The 2009 Hugo Awards: The Novelette Shortlist

Of the three short fiction categories, the novelette shortlist is the one I most look forward to in my annual Hugo reviews. It's where the best stories are generally found, and its overall quality is consistently high. So I sort screwed myself this year by reading so many novelettes and nominating for the Hugo, because though this year's novelette shortlist is pretty impressive, it's also made up, with only one exception, of stories I read, liked, and then rejected in favor of others I liked better. It's therefore a little hard for me to feel excited about this year's novelette shortlist. I keep thinking that though this is a strong bunch of stories, it could have been much stronger, which oddly enough is even more disappointing than the weak short story shortlist.

The only story on the shortlist I hadn't read before the nominees were announced was Mike Resnick's "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders," which might go some way towards explaining why I took so long getting around to this shortlist review, but when I did finally read the story I was, relatively speaking, pleasantly surprised. In the Torque Control discussion of this story, commenters split their time between being baffled by its presence on the shortlist and being baffled by the effusive praise for it in the quoted reviews, but I think Rich Horton (who spoke warmly about the story in his own shortlist review, then backtracked somewhat in the Torque Control comments) gets it about right when he says that for a Mike Resnick story, "Alastair Baffle" is pretty decent. Sure, the story--in which two nonagenarians makes one last foray from their old age home to find the magic shop where they met as children--is mawkishly sentimental, blatantly manipulative and poorly written. But it isn't as mawkishly sentimental as "Travels With My Cats." And it isn't as blatantly manipulative as "Down Memory Lane." It certainly isn't as poorly written as "A Princess of Mars" or "All the Things You Are" or "Article of Faith." (If there's one compelling reason for me to stop writing these Hugo short fiction reviews, it is that because of them I have inadvertently become something of an expert on the short fiction of Mike Resnick.) "Alastair Baffle" is merely somewhat less than mediocre, and though obviously this means that in a sane world it never should have made it onto the Hugo ballot, the fact is that Mike Resnick stories are going to make it onto the ballot. Like the sandwiches in British train station cafes, they are how SF fandom pays for its sins, and this particular nomination is a great deal less embarrassing than many others, some of which have even earned Resnick a win.

Like the Kij Johnson story on the short story ballot, James Alan Gardner's "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" was getting a lot of positive buzz in the final months of 2008, including appearances on several best of year lists and the Nebula final ballot. And as with the Johnson story, I find myself left out of the party. "The Ray-Gun" is a sweet, nicely done story about a boy who finds a ray gun, the relic of a distant, alien war which has fallen to Earth. Being a science fiction fan, he's convinced that having found the ray gun makes him special, and destines him to a future as a superhero or an interstellar warrior. But for all his preparations, and all the sacrifices he makes for the sake of his special destiny, Jack's life is thoroughly ordinary, and the secrets he keeps damage his relationships until he finally has to choose between the ray gun and an ordinary life. This description makes "The Ray-Gun" sound angsty and dramatic, but as the subtitle says this is a love story, and its tone is light, bordering on fairy tale-like, with short, declarative sentences ("Jack wondered where the weapon had come from. Had aliens visited these woods? Or was the gun created by a secret government project?") defusing most of the potential for high emotion.

The result is pleasant but not very exciting. If I had to guess, I'd say that it's the appeal to so many readers' own experiences as young science fiction fans, convinced that any minute their life was going to transform into something out of their favorite stories, that is at the root of "The Ray-Gun"'s appeal (though by the same token it's not much of a stretch to view the ray gun as a metaphor for being an SF fan, and the story's ending, in which Jack and his new girlfriend send the gun to the bottom of the ocean, as saying that if you want to get a girl, you'll have to give up that creepy science fiction habit). I can't say that I think nostalgia and sentimentality are, on their own, good enough reasons to give a story a Hugo nomination, or indeed to lavish it with all the praise that "The Ray-Gun" has received.

Metafictionality rears its head again, somewhat more successfully, in Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom." On the eve of WWII a black university professor comes to Maine to study the shoggoths, Lovecraftian monsters which seem to defy the fundamental laws of biology and evolution. It's a nicely atmospheric piece, and does a good job tying together the protagonist's investigation of the shoggoths and his dark musings about racial prejudice--which is expressed genteelly in the behavior of the local fishermen and violently in the Kristallnacht riots, which take place shortly after the story's beginning--most particularly in the choice the protagonist faces in the story's end, between the freedom of one persecuted minority and another. I liked "Shoggoths in Bloom," but unlike other Lovecraft pastiches such as Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" (PDF) or Charles Stross's "A Colder War," I also can't help but feel that my never having read Lovecraft is a barrier to fully appreciating it. For example, I assume that the story's emphasis on racism is supposed to be intensified by knowledge of Lovecraft's own well-document racism, and I'm wondering if there are other nuances that have gone over my head because I lack the proper grounding. I'm not sure how fair a criticism this is--and maybe the distance I feel from the story has nothing to do with Lovecraft and everything to do with the story itself--but the bottom line is that "Shoggoths in Bloom" leaves me somewhat cold, impressed by Bear's technical achievement in creating her pastiche and grafting it to the real world, but not genuinely moved.

Our final foray into metafiction comes from John Kessel with "Pride and Prometheus," (PDF) which melds together Jane Austen and Mary Shelley's most famous novels when it tells the story of the meeting between Mary Bennet, the priggish, know-it-all sister from Pride and Prejudice, and Victor Frankenstein, escaping his creation to England in one of the interludes in Frankenstein. It's a neat premise, and Kessel gets a lot of mileage out of it, playing clever metafictional games by mashing together two novels which respectively represent the genesis of realism and romanticism, naturalistic fiction and genre, and drawing comparisons between the proscribed position of women in the period he's writing about (and it is surely no coincidence that the two novels he's chosen were both written by women) and the reprehensible manner in which Frankenstein treats his creation. Though she's initially drawn in by his grief and mysterious manner, Mary, who in Kessel's hands becomes wise and level-headed (which will be very gratifying to Austen fans like myself, who feel a little guilty for laughing with her creator at the bookish, socially awkward Mary), ultimately sees Victor as a user, with the story drawing a parallel between his abandonment of his creation and Kitty's abandonment by a local cad.

If I have any complaints against "Pride and Prometheus" they are first that Kessel hasn't really got the Austen-ish voice right. His pastiche rings hollow, emulating Austen's grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure but lacking the spark that imbued her writing with so much humor. Perhaps more importantly, there's the plain fact that "Pride and Prometheus" is barely even a genre story. That's not always a problem--Kessel's story is a hell of a lot more SFnal than Karen Joy Fowler's "What I Didn't See," which quite rightly won the Nebula in 2004--and if nothing else "Pride and Prometheus" has once again reminded me to be grateful for the broadness and inclusiveness of the genre short fiction scene, since I can't for the life of me imagine what mainstream short fiction magazine would publish this story. But with a shortlist already stacked to the rafters with metafictional games, literary pastiches, and appeals to the reader's nostalgia and fannish affection, Kessel's story, which unlike "Shoggoths in Bloom" doesn't do much besides be metafictional, is somewhat devalued. Finally, given my chilly response to Bear's story, I can't help but wonder how much of my positive response to "Pride and Prometheus" has to do with my previous familiarity with the novels Kessel is drawing on.

Thankfully, we have Paolo Bacigalupi on the ballot to give us a much-needed dose of actual, future-set science fiction. "The Gambler" is narrated by Ong, a refugee of Laos's totalitarian regime now living in the US and working as a journalist. His narrative alternates between the present, in which he is in danger of losing his job because his stories, about government corruption, looming environmental collapse, and the plight of the people of Laos, don't generate even a fraction of the hits on stories about celebrity scandals, and the past, in which his father is hounded to death for printing pamphlets which tell the truth about Laotian regime. What I liked best about "The Gambler" was the comparison it drew between the two situations--in totalitarian Laos, bad news is suppressed; in the free West, it's ignored. There's a distinctly Bacigalupian nastiness to this comparison which is absent from the rest of the story, in which Ong is faced with a choice between compromising his principles and writing fluff, and continuing to write the stories he thinks are important and risk losing his job and visa. For all the harshness of this choice, "The Gambler" is atypically gentle and low-key, and its ending holds out hope for a miraculous reversal of Ong's predicament.

Writing about the story a few months ago at Torque Control, Niall Harrison suggested that Ong's dilemma in "The Gambler" represents Bacigalupi "[dealing] with his reputation for miserablism," but I sincerely hope this isn't the case since, while Ong is on the verge of losing his job, Bacigalupi's miserablism has made him one of the most celebrated writers of genre shorts of the last few years. Instead, I suspect that Bacigalupi is trying on new styles after becoming almost synonymous with the angry, confrontational tone of stories like "Pop Squad" or "Yellow Card Man," but I'm not sure this one works for him. Or maybe my problem has less to do with the story's tone and more to do with the simplicity of its plot, which establishes Ong's situation but doesn't go any further with it. I was blown away by "Yellow Card Man" because after introducing us to its protagonist's difficult situation, it changed that situation by having the protagonist make a choice that simultaneously reaffirmed his will to live and tarnished his soul. "The Gambler" is more delicate than that, which I think might be the reason why, as Niall observed yesterday, it didn't arouse much discussion. Everyone likes it--as well they should, since it's a very good story--but beyond the fact that they like it there's really not much to say.

