Back in the LiveJournal days, I had a friend there who was invited to pitch for this book; he reached out to me and my friend Michael for Doctor Who advice because he hadn't really seen the show. (In retrospect, he was kind of obnoxious; he got in the book, and I saw him making comments in promotion of his story like, "I always liked x Doctor because of y," when I know for a fact he'd never seen a story featuring x Doctor until we recommended one to him!) Because of this, I seem to recall (it has been almost two decades, so I may be wrong) that editor Steven Savile wanted to do an anthology covering the history of a city, and was torn between doing London and Prague. Prague has a rich history, but it seems kind of random to be honest (I explained the premise of this book to my wife while reading it and she laughed), and how many Doctor Who authors know a lot about the history of Prague? London would be more familiar territory... but of course, probably too familiar. What's the USP of a book made up of Doctor Who stories set in London?
Doctor Who: Short Trips #20: Destination Prague edited by Steven Savile
Obviously, Savile decided to go with Prague in the end. I thought the book opened a bit oddly, with a story about an inhabitant-less Prague being taken out of time, hardly the kind of thing that makes the reader experience Prague and thus see the upside to setting a bunch of stories there. The next story takes place in Prague's future, and so does the next, and so does the next. I found this a bit of an odd choice, too—I felt like if the selling point of this book was Prague's rich history, then maybe we ought to lead off with a story set in that rich history.
Halfway through, though, I realized we still hadn't had a historical, and so that must be intentional in the sense that I was wrong about the book's premise. It wasn't chronicling past and future history, but only future history. I feel like this is an okay idea, though in that case, I think it probably would make more sense to go with a city readers are more familiar with, like London. But I also think that if you are going to tell just future history, it would be better to do it in chronological order. If the book had a mix of historical and future-set stories, then jumping around would definitely be the right choice for the sake of variety. But if the decision is to only tell the future story of the city, then jumping around makes that future story hard to discern. It would be neat to get a series of snapshots of Prague's future, chronicling its various ascents and descents moving ever further into the future... but what we get instead is dispersed and fragmented and hard to glom onto.
On top of that, I think the choice of just telling future-Prague stories doesn't play to the authors' strengths. I suspect a bunch of authors largely unfamiliar with a city could do some research to find interesting historical incidents to build stories around, and I think a bunch of authors familiar with a city might have found something to say about its future. But telling stories about the future of a city you don't know much about is a tricky business, and mostly what we get are pretty generic sci-fi stories and/or repetitive transpositions of classic Prague things into the future, like (if I counted correctly) three different Golem stories and three different Kafka's "Metamorphosis" riffs.
Like the last Short Trips volume I read, The Quality of Leadership, this one has a second, implicit USP: the editor is not part of the usual cohort of mid-2000s Doctor Who tie-in writers, and thus they have a different Rolodex of authors to call on, most of whom had never written a Doctor Who story (or maybe just one) and many of whom never would again. Some of them are people who have had (or would go on to have) pretty decent writing careers outside of Doctor Who in fact: names I knew from other contexts included Mike W. Barr (a number of DC comics from the 1980s, including Batman: Year Two and Star Trek: The Mirror Universe Saga), Keith R.A. DeCandido (innumerable Star Trek stories, including editing the S.C.E. series), Kevin Killiany (S.C.E.: Orphans), Mary Robinette Kowal (the Lady Astronaut series), Paul Kupperberg (JSA: Ragnarok), Todd McCaffrey (Pern, though I've never actually read any of his contributions), and Sean Williams (The New Jedi Order: Force Heretic).
Bringing in outside writers to an existing tie-in franchise can be hit-or-miss in my experience. Sometimes those outsiders have an expanded way of seeing it, and they come at it from atypical, interesting angles. But conversely, sometimes they have a more limited understanding of it, because their understanding is mostly shaped by what's on screen; because they haven't been living and breathing tie-ins for a decade, they don't see the dynamism that the premise really allows for. Doctor Who can do really interesting stuff in the medium of prose short fiction... but I don't think you'd know it by reading this book, where it seemed to me that most writers were trying to tell fairly "typical" Doctor Who adventures with aliens invading or time-travel shenanigans or rogue Time Lords, stuff that might work very well on screen with a canvas of ninety minutes, but comes across as superficial on the printed page. In particular, the book suffers from the sheer quantity of stories; some Short Trips anthologies have as few as seven or eight, if I recall correctly, but this one crams in over twenty, meaning many of them are by necessity quite short. You just can't do the "typical" Doctor Who story in fifteen-ish pages in a satisfactory way.
Thus, I found this one a bit of a struggle. Indeed, I think it's indicative that of the three stories I did think were very good, two of them were by authors who have written multiple other Doctor Who stories. The first story that really clicked for me was Mary Robinette Kowal's "Suspension and Disbelief"; it's weird and short (the Doctor has to help a woman whose husband is going to be executed for chopping down a tree so she can make a puppet; the resolution involves a giant puppet) but inventive and well told.
The second was James Swallow's "Lady of the Snows," which was a beautiful story about an artist falling in love with an amnesiac Charley Pollard, using her as his muse, with some great imagery and interesting thematic resonance between what the artist is doing to Charley, and what has happened to Prague in the far future. (To be fair to Swallow, who has gone on to write a lot of Doctor Who stories, I think this was just his fourth one or so.)
The last one was also the very last in the book, Stel Pavlou's "Omegamorphosis." (And to be fair to Pavlou, though he has written other Doctor Who stories, it's literally just two of them. But all three are bangers!) This is the book's third and final Kafka riff... but it's the only one of them that actually feels Kafkaesque, surreal and disconcerting.
So, I think there are better Short Trips volumes out there, and I unfortunately suspect this one was fundamentally misconceived from the beginning.
Here is the first post in my customary sequence describing my rankings for the Hugo Awards ballot.
