my vote for this year. But, it is nice to get two different entries out of the biggest sf awards that are both strong and share some thematic links.

Grade: B+

1995 Nebula – THE TERMINAL EXPERIMENT by Robert J. Sawyer

There are lots of little things that annoy me about The Terminal Experiment. 1). The humor is awful (an actual punchline to a real joke in the book: “Vulcan mind melt”). 2). The novel takes place in the distant future year of 2011, and yeah, people watch TV on DVRs and use eReaders, but they also use video phones, have voice-controlled houses, and they have special sleep monitors so they know how much noise they can make when their partner seems to be asleep, possibly the dumbest invention I’ve seen in a sf book. 3). Sawyer also gives us his typical barrage of pop culture references, which would be fine if they weren’t so damn…surfacey. We learn that the main character likes Star Trek and Robert Parker novels, not because they illuminate his character all that much, but because Sawyer likes those things. 4). There’s some petty moralizing as the main character looks down his nose at people drinking alcohol during Friday night happy hour. And then there’s 5). the misguided crusading against organ donation (?!), or 6). the meticulously researched but ridiculous and overwrought “assassination by food-drug interaction” scene. Not to mention 7). the general sense you get from Sawyer novels that Canada is the center of the universe.

So, Robert Sawyer is an author with a few tics, and those tics are bound to get on the nerves of certain of his readers – something annoyed me in almost every chapter here. Still, I’d be willing to overlook these problems if the novel came even close to living up to its central premise(s).

The Big Idea here is that biomedical engineer Peter Hobson accidentally discovers the soul after he invents a super-sensitive nanotech EEG while trying to prove that life-saving organ donation procedures are immoral (?!?!). Oh, and someone else has used nanotech to make people immortal (remember, it is the far-future year of 2011!). We do get some interesting news-clippings about the cultural effects of these discoveries, but Hobson decides that his main goal should be to test their effects on individual personalities…by making three exact computer copies of every aspect of his mind (!!!!). Any of these biotech revolutions would be worthy of an epic science fiction novel, but in The Terminal Experiment, they play out in tandem through a small domestic drama and a generic murder mystery.

Hobson’s copies include an exact “control” copy, a copy that believes itself immortal, and a copy that thinks it is disembodied spirit. Sawyer glosses over the extremely important details of how Hobson and his partner program these differences. But, Peter has recently learned that his wife cheated on him, and one of the copies decides to seek vengeance! There are murders, an uncannily brilliant detective with implausible instincts, and there’s some sort of (dumb) philosophical point about marriage and morality in there. In the end, Sawyer’s writing is okay, but his tics grate. His future feels half-assed, delusionally optimistic, and contrived. And, the Big Ideas trample over each other – they’re jumbled, then buried in a mystery story. The end result is not good at all. I’d say this novel is significantly worse than www:Wake, and I’m again disappointed by the Nebula awards.

I needn’t bother have written all that – Ubernerd pegs this one perfectly in probably his longest review.

Grade: D