Bargain Books | Graham Joyce, Stormwatcher

Though it's taken a bit of a backseat because of his illness, Graham Joyce updated his blog the other day with news about his current work in progress; thoughts on the shortlisting of The Year of the Ladybird for the August Derleth Award; a reminder, not unrelatedly, of The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit's release date; and, of most interest to me at the moment, a pointer towards the e-book edition of his famously "lost" novel.

Wait, his what?

Well, that's what I thought. Over to the author to explain:

I call it lost because it was one of those that fell between one editor going and another coming in the UK, and was never properly published in the US either. It’s an important novel to me because I was trying to push the envelope of what I could do with that mix of magical or supernatural elements and a focus on domestic relationships, and trying hard not let the one value preside over the other. You’ll know I’m still working on that! It comes with an introduction in which I talk about what happens to a book when you lose your editor (fired, head-hunted, absconded, incarcerated or whatever); and about first trying to find a way of writing character-driven supernatural stories.

"A quietly supernatural thriller set in the Dordogne region of France in which a group of somewhat dysfunctional friends spend a two-week holiday in a lonely cottage," The Stormwatcher appears to have been written immediately after The Tooth Fairy—my first Graham Joyce novel, and a brilliant British Fantasy Award winner—before being published in 1997 "not in secret, but with the very opposite of a fanfare."

That's fair. I care, and I wasn't even aware of its existence.

In any event, The Stormwatcher has finally been made widely available... and about time too. You can—and you should, I'm sure—pick up a copy of the digital edition for your Kindle for a couple of quid. Go forth and ghost, folks!

But I Digress | Orbit Angers Fans

Orbit has been riding high recently. As an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group, it was named publisher of the year at The Bookseller Awards, and a number of the novels it published in 2013 have been nominated for something of a smorgasbord of genre honours. Most notably, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie has won a slew of said already, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association’s Award for Best Novel. It’s also up for a Locus, and a Hugo, too.

And here’s where the situation gets iffy. Last week, you see, Orbit released a statement saying that they wouldn’t be giving away thousands of copies of three of their books for free this year, and people on the internet got a little pissy.

But let’s start at the start, with the press release that explained the imprint’s decision to include in the Hugo Voters Packet extended extracts of the nominated novels—namely Parasite by Mira Grant, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross—as opposed to electronic editions of the texts in their entirety:

We are of course very much in favour of initiatives that help readers to engage with important awards, and we are always looking for new ways to help readers discover new authors. However, in the case of the voter packets, authors and rights holders are increasingly feeling that if their work is not included in the packet it will be at a disadvantage in the awards. It’s difficult for anyone to know for certain whether this is the case, but either way we don’t feel that authors and rights holders should feel under pressure to make their work available for free. There are a lot of different attitudes to the idea of giving work away for free, but we hope most people would agree that writers and rights holders should be able to make their own choice, without feeling that their decision might have negative consequences.  

We would like to make it clear that this was our decision, and not one requested by any of our authors. It is a complex issue, with many different perspectives and opinions, and we believe that we are acting in the best interests of our authors while continuing to support the voter packet.

Orbit can’t have expected this "complex issue" to gather the negative momentum it has, however. More than fifty comments followed the blog post above, many of which we might politely describe as declarations of outrage. Boycotts have been plotted; Orbit has been called any number of names; and several of its employees have been singled out on social media.

Which is to say—and I hope we can agree here—the situation’s gotten rather out of hand, hasn’t it? Because whether or not Orbit’s decision to include excerpts rather than entire texts was the right one, at the end of the day, this is not how a community which we all wish the wider world would treat seriously behaves.

To be clear, I’m also disappointed in Orbit’s decision. It stinks of business. But it is what it is—a perspective reflected by the three authors implicated in the publisher’s policy, who put out the following open letter together:

It has become customary in recent years for authors of Hugo-nominated works to provide the members of the World Science Fiction convention who get to vote for the awards with electronic copies of their stories. The ball started rolling a few years ago when John Scalzi kindly took the initiative in preparing the first Hugo voters packet; since then it has become almost mandatory to distribute shortlisted works this way. 

Unfortunately, as professionally published authors, we can't do this without obtaining the consent of our publishers. We are bound by contracts that give our publishers the exclusive rights to distribute our books: so we sought their permission first. 

This year, Orbit—the publisher of Mira Grant's Parasite, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, and Charles Stross' Neptune's Brood—have decided that for policy reasons they can't permit the shortlisted novels to be distributed for free in their entirety. Instead, substantial extracts from the books will be included in the Hugo Voters Packet. 

We feel your disappointment keenly and regret any misunderstandings that may have arisen about the availability of our work to Hugo voters, but we are bound by the terms of our publishing contracts. The decision to give away free copies of our novels is simply not ours to take. However, we are discussing the matter with other interested parties, and working towards finding a solution that will satisfy the needs of the WSFS voters and our publishers in future years. 

Finally, please do not pester our editors: the decision was taken above their level.

At the very least, let’s take that last statement seriously—and please, leave off the authors also.

So what now? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. The backlash has been bad enough that Orbit could conceivably admit their mistake and put aside a policy that is undoubtedly detrimental... though I dare say the damage is done.

And not just to Orbit’s image; the fact is that this negativity is apt to have an impact on the three awesome genre novels nominated in the first for a Hugo Award—and that’s not just right, readers. Agreed?

Book Review | Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, ed. Kij Johnson

The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories in the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. The editor selected by the SFWA's anthology committee, chaired by Mike Resnick, is the American fantasy writer Kij Johnson, author of three novels and associate director of the Centre for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. 

This year's winners and contributors include Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Andy Duncan, and Aliette de Bodard, E.C. Myers and many more.

***

The Nebula Awards Showcase series has been published on an annual basis since 1966, reprinting in each edition a selection of the previous year's finest speculative fiction. Its is a long legacy, then, which guest editor Kij Johnson—herself a recipient of the Best Novella Nebula for 'The Man Who Bridged the Mist'—evidences a welcome awareness of.

In her introduction she discusses how things have changed in the nearly fifty years since the founding members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America rewarded its first round of genre authors—Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Brian Aldiss and Harlan Ellison, which is to say an array of talent no award can match today—as well as touching on those things that have stayed the same.

