2011 Hugo Nominee: Short Story - "The Things" by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010)

So, we’re nominating fan-fiction now, huh?

I’m just kidding. Well, mostly. Watts’ “The Things” is a retelling of John Carpenter’s 1984 film The Thing, and it follows the film very closely (it’s on Netflix streaming, and I actually stopped reading and watched it as soon as I realized what Watts was up to). The twist is that Watts is telling the story from the perspective of the creature. It turns out that the titular Thing just wanted to talk, but its method of talking involves splattering Carpenteresque gore all over the place, a process it calls “communion.” It’s an interesting twist, and yet it felt somewhat familiar, even if I can’t pinpoint exactly from where. For most of the story, it felt like the old “the monster is us!” canard. The story does save itself towards the end by questioning the basic nature of life on Earth – what if all the things we take for granted about biology are unique to our planet? What if death and individuality are cosmic aberrations…even errors? I enjoyed those questions, but they came too late to save the story for me. I’ve also decided that I’m not a big fan of Watts’ dense, chewy prose. It’s certainly not bad, and I give him credit for having more of a voice than many sf writers, but it’s not really my cup of tea.

I know this is everyone else's story of the year, but it wasn't mine. I enjoyed the movie a lot though. I don't think I'd ever seen it before (though I had seen the also great Howard Hawkes version).

Grade: B-

2010 Hugo nominee, novelette: "The Island" by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)

Peter Watts packs a lot into this short piece of fiction, which was part of one of the “New Space Opera” anthologies that are supposed to highlight the new directions the genre has taken away from its traditional Star Trekkish roots.

It is different. The narrator is a woman named Sunday who lives and works on a ship named Eriophora over a billion years in the future. The ship is tasked with building wormholes to facilitate interstellar travel for the various posthumans zipping around the universe. It’s not a job that the crew can quit, and they seem to be immortal. It’s also a fairly thankless job – no one bothers to communicate with them. The crew resents the work, and especially their boss, a computer they call Chimp, but they toil on for eternity. Watts manages to get all of that world-building in, plus a fairly significant plot. The narrator meets a new worker named Dix who claims to be her son but acts a little odd, and the crew encounters a massive alien entity floating through space (the titular “Island.”) So, for all the high-concept post-singularity complexity of the world, it’s really a story about reaching out to other beings and making connections amidst an isolated and hostile situation (the title’s other meaning).

I liked it. It’s well written, and the emotional themes do resonate. At the same time, the world seems needlessly complex to me. The real story is about Sunday and Dix, and we don’t really need the wild setting to get them to the interesting emotional place we see them in. Watts seems to be showing off a bit with the world-building. There’s some interesting material in there, but I worry that these far future post-singularity settings are going to start to feel generic to me by the time I catch up to the present on my Hugo reading.

Grade: B-