John Varley's "Air Raid" (short story, doomsday, free)

I found it mostly uninteresting to wade through, & you will notice that author has consciously made it difficult for you to comprehend what is going on. But nice positive ending.

Story summary.

In a future where a deadly airborne virus has made earth uninhabitable & the few survivors immune to it have a highly withered body. But a group of these men of the future, with advanced technology including time travel, seem to be up to something nasty.

Much of the story appears to be body snatching raid of an airplane in the past, an airplane about to crash. But their intentions are honorable, as we'll discover in the end...

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, Spring 1977.

Download full text from Baen eBooks.

This story was later expanded into a novel, a screenplay, & a movie, all titled "Millenium".

This story has also been published under the pseudonym Herb Boehm.
Rating: B.

Nominated for Hugo Award 1978 in short story category.
Nominated for Nebula Award 1978 (or was it 1977) in short story category.

Related: : Stories of John Varley.

Nebula Awards 2012: Winners announced

@SFWA.

PS: I wonder if I'm making mistakes or Blogger has started behaving in a weird way. I'd posted this several days back, but just noticed it was marked "Draft!"

Frank Herbert's "Dune" (novel): Life on a parched desert world

This was my third attempt at reading this book. I distinctly remember that on each of the two earlier occasions, I gave up within first few dozen pages -  because I found names in the story impossible to spell! This time I had no such difficulty. Only difference between then & now is: I now have some experience reading sf; then I was new to the genre. So if you are a genre novice who discovered sf relatively late in life & cannot relate to the book everyone praises, may be try it a few years down the line. This also makes me wonder if I'll still like the stories I then loved!

While the story has a couple of scenes I found very silly (a completely unnecessary knife duel near the end, a 3-4 year old supremely endowed girl happily fighting on the battlefront of a dirty war), I generally liked the book.

While there are a lot of issues this book of epic scope deals with, one of the most memorable, if macabre, part for me was: the water is so precious & scarce on this desert world of Arrakis that a part of the funeral rituals for the dead involves extracting the water from the dead body for later community use!

There are any number of summaries of this book on the net; so I'll skip that part.

Fact sheet.

First published: (as novel) 1965.
This is a fix up novel, based on author's 2 earlier works: "Dune World" (Analog, December 1963 - February 1964 in 3 parts) & "The Prophet of Dune" (Analog, January-May 1965 in 5 parts).
Rating: A. 
Winner of Hugo Award 1966 in novel category.
Winner of Nebula Award 1965 in novel category.
Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of Frank Herbert.

Ursula K Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (novelette): A feeling of loneliness

10-clones, 5 men & 5 women, all derived from the same man, act as a single individual, mutually dependent, but not noticing others. Even sex is within the group.

9 die in an earthquake. Story is of the survivor discovering life as an individual.

Collected in.

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

Fact sheet.

First published: Playboy, November 1969.
Nominated for Nebula Award 1970 in novelette category.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Ursula K Le Guin.

Barry B Longyear's "Enemy Mine" (novella): They're only different, not evil!

This often well regarded & widely anthologized story didn't work as well for me. It does have its moments, however.

Story is of two fighter pilots from a space war between humans & Dracs - one of each crash on a harsh uninhabited world, & are thus stranded. Initial hate soon gives way to friendship that will outlast even the death of one of them, even after their rescue at the end of war & the continuing mutual antagonism of two societies even in peacetime...

Notes.

* This story "seems likely to have a source from a late 1960s screenplay, this time the 1968 John Boorman film Hell in the Pacific, which starred Lee Marvin and Toshirô Mifune as two WW2 pilots, one American and one Japanese, crashed on a Pacific island, who have to co-operate to survive."

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, September 1979.
[via Bill Garthright @ClassicScienceFiction]
Rating: B. 
Winner of Hugo award 1980 in novella category.
Winner of Nebula award 1979 in novella category.
Movie of the same titled, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, is based on this story.

James H Schmitz's "Forget It" aka "Planet of Forgetting" (novelette, free): An unusual animal defense against predators

An intelligence agent, carrying a secret coded (paper?) file to another world, is captured by the enemy on the way. Story is of him outwitting the entire enemy ship taking him to their world. Features telepathic plants capable of moving around.

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy, February 1965.
Note: "this cover story was mistakenly listed as "Planet of Forge" on Galaxy's TOC."
Eric Flint on online version I've linked in download link below: 'we changed the name of the hero, did some rearranging of paragraphs in the early sections of the story, somewhat modified a few paragraphs of background material to make it fit the Hub setting, and cut a short "trick ending" that wasn't really part of the story itself and wouldn't fit the Hub setting.'
Download full text from BaenCD.
Rating: B.
Nominated for Nebula Award 1966 in novelette category.
Related: Stories of James H Schmitz.

