Monthly Archives: April 2012

Links I found interesting for 15-04-2012

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2012 Hugos: Best Short Story

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I noticed John Scalzi’s challenge to his readers to read this year’s Best Short Story nominees, and thought that this would be as good a day as any to get through them myself. They are all short, they are all available for free online, and three of them are very good. My preferences will be allocated as follows (in traditional reverse order of preference).

6) “The Homecoming”, by Mike Resnick (PDF). The Hugo shortlists seem to feature a lot of stories about Alzheimer’s, and I have never read one in the short fiction categories that was any good at all. This is no exception. From the second page, when we learn that the narrator’s wife is succumbing to dementia, and that he is estranged from his visiting son because of the latter’s lifestyle choices (which are the only really sfnal element here), we know where this is going to go, and it is not in the least surprising. Or, really, much good. Resnick has five Hugos out of thirty nominations for his fiction.

5) “The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City“, by John Scalzi. This scores over the Resnick story in that it is a conscious effort to write a bad story (or, rather, a prologue to a bad unwritten novel). It doesn’t quite succeed; the style is uneven (more than was intended, I think, or certainly more than could work for me), and at one point it looks like a political satire, the Night Dragons being the imaginary threat waved by the ruling classes to stay in power, but then that is undermined by the concluding paragraphs. Mixing demotic language with a High Fantasy setting is tricky; Tolkien avoided it and Zelazny tried it but did not always succeed. This story is bad and not always for the right reasons. Scalzi has four previous Hugo nominations for his fiction, and two previous wins in non-fiction categories (and the not-a-Hugo Campbell Award).

4) No Award. Has never won any Hugo fiction category as far as I know; last won a Nebula for short story in 1970.

3) “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees“, by E. Lily Yu. This story of Hymenoptera politics in rural China brought me back to my former intellectual stamping ground of science and colonialism, and has elements of reversing the allegory of Animal Farm; it has some rather nicely detailed passages, and shows signs of dry wit as well as caustic commentary. However I felt it was a bit jerky – the first three paragraphs have three different points of view, and there are a couple of other awkward transition points. Still, I unreservedly recommend that you go read it. Yu has never been nominated for any Hugo category before.

2) “The Paper Menagerie”, by Ken Liu (PDF). Like the Resnick, this is a tale of familial drama, with a marginal (but significant) sfnal element; the narrator explains how he allowed himself to become estranged from his Chinese mother, who had the magical gift of making origami creatures come alive. I thought this was more honest and much less cloying than the Resnick story, daring to actually be sad. The metaphor is fairly heavy (and we never find out the names of the Chinese girls who translate the mother’s words to him and to his father at crucial moments), but it’s very beautifully written and captures the marginalised schoolboy very memorably. Liu has also never been nominated for any Hugo category before.

1) “Movement“, by Nancy Fulda. I didn’t think I had a dog in this fight, but when I saw that this story’s subtitle is “A Short Story About Autism In The Future” I realised I would probably put it either top or bottom of my list. I commented above about SF not doing Alzheimer’s well; the genre has a more complex relationship with autism, not only the disposable autistic child of Sarah Pinborough’s Into the Silence but also some better examples. Fulda has dared to write a story from an autistic perspective about a possible cure (giving herself a little latitude by making the particular condition a fictional one), along with some nice world-building for her future setting. I thought it worked very well, and have no hesitation in putting it top of my ballot. Fulda is another first-time nominee; indeed she is the only author on this list with no entries in the Locus Awards index at all.

It is encouraging that there are three first-time nominees on this list, and that none of the three are white men.

See also: Best Dramatic Presentation.

April Books 3) The Godmother’s Apprentice, by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

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Yet another of the sff books with an Irish setting which I’ve had hanging around the shelves for a while, the second of a three-part YA series about a sassy American girl from Seattle who is in training to become a fairy godmother, and is sent to a mid-1990s Ireland for a learning experience involving legendary figures plucked both from the more respectable sources of lore and from Yeats and placed in the gritty tail end of the twentieth century. Scarborough’s handling of Northern Ireland is not terribly adept and her geography elsewhere but she is clearly trying hard with the Dublin and Wicklow settings, and her attempts at dialect are not too excruciating. Not a particularly challenging book, but not too objectionable either.

Links I found interesting for 13-04-2012

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2012 Hugos: Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

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When the Hugo nominations were announced on Saturday night, I was not terribly surprised that I had already seen the majority of the shortlist in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category. I was slightly surprised that I had seen four out of the five, and that I had never heard of the fifth, Remedial Chaos Theory, an episode of the American sitcom Community in which a group of friends meeting for dinner must choose who goes downstairs to pick up the pizzas, and we then follow seven different timelines over the next twenty minutes as each of the seven gets their alternate-history turn, with hilarious consequences, for certain values of hilarious.

I suppose it just about qualifies as Hugo-eligible, but only to the same extent as the film Sliding Doors. The only thing that really surprised me about it was my discovery that Chevy Chase is still acting. It goes firmly to the sixth place in my list.

Next in order comes Chris Garcia’s (and James Bacon’s) acceptance speech at the Hugos last year. It was a lovely heartwarming human moment, but I would find it deeply embarrassing if it came anywhere near winning; it’s a joke nomination, not even as serious as last year’s Rachel Bloom video.

In fourth place, No Award.

Doctor Who has done well this year. We have had three Who stories in the mix before, but never with such weak opposition. But I found it pretty easy to rank them as follows:

In third place, A Good Man Goes To War, which had lots of brilliant bits including a lesbian reptile woman but was not wholly satisfactory in tying them together, in resolving the first half of the season, or in setting up the second half. I would not be devastated if this episode won, but I think it’s unlikely. In particular, it will be completely impenetrable to non-Who fans, though I don’t know how large a fraction of the voting base they are.

In second place, The Girl Who Waited. This was much better executed because it was a single idea, without too much ambition in terms of sets and CGI, and it allowed Karen Gillan a decent opportunity to function in the limelight in which she comprehensively succeeded. I think it is probably the most accessible of the three stories for non-Who fans; the notion of three time-travellers, one of whom gets caught in a different time zone to the others, is pretty accessible. In a different year it would be a strong contender for the top spot.

But I will be astonished if The Doctor’s Wife does not take first place by a very large margin, and my vote will be among those making it so. Neil Gaiman had never made a secret of his desire to write for Who some day, and he took the most basic part of the show apart from the title character, and gave it a new twist that was still compatible with 48 years of continuity. The BBC obviously knew that this would be a showpiece episode and lavished money and care on it; and Suranne Jones gave a gloriously bonkers performance to which Matt Smith reciprocated with his usual impressive style. I don’t know how comprehensible it will be for people who know nothing about Who; but there can’t be many of them left among Hugo voters. The crowd will vote for The Doctor’s Wife, and the crowd will be right.

So, in summary:
6) Community: Remedial Chaos Theory
5) The Drink Tank‘s acceptance speech at the 2011 Hugo ceremony
4) No Award
3) Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes To War
2) Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited
1) Doctor Who: The Doctor’s Wife

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Links I found interesting for 12-04-2012

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Speaking in tongues

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I was disappointed with the difficulty I had in reading a short book in French last year, and my heart sank both last week and today when I realised that a business meeting I had expected would be in English was actually going to be in French. I can use French OK for chatting to Francophone neighbours, taxi driver and restaurant staff in Brussels, or for shopping in Wallonia (the nearest open supermarket on Sunday afternoons is in Hamme-Mille), but doing more significant stuff is a bit daunting.

But in fact it was fine. It helped that neither interlocutor was French or Belgian, so perhaps more merciful to non-native speakers, and that my programme assistant, whose native language is Spanish, has much better French than I do and was present in case of communications breakdown. The only tricky moment was in last week’s meeting, where we were talking to a diplomat from a non-European Francophone country, who has only recently arrived in Brussels; I completely threw him when I said “nonante” rather than “quatre-vingt-dix”, meaning “ninety”. (We Belgians also say “septante” rather than “soixante-dix” for “seventy”; Swiss Francophones do the same.) I was unapologetic; it’s not just local slang, it’s officially written on my son’s birth certificate (“L’année mille neuf cent nonante neuf”, ie 1999).

I remember when Anne and I first visited Brussels on holiday, long before we moved here, and the bus driver told us the fare, moving from his own word to French French to Dutch/Flemish to English: “Septante! Soixante-dix! Zeventig! Seventy!” In how many other cities would a bus conductor know to ask for a fare in three and a half languages?
short

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Eastercon

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Well, I had a tremendous time at Eastercon. The unprecedented fact that it had sold all available memberships beforehand boded well; and the hard work put in by the team paid off in almost every way. 

I was on three panels and attended about half a dozen more. I enjoyed my three visits to the Green Room for panel participants. On one of those visits I found myself sitting at the same table as three of the Guests of Honour, Paul Cornell, Tricia Sullivan and George R.R. Martin. One of my co-panellists, awestruck, asked GRRM how on earth he manages to sign so many books in an hour. "Illegibly!" the author retorted. 

My first two panels were both rather eclectic Doctor Who topics in distant rooms clashing with higher-profile events (had I not been on the panels I would certainly have gone to the pub quiz and the BSFA lecture), yet to my surprise they delivered pretty full audience and (less surprisingly) entertaining and well-informed discussion.

The third panel was the Not The Clarke Award discussion, where I was one of four ersatz Clarke judges moderated by Graham Sleight as we discussed this year's nominations. I could not see him, but Christopher Priest was in the audience. It was an interesting process. Although I objected to throwing Sheri S. Tepper's Waters Rising out first, I was outvoted 3-1; but there was then a consensus that Greg Bear's Hull Zero Three should be the next to go. We then hit deadlock with each of the four of us wanting a different book to be chucked out next; but we rapidly agreed that the two remaining books which were definitely not going to win were Charles Stross's Rule 34 and Drew Magary's The End Specialist (which I think we discarded in the wrong order, both in terms of my own preference and in terms of what the balance of views on the panel was, but it doesn't really matter).

That left us split at two votes each for China Miéville's Embassytown and Jane Rogers' The Testament of Jessie Lamb, neatly ranged along the table in order of depth of feeling one way of the other. My proposal for a joint award was rejected by the moderator, and we dug in for a few minutes while each side tried to persuade the less dogmatic voter of the other side to switch. In the end, I didn't change my mind and the other swing voter did, so the mock Clarke Award went to Jessie Lamb. This was pure theatre, with a packed room watching us debate without audience participation, but it seemed to work as an event.


The new King on the Iron Throne

Otherwise, I attended the openng and closing ceremonies, the announcements of the Hugo nominations and BSFA awards, the "Just a Minute" game, the George R.R. Martin interview, the George Hay lecture on invisible women scientists, the unexpected sword-fighting display from the swordmaster from "Game of Thrones" and panels on "How Mobile Phone Technology Can Enhance The Con Going Experience", "How Pseudo Do You Like Your Medieval", "Gender Parity On Panels At Conventions", "Discuss The Hugo Nominees", and "Relative Dimensions (The Limits of Doctor Who)". I arrived late at the bid sessions for the 2013 and 2014 Eastercons and saw the room completely packed, so made a tactical withdrawal to the bar.

I have already written quite enough about the BSFA award ceremony (the actual award-giving itself was smooth, efficient, and went to my first choice in three out of four categories); the other panels were without exception excellent, with particular enjoyment of Lesley Hall's lecture on invisible women (not as well attended as it deserved, due to being on Monday at lunchtime) and the pseudo-medievalism discussion which included George R.R. Martin and Juliet McKenna. I took no notes so can add no more.

The penetration of smartphones helped make this con a most extraordinary experience. There were two factors in particular operating here. One was the smartphone app for the convention schedule, so that at any time you could tap on your screen and see what was going on now and next – or indeed track particular participants or programme lines throughout the weekend. The second was Twitter, which made it clear which fun panels you were missing and gave an amazing power of instant feedback to participants, to use for good or ill. Unfortunately (as I found when compiling a subset of tweets on Monday morning for an event the previous evening) Twitter's memory is pretty shallow; to archive all of the Eastercon content at the time would have been pretty laborious, and by now it may be functionally impossible. Perhaps there are solutions here that I don't know about.

