As usual, I’m behind and am just now getting to write up these thoughts on the 2018 Nebula Awards Showcase, edited by Jane Yolen for Pyr. Until April when the 2019 showcase comes out, it is the latest of annual volumes published since 1966 to reprint the nominated and winning stories for the previous year. Though this past year’s winners might be more in the forefront of your mind, revisiting – or discovering – the stories in the 2018 showcase (published 2016 and 2017) could be even more rewarding. I had read many of the stories at their original appearance, and going back to these again for a second or third time felt in some cases like meeting old friends, and in a few cases felt like appreciating something wondrous that I had somehow missed on that read a couple years back.
Space constraints limit Yolen to including only excerpts from the award-winning novella (Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire), novel (All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders), and young adult novel (Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine). I don’t read excerpts, and so I was disappointed that one of the nominated novelettes was also truncated, “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” by Fran Wilde. Looking into it, I assume this is because Tor.com published the excerpt online from the printed novella length work. If so, I find it odd for a story to be nominated as the excerpted form in the novelette category and not the complete text. Regardless, I did read the included nominated/winning short stories, and novelettes apart from Wilde’s. Levine’s Arabella of Mars should be a part of an upcoming review here of the complete trilogy, but in the meantime, I recommend it to readers of all ages.
The genres of story this year span from fairy tale fantasy to hard science fiction (high richness), but they heavily skew toward the fantasy side (low diversity). On the other hand, a strong diversity in authors is evident. Despite variety, these Nebula stories have a strikingly unifying nature in dealing with socially progressive themes in styles that pull at emotional strings. Their success for me largely ended up depending on how well the message and style of the author melded with the other elements of story. Perhaps indicative of a good set of award selections, there was no story I felt ambivalent over in the end.
The first three Best Short Story nominees opening the 2018 Showcase rank among the best works in the collection. Allyssa Wong’s “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers” sets the dominant tone for the selections with its focus on poetic language, emotions, and mood. It’s a fantasy about two sisters capable of altering the world, like the weather. One sister has committed suicide in a blazing world-ending act, leaving the other to deal with grief and questions as she relives alternate permutations, wondering if anything can be changed. The winner of a 2015 Nebula award for “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers”, Wong also has a nominated novelette later in the collection (“You’ll Surely Drown Here if You Stay”), but the beauty and brevity of this allegory (even if unsubtle) made it more memorable.
“Sabbath Wine” by Barbara Krasnoff continues the feels with a story set in Prohibition-era Brooklyn, where a young Jewish girl meets a young African American boy who claims to be dead. She invites him to a Sabbath dinner, setting in motion events that bring the two children’s fathers together for emotional connection between neighbors of different races that otherwise would not be connecting. This one is a rich, character-driven story that doesn’t get bogged down in message.
Everything that I’ve read from Sam J. Miller I’ve enjoyed, “Things with Beards” included. Miller wrote it as a sort of fanfiction sequel to The Thing, which itself was an adaptation of a Campbell novella. In Miller’s hand the story becomes metaphor for AIDS and an opportunity to delve into the issues of police activity against African Americans and being an outsider. I enjoyed the grittiness of it, and adore Miller’s style of spinning progressive themes into fiction. However, I can understand why others would feel it too heavy-handed, and it could’ve worked better by using the movie as inspiration, but not the exact characters.
Other short story nominees were to various degrees less successful for me. “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” by Caroline M. Yoachim is a satirical and humorous take on health care. I enjoy a lot of what Yoachim writes, but I couldn’t take the second person adventure nature of it. Evoking portal fantasy with its title “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door” by A. Merc Rustad describes what happens when communication among two young friends between worlds is cut off. With time passing differently on either side, they each try and reestablish connection. The story has welcome themes of rebellion against rules and the benefits of diversity, but it didn’t stand out as engaging to me as a short story.
The fairy tale nature of it is also not my favorite kind of fantasy, yet the Nebula (and Hugo, and Locus) winning “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar illustrates that exceptions always occur. A subversion of classic fairy tales that modernizes the ‘damsel in distress’ trope, El-Mohtar succeeds in not just highlighting progressive themes, but doing so in a way that is adventurous and witty without brow-beating.
Classical mythology also is not one of my favorite inspirations for fiction, so “The Orangery”, a novelette by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, didn’t resonate. It shares feminist themes with Brooke Bolander’s “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies”, a blunt short revenge story that is dark and understandably violent. The intensity and simplicity make the heavy-handed message work for that short story, whereas the style of Stufflebeam’s story would have fit better with a subtler allegory or greater complexity.
Two of the other novelettes I did enjoy greatly feature post-apocalyptic settings, a genre I usually enjoy. “Blood Grains Speak Through Memory” by Jason Sanford features nanobots protecting an ecologically damaged world, forming symbioses with Guardians to care for nature so that a now-nomadic humankind cannot do more damage. One guardian questions the harsh, inflexible rules, and faces an ethical dilemma. The plot and biological themes of this make it an easy favorite for me, given that it also is so well written. Likewise, Sarah Pinsker’s “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea” by Sarah Pinsker stands out as a fantastic character-driven story. Pinsker’s stories don’t always work for me, perhaps because they are so often intimately wed to a type of music that falls outside my taste or experience. For whatever reason – and I won’t question it – this clicked.
Finally, the award winning “The Long Fall Up” by William Ledbetter takes place in a future where a large corporation controls human fertility through the myth that embryos won’t develop properly in zero gravity. The pregnant protagonist of this hard science fiction challenges this dogma and the regulations enforced through it to maintain power over the human population. A superb read that blends classic science fiction problem-solving stories with modern values in engaging fashion.
Now I’ll look forward to getting to taking a fresh (or first) look at another batch of Nebula Award nominated/winning works in the 2019 spotlight edition. The 2018 suggests I’ll make some excellent discoveries, and I hope it will do so for you too.
