Nebula Award Short Story Nominees

Each year, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) give a Nebula Award to the best science fiction/fantasy of the previous year, in several categories. (This is the main rival to the Hugo Awards, which are chosen by members of the World Science Fiction Society.) Note only mild spoilers below - mostly just descriptions of the plot.

Of the six short stories nominated this year, five are freely available online (scroll to the bottom of this page for all the links), including the clear best, IMHO, "Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh. A woman wakes, able to move only her face, and it turns out she died, was frozen, and is now in a dating room, where she must interest a man enough that he'll pay to revive her. (Thus, the title.)

It's a creepy story, rather scary (I could just imagine the feeling of helplessness), and quite good. As I say, this is easily my favorite of the nominees. But then, I was quite disappointed in the general caliber of story this year. There were really only two or three stories I liked at all.

The second was "Non-Zero Probabilities" by N. K. Jemisin. Probability has gone nuts in New York City. If there's a chance in a million that something will happen, it will happen. And New Yorkers like Adele have learned to adapt by practicing every kind of superstition. It's a cute little story. Maybe I wouldn't have picked it for a Nebula Award, but then, I'm generally biased against fantasies. It's worth reading, at least.

I probably expected too much from "Going Deep" by James Patrick Kelly, since I was hoping for another "Think Like a Dinosaur," his 1995 Hugo Award-winning novelette. What I got was OK, but nothing special. A 13-year-old girl on the Moon is struggling with adolescence, including the arrival of her mother, a spacer whom she's never met. And with her genes, there's always the possibility of "going deep." I won't explain what that means, since it will give away the ending. And I did (mildly) like the ending, too,... but I just didn't think the story was special. I've only read three other stories by Kelly, but I liked them all a lot better than this one.

Next is "Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela" by Saladin Ahmed. This is pure fantasy, set in a Muslim caliphate. Visiting a small village, a young doctor - a lovesick courtier - is asked to help an old hermit and his shy wife. OK, I said I'm biased against fantasies, but I have to ask,... what's the point of this story? I can't imagine why this was nominated for a Nebula Award.

And I can't imagine why "Spar" by Kij Johnson was nominated, either. After a collision in space, a woman is pulled into an alien lifecraft where she and a slimy, cilia-covered creature continuously... fuck. (The first line basically describes the whole story: In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly.) It really makes no sense at all. I kept hoping for a really good ending, but I was sadly disappointed in that.

The last story, "I Remember the Future" by Michael A. Burstein, is the only one not available free online. However, there's a sale at DriveThruSciFi.com where you can buy a PDF of his collection, I Remember the Future, which includes that story - along with 14 others, most of them Hugo and Nebula Award nominees - for only ONE DOLLAR. What a buy, huh? But I have no idea how long the sale will last.

And unfortunately, I didn't like the story. But to tell why, I really need to talk about how it ended. Since there are real spoilers here, I'll put the rest of this below the fold.



An old science fiction author lives alone - his wife has died, his only child is unhappy with him, and his grandchildren don't visit - and now he faces a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. Like most SF fans of a certain age, he's depressed by the fact that the future didn't turn out as he'd expected. There are no colonies on the Moon or Mars, no flights to exotic planets, no starships - nothing that he'd written about all his life. Until, at the end of the story,...

... he's rescued by a character from his own books, taken to another universe where everything and everyone he wrote about exists. It turns out that he's created new universes every time he's written a story.

OK, this story was pretty depressing at first. But when Burstein resorted to complete fantasy at the end, it became really depressing, at least for me. Yeah, the future hasn't turned out as we expected, back when we were reading those classic science fiction stories. There probably aren't going to be any starships, and we haven't even returned to the Moon in 40 years. Few people look to the future optimistically these days. Instead, we read fantasy and try to pretend it's the same.

And when Burstein takes this situation and solves it with pure fantasy, well, as far as I'm concerned, that's the most depressing thing of all. I could have accepted a story that ended tragically. And I could certainly have accepted a story where this old SF author discovers that he still has fans, or that his personal life isn't quite as bad as it seems. I could even have accepted his descent into senility - or death - while he imagines that his wishes did come true. But I couldn't accept the author telling me that I had to accept fantasy to make this story come out OK.

All in all, I was quite disappointed with these stories. Are these really the very best stories to be written in 2009? Talk about depressing! "Bridesicle" was quite good, and I hope it wins the Nebula Award. But I really hope the Hugo Awards come up with better nominees than the rest of these.