The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories of the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). This year’s editor, selected by SFWA’s anthology Committee (chaired by Mike Resnick), is Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer and editor Julie Czerneda. This year’s Nebula Award winners are Naomi Novik, Nnedi Okorafor, Sarah Pinsker, and Alyssa Wong, with Fran Wilde winning the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book. Also included in this volume are works by N. K. Jemisin and Ann Leckie.
You can find out more about the Nebula voting and judging panels at nebulas.sfwa.org/
The collection provides a mixture of extracts and short stories, along with several reviews and personal pieces. It’s an excellent round-up of the breadth and variety of the SFF scene at the moment, and it’s a fun, eclectic read. As Julie Czerneda says in the introduction, “I don’t know about you, but sometimes that breadth is daunting. We can’t read it all. We can celebrate it all, though.”
One additional benefit of reading the stories in this collection is that they all have a little introduction from the authors, which is a wonderful extra.
Novel
Raising Caine by Charles E. Gannon is a complex and alien piece, integrating the ideas of species, cultures, and biologies mixing. From the extract, it’s certainly not a light read, but the characters are interesting, and the ideas raised sound as if they form an intricate and thoughtful book. N.K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is another book with layers: an apocalypse; the end of the world; a time coming to an end. a beautiful city in a fractured land, and a man who is one with the earth, and a stone eater. This is one I’ve now added to my list to pick up – an interesting, complex, layered book that I want to read more of! Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie is also an alien book, but more in the sci-fi vein; a translator arrives on a ship, but she’s not certain who she is or why she’s there – and there’s a mystery concerning the last translator. To me, this has echoes of Ursula Le Guin, and is certainly an intriguing beginning for a story.
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu is more in the traditional fantasy vein, but mixing wonderfully with Chinese-style fairy tales. What does a commander do when his king is going to kill him for a mistake? Rebel, and try to become emperor. Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen is a wonderful, strange mix of alien and understandable; a ghost-summoner can’t summon one particular shade, and there’s a prophecy…it’s a strange mix, but one that definitely intrigues. Fran Wilde’s Updraft (which was the winner of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy) is a rich, detailed world full of politics and conflict. Flyers defend towers from invisible monsters in the sky; winged traders flying for vital medicines; and the protagonist is a girl who wants to watch the sky and earn her wings – but may have other powers that will require her to take a different path.
The winner, Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, has its roots in Eastern European fairy-tales and myths; it is the story of a girl from a village, taken away by the local wizard to learn magic – but it should have been the beautiful Kasia, for what can Agnieszka offer the dragon in the tower? The rest of the book is one of my personal favourites; it’s a haunting, layered story of growth, magic, woodland and heartland and family.
Novella
The winner in this category was Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, the first novella in a trilogy that has been described as “African girl leaves home, comes home, becomes home.” The first novella deals with her leaving home to go to university, the first of her family and her tribe to do so – but she has to reach the university, and the journey is filled with danger. The novella is a wonderful mix of sci-fi and home, mathematics as power, aliens and understanding the universe, and being a stranger in a strange land. The series is well worth a read (the third novella is due out in 2018).
Novelette
“Our Lady of the Open Road” by Sarah Pinsker is an almost dystopian story…the world as we know it, but changed. In this case, holograms have taken over live music – and who wants to hear a live band when you could have Bruce Springsteen playing in your bar? The novelette follows a broke touring band, struggling to adapt punk to their changed world, but also asks some bigger questions – how will technology change the music scene? How do bands adapt to different audiences? How far can ideals win over reality?
Short Story
Amal El-Mohtar’s “Madeleine” is a sweet story about memories and their triggers – I’m not actually going to say much about it because it takes a slightly unexpected turn towards the end, but it’s as much about your past and how memories fit into your current world as it is ‘time travel’. “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer was actually my favourite of the shorts; I loved this, and it made me laugh. It’s a fun take onthe AI-taking-over-the-world convention, and also the failability and illogical nature of humans, how our world works, how our mind works…the voice and characterisation of this make it a fun read and I loved the cat twist on this. Anyone who even occasionally uses the internet will likely have a moment of “wait a second…how real is this story…?!”
“Damage” by David D. Levine is a war story, told from the perspective of an AI. It’s a haunting and thoughtful story, bringing in themes of pleasing one you love at any cost, what it means to be damaged and broken, the idea of changing minds and obeying orders…the action is excellently written, and the story is one that lingers. In a similar vein, “Today I Am Paul” by Martin L. Shoemaker lingers, thoughtful and sad: the story revolves around an AI that can mimic personalities, and cares for an old lady. It’s sad, thoughtful, and also chilling – a story of memory loss, aging, but also how we remember people after they’re gone.
“When Your Child Strays From God” by Sam J. Miller mixes drug-fuelled weirdness and religious fervor with a sweet, heart-tugging story of someone trying to do their best for their child and their family, and I loved the ending! The final story is the award winner, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong. I have to admit that I didn’t actually like this one. The story’s about being that feed off emotions, and the taste of rage, guilt, murder…and what happens when love is thrown into the mix. The ideas are tantilising and I liked the writing, but it felt unfinished, half-done; all the threads were there, but they weren’t woven into a full story. Still, worth a read; an unsettling and weird story.
The collection includes a couple of additional pieces.There’s a short review of Mad Max, (winner of the Ray Bradbury Award for Best Dramatic Presentation) and a thoughtful and poignant piece on Sir Terry Pratchett by Michelle Sagara. The Rhysling Award winners are also printed; Best Long Poem was “100 Reasons to Have Sex with an Alien” by F. J. Bergmann, which is witty take on modern sex with a sci-fi twist; and Best Short Poem, which is “Shutdown” by Marge Simon, a poem about library closing in a dystopian society where literature is banned. The Dwarf Stars Award Winner, “abandoned nursing home” by Greg Schwartz, is also included, combining horror with nostalgia.The final section of the excerpts focus on C.J Cherryh, with a piece by Betsy Wolheim on the author and then excerpts from Pride of Chanur and Foreigner.
Overall, the collection’s worth reading – snippets and glimpses of other worlds, other places, other views, all collected into one.
What you have in your hands is precious, not because the works here are being honored, but because they exist. Stories matter. Stories linger in the mind and change us. We want more. We need more—yes, from our beloved favorite authors but also, and this is vital, from those new to us. You never know who will become a favorite. ~ Julie E. Czerneda, Introduction.
© Kate Coe, August 2017
Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 by Julie E Czerneda
Published May 16th 2017 by Pyr
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
336 pages
