I’m going to space out the Hugo Award Best Novelette entries a little this year to try to make them last. Click the jump for a brief review of three stories of invasion, transformation, and memory.
“Meteoroid in the void. Meteorite, rock hound’s delight. Meteor, neither nor.”
LT repeated this to himself. Neither nor. Neither nor.
“Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” sounds like it would be a disaster story. And it is…sort of. What if the aliens taking over the planet were taking their time about doing it? Marching across the globe not in days or weeks, but decades? There’d be plenty of time to make your peace with the eventual end, but also time to try to figure out how to stop it, or at the very least survive alongside it. Most of all there would be years and years to just live.
Daryl Gregory’s story is nine vignettes across the life of Illinois-born LT as he grows and evolves in a completely human way (and occasionally deals with being treated as a kind of invasive species himself) amid the backdrop of fantastical alien plantlife.
…even the most enlightened monk was wont to be alarmed by the sudden appearance of a giant snake wanting to know what they thought of the Sage’s comments on water. Still, you could usually extract some guidance from them, once they stopped screaming.
Transforming from a serpent-shaped imugi to a dragon takes time. A lot of time. You couldn’t even make the first attempt to ascend until you’d meditated and studied for a thousand years. Byam has been working on it for three thousand years, and after reading every text and absorbing every mantra from popular dragon memoirs it can find, Byam is finally…not even close to ascending, and it’s mostly because humans keep getting in the way.
Deciding to take revenge for centuries of frustration, Byam takes on human form and visits the human responsible for its most recent failure. What it finds is not even close to what it expected.
If you fail, how do you know whether you’re supposed to keep pushing forward, or use the failure as a sign that the universe has something better in mind for you? What would be worse, giving up on something you love, or stubbornly chasing one goal while ignoring everything else that might make you happy? Zen Cho’s story “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again” doesn’t have any easy answers about how to deal with failure, but it does have poetic Korean imagery, a humorous take on self-help concepts, and an improbably beautiful (and beautifully improbable) romance between species.
An invitation to a Temporal Confections dinner is equally coveted and feared, but never declined.
And now we come to my favorite so far, “The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections”. I love stories with banquets and cooking and ridiculously complex desserts, and Tina Connolly’s story has all of that plus a very interesting magical element. The story is told from the point of view of Saffron – a captive food-taster – who’s husband is Head Pastry Chef to the Traitor King. The only way the two can communicate is through the husband’s creations, which have a special ingredient: memory.
The Traitor King will experience everything from his treats that his food-taster does, so hidden among banquet courses that have names like “Rose-Pepper Shortbread of Sweetness Lost” and “Rosemary Crostini of Delightfully Misspent Youth” is a series of hidden messages and an even more deeply hidden plan. Sitting in full view of the entire court, Saffron has to figure out if her husband’s plan is escape, martyrdom, or a deliciously satisfying (see what I did there?) revenge.