In this fitting fashion the 2014 edition of the Nebula Awards Showcase series begins... with a look back at beginning. But as Johnson reminds us, this is a time to look to the future too.

One conventional wisdom is that our field is a graying field; the writers and readers at its heart grow older; the In Memoriam lists at each year's Nebula Awards banquet lengthens. And it is hard not to stare backwards, ticking each loss off a roster of living greats. 

There is a second conventional wisdom that pulls contrary to this current, that the field is not graying but growing. In recent years, speculative fiction storytelling has exploded across modes and media to fuel 100,000 person conventions and rule the theatres. Even the cloistered garden that written SF sometimes seems to be is immeasurably vaster than it was fifty years ago. (p.9)

Size matters—that's a fact—but bigger is not necessarily better, as this slim Nebula Awards Showcase shows.

Guest Post | "From Ceres to Saga: Research and Inspiration" by E. J. Swift

One of the nicest things about getting a writing career off the ground is the point where someone asks if you can contribute something to a project. There’s a warm fuzzy glow when this happens, and it’s almost impossible to resist, because however little time you have, it feels like a privilege to be asked. This is especially the case when the brief is as exciting as a project as The Lowest Heaven, a solar-system themed anthology which was published by Jurassic last summer.

By the time I came on board, most of the major planets had been snapped up, and my choices came down to Ceres and the Oort Cloud. Whilst the Oort Cloud got kudos for being generally weird and cool (with some wonderful theories expounded on Wikipedia and elsewhere), I wasn’t sure I could do it justice in the short time I had to write the story.

After some research into Ceres, though, there were a couple of things on the table that caught my attention:

• In mythology, Ceres is the goddess of agriculture, fertility and maternal relationships.
• Despite its lowly dwarf planet/large asteroid status, Ceres occupies a rather strategic point in the solar system, and has an icy mantle, the possibility of water below and the potential for mining.

Taking the motherly relationships angle, my original idea was to write something around an astronaut/explorer mother and her relationship with her daughter. The brief for the anthology was to take inspiration from the planets, rather than to locate the stories geographically within the solar system, but I was intrigued by the concept of the lengthy time and distances that would be involved in early space travel, and how that might impact on familial relationships. Initially I had the daughter character pegged at a child or teenage age, and thought the focus of the story would be on growing up with a mostly absent parent.

Then I stumbled across a story by the author Joe Dunthorne which was written in the first person plural, and something sparked in my head. I’ve always been a huge fan of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, a creepily atmospheric novel which sustains a first person plural voice throughout. But I’d never come across it used anywhere else, until now. What if I could try a collective voice with this?

After I’d pinned down the voice, the scope of the story broadened and suddenly I was writing something from the perspective of three adults looking back on their lives. For once, the title to the story was easy.

'Saga's Children' is available to read for free on Pornokitsch and an audio version is available in this episode of Starship Sofa.

***

E. J. Swift is the author of Osiris and Cataveiro, the first two volumes in The Osiris Project trilogy. Her short fiction has been published in Interzone magazine, and appears in anthologies including The Best British Fiction 2013 and Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven. She is shortlisted for a 2013 BSFA Award in the short fiction category for her story Saga’s Children.

You Tell Me | The Women's Prize for Fantastic Fiction

Just a quick one today, to point you all in the direction of yesterday's edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus, in which I proposed a new award called the Women's Prize for Fantastic Fiction.

Why?

I'd have thought the answer would be obvious:

As a community, we’ve cried out again and again for better representation of the “invisible women” working in the male-dominated genre fiction industry... but crying out, however loudly, clearly isn't going to cut the mustard. So let’s do something about it, damn it! Let’s you and I put our heads together and figure out a speculative fiction friendly version of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Kind of like the Not the Booker Prize that The Guardian has. 

A word to the wise: this isn’t going to lead to some seismic shift in the industry. Publishers may or may not change their ways, and whenever they do, if ever they do, they’ll change at their own pace. But if that’s the case, why wait? 

If any woman writing genre fiction in English — whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter — is eligible, then who and what would our nominees be? The only caveat I'd add is to keep our nominees to books published this year, please.

Do click on through to read the entire article, and leave your nominees in the comments.

Let me start you all off with a fantastic five of my own devising:

• The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord 
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson 
• The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker 
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie 
• The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough 

So what am I missing? What would your nominees be? You tell me!

The Scotsman Abroad | On Graham Joyce

Yesterday I received an email that brought both my partner and I to an absolute standstill.

We've both been reading Graham Joyce for years, you see; Memoirs of a Master Forger was my first of his works, whilst the other half has had a passion for his ghostly prose since The Silent Land. Invariably, one of us will manage to bagsy his new book before the other does, such that it's become something of a game between us.

So the news that he has cancer, that he nearly died six months or so ago... let's say it cast a dark cloud over the remains of the day. Per the press release I received:

Graham Joyce received a standing ovation at the 1,000-strong awards ceremony of the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton on Sunday 2nd November 2013. Picking up the Best Fantasy Novel Award for an unprecedented sixth time in his career, Joyce was earlier this year diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma cancer. The event marked his first public appearance since his diagnosis.

Joyce won the Best Fantasy Novel Award for Some Kind Of Fairy Tale, a story in which a young girl thought to have been abducted from the woodlands of the East Midlands returns to her family after twenty years. 

Six months ago Joyce had the experience of being revived by an emergency resuscitation team at the Leicester Royal Infirmary. Joyce said, “Just being able to stand here today is a wonderful award, thanks to the doctors and nurses of the NHS.”

Inadequate as it is, I can only express how happy I am that the doctors and nurses of the NHS managed to bring the man back, and how sorely I hope that he has many more years of good health ahead.

In any event, I've seen a fair few folks express curiosity about his work since the bad news broke, and I'd love for them to discover him as the other half and I have, so I thought I'd gather together links to the reviews I've written of his books.

Here's what I had to say about The Silent Land.

Here are my thoughts on the book he won the Best Fantasy Novel Award at the weekend for.

And to top it all off, my most recent article for Strange Horizons was a glowing review of his new novel, The Year of the Ladybird:

Almost forty years on, the scorching summer of 1976 is remembered by many; however the relative tenor of the tale depends upon the perspective of the teller, very much in the mode of local legend. Some speak of it as a bastion of all that is great about Britain... or all that was, once. Others recall the summer as a season of suffering; of water shortages, hellish heat, economic depression, and — what with the National Front nearing the peak of its power — political volatility. 

Each of these ideas has a part to play in Graham Joyce's new novel, but like the infamous insect invasion The Year of the Ladybird takes its evocative title from, they're in the background, by and large, adding if not narrative impact then immersive depth and telling texture to the text's redolent setting: a ramshackle holiday resort in a nation coming of age just as our protagonist David Barwise does over the course of this slight but delightful ghost story.

Graham Joyce is, in short, an awesome author: if you've been on the fence about his fiction, get the hell off it.

My thoughts, and my partner's, will be with him and his during this difficult time.

News | Dark Eden Captures the Hearts of the Clarkes

As I'm sure you'll have heard by now, Chris Beckett took home the Arthur C. Clarke award yesterday, for the best science fiction novel published in Britain in 2012.

I'd have picked 2312 myself, but Dark Eden is a worthy winner, I think. Then again, aside the much ballyhooed about fact that it didn't feature a single female author, or any persons of colour, the shortlist was extraordinary. I've read everything on it except Nod by Adrian Barnes, which I admit I'm not particularly interested in, and only The Dog Stars disappointed. Otherwise, a bunch of best in class books.

In any event, in light of the news, I went looking for the review of Dark Eden I remembered writing after reading it nearly a year ago, primarily in order to link to it today, but also to see if I still agreed with my initial assessment.

Long story short, I couldn't find it.

I searched through The Speculative Scotsman and Strange Horizons, Tor.com and SF Signal—any and all of the places it might possibly have been published—only to realise that for some reason (very possibly a holiday) it had never made it out of My Documents. Like the 5000 word critique of Haruki Murkami's IQ84 that's been waiting there, utterly unloved, for an even longer period.

I'm going to give my Dark Eden review a bit of a once-over tomorrow morning, with an eye towards running it here on TSS immediately afterwards.

Before I say good day, allow me to offer my hearty congratulations to Chris Beckett. Learn from my mistake and try not to waste all your winnings on sweets, sir!

Say, would you be interested in hearing what I thought about Murakami's last novel while we're at it? :)

The Scotsman Abroad | Marking the Clarkes

Three months in, I can only hope most of you are familiar with the British Genre Fiction Focus: the weekly column about news and new releases in the UK that I contribute to Tor.com.

The response to the series so far has been more positive than I could have imagined, but with every additional edition, I've wondered whether some of the more meaningful news stories I ruminate on each week wouldn't be better serviced in articles of their own.

Well, yesterday was something of an acid test in that respect. Yesterday, the first special feature from the British Genre Fiction Focus fold was posted, and luckily, I had a hell of subject to tackle: namely the recently released shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, especially the overwhelming presence of penises amongst the authors nominated.

Anyway, in Marking the Clarkes, I attempt to round up some of the most representative reactions to the alarming absence of women writers on the shortlist, before pitching in with my own several cents:

So was the reaction to this year’s shortlist basically a case of much ado about nothing? 

No, it wasn’t. Absolutely positively not. There’s a very real problem in play that the subsequent back-and-forth has brought to the fore, finally. But I’d echo the thought that this alarming lack of diversity [...] can be traced back to the publishing industry rather simply set at the doorstep of a panel of individuals with autonomous opinions who announced an inherently subjective shortlist. 

One last wrinkle before I let you folks work out where you stand and why: the publishing industry lives and dies by the same rules of supply and demand as any other commercial sector. Accusing the bigwigs and the buyers, then, is too easy an out. After all, they buy the books that they have reason to believe we’ll read. 

Who then to blame for this dangerous state of affairs but ourselves?

If I may be so bold, Marking the Clarkes makes for an interesting read in its own right, but the real conversation has occurred in the comments section, already almost thirty thoughts long and strong, and featuring a few words from Tom Hunter himself, director of the Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

All of which is to say, you should think about reading this thing. Chiming in, even.

Fingers crossed I see a few of you over there. Otherwise, we'll talk again shortly.

Short Story Review | Immersion by Aliette de Bodard

However much we pride ourselves on our uniqueness, from time to time, I warrant we’ve all wished we were different—which is to say, we’ve every one of us wanted to be more like someone else, and less like ourselves, if only for an instant.

Fitting in is evidently a tempting premise. To be, for a time, a little prettier, or a little wittier; I wonder what we wouldn’t give for an opportunity to do so. Failing that, we can always fake it till we make it.

But it’s not so easy to change who we are—even briefly—nor indeed should we, because what does being one of a number win us, ultimately? Consider, in contrast, all that we would lose, were we to flick some transformative switch.

In her BSFA award-nominated short story, Aliette de Bodard, author of the Obsidian and Blood books, gives voice to that very idea via the immerser, a device which essentially corrects “abnormal” thought processes—but at what cost? And who’s to say what normal is, anyway?

Winningly, 'Immersion' begins with this telling address in the second person:

In the morning, you're no longer quite sure who you are.

You stand in front of the mirror—it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see—eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment's ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew.

You're dressed, already—not on your skin, but outside, where it matters, your avatar sporting blue and black and gold, the stylish clothes of a well-travelled, well-connected woman. For a moment, as you turn away from the mirror, the glass shimmers out of focus; and another woman in a dull silk gown stares back at you: smaller, squatter and in every way diminished—a stranger, a distant memory that has ceased to have any meaning.

The author’s unusual choice of perspective renders ‘Immersion’ immediately engaging, and it proves doubly powerful throughout, not least because it works to obscure the identity of our central character; a clever technical reflection of the identity crisis Aliette de Bodard suggests in the story’s opening moments.

The setting of 'Immersion' is equally considered, I think. The entirety of the tale takes place on Longevity Station, an independent yet isolated spaceport where a commingling of distinct cultures clash. I admit to picturing Deep Space 9 in my mind’s eye; an appropriate point of reference given this story’s focus on trade and tourism. In any event, Longevity allows the author to realise the potential of her premise, particularly when our unknowable narrator crosses paths with Quy.

Quy, whose third person POV punctuates the aforementioned sections, is a wistful young woman who works under Second Uncle in her grandmother’s Rong restaurant. When she’s called in on her day of rest to facilitate an important meeting, Quy comes face to face—or perhaps only avatar to avatar—with a client in real danger of disappearing, so long has she had her immerser on.

