mataglap -- an Indonesian word meaning "dark eye" or, probably, "dilated eye." It is an indication that someone is about to go berserk and start killing people at random. Used in Walter Jon Williams' novel Aristoi as the name of a berserk form of nanotechnology that devoured the planet.

You can e-mail Mataglap SF at mataglap@yahoo.com

 
BSFA nominee 2005

After several successive largish volumes of baroque dystopian space opera with a hard astrophysics slant, Reynolds tries something marginally different by combining a similar baroque dystopian background with a 50's noir crime story set in Paris.  Floyd is the hard-boiled protagonist detective, hired to investigate the apparently accidental death of a young woman by her landlord, who is the first of many characters with motives which are somewhat hyperbolic in order to keep the plot moving.  But while this is all going on, a couple of hundred years in the future Earth is in ruins and the remaining humans have divided themselves into Slashers and Threshers, based on their feelings towards nanotech, which is basically how the Earth got the way it is now.  Auger is an archeologist of sorts who gets roped into a dicey project to retrieve the documents left behind by Floyd's investigatee.  Because while the two stories are told in parallel they are in fact happening at the same time, Auger's on the real Earth or what's left of it, and Floyd's in a simulation contained within what sounds like a Dyson sphere, where time stood still for a bunch of years until a portal between the worlds was opened, and some genetic mutants known as "war babies" have infiltrated and changed history to keep this contained Earth from developing space travel, so that they have enough time to muster their forces and destroy the entire planet.  For some reason.

Reynolds is full of big ideas and he presents them with such conviction that it really doesn't matter whether they hold up or not, the important thing is that he believes they do, and he's smarter than me, so I'm more than happy to just go along for the ride.  If anything this book is a little simpler than his "Revelation Space" type novels, it helps to have much of the story grounded in Earth's alternate past, and while there's still plenty of backstabbing future-politics raging between various factions which drives most of the characters' actions and interactions, it's not nearly as hard to follow as I've seen in his previous books.  Once they meet and team up, Auger and Floyd of course have to fall in love, and during the course of the novel Reynolds throws them into one impossible no-win situation after another, such that they collectively use up more lives than a houseful of cats.  In some respects it diminishes the excitement, because with only the two of them facing most of the action you know they're going to make it through, Reynolds might have been better served by adding a couple more main characters to the story.  Most of the supporting cast are interesting enough, but again their motiviations seem circumspect, and in the case of Floyd's detective partner Custine I still can't figure out why there's a whole sub-plot about him being on the run from the authorities.  And for all Floyd's likability, he takes the future shock of exposure to Auger's reality pretty easily, and it seems a little farfetched that he could infer from an intangible flatness to the sound of some jazz records that they contain coded digital messages.

I don't read much crime fiction so maybe this is a trope, but one could argue that Reynolds is purposefully introducing red herrings and diverging stories that don't go anywhere to keep you guessing as to what's really going to happen, and for that matter to more closely mirror what real life is like.  But unlike Dickens at least, he doesn't tie up most of those loose ends, unless there's a sequel still cooking somewhere, which there certainly could be.  And unlike Stross, the nano-techno stuff isn't the main focus of the narrative.  Reynolds has a great way with metaphors, and his big science ideas are often so big that they've gone past you in favor of the next big idea before you've completely figured out the implications of it all.  While he's all about sense of wonder, it's sense of wonder in a hurry, which I suppose is probably how Floyd is experiencing it, too much to take in as it happens, just keep going and file it away for later.  The colorful similes and strong, wise-cracking, foul-mouthed female characters are just a couple of the more obvious ways Reynolds moves the plot along, the details of making people's actions seem logical or natural sometimes get short shrift.  From most other writers I would find this irritating, but with this one I'll cut him some slack.  Reynolds puts together an audacious set of ideas on a huge canvas, and ironically in this book at least he's holding back, focusing his story enough so you can at least have a chance of keeping up.  It makes me want to read more of his books, both the ones he's written since and the ones I've already read, so you have to consider it a resounding success on that point alone.
posted by Mark at 10:17 PM

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Here's an odd little existentialist story, more a collection of vignettes and observations surrounding Aimee and her 26 monkeys, who travel around performing at local fairs.  The big finale of their act involves getting all the various types of monkeys into a bathtub, from which they abruptly disappear.  No one knows how they do this, least of all Aimee, but they always come back over the course of the next few hours, usually with some interesting little objects.  Aimee seems to enjoy this life, after having impulsively acquired the monkeys and all the trappings of the act from the previous owner, but she exists mostly in the present, she's not quite sure how she got to that point or where to go from here.  The abyss could be the unknown dimension into which the monkeys vanish, or more metaphorically it could also be the emptiness from where the monkeys seem to be rescuing Aimee.  Within a short space Johnson puts together an interesting glimpse into a larger continuity, and at the end you get something of a clue as to where the monkeys go when they disappear, and maybe even why.  She presents the story in a series of 23 (why not 26?) numbered sections which are disconnected yet come together nicely to strike an appropriate evocative tone.  Basically simple but with a larger purpose, which is exactly what a short story should be.


posted by Mark at 10:41 AM

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Those poor souls who don't like to read fiction tend to claim, "Why would I want to read about something that never happened?"  Even moreso with science fiction, where you typically read about something that can't or won't happen.  So along comes Michael Swanwick, who out of his disturbed imagination pulls together bits and pieces of different tropes to create a world that has so many different antecedents that you can't figure out why he bothers except to show off.   The milieu of this story is one he's used in other nominated efforts, but every time he's poking around in different corners.  It's a mixture of elves and dwarves, underground cities, horses and motorcycles and subway trains, with throwaway references to things like Pepsi and Kawasaki that hint that there must be some connection to our own world, but whether now, past or future we can't tell.

Lord Weary is a would-be underground kingpin who leads a ragtag band of various mythical humanoids, living in a vast underground network of tunnels and sewers beneath a city.  The protagonist is Will, who stumbles into Weary's camp while on the run for some reason he doesn't completely understand.  He ends up signing up to serve in Weary's informal battalion, and helps engineer a few skirmishes to steal some horses and lead a raid against some surface dwellers, with the ultimate goal of getting the boss to attain something known as the Obsidian Throne.  For much of story you just go along for the ride, there's nothing too deep going on here, and then in the last few pages Swanwick pulls out the rug and calls into question the reality of everything and everyone you've just been paying attention to for the last 30+ pages.  In spite of the fact that this world is such a hodgepodge of other realities, such that there don't seem to be many rules, Swanwick is still able to do an about-face and catch the reader off-guard.  My overall opinion of the story suddenly went up dramatically at that point.  Maybe it's just a gimmick, in that at the conclusion there's no significant lesson to be learned from all this, with or without the twist, but at least it shows he had a plan and wasn't just making it up as he went along.

Having said that, the story, to my taste, is a bit of a drag.  I keep visualizing this cinematically, and it reads a lot like those awful post-apocalyptic biker movies where everything is shot kind of murkily and all the costumes are just scraps of whatever is lying around and all the characters look basically punked-out but otherwise alike and you watch without any idea what's going on or what is the motivation of anyone on the screen.  In fact it's so similar that it makes me wonder if Swanwick watched the same movies and assimilated some of that into his punk biker underground elfworld.  In a larger story you might get more subplots and more fleshed-out characters and a theme that fits best to this particular world.  The story you have here is worth a read, but at the end I don't have enough bits to hang on to that will make it memorable.


posted by Mark at 9:41 PM

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This story and author both came out of nowhere as a pleasant surprise.  A longish novella by an unfamiliar name would normally not inspire my confidence, but it was liked enough to get nominated, and it turns out with good reason for once.  Melko, who has written a handful of stories prior to this but none that achieved much notoriety, has put forth a well-plotted, well-paced, character driven exploration of a boy caught in an endless progression of parallel universes, actually parallel northwest Ohios.  John Rayburn is a farm boy who one day out of the blue encounters his double, who has somehow come upon a simple device to shift from one quantum universe to another.  Purists will quibble with the fact that the device's provenance is never explained, which then means there is no indication of how it works or how it even came into John's possession.  So maybe it's a fantasy story then, except that when John the farmboy gives it a try he finds that John Prime wasn't completely forthcoming with the machine's limitations.  What follows are then two parallels stories, with John the farmboy trying to figure out how to get back to his own dimension or quantum universe or whatever you want to call it, and John Prime trying to make use of proprietary information gathered from other universes to get rich and hooked up with his childhood sweetheart.