Hugo votes are due July 23, but before that was announced I worked out my reading schedule assuming a slightly tighter due date of July 16; after the announcement, I decided that was doable and so stuck with it. I typically read the finalists in a totally random order, but shuffle things around a little based on availability; this year, that meant saving three big books (Track Changes, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Service Model) until the end. And then, this year one finalist withdrew their book from contention after the ballot was announced, meaning I would actually finish all my reading by July 10 if I stuck with my original pace.
The net effect of these three things together was that I finished my reading for the short fiction categories quite early, on June 20. I don't know that I have ever been done with three categories* over a month before the deadline!
I'm trying to remember if I nominated anything in any of these categories. (Unfortunately, I didn't save my nominating ballot. Maybe I don't have one because I didn't nominate anything at all?) If I did nominate something, it was "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, and it did make the final ballot.
Anyway, here's my rankings and notes. As always, I've linked to longer reviews I've already done when relevant, or to the finalist itself when freely available online.
Best Novella
7. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo
"I'm only a silly girl," Nhung said gravely. "Aren't I a child until I get married, when I shall magically become the lady of the house?"
This is the fifth novella in the "Singing Hills" cycle, about a traveling monk collecting stories; it is the fourth to be a Hugo finalist. Having read four of these now, I wish I found them more interesting. The premises always seem good but there's something too languid about them, they never really get off the ground or engage. This has some interesting twists, but largely at a point where I'd stopped caring. I don't actually a have strong opinion about whether this is better or worse than Navigational Entanglements, I found them about equally dull, but I guess I'll give the edge to something that's not an installment in a series that's been nominated three times already.
6. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard
No, she hated herself for allowing herself to hope. To believe that it could ever be different. [...] [T]hat she'd unlock the ever-shifting and incomprehensible set of rules that allowed her to make sense of other people.
In a science fiction world, navigating between star systems is dangerous because of carnivorous entities that feed on consciousness (akin to "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith). One of those entities escapes into the real world, and so the clans that handle navigation need to assemble a team to hunt it down. They must overcome their differences and mistrust as well as a larger conspiracy in order to solve the problem. This is the sixth Hugo finalist by Aliette de Bodard I've read since 2017, and while obviously she has her fans, whatever she's doing just doesn't work for me. I felt there were too many characters who I didn't particularly care about, or even care to tell apart, and without that, the book just doesn't work. Like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas, there's a sapphic romance, but like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas it seems to happen instantaneously for not really much of a reason.
5. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
A monster who begat monsters, and I walk with them now; little tyrants.
I felt this started quite promisingly: a tyrant loses his children in magical woods from which no one ever returns; he comes to the one woman who ever entered the woods and returned with whoever was lost and demands she recovers his children. At first it's spooky and weird, but—and it feels weird to say this about a novella—it's too long. There's some interesting stuff in here but not enough compared to the length of the book. There's only so much "bargaining with spooky tricky wood creatures" I can find interesting. Still, I was interested at first, so above Navigational Entanglements it goes.
If you read my full review of this, you'll see I was quite tepid about it—both in the sense I'm not sure What Moves the Dead needed a sequel, and in the sense that it doesn't seem very Hugo-worthy. So that I've placed it here is more a testament to the weakness of the rest of the novella shortlist than anything else. Even if I don't really see the reason for this, you can count on T. Kingfisher to be interesting and amusing all the way through.
3. No Award
Once again, we have a year of entirely Tor novellas, all specifically Tordotcom except What Moves at Night, which comes from a different Tor imprint, Nightfire. Are they all terrible or something? No, they're fine. But is this award doing what I want it do? Not really. People are always proposing new Hugo categories; maybe I'll submit a motion to the Worldcon Business Meeting to split the category into Best Tor Novella and Best Novella by Literally Anyone Else. Anyway, putting "No Award" here is more my protest at the lack of imagination demonstrated by the nominators than anything else; in my mind, there's a huge gap between What Feasts at Night and what comes next.
2. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
Once, he said, on ancient Earth, there was a Horizon, and to gaze on it was to look neither up nor down. Look out...
This is an sf story (it is no coincidence that sf stories took up my top two spots) about a generation ship and the people on it who have never known anything else. Those are a dime a dozen in science fiction, of course, but Samatar focuses on the class divide in the ship, and academia's role in both upending and upholding systems of oppression—it's a unique angle on an old sf staple, and of course totally played to my own interests.
1. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler
"[H]e was a man like you." "Like me?" "Yes. A man who thought he could pass the good on to his son without the bad." There was silence in the tent, for a moment. Then one of the other men said, "He's right, Mitya. All our fathers were the same." "Well, let's drink to our fathers then. They wanted the best, but it turned out the same as always."
This is going to be a bit mean, but this is so good it's hard to believe it's a Tordotcom novella. Unlike most of what they publish, it's not a fantasy story that feels like a pilot for a streaming show; this isn't aimed at people who watch a lot of tv and movies, but it's a clever, inventive piece of sf that wouldn't be out of place in Clarkesworld or Asimov's. The basic premise is that in the near future, elephants have gone extinct but woolly mammoths have been revived through cloning, so ivory poachers have turned to mammoths as a new source. It's beautifully written, full of interesting ideas, as a bunch of different plotlines intersect. Disorienting in the way the best sf is, with lots to say about the world we live in now and the world we will live in. The first novella I read for the Hugos, but I instantly knew it would be the one to beat.
[S]he could also see that he was staring at something over her shoulder: the three framed certificates on the wall, busy with gilt and illumincation, B.Wiz, M.Wiz, Ph.W all in a row. Not in envy or awe, she thought, but a doorway, open, beckoning: Here is how you escape. Here is how you get away from them.
An old magician losing her powers takes on a new apprentice. I think this is probably good at what it does, but stories about old magicians taking on new apprentices are just never going to be my thing, to be honest. On a different day, I could be persuaded to move it up one place on my ballot; "Loneliness Universe" has higher aspirations but "By Salt" has better jokes.
The world was still filled with people, of course. Just people she knew nothing or very little about.
