So we all know how Leonard Nimoy created that hand gesture from his memories of Jewish priests using the same signs, but how much else of his Jewish immigrant background was put into Spock, the half-Vulcan, half-human?
Fantastika
Asking SF readers to try something new is asking for trouble
The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take. You could, like Lilit Marcus, read only books by women or, like Sunili Govinnage, read only books by people of color. Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by trans men and women, books by people from outside the U.S. or in translation, books by people with disabilities.
Science fiction readers responded to this with the openmindedness and willingness to explore new things for which they’re kno-oh gods who am I kidding:
Recently I wrote a thing which brought all the trolls to the yard. I’m used to it, but I wondered what it would look like if I just started saving the hateful tweets people send me in one place. Hateful being attacks on me personally, name calling, threats, etc.
The repeated chorus of how racist or sexist it is to not read white male authors is followed by racist, sexist slurs is …precious. Horrifying but unsurprising to see the slurs, but do these people actualy understand “racist” and “sexist” have an actual meaning?
Sady Puppy wrangler Larry Correia contributed his own very special brand of stupid (from File 770):
But the ironic thing about that picture? Tempest is wearing a Dr. Who shirt. A TV show about a white man and his white female sidekick, created by some white men, with episodes written by… Neil Gaiman.
Never mind that the good Doctor has also had a black British sidekick, or regularly has had adventures with a lesbian lizard woman from the dawn of time and her companion, the idea that reading only writers of colour or only women for a year meaning that you swear off all white men is just so incredibly dumb that you hope Larry doesn’t believe it himself, but you fear he does.
Professional kulturkampfers like Correira of course have to oppose anything that smacks of enlightment, but is it really too much to ask from grownups to stop being so incredibly defensive and be open to new reading experiences?
The Jack McDevitt anomaly
Chaos Horizon analyses the Nebula Award nominations for best novel and stumbles over Jack McDevitt:
Case in point: Jack McDevitt, who now has have 12 (!) Best Novel Nebula nominations. The constant McDevitt nominations are the strangest thing that is currently happening in the Nebulas. That’s not a knock against McDevitt. I’ve read two of McDevitt’s book, The Engines of God and the Nebula winning Seeker. They were both solid space exploration novels: fast-paced, appealing characterization, and professionally done. They didn’t stand out to me, but there’s never anything wrong with writing books people want to read. Still, I’m not sure why McDevitt deserves 12 nominations while similar authors such as Peter F. Hamilton, Alistair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, etc., are largely ignored by the SFWA voters. To put this in context: McDevitt has more Nebula Best Novel nominations than Neal Stephenson (1), William Gibson (4), and Philip K. Dick (5) combined.
Because the Nebulas are voted on by the SFWA membership and campaigning and voting for it therefore doesn’t happen out in the open as much as it does for the Hugos, it’s difficult to get to understand why McDevitt, out of all decent but not spectacularly good authors has so many nominations but only one win. If it was purely a block of voters liking a certain type of traditional sf novel, you’d expect other, similar authors to show up more, but instead it’s McDevitt year in, year out. Perhaps he just has a lot of friends in SFWA or campaigns well?
Annihilation — Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer
208 pages
published in 2014
Last year Jeff VanderMeer (or rather his publisher) did something rarely done, releasing an entire trilogy in one year. Annihilation is the first of this Southern Reach trilogy and has gotten steady buzz as one of the shoe-ins for Hugo and Nebula nominations; it already managed the latter, in fact. VanderMeer is arguably the father of the American New Weird, that mid-noughties movement that came bubbling up from England and got codified across the pond, mainly through his and Ann VanderMeer’s contributions. I’ve only read one story of his before this, the deliberately confusing The Situation.
Annihilation is a much more straightforward story, of a four woman expedition into Area X, as told by the biologist through her field journal; the other three members are the anthropologist, the surveyor and the psychologist. Their names are never told: “names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X”. They’re the twelfth such expedition into the Area; the previous eleven all came to grief one way or another. What they’re setting out to discover is left vague; they themselves only know in general terms what they’re doing or what they can expect, though the psychologist seems to know more than she lets show.
