Tag: Matthew Kressel

My Nebula Ballot 2015

written by David Steffen

The Nebula awards are nominated and voted by members of SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.  I have been a member of SFWA in the past, but have chosen not to maintain my membership dues so I am not currently a member.  So I can’t actually vote.  But I do still follow the Nebula awards, and so I thought it worth posting my ballot as if I had the right to vote.  The Nebula ballot has only 5 categories, four of them for lengths of written fiction and one for the Ray Bradbury Award for film.  Unlike the Hugos, its voting system only allows you to vote for one thing, rather than rank-ordering all of them and doing instant runoff votes like the Hugos, so I will structure my post accordingly.  You can find the full list of nominees here.

Because I don’t tend to read many novellas, because the Nebula voting period is so short, and because I was spent some of the Nebula voting period reading books for short-term review deadlines, I didn’t read any of the novella nominees this year.

Best Novel

Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Ancillary Sword is the sequel to Ancillary Justice.  I reviewed Ancillary Justice here.  I gave Ancillary Sword a more lengthy review here.  The story picks up shortly after the evens of Ancillary Justice.  Breq the body-bound ship AI is now in the employ of Anaander Miaanai, the many-bodied emperor that rules over most of the colonized universe, albeit with a schism that has divided herself into a civil war.  With the shutdown of the gate system that most ships depend on for transport between the stars, the empire has been thrown into disarray.  Miaanai orders Breq to visit Athoek Station.  This is the only assignment Breq would have accepted from the emperor, because she owes a debt to the sister of Lieutenant Awn, one of her former crew members who had died in her service.

It’s hard to match the novelty of Ancillary Justice, especially since one of the things I loved about that first book were the flashback sequences in the many-bodied ship AI with ancillary system.  But this was a solid entry in its own right.  I thought it felt rather incomplete, like the first half of a book rather than a whole book, to be concluded with Ancillary Mercy, but was still a good book, worthy of an award.

Best Novelette

“The Magician and Laplace’s Demon,” Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld 12/14)

(this review was part of my Nebula Novelette review, where I review the 3 nominated novelettes I found time to read)

The protagonist of the story is an every expanding near-omniscient near-omnipotent AI.  It thinks it has everything under control, but it discovers a new threat, an inscrutable impossible unprovable threat–magic.  The alteration of probability which only manifests when it can’t be proved.  Alteration of probability isn’t inherently provable because there’s always a chance it could’ve turned out that way anyway, but when the same person can twist it in their favor time and time again, even if it’s not provable.

This story was great on so many levels.  The outcome was never certain because the two sides are so powerful, but differently powerful.  I love a great mix of science fiction and fantasy like this.  Epic, fun, exciting.

Best Short Story

“The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” Matthew Kressel (Clarkesworld 5/14)

(this is an excerpt of my Nebula Short Story Review, where I review all 7 nominated short stories)

Humanity has been gone for eons, and there’s not much of interest going on anymore so the Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye have a lot of time just to talk.  Until they find the DNA encoding of a human named Beth in a pod and recreate her.  She is terribly ill and she only has time to hint at a secret that even the All-Seeing Eye doesn’t know before she dies from her illness.  The Eye cannot allow this, and sets out to recreate Beth again and again and again, but each time they can’t keep her alive long enough.

I really enjoyed this story.  The tone seems light at the beginning, like an intergalactic buddy road trip between the Meeker and the Eye, but as the Eye seeks Beth’s secret’s relentlessly it gets much darker. Solidly entertaining, far future SF.

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

Edge of Tomorrow, Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (Warner Bros. Pictures)

(this is an excerpt of my Ray Bradbury Award Review, where I review the 5 nominated films that I could find rentals for)

Earth is under attack from an alien force known only as mimics, viciously deadly enemies that humans have only one battle against.  Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) works in PR for the US military and has been ordered to the frontier of the war in France.  The general in charge of the war effort orders Cage to go to the front lines to cover the war.  When Cage attempts to blackmail his way out of the mission, he is taken under arrest and dropped at the front with the claim that he had tried to go AWOL and so is quickly forced into service, given only the most passing training in the mechsuits that are standard issue, and dropped into battle with everyone else.  This area was supposed to be fairly quiet, but the battle here is intense.  Cage manages to kill one of the mimics, but dies in the act, only to wake up earlier in the day when he’d woken on the base in handcuffs after the general had him arrested. He dies again, and again, and again.  No one else has any memory of reliving the day except for Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), the super-soldier nicknamed “Full Metal Bitch” after she wreaked havoc against the mimics in the only battle against the mimics that the humans have won.  She confides that she had won that battle because she had gone through the same thing he had–as long as he dies he will always restart at the same time and place.

I avoided this movie in theaters, because I haven’t really gone to any Tom Cruise movies since he kindof went publicly nuts.  But I rented this one since it was nominated.  I thought Tom Cruise was back to old form in it, and even if you don’t like it, well you get to see him die literally dozens of times.  I thought Emily Blunt was especially good in her role as Rita, powerful but still affected by the PTSD of dying over and over and seeing so many die around her over.  The looping-after-death element makes for a cool dynamic when well-plotted and when placed against large enough obstacles, which was well done here.  Good spec FX, good casting all around, solidly entertaining.