This story seems quite potent: the narrator stops being able to see her friends and family, even though they're right where she is. It feels like it could be a potent metaphor for the isolation brought on by our modern condition, how you can be in the same room as someone but not connected to them because they're on their phone or whatever. But I didn't find the mechanics of how it worked very convincing, and the metaphor didn't really land, didn't feel like it told me anything interesting about how the world works. I feel bad ranking it this low, because I do think Triantafyllou is probably up to something a bit more interesting than Pinsker et al., but I don't think she really pulled off what she was attempting.
Sarah Pinsker is my favorite contemporary writer of short sf, but this feels very much like one of her minor works to me. It's about a woman going to see her sister for the first time in a long while, but weird things are afoot. Pinsker has a couple different modes; I think she's at her best when she's doing science fiction (including near future) or fantasy work (especially where the magic is kind of a metaphor), but to me, she's less interesting when she's in what I think of as her "creepypasta" mode, of which this is very much an example. I find this kind of work well constructed but ultimately kind of hollow. This one in particular has a very rushed and unconvincing ending following the big reveal, and I'm not sure why, because it spent too much time building up to that moment, so there was definitely word count to spare.
I sighed. “Academic jobs are hard to find. My husband Stuart also has a PhD, and he landed a job in Minnesota. One thousand miles away from the nearest seals who aren’t in a zoo. And he’s got tenure. We’re only here because he’s on sabbatical.”
Naomi Kritzer is a favorite of the Hugo electorate, and she also ends up in Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes pretty consistently, so I feel like I have read a lot of her work at this point. Based on that sampling, I would say she has two modes: near-future sf focusing on stuff like AI and algorithms, but also community and hope (e.g., the CatNet books, "The Dragon Project," Liberty's Daughter, "The Year Without Sunshine," "Better Living Through Algorithms") and spooky folk horror that is also kind of uplifting (e.g., "The Thing About Ghost Stories," "Little Free Library," "Monster"). This is not too dissimilar to Pinsker, actually, and like with Pinsker, I find Kritzer a lot more interesting in her near-future mode than her horror mode. Unfortunately, this is her in her horror mode... though horror isn't quite the right word for it. This story is well-observed (I am of course always into an accurate depiction of academia) and has some good ideas, but a lot like the Pinsker, actually, feel like too much of a slow burn compared to the length. I doubt it's bad, but it's not really what I am interested in. That said, I did like it more than "Signs of Life"; it felt like it had more of a real pay-off.
This sf novelette is included in Leckie's new short fiction collection of the same title; above, I've linked to my review of the complete volume. Like a lot of Leckie's work, it's a weird, disturbing story about the way our biology drives us. That said, it did feel like minor Leckie to me compared to her novels or even some of the other short fiction collected in the same book. But I think it was asking more interesting questions and doing more interesting things than "Signs of Life" and "Four Sisters," so in this case minor Leckie outranks minor Pinsker or minor Kritzer.
The biggest difference I noticed in the new electronic copy was the ending.
There was a shootout in Copper Hawk like before, yes. But instead of the loss and the blood and the shame of the rider, the iron-handed sheriff was the one to take a bullet. [...] I could almost sense the hand of audience-score maximizer programs in the plot. It could even have been a re-writer at my agency that oversaw the edition, for all I knew.
I felt better in some ways, having read the new, happier ending, but I forgot it promptly, like some garbled conversation I’d overheard on the subway, something that made me chuckle and then escaped my mind.
This is a weird near-future story about a world where there's basically no permanent media anymore: physical books and DVDs and such are all gone, and now all media is electronic—and thus all media can be perpetually altered, updated, tinkered with to suit the present moment. The media of the past no longer serves as a window into that past. I'd never heard of Thomas Ha, but he seems to be one to watch out for based on this. I really liked this, it's basically exactly my taste in short sf, and it easily acquired a high place on my ballot.
“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”
I said above that I haven't really enjoyed Vo's Singing Hills novellas very much, but last year I did really like her novelette "On the Fox Roads," an historical fantasy, so I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, I think this is probably a decent story that I just never figured out, a good example of me finding it easier to glom onto an sf premise than a fantasy one.
The pilots do always try to hit as many as they can.
This is a piece of flash fiction about a prison planet. It's evocatively written, but I find flash fiction kind of tricky, especially in an sf context; this is more worldbuilding than a story.
“I have misjudged many things very badly and I ask your forgiveness.”
I thought this was perfectly okay. It's set in a fairy-tale world beset by giant snails; the main character is a working-class woman who helps the lord whose estate she lives on defeat one. But that's about it, I felt, except for an overly long epilogue about what happens to everyone later. I get what happened but I didn't think there was much of a hook here. Kowal is a competent writer, so it's well told, but so what? More to my taste than "Five Views," but I didn't think trying to do something as interesting as "We Will Teach You How to Read."†
This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.
I thought this was very clever, but perhaps more clever than enjoyable to read. Its plays with form to communicate content, and it's about stories and the ways we tell them, and how that can change people.
THEY ONLY CALL US USURPERS BECAUSE THEY KILLED ENOUGH OF US
Now this is one of those stories where I didn't totally understand what was going on, but I understood enough, and I found it absorbing regardless. Arkady Martine is the author of the Teixcalaan books (I particularly liked the first of those, A Memory Called Empire), and like those, this is a story about empire, but moreso it's about history, the way we interpret and reinterpret the past. I found it really sharply written and thought-provoking; on a different day, I think I gladly could have put it in first. (Am I just a sucker for stories that include excerpts from made-up works of scholarly writing with real citations? Probably but I guess everyone's got to have their thing.)
This is the one story in this whole post that I had before the ballot was announced, and like I said at the top, if I nominated anything, I nominated this. You can read my full review at the link, but I really enjoyed this a lot; a clever engagement with sf criticism's eternal Omelas debates, and beautifully told in its own way. I kind of think this is the obvious candidate to win (fandom does love its self-referential stuff), so obviously so that maybe I should put "Three Faces" in first just to give it an edge in a potential upset, but oh well, this story is that good.