Once John has realized his predicament and starts to focus on the device itself and how to find a way back to his own world, he does the sensible thing and looks up a university physics professor, although it takes several tries to be taken seriously.  The author delves a little bit into the basic idea behind quantum universes to give the story a more science-oriented focus than if it were just written as straight "fabulist" fiction, but it's not enough that John Campbell would have bought it, and the progression from one universe to the next produces huge contrasts when it's convenient to the plot, followed by several nearly identical worlds in a row when that suits the next scene.  But he offers a compelling variety of different versions of John's world, highlighting different variations so that both John and the reader can easily extrapolate just how many variations there could be out there.  Melko has also thought of most of the primary pitfalls of jumps between worlds and how you could end up underground or embedded in cement, fortunately there aren't big enough variations in most of the universes where this becomes a common problem.

What's also interesting are the variations in the same person across universes, particularly John himself.  While farmboy John is fairly meek by nature, he can be a bit of a hothead at times.  This is nicely balanced by John Prime, where the impetuous side of his personality seems dominant, but occasionally he can lapse into a wistful nostalgia for home and family.  In the end both versions find some kind of satisfaction with their chosen surroundings, although not what they initially would have thought or wished for.  There's something to be chewed over after reading this story on the nature of causality and free will, not just for yourself but those around you, and those who came long before, and how it can ultimately affect just the one version of you that you know about.

There's a lot to like about this story, it focuses on a small cast and it doesn't go on too long, and while the story ends satisfactorily there is still plenty more to tell (in fact Melko has since expanded this into a novel).  Parallel universe stories were always thought to be too complicated for Hollywood to handle, but with recent releases like Star Trek having major success, I would have to think there's a screenplay of this being shopped around now.  It doesn't break any new ground stylistically and the premise seems obvious in retrospect, but Melko makes it work with very readable prose that makes this a worthy Hugo nominee.
posted by Mark at 9:18 PM

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First-time nominee William Shunn puts forth this intriguing short novella, probably nominated more for its potential than for what it actually ends up with, but still a very readable story in its own right.  In some indeterminate future there exists a massive space station, home to two million workers who've been there enough generations to evolve into their own quasi-socialist society, although still with plenty of have-nots.  Among that group is the protagonist, a 15-year old named Jude who grows up in a very strict religious community who mostly shun (pardon the expression) all the trappings of modern living, which include rampant body modifications.  But this community, the Guild, are the underclass, poor and in debt to the station management, so Jude's father Thomas sends him to work out among the "Sculpted", exposing him to a series of lifestyles Jude barely knew existed, with of course the admonishment not to stray from his luddite faith.

Within the station is an interesting set of dynamics that can only be touched on within the confines of this story length.  Shunn is more interested with his young hero's coming of age, which is mostly a very conventional set of unfamiliar feelings about his sexuality, his relationship with his father, his devotion to his faith but at the same time being tempted by the other side.  The title stems from the Guild's worship of the Builder and the six classical simple machines, including the inclined plane, which these followers view as a path towards enlightenment.  But Jude's path takes a less fundamentalist turn once he's encountered and starts working closely with the Sculpted.  While he's essentially been brainwashed since birth to disavow what he sees and hears, the appeal of how the other half lives and their seeming ease with it all still has its allure.  Central to his crisis of conscience is the opportunity to make more money for his Guild, if only he agrees to a small body modification that allows him to live in vacuum for short periods of time. 

The revelations come fast and furious at the end, and you ultimately get the sense that this was really just the prologue to a larger story about Jude showing how he rose above his humble origins.  Shunn doesn't directly take on religion, but there would seem to be quite a bit of prodding within the text at the stifling nature of dogma, and the notion of keeping the outside world at bay for the greater good of the community.  But for a novella-length, it seems those issues aren't really explored enough, such that the plot, straightforward as it is, comes across as rather conventional.  For such a vast station, the drama is played out with a very small cast, and it's missing some sense of the overall scope of the artificial world in which the characters live, which after all is the only world they know.   In the end, this story is a reasonably good read that hints at plenty of material from which to build an epic, but by focusing instead on a mostly conventional plot the reader ends up with something that's not as memorable as it could have been.
posted by Mark at 9:48 PM

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Anyone who has browsed around on this site knows Ian McDonald is one of my least favorite writers, but it's not necessarily his fault, and of course he has many admirers who think enough of his work to get just about anything nominated that has his name on it.  So here we have this story, set in the same universe as "River of Gods", which I still haven't been able to bring myself to read yet, but it doesn't really matter.  In a future Delhi, the human residents share the city with the semi-mythical djinn, which are some kind of nanobot AI that seem to still manifest themselves in human form occasionally and have actual names and responsibilities.  The story focuses on Esha, a traditional dancer who becomes entangled with one of those djinn named A.J., and ultimately they get married.  Needless to say there are some insurmountable problems of coping with each other's daily lives and habits, and Esha as it turns out can't really cope, to the point that she plots against her husband.

