Well, here’s a noble thing. Unusual in these me! me! me! times.

No sooner has the ink dried on the BSFA ballot (we’re going to have to come up with some new metaphor for use with electronic media here) than Science Fiction Awards Watch gives us the news that Hal Duncan has withdrawn his nominated piece Ethics and Enthusiasm from the award ballot.

His reasons for this are that his blog essay is marginal to the field at best and others in the final ballot are more central and therefore more deserving of the award.

What a refreshing stance.

Good on you, big man!

Thanks to Jim Steel – see my sidebar – for this news and the link.

The BSFA Awards shortlist for 2010 has been published.

There are links to four of the short stories and to all the artworks plus various of the non fiction pieces on the ballot.

I’ll not get all the novels read and probably not all the short stories either unless the BSFA does a booklet of them like it did last year.

Ah, well.

The latest BSFA mailing dropped through my letter box yesterday. It’s been a while. I thought they’d forgotten about me.

No Focus but the Vector is a J. G. Ballard special.

Plus there was a freebie book, Winter Song, by Colin Harvey, published by the relatively new SF imprint Angry Robot. Presumably they think the PR accruing from this will outweigh any possible loss of sales.

Or maybe it’s just an attempt to get it on the BSFA Award Ballot….

Cynical? Moi?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

The BSFA is the British Science Fiction Association, of which I am a member.

Every year the members can nominate works of Science Fiction from the previous year for an award. These nominations are collated and a final ballot paper sent out to members. Attendees at Eastercon (the annual British Science Fiction Convention – this year taking place in Bradford) may also vote for the awards. This year’s BSFA award shortlists are given here. (The award part of the BSFA website was down when I tried to link to it. They’re in the middle of revamping the site.)

Every two months or so BSFA members receive a mailing containing the Association’s review magazine Vector and (less regularly) its mag for writers, Focus. Non-members can buy these separately from the Association.

This month’s mailing dropped through my letter box today. It was conspicuous by its unusual girth.

Along with the normal goodies there was a small chapbook containing the four short-listed stories in the best short fiction category along with the ballot form for all the awards. This was a surprise as it is the first year we have been treated to the actual fiction in this way. Normally, if you hadn’t read any of the stories, you would have to get hold of the magazine or anthology etc. where they were published; and time between ballot paper and Easter is usually quite short. Now all four are in the one package – no excuses for not reading them! Congratulations to the BSFA for getting this together.

And there’s more. There was a handsome sample booklet of Postscripts (PS Publishing) containing ten stories published there over the past few years. (Postscripts – now publishing as a hard back anthology – is where I recently sold my story, Osmotic Pressure.)

In addition this month’s Focus contains the winning entry (plus the runners-up) in the BSFA’s recent short story competition.

Looks like I’ll be reading a lot of short fiction in the next few weeks.

Information on joining the BSFA is here.