Overall Thoughts
Last year, I was excited that Best Novella was actually kind of diverse... but this year we're back to the same-old same-old of Tor Tor Tor. I mean, I'm part of the problem here (I don't nominate anything because I don't keep up with novellas) but it does make me grumpy. And not only is it so much Tor, but three of them are written by writers who have been finalists multiple previous times: this is Nghi Vo's fourth nomination, de Bodard's fourth, and Kingfisher's third, and at least two of them are follow-ups to previous finalists. (I have read conflicting information on whether Navigational Entanglements takes place in the same "Xuya Universe" as de Bodard's The Tea Master and the Detective.) If the point of sf&f is to take the reader to new worlds, it's not really happening here.
Similar problems with nominee diversity afflict the other two categories: of the twelve finalists in Best Novelette and Short Story, nearly half from Uncanny, who I think benefit from being freely available online and soliciting stories from Internet favorites. Usually there are a couple that make the Uncanny dominance worthwhile (e.g., I really enjoyed Kritzer's "The Year Without Sunshine" in 2024) but not this year. Thankfully there is a little bit of diversity at the edges: in contrast to Uncanny appearing on the ballot in these two categories a cumulative thirty-five times since 2016, this is only the fourth appearance by a Strange Horizons story since 2007... too bad I didn't like it more. We also have an original story from a single-author collection (I don't think this happens much) and the first appearance of a story from the once-dominant Asimov's since 2018. (Asimov's, admittedly, was the Tor/Uncanny of 1986 to 2010!)‡
All that said, maybe my real problem isn't a lack of nominee diversity so much as that the tastes of Uncanny editors Lynne M. and Michael Damian Thomas just aren't my tastes, as my top spots in Best Novelette and Best Short Story both went to Clarkesworld, and Clarkesworld has had at least twenty stories in those two categories since 2010. But, well, I'm always gushing about how much I like editor Neil Clarke. I'm guessing that whenever volume ten of Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year comes out, I will find a lot more to my taste there.
I'll wrap this up by making my predictions, with the caveat that I have not been very plugged into the discourse this year, beyond reading the threads about Hugo finalists on r/Fantasy and Nicholas Whyte's blog posts, neither of whom I think is very representative. I'm guessing:
something I ranked below "No Award" will win Best Novella (I am always disappointed by this category)
Kritzer or Pinsker will win Best Novelette, with an outside chance that it's Leckie (voters love them, and to be fair, they are all good writers)
Isabel J. Kim will win Best Short Story (the story is so very online, and sort of a meta-take on fandom discourse... plus actually quite good!)
* Well, actually five, since I also finished my last Lodestar finalist on June 7 and my last Best Graphic Story one on June 11. But those are other posts.
† After I wrote up my rankings, I read the discussion thread for "Marginalia" on r/Fantasy, which was pretty savage, and made me like the story less. I was kind of tempted to downgrade it after that, but laziness won out; and anyway, fundamentally I don't have a strong opinion between the bottom three in this category.
‡ Hm, I am starting to feel a blog post with charts and graphs coming on...
The fourth "Lady Astronaut" novel returns us to the series's original protagonist, Elma York. By now, Mary Robinette Kowal's alternative twentienth-century history has humanity with a small settlement on Mars; Elma and her husband are members of the Second Expedition recently arrived on Mars, with Elma stepping into the position of deputy base administrator. But is someone trying to sabotage the settlement? And what secret are the members of the First Expedition hiding?
Unfortunately, this is my least favorite of the four Lady Astronaut books thus far. I thought the first one was great and the third one tense and gripping after a slow start. The second had its moments but often plodded—and this one pretty much plods all the way through. None of the conflicts here ever really rise to the level of intensity needed to drive a novel: the mystery of what happened on the First Expedition, the need to rearrange the settlement so the women are in space, the idea that there might be a saboteur somewhere, Elma taking command of a spaceship... they're all fruitful ground for a novel sure, but as written here, none of them really feel like they have stakes, and they don't climax; most of them just seem to fizzle out or never get used. There's nothing as intense as the first book's meteor strike, or the second book's space survival sequences, or the third's desperate attempt to save the lunar colony. There's no drive, no energy here.
It's more like spending a cozy year hanging out with Elma in space. Which I guess might work for some but never really clicked for me. I don't know if there will be a fifth novel,* but I hope that if so, like the third, it moves away from Elma's story—I feel like her story might be done.
* Kowal did crowdfund a collection of Lady Astronaut short stories last year, which totally passed me by. It comes out this year, I think; hopefully there's a way to get hold of even if you didn't participate in the original Kickstarter, because I would pick it up if so.
This is a science fiction murder mystery, set in the 2070s aboard a Luna-Mars cruise; it's a bit of a Thin Man take, I guess, except I've never seen any of those films. (My knowledge of The Thin Man entirely derives from knowing that DC's Elongated Man is also a bit of a Thin Man take.) That is to say, the protagonist is married to a retired detective who is framed for murder, so she must investigate the crime to exonerate him.
It has some interesting stuff going for it: reasonably consistent worldbuilding (which is important for a murder mystery), cocktail recipes as chapter epigraphs (some of which I would like to try), some fun stuff with a lawyer on an ever-increasing communications delay, accurate-feeling depictions of disability and service animals, but also good extrapolation of how they might work in the future.
I'm not a terribly prolific reader of mysteries, but I have read my fair share (mostly Sue Grafton and Elizabeth George), and I did not think this was a very good example of the genre. It takes a while for it to get started: the murder happens pretty early on, but it's over eighty pages in before the protagonist actually starts asking questions. There are a lot of characters who are technically suspects, but none of them really feel like suspects; you as a reader are never like, "oh i bet that guy did it" because you are not really given enough to grab on to with all the many characters to be suspicious of them. Or even to be not suspicious of them, which is itself suspicious in a murder mystery. There are a few too many coincidences: three owners of major technology companies just happen to be on this cruise. One character has a completely coincidental link to the backstory of the protagonist and another completely coincidental link to the backstory of her husband. The solution depends on a piece of information not revealed to the reader until the end... but it felt like something that could have very easily but subtly been revealed much earlier to good effect.