Once again, my ballot for this category:

1. "The Gambler" by Paolo Bacigalupi
2. "Pride and Prometheus" by John Kessel
3. "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear
4. "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner
5. No Award

Even taking into account the fact that I would have preferred other stories on this ballot, this is an odd shortlist, dominated by nostalgia and references to classic SF. But then, when I look at the stories I would have preferred to see here, I'm not sure they're much different. "The Ice War" by Stephen Baxter? War of the Worlds during the Enlightenment. "How the Day Runs Down" by John Langan? Our Town with zombies. "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm" by Daryl Gregory? Superheroes meet communist totalitarianism. "Legolas Does the Dishes" by Justina Robson? A Shirley Jackson pastiche with Tolkien references. Maybe there's something in the water, or maybe we're all in a bit of a nostalgic mood. Either way, this is all the more reason for Paolo Bacigalupi to take the Hugo and remind us that science fiction is supposed to be about what happens next, though I still wish his nominated story was a little more forceful in its speculation.

The 2009 Hugo Awards: The Short Story Shortlist

I made a slight tactical error in my reading of this year's Hugo-nominated short stories when I prefaced it with a reading of Jhumpa Lahiri's recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth. The forced comparison with Lahiri's achingly immediate, scrupulously detailed prose would be unkind to almost any author, and the stories on this year's short story ballot--traditionally the weakest of the three short fiction categories--were no exception. Still, though it may be unfair to condemn the writers on the short story ballot for not giving Lahiri's limpid prose and deft characterization a run for their money, I do think it should count against the shortlist that none of the stories on it were able to remind me why, when all's said and done, I prefer genre shorts to mainstream ones. As astonishing as I found Lahiri's stories, I tend to grow rather weary of the New Yorker-friendly style of which she is so emblematic, and look to genre short fiction for qualities that mainstream short story writers often seem to disdain--plot, adventure, humor, any hint of the numinous or unusual, but mainly the willingness to look beyond the narrow confines of one's immediate environment. A good short story ballot should have reminded me that there are more stories to be told than the ones about unhappy, middle class families, and made me sigh with relief that there are still authors out there willing and able to do so, but this year's short story nominees just made me want to run right back to the suburbs.

We begin our odyssey with perennial Hugo nominee Mike Resnick. The narrator of "Article of Faith" is a priest who at the beginning of the story takes ownership of a new cleaning robot for his church, and, on a rather poorly explained lark, starts giving it religious instruction. When the robot asks to participate in church services the priest, and later his congregation, react with horror and confusion. The premise of "Article of Faith" begs comparison with a whole raft of Asimov robot shorts of a roughly similar ilk, and Resnick's construction of the robot character--anthropomorphic, human-named, soft-spoken, deferential but insistent on puzzling out the logical inconsistencies in the narrator's theology--is also heavily reminiscent of Asimov's robots. Which means that on top of failing in the traditional Resnick ways--plodding prose, obvious and predictable plot, shameless and blatant manipulation--"Article of Faith" fails by falling so very short of Asimov's standards.

Asimov was no great stylist, and his characters were paper-thin, but his robot stories had a lightness to them, an effervescent wit and gentle humor that are completely absent from Resnick's clomping, heavy-handed immitation of him. Add to this a simplistic and borderline reactionary treatment of religion--when arranging the wedding of a pregnant parishioner, the narrator muses that "it's not my job to judge them, only to help and comfort them," which sounds plenty judgmental to me; when the robot questions why services are held on Sundays instead of Tuesdays, the narrator's "first inclination was to say Force of habit, but that would negate everything I had done in my life," which, oh God, I don't even know where to start; then, of course, there's the blatantly telegraphed 'forgive them for they know not what they do' (no, really, he uses the actual quote) ending. There's been a discussion of Resnick's nominated novelette "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" at Torque Control, during which there's been some attempt to pin down just what it is that makes him such a bad writer. A lot of good suggestions have been made, but to my mind his greatest failing is and has always been the one encapsulated by "Article of Faith"--his ability to take a subject that underpins some of science fiction's seminal works, write his own spin on it which is neither innovative nor unusual nor particularly good, and send it out into the world without a hint of embarrassment or self-awareness.

Misunderstood robots also appear in Mary Robinette Kowal's "Evil Robot Monkey," which beats "Article of Faith" hands down in terms of prose and its ability to elicit emotion, but which also isn't really a story at all but piece of one, a thousand-word vignette in which Sly, an uplifted monkey, rails against his handlers and their refusal to ackowledge his personhood. Kowal is a good enough writer that Sly's plight is compelling, but that doesn't change the fact that "Evil Robot Monkey" doesn't do anything beyond establishing that plight, or that it does so in ways that are both trite and familiar. Once again, this premise, of artificial creations gaining a measure of personhood only to see it, and their desires and aspirations, denied, has been at the heart of a significant portion of classic science fiction, and in order to be worthy of a Hugo nomination I think a story ought to do more than simply tip its hat to these works and then stop. In a way, I find Kowal's nomination even more baffling than Resnick's. Hugo voters either like him or his particular brand of sentimental pap, but as far as I know Kowal hasn't amassed that kind of following yet, and it's hard to imagine a non-story like "Evil Robot Monkey" arousing enough passion to make it onto the ballot on its own rather flimsy merits.

Kij Johnson, meanwhile, does seem to have something of a following. Last year, praise for her story "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" seemed to be on everybody's lips. I read "Trickster Stories" when it was nominated for the Nebula and found myself underwhelmed. It was charming and well-written. I was impressed with the way Johnson handled her inventive premise, neither shortchanging nor belaboring it, and couldn't help but be taken in by the gentle melancholy that suffused the story. But I didn't particularly like it, nor did I see why it had garnered such praise. I'm telling you all this because my reaction to "Trickster Stories" is also, word for word, my reaction to "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss," Johnson's story on this year's short story ballot. It's a nice piece with a slightly surreal premise--Aimee owns a carnival act in which 26 monkeys disappear into a bathtub--but so gentle and unassuming that it's hard to believe that, once again, so many people have fallen in love with it. There's nothing wrong with "26 Monkeys," and Johnson's voice and style are unusual enough that I can sort of see how she might deserve recognition for them, but I can't help but think that there are much stronger, more interesting, more passionate stories out there that ought to have had her spot on the ballot. Still, I'm willing to admit that this is probably a case of me being the wrong reader for the story.

Johnson's story makes for an interesting counterpoint to Michael Swanwick's "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled," which is good old fashioned Proper SF, set in the far future and on an alien planet, and featuring interplanetary intrigue, cataclysmic destruction, fights to the death, a mad scramble across hostile, alien terrain, and bug people. Swanwick is a pro at this stuff, and "Babel" finds him very much on top of his game. It's exciting and well-done, cramming a hell of a lot of exposition, action and description into every single sentence until it draws a meticulously detailed portrait of two civilizations, their history, their cherished values, and the often fraught interactions between them. Still, given all the pyrotechnics and grand adventure involved in getting us to its end, "Babel" is somewhat underperforming.

Underpinning the story is a discussion of the economics of the two species--humans, represented by the diplomat Quivera, have an information-based economy, while that of the bug-like Gehennans, represented by the sole survivor of the recently destroyed Babel with whom Quivera flees its ruins, is based on trust--but Swanwick's descriptions of of these systems are messy and difficult to follow, and I found myself unpersuaded by his conclusions. "Babel" ends with one half of its unlikley partnership sacrificing himself to save the other, and in order to safeguard the precious (in many different senses) cargo they are carrying, but it's left to us to decide whether the survivor acted as an adventure hero would and honored his friend's dying wish, or whether he cashed in on an unexpected windfall. Obviously Swanwick is trying to undermine the adventure plot, and remind us that in the real world, it's cold hard numbers, profit and loss, that drive our decisions, but this feels like a petty sort of 'gotcha!' to the readers, whom Swanwick has worked hard to invest in the adventure aspect of his story only to snatch the rug out from under them at the last minute. I can't help but compare "Babel" to last year's Hugo-nominated novelette, "The Cambist and Lord Iron" by Daniel Abraham, which so much more intelligently and elegantly managed to fuse adventure and economics into a single, satisfying whole, without ever resorting to wagging its finger in the readers' faces as Swanwick seems to be doing.

Which brings us to Ted Chiang's "Exhalation," a story about which I've been going back and forth since I first read it some six months ago. Writing about it here, I called it "a chilly thought exercise of a story," but then concluded that Chiang's chilly thought exercises are "cooler, more inventive, and more interesting than just about anyone else's chilly thought exercises." That's still the dilemma I struggle with when it comes to this story--does the neatness of Chiang's SFnal invention counteract the story's chilliness? An interesting discussion centered roughly around this question developed in Torque Control's "Exhalation" post, with Niall Harrison passionately making the case for the story by arguing that

“Exhalation” feels to me like a kind of story that is truly unique to science fiction, and that that uniqueness, that taking advantage of its chosen form, is something to be celebrated. “Exhalation” tackles an idea that is inhuman in its remoteness by creating a literally inhuman world to express that idea — even second time through, I got a tingle from phrases such as, “every day we consume two lungs heavy with air”. If its plot and characters are subordinate to a different act of creation, I say: given how complete that act of creation is, so what?