For the record, here is my entry in the contest to write a story in a single tweet:

Zero-G sex doomed Al and Su; in their vigorous embraces they unwittingly vented their oxygen. Space bonking has now been banned.

I do not expect that it will win, but it does at least sort of have a beginning, a middle and an end.

I did better than a lot of others seem to have done in terms of food. I was satisfied enough with the hotel breakfast, which did not disagree with me (perhaps my standards are lower and my stomach toughened from my work travels); I found cheap lunches all four days; and I ate at the Sheraton sports bar, with different groups but in good company every evening. The downstairs bar was more expensive, but in contrast to Belgium it all seems overpriced to me, and (apparently after a glitch, resolved before I arrived) tap water and ice was always available everywhere.

Two things I did not do and wish I had sampled: I did not go to any of the film or TV episode screenings, because I was having too much fun elsewhere at the time, but missed some interesting opportunities; and I did not try any of the fascinating looking games in the Games Room, which was always packed and had a very good vibe. (I did try a round of Perudo / Liar's Dice on the first evening with 's offspring and since 1986, longer than anyone else who was there, and I had not seen since about 1991, a much longer gap than anyone else who was there who I had actually met before.)


The Games Room, a hive of activity.

I did enjoy the dealer's room, though I restricted my purchases to books rather than steampunk memorabilia, decorative masks, clothing or badges. I was a little surprised that none of the dealers had particularly grabbed the opportunity to sell much in the way of Doctor Who material at the con, though I did purchase a signed copy of Gareth Roberts' new novelisation of Shada.

But it's the people that make the event. I realised quite early on that I couldn't possibly keep track of all the conversations I was having and enjoying, or even just of the people I was meeting for the first time after conversations here on LJ over the years, or indeed who I had never interacted with before at all. I did feel I might have tried a little harder to talk to people I didn't know, but the heaving fullness of the event somehow made that difficult; also this was actually my first convention for several years, so there was a lot of catching up to do. And there were still a couple of people who I knew were there and did not manage to talk to. If you think you are in that category, you are probably right and I wish we had not missed each other.


Caroline Symcox admires Charles Stross's new Kindle;
Paul Cornell seems to admire Charlie's haircut!

And there were some lovely moments of shared joy as well – Paul Cornell dancing with glee at his Hugo nominations, Colum Paget returning the James White Award money to double next year's prize, the wonderful video taken from the International Space Station which was shown at the closing ceremony, the general sense of achievement at the Guardian's positive write-up on the Monday. Certainly there were things that went wrong, but there was an obviously shared culture of wanting to get it right. So thanks once more to those who made it possible, and I expect to see you again.

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Links I found interesting for 11-04-2012

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Hugos and Nebulas

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On both shortlists:

Dramatic Presentation (4/7 N, 3/5 + 1/5 H)
Captain America: The First Avenger
Hugo
Source Code
Doctor Who: The Doctor’s Wife

Short Story (3/7 N, 3/5 H)
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”, by E. Lily Yu
“Movement”, by Nancy Fulda
“The Paper Menagerie”, Ken Liu

Novelette (4/7 N, 4/5 H)
“Fields of Gold”, by Rachel Swirsky
“Ray of Light”, by Brad R. Torgersen
“Six Months, Three Days”, by Charlie Jane Anders
“What We Found”, by Geoff Ryman

Novella (5/6 N, 5/6 H)
“The Ice Owl”, by Carolyn Ives Gilman
“Kiss Me Twice”, by Mary Robinette Kowal
“The Man Who Bridged The Mist”, by Kij Johnson
“The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, by Ken Liu
“Silently and Very Fast”, by Catherynne M. Valente

Novel (2/6 N, 2/5 H)
Among Others, by Jo Walton
Embassytown, by China Miéville

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So, those Hugo nominees for best novel then

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Ranked by Goodreads popularity, with LibraryThing popularity and rankings from both sites provided for comparison.

