Beyond Selidor

I have voting rights for the Hugos this year, voting has opened (and the voter packet finally became available), so I thought it might be fun to use the next few open threads as discussion posts about the various finalists. I'll be splitting the categories up across several posts, and this week is devoted to the short fiction: Novella, Novelette, and Short Story.

All finalists can be found on the Hugo Awards website.

Best Novella

“Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet”, He Xi / 人生不相见, 何夕, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers)

Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older (Tordotcom)

Rose/House by Arkady Martine (Subterranean)

“Seeds of Mercury”, Wang Jinkang / 水星播种, 王晋康, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers)

Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher (Tor, Titan UK)

Best Novelette

I AM AI by Ai Jiang (Shortwave)

“Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition”, Gu Shi /〈2181序曲〉再版导言, 顾适 translated by Emily Jin (Clarkesworld, February 2023)

“Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C.L. Polk (Tor.com 8 December 2023)

“On the Fox Roads” by Nghi Vo (Tor.com 31 October 2023)

“One Man’s Treasure” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, January-February 2023)

“The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny Magazine, November-December 2023)

Best Short Story

“Answerless Journey”, Han Song / 没有答案的航程, 韩松, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers)

“Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld May 2023)

“How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” by P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny Magazine, January-February 2023)

“The Mausoleum’s Children” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny Magazine, May-June 2023)

“The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare Magazine, October 2023)

美食三品 (“Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times”), 宝树 / Baoshu (银河边缘013：黑域密室 / Galaxy’s Edge Vol. 13: Secret Room in the Black Domain)

I haven't read all the Novella and Short Story finalists yet (I have read all the Novelette finalists), but should get there by the end of the weekend.

If you are voting this year, let me know your thoughts on the various categories (or individual works). If you're not a voter, but you have read some of the finalists on this list, feel free to comment on your assessment of the story(ies). Or is there anything you feel should have made the shortlist that didn't?

I feel as if I've barely been around these parts recently — I think it's been close to a week since I logged into Dreamwidth, and there are an overwhelming number of posts to catch up with. Luckily, I've been very productive this weekend, and after writing this post I've essentially got the entire afternoon free, so I can dive into my feed and see what you've all been up to.

I've got a couple of short stories, two films, and a book to log in terms of stuff read/watched since I last posted.

The short stories were from one of the recent issues of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and as always I found myself impressed at the editorial choice to group things together that fit well thematically. Both the stories were about the experiences of people coming to terms with the colonisation of their lands and communities, and trying to navigate this traumatic situation without much recourse to power.

'Our Grandmother's Words' (M.H. Ayinde) is a story in which the colonial erasure of language and culture is made starkly literal: the colonists possess the ability to rob locals of their words, including the ability to say no, or to advocate for fair trading conditions. But it's also a story about the power of language and memory and culture to survive and resist.

'Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea' (Kelsey Hutton) is a story in which a woman from a colonised nation finds herself thrown into the role of ambassador for her people at the court of the colonising country, and she has to navigate this fraught environment using the skills and abilities she possesses, pleading the case of her people to indifferent, uncomprehending ears.

I would have to say that neither story is particularly subtle!

I've just finished reading Book of Night, Holly Black's adult fiction debut. I had thought it was a stand-alone, but it's actually the first in a trilogy in a fantasy version of our own world in which magic exists, but is not equally distributed. Some people have the ability to separate themselves from their shadows, possess other people, and force them to do their will. Black's favourite themes and character dynamics are all on display here — she loves scammers, tricksters, con artists and elaborate supernatural heists, and relationships between characters who are lying to each other and themselves. She likes to write stories about people living on the margins, in the interstitial places, eking out a living throught their ability to read people, lie convincingly, and run successful scams, but always with a slight sense of desperation, as if they know their luck may run out at any moment. She has a couple of irritating stylistic tics that I find very grating (constantly name dropping brands; her protagnist never gets into her car, but always 'her Corolla,' she sends her sister not to the chemist/pharmacy, but 'to Walgreens,' and so on), but I've read enough Holly Black books by now to know that she and I share an id (in particuar when it comes to relationship and character dynamics) so I grit my teeth and put up with it.

