2017 Hugo Nominees, Short Fiction
Jul. 14th, 2018 10:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseSpoilers abound! Novel comments to follow separately if/when I finish the nominees.
Best Novella
All Systems Red, Martha Wells: Previously read. It's entertaining, but it's not life-altering for me, especially because Murderbot is clearly One Of Us, and also smack in Wells' character wheelhouse. On the plus side, people are recognizing her good work. On the minus side, it's hard for me to judge All Systems Red against the other nominees, instead of Wells' fiction to date. Full disclosure, Murderbot is beloved by many, but the "Fall of Ile-Rien" trilogy keysmashes more of my buttons than All Systems Redand you all should buy it or check it out of your local library.
"And Then There Were (N-One)," by Sarah Pinsker: A multiverse convention of Sarah Pinskers. This premise is right up my alley, so I saw the twist coming but was entertained anyway. Okay, but not ground-breaking.
Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor: Also previously read. Again, because I know Okorafor's work, I'm fighting my instinct to judge against her previous work, rather than evaluating the works nominated this year in this category. It's okay, it's cute, I'd recommend it to the kids/teen/YA audience in a heartbeat, it... I don't care the way I want to care.
The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang: Fantasy novella about twins and fate. If it wants to do All The Things, it needed another editing pass to tighten up All The Bits. For example: how is it, in a society where one elects one's gender, at whatever point one is comfortable with a gender, the character who elects to be female is the weepy emotional one in a semi-cloistered environment and the character who elects to be male is the one who can't talk about feelings, but can sure roam the world and kill people? How does gender even work in this context? Its construction may be connected to childbearing, and how does that work with dynasties? Historically, a lot of constraint of female sexuality has been caught up with men trying to control women, for lineage reasons. What happens when you can choose to be a woman and know that kid is yours? Anyway, when biological sex is a choice, does it natively follow that socialized gender will be strongly aligned with sex? Akeha's feelings in the sequence where Mokoya chooses to be a woman and Akeha chooses to be a man suggest reluctance for change and reluctance to pick up the responsibilities of adulthood on Akeha's part.
It's very tempting to namecheck Ann Leckie's Provenance and Taucris' gender choice in this context, apparently something is in the zeitgeist.
On a shallow note,cahn and I agreed that the Protector is cold and kind of awesome. Whose solution to "give one of your children to the monastery" (implication: the one unattached kid) is to go and have another child, and give that child- the surprise twins - to the monastery? Someone who is a great character to follow around, that's who.
All that fails to touch on the Mechanics rebellion and what it says about slackcraft in this universe. I'd like more of that, please. But the complex set-up of the relationships between Akeha, Mokoya, and the abbot Thennjay is foregrounded, subsuming the big sociopolitical saga into the close-focus story of these three characters. If it's supposed to be a reflection of the larger situation, it didn't work that way for me. If it's supposed to be about people shaping and being shaped by the changes of their world, and the fates allotted to them, The novella is ambitious, but it neither does a startlingly new thing nor develops an existing thing to a new level.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire: I was not a fan of the first novella. The second novella has further clarified why I am not a fan. It's the Special Protagonist problem! No one has the problems Jillian and Jacqueline face. No one else's parents have ever tried to mold a round child into a square hole. At least, not in such a two-dimensional fashion, not since Mercedes Lackey or many many YA authors. Sticks hammers on Jack and Jill's parents' desire for object-daughters, not people, and conveniently writes out their grandmother, who does love them unconditionally. This also lets the girls have the Uncaring Parents who can't really be hurt by their disappearance and traumas after their re-appearance. It foregrounds the teen girls' emotional landscapes, at the cost of the social context, and what could have been a more insightful, complex, lasting look into the why and how of parent pressures for kids to go down certain paths. It's emotionally satisfying to emo with teens whose parents are a flat obstacle, but the, ah, angle of flattening (girly vs tomboy, gender expectations, etc) tends to date the work pretty quickly, instead of creating a story that reflects a lasting aspect of the human condition.
