Catherynne Valente, Scott Lynch, and Cameron Reed all have novelettes up for a Hugo Award this year, and the scope of the conflict in each of them is wildly different. The first three novelettes I’m reviewing range from a dystopian story of generational wealth-hoarding running smack into one girl’s complicated relationship with her own body, a world-ending monster doing battle against a species that will not get the point, and a single white porch in a hot summer night where a woman waits with bourbon and dixie cups and a shotgun to confront the woman with a very familiar name who’s trying to steal her man.
“When He Calls Your Name” – Catherynne Valente
It was her name my husband was screaming. Not mine. In our house. In our bed. Out of the depths of the life we built nail by nail, kiss by kiss. Over and over and over and over again until it turned into a howl that pricked up the wolves in the hills and got them going too.
I’ll start with that last one first. Valente drops you down into a world of making do, of getting on with it, of being happy with what you’ve got. Our nameless narrator has a life that she thought would last for a lifetime, but someone had other plans. Some thing had other plans. It’s a little more complicated than at first glance, but it all hurts the same way.
The revelation of her rival’s name gives this a moment of humor, but there’s a lot of pain here. And rage. The conversation on the porch has plenty of fascinating bits of information that comes from a writer brilliantly interpreting well-worn myths (What makes something poison to someone like this? What and why are the rules? And just which type of ammo do you load a shotgun with for this kind of predator?), and it’s Valente, so the prose snaps and dances and sneaks up on you and goes boo. But there’s definitely a lot of anger at how people will use stories and belief to smash people into the right mold: the angry jilted wife, the here-comes-trouble, the “stolen” man, as if the person stepping out on their partner is somehow less to blame for it than the person who’s providing their latest distraction.
What surprised me is how believable it is here, the heart-to-heart conversation leading to a bonding moment between two rivals. Although it probably shouldn’t surprise me. After all, of the three people involved, at least the thief and the person being robbed actually value what’s being stolen, and what’s being lost.
Kaiju Agonistes – Scott Lynch
The seed-planters mean well. In the abstract, they love young thinkers. But young thinkers must be protected from their own worst impulses.
Protected good and hard.
Imagine that a certain famous monster was actually designed. Genetically tailored by a benevolent race, carefully planted and allowed to sleep for millennia, just in case an infant species started playing with matches and had the bad sense to chuck atomic bombs at each other. The monster in that case would wake up at the first sign of trouble and start fulfilling its duty, which in this case would be a delicate campaign of terror meant to teach the young race to put down the bad isotopes and promise to play nice with each other.
Now imagine the clusterfuck that happens when the species in question responds by completely failing to learn the lesson, and instead does everything it can to ramp up the violence and make things worse.
Scott Lynch’s alternate history tale is the sharpest of satire. It’s full of politicians debating in smoke-filled rooms, and scorched earth campaigns as the world powers come close to bombing the entire earth back to the stone age as they deploy nuclear weapons at a monster who is both resistant to bombs and also getting kind of annoyed. The viewpoint bounces back and forth between the inhumanly calm but increasingly baffled millennia-old titan, and the politicians who bring all their stereotypes with them. (Everything the Russians say is simultaneously “I know something you don’t” and “please don’t send me to Siberia”, the Americans obsess over election strategy between glasses of bourbon, and I love how every country’s response to anything North Korea says is basically “Ugh, this guy.”)
The resolution to the whole mess happens when the right people learn to speak the right language. And if you think that language is compassion, diplomacy, and concern for others, then I have some bad news about what the entire history of Earth politics has actually been about.
The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For – Cameron Reed
The girl that my mother is leaving me for has hair as rich and glossy as a horse chestnut. Her skin is ivory and her eyes are emerald green. Her belly is slightly round, and that’s what matters…
The wealthy of this world have always found ways to consolidate their wealth, to keep it contained in one corporation. Or one family. Never mind how many people on the outside are starving, let’s figure out how to make sure none of my money goes anywhere else.
The CEO in Cameron Reed’s story has found a new method for keeping a stranglehold on the company funds. The current CEO selects a woman be implanted with her clone; said woman will raise the child in carefully-curated poverty (just like the original founder of the company), until the clone reaches adulthood and is handed the reins of the company. The woman selected this time is our nameless narrator, who grew up in actual poverty and impressed the CEO with how she’s had to fight for everything in her life, up to and including the hormones she needs to be female. For the price of bearing a clone girl to term and raising her as her daughter, she’ll get a brand new reproductive system and then be paid a stipend to live in comfortable obscurity for the rest of her life once her job is done.
It doesn’t work out. Hence Mira, the replacement “mother”, who’s perfect and beautiful and fertile and destined to have the comfortable life that our narrator has now lost out on. You’d think that would make her easy to hate, but “perfect” includes kindness and empathy and the emotions that result from that are as far from hate as you can get.
I kept expecting this one to have a twist, to maybe lead to a story of corporate deals and billionaire betrayals. But Mira’s life gets derailed exactly as abruptly as the narrator’s was, and what results is a fairly straightforward action story. Also a love story. It’s interesting to have a story with both trans and gay representation in a dystopia where neither of those things are taboo in any way. And then see what the trans experience looks like for someone who’s still trying to figure out what her life is like in many other ways. This is a society where switching out bodies is a perfectly normal (if expensive) option, and I was struck with just how firmly the narrator wants nothing to do with that. No matter what the issues were, or how hard she had to work to deal with them, the narrator absolutely doesn’t hate her body. Because it’s hers, scars and all. Having someone love her because of and beyond what her body is, that’s the only important part.