Hugo Nominees 2015: Short Story

[ase]

Recognizing that people have different interpretations and relationships with fiction, and also that shorter fiction just doesn't hit my buttons the way a fat novel will, I usually try not to just say, "wow, I hated this story." However, I suspect that exposure to this year's Hugo short story nominees actually killed some of my brain cells. I almost certainly will be marking No Award for this category.

Comments are in alphabetical order by surname.

---

"On A Spiritual Plain", Lou Antonelli (Sci Phi Journal #2, 11-2014): Chaplain makes journey to release the spiritual remains at a physical site, for Reasons.

Meh. Just... meh.

---

"A Single Samurai", Steven Diamond (The Baen Big Book of Monsters, Baen Books): Sword-wielder in Japan-flavored setting strives to kill a monster the size of a mountain.

It's an unpolished story, which suffered by comparison to "Pacific Rim" every time the author wrote "kaiju", but good try!

---

"Totaled", Kary English (Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, 07-2014): Woman dies in car accident, becomes a component of her own research study.

This gets points for actual speculation on technology and its impact on the human condition! The execution is not awesome, but it's competent. I would read something else by this writer.

---

"Turncoat", Steve Rzasa (Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House): AI-powered warship votes "no" on killing fleeing civilians, opts to defect to the enemy.

"Turncoat" is so cute! It's like reading a David Weber short story, only with even less grounding in science and also even clunkier prose! Take a look:

If I were a superannuated Homo sapiens sapiens, I suspect fear would have taken hold of me at that moment. Instead, I run a rapid analysis of the pros versus the cons of having my entire operating system rebooted and my memory banks wiped. The outcome is decidedly in favor of the cons.

In this story, suspicion is not an emotion, but fear is, okay. Cybernetic death is bad, and also that conclusion is delivered in a bizarrely convoluted sentence, okay. But the cumulative effects don't add up to a coherent vision. Weak, but I give it a few points for being oddball enough I kept reading to figure out the worldbuilding, even if the entire story was telegraphed by the title.

---

"The Parliament of Beasts and Birds", John C. Wright (The Book of Feasts & Seasons, Castalia House): Animals meet, discuss humanity's departure from the mortal plain, are elevated to Manhood.

It's like C.S. Lewis, minus Lewis' mastery of the tools of writing. The style choices are all over the place, slip-sliding between parable, pulp, and contemporary irony. Look at this quote, emphasis mine:

And there were pleasure houses where harlots plied their trade, and houses of healing where physicians explained which venereal diseases had no cures and arranged for painless suicides, and houses of morticians where disease-raddled bodies were burnt in private, without any ceremony that might attract attention and be bad for business.

Whoa. Total tone-break right at the end of the last sentence. Also, minus one million points for working in a reference to "harlots" in a story with no women.

The erratic capitalization adds on to the style issues. First there is When Raven and Wolf came to where Hound and Horse and the slow and solemn Bull were all exchanging whispered eulogies and reminiscences, and put their question to him, the Hound shrugged philosophically. The animals' names are proper nouns! A paragraph later it's The wolf said... and The hound shook his shaggy head. Whoops, proper nouns dropped. Why? What is going on here?

It's hard to screw up pacing at this length, but the story really tries to. And the science is wrong. There aren't black lions. You can't have the waning moon rise at sunset, it doesn't work like that. If these are supposed to be a signpost of the End Days, or that we're in a fantasy story, well, the slip-sliding prose does not make that evident.

Comments

[legionseagle]

I'd not quite sure but is there a particular reason why you can't have a waning moon whose rise coincides with local sunset? Everything else you've said chimes exactly with everything else I've heard about the awfulness of Wright (which the bits I've read reinforces) but the latter one sounded just about plausible, or didn't ping my wrongness sensors in the same way as a lot of his garbage at least.

[ase]

Astronomy doesn't work that way. Quoting from discussion elsewhere, "If the moon is rising when the sun is setting, then the moon is full, not waning. (This is because when the moon and sun are 180 degrees apart in the sky, then the earth is between the sun and the moon, and we will see all of the sunlit face of the moon.)"

Higher latitudes may be an exception to this... or not. a back of envelope calculation for, say, Helsinki comes close, but solving for converging sunset and waning moonrise starts running into the limit of the midnight sun. Which again is an oddity I'd expect the narrative to signpost.

Wright's fiction is awful. It's riddled with technical problems. I'm giving special attention to the treatment of women as objectified sexual objects, because it's consistent through his work and consistently gross, but that's only one example of Wright's egregious failure to write fiction that does any of the things I could expect from award-winning speculative fiction: I do not find the ideas are compelling, the plot does not engage me, and the prose is terrible.

[cahn]

When I complained about this to my husband, he also pointed out that for a waning moon you would expect to see the moon and sun in the sky at the same time near sunrise, not near sunset. (see e.g. here.

He was inclined to give Wright the benefit of the doubt on that one (as it's a little less well-known) but not for the full moon thing.

[legionseagle]

I agree Wright is doing his usual thing of nicking CS Lewis imagery and chucking it in willy-nilly (there's something similar in The Last Battle and that is happening at the end of the world, and also in the Charn scene in The Magician's Nephew) and I think there probably is something a bit apocalyptic going on

[ase]

I'd agree. Imitation without decent fact-checking.

And again, it says something about the story that this is a scene-setting bit readers are getting hung up on.

[legionseagle]

Also Lewis's observations of the night sky will be coloured by the fact that he's considering things from British latitudes which are significantly higher:
if you look here, you can see that on the last day of this month in Manchester, England (53.47 degrees North) you've got moonrise of a waning moon about an hour before sunset on the same day. Not going to produce anything like the red moon rising/red sun falling effect he's talking about, but I think if Wright's modelling himself on someone else's worldbuilding not his own observations, naturally he's going to end up with an inconsistent mish-mash.

[cahn]

Went through half of these this weekend ("On a Spiritual Plain" and "Turncoat" in addition to "Parliament") and yeah, so far agree totally with your analysis.

"Plain" I didn't even end up reading properly all the way through (I scrolled to the end to find out if there was plot, and, ...no, there wasn't), and "Turncoat" was just mystifying in how apparently with a straight face the narrator would make fun of emotions ("Humans. They disgust me!" Okay, he didn't say that, but he should have) either a line before or a line after talking about his own emotions.

The paragraph you quote I thought was particularly fine in its lack of awareness. Why would such an analysis come out "con" except in given that one feels a need for self-perpetuation, a distinctly human trait? (Okay, Second Law. But that's... properly algorithmic.)

Read lignota's Jukebox story for something that is way more consistent in its use of a computer narrator (and hence rather more moving).

[ase]

Calling this analysis is kind. Mostly I'm pulling quotes for maximum facepalm.

I really want to like "Turncoat". There's a grain of human condition in the conflict between the AI consciousness and the uploaded entity, but that interesting spark might be an unintended side-effect of my interpretation of the narrator as unreliable.