What surprised me is that, despite the tooth-gritting irritation of the first section, and my sense that Jack got the better end of the author's attention, once Jack and Jill got to the Moors I engaged enough to pick this apart in tedious detail in chat. McGuire's prose is compelling at the sentence and paragraph level, she just compels me to nitpick every sloppy plot and theme decision she makes. Sticks does not stand up to close reading: after Jill kills Jack's girlfriend and gets herself kicked out of the local community, Jack goes with her, back to their world, because... sisters? In the context of Every Heart a Doorway's chosen family motif, it's a wrong decision, but the writing seems to ignore the jarring mismatch. I'd say "well, that's the point, the foil of chosen family is unchosen family, or separation from your default family," but the bonds, or obligations, to default family don't seem to be something the two novellas I've read so far have any interest in exploring. (I'm aware the third novella is out, I haven't read it.) The children are hurt by their parents' lack of support pre-portal, and are hurt again by the parents' response to their return. But instead of taking the route with lasting thematic interest, Sticks dodges the "why didn't Jack kick Jill's butt" question in favor of "BUT SISTERS". Constraint of a prequel? The author really thought that would cut it for motivation? It's a choice that feels like a misstep to me.
River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey: Alternate history where, for reasons, hippos were imported into Louisiana, the Mississippi dammed for hippo-related reasons, and Our Protagonists are pulling off a heist to remove feral hippos from artificial Lake Harriet to the Gulf of Mexico. To no reader's surprise, the heist does not go off as planned.
Many people who aren't me liked this a lot, but I got lost in the double-crosses and lost interest toward the end. Especially at the point where a major protagonist took a knife to the chest, another to the belly, got the narrative beats of a death scene, and was revealed to be alive and mending in the falling action. I hate death scene fake-outs a lot. And then there's the malaria question, but I would not have gotten sidetracked into the standing water/mosquito/malaria problem if my suspension of disbelief had been intact through the end of Teeth.
Tentative voting order: All Systems Red (Wells), Binti:Home (Okorafor), Sticks (McGuire), N-1 (Pinsker), Teeth (Gailey), Black Tides (Yang), No Award. Though No Award may get bumped up a bit, the not-death in Teeth annoyed me a lot.
Best Novelette
"Children of Thorns, Children of Water," by Aliette de Bodard: Post-magic-apocalypse Paris, Vietnamese dragon immigrants (?) maneuvering politically wrt local fallen angels, who don't know about the dragons hiding in the rivers. The story focuses on a young dragon who, with his ex-lover, is trying to infiltrate one of the fallen angel Houses. The prose is amazing, the story is a little overloaded for the wordcount.
"Extracurricular Activities," by Yoon Ha Lee: Shuos Jedao is sent after a spy captured by one of the Heptarchate's neighbors, and makes eyes at a nice Kel fellow who is in the chain of command and so doubly Off Limits. It struck me as a basic spy story in space, though at least Jedao and Off Limits contrive to evade the regs at the end of the story. My favorite thing about this story is the letter from Jedao's mother. It's a quick glance at an offscreen character, which manages to convey something of her personality in the process. The story overall is largely pleasant but on the slight side, which makes it readable but not necessarily Hugo material.
"The Secret Life of Bots," by Suzanne Palmer: workmanlike but not brilliant story of the plucky little robot who saves the day. "Bots" is strikingly classic in its plot and storytelling, compared to several other novelette nominees. The prose is a smidge Asimovian. Not in a good way. Especially because I managed to read this right after the de Bodard, which revels in description. It's likeable, but doesn't break new ground.
"A Series of Steaks," by Vina Jie-Min Prasad: steak forging, because why not forge steaks like art. Also blackmail and a really cute developing team-up between the protagonist and the assistant she hires. I like the characterization and I am compelled to admit no one steak forging is a new premise to me. Would read more by this author.
"Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time," by K.M. Szpara: it's trans gay vampire sexing! The worldbuilding is dubious, or at least, not spelled out for those who do not care about vampires. Somehow the protagonist goes from "bitten" to "dying" without a linking infodump in the middle. And the worldbuilding states that vampires can change their physical appearance slowly (think decades) if they want, but somehow the protagonist's body starts reverting to female days? Hours??? After his vamping, and really quickly is beaten back toward male by oral testosterone? (Via a blood bag. Of course.) It doesn't add up. The other plot of the story is the protagonist getting beaten down by unthinking bureaucracy and mourning the last sunset they'll see for a long time (vampires can't wake up before sunset? I guess?) which are plot points that should engage my interest, but the setup does such a weak job with the in-cluing for the world "rules" I couldn't engage with the story. Points for vampires having shower sex, no points for the things I give Hugo points for.
"Wind Will Rove," by Sarah Pinsker: Generation ship, questions of cultural preservation vs evolution. The generation ship lost its cultural databases early in the first generation, and those who remembered Earth worked heroically to preserve as much of the history, art, music, etc, that they could. Unfortunately, that has swung back to the point of stagnating the development of new art...