And there is some truth to that. Certainly there are moments in "Exhalation" in which the sheer neatness of Chiang's ideas and the strangeness of the world he's created are almost overpowering--I'm thinking mainly of a scene in which the narrator dissects his own brain--but as a whole I can't say that the story swept me away as it did Niall. I appreciate it--indeed, I nominated it for this category--but I can't entirely love it, and I agree with the consensus in the Torque Control comment thread that as exceptional as it is, it is also a lesser Ted Chiang story. Whether that's a meaningful censure is something I'm still uncertain about, though I can't help but wish "Exhalation" was up against more worthy competition. That it is the best story on this year's short story ballot says more about the rather unimpressive raft of nominees than it does about Chiang's accomplishment.

Since I'm a Hugo voter this year, we might as well make this official. My votes for this category will be:

1. "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang
2. "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" by Michael Swanwick
3. "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson
4. No Award

Honestly, the toughest decision I had to make when making up this ballot wasn't the order of stories on it, but deciding how high the No Award vote should go. This is a profoundly unimpressive list of nominees, and though I take some comfort in the knowledge that Chiang's victory is very nearly assured, it's hard not to feel that, once again, the short story category reflects poorly on the award as a whole, and casts a pall on nominees and winners in all categories.

Hugo Season

The Hugo nominations are also out this week, somewhat sooner than I had expected. In all the fun and exasperation of trying to figure out what my own nominees were going to be, I sort of lost sight of the fact that the shortlist would be what it has always been--stodgy, middle-of-the-road, and old-fashioned. So I'm probably a little more disappointed than I ought to be by a ballot that does include a sizable proportion of stories I liked. Niall has the whole ballot, but here are my thoughts on the categories I can speak knowledgeably on (by the way, I note that Niall reprints the nominations in the order listed on the Anticipation website, which is not alphabetical by either title or author's name; should we draw conclusions from this about the number of nominations received by each work?):

Best Novel:

• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi
• Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

It was pretty obvious that this year's shortlist was going to be dominated by YA and YA-tinged fiction, and I had resigned myself to Little Brother being on it (I'm being a little unfair--I haven't read the book yet--but everything I've heard leads to believe I'm going to hate it) as well as The Graveyard Book (though I thought there was a chance that Gaiman might refuse the nomination as he did for the vastly superior Anansi Boys). I was hoping, however, that some of the more impressive genre YA novels of the year--Nation, Tender Morsels, by all accounts The Knife of Never Letting Go and Hunger Games--might get in as well.

Best Novella:

• "True Names" by Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum (Fast Forward 2)
• "The Political Prisoner" by Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF, August 2008)
• "The Erdmann Nexus" by Nancy Kress (Asimov's, October/November 2008)
• "The Tear" by Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
• "Truth" by Robert Reed (Asimov's, October/November 2008)

I was unimpressed by both the Finlay and Kress (what is it with her nursing home novellas and their inexplicable popularity?) when I read them for my Hugo ballot, but "True Names" and "Truth" were the two best novellas on it, and I've heard good things about "The Tear," so all told this is a strong ballot.

Best Novelette:

• "The Gambler" by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2)
  
• "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's, March 2008)
• "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" by James Alan Gardner (Asimov's, February 2008)
• "Pride and Prometheus" by John Kessel (F&SF, January 2008)
• "Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" by Mike Resnick (Asimov's, January 2008)

With the exception of the Resnick (sigh) all of these stories were on my second tier of potential nominees. So while it certainly can't be said that this is a bad list, I am disappointed that none of the more exciting stories I read are on it. I'm particularly baffled by the love for Gardner's story, an enjoyable piece which has nevertheless been wildly overpraised.

Best Short Story:

• "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang (Eclipse 2)
• "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson (Asimov's, July 2008)
• "Evil Robot Monkey" by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two)
• "Article of Faith" by Mike Resnick (Baen's Universe, October 2008)
• "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" by Michael Swanwick (Asimov's, February 2008)

Hurray, more Resnick. The Johnson is another story that readership seems to have gone crazy over this year. I liked it better than the Gardner, but still not enough to understand what the fuss is over (I had a similar reaction to Johnson's similarly well received "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" last year). Of the remaining nominees I've only read the Chiang, so it's too soon to say whether this is a strong ballot or not. I was hoping Margo Lanagan's "The Goosle" would get in, but I think its popularity might have been blown out of proportion by the crush to stomp on Dave Truesdale's wrongheaded criticism of it.

I note, by the way, that it's been a very good year for Asimov's, and somewhat less so for original story anthologies, but not such a good year for the other print magazines. This despite the fact that Asimov's was the most wildly inconsistent market I read in 2008--quite a few outstanding stories, lots of terrible ones, and very little in between.

The Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form ballot is too boring to discuss except for the presence of the audiobook METAtropolis, though I suspect that's mainly due to the Scalzi effect.

Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form:

• Battlestar Galactica, "Revelations"
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
• Doctor Who, "Silence in the Library"/"The Forests of the Dead"
• Doctor Who, "Turn Left"
• Lost, "The Constant"

Not terribly exciting, but pretty much as I expected. I'm a little surprised to see the wildly divisive "Revelations" up here as the Galactica nomination, but I suppose the show didn't have many standout individual episodes in 2008. "The Constant" was a shoo-in given the enthusiasm for it, and the Doctor Who contingent is still out in force--I'm more pleased by the "Turn Left" nomination than the underwhelming library two-parter, though I still wish "Midnight" had gotten a nod. And, of course, Dr. Horrible is going to take the award in a walk.

Rather shockingly, no one seems to have done this yet: in the fiction categories, there are 21 19 nominees, of which 4, or 19% 21%, are women (UPDATE: fixed because I can't count). Not as bad as recent years, but still not very good. There's also only one woman on the Campbell ballot.

I'll probably wait until all the nominated stories are online before I start posting my shortlist reviews. I think I need a short Hugo break right now.

The 2009 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot

The deadline for submitting Hugo nominations is this Saturday, and at this point my ballot is more or less complete. I'm hoping to get the chance to finish reading Matter before I have to send in my nominations, though at this point that seems unlikely, and of course any short fiction that suddenly gains great acclaim (and is available online) will warrant a glance (so by all means make your suggestions if you have any). These aren't all the categories I plan to nominate in--for example, I've only read one book that qualifies for Best Related Work this year, Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy, and though I do plan to nominate it I hardly think a field I'm so poorly read in is worth talking about much.

Still, in the major fiction and A/V categories, my nominees are:

Best Novel:

I've only read a few of the novels eligible for this category, and of them only one, Anathem, excites me and feels worthy of the Hugo. Which in itself is unexciting as this is probably the most unoriginal choice this year, and I sincerely doubt that Neal Stephenson's place on the ballot hinges on my vote. Still, Anathem is a good novel and worth acknowledging. As for the rest of my nominating slots, I may end up using them to nominate some or all of a group of novels--Nation, Tender Morsels, The Other Side of the Island--that I found problematic but interesting.

Best Novella:

• "True Names" by Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum (Fast Forward 2)
• "Gunpowder" by Joe Hill (PS Publishing)
• "Arkfall" by Carolyn Ives Gilman (F&SF, September 2008)
• "Truth" by Robert Reed (Asimov's, October/November 2008)

Because of their length, novellas are relatively thin on the ground in genre publishing--none of the online fiction sources, for example, publish them. Which is why I'm short one nominee in this category, and why, though I like each of the stories on it very much, I have reservations about most of them--"Arkfall" is very engaging when it describes the joy its characters take in exploring the unknown, but those characters are flat, verging on stereotypes; "Gunpowder" has a tense and intriguing premise, but its ending is weak and slightly muddled; "Truth" held me spellbound while I was reading it, but left very little residue, and only a week or two after finishing it I couldn't remember a single detail of its plot. Still, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of these stories, and most especially "True Names", which combines its authors' strengths and their distinctive voices and favorite themes to create an utterly engrossing and completely original work. I am sorry, though, not to have been able to track down copies of either Kelly Link's "The Surfer" or Ian McDonald's "The Tear", which were both extremely well-received.

Best Novelette:

• "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm" by Daryl Gregory (Eclipse 2)
• "How the Day Runs Down" by John Langan (F&SF, December 2008)
• "Legolas Does the Dishes" by Justina Robson (Postscripts 15)
• "Days of Wonder" by Geoff Ryman (F&SF, October/November 2008)
• "Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moons' Blues" by Gord Sellar (Asimov's, July 2008)

As usual, the strongest stories showed up in this category, and it's the one in which I had the hardest time narrowing down the field of potential nominees to five. I've spoken warmly about the Ryman and Gregory stories already. Robson's piece is a pitch-perfect Shirley Jackson homage; Langan's a shocking twist on the zombie story; Sellar's combines music, aliens, and a really great period voice into an eerie, unforgettable story. I wish I could also have given nods to Stephen Baxter's "The Ice War", Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom", John Kessel's "Pride and Prometheus" (available here) and Meghan McCarron's "The Magician's House", but this is a fantastic bunch of stories.

Best Short Story:

• "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang (Eclipse 2)
• "Running" by Benjamin Crowell (Strange Horizons)
• "Tokyo Rising" by Lynne Hawkinson (Strange Horizons)
• "The Goosle" by Margo Lanagan (The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy)
• "Linkworlds" by Will McIntosh (Strange Horizons)

I tend to get less excited about short stories than I do about novelettes and novellas because it's a rare author who manages to spin a story in only a couple thousand words. Most stories of this length are mood pieces or vignettes. The Chiang and Lanagan stories on my ballot are these kinds of stories, but exceptionally good examples of them--Lanagan's a terrifying glimpse into the mind of an abuse victim and Chiang's the kind of mind-bending thought experiment that only Ted Chiang can write. The other stories, however, got their spots because they managed the arguably tougher job of building a world, peopling it with characters, and, most importantly, spinning a tale on a very small canvas.

