Best Novel

• Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
• Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
• The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
• Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdomsby N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Best Novella

• “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2010)
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
• “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All New Tales, William Morrow)
• “The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s, September 2010)
• “Troika” by Alastair Reynolds (Godlike Machines, Science Fiction Book Club)

Best Novelette

• “Eight Miles” by Sean McMullen (Analog, September 2010)

• “The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010)

• “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s, July 2010)

• “Plus or Minus” by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s, December 2010)

Over 15 years ago Asimov’s published what has arguably become Jim Kelly’s most famous story, “Think Like a Dinosaur”, which went on to win the Hugo in 1996. That story was widely recognized as a response or a commentary or a riff on “The Cold Equations”, one-hit wonder Tom Godwin’s even more famous story from the 1950’s in which a girl somehow stows away on board a spacecraft and has to be jettisoned in order to save the rest of the crew because the ratio of the mass of the ship to the amount of fuel is so exact that it can’t be adjusted for an extra passenger without killing everyone. “Think Like a Dinosaur” doesn’t really involve equations at all, but posits nanotechnology that can instantaneously transfer someone light years away into a brand new corporeal form, but their original form has to be destroyed for reasons that are more spiritual than scientific. The force of that story comes from its first person narrator, the tech operating the transfer machinery who must close the loop when the transfer malfunctions. Both stories paint their protagonists into a moral corner from which they can only escape by violating their own ethics and beliefs for a higher moral imperative.

In this new story, Kelly seems to be skirting close to this idea again, but maybe with more philosophical intent than before. Mariska is a young space monkey who has signed onto a boring multi-year stint on an asteroid mining ship to escape the yoke of her domineering mother, of whom she is a clone. The rest of the crew is of a similar age except for Beep, a grizzled old timer who is not really in charge, since the ship basically runs itself, but has some level of seniority. Still a hundred days from home, things go awry very suddenly when one of the crew members loses some large blocks of ice during a routine maneuver, such that there won’t be enough oxygen for everyone to survive the remainder of the trip. Seemingly within minutes, someone makes the decision to sacrifice himself in order to decrease the amount of oxygen being consumed and save everyone else. But it’s still not enough, Mariska takes matters into her own hands by going into hibernation, which carries its own risks, plus there’s no way to know just how much oxygen she can save as the level of hibernation is variable. Hence the plus or minus of the title, the equation this time isn’t quite as cold because one key property is an unknown quantity and can only be defined up front as a range.

At the end, again somewhat abruptly, Mariska is rescued by a ship thanks to her estranged mother. In some respects this story comes off as too short, there could be a little more time spent on the various life or death decisions that happen after the crisis, and Mariska’s shipmates could use a little more depth to allow the reader to care about them a little more. There’s some interesting moral ambiguity here too that could use some additional exploration. After all Mariska, in trying to save everyone, ended up saving only herself, sort of “The Cold Equations” in reverse, and even if she does reconcile with her mother, living with herself is going to be a difficult task. The narrator of “Think Like a Dinosaur” can at least take comfort in the fact that he had to kill someone who should have been dead already, who in the eyes of the dinos was no longer really alive even though she was still breathing and talking. But here as in Godwin’s original, the idea of redemption is left as an exercise for the reader, and it would seem that this time around Kelly’s protagonist can’t rely on the equations but must accept an element of chance, or fate. Either way, in the end she must still face the consequences.

• “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone (Analog, September 2010)

Best Short Story

• “Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed, June 2010)

• “For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, September 2010)

• “Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Tor.com, November 17, 2010)

This very short story involves a group of girls who own girl-sized, pastel-colored, winged unicorn ponies, primarily as a token to a rite of passage into the “in” crowd. Johnson tells the story in parable form, none of the girls are named except for the protagonist, and there’s a certain dreamy/nightmare approach to the prose. In order to be accepted by “TheOtherGirls”, Barbara confers with her pony Sunny about which of 3 characteristics she most wants to keep, her wings, voice or horn. The girls require her to remove the other two in order to be accepted into the group. Barbara and Sunny don’t realize until too late that the other ponies have their own rites too. While I guess you could say there’s some lesson in here about the cost of conformity, and how either different groups may have their own rules, or that the rules are arbitrary, or contradictory, or whatever, the story isn’t really long enough to make that kind of a point with any sort of depth. If this tale has any staying power, its in the juxtaposition of the reader’s identification with Barbara and the image of mutilation of My Little Ponies.

• “The Things” by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010)