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

 
There's the usual amount of excitement and head-scratching around this year's Hugo nominees, announced yesterday.  I think I set a new record this year for trying to read as many different potential nominees as possible before the voting deadline (and even continuing somewhat afterward), and it helped a little, but in the short story category, where a single vote has the most influence, I came up empty.  So let's run through the fiction categories.

Best Novel.  Two obvious candidates made the list, China Mieville's The City & The City and Paolo Bacigalupi's first novel, The Windup Girl, both of which got wide notoriety in a variety of venues.  I was somewhat surprised that Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream didn't get a bid, although it was maybe too new to the US/Canadian market for enough people to have read it, but his work usually makes the ballot and he is after all guest of honor at this year's Worldcon.  Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock should probably be no surprise, as it is an expansion of a novella nominee from a couple of year's ago, and he's Canadian, like a good chunk of this year's voters since last year's Worldcon was in Montreal.  Likewise Robert Sawyer's Wake, as usual not a great crticial success (and not on the Locus recommended list) but always popular with the fans, and while he's Canadian too he probably would have made it anyway.  Cherie Priest's Boneshaker and Catherynne M. Valente's Palimpsest finish off this category, both were recommended, with the former making the Nebula ballot too, so no big surprise for either.  Based on demographics, reviews and name recognition, other books I thought might make the cut besides Robinson's include Iain Bank's Transition, Dan Simmons' Drood, and Paul Melko's The Walls of the Universe.  I enjoyed Nancy Kress's Steal Across the Sky enough to nominate it, but I didn't figure enough other people would agree for it to make the ballot.

Best Novella.  Since there aren't too many choices in this category, it's a little easier to handicap this one.  Ian McDonald's track record made "Vishnu at the Cat Circus" a shoo-in, along with Stross' "Palimpsest".  What are the odds of having two nominees in two different categories with the same name?  I was a bit surprised that James Morrow's "Shambling Towards Hiroshima" made it, I always enjoy his work and it got my vote but I guess it wasn't overtly political or blasphemous enough to keep others from picking it too.  "Act One" by Nancy Kress was another good story from last year's winner in this category, so no big surprise there.  John Scalzi's "The God Engines" didn't make the Locus list but it was published so late in the year maybe they didn't consider it to make the cut.  It's by all accounts a bit of a departure for him, which from my point of view is a good thing.  Lastly is Kage Baker's "The Women of Nell Gwynne’s", like the Scalzi a Nebula nominee and another small press chapbook, but this one is already out of print, making me wonder how many voters actually read it.  Baker sadly died of cancer just a few months ago, but had been nominated in the past and had enough of a consistently high body of work that this shouldn't just be a sympathy vote.  Contenders which didn't get the votes include Michael Flynn's "Where the Winds are All Asleep", which I liked enough to nominate, Greg Egan's "Hot Rock" (thanks for nothing to his fellow Australians), and Paul McAuley's "Crimes and Glory" which was picked for both the Horton and Dozois Year's Best anthologies. 

Best Novelette.  So far so good, but things start to break down a bit when we get to novelettes.  It's not that unworthy stories were nominated, but they were chosen over ones that you would expect had better chances. Let's first cover the ones that got left out.  I read seven candidates based mostly on their anthology ratio, and the only one to make the ballot was Peter Watts' "The Island".  Another Canadian, true, and also the only novelette to make all four Year's Best anthologies, so even his recent legal troubles probably didn't have much of an effect one way or the other.  Two novelettes by his countryman Wilson were ignored, "Utriusque Cosmi" and "This Peaceable Land".  John Kessel's "Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance" was more of a long shot, as was Damien Broderick's "This Wind Blowing and this Tide", although both stories were picked for two Year's Best books.  Stephen Baxter always has a shot and "Formidable Caress" was a good high-concept sense-of-wonder story, but not enough for this time around it seems.  Triply anthologized to no avail were Bruce Sterling's "Black Swan" (languishing in Interzone) and fan-favorite Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's "Mongoose" (from a horror anthology). 

So besides Watts, a few of the other nominees were well regarded enough to make multiple lists even though they came from various sources.  Paul Cornell must be thrilled to have a writing Hugo nomination for "One of our Bastards is Missing", also picked by the Dozois and Hartwell/Cramer anthologies.  Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two" was by many accounts the best thing about the Eclipse 3 anthology.  And Rachel Swirsky's "Eros, Philia, Agape", while a lesser known name, also got a couple of anthology picks and another story of hers from last year is on the Nebula ballot.  That leaves Stross' "Overtime", left off of every list including Locus but the cult of the personality prevails and I'm sure is still worth reading, and an Interzone story by someone named Eugie Foster called "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" for some reason, which made the Nebula ballot and nothing else, but he still has the last laugh. 