That latter’s rationale for relying so heavily on said, whispered so innocently in her ear, illuminates one of this story’s darkest aspects:

People like you [...] have to work the hardest to adjust, because so much about you draws attention to itself—the stretched eyes that crinkle in the shape of moths, the darker skin, the smaller, squatter shape more reminiscent of jackfruits than swaying fronds. But no matter: you can be made perfect; you can put on the immerser and become someone else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful.

In this way, Aliette de Bodard draws attention to the difficult, not to mention discomfiting question 'Immersion' asks: if, after all, we can so utterly alter ourselves at the touch of a button, where do we draw the line, and why? Surely it cannot be right to reorient our race, but what about class and gender and other such issues? When we can be anyone we want, who are we really?

Striking yet subtle, thoughtful but not ponderous, and ultimately uplifting, 'Immersion' is without question one of the strongest contenders on the BSFA’s shortlist. I wouldn’t be in the slightest surprised to see Aliette de Bodard take home the Best Short Story trophy for this entrancing effort.

***

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard was published in Clarkesword Magazine #69 in June 2012. You can read it for free here.

Short Story Review | The Flight of the Ravens by Chris Butler

In the year 1889, childhood friends Bernard and Elizabeth are essentially inseparable... until a deadly game divides them forever after. The BFFs cannot resist but investigate an abandoned building, nor, alas, can its occupant—some sort of a soul-sucking vampire, complete with red wine and a raven—resist the visiting children. He vanishes Bernard, to devour at a later date, and casts Elizabeth out, alone yet alive, that she may remember this terrible day.

Ten years passed, years in which Elizabeth lived with the certain knowledge that there were monsters in the world and they would consume you if you did not adequately protect yourself. To that end, she learned all she could of the magical nature of the world.

Fast forward to the turn of the century, during which period the bulk of this gloomy tale takes place. Even now, Elizabeth unable to talk about the events of that fateful night, but Bernard’s father has taken an interest in her development in any event. In fact, she and Huginn have becomes fast friends themselves.

The loss has so overwhelmed Huginn’s wife, however, that a certain turn-of-the-century psychologist—let’s play Spot the Sigmund!—has had to take her into his care.

Then, when a parent comes to the school where Elizabeth currently works to enrol his son as a new student, Elizabeth finds herself falling for yet another father figure. But there is more to Lukas Nostrand than meets the eye, and only Huginn seems to see it.

Though Chris Butler has been nominated for four BSFA awards before, 'The Flight of the Ravens' is the first of his stories to hit the shortlist proper, and I dare say it takes a certain amount of creativity to think of it as science fiction in any sense.

Indeed, whilst reading through it for the column this review previously featured in, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop... for some aspect of the narrative to be unmasked as science fictional in some way. But no. No such turns occur. The closest we get to the tropes typical of that category is a black hole in someone’s belly—but this is an incidental glimpse at best. At bottom, 'The Flight of the Ravens' is a fairly straightforward story about gods and monsters.

Huginn and Muninn were the ravens of Odin, king of the Norse gods. The ravens were brothers. Huginn was the thoughtful one, interested in the why of thing, while Muninn sought to unlock all the mysteries of the world, to know the what and the how. [...] In times of war, the ravens were intelligence-gatherers. In the times between wars, they brought Odin knowledge and understanding of the worlds, so that he, already the wisest of gods, could become wiser still.

Call it historical horror, or dark fantasy perhaps, but whatever you do, don’t think of 'The Flight of the Ravens' as science fiction. It simply isn’t. Which leaves me wondering why in the world the British Science Fiction Association opted to shortlist it for an award.

That said, this is the same organisation who crowned Coraline as the year’s Best Short Story in 2002. Read into that what you will.

So 'The Flight of the Ravens' is a far cry from sci-fi. Nor, by most measures, could you call it short fiction. At almost 100 pages long, with 25 short chapters, several narrative perspectives, three time periods and scenes taking place from Frankfurt to Amsterdam—not to mention Vienna—Chris Butler’s novella has markedly more opportunity to (ahem) spread its wings than any of this year’s nominees for the BSFA’s Best Short Story trophy... yet it lacks the impact of even the least of these.

The premise is nothing new; the scattershot narrative is, shall we say, strangely paced; and through it all, the denouement is a forgone conclusion, albeit one with an interesting twist.

Thus, our penultimate contender seems utterly out of place on this specific shortlist, but leaving aside questions of form and content, 'The Flight of the Ravens' is a fine, if not sublime story, with absorbing characters, an authentic setting and undeniably admirable ambitions. Though I struggle to understand what the British Science Fiction Association see in said, overall I enjoyed the experience of reading it regardless.

***

'The Flight of the Ravens' by Chris Butler was published by Immersion Press in September 2012. You can buy a copy of the novella here.

Short Story Review | Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville

The presence of 'Three Moments of an Explosion' on the BSFA's shortlist for the Best Short Story of 2012 may strike some as strange, but consider that this brief piece comes from China Mieville, author of the Association’s choice of Best Novel in 2010, The City & The City, and a shoe-in for subsequent awards if ever there was one.

And it is, despite its succinctness, a searing short, packing more panache in 500 words than most stories ten times its length can conjure. Also more ampersands, per the perplexing example the serial nominee set in Railsea recently.

'Three Moments of an Explosion' starts with... well, what else but a bang? But this is an explosion of ideas inasmuch as actual matter:

The demolition is sponsored by Burger King. Everyone is used, now, to rotvertising, the spelling of company names & reproduction of hip product logos in the mottle & decay of subtly gene-tweaked decomposition—Apple paying for the breakdown of apples, the bitten-fruit sigil becoming visible on mouldy cores. Explosion marketing is new. Stuff the right nanos into squibs & missiles so the blasts of war machines inscribe BAE & Raytheon’s names in fire on the sky above the cities those companies ignite.

All too plausible, isn’t it?

Here, however, China Mieville makes do with a rather more modest illustration of the press push outlined above: instead of some oil-rich nation state, the titular explosion is of “an old warehouse, too unsafe to let stand,” brought to you by BK.

Have it Your Way, eh?