Nebula Awards 2011 - short stories: Nominees & my rankings

Official announcement.

Seven stories, all first published in the US during 2011. Nothing really outstanding. I found two completely unreadable; rest are at least readable.

All the ones I finished, except Yu's, are in sad mood, about various kinds of tragedies.

Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there. My rating appears in brackets. Links on author or publisher yield more matching fiction. All stories are online, & download links are included.

Nominees (7 stories, best first).

1. Nancy Fulda's "Movement" (B); download text & audio; Asimov's, March: Life of a girl inflicted with "temporal autism".
2. David W Goldman's "The Axiom of Choice" (B); download; New Haven Review, Winter: A personal tragedy & a man's pain coping with it. Has unusual FORTRAN-style presentation.
3. E Lily Yu's "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" (B); download text/audio; Clarkesworld, April: Wasps colonize bees territory. Imaginative but with lousy ending.
4. Ken Liu's "The Paper Menagerie" (B); download; F&SF, March/April: Emotional & sad story of a Chinese peasant girl - losing her parents, being sold as a slave to a Hong Kong household, being sold as a "wife" to an American man, & finally being rejected by her American son who disliked his Chinese origins.
5. Tom Crosshill's "Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son" (B); download; Lightspeed, April: A woman has sold her 8 year old son to a scientist for experiments. Scientist who plugs him into a virtual reality environment, only we are not clear if it is virtual reality or alternate realms. Where multiple copies of child's consciousness experience multiple terrors.
6. Adam-Troy Castro's "Her Husband's Hands" (C); download; Lightspeed, October: Left partway through. This is macabre stuff. A soldier lost all of his body except hands, which were reanimated & returned to his wife. How should the wife be interacting with these living disembodied hands?
7. Aliette de Bodard's "Shipbirth" (C); download; Asimov's, February: Left partway through - something incomprehensible & apparently gory about future star-faring humans.

Fact sheet.

1. Other categories in this year's Nebula awards: [novelette], [novella].
2. This year's other awards: BSFA short fiction.
3. Previous Nebula award nominees & winners.
4. My "best of 2011" list.
5. Fiction originally published during 2011.
6. "Best of" lists.

E Lily Yu's "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" (short story, colonization, free): Wasps colonize bees!

Interesting colonization story - wasps are colonists & bees are natives whose territory they're colonizing. But resolution is by invoking deus ex machina, & that spoiled the ending for me: colonists are removed from the scene by a higher power, & rebels are killed by weather!

Fact sheet.

First published: Clarkesworld, April 2011.
Download full text/audio from publisher's site.
Rating: B.
Nominated for Nebula Award 2011 in short story category.

David W Goldman's "The Axiom of Choice" (short story, non-genre, free): Revisiting "goto"!

The most interesting thing about this story is its unusual structure - somewhat in the form of a FORTRAN program.

Story itself is about a personal tragedy, initial inability of the victim to cope, & eventually signs that may be he's beginning to put it behind. This plot usually doesn't work for me - there are just too many stories of the kind. But I wasn't bored.

Fact sheet.

First published: New Haven Review, Winter 2011.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.
Nominated for Nebula Award 2011 in short story category.

Ken Liu's "The Paper Menagerie" (short story, fantasy, free)

This may not be a bad read, provided you have a taste for emotional tearjerkers.

It's the sad story of a Chinese peasant girl - losing her parents to lawlessness during Cultural Revolution, being sold as a slave to a Hong Kong household, being sold as a "wife" to an American man, & finally being rejected by her American son who dislikes his Chinese origins.

Fact sheet.

First published: F&SF, March/April 2011.
Download full text from Random House.
Rating: B.
Nominated for Nebula Award 2011 in short story category.
Related: Stories of Ken Liu.

This year's Nebula award nominees

@SFWA website. [via SF Signal]

Related: Previous nominees & winners.

Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" (short story, parallel universe, free): Got a traveling itch?

This has what some Westerners describe as the "homey" feel of some of the Clifford D Simak's fiction. And nice language.

Story summary.

A diner somewhere at the edge of a small town often receives some very weird crowd late night - travelers from other parallel universes. Their talk overs the years has ignited a traveling itch in the narrator, a teenager employee of the place.