Putting these three ballots together has been an interesting experience, one which required me, for the very first time, to read through entire runs of print magazines and entire archives of online fiction sites, and allowed me to develop a broader understanding of the genre short fiction scene and a greater appreciation of the differences in tone, topic, and, of course, quality that characterize the different venues within it. The most intriguing observation I made during this process was that whereas online fiction sites like Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld reliably published likable, well-written stories, the standout pieces--for better and worse--came from print magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction or Asimov's (the latter made for an almost schizophrenic reading experience--without fail, every issue I read contained one story I loved and a whole bunch I could barely stand to finish). I think that this is once again an issue of length. For what I assume are reasons tied to their precarious financial model, sites that offer free online fiction tend to publish stories that, at best, tickle the underside of the novelette category, and though as I've said it's possible for a short story to be more than an exercise in tone, generally that is exactly what they are. It's in the print magazines--and in the original story anthologies, which are well-represented on my ballot--that longer, more engaging pieces tend to appear.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:

• Wall-E by Pete Docter, Jim Reardon and Andrew Stanton

This isn't the only genre film I was excited by in 2008, but as I'm already and preemptively annoyed by the debate over whether The Dark Knight is a science fiction film and belongs on this ballot, I can't bring myself to vote for it.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog by Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, Joss Whedon and Zack Whedon
• Doctor Who, "Midnight" by Russell T. Davies
• Pushing Daisies, "Oh Oh Oh... It's Magic" by Kath Lingenfelter
• The Middleman, "The Obsolescent Cryogenic Meltdown" by Tracey Stern
• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "Samson & Delilah" by Josh Friedman

Pushing Daisies, Middleman and Sarah Connor are tough series to nominate in this category. In the latter case, I chose "Samson & Delilah" because, though it stresses the characters' angst and their strained relationships, it also has a well-paced, exciting plot. "Oh Oh Oh... It's Magic" was the first episode in Pushing Daisies's second season in which the show seemed to regain the indefinable combination of wit and sweetness that made it so irresistible in its first season, and also features some immortal one-liners and great moments for all of the main cast (except for the aunts, unfortunately). "The Obsolescent Cryogenic Meltdown" isn't actually my favorite Middleman episode--that would be the vampire puppet one--but it's a close second, and to my mind more accessible to newbies (I should know, as it was the first episode I watched and it completely won me over to the series). The problem with all three of these series is that they don't have true standout episodes, in the vein of "Company Man" or "Once More With Feeling", and I suspect that in each of their cases fans will split their votes between different episodes and make way for things like Lost's "The Constant". I'm also guessing that my Doctor Who choice will prove unpopular, but Stephen Moffat has three Hugos already and delivered something of a dud this year, whereas "Midnight" was completely different from anything either Davies or Who have done before. At any rate, these are all academic quibbles--Dr. Horrible has had the Hugo sewn up for months.

So, that is (part of) my Hugo ballot. It's been a lot of fun putting it together, though I'm glad this isn't something I do every year. If you'd like to argue with my choices or make alternate suggestions, you have until midnight on Saturday to do so.

2008, A Year in Reading: Best Short Stories of the Year

I made a startling discovery when I sat down to put together this list: at a very rough estimate, I've read in excess of 200 short stories this year. And, with a very small group of exceptions, they were all genre stories. And, with a slightly larger group of exceptions, I read them all in the last few months, as I started gearing up for the Hugo nomination deadline. The results of this glut are both rewarding and slightly disappointing. There are nearly twice as many stories on this list as there were last year (including honorable mentions), and each one of them is a fine, exciting piece of writing. For each excellent story, however, my slowly-accumulating list of potential Hugo nominees contains two or three pieces which I found interesting or well crafted but ultimately not that special, and in order to find each one of those I had to wade through several others which were mediocre, predictable, or just plain bad. I'm starting to get a feel of just how exhausting it would be to have one's finger on the pulse of genre short fiction, and though I wouldn't quite say that the rewards aren't worth all that work, the fact remains that I found most of the stories on this list not in genre magazines or original story anthologies but as a result of someone else having done the work of separating the wheat from the chaff--in single-author collections, best-of-year anthologies, and even awards shortlists. Still, in the short-term, it's quite fun to dive into the raw (for which read post-slush pile, post-editorial staff) mass of new genre short fiction. Here's what I've come back with.

As ever, these are the best short stories I've read for the first time this year, not the best short stories published this year, though I've noted year of publication for those of you who, like myself, have a Hugo ballot to put together. The stories are listed by order of their author's surname.

• "The Fluted Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi (2003), from Pump Six and Other Stories
  
  "The Fluted Girl" isn't really representative of Bacigalupi's exceptional debut collection (about which more in the forthcoming best books of the year post). It's probably the closest thing Bacigalupi has ever written to a fantasy story, for though there's a carefully explained SFnal explanation for every one of fantastic elements within it, it has the feel of a particularly dark fairy tale: the young girl who grows up in a feudal system, who is stolen away to the evil witch's castle, befriending some of its enchanted denizens and making enemies of others. Despite which, it is a quintessential Bacigalupi story--furious at the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and tinged with horror at what human beings do to one another and themselves. The revelation of the transformation wrought on Lidia and her sister ranks as one of the most startling moments in my reading this year, and the ending, in which Lidia is poised on the brink of a break for freedom, is perfection itself. I've read lots of good stories by Bacigalupi this year (in addition to Pump Six he has a piece in Fast Forward 2, "The Gambler"), but "The Fluted Girl" is the one that continues to haunt me.


• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang, from Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2007
  
  Would you believe it, I very nearly left this story off the list. My excuse is, I was sure I'd read Chiang's universally lauded, Hugo-winning novelette last year. And the fact is, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" does feel a little like yesterday's news (Chiang has already got a new story out, "Exhalation" in Eclipse 2, which for him is a breakneck pace of publication). Buckets of virtual ink have already been spilled in praise of this story, culminating with its winning both the Nebula and Hugo awards earlier this year. In light of which, it seems like stating the obvious to say that this was one of the best short stories I read this year, but here goes: Chiang's story is the perfect fusion of his trademark love of science and good storytelling, which combine into a sad, haunting piece about free will and predetermination that more than earns its place on the short list of truly excellent time travel stories.


• "Drown" by Junot Díaz (1996), from Drown
  
  Díaz's debut collection didn't quite get a fair shake from me when I read it very soon after being blown away by his excellent novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Fine as they all were, too many of the stories within it felt like dry runs for or outtakes from the novel. The title story, however, while still hewing close to Díaz's recurring theme of the life of Dominican immigrants in America, is something quite different to the novel, a raw, heartbreaking narrative with little of the linguistic gymnastics that characterize so much of Díaz's writing. Narrated in the first person, "Drown" is the story of a young man who knows that he has squandered most of his opportunities to get out of his neighborhood and off a path that leads to a lifetime of poverty and petty crime, but who can't quite work up the courage to change his life. The material is familiar and depressing, but in Díaz's hands it becomes fresh and utterly devastating.


• "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm" (2008) by Daryl Gregory, from Eclipse 2
  
  There have been so many attempts in recent years to tell superhero stories with weight and substance and relate them to the concerns of real people and the real world, but in my experiences of this burgeoning subgenre Daryl Gregory's decision to tell a superhero story from the point of view of the people on the ground is unique. It is also brilliant, as is Gregory's decision to parallel the antagonism between superheroes and supervillains with the East/West divide during the Cold War. "Grimm" is told from the point of view of Elena, a young woman who has grown up under a regime that might be Soviet were it not for the fact that her fearless leader is the supervillain Lord Grimm, whose glorious exploits are recounted in song, story, and comic book for the edification of his country's citizens. When a troupe of American superheroes launches another attack against Grimm, Elena and her friends and neighbors have to scramble for safety in a direct and deliberate parallel to the all-too-familiar plight of civilians during wartime, and as result their attitudes towards the superpowered beings who torment and champion them are similarly tinged with realism. I can't think of a single story or novel I've read that's done a better job of placing superheroes in the real world.


• "Stories for Men" by John Kessel (2002), from The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (free download)
  
  I've gone on at great length about this thought-provoking, meaty novella, so I'll just quickly recap: "Stories for Men" packs more, and more interesting, thoughts about the role and trappings of gender into several dozen pages than many full-length novels. This is a clever, impeccably crafted story about the reversal of gender roles and life in a female-dominated society that pushes itself far beyond the often simplistic depictions one tends to find of both these concepts, and which forces its readers to ask difficult, thorny questions to which there are no easy answers. It may very well be the smartest story I've read this year, and certainly the one that hews closest to the classic definition of science fiction as a genre that ponders how technology might change humans and human society, while still focusing on characters and communities.


