The BSFA awards have been voted on and are listed at Science Fiction Awards Watch.

Ted Chiang’s Exhalation won best short story.

It wasn’t my favourite among the nominees.

Still, congratulations to him and to the other winners (and commiserations to the non-winners.)

The Rock, 11/4/09

It’s a gey long time since we last won four in a row. And all 2-0, which is a bit weird. Without our talisman Ross Clark too.

A great run of form, which needs to be kept up.

But… Derek Carcary was carried off.

Next Saturday’s game at Cowdenbeath is our biggest since we last played Alloa in the Second Division. I only hope they’ve got the jitters.

I’ll be on tenterhooks all week.

Evidence of Love In A Case Of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account by M Rickert.

Evidence Of Love… is a cautionary tale set in a “Holy Time” in what is (apparently) a theocracy where regular executions take place. As ritualistic and theatrical spectator events.

The executions are of women who under a previous regime had an abortion and are now retrospectively being subjected to the ultimate sanction for their offence. This is despite the fact that some of them have subsequently borne children. These children are given lockets containing locks of their executed mother’s hair as mementos. Display of these has become almost a fashion statement.

Some women have sought to avoid punishment, have disappeared and are said to be forming a guerrilla army, though we are never actually shown any of them.

Our narrator is the daughter of one such absentee and a father who has been left to bring her up and who tries to protect her from knowledge of her mother’s transgressions. However, she knows her prospects of advancement/marriage are blighted as a result of her maternal inheritance. Paradoxically (but this is a theocracy) they would be enhanced if her mother were to be found and executed.

In the context of the other three short listed works the focus on the narrator’s experience here is refreshing even if the premise of the story falls down as soon as immersion in its scenario ends.

Theocracies in SF are relatively familiar – The Handmaid’s Tale is the most obvious example – but they too often feel like straw men and the settings fail to convince. Even allowing for poetic licence I doubt we could get from abortion being tolerated to the society shown in Evidence in the sort of short order the story indicates. I assume the story will have more resonance in a North American or Middle Eastern context but it is probable this particular idea would never have been conceived by a British author.

No typos in this one but we did get sprung instead of sprang and broke for broken which may be due to the narrative voice (and American usage) but still grated with me.

However, if one of the purposes of SF (if it has any) is to warn or advise, then this story does succeed admirably. Plus, Americanisms notwithstanding, it is well written. Tonally, it is close to that of some of my own short works so it is not surprising I found this the most pleasing of the four in contention. Its emphasis on the human helped.

Are these the best four SF stories of 2008?

I have no idea.

But I do wonder what this selection says about those who nominated them. Taken as a four they do seem to bespeak a preference for idea over human experiences and that’s not really where I’m at my happiest.

Little Lost Robot by Paul McAuley

Paul McAuley is an example of that rare beast, a Science Fiction writer who has experience of scientific research. He trained as a biologist but his SF has not confined itself to biological influences, and has explored most aspects of the genre.

Here, a galaxy travelling robotic killing machine is ravaging the planets and suns of its creator’s enemies, seeking out life and civilisations, boldly destroying where others have gone before.

It does its job too well and, despite increasing difficulties in subduing their ever more frantic efforts to frustrate it and not without suffering from their depredations itself, runs out of enemies.

Its attention turns to a faint sign of life from way across the galaxy. A sign that is in some way haunting and familiar…. I guessed the rest.

Another cold story, another lacking in engagement. Another told, rather than showing us. I’m beginning to detect a pattern.

Station Park, 7/4/09

Third away game in a row with a 2-0 win! It’s a good time for away form to improve.

First thing: why did Forfar play in black and red halved shirts? It made them look like Cagliari. Without the skill, obviously.

Not much happened in the first half, our midfield struggled to get into the game. We managed two attempts cleared off the line from Ben Gordon and Derek Carcary (who didn’t hit his hard enough) but Forfar had a couple on target too, plus a lot of corners.

The game was meandering in the second until we scored out of nowhere. The ball came out to Ross Clark on the edge of the box and he volleyed it precisely over the keeper. Nice finish. We weathered the Forfar push and started to look threatening on the break and Clark again scored by picking up the scraps when the ball reached him as he was following in. He nearly got a hat-trick after a fine move (confidence was brimming by this time) when McLoughlin should maybe have hit it himself but passed to the better positioned Clarkie but the ball bobbled just as he hit it.

I refuse to get my hopes up. The last time we won three on the bounce without conceding a goal we got one point out of the next nine.

Below you’ll find the blurb for the tePooka gig (tonight) where I shall indeed be reading The Gentlemen Go By.

Writers’ Bloc takes its shows very seriously. That’s why it’s doing a special event at the tePOOKa April Fools Festival this month.

Portuguese magic realists meet their match by the sea. Edinburgh’s weeping statues mask a bizarre conspiracy. And we learn the truth behind the Wemyss cat’s inscrutable smile. Step through a mysterious red door to hear stories less reliable than the marriage of a Premiership footballer.

UNRELIABLE NARRATIVES will be a shorter themed show than usual but with all-new material, an atmospheric venue, and company from tePOOKa’s very own mischief makers.