So as far as it goes, the plot doesn't really cover anything particularly original, but as we know from McDonald's other writing that isn't his point, he's come up with a richly detailed exotic future full of foreign words and place names that are rattled off without explanation, with a whole political subplot in the background around two competing regions fighting over whether a dam gets built or not.  In the midst of all this high-stakes intrigue, this small personal story gets played out, and in some respect affects the course of history, so there is that element.  Also, McDonald would seem to have taken as a point of departure the notion that swarms of self-aware nanobot AI are the real explanation behind the mythical genie (i.e. djinn), and they seem to be something that has always existed and not just created by humans.   Esha is stubborn and independent minded enough to get herself married to one, but as a reader you can't really see why she would, and she obviously hasn't thought this through as it doesn't take long for her to realize that A.J is, for all his human trappings, alien in the extreme.

Unlike many McDonald stories, this one has a linear, comprehensible plot with a beginning, middle and end, which should be a good thing, but I feel once again like it fails to live up to the backdrop that he has so meticulously assembled around it.  By making the story easily related to and following a more conventional narrative, you can't help but focus your attention more towards plot and away from setting, but since the plot is kind of thin, I find the end result unsatisfying.
posted by Mark at 10:26 PM

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Rosenbaum's story takes place towards the latter end of the universe, where some sort of post-human priest named Matthias is tinkering with a number of individual worlds in various stages of creation. A pilgrim, representing the "old ones" who created him, comes to visit, having heard of his efforts to create a brand new universe, in which they are very interested as the current one is dying. Parallel to this are brief vignettes from six-year old Sophie, inhabitant of this new universe, who is caught in the middle of a violent argument between her parents. Matthias is able to fend off the pilgrim's attempts to take over by retreating into Sophie's teddy bear, at the same time providing the little girl with some extra resolve to try to make things right.

There's a lot going on here in a very short amount of space, this story is really a prose poem in its use of language to describe setting and mood. Rosenbaum very deftly juxtaposes the medieval aspect of priest and pilgrim with their actual embodiment as essentially computer-based lifeforms. I won't pretend to understand what the author is trying to say here, I suspect given its poetic structure you could take this several ways, but he's mostly poking at the corners of metaphysics and the idea of how sentient existence can relate to a series of bubble universes. Certainly ambitious, nicely evocative, maybe a little pretentious, but in this short form you have the opportunity to read it a couple of times and at least get a sense of wonder out of the story and the author's unorthodox imagination.
posted by Mark at 3:15 PM

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Two previous nominees team up to deliver a story that manages to be way out there and yet deals primarily with a small cast of characters. What these characters are, despite their human names, emotions and speech patterns, isn't entirely clear, they would seem to be parts of some sort of cloud of replicated intelligences, with tentacles and gills and yet behaving more like a group consciouness or swarm of nano-machines, you can't really tell if they're biological or just pretending to be or they just think they are. This difficulty in establishing the form of the characters obviously detracts from the story they are living out.

There would seem to be a world of consciousness called Beebe, living off a comet somehow, who have some long-standing grudge against a similar organism called Demiurge. These two are at odds until they find the need to unite against a common enemy called Brobdignag, which apparently just wants to devour everything in its path. Parts of the larger entities, with their own names like Alonzo and Nadia, conceive somehow a new entity called Firmament just for the purpose of taking on Brobdignag, centering around a planet called Byzantium. The good guys prevail, for what its worth.