• "The Goosle" by Margo Lanagan (2008), from The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
  
  Like the Chiang, this is a story that's gotten a lot of virtual ink this year. If there's any justice, it'll follow in "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"'s footsteps and earn, at the very least, nominations for the Hugo and Nebula. Lanagan's dark sequel to "Hansel and Gretel" drew criticism for its frank depiction of sexual abuse, but it should be clear to anyone who reads it that her goal, at which she was entirely successful, was to depict not only the physical but emotional toll of such abuse, which grinds down its victim's soul to the point where they depend on their abuser for their sense of self. From this grim premise, Lanagan crafts the closest thing she can to a happy ending--the triumph of anger over self-loathing, with only the faintest hints of hope for the future. This is a punishing story, but also one of the most remarkable I've read this year.


• "Days of Wonder" by Geoff Ryman, from Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2008
  
  SFnal invention as only Geoff Ryman can do it--surprising, exhilarating, clever, and benevolent. "Days of Wonder" starts from a Tiptree-esque premise, set in a future in which the world has been inherited by animals who are both sentient and ruled by biological imperative. When a throwback horse begins to question the natural order of things, she arouses both suspicion and new kinds of relationships, including a short-lived but strong alliance with one of her predators. Ryman's depiction of the costs and advantages of biological determinism is nuanced and thoughtful, and the SFnal McGuffin driving the story is a delight to uncover. I've had problems with Ryman's short fiction in the past, and particularly with his tendency to write happy endings which sometimes offer cheap, false consolation to victims of real hardship and atrocities, but this story's happy ending is impeccably crafted, and feels organic and well-earned.

Honorable Mentions:

• "The Man Who Married a Tree" by Tony D'Souza (2006), from Best American Fantasy


• "Gunpowder" by Joe Hill (2008)


• "Divining Light" by Ted Kosmatka, from Asimov's, August 2008


• "The Magician's House" by Meghan McCarron (2008), from Strange Horizons


• "Finisterra" by David Moles, from Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 2007

In Conversation

Appearing today in Strange Horizons's reviews department is Dan Hartland's review of Benjamin Rosenbaum's The Ant King and Other Stories. Over at Torque Control, Niall Harrison has posted a discussion he led with Dan, Martin Lewis, and myself about the collection and Rosenbaum's strengths and weaknesses as a writer, plus links to other reviews. And, of course, the collection itself is available as a free download from Small Beer Press.

The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow

Several months ago, around the time that the debate on the viability of the genre short fiction scene was having its semiannual resurgence, I participated in an SF Signal Mind Meld on the subject. Most of the other participants were authors and editors, which left me as the lone representative of readers, from whose perspective, I wrote, the short fiction market seemed not endangered but fragmented, no longer dominated by three magazines but by a whole host of on- and off-line markets and an ever-growing original story anthology scene. As a possible reason for this fragmentation and for the increasing popularity of these anthologies, I suggested that for younger genre fans

a magazine subscription isn't an automatic, or even reasonable, choice. People who want more bang for their buck are more likely to plop 12-15$ for an anthology published by a recognizable name, and featuring at least three or four authors they know and like, than they are to pay 50$ for a year's subscription that essentially boils down to a monthly gamble.

I had a spontaneous demonstration of the difference between magazines and original story anthologies just last week, when my reading of the Ellen Datlow-edited The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy coincided with that of the September issue of Asimov's. The latter contains one good story: Stephen Baxter's "The Ice War," which takes place in the early 18th century and describes an alien attack through the eyes of a young Englishman who falls in with Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe, and therefore reads a little like a cross between The Baroque Cycle and War of the Worlds. Another story, "Usurpers" by Derek Zumsteg, is stylish and harsh, but the rest of the magazine is dull and underperforming, with the exception of Ian Creasey's "Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone," which may very well be the worst story I've read this year that wasn't a major genre award nominee. The Del Rey Book, meanwhile, though obviously not entirely to my taste, is a meaty, impressive anthology, with something to recommend almost every story within it.

The standout story in the anthology, and the one you'll most likely have heard of, is Margo Lanagan's "The Goosle," a sequel of sorts to "Hansel and Gretel" which shot to public attention when Dave Truesdale excoriated it in his review of The Del Rey Book, calling it pornographic and complaining that its darker elements--the story finds Hansel returning to the witch's cottage as the sex slave of a drifter and con man, who engages the witch in a battle of wits while Hansel uncovers evidence of her depravity and the Black Death rages around them--were introduced solely for their 'shock value.' Niall Harrison has already done an excellent job of explaining just how wrongheaded Truesdale's critique is, so I will simply echo the point he makes, that "The Goosle" is a terrifying and absorbing examination of abuse from the victim's perspective, which stresses the importance of isolation and loneliness in perpetuating the abusive relationship. Lanagan's Hansel is starved for affection, and has no one left in the world but his abuser. What keeps him in his situation is not force or even fear, but the willingness to put up with pain and humiliation for just a few moments of what he can pretend is love.

I do, however, have a vague sympathy with Truesdale's accusation that "The Goosle" shocks for the sake of shocking, as at several points throughout the story I found myself thrown out of its world, and its overpowering emotional tone, by Lanagan stepping up the grand guignol--having Hansel lay his head against what he believes to be a pumpkin only for it to turn out to be the skull of one of the witch's victims, or the description of the witch dismembering her latest kill. Elements that should have sunk me further into the story's horrific mode instead came off as over the top, and had me shaking off the story's effect to go 'oh, come on.' This is, however, a minor complaint. "The Goosle" soon recaptured my attention, and its ending manages to introduce a new horror without being hysterical, making for a grim (and yet, in its own way, almost hopeful) conclusion to Hansel's story that is entirely of a piece with the pages preceding it.

Other standout stories in The Del Rey Book include "The Elephant Ironclads" by Jason Stoddard, an impressive and immersive alternate history in which the ubiquitous zeppelins actually have a reason for floating in the sky. Stoddard builds on the urban legend that Siamese king Mongkut offered to provide Abraham Lincoln with elephants with which he might win the civil war (in reality, the elephants were offered to President Buchanan as beasts of burden, but the offer was only received after Lincoln took office) and posits a world in which those elephants were accepted and, after winning the war and being left to wander in the American south-west, rounded up by Native American tribes and used to run white people off their land.

In the present day, the Diné still rely on elephants as beasts of burden, and prefer airships to airplanes because they don't disrupt the landscape with noise and smoke. The society Stoddard describes is dedicated to preserving the status quo--culturally and environmentally--disdaining members who gravitate towards the mechanized, progress-oriented US. Stoddard's juvenile characters find themselves caught in a struggle between those who want progress and those who want to preserve their way of life, and the story emphasizes the thorniness and complexity of this choice. I was also impressed by Maureen McHugh's "Special Economics," in which a young Chinese woman eagerly accepts a job in a factory only to find herself trapped in a modern-day feudal system. It's the sort of story that Paolo Bacigalupi and Geoff Ryman have specialized in in recent years, and therefore feels a little derivative, but McHugh is no less gifted a storyteller than either of them, and no less capable of conveying both the foreignness and familiarity of her characters.

Other stories in the anthology are impressive but somehow unsatisfying. In some cases this is my fault for lacking context or a common cultural vocabulary with the author. Colleen Mondor was blown away by Elizabeth Bear's "Sonny Liston Takes the Fall," in which the titular boxer and one-time opponent of Muhammad Ali is recast as the hero of his tragic life story, which ended with his death from a drug overdose. The problem is that it wasn't until I read that post that I even knew Liston had been a real person, and I certainly don't have the background in either boxing or American race relations in the 60s and 70s that made the story so irresistible to Mondor, a boxing fan (and which the story itself sketches in only faintly). Similarly, Richard Bowes's "Aka Saint Mark's Place" takes place, like his Hugo-nominated story "There's a Hole in the City," in the counter-culture scene of the East Village in the 60s, which is not a setting that speaks very strongly to me.

In other cases, I found myself too close to the subject matter. Lavie Tidhar, an author whose work I've greatly enjoyed in the past, here serves up a piece about a Jordanian scholar who, in a post Arab-Israeli conflict 21st century, travels to Haifa to research a late 20th century Israeli poet. The story makes an unfortunate left turn into cliché when it resolves the protagonist's obsession with her subject by having her go to bed with him, but even more frustrating to me was the fact that "Shira" manages to be simultaneously too Israeli--one of the fictional poet's poems quotes from Hannah Szenes's "Blessed is the Match," but Tidhar's translation completely misses out on the harsh, almost martial cadences that make that poem so powerful in the original Hebrew--and not Israeli enough--Szenes, a writer of doggrel whose poems remain in the public consciousness mainly because of the heroic myth that's sprung up around her and the stirring melodies to which they've been set, is mentioned in the same breath as Yehuda Amichai, possibly the most important Hebrew poet of the 20th century.

