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Last year, after an unintentional multi-year lapse in my SFWA membership, I re-upped. So it occurred to me that I should make some effort to read enough of the Nebula nominees to do some informed voting. Thankfully, most of the short works are available in some form on-line (either in e-book format or on web sites), making it easier to track things down. And thankfully this means I can do a great deal of the reading on the iPad while working out on the elliptical. (Although typing even minimal notes while doing so is tricky.) I'll be blogging brief reviews as a read, in part because it makes it easier to remember what I thought of a story, and in part because of my commitment to reviewing what I read.
Novelette: "Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters," Henry Lien (Asimov’s 12/13)
I am immensely fond of stories that plop you down in the middle of a complex and detailed unfamiliar setting and force you to scramble to figure it all out as the action starts. My motto might be “Info-dumps are for the weak!” But “plop you down” is an unfair characterization because this manner of presenting a story’s setting is much more difficult than a simple absence of explanation. Lien does extremely well at presenting information in the right quantity and distribution to allow the reader to catch their balance even as the story plunges forward. The setting of this fantasy might be summed up as “Chinese ice-skating roller-derby girls’ reform school”. Such a description does no justice to the rich background that can be inferred: hints of the artificial “pearl” surfaces on which the characters skate that seem to make up the entirety of their island world. And the girls are being reformed not from criminal activity but from the disappointing state of being undutiful daughters to their parents. But behind this surface, the true purpose of the school is as a training ground for the martial arts skills necessary to enter the nebulous prize of the Pearl Opera Academy. The connections between these themes are vague, but as the point of view is embedded tightly within one of the undutiful daughters, a detailed explanation of the greater picture would break character. The prose is richly atmospheric, sketching out a larger created world that will evidently feature in a forthcoming trilogy from Lien. But when it comes down to it, there is far more atmosphere than plot--or even character development--within the story. The action follows a well-worn trope: belligerent rivals must learn to cooperate against a hostile system in order to achieve, if not mutual goals, at least their own individual goals in parallel. This plot is not without its twists, and the end of the story leaves a certain curiosity as to the eventual fate of the characters, but overall it feels more like a character sketch than a story, where the character is the culture and not the protagonist. I also found the proportion of text that lovingly describes details of the skating-based martial art to be a tad excessive. Far more than was needed to establish for description and adding little depth to the overall goals of the story.
Novelette: "Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters," Henry Lien (Asimov’s 12/13)
I am immensely fond of stories that plop you down in the middle of a complex and detailed unfamiliar setting and force you to scramble to figure it all out as the action starts. My motto might be “Info-dumps are for the weak!” But “plop you down” is an unfair characterization because this manner of presenting a story’s setting is much more difficult than a simple absence of explanation. Lien does extremely well at presenting information in the right quantity and distribution to allow the reader to catch their balance even as the story plunges forward. The setting of this fantasy might be summed up as “Chinese ice-skating roller-derby girls’ reform school”. Such a description does no justice to the rich background that can be inferred: hints of the artificial “pearl” surfaces on which the characters skate that seem to make up the entirety of their island world. And the girls are being reformed not from criminal activity but from the disappointing state of being undutiful daughters to their parents. But behind this surface, the true purpose of the school is as a training ground for the martial arts skills necessary to enter the nebulous prize of the Pearl Opera Academy. The connections between these themes are vague, but as the point of view is embedded tightly within one of the undutiful daughters, a detailed explanation of the greater picture would break character. The prose is richly atmospheric, sketching out a larger created world that will evidently feature in a forthcoming trilogy from Lien. But when it comes down to it, there is far more atmosphere than plot--or even character development--within the story. The action follows a well-worn trope: belligerent rivals must learn to cooperate against a hostile system in order to achieve, if not mutual goals, at least their own individual goals in parallel. This plot is not without its twists, and the end of the story leaves a certain curiosity as to the eventual fate of the characters, but overall it feels more like a character sketch than a story, where the character is the culture and not the protagonist. I also found the proportion of text that lovingly describes details of the skating-based martial art to be a tad excessive. Far more than was needed to establish for description and adding little depth to the overall goals of the story.