I have managed to miss Rosenbaum's previously nominated stories, nothing personal, but my guess would be he's the one with the more poetic, colorful expository sections. Presumbly Doctorow, based on my encounters with his other work, provides much of the dialog and a lot of computer references. These serve to help bring the story more down to earth (not Earth, just to comprehensibility), but they can be sort of jarring too, such that the tone of the story seems inconsistent from one section to the next (and there are a lot of sections). There are some interesting concepts floating around here with these swarms of sentient group organisms or nano or whatever the hell they are. Beyond the basic plot is some ulterior quest to discover the secret of determining whether this is all a dream and if so then whose? But after a very long slog you can't be quite sure what the fuss was about, since the characters are obviously not human even if they want to be or think they are. Why are there sockpuppets in the story? What if anything does this have to do with Vinge's "True Names"? These two worthy writers have come up with the makings for a fascinating milieu, but the plot they choose to expand upon is not worthy of the setting, at least in the amount of space they've chosen to use. The ingredients for a great story are in here, but this isn't it.
posted by Mark at 9:18 PM

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While a couple of this year's novella nominees are so sfnal as to be essentially incomprehensible, Finlay gives us a story that is a compelling read and throws around a few questions and ideas worth pondering, but could be accused of not being science fictional enough. Following along from his 2002 Hugo-nominated novella "The Political Officer", this story features the return of that tale's protagonist, Max Nikomedes, who has the dubious occupation of double agent in the midst of an ongoing war between two quasi-religious factions whose motives are unclear. In that first story Max had to cause a nuclear accident on a spaceship in order to accomplish his objective and keep his cover, and this story picks up not too long after that where the ongoing skirmishes between his two rival masters lands him in the wrong place during an assassination attempt and ultimately bound for a labor camp.

The bulk of the story focuses on Max's efforts to stay alive and gain any advantage while being held prisoner, ultimately befriending a group of humans called Antaeans who have gone through enough genetic modification that they are no longer treated as humans. Finlay channels Solzhenitsyn in his account of the camp, from the looming specter of imminent death and mind-numbing misery to the conceit that many of the characters names are Russian. The underlying theme seems to be that when presented with two opposing points of view, such as in a civil war, everyone is compelled to choose a side and has to subsequently stand by that decision whether they want to or not, especially when it can quickly turn against them. I don't think there's anything too substantive to take away from this idea after having read the story, but Finlay does a creditable job in conveying the desperation and fragility of human life among the prisoners. There just isn't much science fiction in this story to make it significantly different from if it really did take place in Stalinist Russia. Yes, there are "aliens" in the form of the Antaeans, but they could just as easily be some indeterminate eastern European nationality, and everyone's motives are fairly universal, the whole thing between Max's two bosses and their corresponding factions is kind of vague and doesn't seem to be that important except to provide a reason for the plot.

At the end, Max has inevitably changed, with a deeper understanding of the distinction between oppressed and oppressors, but it's not exactly uplifting. At novella-length this story almost isn't long enough, in that everything seems to be leading up to Max's abduction to the camp, and yet his time in the camp goes by fairly quickly, and the ending is tied up in just a few pages, such that it's difficult to tell what the focus of the story was supposed to be. Still, well worth reading and with some broader questions to ponder, just not sure if it benefits from the trappings of sf or if it would be just as effective as non-genre fiction.

posted by Mark at 9:06 PM

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For those of you who enjoyed Scalzi's nominee from last year, The Last Colony, here it is again, retold from the viewpoint of the spunky teenage girl who saves her planet and achieves intergalactic peace where zillions of others have failed. It's hard to imagine the intent behind this, other than as an exercise for the author to see if he could actually do it. Scalzi admits that retelling the same story without becoming redundant and keeping them consistent is in fact very difficult, and I don't doubt it, the question the reader keeps coming back to is whether it is really worth it or not. The Last Colony was a good story, but it wasn't exactly Dune, does it really need to be given the same treatment as the Alexandria Quartet?

According to Scalzi, yes it does, there were a couple of missing parts in the last book that could have been filled in more, concerning both the "werewolves" and how Zoe ends up being given the one gizmo that can save her colony planet. So under the guise of presenting Zoe's side of the story, the author can correct these omissions and at the same time present Zoe in all her YA trappings as the "chosen one" of a race called the Obin, newly raised to consciousness thanks to her father, and who now consider her their sacred mascot. This is all very compelling for a younger reader who can envy or empathize with the hero who is "special", but in the context of the story it seems very contrived. Zoe and her friends are all supposed to be around 15, yet they all talk in wry ripostes that sound like they've just been introduced to the work of Oscar Wilde, and the adults aren't much better. Hundreds of years in the future, humanity's very existence is hanging by a thread, and everyone is trying to out-bon mot one another? Seems hard to believe to me, but maybe teenagers would eat this up.