The majority of the stories in The Del Rey Book, however, are ones that I'd categorize as 'good, but.' There are only two stories I disliked (Lucy Sussex's "Ardent Clouds," which manages to be dull when talking about people who chase volcano eruptions, and Nathan Ballingrud's "North American Lake Monsters," which is all too obvious in hammering in the point that its protagonist, recently paroled and working hard to alienate and make miserable his entire family while deciding what to do with the creature that's washed up near his house, is the real monster), but the remaining stories do one thing well, and everything else poorly or not at all. Christopher Rowe's "Gather" is set, like his most famous story, "The Voluntary State," in a world that's pitched halfway between futuristic SF and 19th century fantasy. His characters are hemmed in by rigidly defined codes of behavior but, spurred by scientific curiosity, find themselves pushing against the boundaries imposed on them, in the process taking us on a tour of their proscribed world and giving us glimpses of the larger world outside it. It's a great piece of worldbuilding, and its characters are appealing, but not much happens in it. Jeffrey Ford and Carol Emshwiller both deliver enjoyable, whimsically surrealist pieces (though with a dark undercurrent in the latter case) about, respectively, cities in bottles and a shipwrecked librarian, but that whimsy never coalesces into anything substantial. Laird Barron's "The Lagerstätte" is a horror piece about a woman being haunted by either the ghosts or the memory of her husband and son. It successfully describes the stifling despair of a character being forced to choose between accepting her loss and destroying herself through grief and memory (though Barron's frequent recourse to gore achieved the same effect of throwing me out of the story that I experienced when reading "The Goosle," and unlike Lanagan, he wasn't as skilled at luring me back into the narrative), but doesn't go beyond establishing that emotional pitch.

Overall, The Del Rey Book is a good, but only occasionally great, collection. That said, even the worst pieces within it are more professionally put together than so much of what graces the pages of your average Big Three issue. It's obviously unfair to compare an anthology that was probably the better part of a year in the making with any one issue of a magazine which, over the course of that year, publishes four or five times the amount of material Datlow needed to put together, but there's a thinness that characterizes some magazine stories, a willingness to settle for mediocrity on all levels--prose, characterization, plot, worldbuilding--which is entirely, and refreshingly, absent from the anthology. Writing about the slipstream anthology Feeling Very Strange earlier today, Martin Lewis wrote that it is "much like every other SF anthology I have read: a couple of good stories, a couple of rubbish ones and an awful lot of filler," but though I only loved a few of the stories in The Del Rey Book I wouldn't characterize any of them as filler. Each is trying to do something new or interesting or just plain good, and even their failures or incomplete successes are preferable to entries by writers who are either not making that effort or lack the skill to do so creditably, which is the kind of filler one tends to find in magazines. Despite what I said in the SF Signal Mind Meld, it's not cost that makes original story anthologies more appealing than a magazine subscription. I payed for my copy of The Del Rey Book, and was given the September issue of Asimov's, but I resent the time I spent wading through pointless, underwritten pieces to get to the one or two worthy stories.

There's a flipside to this, however, which became apparent when I scanned the author bios in The Del Rey Book and discovered that not a single one of its contributors was a first time writer. The reason that the genre short story scene is still vibrant is that there's a relatively low threshold for entry, with new writers making sales and putting their material before an audience every month. Just as the investment of time and money in original story anthologies dwarfs that afforded to any month's issue of a magazine, so, presumably, do the hurdles first time writers have to clear before they're published in those anthologies become tougher, perhaps even impossible, to overcome. I rarely read magazines for just the reasons stated above--because there's so much dross to wade through, and I'd rather wait for other readers to do that work and discover new voices for me. But if magazines and other venues like them become an endangered species, and original story anthologies become the dominant delivery system for new short fiction, those new voices might peter out. This should not be construed as a specific criticism of Datlow, who as I've said has put together a strong anthology whose table of contents is by no means dominated by heavy hitters, but it is telling that all but two of the contributors to The Del Rey Book were published in SciFiction, and that several of them published their best-know stories and made their reputation there. If it weren't for the webzine, would Datlow have had as varied and talented a stable of authors to approach when she made up The Del Rey Book?

There's been a lot of talk in the last year about the financial realities of publishing in general and short fiction in particular. It's those realities, one assumes, that are the reason monthly magazines pad their issues with forgettable and sometimes unreadable pieces, and which demand that original story anthologies skew towards recognizable, bankable names. When I replied to the SF Signal Mind Meld, I was writing as a reader, who wants the most payoff for the least investment of money, effort, and time. It's hard for a reader to look at a delectable table of contents like that of The Del Rey Book and wish for less familiar, less reliable names on it, but just as we've accepted that it is our role as readers (and consumers) to voice our displeasure at gender and racial inequality in both magazines and anthologies, it should also be our role to encourage editors and publishers to take the long view and foster new voices. The future of short genre fiction may very well be in books like The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but if it is then it falls to us to make sure that that future consists of more than the names we already know.

With Anticipation

The credit card bill (if not, just yet, the convention itself) confirms that I am a paid-up member of Anticipation, the 2009 WorldCon. This does not quite mean that I will definitely be in Montréal next August, but that is certainly the plan, finances and life events permitting. Long-time AtWQ readers will perhaps have guessed just what kind of bind this puts me in. It's a little difficult, after all, to decry the degraded, provincial tastes of Hugo voters when you are one of them. Not impossible, obviously, but it would be nice, if and when the time comes to complain loudly about next year's Hugo nominees, to have a list of alternative nominees which I had actually cast my vote for. And since I rarely read stories or books in the year of their publication, I find myself, with less than four months left in the year, somewhat overwhelmed by the wealth of material available.

So, my question to you is, what genre stories have you read since January that you think are award-worthy? Obviously, precedence will be given to stories available online, though I've also been checking the tables of contents of 2008's Big Three issues at Fictionwise (and, in the process, getting a close look at what had been, up until now, only a mathematical fact--if I read only these magazines in my search for Hugo-worthy stories, I will have sampled only a handful of female authors), and given their prevalence in the last few years I suppose I should give original-story anthologies a look too. Note that I'm asking for story recommendations, not novels--it's a little late in the game, not to mention a little expensive, for me to start seeking out 2008 novels just in case they happen to be Hugo material, and at any rate I'm much more interested in the short fiction categories, if only because it's in these categories that a few votes can make a real difference.

Over to you, then.

"Stories for Men" by John Kessel

One of the effects of a magazine-and-award-oriented short story culture is that I often remember stories but not their authors. I admired John Kessel's writing, therefore, long before I knew his name. His two publication in SciFiction, "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" and "It's All True," both made my best of SciFiction lists for their respective years, and "The Invisible Empire," which I read in Conjunctions 39, has lingered in my mind for several years. Once I put the three stories together with a single author, I knew that I had to give his collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (available under Creative Commons License here), a look. I wasn't disappointed. Baum Plan is an excellent collection, full of smart, playful stories, which cover every genre, sub-genre, and quasi-genre under the speculative fiction umbrella, but the best of the bunch is undoubtedly the novella "Stories for Men."

The second in a sequence of four stories called The Lunar Quartet (it is preceded by "The Juniper Tree," and followed by "The Lunchbox Tree" and "Sunlight or Rock"), which were published between 2000 and 2006 in Asimov's and Science Fiction Age, "Stories for Men" is set in a colony on Fowler crater on the far side of the moon. Established some 60 years before the story's beginning, the colony is the home of The Society of Cousins, a matriarchal group whose founders sought to rid themselves of violence and the fear of it by drastically reducing the roles and rights of men. Family among the Cousins is centered around the mother. Children are raised by their mothers and aunts, and whatever male happens to be around--who may or may not be their father. Property is passed down the maternal line, and partner-less men are the wards of their mother, sisters, or the state. Men receive a stipend which allows them to pursue their interests at leisure, but if they accept it they have to live under a woman's roof and forfeit the right to vote. Men who want to vote must leave their mother's house, live in communal housing, and do menial labor. As "Stories for Men" opens, a male Cousin has begun agitating against the status quo, and the story is told from the viewpoint of 17 year old Erno, one of his admirers.

If "Stories for Men" were simply a depiction of a gender-flipped version of pre-feminist societal norms, it would still be a powerful, if perhaps broad, social commentary. Kessel holds up a distorting mirror to inequalities common in our society a century ago (and in some cases even more recently) and his reimagining of them is flawless, effortlessly finding the middle ground between familiarity and the demands of his invented setting. Erno is repeatedly told not to complain about his lot in life, that he is protected and pampered while women face the hardships of the real world, have to make a home and a life for themselves and the men and children they support--a perfect mirror-image of the argument which has been put to women when they demanded the vote, or the right to study and work. Erno's mother, a policewoman, is described like so many antagonists of women's self-discovery and empowerment: "She was comfortable in the world; she saw no need for alternatives." Hers is the role of the narrow-minded, rule-bound parent, which in naturalistic fiction is almost invariably the father's.

At the same time, "Stories for Men" is cognizant of its premise, and of the ways in which a straight-up reversal of familiar gender roles would suit it poorly. So, though historically the subjugation of any group has tended to have economical underpinnings--if you need slaves to make your economy run and guarantee your wealth, you're bound to find some group which strikes you as naturally predisposed to the role--among the cousins it is a philosophical decision, a violent reaction to the prevalence of violence against women, and violence in general, in male-dominated society. Other unique touches include the diabolical choice forced on male Cousins, between self-actualization and enfranchisement, which rather neatly prevents men from ever gaining a substantial voice in the running of the colony while allowing its female members to claim that men choose to be voiceless, and the Cousins' attitude towards sex, which can best be described as 'yes, please.' The vilification of sex, of women's sexuality, and of promiscuity are all foregone conclusions in a patriarchal society in which property and titles are passed down the male line and yet one has only the mother's word as to who a child's father is. If property is passed down the maternal line, these attitudes and restrictions vanish, and consequently the only sex the Cousins outlaw is the non-consensual kind. Men take on a role that is just this side of sex-toys, and relationships are easily entered into and just as easily gotten out of.