2014 Nebula nominations
The SFWA has just announced the shortlist for the 2014 Nebula Awards:
Novel
- The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Tor)
- Trial by Fire, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
- Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu ( ), translated by Ken Liu (Tor)
- Coming Home, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
- Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals; Fourth Estate; HarperCollins Canada)
I’ve read two of the six novels on this list, Annihilation and Ancillary Sword. Both The Goblin Emperor and The Three-Body Problem have had a lot of online buzz, with people I trust liking both. As per usual there’s a Jack McDevitt novel on the list, because he either has a lot of friends in SFWA or a lot of blackmail material, as he’s the dullest writer in existence. Gannon I’ve no clue about, but he’s published by Baen and with a few exceptions, the best their writers aim for is “decent”.
Novella
- We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory (Tachyon)
- Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)
- “The Regular,” Ken Liu (Upgraded)
- “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” Mary Rickert (Tor.com 4/30/14)
- Calendrical Regression, Lawrence M. Schoen (NobleFusion)
- “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)”, Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer ’14)
Of these, only Mary Rickert and Rachel Swirsky are on the list of critically acclaimed short SF I’m reading my way through on the booklog. An indication perhaps that there is a rough consensus on what last year’s best stories were, but only a rough consensus.
Novelette
- “Sleep Walking Now and Then,” Richard Bowes (Tor.com 7/9/14)
- “The Magician and Laplace’s Demon,” Tom Crosshill (Clarkesworld 12/14)
- “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)
- “The Husband Stitch,” Carmen Maria Machado (Granta #129)
- “We Are the Cloud,” Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed 9/14)
- “The Devil in America,” Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com 4/2/14)
In the novelette category, traditionally the most …awkward… category with both the Nebula and the Hugo as nobody really knows what is and isn’t one, there’s more of a consensus: Richard Bowes, Tom Crosshill, Carmen Maria Machado and Kai Ashante Wilson all are on my list with the same stories. This may just be because fewer novelettes than novellas or short stories are written.
Short Story
- “The Breath of War,” Aliette de Bodard (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/6/14)
- “When It Ends, He Catches Her,” Eugie Foster (Daily Science Fiction 9/26/14)
- “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” Matthew Kressel (Clarkesworld 5/14)
- “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family,” Usman T. Malik (Qualia Nous)
- “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” Sarah Pinsker (F&SF 3-4/14)
- “Jackalope Wives,” Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14)
- “The Fisher Queen,” Alyssa Wong (F&SF 5/14)
In the short story category, there are once again only two stories that overlap: Usman T. Malik’s and Alyssa Wong’s. Again evidence of a lively short story field?
What struck me also is that how little in all these three categories was published in the traditional venues; basically anything that doesn’t have a link above. Two novellas, one novelette and two short stories. The novellas published as chapbooks by Tachyon, the rest in Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Written by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
- Edge of Tomorrow, Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (Warner Bros. Pictures)
- Guardians of the Galaxy, Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
- Interstellar, Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan (Paramount Pictures)
- The Lego Movie, Screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (Warner Bros. Pictures)
This award has the same problems as the media Hugos: it’s not where the Nebulas’ focus lies, so the selection is predictable and limited to big budget blockbusters rather than anything surprising. Are these really the best science fiction or fantasy movies from 2014, or just the ones the Nebula nominators have heard of?. I suspect the latter and I don’t see the point in yet another award rewarding the already known and unsurprising.
Granted, you can make the same claim for the novel award, but the difference there is that the Nebula is one of the two top awards in the particular field of SFF novels, while nobody cares about winning the Bradbury. Moreover, while the novel Nebula can be predictable, it isn’t to the extent shown here.
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
- Unmade, Sarah Rees Brennan (Random House)
- Salvage, Alexandra Duncan (Greenwillow)
- Love Is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)
- Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, A.S. King (Little, Brown)
- Dirty Wings, Sarah McCarry (St. Martin’s Griffin)
- Greenglass House, Kate Milford (Clarion)
- The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, Leslye Walton (Candlewick)
If the Nebulas do have to have speciality awards, I’d rather it’s for categories like this, of more direct concern to the SFF field and highlighting a critically underserved branch of SFF.