![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Just a reminder to local (Silicon Valley) peeps: this Wednesday (March 26, 2014) from 7-8pm I'll be doing a reading from Daughter of Mystery at the Sunnyvale Public Library and giving away a copy of the book to some lucky attendee.
Mar. 24th, 2014
When I set myself the goal of reading all the Nebula nominated material in time to vote, I wasn't paying attention to the voting deadline. (End of the month.) So I may manage to cover all the short fiction, but there's no way I'll make it through the novels. The reviews are also necessarily going to get shorter as I go along. I'll start by finishing off the short story category (see also prior review of the Wrigley story).
"The Sounds of Old Earth," Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed 1/13)
A depressing tale of ecological disaster, changing generational values, and the commercialization of survival itself, redeemed on a small personal level by an act of love and sentiment. Like most of the short fiction, there's deft and compact worldbuilding of the sort I normally enjoy. I confess I felt a bit too emotionally manipulated.
"Selkie Stories Are for Losers," Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons 1/7/13)
A light, relationship-centered story where the fantastic elements (the selkie theme) doubles as a metaphor for loss and abandonment (or -- depending on the reliability of the narrator -- might exist entirely as metaphor).
"Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer," Kenneth Schneyer (Clockwork Phoenix 4)
The delight of this story is the structural conceit of a series of art exhibition notes. The persona of the exhibit curator seems to be entirely oblivious to the supernatural nature of the paintings he describes and the author's genius is to lead the reader into that understanding, laying out the life and unusual talents of the painter through a series of vignettes.
"If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love," Rachel Swirsky (Apex 3/13)
This is almost more of a prose poem than a short story, leading the reader from whimsy to scientific description, to rage, to agony, and back again to the beginning. An incredibly powerful piece, though I have trouble fitting it into the category "SFF".
"The Sounds of Old Earth," Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed 1/13)
A depressing tale of ecological disaster, changing generational values, and the commercialization of survival itself, redeemed on a small personal level by an act of love and sentiment. Like most of the short fiction, there's deft and compact worldbuilding of the sort I normally enjoy. I confess I felt a bit too emotionally manipulated.
"Selkie Stories Are for Losers," Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons 1/7/13)
A light, relationship-centered story where the fantastic elements (the selkie theme) doubles as a metaphor for loss and abandonment (or -- depending on the reliability of the narrator -- might exist entirely as metaphor).
"Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer," Kenneth Schneyer (Clockwork Phoenix 4)
The delight of this story is the structural conceit of a series of art exhibition notes. The persona of the exhibit curator seems to be entirely oblivious to the supernatural nature of the paintings he describes and the author's genius is to lead the reader into that understanding, laying out the life and unusual talents of the painter through a series of vignettes.
"If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love," Rachel Swirsky (Apex 3/13)
This is almost more of a prose poem than a short story, leading the reader from whimsy to scientific description, to rage, to agony, and back again to the beginning. An incredibly powerful piece, though I have trouble fitting it into the category "SFF".