On its own, Wind is a bit slight. The protagonist goes about her life on the generation ship, teaching, participating in her strain of historical preservation, reflecting on the ship's history and the problem of preservation vs creation. Whencahn and I talked about this story, we both named other generation ship pieces - she named an Ursula Le Guin story, I thought of Jo Walton's take - that we'd liked, and she pointed out that Wind reads a bit differently for people embedded in transformative works culture. I think the story is better in the discussion than the reading, for that reason. It's difficult to talk about this story without talking about what came before, and what's going on adjacent to it. A couple of other Hugo nominees connect to the fannish experience by creating fellow fans (All Systems Red, Fandom for Robots). To me, Wind feels like it connects to arguments about What Is Genre. The history and re-creation of the song Wind Will Rove is smack in that "What is a genre? It's a group of works in conversation with each other" zone that's my working definition of What Is Science Fiction. Rosie inherited and preserves it, her granddaughter Teyla re-creates her version of it, Rosie plays her version at the end of the story.
Tentative voting order: Steaks (Prasad), Children (de Bodard), Extracurricular (Lee), Bots (Palmer), Wind (Pinsker), No Award, Small Changes (Szpara)
Best Short Story
"Carnival Nine," by Caroline M. Yoachim: Clockwork family, toy trains running between little towns. One woman joins a circus, falls in love, makes a child... and instead of the twenty or thirty wind-up turns most people get, on his first day, her son's mainspring has four.
It might not have been intended to evoke the experience of having a disabled child, but to me, it evoked the Holland essay in fiction format. I've got very mixed feelings about that.
"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand," by Fran Wilde: my nemesis, second person present tense, teams up with in media res gothic-ish(?). Barely finished.
"Fandom for Robots," by Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Robot discovers fandom. Robot is honest. The internet thinks it's the best roleplay ever. Despite my native suspicion anything that hits my emotional centers this hard is pandering to a targeted audience (hi), Prasad jumps way up my "to read" list.
"The Martian Obelisk," by Linda Nagata: in a vaguely post-apocalyptic future heaving with the imminent collapse of humanity, the ecology, etc etc, a woman must choose between creating a monument to eternity and giving the surviving Martian colonist and her Small Children a shot at survival.
The PoV framing shamelessly stacks the deck in favor of "help living humans" with a clumsy side of "oh yeah, your dead granddaughter? Who's right about the same age as the Martian Small Children? Mot dead!" It robs a lot of the dramatic tension from the Monument to Death or Fight For Life conflict, because the story has a really blatant agenda. That Obelisk milks the tiniest scrap of narrative tension from this conflict is a compliment to the author's ability to argue for eternity, even if the story signposts Wrong Choice in flashing neon.
"Sun, Moon, Dust" by Ursula Vernon: A young man inherits a magic sword and the three spirits in the sword on his grandmother's death. The spirits try to teach him war. He persuades two of them to leave him alone and the third to try farming.
Vernon has a gift for punchlines, and a focus on de-escalation that's very soothing sometimes. You could go to war, but why? Slight, but extra points for making me laugh.
“Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse: Native American loses his job, his girlfriend, and his life to a white man who thinks he can do it better.
It's a pretty pointed cultural appropriation metaphor, rendered in clear strokes. It's just... not that much more than that.
Tentative order: Fandom (Prasad), a long gap, Carnival (Yoachim), Sun (Vernon), another gap, Authentic (Roanhorse), Martian (Nagata), Clearly Lettered (Wilde), No Award. Though I may bump No Award up a bit.
Best Novella
All Systems Red, Martha Wells: Previously read. It's entertaining, but it's not life-altering for me, especially because Murderbot is clearly One Of Us, and also smack in Wells' character wheelhouse. On the plus side, people are recognizing her good work. On the minus side, it's hard for me to judge All Systems Red against the other nominees, instead of Wells' fiction to date. Full disclosure, Murderbot is beloved by many, but the "Fall of Ile-Rien" trilogy keysmashes more of my buttons than All Systems Red
"And Then There Were (N-One)," by Sarah Pinsker: A multiverse convention of Sarah Pinskers. This premise is right up my alley, so I saw the twist coming but was entertained anyway. Okay, but not ground-breaking.
Binti: Home, by Nnedi Okorafor: Also previously read. Again, because I know Okorafor's work, I'm fighting my instinct to judge against her previous work, rather than evaluating the works nominated this year in this category. It's okay, it's cute, I'd recommend it to the kids/teen/YA audience in a heartbeat, it... I don't care the way I want to care.
