This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse.
The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the stories can be found via the official nominations page) are:
- “Yellow Card Man,” Paolo Bacigalupi
- “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth,” Michael F Flynn
- “The Djinn’s Wife,” Ian McDonald
- “All the Things You Are,” Mike Resnick
- “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),” Geoff Ryman
Best Novelette is apparently the Official Short Fiction Category of the Third World, with three of the five nominees set in non-Western countries. And a fourth has special bonus embarassing dialect sections! Whee!
“Yellow Card Man,” Paolo Bacigalupi. This is an unpleasant little story about an unpleasant little man in an unpleasant and squalid dystopian future. It’s very well written, and the dystopian future is well thought out, but ugh. I didn’t enjoy this one at all.
“Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth,” Michael F Flynn. Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim is up for Best Novel, and turned out to be a lot better than I expected. This story, on the other hand…
The story starts with the disappearance of a commuter ferry in Seattle, which is sucked into some Twilight Zone type dimensional rift in a fog bank, and explores the event and its aftermath from the point of view of a whole slew of different characters. With the exception of the bits done in dialect, which are horrible and embarassing, the individual stories are well done, but the story as a whole doesn’t really go anywhere.
“The Djinn’s Wife,” Ian McDonald. A story set in the world of his sprawling future India novel, River of Gods, featuring a dancer who falls in love with a diplomat, who just happens to be an artificial intelligence. It’s wonderfully atmospheric, and has some good set pieces, but again, it doesn’t really add up to much. It might be more meaningful if I had actually read River of Gods, and had a better idea of the context, but I don’t think that’s the problem. The real problem is that the main character seems to do things mostly because the author needs stuff to happen, rather than as a result of fundamental elements of her character.
“All the Things You Are,” Mike Resnick. The narrator witnesses a suicidal act of heroism by a seemingly ordinary man, and finds that this was the third such event, and that the other members of the man’s military unit (who were stranded on a distant planet for a time during the recent war) also died in similar fashion. He sets out to find what it was about that planet that drove them to act in such a strange way, and finds more than he bargained for.
It’s a cute Twilight Zone sort of story, but in the end, it doesn’t quite work for me. In the end, it’s a love story of sorts, and like most such stories, I just don’t quite buy the relationship, and that kind of sinks the whole story.
“Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),” Geoff Ryman. This was actually the first of this group that I read, and at the time, I said “Enh. The others will probably be better,” mostly because I started it directly after finishing the last of the novellas. In the end, I think it’s the best of the lot– a sweet fable about memory and redemption set in Cambodia.
This is a tough category to vote in– “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter” is my clear favorite, but I was distinctly unimpressed by all the other nominees.If you put a gun to my head and made me rank order them, I’d probably go with McDonald, then Resnick, then Flynn, then Bacigalupi, but the gap between the first two dwarfs all the other differences.