That said, this too comes at a cost—indeed, you might measure the collateral damage in lives—because in the story’s dense second paragraph China Mieville moves from the moment before the explosion to the moment of it, pulling back from one big idea to reveal another. Herein we hear of three demolition-trippers who have taken “tachyon-buggered MDMA” to be excepted, temporarily, from time. Thus, in these stolen seconds the trio mount a frenzied survey of the structure... as it crumbles.

This is extreme squatting. The boisterous, love-filled crew jog through their overlapping stillness together & bundle towards the building. Three make it inside before they slip back into chronology. Theirs are big doses & they have hours—subjectively—to explore the innards of the edifice as it hangs, slumping, its floors now pitched & interrupted mid-eradication, its corridors clogged with the dust of the hesitating explosion.

Come the third and final paragraph of 'Three Moments of an Explosion,' time has passed—this, then, is the moment after—but if you’ll pardon my Metallica, the memory remains. I’ll let you find out how on your own.

As I’ve touched on I don't know how many times here on The Speculative Scotsman, China Mieville is one of my very favourite writers. His Bas-Lag books in particular proved pivotal during my younger years, and ever since The Scar I’ve had a special place in my heart for his weird and wonderful worlds. Also his way with words; his wicked wit; and his specific stylistic signature—ampersands & all, of late.

In terms of character I confess he tends to be less successful, but 'Three Moments of an Explosion' showcases none by name, smartly sidestepping that potential pitfall. Furthermore, the verbosity which characterises China Mieville at his least appealing is also absent, for there are no wasted phrases in this shockingly short story. Every sentence, one senses, serves a purpose.

'Three Moments of an Explosion' may appear to be minor Mieville, but its brevity behoves us to look more closely. Read it once, read it twice, read it thrice. You’ll unpick the puzzle soon enough, and the solution is sublime.

***

'Three Moments of an Explosion' by China Mieville was published in Rejectmentalist Manifesto in September 2012. You can read it for free here.

Short Story Review | Adrift of the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales

Imagine, for a moment, that the Earth had died, but somehow, you were still alive. That’s the possessing—if, yes, depressing—elevator pitch for the first short story we’ll be discussing today.

Saying that, Ian Sales’ story is not, strictly speaking, short at all. I’m not sure about its exact word count—it’s either a novelette or a full-fledged novella—but whatever its length, and aside the pros and cons of including it in this particular category, what 'Adrift on the Sea of Rains' is... is extraordinary.

Brace yourself, however, because this tour de force begins bleakly. Which is not to say it ends happily either!

Some days, when it feels like the end of the world yet again, Colonel Vance Peterson, USAF, goes out onto the surface and gazes up at what they have lost.

In the grey gunpowder dust, he stands in the pose so familiar from televised missions. He leans forward to counterbalance the weight of the PLSS on his back; the A7LB’s inflated bladder pushes his arms out from his sides. And he stares up at that grey-white marble fixed mockingly above the horizon. He listens to the whirr of the pumps, his own breath an amniotic susurrus within the confines of his helmet. This noises reassure him—sound itself he finds comforting in this magnificent desolation.

If he turns about—blurring bootprints which might otherwise last for millennia—he sees the blanket-like folds of mountains, all painted with scalpel-edged shadows. Over there, to his right, the scattered descent stages of LM Trucks and Augmented LMs fill the mare; and one, just one, still with its ascent stage. Another, he knows, is nearly twenty years old, a piece of abandoned history; but he does not know which one.

No prizes for guessing where Peterson and the eight other survivors Ian Sales soon introduces us to were when the world ended.

But as a wise man mooted many years ago, the moon is a harsh mistress, and it’s all the crew of Falcon Base can do to wake up each day without a home to go to.

It’s been twenty-four months since Earth stopped responding to messages from Peterson and his fellow Americans. Twenty-four months since the world’s beautiful blue gave way to a dismal, gritty grey. Since the conflict between the United States and the Soviets culminated in a planet not going but gone, leaving only this sliver of life behind.

They all have their own ways of dealing with the situation. Deep inside each of them, hope has been eroded away to a tiny nub, as useless as an appendix. Peterson loses himself in the lunar landscape. McKay locks himself in his room and listens to mournful country music, as if their misery renders his own smaller and more manageable. Scott has put away his personality, consigned it to some corner of his mind where it cannot be battered and bruised by their slow descent into despair. Curtis reads, working his way obsessively through every manual and technical document in the base. Kendall has his torsion field generator, the Bell, whose arcane workings he claims to understand more with each passing week.

It is this last device that our wretched moon-men have hung the weather-beaten wreck of their expectations on. With the Bell, they may very well be able to turn back time. But all the potential points of divergence they program into the thing seem to lead to the same inevitable end, and even if they are able to find a replacement present—which, with precious resources diminishing by the day, seems increasingly unlikely—what then?

Excepting said tech and an alt-history element, Ian Sales seems comprehensively committed to accuracy in all things relating to the several subjects addressed in 'Adrift on the Sea of Rains,' as evidenced by its independently lengthy appendixes. But though the level and texture of Sales’ procedural detail is remarkable, it does not detract from the narrative’s forward progress, nor the arc of our central character, who snaps out of his trance just in time to crash a spectacular last act.

The supporting cast, on the other hand, hardly figure in to the fiction. But given that “despair has made strangers of them”—“Their paths cross only at meal-times—and even then, the nine of them might as well be in separate rooms”—this is wholly appropriate; in fact, this pervasive sense of solitude, even (or especially) when Robertson is in the company of others, adds to the effectiveness of an already sorrowful story.

So too does the author’s use of the present tense imbue each moment with the dreadful emptiness Peterson himself feels—and this is but one of the compositional tricks Ian Sales has up his sleeve. Indeed, 'Adrift of the Sea of Rains' is but one of the four proposed volumes of The Apollo Quartet, the second of which is already upon us. Let me stress, though, that both parts of the whole stand alone; their only real relation beyond the obvious is that they’re both brilliant.

I dare say you too will despair as you read through 'Adrift on the Sea of Rains,' and though this might not sound particularly pleasant, believe you me: this nominee is required reading for anyone with the remotest interest in science fiction.

As it its successor. But we’ll leave 'The Eye with Which the Universe Beholds Itself' for another time, perhaps...

***

'Adrift on the Sea of Rains' was published by Whippleshield Books in April 2012. You can buy a copy of the novella here.

Short Story Review | The Song of the Body Cartographer by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

The trouble with ‘The Song of the Body Cartographer,’ is my opinion, is that it’s just too short to get its point across.