I also struggled with the protagonist and her husband. She was basically fine, but I felt like Kowal is capable of better character work than we ultimately got with her. There are a lot of good ingredients to her—genius inventor, wealthy heiress, PTSD sufferer—but I didn't think they came together in a meaningful way. As for him, I struggled to understand his reasons for not wanting to get involved. I mean, sure, he's retired... but if you're the murder suspect and shipboard security clearly incompetent and the murderer is still on the loose, maybe your retirement rationale of "i got too famous to be effective" isn't very relevant any more!
(Despite the repeated assertions of someone I talked to on LibraryThing, this is clearly not set in Kowal's "Lady Astronaut" universe, but our own future.)
Twenty-First Century Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden
This is an anthology of post-2000 sf written by authors who "came to prominence" after 2000. That is to say, they may have published something prior to 2000, but they didn't break through into wider consciousness until after; see for example Charles Stross, whose first publication is all the way back in 1985, but achieved wider acclaim with his 2001 novel The Atrocity Archive. I got the book as a parting gift from my boss back when it came out in 2013, but as is usual for me, did not get around to reading it for another decade. In a way, this was helpful for evaluating the book's "argument."
Collection published: 2013 Contents originally published: 2003-11 Acquired: December 2013 Read: April–June 2023
It's been my thesis that large anthologies (and this one clocks in at 572 pages, with over thirty stories) are arguments. In this case, the argument seems to be: "These writers are the future of science fiction." In that case, reading it ten years late lets me estimate how right the editors got it. Did these talents pan out?
Overall, I have to say yes, but sort of with reservations. There's no denying that, say, Mary Robinette Kowal has gone on to be a juggernaut of twenty-first century science fiction. But enjoy as I might her "Lady Astronaut" books, the story included here ("Evil Robot Monkey") didn't grab me—this isn't the reason. (Though given the story was a Hugo finalist, it must have grabbed other people.) Similarly, some of the stories feel like stretches, in that they're sf tales from writers much better known for publishing fantasy or even horror, like Jo Walton's "Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction" or Daryl Gregory's "Second Person, Present Tense"; these were two stories I enjoyed a lot, actually, but I wouldn't put either Walton or Gregory in the pantheon of great twenty-first century sf writers, based on what I've read of them at least.
And of course, there are a couple stories I found outright bad... but they're by writers whose work in general I struggled to enjoy yet I cannot deny that those writers are generally popular. I speak here of John Scalzi's "The Tale of the Wicked," which requires all of its main characters to be idiots, and Catherynne M. Valente's "How to Become a Mars Overlord" which at eight pages still had me skimming to get to the end. So I guess the anthology is right to include them: both works read as
fairly typical for their writers even if I did not like them. They are a key part of twenty-first century sf. I just wish they weren't.
But of course there are areas where the editors totally get it right. I always like a bit of Vandana Singh, and her story "Infinities" (one of only three rereads for me in the book) is a typically excellent piece of work. I don't think Rachel Swirsky has ever published a novel, but her story "Eros, Philia, Agape" is astounding, a masterful tale of what might it mean for an android to love, and she's an acclaimed writer of short science fiction and fantasy, with two Nebula wins and a number of Hugo and Nebula finalists. Madeleine Ashby is someone I haven't read much of, but I really enjoyed her story "The Education of Junior Number 12" here (another story of androids in love, actually, but very different from the Swirsky) and everything else I have read by her I have enjoyed; she's an incisive writer on the cutting edge of current technology, and now I want to seek our her related novel, vN. Ken Liu is an acclaimed writer of short sf, and though I've personally found his stuff hit or miss, "The Algorithm of Love" is probably the best thing I've read by him, a dark meditation on the implications AI might have for human consciousness.
"A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" is a pretty typical piece by Yoon Ha Lee: told in the form of a series of encyclopedia entries, so purely exposition, it nonetheless manages to say interesting things about how societies interact, especially with a really strong last line, and it's no wonder he went on to do acclaimed work like Machineries of Empire. Peter Watts is a highly acclaimed writer of hard sf about consciousness, and his story "The Island" here is great on many levels, examining how people think, how machines think, and how something we don't even understand thinks, and how different that might or might not be; dark but highly effective. There's a Cory Doctorow story here, too: "Chicken Little," about a lot of stuff, including immortality, marketing, and rational calculations of risk. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a Doctorow story before, but I thought this was great. So you have a lot of great stuff here by acclaimed writers.
Beyond that, though, you have great stuff from writers I actually had never heard of... but if Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden are making an argument, it's that I should have heard of them, and so I'm prepared to accept that it's not the anthology that's at fault but the universe—or, perhaps, me. I'd never heard of David Moles, but I loved his story "Finisterra" about a gas giant with an Earth-like atmosphere where people build communities on the backs of giant floating life-forms. Similarly, I didn't know Karl Schroeder but found his "To Hie from Far Cilenia" very intriguing, a story about digital communities overlapping with the physical world that we might not even notice unless we learn how to see differently. "The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka was fascinating, set in a world where the Earth really was created in 4,000 B.C. but otherwise science is the same, and exploring what implications the discovery of the so-called hobbits of Flores would have. It was expanded into a novel, which I'll have to seek out. These people ought to be the face of twenty-first century sf if they're not.
It's not all great, of course; I've mentioned a couple I didn't like already, and there were some more that I bounced off of, including Stross's "Rogue Farm" (too clever for me, maybe), Marissa Lingen's "The Calculus Plague" (some improbably bad research ethics; where's the IRB?), Paul Cornell's "One of Our Bastards Is Missing" (I love Cornell but have never gotten much out of his Hamilton shorts), Oliver Morton's "The Albian Message" (less a story, more a thought experiment), and Alaya Dawn Johnson's "Third Day Lights" (I just could not be bothered to work out what was actually happening). But most of what was left was usually good, if not great, or among the best short stories I've read in the past year.