The Best of Clarkesworld 2014

written by David Steffen

Clarkesworld has been getting bigger and better.  They’re publishing more stories than ever before and they’re good as ever, publishing more episodes than any of the other podcasts I listen to.  Neil Clarke continues to edit and Kate Baker continues to host and usually narrate the podcast.

 

The List

1.  “The Clockwork Soldier” by Ken Liu
I enjoyed this story so much, moving science fiction story involving text adventures (like Zork).

2.  “The Magician and LaPlace’s Demon” by Tom Crosshill
Probability magician vs near-omnipotent AI.  Great stuff.

3.  “Fives Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion” by Caroline M. Yoachim
Another great one by Caroline, aliens that look like frogs but are intangible mists start making deals with Earth.

4.  “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye” by Matthew Kressel
Omnipotent super-AI finds a drifting human eras after the rest of humanity has gone extinct.

5.  “The Saint of the Sidewalks” by Kat Howard
Its the rituals that make a saint.

6.  “Seeking boarder for rm w/ attached bathroom, must be willing to live with ghosts ($500 / Berkeley)” by Rahul Kanakia
Pretty much what it says on the tin.

7.  “The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter” by Alastair Reynolds
Hard to describe the parts I liked about it without spoiling it…

Honorable Mentions

“A Gift in Time” by Maggie Clark

“Stone Hunger” by N.K. Jemisin

“Cameron Rhyder’s Legs” by Matthew Kressel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Review: Nebula Short Story Nominees

written by David Steffen

You can find a full list of the 2013 Nebula nominees here. This is a review of the short stories nominated this year for the Nebulas, which are chosen by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

1. ‘‘Alive, Alive Oh,” Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (Lightspeed 6/13)
The story of an interplanetary colonist from Earth who traveled with her husband with the expectation that they would be able to return in ten years, but a pathogen keeps them from returning. Their daughter, born on the colony, has never seen Earth and has grown up with her mother’s stories of the old world. This story has roots in the experience of immigrants here on Earth, but is all the more heartfelt for the differences rendered by SFnal treatment.

Top notch. Not much else to say, just go read it. This is easily my pick for the category.

 

2. ‘‘The Sounds of Old Earth,” Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed 1/13)
Old Earth isn’t worth preserving anymore, most people say. It should be broken down into its component materials for the further development of New Earth. But not everyone wants to evacuate the planet. For people who have spent their whole lives there, raised their families there, that’s a difficult and painful transition to make.

Not a bad story. I felt for the character, but it was a bit maudlin for my tastes. There is conflict, certainly, but nothing that the character can do anything about so the story just kind of happens around him. Not bad, but just not my cup of tea, I guess.

 

3. ‘‘Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,” Kenneth Schneyer (Clockwork Phoenix 4)
This is told as though it were one of those audio tours you can sometimes get at museums to walk you through the exhibits in some meaningful order. It steps through an artist’s works from the beginning of her career to her death, examining how her technique changed with events in her life, in particular in the representation of loved ones who had died.

I found the technique for this one served to only increase the distance between me and the character so that she’s a historical figure of little importance to me rather than really immersing me in the story. It was very faithful to its medium–I would enjoy listening to this in headphones as I walked around an art exhibit looking at each of the works as it’s described. But on its own, without the actual art having been created and shown to me in parallel, it reads pretty much like I’d expect a museum tour to read without being able to be there or look at anything–kind of interesting but very prolonged and all of the most interesting stuff is not onstage. I found some of the discussion questions after each painting rather annoying because so many seem to be based around the writer of the audio tour not really paying attention to the quote the author herself gave about why some figures are drawn differently than others. If Mr. Schneyer hired an artist to make the paintings that go along with this story and presented them together, I’d happily buy the ebook for that.

 

4. ‘‘If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” Rachel Swirsky (Apex 3/13)
This story starts out with the whimsical hypothetical in the title, as spoken by a woman to a friend she loves dearly, and continues on to give real life reasons why she is pondering this whimsy.

The characters read as real once the story got to the story, but I found all the hypotheticals more irritating than entertaining or illuminating. If A, then B. If B, then C. If C, then D. A story this short shouldn’t feel too long, but to me it does. Eventually the story gets to the actual story behind the hypotheticals, but by that time I was just impatient for it to be over.

 

5. ‘‘Selkie Stories Are for Losers,” Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons 1/7/13)
A girl’s mother leaves her family behind. The girl thinks the circumstances imply that her mother is a selkie (a mythical shapeshifting creature that could turn into a seal by pulling on her sealskin, but would be trapped in human form if that skin was stolen).

Most of the body of the story is the girl criticizing the tropes of selkie stories, which I wasn’t very interested in, partly because I haven’t seen enough selkie stories to really say whether her tropes are actually accurate or not. While some of the circumstances of her mother leaving match a selkie story, I didn’t see any really strong evidence that that was the case, so it just seemed to be a story about a neurotic fixation caused by family trauma. The family trauma, perhaps I should’ve felt moved by, but it happened before the story started, and rather than confront the real situation she spends all of her time obsessing about selkie stories.

Not my thing, I guess.