At the outset, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz introduces us to Siren and Inyanna, class-cross’d lovers in a world of windbeasts, where emotional programmers are able to remap the human animal:

The Matriarchy had sent Inyanna to Siren with an express command. For all that Siren was one of the common, she had been and still was the best body cartographer in all of Ayudan. She could have become Qa’ta if she wished, but she’d always cherished the freedom that came with being common and no matter that being Qa’ta came with privileges, she couldn’t bear to leave her carefree life behind.

Inyanna was Timor’an–more than that she was gifted with insight and with the Matriarch’s blood. She would ascend to the Matriarch’s place if she could prove herself in flight. And there lay the heart of the problem–Inyanna was meant to fly and yet she could not.

What follows, in a succession of short scenes, is equal parts a chronicle of Siren’s attempts to enable Inyanna to fly as the rest of her kind can, and an account of the rise and fall, or the fall and rise, of a strange but beautiful relationship.

On the sentence level, at least, ‘The Song of the Body Cartographer’ is sublime. The author’s soaring prose is practically poetry in motion—that she is a Clarion West graduate comes as no surprise—and whatever its other issues, this is an undeniably evocative short.

But from the climax at the start to the bittersweet resolution come the conclusion, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz seems keen to the reader on the back foot, and unsurprisingly, this proves problematic. ‘The Song of the Body Cartographer’ boasts enough world-building to warrant a novel, characters that seem to have stepped out of something far larger, and though it does end, in a sense, on the whole, it reads more like an isolated excerpt than a whole story.

For instance, there’s an overwhelming volume of terminology, complete with the deliberately placed apostrophes we see so much of in high fantasy: see qa’ta and qi’ma, pillor’ak and Timor’an. Meanwhile one’s sense of setting is fragmented at best, and the narrative—which I should stress does come together eventually—is so overstuffed with invention and imagination that its focus feels fleeting:

Siren adjusted the gaze on the machine. The cocoon was one she’d had made after a visit to the Veils. She had watched the stoic Nahipan as they went about their business and had observed a cocoon which was put to use at certain intervals of the day. 

Drawing closer, she had been surprised to see that the cocoon uncovered extraneous layers, laying bare the cords of muscle and the line of nerves underneath. 

Fascinated by the cocoon, she’d obtained permission from the Nahipan’s chief technician and with his help she had managed to recreate a facsimile in Lower Ayudan.

Ultimately, I was not surprised to read, per the story’s postscript, that ‘The Song of the Body Cartographer’ is inspired by the surrealist artwork embedded above—namely ‘Creation of the Birds’ by Remedios Vario—nor latterly that it was in fact extracted from Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s current work in progress.

In the past, I’ve enjoyed several of this author’s other shorts—let me especially recommend ‘Of the Liwat’ang Yawa, the Litok-litok and their Prey,’ which you can read for free here—and indeed I appreciated the potential of ‘The Song of the Body Cartographer.’ I’m just not quite convinced Rochita Loenen-Ruiz realises it here, but perhaps she will in the forthcoming novel this nominee is but a small part of.

***

'The Song of the Body Cartographer' was published in Philippine Genre Stories in June 2012. You can read it for free here.

Short Story Review | Limited Edition by Tim Maughan

In early August 2011, the world almost ended. Or so it seemed from where I was sitting: at home, glued to the news, watching in horror as thousands of people took to rioting in the streets for no reason I could easily see.

Using social media and mobile devices to organise themselves, these individuals made of London a living hell, and various other British cities went down the toilet as well. The gangs took what they wanted from high street retailers—from TVs to trainers—and burned what they didn’t.

Estimates place the cumulative cost of the resulting property damage at approximately two hundred million pounds. But forget the finances: five people died, many others were injured—and that isn’t counting the countless participants who were uncannily quiet about their so-called war wounds.

The forces of law and order did eventually respond. All the police who had planned leaves of absence were told to hold their horses, whilst parliament was (rather pointlessly) recalled. Our poor pillock of a Prime Minister even had to cut short his holidays!

Ultimately, more than three thousand people were arrested in relation to the riots, and gradually, they did die down. But the image of them—the idea of them—still persists. As ‘Limited Edition’ illustrates.

Tim Maughan’s startling short story begins with an extraordinary advert:

Eugene Sureshot, one mile tall, strides through the wasteland. Where his limited edition trainers hit the ground deserts bloom, city blocks rise and mountains rip themselves from the ground. Vistas erupt from each footfall, spreading like bacteria, mingling, creating landscapes. New places from the dead ground. Civilisations rise, intricate detail evolves around the soles of giant feet. 

Then Sureshot stops, as if something blocks his path. [He] steps back, raises a foot from the ground—leaving behind light-trails of glass skyscrapers and steel domes, and puts one limited edition kick through the screen, so all that Grids can see is the rubber sole, embossed tick logo.

It’s only a commercial for new shoes, but Grids can’t get it out of his head. By hook or by crook, he resolves, he’ll call a pair of these limited edition kicks his own. Alas, “he’s got no cash. Never has. And down here that makes him irrelevant, an outsider. It makes him insignificant.” So when Grids gets wind of a local store with inventory already, weeks before street date, he and his mans meet in an empty epic fantasy MMO to hatch a plan.

“Standard Smash/Grab rules yeah? No casualties, especially no staff or civilians,” he stresses. Thus the game begins: servers are brought online, admins are installed, and other essential information is seeded, secretly, via >>blinks<< on Twitter.

The progress of Grids and his gang will be followed by a flash mob of interested observers; though an ARG overlaid on their spex, they’ll unlock achievements and score multipliers for achieving certain objectives. Their success will essentially earn them significance. Their failure? Infamy. It’s a win-win situation... but of course it gets out of hand quickly.

‘Limited Edition’ is a chilling take on the reign of organised anarchy in the UK discussed above, and as such, its contemporary relevance is second to none—certainly to none of the BSFA’s other nominees for the Best Short Story of 2012. It touches, too, on the potential consequences of targeted marketing; on the place of gaming in our era; and on the immeasurable impact social media has had on society. As an extrapolation of recent events and advances, ‘Limited Edition’ is as astonishing as it is alarming.