Goodreads Librarything
number average number average
A Dance With Dragons, George R.R. Martin 33297 4.13 2756 4.04
Embassytown, China Mieville 2944 3.86 842 3.95
Deadline, Mira Grant 2479 4.26 270 4.29
Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey 1710 4.03 211 3.97
Among Others, Jo Walton 1499 3.83 496 4.21

Hearty congratulations to . This is really cool. (But A Dance With Dragons is owned by roughly four times as many GoodReads members as the other four combined.)

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Links I found interesting for 06-04-2012

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Bad writing

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Here are two sample sentences from a novel which I am reading.

But it was the sight of the creature looming over the two corpses that caused Miller’s knees to almost buckle in terror.

That misplaced “almost” is really jarring. You don’t cause something to “almost happen”; it either is caused to happen or it isn’t. “Almost caused” would have been an improvement, though not much. Better yet would have been a more restrained “made his knees go weak with terror”. Or indeed, why should poor Miller not be struck to his knees in shock? He is about to be killed anyway.

From a few chapters later:

He raised his cane and brandished it before him like a sword, as if warning the creature to keep back.

Many problems here. First off, one normally brandishes a cane like a canesword is brandished in quite a different way. Is it significant that in this instance the cane is brandished like a sword? Or just, as I suspect, bad writing?

Second, that “as if” clause drops us out of the tight-third viewpoint of the rest of the sentence (and indeed this whole passage) to external narrator. The viewpoint character presumably knows what he is doing, and “as if” confuses the issue.

Third, the “as if” clause implies some potential uncertainty about what follows. But there can be no uncertainty here; our man is absolutely brandishing his cane, whether like a cane or like a sword, as an attempt to warn the creature to keep back. What other possibilities are there?

Rather than create a tight image of a man using the sole means at his disposal to try and warn off a threat, the sentence raises questions about his real intent, about the focus of the narrative, and about brandishing techniques, and leaves those questions unanswered.

Don’t editors have a duty to watch out for this kind of thing? Or, shudder, perhaps this already is the heavily-edited, cleaned-up version…

(This is the same author who in another book wrote that someone’s wounds “looked like huge purple welts”, probably because they actually were huge purple welts.)

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Links I found interesting for 04-04-2012

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April Books 2) Rule 34, by Charles Stross

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Having now read all of the novels on the shortlist for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, I am glad to say that I finished on a high note. Rule 34 ticked a lot of my boxes, dealing with the relationships between small state-like entities (in this case, a near-future Scotland and a fictional Central Asian republic) and also with the relationships between law enforcement, social networks and artificial intelligence, as well as quite deliberately referencing Ian Rankin’s excellent Rebus novels. My only serious stylistic quibble is that the second person voice, which was appropriate for Halting State, the game-centred previous novel in this sequence, seems a bit more forced here. But otherwise it’s an effective mix of techno-horror and black humour, and I enjoyed it more than any of the other books on the shortlist.

(I will save my detailed assessment of the shortlist for the Not The Clarke Award panel on Saturday at Eastercon, but I’ll just note here that although I enjoyed Rule 34 most, I still think The Testament of Jessie Lamb the best of the bunch.)

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Links I found interesting for 03-04-2012

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A post for World Autism Awareness Day

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This is our family, a picture taken on Christmas Day last year. It's a rare shot of the five of us together – the two girls sharing a laugh, and the rest of us a little nervous about what that might lead to.


This is B, our oldest. She is 14. She developed normally until she was 2, and then over a six month period lost her speech and many other things in an autistic regression. She lives in permanent residential care about 30 km away from us. We go and see her often; I took this a week ago. She likes to move her hands rapidly in front of her face, but I caught one shot of her looking at me clearly.


This is U, our youngest. She is 9. She likes to sing, always in tune, and goes to the special school that B used to go to (and which is the reason we live where we do, rather than closer to my work in Brussels). Unlike B she was late developing in some ways from the start, and very late talking; she started saying a few words – names and songs and common actions – just a year ago soon after she turned 8.


