Longer than a short-story but shorter than a novella, six entries and each one packed with as much world building as you can fit into 15000 words or so. Click the jump for a review of this year’s Hugo Award finalists for Best Novelette.
“Extracurricular Activities” – Yoon Ha Lee
He had considered taking up crochet, but thanks to an incident earlier in the term, crochet hooks, knitting needles, and fountain pens were no longer permitted in class…
Having just finished the third book in the Machineries of Empire trilogy (the 2nd book is also up for an award for Best Novel), I was definitely curious about Yoon Ha Lee’s novelette entry. It features a young Garach Jedao who’s very early in his career as a Shuos operative (years and years before he, you know, commits mass murder).
I was surprised at the light-hearted tone that Lee took with this one. It’s an almost swash-buckling type story of squabbling undercover agents, hand-to-hand-combat in a spaceship, some romantic tension, and lots of hilarious linguistic misunderstandings during a secret rescue mission to a world where the citizens fight duels with germs and have OPINIONS about how people are supposed to do their hair.
“Children of Thorns, Children of Water” – Aliette de Bodard
Stay safe. Stay hidden. As if that’d ever worked…
Another story of undercover agents, this time in a fantasy setting in a ruined but still elegant Paris, where a hidden fae family is trying to infiltrate a household of fallen angels. Aliette de Bodard’s ongoing Dominion of the Fallen is an example of fascinating, intricate world-building, featuring a very pleasing combination of urban squalor and high fantasy. (One of the undercover agents is a dragon in disguise. ‘Nuff said.)
“Small Changes Over Long Periods Of Time” – K.M. Szpara
“I thought you smelled different. Not enough to deter me. Actually, not bad at all. Just different.”
“I’m flattered.” I suppose that’s the vampire equivalent of “Wow, I’d never have guessed you were trans,” or “But you look so normal.”
Making the transition from female to male can obviously turn your whole world upside down. Making the transition from human to vampire can be exactly as traumatic. Now imagine having to do both at the same time.
K.M Szpara’s story takes place after vampires have been accepted into society, as long as they follow the rules. Szpara highlights a few of the more irritating examples of prejudice-but-oh-not-really (the maddening “what if you change your mind” questions for would-be transexuals, the clinics that exclude vampires by only opening during daylight hours,) and dives into what it’s like to want to have control over a body (or a life) that isn’t what you would have picked.
The story is heavy on the erotica, but light on actual substance. I would have liked for Szpara to have dealt more with the idea of consent (or lack of it), rather than what seems to be more of a dark daydream where problems are resolved with mind-control and blood.
“The Secret Life of Bots” – Suzanne Palmer
Ship, is something wrong with the cleaner bots?”
There was a noticeable hesitation before Ship answered. “I am having an issue currently with my bots,” it said. “They seem to have gone missing.”
“The cleaners?”
“All of them.”
“All of the cleaners?”
“All of the bots,”
Take a galaxy-spanning conflict, where an alien race is bent on wiping out all of humanity. Now bring the focus in, closer and closer, down to one mission, and one falling-apart spaceship. And on that ship is a centimeters-tall robot who’s just been assigned to track down a mouse (or a bug? A lizard maybe?) before it chews through the wrong cord and the whole vessel explodes.
Suzanne Palmer’s story of robots on pest control is all kinds of adorable.
“A Series of Steaks” – Vina Jie-Min Prasad
The main character of Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s story is Helena, a reluctant artist in dystopian Nanjing, who’s found herself part of a counterfeit operation. She’s more or less resigned herself to drudgery, until someone blackmails her into filling an impossible order in just four weeks. The result is a caper that includes a surprising amount of interesting details about counterfeiting, and what exactly constitutes a successful forger, as opposed to a merely famous one.
This is my favorite story in the group, and a big part of that is because of the nature of the illegal business. Helena’s expertise in forgery isn’t paintings or money.
It’s meat.
“Wind Will Rove” – Sarah Pinsker
It is not the ship nor the session nor the bow nor the fiddle that births us. Nor the hands. It’s the combination of all of those things, in a particular way they haven’t been combined before. We are an alteration on an old, old tune. We are body and body, wood and flesh. We are bow and fiddle and hands and memory and starship and OldTime.
Arguably the loveliest entry this year, Sarah Pinsker offers up a tale of life on a generation ship, a few decades into its centuries-long voyage.
It’s generally accepted that of course you have to hold on to your heritage, but not everyone agrees that the history of Earth is important when you and your whole generation will live and die on a ship that’s been traveling for decades before you were born and will keep going for centuries after you’re gone. So what happens when some of your heritage is lost? Or is stolen?
Like a song turned into a story, we see everything through the eyes of a violinist in a folk-music group that meets for the purpose of preserving their music for future generations. Whether you want the details of living on a ship that holds an entire world, or the politics of seating arrangements in the orchestra, this story has a little something for everyone.