There is more to "Stories for Men," however, than just this reversal, however sophisticated its execution. The novella is a drawn-out exercise in frustrating its readers' sympathies and expectations. Our initial response is to recoil from Cousin society, its inequalities and codified prejudices, but Kessel's choice to set the story in our own universe, and to stress that outside the Cousins' enclave everything is business as usual, divides our loyalties. The Cousin women aren't simply exploiters, as they would be in a story whose author had simply posited a wholesale reversal of gender roles, but people who have fled exploitation, or their descendants. Kessel never lets us forget that what they are reacting to--the casual acceptance of violence towards women, the twisted attitudes towards sex and sexuality, the ceaseless condescension--is real, and still going on just outside their door, so that even as we abhor their chosen reaction we can't help but wonder whether they might not be onto something. (There is also something almost whiny about Erno's dissatisfaction with his situation, which on the whole is so much better than what women in equivalent situations have endured--he enjoys the protection of the law, after all, and is free to pursue an occupation rather than being expected to drudge for his mother and sisters until he marries. One is reminded of the old joke that, if men were responsible for childbearing, the artificial womb would have been invented decades ago.)

For all these misgivings, however, there is no doubt that Cousin society is rooted in a grave injustice, and that the people seeking to address that wrong have a solid case. Kessel gives our moral compass another good rattle, therefore, in his choice of the champion of this cause, a stand-up comedian and social agitator who uses the stage name Tyler Durden ("I think it's historical," one character says). Brilliant as this allusion is, the novella's first segment, in which Erno attends one of Tyler's performances, which leads to a riot, and escapes with him through the colony's forgotten tunnels, is reminiscent not so much of Chuck Palahniuk's novel as it is of the Tom Cruise segments of the movie Magnolia. Tyler's rhetoric is just the kind of vile, misogynistic, poison that character, a self-help guru who holds seminars for men who feel downtrodden by their inability to succeed with women, pours into his listeners' ears when he urges them to "respect the cock, and tame the cunt!" Like him, Tyler blames women for his misfortunes, and accuses them of using sex to subjugate and confuse men. The problem is that in this particular setting, he isn't entirely wrong.

Racism (or any other kind of -ism), we're told, is prejudice + power, and in the setting of "Stories for Men" women hold all the power. Does that mean that Tyler's invective is harmless, perhaps even justified? When we first meet Erno, he's described as "a seventeen-year-old biotech apprentice known for the clumsy, earnest intensity with which he propositioned almost every girl he met"--an off-putting description that recalls the infamous Nice Guy, who can't conceive of any reason to interact with a woman except in order to have sex with her. But in Erno's society, his social position is determined by his mate, and for him not to have one means his continued immurement in his mother's home. Does this not justify his desperation?

For a time, Kessel's Tyler Durden follows in the original's footsteps. Like him, he pulls off daring stunts that tweak the noses of those in authority without endangering or hurting anyone, while playing games of trust and dominance with this followers meant to help them become his idea of what a real man is like--people who stand tall and make their mark on their surroundings, who embrace the moment and disdain caution, comfort, and compromise. Where the two characters diverge is in their attitude towards women. Kessel's Tyler is, for all his grand rhetoric, a misogynist. "Men put their lives on the line for every microscopic step forward our pitiful race has made." He announces at a town meeting. "Nothing’s more visible than the sacrifices men have made for the good of their wives and daughters. Yes, women died, too—but they were real women, women not threatened by the existence of masculinity." This last shows a laughably poor grasp of history, and puts me in mind of a similar passage from Richard Morgan's Black Man, in which a character concludes that 20th century American society was 'feminized' because of the crisis it posed for 'traditional' (or perhaps imaginary) manhood. In the end, Tyler shows his true colors by urging Erno to procure for him a virus that would quickly kill the next generation of Cousin women while allowing the men to live--something the 'real' Tyler Durden would never sink to.

Of course, the real Tyler Durden doesn't have much of an opinion about women in general. There is one female character in Fight Club, and though she is hardly marginal or a plaything, neither does she affect Tyler's choices or philosophy. Tyler urges his followers to be men, to revel in each other's company, in violence for its own sake and for the sake of feeling their strength and vitality, but he never says anything to them about women. The closest he comes is a quip about "a generation of men raised by women," but his problem here is not with women but with the absence of men, and specifically fathers. Though it's never stated in these terms, the original Tyler Durden's philosophy seems to be the one expressed by Erno's father when the boy tracks him down:

"The genius of the founders, Erno"—Micah opened another drawer and started on the next rack of tomatoes—"was that they minimized the contact of males and females. They made it purely voluntary. Do you realize how many centuries men and women tore themselves to pieces through forced intimacy? In every marriage, the decades of lying that paid for every week of pleasure? That the vast majority of men and women, when they spoke honestly, regretted the day they had ever married?"

Palahniuk's Tyler Durden lives in a world of men. His interest is in masculinity, which to his mind has nothing to do with its relation to femininity. Unlike Tom Cruise in Magnolia, Tyler Durden's beef isn't with women but with society (and unlike the character twisted by his frustrated sense of entitlement in Black Man, he doesn't conflate the two) and its expectations from him. The social contract dictates that Tyler live a small, boring, unremarkable life, work in an office, have a family, and most of all buy things, and in exchange, he will be allowed to live safely and comfortably. Tyler rebels against this life. He wants neither its privileges nor its obligations. And this, for all their differences, brings Kessel and Palahniuk's Tylers back into agreement. Both of them are rebelling against safety and caution, against the conformity imposed by a society that offers this kind of extensive safety net. Kessel's Tyler, however, equates the suffocating protectiveness of Cousin society with femininity--men seek conquest and exploration, women crave security and stability.

It's an opinion expressed by other characters in the story. In an attempt to get through to him, Erno's mother tells him about an encounter with a security officer on another, non-matriarchal lunar colony, whom she reproved for wasting precious water: "He thought that invoking the free market settled the issue, as if to go against the market were to go against the laws of nature. The goal of conquering space justified the expenditure, he said—that they’d get more water somewhere else when they used up the lunar ice. ... The market as a law of nature? ‘Conquering space?’ How do you conquer space? That’s not a goal, it’s a disease." To Tyler's mind, the Cousins' choice to prioritize safety has doomed them. As in other stories about men encountering female-dominated, peaceful societies--Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland--he insists that the sublimation of masculinity equals the sublimation of struggle and growth, and that without the violence that men bring to society it will stagnate, "an evolutionary dead end" (but then, maybe it's just peace-loving utopias that bring this attitude out in those observing them--see just about every outsider's reaction to the Culture in Iain M. Banks's novels).

There's a boatload of assumptions driving Tyler's conclusions, and the most significant one--that men crave violence and women crave security--seems to underpin "Stories for Men" itself. I certainly would like to believe that this isn't true, but poised as we are at the very beginning of the long process of disentangling ourselves from millennia of absolute male domination, it's difficult to say one way or another. Like the best stories of James Tiptree Jr., however, "Stories for Men" is persuasive in its worldview, at least while one reads it.

The story's title comes from a book Erno finds, a short story anthology published in 1936, featuring authors like Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway, which he makes his way through as the events of Tyler's rebellion unfold. One by one, he is shocked by the violence and despair underlying these stories, which depict men being broken and undone by an uncaring society that rewards might and stomps on those in need. Erno's education in school has a distinctive slant to it--the authors he's read are, in another one of Kessel's brilliantly revealing reversals, "Murasaki, Chopin, Cather, Ellison, Morrison, Ferenc, Sabinsdaughter," so for him this may be the first time he encounters male protagonists, and certainly male authors (though in light of this extensive reading list it is perhaps surprising that the content of the stories in Stories for Men should have shocked him so). At the same time, however, the portrait it presents of these protagonist's lives is a grim and dispiriting one.

I think it's possible to say that "Stories for Men" boils down to this bitter choice--safety in a cage, or freedom in a dangerous, cruel world. Feminism (and most other forms of social activism) is, among other definitions, the demand to eliminate this choice, to give women the right to step out of their cage and yet live in a community that cares for its members and doesn't victimize them, but is the end result of this demand that society make itself safer and kinder the restrictive, exploitative Society of Cousins? Or was the Cousins' choice to turn away from the patriarchal world an abdication, which helped to ensure that, when Erno does venture into the outside world in "Sunlight or Rock," his experiences read like an entry out of Stories for Men? What came first, gendered predilections for and against violence, or patriarchal, strength-driven society? I don't know. Neither does John Kessel, but he pokes and prods at these questions, and the others that I've raised throughout this essay, and as a result "Stories for Men" is one of the most thought-provoking, consuming pieces of fiction I've ever read, and certainly one of the best short stories I've read this year.

Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2008

Following a similar experiment a couple of years ago, the folks at Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine offered a copy of their most recent issue to anyone willing to blog about it, and, after taking a look at the issue's table of contents, I happily took them up on their offer. With stories by Geoff Ryman, Stephen King, M. Rickert, Robert Reed and several others, this seemed like a not-to-be-missed entry in the magazine's history, and I was looking forward to writing an exuberant piece about some top-notch short fiction. Sadly, the further I got into the October/November issue, the less I found to be excited about. The big names have turned up, to be sure, but only one of them has delivered on the level I'd expected.