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, July 1987.
Read online at Google cache.
Rating: A.
Winner of Hugo Award 1988.
Nominated for Nebula Award 1987.

3 stories of James H Schmitz

All are colorful in their own way (but "Balanced Ecology" is more colorful than others). List is in order of my preference, best first.

1. [ss] "Balanced Ecology" (B); download; Analog, March 1965: A jungle world knows how to defend itself against greedy humans.
   Nominated for Nebula Award 1966 in short story category.
2. [novelette] "The Winds of Time" (B); download; Analog, September 1962: A man & a woman are trapped, kidnapped, & ... harassed ... by ... aliens.
3. [ss] "A Nice Day for Screaming" (B); download; Analog, January 1965: One of the early exploration ships in "pseudospace", a kind of parallel space, is chased by ... something.

Among the stories from Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell.
Related: Stories of James H Schmitz.

Terry Bisson's "Bears Discover Fire" (short story, non-genre, free)

I don't really get what makes this story so famous. May be it touches some US specific cord, & has local appeal there.

It's not a bad story, though. A non-genre story about the life of a family with dying mother, with some interesting observations.

There is an attempt to make the clearly non-genre story genre that didn't really work for me. We're told in parts of US countryside, bears have discovered the secret of fire, & make campfires at night.

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, August 1990.
Read full text at Scribd.
Rating: B.
Winner of 1991 Hugo Award in short story category.
Winner of 1990 Nebula Award in short story category.
Related: Stories of Terry Bisson.

Joe Haldeman's "None So Blind" (short story, superman, free): Redeploying the human visual cortex

This very amusing story has its technological parts premised on this: if more than a third of human brain is devoted to dealing with visual signals from the eyes, why aren't the blind people geniuses as a rule (since this much brain capacity is lying "unused" in them)?

That leads to actual technology that lets a surgeon tinker with the optic nerves to help brain rewire itself - so we get intellectual supermen off the operating table!

See also.

1. John Wyndham's "The Day of the Triffids": Is based on the antithesis: however big a brain, without eyes, it's not much use. If most of the world were to go blind suddenly, our large brains won't save us from even small-brained menaces.

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, November 1994.
Download full text from one of the author's sites. [via an anonymous visitor of Variety SF]
Rating: A.
Winner of Hugo Award 1995 in short story category.
Nominated for Nebula Award 1995 in short story category.
Related: Stories of Joe Haldeman.

Geoffrey A Landis' "The Sultan of the Clouds" (novella, adventure, free): Ordinary man foils genocide conspiracy

Actually, you've probably read this story before; it's just umpteenth retelling of the same story. Interesting thing is: it's one of the few Nebula nominees this year in novella category that I could actually finish. There is constant action, so no boredom.

Story summary.

Dr Leah Hamakawa & David Tinkerman, because of their experience studying Martian ecology, are invited by Carlos Fernando, the heir who will own practically all of the 1000s of orbiting human habitats of Venus. Only, several habitats don't owe him allegiance, & he's hatching a genocide conspiracy that David will foil.

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, September 2010.
Download full text from author's site.
Rating: B.
Nominated for Nebula Award 2010 in novella category.

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. 

Felicity Shoulders' "Conditional Love" (short story, genetic engineering, free)

This one is for readers who like emotional stories.

It's set in a hospital that cares for abandoned children. Abandoned by their parents because of their physical deformities. Physical deformities introduced in the first place by parents themselves, by genetic modifications of the unborn to create "perfect" kids - an illegal process that sometimes has horrific side effects.

Fact sheet.

First published: Asimov's, January 2010.
Download full text/audio from author's site.
Rating: B.
Nominated for Nebula Award 2010 in short story category.

Harlan Ellison's "How Interesting: A Tiny Man" (short story, fanfic, free): Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" retold, with a twist

This is, in a way, a satire on tendency of some people to poke their nose into things that are none of their business. But similarity with Shelley's "Frankenstein" is uncanny. But unlike Shelley's classic, this story doesn't have an irresponsible creator; it's the society that is the villain.

Story summary.

Narrator has created another man in a lab - a very tiny man, just 5 inches tall, but otherwise a normal man. All is well, the tiny man is welcomed everywhere ... until a woman begins spewing venom for no reason at all...

Fact sheet.

First published: Realms of Fantasy, February 2010.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.
Nominated for Nebula Award 2010 in short story category.
Related: Stories of Harlan Ellison.

Nebula Awards 2010: nominees announced

Link. [via QuasarDragon & SF Signal]

Includes download links for short fiction.

Related: Nebula Award fiction - nominees & winners.