This is F with his sisters. He is 12, and goes to normal school. He enjoys being with them and they enjoy being with him. (I should note that B only uses the wheelchair because it is sometimes difficult otherwise to persuade her to go where other people want her to go; and U only uses the sledge if it has been snowing.)

I was going to write something deep and profound about World Autism Awareness Day, but I think I will leave it there.

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April Books 1) Washington Square, by Henry James

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The last couple of times I've been to New York I have been fortunate enough to stay on Washington Square itself, but I was actually prompted to get hold of this classic after learning that the amazing Fanny Kemble had inspired James to write it. It is a short, vivid, sad story of a father and daughter who fail to communicate emotionally, and an aunt who communicates far too well with her niece's unworthy lover, set in the much smaller New York of the 1840s (published in 1880). There's lots of beautiful character observation (at least of the central four personalities; the others are a bit marginal) and a vivid sense of time and place. Strongly recommended.

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March Books 19) The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, by Umberto Eco

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Like a lot of people, I was enchanted by The Name of the Rose, baffled by Foucault’s Pendulum, and ignored Eco’s subsequent work, but picked this up cheap a while back and have now got onto it. I’m glad to say that I mostly enjoyed it; Eco’s protagonist starts the novel with amnesia and must reconstruct his own memories by revisiting his family’s country retreat and going through his own souvenirs of youth before and during the Second World War, a process that brings back adventures with the local resistance as well as his teenage love interest. It is beautifully illustrated and for most of the book appears to be going somewhere interesting but unfortunately peters out at the end.

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March Books 18) Darkstar Academy, by Mark Morris

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One of the newer original single-CD audiobooks in the Who range, read by Alexander Armstrong (whose accent is occasionally a bit surprising – his “stall” sounds like “stool” which doesn’t quite have the same meaning). All but completists can safely skip this one; the setting is a future-kitsch 1950s public school which turns out rather pointlessly to be In Space, and the Doctor compassionately tells the victim of bullying that he should ruddy well get over it; that will be very helpful to any young (or older) listeners who find themselves in that situation.

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March Books 16) Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear

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Yet another of the Arthur C. Clarke award nominees, and one which really failed to impress me. Bear is regarded as one of the hardest of hard sf writers, but even so he has managed to create characters I actually cared about in other books of his that I have read. Perhaps I was wrong to try and read this during my travels at godawful hours of the morning last week, but I found little to recommend in this novel.

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March Books 15) Borrowed Time, by Naomi A. Alderman

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This is a particularly good Eleventh Doctor book, read very effectively by Meera Syal (who does a very effective Scottish accent). The setting is a London bank, just before the economic crash of 2008, where key staffers are being tempted to use time-travel bracelets to multi-task; the bracelets of course come at a much higher cost than is immediately apparent. There is a particularly effective passage early on where Amy becomes addicted to the giddy possibilities of personal time-looping, and some brilliant description. After a not brilliant start in 2010, the Eleventh Doctor books are doing very well now. I shall look out for more by Alderman – I confess I had not really heard of her before compiling my list the other week but that’s clearly my loss.

March Books 14) The End Specialist, by Drew Magary

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Another of this year’s much-discussed shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, this time set in a near-future America where a relatively affordable immortality treatment abolishes death by aging (though disease, accident and homicide remain). Our narrator spends very little time pondering the immense psychological and philosophical consequences, and much more watching those around him die of disease, accident or homicide; he becomes a paid killer, first of voluntary suicides and then of those the state deems worthy of death; he is obsessed with a woman who he eventually finds in melodramatic circumstances. I was disappointed that having taken up the medical development which is key to the situation, the plot then did not go much beyond the techno-thriller format.

By odd coincidence, in both The End Specialist and Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which I was reading at the same time, the narrator is obsessed by Solara, though in this case Solara is a tall blonde woman rather than a country estate.

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March Books 13) The Krillitane Storm, by Christopher Cooper

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I am gradually getting towards the end of the many Tenth Doctor novels, this being another one from the companionless era (ie 2009). Set in 12th-century Worcester, it presents the Krillitane very differently from School Reunion, actually being exploited by alien geneticists who are much nastier than they are. Some very good concepts, not executed quite as well as they deserved.

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