But beyond its bearing on tomorrow’s world—nay today’s—Tim Maughan’s cautionary tale of the dispossessed in Britain’s cities also functions on a number of other fronts. In particularly fantastic in terms of character; somehow, despite what they’re doing, Grids and his fam seem sympathetic. On one level I honestly wanted them to get away with their Smash/Grab!

Then I remembered myself...

There is, then, a sense of tension between what is right outside the story, and what is true within its narrow, claustrophobic confines. In addition to this, ‘Limited Edition’ is propelled by an exponentially more desperate momentum, and bolstered by some very fitting imagery, which has nature resembling artifice rather than the other way around:

When Grids and his crew get to Avonmeads, he sees they’re being eyeballed by a fat black crow, perched on top of a CCTV pole. Like the camera it watches them pass. [...] He feels knots in his stomach, that feeling of being out of his comfort zone, of being watched and pointed out as an outsider.

‘Limited Edition’ may be a cutting commentary on any number of contemporary topics, but it’s also a damn fine short story—one of the most potent I've read in recent years—with candid characters, powerful pacing, and a terrific yet terrifying perspective.

To wit, Tim Maughan’s latest tale is well and truly deserving of its spot on the BSFA’s shortlist—as was ‘Havana Augmented’ (now available as one third of Paintwork) when it was nominated two years ago—though I wonder whether or not the same can be said of our next contender.

***

'Limited Edition' by Tim Maughan was published in Arc 1.3: Afterparty Overdrive in September 2012. You can buy a copy of the magazine here.

The Scotsman Abroad | Introducing the Short Fiction Spotlight

Yesterday was a big day for your resident Scotsman!

In addition to the third instalment of the British Genre Fiction Focus—wherein I touched on the rebranding of Guy Gavriel Kay in the UK, the impact of the cold snap we've had on high street retail, the rise of "artisan authors" via The Guardian, and the announcement of The Time Traveler's Almanac—yesterday also saw the debut of the other feature series I've been working on for Tor.com.

Wonderfully, this once I wasn't working alone, because the Short Fiction Spotlight is a team effort between myself and the brilliant Brit Mandelo. Both of our first editions hit the front page at the same time yesterday, but from here on out we'll be sharing the Spotlight equally, which is to say one week Brit will curate the column, and the next week I will; then her again, then me once more, and so on and so forth—for all time if it takes off.

Long story short—and isn't that the point?—the Short Fiction Spotlight is live, and I'd love it if you took a look.

Here's how my half the whole starts:

Much as we like to tell ourselves otherwise, size absolutely matters. 

What? I’m a shorty; I get to say these things! 

But I mean the size of stories, of course. There are no two ways about it, I’m afraid: whether because of price or presence, viability or visibility, short fiction is the person at the party we politely ignore, or outright rudely overlook. 

I’m as guilty of this telling offence as anyone. In the second installment of my ongoing British Genre Fiction Focus column, I talked up the British Science Fiction Association’s Best Novel nominees—amongst many and various other subjects—yet neglected to mention the six short stories up for one of the BSFA’s other awards. I am appropriately penitent, as we shall see, but this sort of treatment is simply all too typical of the short shrift short fiction is given.

In order to address the problem head on, Brit Mandelo and I will take turns discussing a selection of short stories. As we alternate weeks, Brit will be writing about magazines, primarily—whether physical or digital—meanwhile I’ll be going wherever the wind takes me. This week, for instance, in a timely attempt to correct my earlier oversight, I’ll be running through two of the six nominees for the BSFA’s Best Short Story award, and in subsequent editions of the Short Fiction Spotlight, time permitting, we’ll consider the remaining contenders together. 

After that? Well. I’m sure we’ll see... 

You are, of course, cordially invited to read along with us. We’d adore it if you did! And though not all of the shorts we mean to talk about in this column are available to read for free, where possible we’ll be providing links to the texts themselves, and failing that, advice on how to get hold of certain stories. If you keep watch on the comments, I’ll try to give you advance warning about what we’re reading next, as well.

I'm already hard at work on weeks two and three of this feature, and let me tell you, I've never read so many short stories in such a short space of time. Not in me tod!

Be they great or merely good—there certainly hasn't been a bad 'un in the bunch thus far—committing to co-curating the Short Fiction Spotlight has given me a glimpse in a whole other world of genre goodness, and I'd be over the bloody moon if did the same for a few of you.

So click through. Show your support for short fiction. And while you're at it, why not suggest a few choice stories for Brit or I to read and review?

Guest Post | Stefan of Far Beyond Reality Reviews Her Husband's Hands by Adam-Troy Castro

Ladies and gentlemen: welcome once again to The Speculative Scotsman!

You may or may not know that I’m in America at the moment – if not, yes, it’s true... in fact I’m as far AFK as I’ve ever been before – but never ye fear! For in my absence, a few good men and women have volunteered to make the site their own, albeit only momentarily. They’re bloggers, by and large, but also friends; fine folks one and all that I’ve met on the internet (and occasionally off) in the course of keeping this shared space set aside for burbling about speculative fiction of all shapes and sizes.

They all have blogs of their own, of course, and I’d urge you to seek them out. I care a lot about what goes on here on The Speculative Scotsman, so let me stress this one thing before I get to giving over the floor: the fact that I’m hosting the work of each of these excellent writers here speaks to my admiration and my respect for every last one among them.

If you enjoy some or all of these terrific reviews and opinion pieces, do the decent thing and click through the links in the intro and outro of each. Follow a few of my favourite internet critics. :)  

I'm afraid today marks the last of the great guest posts. Which is to say the last of the guest posts, period... not that there are more coming up that are rubbish. Obviously. 

Anyway, to top this whole thing off, it is my inestimable pleasure to welcome Stefan Raets of Far Beyond Reality to TSS. For all that it's clearly hit its stride already, Far Beyond Reality is a fairly new blog, but I've been a fan of Stefan's superlative reviews since they started appearing on Tor.com, which which I also contribute to on occasion. He's truly a terrific critic - one of my very favourites of late - and going solely on the guest post below, in which Stefan considers a certain Nebula Award-nominee, I'm sure you'll be inclined to agree.

***

I’m currently writing an article about the Nebula-nominated short stories for Tor.com, covering all seven stories on the final ballot in one post. However, I quickly discovered that I have much more to say about one of the stories than would fit in the one paragraph or so I can devote to it. So when Niall invited me to contribute a guest post to The Speculative Scotsman during his trip abroad, I decided to devote it to that story: “Her Husband’s Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro. 

