The BSFA booklet containing the short stories and art works listed on the ballot form is handsomely produced. It’s dated 2009 because the awards were for stories published in that year. It’s a pity it didn’t arrive before the deadline but the BSFA has had trouble recently with printers and distributors for their magazines going bust on them. However, it still gave me the chance to catch up on the story which I had not been able to read online.

The Push by Dave Hutchinson

This is a traditional tale, traditionally told. No pyrotechnics, no fuss. Straightforward exposition, twist at the end. The Push of the title is a faster than light drive, improvements in which reduce the time dilation effect of its use but not enough for our narrator, Neil Hanson, not to appear much younger than his contemporaries who have done less travelling.

He has been called back to the planet Reith, which he helped colonise, because a problem has arisen with a local species, called rockers, which has suddenly developed sentience. These creatures also worship him as a god. This second factor is explained but the first, much the most interesting feature of the story to me, is unfortunately left hanging.

The characterisation is fine, you can believe these are real people – except for the newly sentient rockers, who are little more than props.

It’s not my favourite of the contenders but I would have placed it above several of them.

For my comments on the other stories on the ballot see here.

Today I received the latest BSFA mailing through the post. As well as Vector and Focus it contained the expected booklet of stories shortlisted for this year’s BSFA Award.

Unfortunately this is ten or so days late as the voting was to be by 3/4/10 and the award was presented on Easter Day, as usual.

You can’t blame the BSFA for this, the time scale involved is really too short to produce and mail out the booklet before Easter. It’s a historical accdent that the awards are announced at Eastercon, too hallowed by tradition to change now. It’s only the second year the BSFA has attempted to avail its members of this opportunty to cast their eyes over the nominations and is to be applauded.

The booklet is a lovely glossy thing and I’ll let you know what I thought of Dave Hutchinson’s The Push once I read it.

The winners of this year’s BSFA Awards have been announced.

Non-Fiction
Nick Lowe, Mutant Popcorn.

Best Artwork
Stephen Martiniere, Cover of ‘Desolation Road’

Best Novel
China Mieville, ‘The City and the City’

Best Short Story
Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia, ‘The Beloved Time of Their Lives’

Congratulations to the winners.

Commiserations to the others.

My favourite of the nominated short stories, Vishnu At The Cat Circus, has a chance of the Hugo for a novella.

THE CITY & YTIC EHT by China Miéville is on the Hugo list for Best Novel.

The ballot paper for this year’s awards is due to be completed before or at Eastercon. I’ll not be attending so I’ll need to email my votes. My thoughts on the fiction nominations that I have read are below.

Best Novel
Ark by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz) Not read by me.
Lavinia by Ursula K Le Guin (Gollancz) Not read by me.
The City & The City by China Mieville (Macmillan) See my review here.
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts (Gollancz) Not read by me.

I bow to no-one in my admiration for Ursula Le Guin’s writing but I am slightly puzzled as to why Lavinia is on this list. As I understood it the book is a historical novel with no speculative content. If so, why it should be on the ballot for the British Science Fiction Association Awards?

Best Short Fiction

I was hoping to receive a booklet with all the short stories in it in my spring BSFA mailing, as we members did last year, but the package hasn’t arrived yet so I resorted to the internet to read most of the candidates. Links can be found on the page where the shortlists appear.

1. “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster
This one is very Science Fictional with a first person present tense narration. It depicts a society where people must choose a mask every morning. To be unmasked is a crime. The mask imprints them with a personality for the day which may mean a pleasurable or painful experience results. One day our unnamed narrator meets someone who unmasks both herself and him.
All the characters are unnamed; only the queen who set up and directs the system (and is clearly inspired by the bee genus) has a designation.
I might add this story has an unusual solution to the problems inherent in info dumping.
Interesting but violent.
It has echoes of last year’s winner Exhalation so may be one to watch.

2. The Push by Dave Hutchinson (Not on internet? Unread.)

3. Johnnie and Emmie-Lou Get Married by Kim Lakin-Smith
The story is a reworking of Romeo and Juliet (or, given the gang background, West Side Story) with a scenario reminiscent of the car race from Grease or even The Phantom Menace. I was also reminded of Roger Zelazny’s Deadboy Donner And The Filstone Cup (1988.)
The language contains a strange cross-Atlantic mixture and other infelicities. Lakin-Smith uses “arse” not “ass” but “dove” not “dived” and surely could have found a better verb than “splurged” for an exhaust emission. She also unfortunately has a car “loose” momentum as if it can set that quantity free, plus there is a “span” count of one.
This is readable but inconsequential.

4. Vishnu at the Cat Circus by Ian McDonald. (Not on internet? Read from the collection Cyberabad Days.)
This reminded me more than a little of Midnight’s Children. But it’s a Midnight’s Children hyped up on steroids, overdosed on speed and LSD. Told in McDonald’s trade mark pyrotechnic prose it is the life story of Vishnu, a gene-enhanced Brahmin (see his novel River Of Gods,) who ages at half the pace of normal humans. It traces his arc from harbinger of the future to obsolescence and the getting of wisdom of sorts, all mixed up with a compelling depiction of a future India and replete with AIs, other universes and picotechnology. The Paul Daniels allusion and the reference to a Goodness Gracious Me sketch may be over the top for some but I was amused – and the second was justified by the subject matter.

5. The Beloved Time of Their Lives by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia
An unusual story of undying love transcending the boundaries of time.
Jonathan meets the love of his life, a physicist, in her old age. When she dies in his arms he resolves to investigate time and eventually uses the somewhat unorthodox medium of a McDonalds to travel back in time to meet her in her youth. The story is light hearted but contains a degree of amusing speculation. