Hugo Awards 2013 - short stories: nominees, my ranking & winner

Note 22 April 2013:  I'm not clear what happened. This article was posted yesterday & appeared ok. But I just noticed it stopped appearing at the site & Blogger had changed its status from Published to Draft! I'm just hitting the Publish button again.
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Only 3 nominees this year, 2 online. All originally published during 2012.

None really worked for me, though Bodard's has an idea briefly taken up near the end of the story that I could identify with - intelligently adapting an artifact of an alien civilization isn't easy; for best results, you better be born in the culture that originated it! Artifacts carry around their cultural origins in many ways.

List below is in order of my preference. Links on author or publisher fetches more matching fiction.

1. Aliette de Bodard's "Immersion" (B); download text/audio; Clarkesworld, June 2012: Not sure what to think of it. And it certainly didn't touch me at any emotional level.
   
   There is a gadget - an "immerser". "Wear" it & you become someone else, whatever avatar you choose. And you can wear it at varying levels of power that determines how much you will be aware of you real self when wearing it.
   
   Set aboard a "station" that makes money from "Galactics", a technologically advanced stream of humanity that has split from earth.
   
   There is a minor side story of a woman who married to a different culture, felt completely lost, tried to fit in so much she lost her own original self.
2. Kij Johnson's "Mantis Wives" (B); download text/audio; Clarkesworld, August 2012; macabre: The story doesn't really say anything, but uses nice language & is comprised of many tiny episodes.
   
   Mantis, an insect whose female eats the male after copulation. Could the mantis develop this killing into an art? Story describes many ways the female could slowly torture & kill her mate!
3. [winner] Ken Liu's "Mono no Aware" (B); Nick Mamatas & Masumi Washington (eds)' "The Future is Japanese"; apocalypse: Tries too hard to arouse your emotions. And too dramatic near end, for my taste.
   
   Life on earth is about to be destroyed by an asteroid(?) impact & the world knows it early enough. It's about reactions in a small Japanese town to this news, & later escape to a distant star in a solar-sail powered generation ship of the only human survivors - mostly Americans, plus a few others, among them a child from this Japanese town

Related.

1. Official announcement of 2013 nominees @The Hugo Awards.
2. Other Hugo nominees & winners.
3. "best of" lists.

Nebula Awards 2010: Short stories - nominees & my rankings

Official nominees announcement is at SFWA.

7 stories, all first published during 2010. If you like a shocker, "Arvies" might work. Two others are at least readable - "Conditional Love" & "How Interesting: A Tiny Man". One I've not read. Rest aren't worth noting.

If I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there. Link on author or publisher fetches more matching fiction. All stories are online, & download links are included. My rating is in brackets.

List below is in order of my preference, best first, unread last.

1. Adam-Troy Castro's "Arvies" (B); download; Lightspeed, August 2010: An extreme form of slavery.
   
   Caution: This is a very dark story, intended primarily to shock, with extreme cruelty.
2. Harlan Ellison's "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" (B); download; Realms of Fantasy, February 2010; fanfic: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" retold, with a twist.
3. Felicity Shoulders' "Conditional Love" (B); download; Asimov's, January 2010: Caring for deformed & abandoned children. Deformities introduced by parents because of their quest for genetically tweaked "perfect" babies, a process that sometimes has horrific side effects.
   Related: Judith Merril's "That Only a Mother" far more effectively addresses the same general theme.
4. Vylar Kaftan's "I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You in Reno" (B); download; Lightspeed, June 2010: A love story that's a bit too science fictional for my taste.
   A man & a woman. Next door neighbors. Forever in love, never really meeting. A lot of cosmic & relativity adjectives thrown in in the descriptions. In some ways, it's just a review of many popular sf tropes.
5. Amal El-Mohtar's "The Green Book" (C); download; Apex Magazine, 1 November 2010: Cannot make out the head or tail of it.
   There is a magical impossible-to-destroy notebook ("The Green Book") that can be used to chat with some dead - you write something, they write back! And some sort of sinister organization called "Sisters" that apparantly killed the dead you chat via the notebook & ominous implication they'll get to you too for having read their secret.
6. Kij Johnson's "Ponies" (C); download; Tor.com, 17 November 2010: Little (or is it teenage?) girls competing for status & belonging. It's for fans of unicorns, & of unnecessary gory violence.
7. Jennifer Pelland's "Ghosts of New York; download; Dark Faith: Not read. Going by some comments I've read about it, it has something to do with 9/11 terrorist attack in New York.

Related.

1. Other short fiction categories of Nebula Awards 2010: [novelette], [novella].
2. Previous Nebula Awards for short stories: 2009, 2008, 2007.
3. All Nebula Award winners & nominees.
4. Competing awards for "best" short stories of 2010: BSFA, [Hugo].
5. Anthologies collecting "best" short fiction of 2010: [Dozois'], Horton's, Strahan's, Hartwell/Cramer's.
6. Fiction originally published during 2010 (search "Rating: A" for my selections of "good" stories).
7. My "best of 2010" list.
8. "Best of" lists. 

Nebula Awards 2009: Winners announced

Official announcement & complete list.

1. [novel] Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl"; download.
2. [novella] Kage Baker's "The Women of Nell Gwynne’s"; all nominees.
3. [novelette] Eugie Foster's "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast"; download text/audio; all nominees.
4. [ss] Kij Johnson's "Spar"; download text/audio; all nominees.

Kij Johnson's "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" (short story, fantasy, free): Description of a magical trick

It made very easy read, but what the heck is the point of the story? But it's included in a "best of 2008" anthology & is on this year's Nebula preliminary ballet - so take your call.

Story summary.

Aimee owns a bunch of monkeys who can perform a vanishing trick on stage in fairs - they enter an ordinary tub, & vanish in front of audience. After some hours, they return to Aimee's tour bus, sometimes bringing in trinkets from apparently far away places. No one, not even Aimee, has a clue to what happens. That's the whole story.

Collected in.

1. Jonathan Strahan (Ed)'s "Best SF and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 3" (2009).
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, July 2008.
Rating: B.
Download full text from author's or publisher's website.
Nominated for Hugo Award 2009 in short story category.
Nominated for Nebula Award 2008 in short story category.
Related: Stories of Kij Johnson.

Kij Johnson's "The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change" (novelette): What if dogs could speak?

Among the better stories from this year's Nebula finalists. Very unconventional presentation, but quite enjoyable.

I could particularly identify with the story because the issue of stray dogs is a recurring one in Bombay. Every couple of years, we have a big controversy with substantial newspaper coverage - highly abused & often hungry street dogs attack someone, some people want the city freed of all strays or at least have them all sterilized, others opposing citing even dogs' right to life, municipal corporation doing some half hearted sterilizations, ... but in few weeks, back to status quo!

Full text of this story is available for download.

Story summary.

The "Change" at the end of the title is a technological innovation that made "all the mammals we have shaped to meet our own needs" capable of speech. This story is of speaking dogs. Now suddenly, people start getting uncomfortable treating them the way they always did - so they begin kicking them out, & parks are becoming shelters of these strays.

Linna, a young girl, often goes to North Park - a popular haunt of these strays. She feeds them, & they tell her their stories - sometimes very moving, sometimes childish, accounts of man/dog relations from dog's perspective.

In the end, there is a police drive to kill all strays by poisoning them. Linna will save most of North Park dogs by conning authorities, & find them a new home.

Fact sheet.

"The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change", short story, review
First published: Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (Ed)'s "Coyote Road, Trickster Tales", July 2007.
Rating: A
Nebula Awards 2007 finalist in novelette category.
Added to my best of the year 2007 list.