I’m actually ahead of the game this year as far as the Hugo-nominated novelettes. By which I mean I’ve read one of them already (it’s the Catherynne Valente one, which I’m sure is no surprise).
For the first three Best Novelette nominees, we have stories which all include the theme of needing to be seen, whether it’s by society, the sum total of space and time, or our own mother.
“If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” – John Chu
We’ve both clearly had plenty of prior experience being closeted and outing ourselves. I know. He knows I know. I know he knows I know. And, now, in a thrilling anti-climax, we finally both know that we both know. I swear a big chunk of the experience of being closeted is the bookkeeping.
In a timeline very much like ours, a body-building actor has found (or has been found by) the perfect workout companion. The mysterious Sweatshirt Guy at the gym looks simultaneously like he’s been lifting every second of the day and could bench-press a Mack truck from birth, and with his gentle influence the narrator’s workouts are the best they’ve been in years. There may even be…something between them, but it’s easier to stay quiet about it than to risk ruining what he has by making the wrong assumptions.
Sweatshirt guy might also be the superhero that’s appearing on cellphone videos flying gracefully around suspension bridges and just generally saving the hell out of everyone.
It’s a nice juxtaposition, a superhero’s need for a secret identity and for the everyday person to stay in the closet as much as possible. Casting both characters as Asian makes for an extra layer of peril. You have to admit that the Asian community has had to put up with a lot of crap lately, and much of it has to do with being attacked for being a large indistinct group of “other”. There’s always someone willing to to shout YOU’RE the one to blame for this. YOU’RE the outsider. YOU look like someone who’s ancestry is from a completely different continent from the one I think I’m attacking but why should I bother knowing the difference?
John Chu’s novelette is partly a daydream of “what if there was someone with the power to stop all of this who actually cares”, but also a tentative will they/won’t they love story, and a longing to be seen.
“We Built This City” – Marie Vibbert
Their parents’ generation built a city to float in the clouds. Her generation keeps it flying.
With the current screenwriters strike, and places like Florida not having enough people to harvest crops because immigrants and migrants are finding themselves VERY UNWELCOME, there are a lot of examples of jobs that are necessary, but somehow not valued. For some reason the people at the top are always trying to find ways to pay less, to make the work harder, to thwart the workers from doing a good job and then threaten vulnerable people with losing everything if they dare to complain.
In Marie Vibbert’s nominated story, the workers are forced to choose between a job that’s harder and harder to do as fewer and fewer people are employed to do it, or deportation to a factory prison if they try to leave and can’t find someone else who will hire them. And the job in question is maintaining the glass dome over a city that’s floating in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
Julia’s been doing her job for years; it’s hard work, but she’s good at it. Cleaning and repairing the glass of the dome is literally the only thing keeping the city from losing air and sinking into the poisonous atmosphere of Venus. And yet the head office keeps cutting staff and denying supply requests, and even Julia’s mother thinks her daughter should be looking for a “real” job instead of doing back-breaking menial labor.
It’s a fantastical setting with a gritty, exhausting dilemma. The corporation relies on desperate people to do the work. The only way to make changes is to walk away, but how can you do that if the job is all that’s keeping you from being homeless, starved, and deported? It’s even worse when after months of cutting costs, making it harder and harder to do the work, the corporation then has the gall to blame the workers when the dome starts to fail.
It’s utterly infuriating, there are no easy answers, and yet somehow Vibbert finishes the story with a final line that absolutely made me smile.
“The Difference Between Love and Time” – Catherynne Valente
The space/time continuum is the sum total of all that ever was or will be or ever possibly could have been or might conceivably exist and/or occur, the constantly tangling braid of physical and theoretical reality, (steadily degrading) temporal processes, and the interactions between the aforementioned.
It is also left-handed.
Is this the story of a real love affair? Or is this an unreliable narrator dealing with all of life’s joys and disappointments by putting them into one person that can be both blamed and loved? Is it a metaphor, or a fairy tale? Like a lot of Catherynne Valente’s works, this story can be read on several levels.
I started out by absolutely taking this one at face value: our nameless narrator meets all of creation at a playdate at six years old, and forms a friendship which turns into a love affair which goes on and off for an entire lifetime with someone who’s always different, who speaks in the sound of pulsars and smells like lavender and bread baking. Sometimes. It’s a relationship marked by a disastrous attempt to play Cowboys and Indians, birthday gifts on days that aren’t a birthday, the death of a beloved parent, lovemaking, being a terrible roommate, and fights over absolutely nothing where your prized possessions end up circling Saturn because why would you SAY that to me?
What can I say about Valente’s writing that I haven’t said before? Her prose here does what it usually does; braiding cold hard reality with a kind of whimsy that sneaks up behind you and goes “Boo!” There are too many quotes, the entire story is quotable non-sequiturs. (“If you can’t handle me at the peak of my recursive timeline algorithm, you don’t deserve me when I’m an iguana.”) And once I finished it I started to wonder if some of these things were real events, twisted in a way to explain how life can be so merciless and stunningly beautiful, for no reason and every reason you can imagine. A childhood illness or a loved one leaving forever makes no sense at all, so why not a person who’s everything and all genders and also an iguana changing your favorite toy into a Cartoon Sparkle Rainbow Geoduck playset.
You need to read this all the way through in one sitting if possible to get the full mind-bending effect. Valente jumps to random points in the narrators life, but then keeps calling back with echos of things we didn’t understand the first time (and maybe still don’t). It’s joy mixed up with the sadness of having your lovely memories tinged with regret that they’re over, or can’t last, or didn’t mean what you thought they meant when they’re happening. But it’s also heartbreak that’s bearable because if space and time is a continuum then everything you loved or enjoyed was there and is still there. And always will be.