The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang: Fantasy novella about twins and fate. If it wants to do All The Things, it needed another editing pass to tighten up All The Bits. For example: how is it, in a society where one elects one's gender, at whatever point one is comfortable with a gender, the character who elects to be female is the weepy emotional one in a semi-cloistered environment and the character who elects to be male is the one who can't talk about feelings, but can sure roam the world and kill people? How does gender even work in this context? Its construction may be connected to childbearing, and how does that work with dynasties? Historically, a lot of constraint of female sexuality has been caught up with men trying to control women, for lineage reasons. What happens when you can choose to be a woman and know that kid is yours? Anyway, when biological sex is a choice, does it natively follow that socialized gender will be strongly aligned with sex? Akeha's feelings in the sequence where Mokoya chooses to be a woman and Akeha chooses to be a man suggest reluctance for change and reluctance to pick up the responsibilities of adulthood on Akeha's part.
It's very tempting to namecheck Ann Leckie's Provenance and Taucris' gender choice in this context, apparently something is in the zeitgeist.
On a shallow note,
cahn and I agreed that the Protector is cold and kind of awesome. Whose solution to "give one of your children to the monastery" (implication: the one unattached kid) is to go and have another child, and give that child- the surprise twins - to the monastery? Someone who is a great character to follow around, that's who.All that fails to touch on the Mechanics rebellion and what it says about slackcraft in this universe. I'd like more of that, please. But the complex set-up of the relationships between Akeha, Mokoya, and the abbot Thennjay is foregrounded, subsuming the big sociopolitical saga into the close-focus story of these three characters. If it's supposed to be a reflection of the larger situation, it didn't work that way for me. If it's supposed to be about people shaping and being shaped by the changes of their world, and the fates allotted to them, The novella is ambitious, but it neither does a startlingly new thing nor develops an existing thing to a new level.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire: I was not a fan of the first novella. The second novella has further clarified why I am not a fan. It's the Special Protagonist problem! No one has the problems Jillian and Jacqueline face. No one else's parents have ever tried to mold a round child into a square hole. At least, not in such a two-dimensional fashion, not since Mercedes Lackey or many many YA authors. Sticks hammers on Jack and Jill's parents' desire for object-daughters, not people, and conveniently writes out their grandmother, who does love them unconditionally. This also lets the girls have the Uncaring Parents who can't really be hurt by their disappearance and traumas after their re-appearance. It foregrounds the teen girls' emotional landscapes, at the cost of the social context, and what could have been a more insightful, complex, lasting look into the why and how of parent pressures for kids to go down certain paths. It's emotionally satisfying to emo with teens whose parents are a flat obstacle, but the, ah, angle of flattening (girly vs tomboy, gender expectations, etc) tends to date the work pretty quickly, instead of creating a story that reflects a lasting aspect of the human condition.
What surprised me is that, despite the tooth-gritting irritation of the first section, and my sense that Jack got the better end of the author's attention, once Jack and Jill got to the Moors I engaged enough to pick this apart in tedious detail in chat. McGuire's prose is compelling at the sentence and paragraph level, she just compels me to nitpick every sloppy plot and theme decision she makes. Sticks does not stand up to close reading: after Jill kills Jack's girlfriend and gets herself kicked out of the local community, Jack goes with her, back to their world, because... sisters? In the context of Every Heart a Doorway's chosen family motif, it's a wrong decision, but the writing seems to ignore the jarring mismatch. I'd say "well, that's the point, the foil of chosen family is unchosen family, or separation from your default family," but the bonds, or obligations, to default family don't seem to be something the two novellas I've read so far have any interest in exploring. (I'm aware the third novella is out, I haven't read it.) The children are hurt by their parents' lack of support pre-portal, and are hurt again by the parents' response to their return. But instead of taking the route with lasting thematic interest, Sticks dodges the "why didn't Jack kick Jill's butt" question in favor of "BUT SISTERS". Constraint of a prequel? The author really thought that would cut it for motivation? It's a choice that feels like a misstep to me.
River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey: Alternate history where, for reasons, hippos were imported into Louisiana, the Mississippi dammed for hippo-related reasons, and Our Protagonists are pulling off a heist to remove feral hippos from artificial Lake Harriet to the Gulf of Mexico. To no reader's surprise, the heist does not go off as planned.