The show will be at The Big Red Door, 10 Lady Lawson Street (off West Port). It begins a little after 8pm on Wednesday 8th April, and finishes shortly after 10pm. Admission has been kept at the foolishly low figure of 3 pounds (2 for concessions).

Check out the other events of the festival at:

http://www.tepooka.org/news.htm#foolFest

Writers’ Bloc:

www.writers-bloc.org.uk

Crystal Night by Greg Egan

Greg Egan’s early stories in Interzone (quite a while ago now) exploring aspects of quantum physics were much vaunted but I always found them cold, distanced, unengaging. In this respect Crystal Night, about developing artificial intelligence by evolutionary means within hardware housed in an expensive computer device Egan calls a crystal, starts promisingly, as one of the human characters raises ethical objections to the project. She rapidly vanishes from the story, however, never to reappear as a voice.

The nub of Crystal Night of course reminded me of Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God which also dealt with developing intelligence in an artificial environment, but that was with flesh and blood creatures and, as I remember it, had a more human dimension.

By contrast the protagonist in Crystal Night is a borderline megalomaniac. Egan tries to endow him with sympathetic tendencies but these do not go near counterweighing his autocratic nature, his feeling of entitlement. As in Microcosmic God the conditions the intelligences experience in the crystal are progressively and ruthlessly adjusted to force them to evolve in the desired direction.

Crystal Night does raise incidentally the question of whether we might be artificial creatures in some sort of huge simulation but it is not alone in that. More centrally it questions how much creations owe to their creator especially if that creator is insensitive to their needs and wishes, more intent on pursuing (in this case) his devices and desires but the main fault in Crystal Night is that the AIs are more interesting than the humans; and we see too little of them.

Interestingly, in comparison to the Ted Chiang piece, I noticed only one typo here.

Really, though, this is just Microcosmic God with AIs. And without the humanity.
No award.

There’s another Writers’ Bloc reading, this one titled Unreliable Narratives, on Wednesday 8th April in The Big Red Door, Lady Lawson Street Edinburgh. 8 pm start (£3; £2 concessions.)

I may be reading my story The Gentlemen Go By, though the author line up has not quite been finalised.

I know this is a bit short notice but it’s one of our special shows and is to tie in with the performing arts charity te Pooka‘s April Fools Festival.

Ochilview, 4/4/09

I’d have taken a scabby one-nil but we got two.

After a brief Dumbarton flurry the first half was more or less all Stenny in terms of possession but they never created a clear chance. We scored from a corner just before half time – the ball ricocheting a bit from the header and ending up in the net. This confused the announcer at the ground who said, “Dumbarton scorer; I don’t know who that was,” to much laughter; but it’s been credited to Ben Gordon.

Second half we had the wind but never a full grip on the game. We caused their keeper fewer problems than he caused himself until a brilliant Stevie Murray dummy let in Ross Clark for a one-on-one he didn’t miss and after that Stenny lost heart a bit.

Overall it wasn’t a classic and we didn’t really play that well or put many passes together. How much that is due to the plastic pitch I don’t know: the bounce is weird at times. In any case, silky football doesn’t get you out of this division.

Another away clean sheet despite me approaching the game with trepidation as we don’t win at Ochilview very often. That’s also true of our record at Forfar, so no getting hopes up, chaps.

Nice to meet up with Sonsdiary.

Still second. And after Tuesday night we could be… err, second.

Since the BSFA has given me the chance to catch up on the candidates for its short story award for 2009, I decided to give them all a whirl. Starting with….

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang has garnered a reputation as a writer of excellent SF short stories but has not as far as I know produced a novel length work. Since he has mostly been published in the US I have not previously actually read anything of his.

Exhalation at first reminded me a bit of Cordwainer Smith’s Scanners Live In Vain dealing as it does with attachments to/in the chest area but it rapidly devolved from this template to become something quite other (its world’s inhabitants are clearly not human) while still retaining the sense of detachment I remember from that work.

While the story here is well written, there is a good deal of information dumping and, more unfortunately, absolutely no character interaction, the whole being almost declaimed, in a lecturing tone, by the agonist. (I could not call [it?] a protagonist as there is no one else for it to protag against or with.)

The idea that existence is merely one long exhalation, a running down, is nicely fashioned but in essence harks back to the New Worlds era of the 1960s and its preoccupation with entropy. There is obviously a sense of environmental decay running through stories such as these which, of course, has resonances with our (globally warmer) times.

There were unfortunately some typos or mis-edits. I always find this annoying as, for me, they mar the reading experience. It made me wonder if these appeared in the original or were introduced in the transcription to the BSFA publication (admittedly unlikely in this electronic age.)

I can see why others would nominate this story for an award as the writing is polished and the narrative strives for significance. My own thought was that this was all just too contrived and the author trying too hard. In the end, Exhalation didn’t satisfy the way an award winner ought to.

Exhalation has also been nominated for the Hugo Award (effectively the World Science Fiction Award.) Ian Sales reviews those candidates here.