Hugo Nominees: 1995

I still have yet to read anything by Bujold.

Have we had a go-round on the recent (post-Disco) F&SF books every SF fan would benefit from reading?

(Yes, yes I finally read “A Rose For Ecclesiastes” and I think this Zelazny kid could go places. Did he write anything else of note?)

Jo, does this mean you’ve not read The Iowa Baseball Confederacy or Shoeless Joe? You know as a Canadian you are obligated to read Kinsella, along with WO Mitchell, Margaret Lawrence, Robertson Davies and at least one of Farley Mowatt, Stephen Leacock or Mordecai Richler. We all had to suffer* through them in school and now so do you.

In any case, Brittle Innings is worth tracking down.

* No, in fact I don’t care how Boy Staunton died.

* No, in fact I don’t care how Boy Staunton died.

As I recall, the reason I have a shelf of Davies is for two reasons:

1: I read Tempest Tost about the time I was stage manager of a local amateur production. The stage manager’s reaction to the (rot13 foor spoilers) nggrzcgrq fhvpvqr spoke to me.

A: Samuel Marchbanks is one of my role models (accordingly, I avoid rereading him because I fear the Suck Faeries), although I hope to some day be somewhat less self-effacing than Marchbanks.

Heavy Weather should have been on the ballot. It’s maybe Sterling’s (counts on fingers) fourth best book? But it’s still clearly better than at least three of the five that made it, and it’s certainly in the top five of the year.

Note that it’s a near-future book — Sterling doesn’t give dates IMS, but it’s in the second quarter of the 21st century — that still holds up just fine. That has nothing to do with literary merit, of course, but it’s got plenty of that too.

It’s set in a somewhat chaotic North America much afflicted by global warming and resource depletion. That comes across as flat and boring but, oh my, it is not. There’s a sweet (for Sterling) coming-of-age story in there, a truly creepy global conspiracy subplot, and smart lasso that ends up being both fun and important.

It’s a great little book, and highly recommended.

— I’m in the “not catching the excitement about James Morrow” camp. What made this book awesome again? I’m sure some kind person can explain.

Doug M.

Doug M.

I don’t think it’s really necessary to be so coy about the identity of a character in Brittle Innings. It’s not a murder mystery, for gosh sakes. And even knowing in advance that it’s a kinda-sorta sequel to an early classic sf novel didn’t spoil it for me. (Is that coy enough to pass for a non-spoiler?)

A weak year for novel. I’d have given it to HEAVY WEATHER, which I liked quite a bit, and which is coming to look more and more predictive all the time as more and more really strong tornados rake the American Midwest every year, and are beginning to be seen more frequently in regions that rarely got them before. I also liked the Egan, and it probably would have been between those two books for me. Probably the Robert Charles Wilson and the Paul McAuley, maybe the McDonald, should have been on the ballot as well.

As has been pointed out, BRITLE INNINGS isn’t really about baseball, baseball is just a framework to hang the plot on, and almost any other sport would have served the purpose as well. It’s an early precursor of what we’d now call a “mash-up,” and my only problem with it is that I think it would have worked as well or better as a novelette than a novel, being the kind of idea that it’s hard to get to stretch well that far.

Of course, there’s a culturial bias involved (although I didn’t grow up paying any attention whatsoever to baseball either, not getting interested in it until a few decade back), but I do think the rules of baseball are considerably easier to understand than the rules of cricket. I once read an entire novel about cricket, FLASHMAN’S LADY, by George Macdonald Fraser, and was no closer to understanding the rules by the end than I’d been in the beginning. I once asked a table of five or six British SF writers to explain the rules of cricket to me, and none of them could, admitting that they didn’t understand them either. They challenged the Americans to tell them a baseball joke, and, without missing a beat, Peter Heck said, “What do you do with an elephant with three balls?” The answer being: “You walk him, and pitch to the giraffe.”

Blank stares. Baffled silence.

I then asked them to tell us a cricket joke, but none of them could come up with one.

The short fiction categories are a lot stronger than the novel this year. In novella, I’d go for Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Forgiveness Day,” one of the best of the new Hanish stories that she started to write about then, after a lapse from that setting of some years, although Brian Stableford’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” is also excellent. The Bishop, the Flynn, and the Resnick are also good, but not as good as the Le Guin and the Stableford. R. Garcia y Robertson, a writer who produces good, intelligent, often funny adventure stories year after year without ever drawing much attention, had “Werewolves of Luna.”

