Next up on our Hugo Awards coverage is two more of the Best Novella nominees. Click the jump for a review of Martha Wells’ “Artificial Condition” and P. Djèlí Clark’s “The Black God’s Drums”.
Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries) – Martha Wells
This place was creepy. I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me.
Somehow that didn’t help.
Martha Wells won the award for Best Novella at last year’s Hugo Award ceremony for the first book in the Murderbot Diaries. I’d say her odds are very good for winning this year’s award as well, because the second installment in this series is even better than the first.
The rogue Security Unit and self-named AI Murderbot would be perfectly okay with just hiding out on transport ships and watching media serials (literally the first thing it does when landing at any port is to download as many new episodes as possible). Unfortunately it still has a lot of unanswered questions about the massacre where Murderbot gained its freedom and its name. The answers are most likely at the off-limits location of the massacre itself, and there’s really only one way Murderbot can pass for a human and sneak inside: find a group of gullible humans who are looking to hire a security guard without asking too many questions.
It’s a great twist of the Killer Robot trope to have the main character be less focused on wiping out humanity than it is on its crippling social anxiety whenever it has to interact with humans (as a coping method, Murderbot usually hijacks a security camera so it can watch its conversations from a distance, which sounds like a visualization technique that I really should try sometime.) It’s also fun, and occasionally very touching, to see Murderbot realize once again that it would do anything to safeguard the humans under its protection, even while being really annoyed at how those same humans don’t have the sense of self-preservation God gave a goat.
What really makes this story work for me though is the interactions Murderbot has with other AI’s. Sometimes the differences between “bots” and “constructs” (and their varying levels of sentience) can be a little confusing. That doesn’t take away the fun of things like a conversation with an opinionated, ship-sized AI who also likes media serials (but not the “based on a true story” ones where humans are killed, those are upsetting), and the heist-like story of having to infiltrate a secret base while simultaneously protecting a group of naive humans who are obviously walking into a trap, all while the same ship-sized AI is working in the background, hacking security feeds and playing the theme song to one of its favorite media serials if it senses Murderbot is getting freaked out.
This would be a goofy, madcap, buddy adventure if Wells played it for laughs, but instead we get a little skullduggery and a lot of treachery and some pretty kick-ass fight scenes (Murderbot’s clients get their money’s worth, that’s for damn sure) and we see more of this very gritty future where the line between human and machine has been blurred to the point where both sides are having a hard time telling the difference between them.
The Black God’s Drums – P. Djèlí Clark
In New Orleans, you can’t survive on just dreams.
I probably would have picked up this novella a lot sooner if I’d run across this magical description: Civil War-Era alternate-universe Steampunk New Orleans.
This debut novella by P. Djèlí Clark is set in a version of our world where the American Civil War has been at a stalemate and cease-fire (mostly) for years. With the help of a superweapon and some orisha (spirits/gods/emissaries of African deities/it’s complicated) the Haitian Revolution didn’t just free themselves from French 
rule and slavery, they wiped out the French fleet, changing the whole balance of power in the region, and eventually helping to establish a nonaligned New Orleans.
The town on the edge of a swamp welcomes citizens of all countries, and it’s been a good place for street-orphan Creeper (born Jacqueline, but don’t call her that), but she has big plans to travel the world. The story starts with her stumbling across some valuable information that she thinks she can use to buy her way onto the crew of a airship that touched down just before Mardi Gras.
Even with the supernatural elements, Clark has created a believable city that’s a glorious mix of cultures and languages, where the free people of color never quite forget the boogiemen of the Confederate States, where slavery is still legal. (In our universe, the Haitian Revolution made a slave revolt a real possibility to every slave-owning nation. In Clark’s universe, the Confederates states have found a nasty way to make sure that doesn’t happen.)
“Nogai a Mongolian,” the captain responds. Catching my quizzical look before I can hide it, she explains. “The one you calling a Chinaman. He not a Chinese.”
I try to shrug it off. “What’s the difference?”
“A whole wall,” she remarks dryly. “You see? This is why you need your schooling.”
I loved the lyrical patois that Clark uses for the characters, the snappy back-and-forth dialogue with devastatingly beautiful bordello madames, fiery airship captains who are one step removed from pirates, and nuns who supply information and weapons along with their gumbo. The story has secret holdout rebels from plantation days, the occasional reference to historical figures (General Tubman, loved that) and Yoruba gods that have reinvented themselves as they traveled from Nigeria to Haiti, to America, to New Orleans, to a scrappy freeclimbling pickpocket girl who makes for the oddest little priestess you can imagine.