Next up for the Hugo awards, three of the stories nominated for Best Novelette. For this group we’ve got a dystopian commentary on body image (and how society’s treatment of it is so much more poisonous than “don’t you want to be healthy?”), a tale of high school friendship mixed with genetic tampering and revenge, and a Gothic urban fantasy of fallen angels being hunted by a mysterious assassin.
The Pill – Meg Ellison
I knew this time was going to be different the first night I heard the screaming.
The pressure that society puts on people to meet all the requirements for the “perfect” appearance (hair, makeup, clothes, etc.) is relentless. And the worst pressure is always about weight. So imagine if scientists created a weight loss method that was fast and 100% effective, but one in ten people who use it will die. Would anyone actually decide that death while trying to lose weight is better than living while fat?
Answer: of course people would.
Meg Ellison’s story “The Pill” is told from the point of view of one woman who won’t take the risk. The weight loss method here is brutal and horrifying (think the episode with the Adiposes from Doctor Who, only much, much worse.) Ellison makes this seem like something any sane person would consider by pairing it with all of the pressure from a mother who has been so desperate her whole life to lose weight that she’s warped her definition of “loving” into a laser focus on having every member of her family try to lose weight as well.
She’d throw out all the junk food and make us promise to love ourselves more. Loving yourself means crying over the scale every morning and then sniffling into half a grapefruit, right?
We already see every day how comfortable everyone is with treating the overweight like a mistake, a failing, an actual sin. No other aspect of someone’s life lets people offer criticism to (and express their disgust with) total strangers all under the guise of being “concerned” about someone’s “health”. Ellison just takes that existing attitude a little further.
This story is fascinating and frightening and utterly bleak. Even when the main character is able to hold to her conviction that risking death isn’t worth it to change who she is for the benefit of other people, it doesn’t really fix the actual problem. She’s still being told that her choice is between having people love her in spite of her weight, or people who desire her because of it. No easy answers available.
Monster – Naomi Kritzer
Nadine tried to tell me. Andrew himself tried to tell me. Did I turn away from these warnings because on some level it felt like being the one person the monster would never harm made me special?
Naomi Kritzer’s story starts with two high-schoolers, Andrew and Cecily, who develop a friendship over their outsider status and their joint love for all things science-fiction…
Actually that’s not true, we see that in flashbacks. The story really begins with Cecily, now a successful geneticist, traveling through an obscure part of rural China. We don’t know what’s going on at first, only that Cecily is hunting for Andrew, painfully scanning through the newspapers with a translation app on her phone and wondering “have there been any more bodies?”
The flashbacks show the kind of friendship a lot of us dreamed of finding when we were a shy and nerdy teenager, the one where you find someone that unconsciously gives you permission to like things. The present-day parts of the story seemed like mostly local color to set the scene except…they way Cecily experiences a new culture echos the way she moves through the world: eyes wide open, with curiosity, willing to try new things and willing to move on from the parts that are simply not for her. Looking for the place where she fits.
And meanwhile Andrew…doesn’t. And isn’t. And is laser focused on changing himself in order to force his way into wherever he wants. Even if it kills people.
The story is wistful, and a bit frightening, but it’s less “the monster’s after you, run!” and more “the monster’s been in your house the entire time!”
The Inaccessibility of Heaven – Aliette de Bodard
We have a different type of monster altogether in Aliette de Bodard’s novelette. The story is set in her Dominion of the Fallen world, which I’ve only read a couple of stories from. Fortunately she drops in enough information that a newcomer will be able to pick up on things fairly quickly.
Starhollow is a city of everyday humans, witches of varying degrees of power, and most importantly the Fallen. Angels who have been kicked out of The Celestial City congregate in Starhollow to pine for the heaven they’ve lost. Starhollow is not an easy place to live in, so a lot of them spend their time drinking and drugging themselves into a stupor. The magic that’s left in the bodies of the Fallen – even in their bones – means that they’re preyed upon by gang-lords and quietly disposed of once everything valuable has been…harvested.
Human witch Samantha runs a shelter for the down-and-out Fallen. She’s helped by Calariel, a powerful Fallen who Samantha would worship if she thought the Fallen were even interested in that sort of thing. Usually running the shelter involves backbreaking work for a clientele that can lash out in despair at anyone, including the humans who are just trying to help. But then bodies of Fallen start turning up, not just harvested but clawed to pieces, and even the local gang-lord is scared enough to ask for help in tracking down the killer.
I do like a gritty urban setting with magical elements, and the Dominion of the Fallen series fits that genre perfectly. Here though, the magical elements are slightly less important than the friendships (or attempts at them) between the humans and the Fallen, and what everyone is willing to do in order to keep them.