Short Stories.  Here I sit left in the lurch once again by the final short story list, which ignored every one of the 12 stories I read including all the ones I voted for.  This is the only fiction category with five nominees, and only one of them made a Year's Best anthology or the Locus list, and that was "Spar" by Kij Johnson, a nominee from last year.  "Spar" is also on the Nebula ballot, as are Locus wannabees but double nominees “Bridesicle”, by Will McIntosh, and “Non-Zero Probabilities”, by N.K. Jemisin.  Hugo voting rules indicate at least one Mike Resnick story must be nominated, and this year it is “The Bride of Frankenstein".  Lastly is Lawrence Schoen's "The Moment", from an obscure anthology and seeimingly completely out of left field, but we'll take a look and see what the deal is.

So who got snubbed for short fiction?  Number one is probably Geoff Ryman's "Blocked", picked for three Year's Bests but maybe too literary for the Hugo crowd?  Doubly anthologized but still ignored were, from the magazines, "A Story, With Beans" by Steven Gould, "As Women Fight" by Sara Genge (as worthy a contender as any of the others that made it), "Erosion" by Ian Creasey and "Before My Last Breath" by Robert Reed, along with online and anthology candidates "Edison's Frankenstein"  by Chris Roberson,
"On the Human Plan" by Jay Lake, and "Bespoke" by Genevieve Valentine.  Mostly not household names, but neither are the ones who actually ended up on the ballot.  And while I didn't think Jim Kelly's "Going Deep" was one of his better efforts, it still made the Strahan Year's Best and could have gotten in just on the author's reputation and the story's visibility. 

So I'm glad I didn't invest in Galileo's Dream when I didn't need to, and I'm even happier that I didn't pay big bucks for the British edition of the Tales of the Dying Earth anthology.  The novel nominees all look worthy, although I'm a bit worried about Palimpsest, sounds like a lot of stuff I don't particularly like to read.  Novellas are mostly in the bag already, hoping the Baker story turns up online soon.  Having read a reasonable cross-section of un-nominated shorter fiction, it will be interesting to see not only how the actual nominees fall out but how they measure up against the higher profile stories that got left behind.  Worldcon is late, so there are four whole months to get through everything, maybe I'll even have time to peruse the work of the some of the Campbell nominees.  Now that would be a first.
posted by Mark at 3:42 PM

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(published by Tachyon)


Published as a short novel, Morrow's latest work follows on from his more accessible style in which he engages the reader with some wry, quirky characterizations plunked down into a unique situation that is very real to them but somewhat allegorical or satirical to the rest of us.  Here he's absorbed much of what there is to know about low budget horror and monster movies of the golden age of filmmaking, with a number of cameo appearances by real people, including James Whale, who directed the first iconic Frankenstein movie.

The story concerns aging B-movie star Syms Thorley, who in the recent past is writing his memoirs from a hotel where he is a guest of a monster movie fan convention, receiving an award for his career achievements.  The narrative gives him the opportunity to reveal some secret history of his movie career while at the same time exorcising a few demons while he tries to decide whether to kill himself or not.  Morrow easily shifts forward between the present and the story Thorley is writing about, which concerns his duty during World War II in helping the government convince the Japanese that the US military was on verge of unleashing giant reptiles against their shores.  The G-men have the somewhat uncharacteristically humane idea that it would be preferable to convince the enemy of the destructive potential of this threat without having to actually deploy it, so they enlist Syms to recreate his reknowned performance as Gorgantis for a government-produced movie, directed  by Whale, which would then be shown to Japanese representatives as though it were evidence of the real monsters destroying a city.  Syms is bemused by the whole idea, but as an actor rises to the challenge.

Where Morrow seems to be going with this is contrasting this somewhat ridiculous secret project to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, although Syms' memoir doesn't really spend too much time drawing parallels between them.  The movie is made (in fact it's hardly even a movie at all as it seems to play out in real time to the Japanese emissaries as it is being filmed), the results are mixed, and the war plays out pretty much the way we remember.  The main dramatic moment comes when his archrival in the B-movie business tries to hold him hostage for the rights to what he thinks is a new movie monster, but it seems kind of pointless to the action, although it does illustrate a fateful turn in Syms' career.  In the present story, Syms has introspective encounters with a hooker and a hotel bellhop, to whom he tries to give away the meager amount of worldy goods he has in his possession there. 

But in the end what the reader is supposed to make of this entertaining but somewhat aimless story is left open to interpretation.  If Syms is speaking for western civilization, then are we to conclude that his best effort to bring peace through intimidation was doomed to fall short, and that dropping the bomb was the "least bad" way to end the war?  In the present there seems to be more revisionist views of those events and whether destroying Hiroshima was really necessary, but one way to look at this book is that we were moving towards something on that scale of horror with some level of inevitability.  Unleashing the real giant reptiles carried some degree of risk too because there was no guarantee they could be completely controlled and end up turning on the rest of the world.  There's also a certain sense of nostalgia here for this somewhat more innocent time where what we thought of then as horror depicted in the old movies didn't really prepare us for what happened during World War II, and at the same time paved the way for all the post-war Japanese angst and self-doubt that manifested itself in decades of their monster movies.  Morrow ends up with a very worthwhile story, both humorous and poignant by turns and well worth checking out, even if the end result is a little more mellow than you might expect.
posted by Mark at 10:19 PM

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