One story is a bit tragic: Kage Baker's "Plotters and Shooters" was good fun, a take on Ender's Game where the protagonists are all thirty-year-olds who are stuck in their mothers' basements. But Kage Baker can't be the future of sf, because she unfortunately died at the age of 57 in 2010. It reminded me I really must get around to finishing her Company series, though.
There's a lot of great stuff here; I think this probably has one of the best hit rates for an anthology I've read outside of something like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes. Perhaps the real argument here is that "Twenty-first century science fiction is in rude health." If that's the case, then the editors have assembled evidence that demonstrates their conclusions thirty times over.
The third "Lady Astronaut" book takes place in parallel to the second, showing us what was happening on the lunar base at the same time Elma York was headed for Mars. This means a new narrator, Nicole Wargin, wife of the governor of Kansas; she was a minor character who I only vaguely remember from the previous books.
I found it tough to get into at first. Wargin herself I didn't find very sympathetic as a narrator, and though I think some of that might be gender bias on my part, I still wasn't enjoying the experience. I felt like her reactions to things were often off. The plot, too, took a while to become interesting; it seems as though someone is trying to sabotage the space program, but at first this is a repetitive series of dangerous incidents followed by people going, "Gosh, could there be a traitor?" But once Wargin gets into space and the polio hits the lunar colony, the book picked up steam, becoming a gripping thriller. The overall effect of the book is quite tense, and after an on-and-off start, I read it voraciously through to the end. I love space disaster stories, and this is a good one. There are also some pretty emotional beats that I did not see coming, and which really worked. The very last scene had me tearing up! And after not liking Wargin at first, I came to really understand her; Kowal does a good job of balancing all the different aspects of her psychology into a complete character.
There are two things that bothered me. One, I don't know why what Wargin did during the war was held back from the reader for so long; it felt contrived to do so. Two, I felt like it occasionally took the characters too long to think of solutions; four days of lost contact with Earth before someone looks through a telescope? But I liked this a lot, and in some ways it's more successful though I would say less ambitious than the first Lady Astronaut novel. I will probably put it on my Hugo nominating ballot.
Kindle eBook, n.pag. Published 2014 (originally 2012) Acquired and read August 2019
The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal
This novelette was the first-written story in Kowal's "punchcard punk" Lady Astronaut series, but it is set last. Unavoidably, as she clearly tweaked aspects of it when it came time to write the full-length novels, this story jars, and I think I would have been better off reading it in publication order, rather than chronological order.
The broad details line up with the later-written novels, but it doesn't quite fit. This story says Elma used to have a habit of folding paper eagles out of discarded punch cards, something she never actually does in the prequel duology. This story riffs on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with an orphan named Dorothy on a Kansas farm with an uncle named Henry and an aunt named Em; no one comments on what a weird coincidence that is. It must be meant to be a literary device, not a literal thing, but that's not the tone of the very grounded novels. (The character of Dorothy also appears in The Calculating Stars, but the Oz elements are downplayed.) I think worst of all is that the entire plot of the novelette revolves around whether Elma will go through a "tesseract field" to another star system, a fanciful thing that doesn't fit with the hard sf approach of the novels. As a result, it's hard to buy the emotional dilemma upon which the entire novelette rests.
The Fated Sky continues the story begun in The Calculating Stars, of Elma "Lady Astronaut" York, and her mission to get into space. When the book opens, she's making regular runs to the lunar colony... but her real goal is to go on humanity's first trip to Mars, which is what occupies the majority of the book.
It's enjoyable stuff. I like those kind of space problem-solving stories; this is Apollo 13 or The Martian, but with more human drama because they're all cooped up together for so long. My biggest issue is that it feels a little tension-free at time, just because you know how a novel like this has to be structured, and it doesn't really throw any big surprises at you, just little ones. I think I probably liked the first one more, but this one had some great moments here and there.
Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology
edited by Peter Ahlstrom
When I was teaching my science fiction creative writing class this fall, I found myself skimming the transcripts of the podcast Writing Excuses for writing exercises to do in class, or just insights. I still haven't really listened to the podcast, but I found it interesting enough to see if they'd done a textbook: there's definitely a market for a good sf writing textbook as far as I can tell. They haven't exactly, but they have published this, and I was intrigued enough to pick up Shadows Beneath.
Shadows Beneath contains one short story apiece by each of the podcast's four co-hosts. In addition to all the stories, though, each is usually accompanied by:
transcripts of brainstorming sessions (from Writing Excuses episodes)
early drafts
transcripts of critique group sessions (also from WX episodes)
"Track Changes" versions between the first full draft and the final draft
essays about the process of writing the stories
It's great stuff. It made me wish I had assigned this as a textbook, and if I ever get to teach the class again, I might just. The strength of the book is that it lets you see experienced writers get at some of the more ineffable parts of the writing process. How do you go from an idea to a story? How do you decide what's important in the revision process? It made me think we ought to have spent more time on brainstorming and revision in class.
It's also of benefit that these are just four very solid stories. Of Kowal, I expected that on the basis of other work I've read by her, but I'd never read anything by Brandon Sanderson or Dan Wells before, and the only thing by Howard Tayler I've ever read (Schlock Mercenary) is awful.
Kowal's "A Fire in the Heavens" is neat, but hard to discuss without spoiling what I think ought to remain unspoiled. But suffice it to say, it's a good example of a "first contact" story. The revision is really neat: there's a lot of small alterations that improve the story (things like having the main characters pick a port from a map, rather than just blunder into the closest one), but also a big chunk added into the middle of the story (that it's impossible to imagine not being there, but it worked pretty good without it).