On Thursday night, Matthias and I saw a film at the community cinema — Ynys Men, an unsettling, nightmarish film set on an isolated Cornish island in the 1970s. There's very little dialogue, and we observe a middle-aged woman engage in repetitive, ritualistic daily routines. As these routines cycle around, strange memories and historical moments start to intrude, and the audience's grip on reality becomes more and more tenuous. It's as if the island is haunted by the memories of its previous inhabitants, and the blasted landscape of ruined buildings, decaying mines, and weathered standing stones adds to the eerie atmosphere. The film's use of sound, in particular, is excellent.

Last night, we watched the Luther film, which has just been added to Netflix this week. In it, the titular police officer (played by Idris Elba) stalks his way through a labyrinthine, dystopian London, hunting a serial killer whose cruelty is particularly theatrical and comic-bookish, even by the standards of this show. We're missing the character of Alice, who in the TV series was played with amoral aplomb by Ruth Wilson and was a fabulous foil for Luther, and the film does suffer from her absence, but if you liked the show, you'll probably like the film. I'm on record as absolutely detesting any work of fiction that suggests that some criminals or terrorists are so vile and evil that stopping them means abandoning correct police procedure and stooping to their level (the Nolan Batman films are a particularly hated example of this for me), and that is of course the central premise of the Luther series, so I guess it's my one exception. I suppose it helps that a) the rule-breaking police officer is played with such presence and charisma by Idris Elba (it really is his best role) and b) his slow slide (and then speed run) towards damnation is shown to utterly destroy him as a person, until he's hollowed out, nothing but a dramatic swooshy coat and a death wish. But his methods are vindicated in that they're shown in the show (and film) to work, and implied to be the only thing that would work in such circumstances, which makes me uneasy, although Luther is hardly the only crime drama to make this particular argument. It helps, I guess, to view the whole thing as a setting-change and no-superpowers Batman AU.

In addition to reading and films, I've finished the first draft of my once_upon_fic assignment, gone to the gym twice for swimming, and for fitness classes, wandered along the river with Matthias, and done a bunch of cooking (including multiple recipes from sami_tamimi's Palestinian cookbook). Compared to how I was feeling for much of the past six weeks, it's a change very much for the better. I feel like the vegetable seedlings growing in the kitchen — emerging from the dark earth, into the light.

I'm going to start this post with a brief review of some short stories I read this week, and then I will get to the question. I am trying a thing with SFF short fiction this year (namely to read more of it; by 'short fiction' I mean anything shorter than a novella), and am jumping between various online magazines and reading anything that takes my fancy. This week, I read four stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies — the first two were in a very early issue ('Beneath the Mask' by Aliette de Bodard, and 'Winterblood' by Megan Arkenberg), and the second two were in the current issue at time of reading ('Constant Ivan and Clever Natalya' by M.A. Carrick and 'Notes on The Seventh Battle Of The Queen Of The Ruby Mists' by Mari Ness).

( Short reviews and musings on my tastes in short fiction behind the cut )

So, all of the above basically forms my answer to today's question:

Do you read short fiction? And do you have different markers of enjoyment for short fiction than you do for longer pieces of writing?

The current snowflake_challenge is one that I always find incredibly stressful: I don't really collect fannish merch (other than ... physical books? Dreamwidth icons?), and I'm completely incapable of taking decent photos of anything that isn't a) a tree or b) a body of water.



So, with that disclaimer out of the way, here is the prompt:

In your own space, post the results of your fandom scavenger hunt. earch in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture or description of something that is or represents:

1. A favorite character
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A bookshelf
4. A game or hobby you enjoy
5. Something you find comforting
6. A TV show or movie you hope more people will watch
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A thing from an old fandom
9. A thing from a new fandom

My photos can be found on Instagram. Edited to add that the bad-quality photos were stressing me out so much that I deleted the whole photoset from Instagram, so the link here will no longer work. The descriptions of the photos remain below.

I have merged several categories.

1. A favourite character — Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. This is the back of a t shirt which is possibly the only piece of fannish merch I own, a quote from McDougall's book referencing Una. (A picture McDougall drew of her own character, plus this quote, forms my default Dreamwidth icon.)

2. and 3. Something that makes me laugh + a bookshelf — a small portion of the Terry Pratchett section of our bookshelves. This is only a small portion of our collection as a whole — my copies are all still at my mum's place in Australia, and many of Matthias's copies are still in Germany. At some point, we will have all the copies in the one place and may have to discard the duplicates.

