I thought the novellas would be an easy category for me, but it turned out to be tougher than I expected. I liked four of the five nominees quite a bit, and the one I didn’t like was a surprising disappointment. I think the top two are set, then the next two could swap places, and the fifth is definitely on the bottom.
So here they are:
1. Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold. I expected to put this novella first. And I am, I’m pretty sure. This novella has a lot of charm and is beautifully written. How it works out is not precisely unexpected, is it? Yet . . . it does have all that charm. And it is beautifully written; such a warm, amusing story – and with tons of added depth because it’s connected to the broader Chalion world.
2. Slow Bullets by Alistair Reynolds. I haven’t actually read a whole lot by Reynolds, though I know he’s a well-established author. Let me see. Yes, nine novels, Wikipedia says, and a bunch of stories. I see he’s known for “dark hard SF,” which is not a subgenre of SF I’m much drawn to generally. That explains why I haven’t read much by him.
Well, I liked “Slow Bullets” quite a bit. I found the story absorbing on a character level, and I liked the broader plot, which involves a ship that suffers a little accident and finds itself way, way far in the future, having outlived a disaster that took down civilization. I wasn’t too keen on the sacrifice of personal history to preserve fragments of the vanished society, and also didn’t get what the slow bullets actually were supposed to be for – they seem like an extremely cumbersome type of identity tag? But so very, very cumbersome and with such a pathetic amount of memory; I think my phone could hold more; it didn’t seem all that reasonable for the slow bullets to be so inefficient if their whole purpose is to store information.
But the idea that bad people can turn out to serve good ends and the hopeful rise of a new civilization out of the ashes of the old – I appreciated all that.
3. Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson. I sort of liked this story from the first reading, but found it growing on me after the fact. The world involves a backstory where we’ve started maximizing happiness thus: every infant gets plugged into his or her own personal virtual reality world. Thus everyone is the most important person in their own world, which is tailored to suit their particular taste, but they interact almost exclusively with machine intelligences. Only under specific and rare circumstances do living people meet each other.
Okay, now, as far as I’m concerned this is quite a creepy future and possibly not quite as utopian as the inhabitants are supposed to find it. And the plot twist is fairly brutal. But the ending is not as bleak at it might be, as the protagonist grows as a person due to his experiences and winds up reaching out to his real neighbors. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s hopeful.
Still a seriously creepy future, though.
4. The Builders by Daniel Polansky. What a . . . peculiar . . . reading experience. I actually enjoyed this pointless, nihilistic story about revenge that solves nothing and creates nothing. The anthropomorphic animal characters made this possible by adding a cartoon element to the story; if I’d felt I was supposed to take it seriously, I’m sure I would have hated it. I liked every single vicious, brutal, heartless character, from the mouse to the rattlesnake.
There really is an elf owl, by the way. It is a tiny little sparrow-sized desert owl that, when disturbed, mimics a rattlesnake’s rattle. I just thought you’d like to know that.
But a salamander is definitely not a lizard, I feel compelled to point out.
… and, moving on –
5. Binti by Nnedi Okorofor. I know, right? It won the Nebula. Everyone was talking about it. I wasn’t a bit surprised it made the nominee list for the Hugo, and I was really looking forward to reading it. And then . . . then I didn’t care for it at all.
The protagonist’s voice did not sound right to me. It sounded like an anthropologist telling the story from the point of view of a girl. She seemed to me to slip into a tone that was just kind of . . . clinical . . . when thinking about her own people and other peoples. Also, Binti kept doing things that seemed just peculiar. Like when the meduse attack and she prays for protection to the little artifact thing she found years ago in the desert. I was like, What? Why? She makes this whole big fuss about her people not praying to totems or artifacts or objects or whatever, and so where in the world did that come from? This seemed like . . . I don’t know, kind of like a Christian praying to a flint arrowhead she found in the desert when a dire emergency erupts. It just seemed so peculiar.
And then how very lucky it is that Binti turns out to be able to communicate with the meduse. Wow, that’s handy. And the friendship that arises between herself and that one meduse, well, sure, it helped kill everybody on that ship, but hey, you can’t hold that against it because . . . I’m not sure why not, actually. It seemed like everyone in the story, not just Binti, shrugged off the murderous attack on the ship; like, Oh, well, these things happen. Meduse, you know, they’re just like that, and what’s a spot of mass murder between friends. I didn’t buy it.
Disappointing, but yeah, this one just didn’t work for me
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I’m not sure if I would’ve considered Reynolds to be a “dark” hard SF, just “hard SF,” and that only with his Revelation Space series (I haven’t read Poseidon’s Children trilogy).
I almost always like his short stories, though, so I really liked the unreliable-narrator-ness of Slow Bullets, and stuff like that (he’s got a best of collection out soon).
BTW, I would recommend “House of Suns” by him–that has a little bit more of a Robert Reed’s Sister Alice feel, and I found it very good–I think he’s planning on a sequel to that sometime.
House of Suns, hm? I’ll pick up a sample.
Oh wow, I didn’t realize my comment had posted after all (your site gets intermittently blocked from my work).
Yes, “House of Suns” is a lot of fun, though my favorite works by him have been his short stories–I would say that “Zima Blue” is my favorite story, and he said at Capclave last year that his agent keeps wanting him to write more Merlin stories (no relation to the Arthurian fella), and I think he said he’s writing a 4th one finally, though not sure when it’ll be published.
I haven’t finished Builders yet, but I agree that the top four are all pretty good, and I didn’t like Binti at all.
Having said that, I think I’m going to go with Perfect State (followed by Penric’s Demon and then Slow Bullet). I actually had a very hard time getting past my suspension of disbelief for Slow Bullet (as did Craig, I believe), although I am a sucker for a good redemption arc and like the general themes of the story a lot.
The best thing I can say about Binti is that I disliked it only marginally more than Fifth Season…
That’s not really fair. I feel disappointed, though. Space raptor was a bad joke, but I had higher expectations for Binti and Fifth Season. Fifth Season I can chalk up to just hating the characters and the world, but Binti just was not well written in my opinion. The tone was inconsistent and odd, and many of the plot points seemed odd as well. Though clearly the Nebula voters disagree.
That’s interesting about Binti. I actually enjoyed the character’s voice and perspective, and I thought it realistic assuming a futuristic yet tribally divided and highly educated world. The Meduse, on the other hand, were not well characterized. I did think Okorofor skipped over the massacre part and reaction too quickly, which I also disliked. I thought at the time and still think the story as a whole would be better if fleshed out into a full novel. But the concept, setting, and initial characterization were there.
Mona, what can I say? I’ve seen enough responses to Binti to know a lot of people must agree with you. But there it is.