Many people who aren't me liked this a lot, but I got lost in the double-crosses and lost interest toward the end. Especially at the point where a major protagonist took a knife to the chest, another to the belly, got the narrative beats of a death scene, and was revealed to be alive and mending in the falling action. I hate death scene fake-outs a lot. And then there's the malaria question, but I would not have gotten sidetracked into the standing water/mosquito/malaria problem if my suspension of disbelief had been intact through the end of Teeth.
Tentative voting order: All Systems Red (Wells), Binti:Home (Okorafor), Sticks (McGuire), N-1 (Pinsker), Teeth (Gailey), Black Tides (Yang), No Award. Though No Award may get bumped up a bit, the not-death in Teeth annoyed me a lot.
Best Novelette
"Children of Thorns, Children of Water," by Aliette de Bodard: Post-magic-apocalypse Paris, Vietnamese dragon immigrants (?) maneuvering politically wrt local fallen angels, who don't know about the dragons hiding in the rivers. The story focuses on a young dragon who, with his ex-lover, is trying to infiltrate one of the fallen angel Houses. The prose is amazing, the story is a little overloaded for the wordcount.
"Extracurricular Activities," by Yoon Ha Lee: Shuos Jedao is sent after a spy captured by one of the Heptarchate's neighbors, and makes eyes at a nice Kel fellow who is in the chain of command and so doubly Off Limits. It struck me as a basic spy story in space, though at least Jedao and Off Limits contrive to evade the regs at the end of the story. My favorite thing about this story is the letter from Jedao's mother. It's a quick glance at an offscreen character, which manages to convey something of her personality in the process. The story overall is largely pleasant but on the slight side, which makes it readable but not necessarily Hugo material.
"The Secret Life of Bots," by Suzanne Palmer: workmanlike but not brilliant story of the plucky little robot who saves the day. "Bots" is strikingly classic in its plot and storytelling, compared to several other novelette nominees. The prose is a smidge Asimovian. Not in a good way. Especially because I managed to read this right after the de Bodard, which revels in description. It's likeable, but doesn't break new ground.
"A Series of Steaks," by Vina Jie-Min Prasad: steak forging, because why not forge steaks like art. Also blackmail and a really cute developing team-up between the protagonist and the assistant she hires. I like the characterization and I am compelled to admit no one steak forging is a new premise to me. Would read more by this author.
"Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time," by K.M. Szpara: it's trans gay vampire sexing! The worldbuilding is dubious, or at least, not spelled out for those who do not care about vampires. Somehow the protagonist goes from "bitten" to "dying" without a linking infodump in the middle. And the worldbuilding states that vampires can change their physical appearance slowly (think decades) if they want, but somehow the protagonist's body starts reverting to female days? Hours??? After his vamping, and really quickly is beaten back toward male by oral testosterone? (Via a blood bag. Of course.) It doesn't add up. The other plot of the story is the protagonist getting beaten down by unthinking bureaucracy and mourning the last sunset they'll see for a long time (vampires can't wake up before sunset? I guess?) which are plot points that should engage my interest, but the setup does such a weak job with the in-cluing for the world "rules" I couldn't engage with the story. Points for vampires having shower sex, no points for the things I give Hugo points for.
"Wind Will Rove," by Sarah Pinsker: Generation ship, questions of cultural preservation vs evolution. The generation ship lost its cultural databases early in the first generation, and those who remembered Earth worked heroically to preserve as much of the history, art, music, etc, that they could. Unfortunately, that has swung back to the point of stagnating the development of new art...
On its own, Wind is a bit slight. The protagonist goes about her life on the generation ship, teaching, participating in her strain of historical preservation, reflecting on the ship's history and the problem of preservation vs creation. When
cahn and I talked about this story, we both named other generation ship pieces - she named an Ursula Le Guin story, I thought of Jo Walton's take - that we'd liked, and she pointed out that Wind reads a bit differently for people embedded in transformative works culture. I think the story is better in the discussion than the reading, for that reason. It's difficult to talk about this story without talking about what came before, and what's going on adjacent to it. A couple of other Hugo nominees connect to the fannish experience by creating fellow fans (All Systems Red, Fandom for Robots). To me, Wind feels like it connects to arguments about What Is Genre. The history and re-creation of the song Wind Will Rove is smack in that "What is a genre? It's a group of works in conversation with each other" zone that's my working definition of What Is Science Fiction. Rosie inherited and preserves it, her granddaughter Teyla re-creates her version of it, Rosie plays her version at the end of the story.Tentative voting order: Steaks (Prasad), Children (de Bodard), Extracurricular (Lee), Bots (Palmer), Wind (Pinsker), No Award, Small Changes (Szpara)
Best Short Story
"Carnival Nine," by Caroline M. Yoachim: Clockwork family, toy trains running between little towns. One woman joins a circus, falls in love, makes a child... and instead of the twenty or thirty wind-up turns most people get, on his first day, her son's mainspring has four.