Last time I wrote about a F&SF giveaway issue, I complained about the magazine's nonfiction content, and specifically its datedness. What was the point, I asked, of reviewing Ian McDonald's River of Gods months after it had been nominated for the Hugo as if the magazine's readers had never heard of it? It was pointed out to me, however, that there is a contingent of subscribers who are not online, and for whom F&SF is their only source of genre criticism. These people might very well have been hearing about River of Gods for the first time, as it had only recently been published in the US.

Fair enough, though for the sake of these readers I wish the magazine's book reviews were a little more interesting and thoughtful, but what is to be made of Lucius Shepard's film column? In an issue sent out in August, to be sold in bookstores in the fall, Shepard turns his focus to the summer phenomenon of comic book films, and decides to write about... Iron Man, which he derides for being silly and incoherent. I realize that there are probably lead time issues here that I'm not privy to, but you can't talk about comic book films at the end of the summer of 2008 without talking about The Dark Knight--a fact which is powerfully brought home by Shepard's numerous unfavorable comparisons between Iron Man and The Dark Knight's prequel, Batman Begins. Shepard has nothing to say about Iron Man that hasn't been said countless times already, including in many venues which even offline F&SF readers will have been likely to see, and in addition his review is mean-spirited, trotting out a fanboy caricature who lobs low-ball arguments--you don't get it man, you're out of touch!--about Iron Man's merits for Shepard to knock aside, so that even I, who didn't think much of the film, found myself wishing him off my side. Given F&SF's long lead time I simply don't understand why the magazine bothers to write about current films, especially if its reviewer has so little to add to the discussion.

Still, nonfiction isn't the reason for F&SF's existence, and once I was done puzzling over Shepard's movie column I happily turned to the stories in the October/November issue, only to be puzzled once again. A few of the stories here are exercises in tone, effective but ephemeral. Carol Emshwiller's "Whoever" is narrated by a woman who wakes up with no memory, and spins a story to explain her circumstances, venturing further and further into the realm of the fantastic as she does so. Steven Utley's "Sleepless Years" is narrated by a suicide who is being used as a test subject in experiments in reanimation. Terry Bisson's "Private Eye" is an erotic piece extrapolating from the webcam phenomenon to a world in which one can, for a fee, see through another person's eyes. All are well-written and successfully put us in their characters' heads, but that's really all they amount to. Less impressive are the two humorous pieces in the magazine, Albert E. Cowdrey's "Inside Story" and Scott Bradfield's "Dazzle Joins the Scriptwriter's Guild" (a third piece, a short-short by Laurel Winter titled "Going Back in Time," is probably intended as humorous but doesn't really come close). Both rely on stereotypes and clichés for their humor--the soullessness of the Hollywood filmmaking apparatus in Bradfield's story, the funny accents and love of greasy food of lower-middle and working class New Orleans residents in Cowdrey's--but neither crackles on the page. Cowdrey, at least, is trying to do something more than just entertain, as the supernatural occurrences in his story take place among FEMA trailers and in dilapidated and abandoned neighborhoods still patrolled by the National Guard, but he tells us nothing that we don't already know.

Michael Swanwick and Tim Sullivan are almost unique in the issue for trying to tell actual stories rather than striking a single emotional tone, the former with the short story "The Scarecrow's Boy" and the latter with the novelette "Planetesimal Dawn." Sullivan's story is good old fashioned SF, taking place in a mining colony on an asteroid, and paying great attention to the realities of survival in space. The story kicks off when a scientist and security officer on routine patrol become stranded when their vehicle malfunctions, and have to scramble to avoid the boiling dawn, then complicates when the two fall through a temporal anomaly. I feel a little guilty saying this, since stories of this ilk are, allegedly, not only the meat and potatoes of science fiction its bricks and mortar, the kind of hardcore, scientifically oriented stories that are at the foundation of the genre, but "Planetesimal Dawn" is boring. The characters are crudely drawn--the defeated scientist, the plucky security officer--and Sullivan's focus on mechanics (of the temporal anomaly, of the alien mining facility the characters find once they traverse it, of the alien spacecraft one of them visits) drowns out any urgency or sense of wonder his story might have elicited. It comes off like a mission report rather than a story. Swanwick's story, in which obsolete robot servers put out to pasture rally to save the life of a lost child, might have gone to the other extreme, and been slathered in sentiment, but, perhaps because it's such a short piece and perhaps because the title character is enjoyably down to Earth, he pulls it off, and even makes us care for his characters, who are trying to make moral decisions within the imposed framework of their programming.

I was interested in the October/November issue of F&SF, however, because of four names--King, Reed, Rickert and Ryman. The first is something of a surprise on a F&SF cover. If you look at the publication credits in King's upcoming short story collection, you'll find high-paying, prestigious mainstream markets like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. According to the introduction to King's story, "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates," he was inspired to submit to the magazine after reading it regularly as part of his duties as guest editor of Best American Short Stories 2007 and being impressed with its content, but were I feeling uncharitable I might wonder if he didn't realize that he had a throwaway piece on his hands which Esquire wouldn't bother with. "Bargain Rates" is, as its introduction calls it, a Twilight Zone piece--something weird happens, the end. It's not bad, but not nearly as good as King's short stories can be (and in recent years I've grown more and more convinced that he is at his best in the short form), and in its language in particular feels almost lazy--as if someone were imitating King's folksy, conversational style and falling a little short of the real thing.

More disappointing is M. Rickert's "Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter's Personal Account," but then I expect a great deal from Rickert, who has a knack for combining present day events with SFnal speculation and a possibly unhealthy dollop of cynicism about human nature. She does all that here, imagining a world in which abortion has been made retroactively punishable by death, and in which women are rounded up by the hundreds and thousands to pay for abortions performed years or even decades ago. As the title indicates, the story is narrated by the daughter of one of these condemned women, who has fled rather than face her punishment, to her family's everlasting shame. It's an effective piece, as, indeed, how could it help being? Mass executions! Gross miscarriages of justice! Institutionalized misogyny! Young women brainwashed into a Handmaid's Tale-esque attitude of seeing themselves as nothing but walking wombs! It is also, however, shamelessly manipulative and unsubtle, a piece aimed only at people who agree with its politics, and one which encourages them to sneer rather than think.

Robert Reed has been churning out short stories at the rate of several per year for some time now (which leads me to wonder whether it isn't time for a single-author collection). He's a consistent presence on Hugo and Nebula shortlists, and justifiably so--his novella "A Billion Eves" was one of my favorite short stories last year--but with the sheer bulk of material he produces it stands to reason that there are also plenty of also-rans in the mix. The novelette "Visionaries" is, sadly, one of these. It's also an oddly metafictional piece, narrate by a science fiction author who occasionally produces pieces which don't even seem to be properly stories, but glimpses into the life of a wholly unremarkable man who happens to live several decades in the future. In short order, the writer is contacted by a shadowy group within the SFWA, who pay top dollar for what they believe to be a genuine glimpse of the future. "Visionaries" touches on many of the hot-button topics that regularly crop up in the SF blogosphere--the declining fortunes of SF magazines, the internal politics of the SFWA, associate members of that organization with hardly any publishing credits to their name who nevertheless turn up at every official gathering, resentment of new writers and their media savvy, what may very well be a dig at free online fiction, and, of course, the capacity of science fiction to actually predict the future. Though there is a more accessible sub-plot that runs through the story, in which the narrator tries to affect the life of one of the people he glimpses in his visions, it is overpowered by what feels like a succession of inside jokes with very little substance. That said, I think I'm going to have to give "Visionaries" a little more thought, because I can't help but suspect that it does have a larger point that I'm missing.

Geoff Ryman is less prolific than Robert Reed but a great deal more dependable--I don't think I've ever read a poor or uninteresting piece of short fiction by him. His novelette "Days of Wonder" is no exception, an utterly original take on the post-apocalyptic, post-human future familiar from so many other stories. The narrator is a horse, and yet not a horse--a genetically engineered creature whose species was created just prior to humanity's destruction along with many other altered animals, who possess sentience but are also ruled by their biological nature, at least until the narrator's throwback friend, Leveza, starts questioning the natural order of things--why should the old and sick be sacrificed to predators on migration? Why can't truce be made with those predators? Why can't technology be used to prevent the need for migration at all? The result feels at first like a Tiptree-esque story about intelligence and free will at war with, and ultimately overpowered by, biological determinism, but this is Geoff Ryman, and if there's anything more predictable than that his stories will be good it is that they'll have a happy ending. Fortunately, the ending of "Days of Wonder" feels earned, not least by the clever SFnal mechanism driving the story and its gradual revelation, which are both far too much fun for me to spoil here, but also by Ryman's refusal to draw the kind of stark division between human and animal nature that Tiptree so often did. When Leveza is cast out of the group, animal instinct is mingled with human emotion, and with the all too human tendency to enforce conformity and, when pushed too far, to cast out anyone different or rebellious. "Days of Wonder" ends up asking a lot of questions about both human and animal behavior, pointing out that the two are a great deal more similar than we'd like to think while still holding out the possibility of rising above our worst impulses--whether biological or emotional.

Fantasy & Science Fiction's October/November issue is worth reading for Ryman's story, though you'd probably get as much out of it if you skipped the rest of the issue and just read this one piece. It's clear that the issue was intended to draw in new readers and potential subscribers--it marks the beginning of F&SF's 60th anniversary celebration, and clearly the big guns were trotted out just for this purpose. It's a shame, therefore, that the authors in question seem to have, one by one, failed to live up to the promise of their names and bibliographies.