Because most of the interesting parts of the story were told in The Last Colony, concerning the eternal John Terry and his final mission to lead a new settlement that turns out to be a giant sham created by his government to lure the enemy Conclave into their territory so they can be wiped out once and for all. The battles, the tense negotiations under the threat of treason, all happen off stage like a Shakespeare play, too expensive to produce. Zoe is mostly concerned with her interpersonal relationships and the events around her have an impact, but they are fleeting ones. When she's called upon to be an emissary for the enemy General Gau, we're in serious Heinlein mode, presumably on purpose, where the kid narrator does her duty and saves the world. Earlier parts of the book when the colonists first land on their new home seem straight out of Farmer in the Sky.

This isn't a bad book by any means, but I'm probably more complaining about its intent than its execution. Scalzi seems to have accomplished exactly what he set out to do, and by a certain standard that would be commendable and more than sufficient, but why this should be legitimately considered worthy of nomination for a Hugo is beyond me.
posted by Mark at 8:47 PM

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All you have to read is the title of this story to know that it must be a cross between Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein, and that's exactly the case. The originals were published only 5 years apart, but are very different in composition and tone, never mind the subject matter. I suppose I should recuse myself, since Austen bores me to tears, but Kessel has done a masterful job of channeling the right amount of Austen's prose style without getting too cumbersome. As the stories come together, if anything he starts to stray even more, introducing more Romantic tropes without succumbing to the overwrought style of Shelley's prose.

The story concerns the younger Bennett sisters, Kitty and Mary, after the older ones have been married off, when the mysterious and obviously troubled Dr. Frankenstein is a guest in their house. Frankenstein is shadowed by his creation, who seems to have taken matters into his own hands for finding a suitable bride to use as the doctor's next subject. The initial conversations around the dinner table between the Bennetts and Frankenstein sound the most like Austen, with every observation about human nature turning into Socratic dialog, made more relevant because Kessel can provide them with specific contemporary subjects like Darwinism to talk about. This all ties in nicely with the plot and provides plenty of foreshadowing.

He veers into Shelley-esque territory when the sisters encounter the monster during a raging thunderstorm, and Kitty is taken ill from the experience and her exposure to the elements. Given the circumstances, the monster's choice of bride isn't too hard to guess, and Kessel finishes up by integrating remaining pages into the last part of the original Frankenstein story, with tragic consequences for the doctor and many of those around him. I was dubious at the beginning of this story, since this was obviously not a send-up of Austen, but Kessel knows what he's about and makes the story work, even though the ending takes place primarily offstage and Mary's fate from the experience is spinsterhood and a career as a writer, which isn't particularly tragic or uplifting either. Still, an altogether successful pastiche, given the popularity of the two classic authors within the genre I'm surprised no one's done this before.
posted by Mark at 9:51 PM

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Bacigalupi makes a departure from his popular, poetic post-apocalyptic stories to focus on this quiet tale of a young Laotian man named Ong who comes as something of a refugee to a future US to work as a reporter. Rather than a newspaper, Ong's employer is some kind of umpteenth-generation web site where the news is tailored to what will get the most clicks and generate the most traffic, which in turns brings in the most revenue. The author concisely draws a very plausible near-future that isn't that much different than how tv news works today, except everything has moved to the web and a given story's success or failure can now be determined within minutes of its publication.

Ong has no interest in the type of story that generates traffic, choosing instead to focus on political or ecological stories that need attention but are inherently depressing. As a last resort to get his average up before he's fired and deported, Ong is given the opportunity to interview a reclusive Asian movie star named Kulaap, who helps him out by making some news in which he plays a part, giving him an exclusive angle to report the story and increase traffic to his byline. The gambler of the title initially refers to Ong's father, who was a gambler both in monetary terms and in western ideas in his repressed home country, but by the end Ong has become a gambler himself, choosing between popularity and importance in his reportage.

