A little while ago, I griped about the Short Story nominees for this year’s Hugo Awards. I’ve now finished the nominees in the Novella and Novelette categories, so I thought I’d comment on them as well.
As a general matter, I’d just about be willing to contribute money toward a fund to buy supporting memberships for fans who can’t generally afford Worldcon, in hopes of getting fewer nominees that suck. Seriously. It only takes 20-ish nominations to get a story on the ballot in one of the short fiction categories, and this would be a worthy project if it meant not having to read another mawkish Mike Resnick story in a mode that was hopelessly cliched before I was born.
Anyway, the stand-out piece of the lot is “Truth” by Robert Reed, in the Novella category. It’s very much a George W. Bush-era story, but manages to rise above the cheaply topical with a terrific hook and an excellent voice and characters. If you only read one Hugo-nominated work of short fiction, this should be the one.
And, honestly, I’m tempted to say that you should read only one of the Hugo-nominated works of short fiction.
These two categories are pretty thin. The next best story is “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story,” a novelette by James Alan Gardner that does a sort of Kelly Link-ish thing where the SF element is there mostly as an excuse to present a detailed story about everyday life. The prose and narrative voice aren’t as charming as Link at her best, but it’s a good piece of work.
Everything else has major flaws. I got about a third of the way into the Doctorow/ Rosenbaum novella “True Names” before saying the Eight Deadly Words (“I don’t care what happens to these programs”). “The Tear” by Ian McDonald has the grand sweep thing going for it, but the characters are pretty flat. “The Erdmann Nexus” by Nancy Kress has good characters, but ruins it by saying stupid things about quantum physics. And “The Political Prisoner” by Charles Coleman Finlay is this year’s version of Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Yellow Card Man” from a couple of years ago, only marginally less brutally unpleasant to read.
Speaking of Paolo Bacigalupi, he has a novelette nominated, “the Gambler,” which is considerably less unpleasant to read than “Yellow Card Man.” Unfortunately, it’s several thousand words about how modern Americans are all horrible people for not caring enough about Serious Issues, and I can get that in a much more convenient blog form, thanks very much.
The other two reasonable nominees, Elizabeth Bear’s “Shoggoths in Bloom” and John Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus” are the sort of “look at how clever I am!” pro-level fanfic (Lovecraft and Austen/Frankenstein) that always rubs me the wrong way when Neil Gaiman does it. Neither have much point beyond the playing around with other author’s worlds, and I’m pretty sure that I’m missing a bunch of stuff in the Kessel story, by virtue of not having read Pride and Prejudice.
And then there’s Mike Resnick’s “Alistair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but how on earth is this shit getting nominated? Are there legions of Hugo voters who have spent the last sixty years in cryogenic suspension, and find this stuff bracing and new? Evil time travelers from the future deliberately trying to give me a stroke for some obscure reason?
I’m fairly confident that the mysterious magical store thing was pretty well played out before I was born, and this brings nothing new to that tattered and worn-out table. The prose is nothing special, the story doesn’t ring any changes on the dusty old theme, and even the names of the characters are ridiculously cliche. And the worst part is, the whole thing is suffused with a sense that the author thinks he’s being incredibly clever.
I don’t know why I even bothered to read this, after the literary cow-pie to the face that was “Article of Faith,” but I guess I was hoping for some glimmer of worth that might justify the fact that he’s had at least three stories nominated in the last handful of years. But this just keeps alive his perfect streak of nominations for mawkishly sentimental warmed-over crap on subjects that were getting a little overdone when my father was a kid.
Seriously, how does this shit keep getting on the ballot? And how can we stop it from happening again? Because if you want money, I’ll contribute money toward paying people to vote better stuff onto the ballot.