BSFA Awards 2011: Short fiction nominees, winner, & my ranking

Official announcement came out a few days back. Only minor stories this year.

All nominees are online. All originally published in UK during 2011.

List below is in order of my preference - best first, unread last. Links on author or publisher fetch more matching fiction. My rating is in brackets. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on title goes there.

1. [novella] Nina Allan's "The Silver Wind" (B); download; Interzone 233: Evil British government has been secretly experimenting with randomly picked citizens without informing them. Experiments that leave the victims grotesquely changed in body, if they survive at all. Experiments with a device that puts the subject in a parallel universe or in a different time.
   
   This is the story of a man who will be thus stranded in a parallel London, never able to return.
   
   British readers might find it more interesting as the story makes several references to what appear to be popular political issues there.
2. [novelette] Al Robertson's "Of Dawn" (C); download; Interzone 235: Left midway through. It wasn't that badly written, but I had read enough of unimportant stories in succession & wanted to move to something interesting.
   
   A woman is mourning the recent death of her soldier brother.
3. [ss] China Mieville's "Covehithe" (C); download; The Guardian, 22 April 2011: If the story has a head or tail, I cannot make it out.
   
   Oil rigs lost in the seas due to disasters are mysteriously coming alive, walking at ocean's surface, sometimes visiting coastal places & doing mindless destruction, laying "eggs" & having baby rigs, ... 
4. Kameron Hurley's "Afterbirth" (C); download; author’s own website: Way too complex to describe story & completely pointless. A world where women are required to have at least some children, though the responsibility for raising them is of the state. A woman is interested in some sort of astronomical artifact.
5. [winner] [novelette] Paul Cornell's "The Copenhagen Interpretation" (C); download; Asimov's, July 2011: In a Europe where diplomatic messages are conveyed via human couriers by burning the message in a courier's head in a language known only to two end parties, & even the courier doesn't know the message. Where walls & doors of rooms are made by bending space itself.
   
   Don't ask me what the story is about, though. It made zero impression & I immediately forgot. Something about a spy getting involved in an intrigue where terrorists have got hold of a courier carrying a valuable message.

[via SF Signal]

Related.

1. Past nominees & winners.
2. My "Best of 2011" list.
3. Fiction originally published during 2011.

Free fiction: J G Ballard's "The Dying Fall" (ss)

At The Guardian/UK. From Interzone, April 1996 issue.

[via Ansible, May 2009]

Greg Egan's "Crystal Nights" (novelette, AI, free): A retelling of Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God"

Undoubtedly one of the better science fiction stories of 2008, but I still prefer Sturgeon's original. Sturgeon uses less jargon & is more consistent.

Story summary.

Daniel Cliff is a rich businessman who's purchased rights to someone's private invention - a tiny optical computer that works better than buildings full of conventional ones.

He's going to run a simulation in it of a microcosmic universe - a world called Sapphire & its moon, local evolution of life, & a handle to our physical universe via a "monolith" placed on their moon (remember Clarke's "2001 A Space Odyssey"?) once they evolve enough to reach their moon. This monolith is actually a control panel for actual equipment in a physics lab in our world.

Idea is to eventually have them outsmart humans because of their much faster evolution - so they can do things for him in our world. Daniel personally has ambitions to be digitized & uploaded into their world!

Only, the simulated beings ("Phites") are now way too smart to do his bidding...

See also.

1. Gregory Benford's "Reason not to Publish": What if we were in place of those simulated beings?
2. James P Hogan's "Making Light": A humorous, sometimes hilarious, description of why GOD was forced to create our universe an evolving one by embedding some things called the laws of physics, in preference to standard precreated one!
   

Collected in.

1. Gardner Dozois (Ed)'s "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection" (2009).
2. Jonathan Strahan (Ed)'s "Best SF and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 3" (2009).
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Interzone, #215 (April 2008).
Rating: A.
Download full text from publisher's site; or podcast at Transmission from Beyond (includes downloabable MP3 audio).
Among the nominees of BSFA Award 2008 in short fiction category.
Added to my best of the year 2008 list.
Related: Stories of Greg Egan.

* David Brin's "What Continues, What Fails..." (short story, science fiction)

Rather muddled story with a lot of jargon about black holes. A pair of women researchers of far future have figured a way of looking inside a black hole, & have seen a separate universe there! Plus a parallel track of one of the pair bearing a child (clone in her own womb) - highly wanted because her "tenaciousness" genes are in high demand. Plus description of the many wonders of this far future.

Collected in.

1. David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (Ed)'s "The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF".
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Interzone, December 1991.
Rating: C

Note: Why is this post so short?

Alastair Reynolds' "The Sledge-maker’s Daughter" (novelette, science fiction): A victim of sexual assault gets a weapon to punish her oppressor

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