Friday short fiction #21: cornucopia

Mark Stoner   North   2000   ( PHOTO BY MARK GAYLARD )
I've been catching up one some more recent award-winning and -shortlisted short SF. A bit of a disappointing week, all round: this year's 'Best Short Story' Hugo shortlist is not the greatest I've ever seen – I predict either Kij Jonson's Nebula-winning 'Ponies' or Peter Watts's 'The Things' will win, even though the former lacks substance and the latter is essentially fan fiction, but they do have varied strengths. Regarding the Aurealis Awards, I was disappointed that the winning short story was the only one shortlisted to be made available online (I'd also like to see a go-to flagship webzine for Australian/NZ science fiction, in fact I'm surprised one doesn't exist already).

K.J. Bishop, 'The Heart of a Mouse',  (SUBTERRANEAN PRESS, WINTER 2010)
This was last week's winner of the 2010 Aurealis Award for 'best short story'. It takes time to mentally establish the kind of apocalypse that has befallen humanity before this story begins (like no other, in fact: we've somehow been genetically altered to take on animal forms), and what follows does make a certain kind of extrapolative sense regarding a violent father and his weak son who have become rodents. But it's hard to figure out the purpose of this weirdness; it's both uncomfortably macho and at the same time despairing, and the story is something akin to a parody that leaves plenty unexplained (although I felt that's actually a plus point). What I'm still puzzled about is what it does say beyond the immediate narrative, therefore this is not a story that will be forgotten easily and its Aurealis win adds an extra aura to its mystery. Even though I've not been able to read the rest of the shortlist I still would not have singled this out as a likely award-winner, as uncompromisingly punchy as it is.

Mary Robinette Kowal, 'For Want of a Nail',  (ASIMOV'S, SEPTEMBER 2010)
Asimov's was probably an appropriate venue for this story, and given that it's an exploration of the capacity for artificial intelligences to deceive humans it reminded me a little of the procedural nature of Asimov's The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. It reads easily with some good dialogue, and set on a generation starship it's a family story that's rightly told in a minor key, but I had trouble really engaging with it as it feels like an excerpt from a much longer work or series (it isn't, as far as I know). It shares a couple of themes with Carrie Vaughn's story 'Amaryllis' (below), those of reproductive rights and resource limitations and how they are connected in a tightly bound environment, but while 'For Want of a Nail' is indeed a good story, it's still not of the calibre I'd like to find on a Hugo shortlist.

Eric James Stone, 'That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made',  (ANALOG, SEPTEMBER 2010)
Last week I said LDS fiction would be an interesting genre niche to explore, then something goes and wins a 'best novelette' Nebula the following day. Okay, like a whole lotta people I have major problems with this story: the protagonist is a Mormon missionary stationed deep inside the sun (!) where ancient star-inhabiting aliens have converted to his faith, and the plot resolution, ie. the moral point to the story, is simply to reiterate that Love Conquers All. For me the setting is an unconvincing stretch too far, the story itself is a preachy Babylon 5-lite drama, and I could barely suspend my disbelief throughout. What am I missing? Please tell me there's more to it than this, because it really doesn't feel worthy of a Nebula at all.

Carrie Vaughn, 'Amaryllis',  (LIGHTSPEED, JUNE 2010)
This was the admirable Lightspeed Magazine's first ever story but IMHO it wasn't the strongest start. It concerns the lives of a near-future fishing boat crew for whom society's overpopulation pressures mean reproduction has to be strictly controlled and their resource capture can't exceed an allotted amount. It's the weakest story on this year's Hugo 'short story' shortlist; it has an interesting setting (the dystopian aspects of which are debatable) and some decent enough characterisation, but its straightforward human-angle story plus the simple resolution left me feeling it needed far more drama than was on offer to make it stand out enough for a Hugo.

Favourite short story of the week: Harry Kemelman, 'The Nine Mile Walk'  (ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, APRIL 1947)
This crime classic displays the kind of high literary concept that evidently deserves to be stumbled upon by new generations of readers and writers, and its idiosyncratic playing with the language is what ought to keep at bay any literary evanescence. Nicky Welt is an English Language and Literature professor whose occasional dealings with the law (over the course of eight short stories) ended with solved crimes based on his knowledge of language and human nature, in that respect rather like Chesterton's Father Brown. Considered by the likes of Borges, Bioy Casares, Hillerman, and Penzler (yes, all of them) to be one of the best mystery stories ever written, this requires at least a basic understanding of inference and has its origins in advanced composition classes Kemelman was teaching at the time. Language itself is the marrow of this short story, and it is a rather ingenious realisation of its possibilities. I would love to find more stories that stretch our use of language like this.