4. and 5. A game or hobby I enjoy + something I find comforting — swimming swimming swimming. I am, as I have said many times, half woman half ocean. Swimming is the only thing that stills the sea inside.

6. A TV show or movie I wish more people would watch — Babylon Berlin

7. A thing from an old fandom — the final lines of Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. This isn't my oldest fandom, but it was my first experience of fandom as an online community, and the HDM forum I joined still remains my gold standard for online fannish spaces. It was the perfect welcome and introduction to fandom-as-shared activity.

8. A thing from a new fandom — the extant books from Pat Barker's Briseis-centric Iliad retelling trilogy.

I read three more short stories yesterday. All are free and online at the Tor.com website.

( Short fiction )

I spotted this fantastic book meme via ermingarden a week or so ago. I think the original intention was for the meme to be done Tumblr-style (i.e. post all the questions in a batch, answer them when requested in the comments of the post). If you want to do this meme in that fashion, please feel free!

I decided instead to answer it in the old school Livejournal/Dreamwidth manner: as a thirty-day meme, one answer per day.

This is day one:

1. A book that haunts you

( My answer behind the cut )

( The other days )

These past two weeks have caused a steady depletion of my mental energy, to the extent that I've retreated into a world of chefs and cooking. I've always cooked as an expression of love, and I always find reading cookbooks, chefs' Instagram accounts, and above all interviews and podcasts with professional chefs to be really cosy and relaxing. And so for the most part I've bounced between Nadiya Hussain's Instagram highlights and random interviews/panel discussions involving Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi, or both. (There is some method in this madness: I was given the Jerusalem cookbook as a Christmas present, and the Falastin cookbook as a random gift by Matthias early on during lockdown, so I have been basically swimming in za'atar, pomegrante molasses, tahini, and the other repeat ingredients of the Ottolenghi/Tamimi oeuvre for the past few months.)

My favourite so far was this panel discussion between Tamimi and Ottolenghi several years ago when they were promoting their Jerusalem cookbook. They were constantly asked the most ridiculous things (and people seemed to want them to act as some sort of poster children for Israeli-Palestinian peaceful coexistence, as if their own personal circumstances, friendship and business partnership could somehow be expanded outwards to an entire fraught region; they resisted this as unrealistically sentimental and simplistic), but ultimately it's just an hour of two people geeking out about food and flavour. I feel their pain re: those dreadful premade refridgerated falafel sold in British supermarkets, which are an abomination.

I say that I've only had mental energy for cooking and foodie stuff, but that's not 100 per cent true. I've also read a bit of short fiction, mainly the newly unlocked stories in the current issue of Uncanny Magazine. My thoughts on all are behind the cut — every story is free to read online.

( Five short stories behind the cut )

What is getting you through the current ... everything?

I was going to devote this week's post to the Hugo Awards situation, but to be honest, I thought better of it. Why waste my energy on the emotionally draining behaviour of a bunch of immature, selfish, cruel, destructive people? I'd rather talk about people who build, create, nurture and share.

At Safe, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz talks about words, actions, and using power for good. It's a post filled with hope and compassion. (Content note for discussion of abusive behaviour.)

Rochita's post refers to this one by Laura Mixon, which comes with a similar content note.

I absolutely adore M Sereno's poetry. Her latest, 'The Eaters, published in Uncanny Magazine, is gorgeous. Amal El-Mohtar reads it aloud here.

BBC Radio 4 is doing a programme featuring extensive interviews with Ursula Le Guin, Ursula Le Guin at 85.

Short stories I read and enjoyed this week include 'Monkey King, Faerie Queen' by Zen Cho (published at Kaleidotrope) and 'Ambergris, or the Sea-Sacrifice' by Rhonda Eikamp (published at Lackington's, illustrated by Likhain).

Over at SF Signal, authors pay tribute to Terry Pratchett and Leonard Nimoy.

Ken Liu discusses his new novel The Grace of Kings at SF Signal.

This round-up post at Ladybusiness has some fabulous short story recommendations.

It's always disorienting for me to see real-life friends and former academic colleagues getting discussed in SF publications.

This is the most Cambridge story ever.

Please spend your weekends being lovely to each other.