Wells's "I.E.Demon" was my favorite, a fun story about a group of soldiers in Afghanistan who discover that their new I.E.D.-neutralizing device actually runs off demonology... when it malfunctions. Quick and breezy and delightful in the way it thinks through the implications of it all. The revisions are useful, too: there's an abandoned first draft that takes way too long to get to the point, demonstrating how important it is to get a short story to its crisis point quickly. (It also shows the importance of voice, going from third to first person.)
Tayler's "An Honest Death" was pretty good, though I found the ending a little rushed. A company making immortality drugs finds itself being shook down by Death! The story's told from the perspective of the CEO's security guy, as he tries to figure out if that's really what's going on. Like "I.E.Demon," it has strong use of voice and character; I believed in this guy. The concept is neat, even if it took me a couple reads to get the ending. Again, the revisions were instructive.
Sanderson's "Sixth of the Dusk" was my least favorite; I more admired it than enjoyed it, though that might have just been the headspace I was in. Reading the revisions substantially improved my opinion of it, however, as it was interesting to see how Sanderson made the piece much more thematically rich through revision with just a few alterations to most of the story-- and completely redid the ending to bring things full circle in a much more compelling way. The alien biology concepts were really cool.
Incidentally, I think you can classify all four stories here as science fiction, even if they seem fantasy-ish in some ways. There's no magic in "A Fire in the Heavens"; it just takes place on another world with different astronomical principles. "I.E.Demon" has a demon in it, yes, but beyond that it functions like one of those old sf "problem stories" proceeding from the premise that demons are real; a competent man has to be clever to get out of a dangerous situation. "An Honest Death"'s ending makes it clear that we're not looking at Death Death per se, but a more sfnal take on the idea. And thought "Sixth of the Dusk" apparently takes place in Sanderson's Cosmere fantasy universe, on its own, it seems to be science fiction: everything can be explained by weird alien biology and extraterrestrial technology.
And the title is aptly chosen. It's a phrase from Sanderson's story, but it applies fairly literally and also metaphorically to all four. There's literally dangerous things below the surface in the stories by Wells (the demon), Tayler (Death), and Sanderson (sea creatures), and all four stories are about something that was simple but turns out to be much more complicated.
But the title also describes the book's insight into the writing process: as per the cover, we normally just see the poised little boat on the surface, sailing perfectly, and miss the shadows beneath: the false starts, the bad ideas, the arguments, the self-doubt. I've published over 150,000 words of fiction, but I still felt like I learned something from reading this book about how writers write, and I suspect you will too.
I've been teaching a science fiction creative writing class this semester, and it's definitely testing the limits of my pedagogy: I have a formula and structure for teaching both academic writing and literature at this point, but I've never really thought about how to teach the writing of stories before. What do you actually do in class? Beats me.
I used a textbook to guide me and give structure to the class, but I ended up not liking it very much. What I did find myself doing was googling around and coming up with writings by working sf authors and using them as the basis for lessons. If I got to teach this class again, I would probably make my own "textbook" by assembling them into a course packet or something, and in the future, I'll probably spend a blog post detailing the ones I found most interesting and helpful.
One thing I found myself doing a lot was skimming the transcripts of the podcast Writing Excuses for ideas. A weekly podcast now in its fourteenth season, Writing Excuses is co-hosted by Brandon Sanderson (my sister's favorite fantasy writer), Mary Robinette Kowal (author of this year's Hugo Award for Best Novel winner), Dan Wells (who I had never previously heard of), and Howard Tayler (creator of Schlock Mercenary, one of the most unfunny and uninteresting webcomics I have ever read; regardless, it was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story five times). Each episode is a twenty-minute discussion of a topic and includes a book recommendation and a writing prompt; I pinched from those writing prompts a lot.
I became curious if they had published a textbook or something similar. Amazon brought me to Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology, a collection of four short stories by the four co-hosts. What makes it interesting, though, is that in addition to the finished short stories, it also includes transcripts of brainstorming sessions (originally aired as Writing Excuses episodes), early drafts, transcripts of workshop sessions, "Track Changes" comparisons between drafts, and essays about the writing process. I'll review it in a future blog post; what I want to focus on now is a concept I learned from reading the transcripts.
MILIEU: Stories of place and environment. This is a story that focuses on a setting; it begins when the character enters the setting, and ends when they leave, and a large part of the interest for the reader is in the setting. A lot of portal fantasies are milieu stories: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Out of my own recent reading, I would say the 1900 novel Stringtown on the Pike: A Novel of Northernmost Kentucky is a milieu story; though it obviously includes the three other factors, the purpose of the story is (as indicated by the title) to introduce the reader a particular place at a particular time: Florence, Kentucky, during and after the Civil War.
IDEA: Stories of problems that have to be solved. A lot of mysteries fall into this category; so do those (mostly now perceived as old-style, I suspect) sf stories where someone has to cleverly science their way out of a science dilemma in a scientifically plausible way.
Of what I've read recently, I actually think a lot of the Hornblower stories would qualify: Lord Hornblower, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, and Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (among others, I'm sure) all have parts where Hornblower is thrust into a tricky situation, and reasons his way out of it: how does he take down a group of mutineers without force? how does he survive a duel when he's really a quite awful shot? how can he stop a group of French loyalists from freeing Napoleon with just his wits? Hornblower's character, though fascinating, only exists as a vehicle for the idea stories.
CHARACTER: Probably self-explanatory: stories where the focus is on the characters (as opposed to the other ones on this list, where the characters are just there to get you to the milieu, idea, or event). In a character story, the character needs to (though they might not succeed in) changing something about themselves.
Probably the easiest to find examples of in my own reading, especially in highbrow sf and literary fiction: Ancillary Justice, Kowal's own Lady Astronaut books, Heinlein's Double Star, the Murderbot Diaries, are all examples of character stories.
EVENT: These are more plot-driven stories. An event happens, and the characters have to react to it. The way the Gunn Center site puts it is pretty clear: "Although events happen in every story, the world in an Event Story is out of whack. It is out of order; unbalanced. An Event Story is about the struggle to re-establish the old order or to create a new one."