It might not have been intended to evoke the experience of having a disabled child, but to me, it evoked the Holland essay in fiction format. I've got very mixed feelings about that.
"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand," by Fran Wilde: my nemesis, second person present tense, teams up with in media res gothic-ish(?). Barely finished.
"Fandom for Robots," by Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Robot discovers fandom. Robot is honest. The internet thinks it's the best roleplay ever. Despite my native suspicion anything that hits my emotional centers this hard is pandering to a targeted audience (hi), Prasad jumps way up my "to read" list.
"The Martian Obelisk," by Linda Nagata: in a vaguely post-apocalyptic future heaving with the imminent collapse of humanity, the ecology, etc etc, a woman must choose between creating a monument to eternity and giving the surviving Martian colonist and her Small Children a shot at survival.
The PoV framing shamelessly stacks the deck in favor of "help living humans" with a clumsy side of "oh yeah, your dead granddaughter? Who's right about the same age as the Martian Small Children? Mot dead!" It robs a lot of the dramatic tension from the Monument to Death or Fight For Life conflict, because the story has a really blatant agenda. That Obelisk milks the tiniest scrap of narrative tension from this conflict is a compliment to the author's ability to argue for eternity, even if the story signposts Wrong Choice in flashing neon.
"Sun, Moon, Dust" by Ursula Vernon: A young man inherits a magic sword and the three spirits in the sword on his grandmother's death. The spirits try to teach him war. He persuades two of them to leave him alone and the third to try farming.
"In my land, the earth is red," said Moon.
"In mine, it is black," said Sun.
"It's dirt!" shouted Dust. "You walk on it! You bury your enemies in it! Enough!"
Vernon has a gift for punchlines, and a focus on de-escalation that's very soothing sometimes. You could go to war, but why? Slight, but extra points for making me laugh.
“Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse: Native American loses his job, his girlfriend, and his life to a white man who thinks he can do it better.
It's a pretty pointed cultural appropriation metaphor, rendered in clear strokes. It's just... not that much more than that.
Tentative order: Fandom (Prasad), a long gap, Carnival (Yoachim), Sun (Vernon), another gap, Authentic (Roanhorse), Martian (Nagata), Clearly Lettered (Wilde), No Award. Though I may bump No Award up a bit.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-18 04:21 am (UTC)I hate death scene fake-outs a lot. Hee. I do too, but this one read very much to me like one that wasn't going to be permanent? Maybe I'm just jaded at this point :)
My favorite thing about this story is the letter from Jedao's mother. Seconded!
"Wind Will Rove": See also this critique which I thought was a really good one.
It might not have been intended to evoke the experience of having a disabled child, but to me, it evoked the Holland essay in fiction format. I've got very mixed feelings about that.
OH! That... is very interesting. And I agree that it was supposed to be about having a disabled child.
(The Holland essay is so weird. I get what the point is supposed to be, and I know people who really like it, but... it's just... I....)
"The Martian Obelisk": I still wonder if it would have been a better story if she'd decided to save the obelisk instead. Have you read "Dogfight" by Swanwick and Gibson?
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-23 09:14 pm (UTC)Hee. I do too, but this one read very much to me like one that wasn't going to be permanent? Maybe I'm just jaded at this point :)
Ha. It also could be a Western genre convention that I don't know as well? Westerns have not been something I've gravitated toward.
That critique of Wind nails the issue about why it wasn't working so well.
The Holland essay... it might not be 100% fair to compare "Carnival Nine" to it, but there's a way disability, intrinsic worth, and parental experience are operating in both, especially at the end of C9, that seem congruent. If the Holland essay is comforting or helpful to some parents, great! But some cursory googling suggests its perspective is not universal.
*googles "Dogfight"*
Oh, right, this one! I vaguely remember reading it. What's the connection... oh. Pyrrhic victory versus connection to people?
The world is in such difficulty these days, I could go either way on saving the obelisk as key to a better story. It would depend on the skill of the author, which was not in great display in the story as written.