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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jo Walton
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October 10 - October 24, 2019
James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah is brilliant but weird. The enormous body of God is floating in the Atlantic, and a tanker has to tow it away. It’s not at all the book you’d expect from that description either.
Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music;
The John W. Campbell Memorial Award went to what I thought at the time and still believe to be the best book of 1994, Greg Egan’s Permutation City.
The Philip K. Dick Award was won by Robert Charles Wilson’s excellently strange Mysterium.
Greg Egan’s “Cocoon” is also first-rate, one of his first major stories, and one of the first in those days to feature an openly gay man as the hero (something we heard about from readers, too).
John Brunner’s “Good with Rice” was one of his last major stories,
Slipping through without much notice is Joe Lansdale’s “Bubba Ho-Tep,” which would later be made into a movie that many regard as a cult classic.
The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, Theodore Roszak;
Kaleidoscope Century, John Barnes;
I think Kaleidoscope Century absolutely was one of the most significant books of the year, if also one of the nastiest.
“The Good Rat,” by Allen Steele (Analog, mid-December 1995)
To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, by Joanna Russ Yours, Isaac Asimov, by Isaac Asimov, edited by Stanley Asimov
Gary Lippincott, cover of F&SF, January 1995 (illustrating “Tea and Hamsters,” by Michael Coney)
one story, I think, was the best of the year, by SF’s greatest-ever writer of novellas: Gene Wolfe. This is The Ziggurat, a tremendously exciting and quite chilling novella, with a classically, profoundly unreliable narrator. It can be read entirely differently depending on how much you believe what the narrator says—I think enough clues are there to suggest he’s entirely out there—but the story certainly doesn’t demand any particular reading.
“Think Like a Dinosaur” is a great story, clearly one of the best Hugo winners. It’s in very fruitful dialogue with not one but two classic SF stories (“The Cold Equations” and “Rogue Moon”), and it’s great even if you don’t know those stories. A masterwork.
But neither was even the best Egan novelette of the year. That honor, in my opinion, goes to “Wang’s Carpets,” which I think one of the best SF stories of all time.
(And last year, I should have mentioned Friesner’s very affecting “Death and the Librarian.”)
Some people might feel that The Sparrow might have deserved a Hugo nomination, and surely it was a book many people were talking about. I hate it—it sets up a situation that eventually makes no emotional sense, and I felt I’d been conned into caring about something that’s just stupid. I don’t mean science errors; I mean people are not like that and do not act in ways like that. The Sparrow requires hundreds of people to behave in ways that only psychopaths behave. It’s just barely plausible that one person could find a victim of severe abuse and assume this is a degenerate who should be blamed
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The Wood Wife won the Mythopoeic Award, and very well deserved—it’s a great book.
There was Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall, which really was one of the most exciting books of the year, or any year,
“Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast,” by Suzy McKee Charnas (Asimov’s, March 1996)
“A Crab Must Try,” by Barrington Bayley (a very weird late story by this often very weird writer—I think this one won the BSFA short fiction award)
Tony Daniel’s The Robot’s Twilight Companion.
One of the weirdest novellas of the period was Eliot Fintushel’s Izzy at the Lucky Three.
Of historical interest is “Invasion,” one of the last, if not the last, Joanna Russ stories to appear in a mainline SF magazine—a Star Trek pastische, of all things—and
Mother Grimm, Catherine Wells;
The Prometheus Award was won by Ken MacLeod’s The Stone Canal, which strikes me as exactly the sort of book that should be Hugo nominated.
Reflections and Refractions: Thoughts on Science-Fiction, Science, and Other Matters, by Robert Silverberg
Susan R. Matthews had a controversial and much-discussed first novel, An Exchange of Hostages. She published another few novels, but I haven’t seen anything from her recently.
“Alice, Alfie, Ted, and the Aliens,” by Paul Di Filippo (about Tiptree, Bester, and Sturgeon, of course, and riffing on a Tiptree title)
Eliot Fintushel’s Izzy and the Father of Terror was very strange indeed.
She’s a member of a visible minority, the Barkazils, who are known as the “cunning people” but who live in a ghetto and suffer all the kinds of prejudice and violence that minorities do tend to suffer in big cities.
Willis is a master of the screwball comedy, and here she’s working with wonderful material like Victorian England, cats and dogs living together, jumble sales, and the significance of art and love on history.
But “Maneki Neko” is my favorite thing Sterling has ever written.
To me, Story of Your Life is clearly one of the great SF novellas of all time. (We’ll just miss covering another one a couple of years later—Ian MacLeod’s 2001 masterwork New Light on the Drake Equation.)
“Auschwitz and the Rectification of History,” by Eliot Fintushel (my second favorite story by this weird writer—my favorite is the tragically neglected “Milo and Sylvie” [2000])
William Barton’s very depressing “Down in the Dark.”
Jim Grimsley, who seems subsequently to have been driven from the field by reactionaries upset with him being openly gay, had a strong story, “Free in Asveroth.”
Gregory Frost published “How Meersh the Bedeviler Lost His Toes,” probably one of the few stories ever to feature a talking penis as a character.
but I must admit that I wanted to see Kage Baker, who was pouring out a remarkable amount of first-rate work at that point, to win. In my opinion, she was perhaps the best natural storyteller to enter the field since Poul Anderson.
Hunting the Snark, by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s, December 1999)
Winner: Science Fiction of the 20th Century, by Frank M. Robinson (Collectors Press)
Winner: Science Fiction of the 20th Century, by Frank M. Robinson (Collectors Press) hey, i actually read this one!
That’s in more or less my order of preference. My clear favorites were the two Arnason novellas—the best two Hwarhath stories of all, in my opinion. You’ll note I mildy preferred Turtledove’s Twenty-One, Counting Up to the Hugo nominee, Forty, Counting Down. But really I consider them as parts of the same story.
And finally, I seemed to be the only person who noticed Denise Lee’s “Sailing the Painted Ocean,” but I thought it remarkable. (It’s one of those stories that I wish I could anthologize, to bring it to more people’s notice.) (I should note that it did appear in Datlow and Windling’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.)
I too am very fond of Eleanor Arnason’s Dapple, which some readers complained was “slow-moving,” but which I found profound and emotionally affecting, and which I would agree is one of the best, perhaps the best, of her Hwarhath stories.
Richard Wadholm really looked at this point like he was going to be one of the hot new writers in the genre, and his “Green Tea” was terrific—he disappeared not too long thereafter, a pity.
Alastair Reynolds’s “Galactic North” was also good, as was Walter Jon Williams’s brutal “Daddy’s World.”
I have learned exactly how to find everything quickly in Locus’s wonderful Index to Awards, without which I couldn’t even have thought about doing this.
In 2017, the nominees were rediscovered by Olav Rokne and they were Call Him Dead by Eric Frank Russell, The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov, Not This August by Cyril Kornbluth, The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett. This is the first woman on the short list, and also, wow I was wrong!