The David Gerrold story was a controversial winner that year, with many, including me, arguing that it wasn’t really a science fiction story at all. I rejected it for ASIMOV’S, and in spite of it going on to win the Hugo, never regreted the decision. Strongest story there is probably Le Guin’s “Solitude”; Le Guin was really having a wonderful year that year, with not only the two stories already mentioned but “The Matter of Seggri,” very strong itself, and other strong stories such as “Another Story,” “Betrayals,” and “Unchosen Love.” 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). Maureen F. McHugh’s “Nekropolis” is also very strong, and a story that I always thought deserved more attention than it got. Robert Reed’s “The Remoras” was I think the first of his Great Ship stories, a series still running to this day, and very strong. Steven Utley’s “Edge of the Wind” is a strong Silurian story, George Turner’s “Flowering Mandrake” is a powerful First Contact story, John Brunner’s “Good with Rice” was one of his last major stories, and Terry Bisson’s “The Hole in the Hole” is very funny. Kandis Elliot, who seems to have subsequently disappeared, had a brief run of good biological mystery stories in ASIMOV’S. Gregory Feeley’s “Aweary of the Sun” is a good Shakespeare story, although, as I recall, one with a slight fantastic element.

In short story, I have no problem with the Haldeman, although Stephen Baxter had one of his strongest stories, “Cilia-of-Gold,” there was the wry but bleak “Dead Space for the Unexpected,” by Geoff Ryman, and Howard Waldrop’s funny, folksy “The Sawing Boys.”
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. Michael Swanwick’s “The Changeling’s Tale” is also good. as is Nancy Kress’s “Margin of Error.”

Movies were very, very weak this year, one of the few years I couldn’t really find anything I could justify voting for.

The Campbell Award is also very weak. I might have given it to Kathleen Ann Goonan, if she’d made it on to the ballot.

nowery@29, I’m still waiting to hear what’s wonderful about Morrow. Satire, fine; I love me some good satirical writing. But I don’t think Morrow is all that good at it. Secular humanist, fine — but, again, neither here nor there to why he’s So Awesome.

Insofar as I like Morrow — and I don’t, much — I like his earlier stuff better than his post-1990 work. The one with the river of liquefied violence was okay, as was the one where nobody could lie. But the later stuff… well, the quality of the writing is a little better. But Morrow himself comes across as a bit of a smug know-it-all, and the conclusions he reaches seem to be either trite or slight. YMMV.

Doug M.

@carlos, “it’s an installment”: Bujold has said on more than one occasion that she views the Vorkosigan books as part of one big semiserial, a macronovel stretching across over a dozen books. They’re /all/ installments, though perhaps that’s more obvious with some than others.

Doug M.

44: As I recall, Mother of Storms led to Pete’s Law, formulated by Pete McCutchen on rasfw: “Avoid Barnes books if they involve sodomy.” Inexplicably the publishers refuse to put the appropriate warnings on the covers of Barnes’ books.

As I said earlier, BRITTLE INNINGS is one of the first examples of what we’d today call a mash-up. Easy enough to say what it is in one line, but harder to do and avoid spoilers at the same time.

If you want, I can email you and tell you.

I second Rich’s recommendations for “Another Story” (boy, what a year Le Guin was having!), and for “Going West,” “The Valley of the Humans”–Jennings, who did some really weird but good stuff also seems to have largely disappeared–and “Ylem” (Fintushel is another weird but good writer who doesn’t seem to be around much anymore), and especially for Arnason’s “The Lovers,” one of my favorite Hwarhath stories.

In short story, M. Shayne Bell’s “Mrs. Lincoln’s China” was a quiet but moving story, and Bell is another writer who has disappeared; since he was majorly sick at one point, I wonder if he’s even still alive.

Anyway…I can’t even imagine enjoying a baseball fantasy novel, it’s inconceivable to me that that won the WFA!

In fact, it happened again in 2003, with Michael Chabon’s lovely and joyous SUMMERLAND.

Thanks, Rich!

My main objection to Mirror Dance is that I think without the weight of previous books, it loses much of its impact. Within the series, it is very good. The rise of the extended series poses problems with judging books on their individual merits.

(I dislike the casual and, dare I say it, the fannish assumption which can be seen in this thread: “Hey, why not read all the books in an extended series to see if the one installment is worthy?” I have to say, it’s a marketer’s dream. But how many Benjamins will the casual reader have to shell out to see if The Final Contract or Miles To Go is worth the hype? Not to mention the time investment.)

66: I’m not actually replying to Womzilla but in general about my opinion of Mirror Dance as an installment. I don’t know if any of the books individually are “don’t miss” as such. They depend on their effects by referring to each other in small and large ways.

That’s the problem with judging these sorts of series by single books. Shards of Honor reads like a very well done but somewhat slight romance novel, The Warrior’s Apprentice like a very well done but somewhat slight coming of age novel, and so forth. The hints of a broader universe that one person might find thrilling, another reader — one without genre sensibilities, say — might find curiously incomplete.

Even more generally, setting aside the time and money investment, many readers — both fan and non-fan — are less willing to start series that are unlikely to have a fulfilling resolution. I hear this concern all the time about Mr. Martin’s fantasies. I would say that, in my experience, the non-fan reader is less willing to swim through an ocean of mediocre words to get to the breathtaking moment where everything comes together. Since Bujold is a good writer by non-genre standards, there isn’t so much of that question in her Vorkosigan series — although I wonder what a non-fan would make of A Civil Campaign as a standalone novel and first experience of Bujold.

So I agree. I think the honest answer is to say, it’s something you need to read several if not most of the preceding novels before you can understand the depth (or lack) of any given installment — and I will note that Cordelia’s Honor is already two books packaged as one: that’s still not enough?

But this makes Mirror Dance‘s award for Best Novel problematic.

most of the best sports fiction is about baseball.

Although nobody has mentioned it, allow me to pre-emptively warn you against trying Robert Browne (AKA, I think) Marvin Karlin)’s 1980 SF/baseball book The New AToms Bombshell.

81: thank you for the recommendation of Joiner! it looks exactly up my alley.

Barnes writes about social problems by intensifying them to a breaking point and graphically depicting their effects on his characters. It’s not a method I like personally, but I understand its use. The problems I have with Barnes in that aspect of his production are threefold:

First, it’s often apparently gratuitous. To change forms briefly, it reminds me of the tendency to have “extreme” characters in comic books in the 1990s: ultraviolent, hypersexualized, psychologically unaccountable. E.g., yes, this is a culture where *everyone* is a sadistic child molester. How shocking! He’s used that one in four separate settings, I think.

Second, his psychology at those extremes of the human condition is unconvincing. It feels a little like “fake primitive”, and it tells me more about how Barnes thinks his characters should act (and how he thinks his readers should react), than it does as an imaginative extrapolation. Occasionally he does hit the mark — the alcoholic in one of his Thousand Cultures books (one of the tells is that she eats classic hangover food, and it would have been better if the narrator hadn’t noticed that) — but more often it feels like a manipulative puppet show.

Third, I am unconvinced he isn’t at some level pandering to an audience who appreciates ultraviolence and unpleasant sexual content. He has been associated with writers who quite clearly do (the ex-Canadian non-gentleman in New Mexico whom I will not name, for example). Unlike them, however, I don’t think it is necessarily a fully conscious decision.

I read Barnes’ A million open doors on the strength of these Hugo-related blogs, and thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the memorable aspects was seeing a faux-medieval, highly sexist society from the inside, then from the outside, from the viewpoint of the same character. So is it worth combing the used bookstores for Earth made of glass and the other sequels?

@85: A notorious ex-Canadian? Just give a tiny hint to a curious Canuck.

Shireling@87, it’s the guy who wrote the Dr@ka books. He used to have a habit of grepping or googling his own name and then popping up on comment threads to respond. Don’t know if he still does that, but why take chances.

One of the nicer bits in A Million Open Doors is where the narrator, or someone close to him, observes that the isolated human societies respond to Recontact by suddenly expressing aspects of their cultures that had long been suppressed. Thus (IMS) the Randian / libertarian / selfish rationalist world rediscovers sentiment, kindness and humor. Which is fine, and mildly amusing — but then at the end of the book the narrator abruptly realizes that his home culture is going through the same thing. That was middlin’ neat.

Carlos@92, IOW we were quite right — it was his divorce novel.

We’ve discussed the drawbacks of the biographical approach. But in this case, the book has THIS IS MY DIVORCE NOVEL embossed on the spine. The letters are in a vaguely Gothic font and give off a faint, sad luminescence.

Doug M.

Here is how I voted in 1995:

Best Novel
1. Mother of Storms John Barnes
2. Brittle Innings Michael Bishop
3. Mirror Dance Lois McMaster Bujold
4. Towing Jehovah James Morrow
5. Beggars and Choosers Nancy Kress

Best Novella
1. “Melodies of the Heart” Michael F. Flynn
2. “Forgiveness Day” Ursula K. Le Guin
3. “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” Mike Resnick
4. “Les Fluers du Mal” Brian Stableford
5. “Cri de Coeur” Michael Bishop

Best Novelette
1. “Solitude” Ursula K. Le Guin
2. “A Little Knowledge” Mike Resnick
3. “The Matter of Seggri” Ursula K. Le Guin
4. “The Singular Habits of Wasps” Geoffrey A. Landis
5. “Cocoon” Greg Egan
6. “The Martian Child” David Gerrold

Best Short Story
1. “None So Blind” Joe Haldeman
2. “Understanding Entropy” Barry N. Malzberg
3. “Barnaby in Exile” Mike Resnick
4. “I Know What You’re Thinking” Kate Wilhelm
5. “Mrs. Lincoln’s China” M. Shayne Bell
6. “Dead Man’s Curve” Terry Bisson

afournier@41, I’m surprised you found _Mother of Storms_ not-science-fictionish. I mean, sure, it has horrible horrible sex (explicitly described as horrible by the participants, too), and it has disasters and megadeaths, but it also has N gevc gb gur bhgre fbyne flfgrz gb pncgher n pbzrg naq oevat vg onpx,pneevrq bhg ol na vapernfvatyl genafuhzna fhcrevagryyvtrag hcybnqrqnfgebanhg naq uvf rabezbhf nezl bs frys-ercyvpngvat znpuvarel. You really cannot get more science-fictional than that plot thread: it was fairly pure late-90s posthuman SF. (It’s just a shame about the rest of the novel. I reread that plot thread on occasion, but not the rest.)