Bacigalupi tends to write stories that are generally depressing, his usual "post-oil" milieu doesn't come across as hopeful or redemptive or uplifting at all. The stories he chooses to write are those that make an easy extrapolation of the present into the near future, but with an immediacy and richness of detail that shows the reader just how close we are to seeing this come to pass. The world of The Gambler isn't as dystopian as what we normally get from him, but his protagonist still serves a similar function as a lone voice of reason in a future you would not prefer but which seems somehow inevitable. There may be some analogy there with the author himself, but either way this is a nicely done story.
posted by Mark at 8:56 PM

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To make up for my lack of anything substantive to say about this story, I have to start by wondering how it got nominated, not because of its quality, which is a separate debate, but only because it was published in an SF Book Club-only edition, which does not sound like it had a very large initial print run. I'm not aware of anyone active in SF who buys books from SF Book Club, an organization that is a shadow of its once-great self. If you've looked at their recently redesigned website, they now will sell you any book in print, and you have to squint to see whether its something available only through SFBC. The main reason I stopped buying their books was that most of the hardcovers I wanted could be had through Amazon for just about the same price, and it was worth a couple of dollars extra to get a real hardcover and not a cheaply made reprint.

A lack of accessibility both physical and literary does not seem to be an impediment for McDonald, who gets nominated for something year after year. You could say he is one of the major driving factors behind my writing down these reviews, since I would otherwise have no recollection of any details at all concerning "The Little Goddess", "Brasyl", or "The Djinn's Wife", nominees all. Unlike all of those, which take place in future or alternate South America or India, the Galactic Empires remit means we're in the far future, with a race of people who may be descended from humans and who manifest different personalities with different names at different points in their lives. The main viewpoint character starts out as a child named Ptey, but with each section of the story he transforms into another "manifold" with a different name, seeking out friends who have done the same thing, it must get very confusing after a while. Most of the characters have j's in their names in odd places, making them look similar and hard to pronounce. There are three planets involved, their homeworld Tay, another planet around a distant star with whom they have some tangled history, and a third planet Tejaphay, which is all water and may or may not support life. Due to time dilation effects, millions of years go by as Ptey matures, leaves home and ultimately returns, wars break out in which billions of people are killed in less than a sentence. At this scale, evolution is a factor in successive interactions among the characters, until at the end Ptey, in his older form as Oga, is reunited with his childhood friend Cjatay, who never was able to take on the extra personalities.

The main problem with McDonald's work is the density factor, the story he is trying to tell is a personal tale involving just a few characters, but it is set against a world-spanning backdrop over millions of years. This would still be okay if the backdrop was just that, but McDonald repeatedly insists on populating his universe with relentless details of its history, politics, religion, sexual interaction and traditions, creating a richly thought out and worked through canvas which only ends up dwarfing the actual story he is trying to tell. Plenty of people love this stuff, I think these are either people for whom plot isn't all that important, or who subconsciously read more into the story than is really there in order to better balance the overall effect. Since I don't fall into either camp, his work consistently comes up short for me, but I can't deny that it is endlessly imaginative and original, and McDonald is unmistakeable in the evocative nature of his prose. The Brits love him, if you can live with a serious penchant for LeGuin-itis, then he's your man.
posted by Mark at 9:34 PM

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Doctorow's first novel nomination is a rabblerouser aimed squarely at older teenagers, but must also appeal to your average flaming liberal regular Hugo voter. Hackers rise up against a corrupt government, what more could you ask for? Told from the point of view of 17-year old Marcus, the story is based on the premise that if there had been a second major terrorist attack within the U.S., the government's response would be a much wider and more oppresive crackdown on personal liberties under the guise of keeping people safe. If you've ever read or heard Doctorow before, you know he has a lengthy background in security and privacy issues as they relate to digital media and computer technology, so the novel serves as a soapbox on which he can point out all the ways the government can use these things to spy on people, whether they're under suspicion or not. The fact that people know they're being spied on can cause them to act suspiciously, which means the feds are spending a lot of money and wasting a lot of time going after the wrong people.

The story is set in San Francisco, and Marcus and his friends are in the wrong place when the attackers blow up the Bay Bridge. When the Department of Homeland Security mobilizes a sweep of possible suspects, they're all caught up in the dragnet, and since Marcus is a techno-geek already, he looks a little more suspect than most. His run-in with the DHS incites him to rise up against the oppressors, if anything making matters worse by fomenting dissent among his fellow hackers, who start an informal campaign of disruption that could be argued as a form of terrorism of its own. So you have three different kinds of "terrorism" at play here, the original attacks themselves, the government's crackdown on basic liberties in the name of security, and the hackers' retaliation against the crackdown through flashmobs and small-scale technological disruption. But Doctorow skirts around the ambiguity of the last kind, seeing it as a modern-day form of civil disobedience.