First of all, you can read the entire story here. I recommend doing this before reading the rest of this post, because doing it the other way around will significantly reduce your enjoyment of both.

One thing that struck me early on about this story is that there’s initially a huge amount of dissonance between the science fiction component and the emotional tone. I’m afraid this dissonance may cause some readers to dismiss the story, which would be a huge shame. There’s a bit of an adjustment required on the part of the reader, early on during “Her Husband’s Hands,” but once you’ve made that adjustment, you can expect one of the most emotionally gripping stories you’ll read all year. 

The science fiction component of the story initially seems to border on the absurd: any part of the body can be revived and loaded with the most recent backup of the owner’s personality and memories. It’s more or less exactly the negative of an amputation: instead of a soldier returning home without a limb, the limb returns home without the soldier. Sometimes this results in a person coming home as “just enough meat to qualify as alive.” The situation these survivors and their families find themselves in is so horrifying that “it was impossible to know whether to scream in horror at their predicament or giggle uncontrollably at its madness.” 

And so it happens with the story’s main character, Rebecca, whose husband’s hands are solemnly returned home to her, delivered by two serious soldiers. They arrive in a pretty box with an American flag draped over it, a grim parody of an American military funeral that becomes acutely meaningful later on. She’s told she’s lucky: it could have been just a random chunk of flesh in a box, not two perfectly preserved and functional hands. Still, there she is, sitting across the table from her husband, who has been reduced to two faceless extremities.

The strength of the story lies in the way Castro swings from absurdism to genuinely painful emotion in no time. He explores the complexity of Rebecca’s pain in unflinching detail: her husband is technically still alive, but all that remains of the man she loved are these faceless hands. She can’t help but feel revulsion for the sentient body parts. When he asks her to kiss them, she does so out of a sense of obligation. When he moves over to touch her, it’s described as “crab-crawling over,” like one of those scenes in zombie movies where mindless body parts keep moving. She longs for the man who could “arouse her passions as well as her pity,” and most painfully for her (and for the reader), she feels guilty as she does so. 

Rebecca can’t help but feel like a war widow. There’s not enough left for her to relate to. She feels like her husband is gone. That’s why the delivery scene, with the flag draped over the box, is so poignant: Bob is not a person to her anymore. It feels as if he’s dead. As if he should be dead. Before long, Rebecca feels trapped. She has to care for her husband. She can’t leave. She realizes the rest of her life is going to be spent in service to the remnants of the man she loved and the remnants of her marriage. She’s uncomfortable sitting across from him during lunch, and by dinner time she realizes that “the silence of their meals would soon be a familiar ritual, for as long as the future still stretched.” 

The other side of the coin is of course Bob, her husband, whose body has been almost completely destroyed. The story doesn’t touch as much on his feelings towards his wife, because it’s told from Rebecca’s perspective, but it does deal with the issue of PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In this future, the possibility of backing up your personality and memories also means that, after death or injury, the revived victim can decide how much he or she wants to remember. Bob initially claims that he’s had most memories of the horrors of war erased (so he can live “blessedly free of some experiences that would have crippled him even more than his current condition”), but eventually it becomes clear that this is untrue and that he remembers everything. The first hint of this comes when he tries to strangle Rebecca in her sleep during a nightmare, which leads directly to the support group, one of the most memorable scenes in the story. 

The support group is another part of the story where the absurd and the poignant walk hand in hand, creating what has to be some of the most uncomfortable reading on this year’s Nebula ballot. The other people in the group are all mirrors for Rebecca. One person has been so fragmented that she has to be carried around in a suitcase. One couple is in a situation that’s almost identical to Bob and Rebecca’s, except that the woman has had her hands amputated so her husband’s surviving body parts could be grafted onto her own body. Rebecca wonders if her own husband expects something similar and if she could ever bring herself to do it, which is the most overt example of the struggle between guilt and self-sacrifice that she’s going through: how much of her life is she supposed to give up to accommodate what happened to her husband? 

The most meaningful scene at the support group comes when a woman who is almost entirely intact - only her face has been replaced by the reflective silver interface - gives Rebecca a hug and says “You’re not alone.” She is literally a mirror: Rebecca sees herself, faceless. All of her identity is being removed now her life has been completely taken over by the return of her husband’s hands. Her reaction sums up the darkness at the core of this story perfectly: “She wanted to tell the other woman, of course I’m alone, and my husband’s alone, and you’re alone, and we’re all alone; the very point of being in hell is that there’s a gulf between us and all our efforts to bridge it for even a moment give us nothing but a respite and the illusion of comfort before those bridges retract and we’re left to face the same problems from our own separate islands. She wanted to say it, but of course she couldn’t, not if it meant embracing despair in defiance of this sectioned woman’s kindness, and so she wept herself blind and took the hug as the gift it was meant to be.” 

And then, at the very end, the story suddenly ends on a hopeful note, when Bob comes clean and admits that he didn’t have all his memories expunged, because “the only thing worth remembering about any of it was how much of it i spent wanting to return to you.” The couple finally find common ground, despite everything that’s happened. It’s a surprisingly gentle and tender ending to this story. 

Amputees sometimes refer to “phantom pain,” a strange neurological phenomenon that can cause them to have feelings in a limb that’s no longer there. In “Her Husband’s Hands” that phantom pain seems to happen to the spouse, whose husband is almost completely gone, leaving a gaping hole in her life that she is struggling to cope with. It shows in painful, direct language the unspoken feelings of helplessness and guilt that may be experienced by some military families. It’s an incredibly poignant story that’s firmly in the realm of science fiction but still deals with issues that are relevant today. I’m not a member of SFWA so I can’t vote in the Nebulas, but if I could, “Her Husband’s Hands” would have my vote on a very strong final ballot.

###

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find many of his reviews at Tor.com and on his own site, Far Beyond Reality.

***

Thank you again, Stefan, for rounding off this month of fine friends and great guests with such style. I'll be sure to check "Her Husband's Hands" out myself just as soon as I have reliable internet access again, meanwhile you all have to promise me you'll bookmark Far Beyond Reality immediately.

In other news, please do stay tuned for the last of my Letters From America tomorrow.

And then? Well... that'll be that.

How sad. :(