Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 | ||||||||
edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel | ||||||||
Pyr, 336 pages | ||||||||
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A review by D. Douglas Fratz
One unsettling touchstone moment occurred when I realized that perhaps the most powerful and thought-provoking
story in the book -- at least to me -- was "And I Awake and Found me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" by
James Tiptree, Jr., posthumous winner of this year's Solstice Award. This story from 1972 is the epitome of 70s
disturbing social science fiction, extrapolating what man's inbred desire for genetic diversity might cause when
there are extraterrestrial aliens among us. It is more powerful today than it was when I was 20, and did not
recognize the literary allusion of the title taken from the John Keats poem about love with a fairy woman.
Another unsettling indication that the field may be passing me by was the first story in the
collection, "Ponies" by Kij Johnson, a slipstream fantasy about the cruelty of young girls to their peers
that left me cold. (Clearly, I must be the wrong demographic for this.) A third came moment from Harlan
Ellison's "How Interesting: A Tiny Man," which seems to be a slipstream allegory on the fickle nature of
public perception that also struck me as contrived and less than profound. Why were these stories so highly regarded?
The often fascinating non-fiction included in past Nebula volumes has been replaced by novel excerpts, which I
find a step backwards. This year we have an excepts from Connie Willis' brilliant two-volume
Nebula-Award-winning novel, Blackout/All Clear, and Terry Pratchett's delightful humorous fantasy
novel, I Shall Wear Midnight. I may be in the minority these days, but I do not enjoy free excerpts
of longer works, and find paying for them annoying. (That is a role reserved for book reviewers,
in my mind -- not excerpts...)
But wait! I may not yet be totally mired in my curmudgeonly mindset, because I find that there are also quite
a few excellent and original stories here, including some hardcore SF, and some by new young
authors. "The Sultan of the Clouds" by Geoff Landis is an excellent mystery SF story set in floating cities in
the atmosphere of Venus. "Map of Seventeen" by Chris Barzak is a haunting contemporary fantasy story about the
clash between the attitudes of small-town middle-America and urban cultural realities. "Arvies" by Adam Troy-Castro
is a strange but effective far-future tale of effete humans who achieve a kind of immortality by never being
born, and instead living inside human slaves called arvies.
Several of the aforementioned new young authors also have excellent stories here, many of which are cross-genre
fusions. Shweta Narayan's "Pishaach" is a hauntingly original slip-stream fantasy set in a future India,
effectively using a mixture of Indian myths and folktales. Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House in Shadow" is
set in an interesting alternate history 20th century where Aztec culture is engaged in a sort of cold war
with western culture. Amal El-Mohtar's "The Green Book" is a New Wave-styled slipstream fantasy of a magic
book that can trap the spirits of people that is a complex and effective -- if occasionally confusing -- story.
James Stone's "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" is an SF story about a Mormon missionary seeking to recruit
energy beings at the heart of the Sun to the Mormon religion; it's a better story than one would expect, although
not without the inevitable weaknesses often seen in SF on religious themes. The final story in the volume is
Rachel Swirsky's "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window," a powerful fantasy story that
evokes SF-like sense of wonder through the use of long-time frames, as a witch from a matriarchal medieval
kingdom has her mind trapped in perpetual enslavement and is summoned at various times in her future.
Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have done an excellent job overall
with this year's volume, and provide a light and
interesting dialogue as introduction. Also included are the Rysling Award-winning best poems, a feature which
makes the Nebula collection unique among best-of-the-year books.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 therefore provides an overall excellent reading experience, and profound
evidence that the science fiction and fantasy genres are continuing to grow and find new voices. It remains
must-reading for all fans of fantastika.
D. Douglas Fratz has more than forty years experience as editor and publisher of literary review magazines in the science fiction and fantasy field, and author of commentary and critiques on science fiction and fantasy literature and media. |
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