If you're not into detailed descriptions of cryptography, tunnelling, and various other low-level computer gunslinging, or if you think the Bush-era scorched earth response to terrorism is perfectly acceptable, then this probably isn't going to be that interesting of a read. Doctorow moves the story along at breakneck speed, those computer-oriented backstories don't get in the way, there's enough teenagers rising up against The Man (and young geeks in love) to satisfy the younger crowd, the nominating crowd I think appreciates the author's command of the subject matter and how he is able to weave together a bunch of real-world computer concepts into a compelling story. While Marcus is a bit of a goody-goody, he and the other main characters are all well-defined and have their own unique voices. For a kid, he probably is a little too informed on the comparison between urban areas in San Francisco and elsewhere, and the while the prose has the occasional clunky or awkward phrase, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he's doing it on purpose to keep within the character of the first person narrator.

Beyond the initial premise of the terrorist attack, and maybe the noticeably high percentage of Stalinists in the government, nothing else in the book is SF. Doctorow is using the trappings of the YA novel to reach a young audience with a warning message that your government is watching you (not to mention your school, advertisers, the RIAA, ad nauseam), and they really shouldn't be, and you can do something about it if you keep informed. This book can really change the way you think about the world, and does it in an entertaining, thought-provoking way, which after all is what science fiction is supposed to do.
posted by Mark at 9:20 AM

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If you're inclined to despair at the number of YA nominees for best novel in this year's Hugos, look no further than the annual entry by Charles Stross, which channels the sex and politics of Heinlein with the technology of Asimov into a somewhat entertaining mishmash that is Saturn's Children. In the future, robots have done such a good job of taking over all the tasks that humans would rather not do that humanity itself has died out, leaving the robots to make their own destiny. This poses particular problems for certain kinds of robots, starting with the protagonist, Freya, who comes from a line of, well, basically sexbots. She herself was not created until years after humanity's passing, there's still plenty of sex to be had with other robots (and not even just the humanoid variety), but it's just not the same thing. For dubious reasons she goes from a vague previous existence on an outpost of Venus to gradually becoming an interplanetary secret agent, giving the reader the grand tour of several planets within the solar system and without. One advantage, if you can call it that, of being a robot is that the lengthy travel times between worlds don't mean much to your overall lifespan, although they're still boring, and pesky problems like radiation are not particularly dangerous either.

Although Stross starts his story at the beginning, he does drop you into a future backstory that takes a while to be revealed. There's something of a method to his madness, since all this intrigue revolves seemingly around a plot to resuscitate humanity, which may have been humanity's plan all along. Freya herself isn't always privy to what's going on until well after it's already happened, such that some of the revelations late in the book don't pay off as satisfyingly as they could have. All the robot sex serves to make the story less grim and clanky than other Stross efforts, but it still seems a little silly, Heinlein at least seemed genuinely invested in the future of sex, but I've never gotten the impression that this is one of Stross's areas of interest. But he does do a good job of extrapolating a robot-centric Asimovian future realistically, to the point that much of the time the various characters don't even really need to be robots, but Stross still keeps their mechanoid origins and idiosyncracies front and center, less this devolve into just another future spy novel. At the end, things get kind of rushed and the main story sort of fizzles out, but for me it was okay as I was ready to move on by that point anyway.

You can't under-appreciate the magnitude of what Stross has done here, keeping the information density fairly high but still comprehensible, there are few throwaway techno-references, the backdrop is wide-ranging but still focuses on a few core characters, it's still at heart a personal story told against a much greater canvas that all seems to fit together very well. After it's over, maybe a little more canvas spread out over a few more pages would have given the story more heft, but the novel's forebears could achieve much with much less. The modern sf novel can't get away with the economy of means that Asimov or earlier Heinlein could, such that by today's standards this book comes across as a little too abrupt, and the perfunctory ending doesn't help mitigate that impression. Not as satisfying as Glasshouse, perhaps, but still worthwhile and completely different yet again from his prevous books, which should count for a lot.
posted by Mark at 11:26 AM

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