Second paragraph of third chapter:
light squeals in red and white flashes
Intense story of a gay man who serves in Vietnam and becomes a biker. Graphic and lyrical language; mercifully short. Not really sure what more to say. You can get it here.
I thought that this was the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves, but it turns out to be non-genre. Next on the unread SF pile is Knowledgeable Creatures, by Christopher Rowe.
No internal divisions, so this is the third paragraph.
She meant that people who live in space live differently than people who live on planets. I’m not talking about the micro-gravity and the sense of confinement and the recycling of air and water and protein, the exercise regimen, and all the implants and augments, like bone-sintering and radiation-nanos and white-blood infusions, and all the other stuff that dirtsiders think about. That’s just mechanics. You live with it.
Entertaining short story about teenage Starling who lives with her grandparents on a space station in the asteroid belt. They are vulnerable to capitalism, betrayal and death, and Starling’s Ganny does her best to outwit them. Very cheerful in the end. You may or may not be able to get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is thirteen fourteen fifteen o’clock, also by David Gerrold.
These two stories both won the Hugo and the Nebula in their respective categories in 1996 for work published in 1994. They are very different works, one trying to put a new gloss on an old theme and the other barely sfnal.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” is:
But the more he concentrated on those memories, the more vague and imprecise they became, and he knew they must have occurred a very long time ago. Sometimes he tried to remember the name of his tribe, but it was lost in the mists of time, as were the names of his parents and siblings.
This is an old-fashioned tale about the decline of humanity, as detected by alien anthropologists investigating a depopulated Earth; the narrator is able to sense the story of the owner of an artefact through its aura (or whatever). It turns out that the humans are not so extinct after all. Seven short stories add up to a grim big picture. I found it a somewhat moralising tale, with an original concept reaching a rather obvious conclusion. The best of the internal stories is the middle one, about a safari in the year 2103, which is also the only one explicitly about white folks from outside swooping in to look at Africa; better when you write what you know. People loved this at the time, but I feel it slightly muffs the landing, though not as badly as Resnick’s later humorous squibs.
“Forgiveness Day”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, was also on both Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novella.
The second paragraph of the third section of “The Martian Child” is:
I was in Arizona, at a party at Jeff Duntemann’s sprawling house. Jeff is a two-time Hugo nominee who gave up science fiction to write books about computer programming. Apparently, it was far more profitable than science fiction; now he was publishing his own magazine, PC-Techniques. I write a regular column for the magazine, an off-the-wall mix of code and mutated zen. It was the standing joke that my contribution to the magazine was the “Martian perspective.”
This on the other hand is a story I love, even though it may not even be sfnal depending on how you read it. The author, who is not named but clearly shares many characteristics with David Gerrold, adopts a boy who has certain behavioural quirks, one of which is that he believes that he is a Martian and may have a limited ability to grant wishes. Any of us who have experienced or closely observed parenthood will sympathise with the experience of having a tiny and new personality developing right in front of you. Any child that you raise includes bits of you, but also has characteristics that seem to come from somewhere else entirely. From Mars? Why not?
I was fortunate to meet with David Gerrold at SMOFCon in Santa Rosa, California, in December 2018, and we discussed this story among other topics. Here we are at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. I admit that I was a little starstruck.
“The Singular Habits of Wasps”, by Geoffrey A. Landis. and “The Matter of Seggri”, by Ursula K. Le Guin, were also on both Best Novelette ballots.
That year the Hugo for Best Novel went to Mirror Dance, by Lois McMaster Bujold, and the Nebula to Moving Mars, by Greg Gear; the Hugo for Best Short Story went to “None So Blind”, by Joe Haldeman, and the Nebula to “A Defense of the Social Contracts”, by Martha Soukup.
This marks the start of a rather odd period when there was very little crossover between the Hugos and Nebulas. Normally there are a couple of joint winners every year, but between 1995 and 2001 there was only one, Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, which will be the next in this series.
Meanwhile my own copy of both stories is in the Nebula Awards 30 anthology, which you can get here.