I actually just finished a really good example of an event story: The Walking Dead. The series begins with the world going out of whack (a zombie outbreak); it ends when the situation is resolved, and a new, stable society is establishes, largely zombie-free.
The thing that makes the MICE Quotient useful is that it makes you aware that stories are a contract with your reader. The beginning of the story signals what kind of story it is, and the end of the story has to fulfill that promise. You can't have a story that begins with a murder mystery and ends with the protagonist fixing her relationship with her mother; you've swapped an idea story for a character story there. The two can co-exist, of course, but you can't break the promise you made when you opened your story with a dead body.
Mary Robinette Kowal has built on Card's basic idea. (I think this is her addition, anyway.) I can't find a succinct write-up of it on her own site, but the blogger Wendy Barron wrote up her notes from attending a workshop run by Kowal. The idea is that, especially in short fiction, the different factors nest within each other, and operate kind of like HTML codes, on a FILO system: "first in, last out."
So say you want to write a murder mystery where the detective also has a strained relationship with her mother. If you open with the dead body, you've begun an idea story: <i>. Then, later, you introduce the relationship issue: <c>. That means that the very last thing you must do is resolve the idea story, so you must resolve the character story first: </c></i>. On the other hand, if you want the detective's relationship to be the focus, but also to have a murder mystery, you need to begin with a character problem and end with a resolution to it, with the murder mystery being introduced second and resolved first: <c><i></i></c>. What you can't do is open with the character crisis and end with the solution to the mystery, because then the story you promised your reader ends but things keep on going: <c><i></c></i>.
The nesting can get complicated if you want. Barron's write-up gives the example of The Wizard of Oz (the film, not the novel), which I've paraphrased for you:
<c> Dorothy is dissatisfied with home.
<e> Dorothy runs away.
<m> Dorothy ends up in Oz.
<i> Dorothy needs to find a route home.
VARIOUS ADVENTURES WITH EVEN MORE NESTING
</i> Dorothy is told how the Ruby Slippers work.
</m> Dorothy leaves Oz.
</e> Dorothy returns home.
</c> Dorothy accepts there's no place like home.
In my ALL CAPS bit, you could expand: there are lots of <i>s and <e>s nested within there: how will they convince the Wizard is an idea story, with how will they kill the Wicked Witch of the West? another <i> within that one, and within that, the event story of Dorothy being captured by the Wicked Witch! And once the convincing-the-Wizard <i> is closed out by Toto's inadvertent discovery, a new <e> is soon opened up by his balloon accidentally flying away.
Though I think the FILO nest definitely applies to the outermost code, I'm not entirely convinced it has to all the way down: it seems to me that in a novel, you could introduce a character sub-story, introduce an idea sub-story, then resolve the character sub-story, then resolve the idea sub-story, as long as the whole set was nested in something else. But despite the Wizard of Oz example, Kowal is mostly focusing on short fiction.
Using the MICE Quotient
So, after I paused reading Shadows Beneath to figure all that out (the book mentions the MICE Quotient a couple times, but doesn't explain it), I thought, "Well, that's neat... but is it true?" Which is to say, lots of people will give you formulas and ideas about writing, but no matter how neat they sounds, they're totally useless if they don't lead to you writing better stories.
I read Shadows Beneath over Thanksgiving break, and the week we came back, I was meeting with my creative writing students one-on-one to discuss their final stories. They had all previously submitted rough drafts, which had been workshopped by the class; now, they were meeting with me to discuss their revised drafts in anticipation of submitting final drafts the following week.
On my first day of conferences, I found myself explaining the MICE Quotient three different times because it allowed me to name structural problems that were working against my students. I think I would have known something was wrong with out it, but the MICE Quotient was very helpful for labeling what it was quickly and easily. I'll give some examples, kept vague for my students' sake.
For the rough draft, one had turned in the opening of a story about a guy isolated by himself, a person apparently full of self-loathing. Then, something happens that break that isolation, and he has a problem to solve. The story ended when he solved the problem. But the ending didn't satisfy, because the character issues hadn't really wrapped up; essentially he'd begun a character story, but ended an event one: <c><e></e>. So my suggestion wasn't a whole-scale rewrite, but another scene or scenes that wrapped up the issues of isolation the first few pages had focused on.
Another had written a story that opened with a dramatic murder, and then jumped forward several years to explore the effects on the victim's daughter. She wanted to know if the murderers had to come back. (There had been mixed opinions on this during the workshops.) My argument was that if the story opened with the murder, then yes, they ought to, because the opening would lead us to expect an event story. But if the story opened with the daughter several years later, then we would know it was a character story about the way this was affecting her life. She opted, in the interests of time, to go with the character story, as telling the event story would take more words and thus more time... and after all, it was almost finals week. I kinda feel like this is a shame, because I really liked how she wrote the opening, but I guess that's the kind of thing you gotta do in writing.
Another student had fundamentally written an idea story, about an inventor trying to get an invention to work, but the response to it had been muted: there wasn't a strong "hook" to get the reader involved; the "stakes" were abstract as we were often just told that people out there were suffering. The class had suggested adding another character that we actually met who was experiencing the problem themselves. In my conference, I suggested this new character should go in the first scene to make the stakes clear: but the MICE Quotient led me to realize that the story then couldn't end with the main character finally getting the technology to work, but with the side character's problem being resolved: <c><i><e></e></i></c> is probably how you would diagram out the resulting final draft, though I would argue that it's fundamentally an idea story, so I don't know if I made the right suggestion there or not.
So, I think on the whole, the MICE Quotient was a surprisingly useful concept for working with short fiction, and if I ever teach creative writing again, I will have to make use of it more than dropping it on some students during individual conferences. For starters, I will need to track down the actual place where Orson Scott Card actually writes about it himself, instead of relying on other people's interpretations!
Here is the first post in my customary sequence describing my rankings for the Hugo Awards ballot. 
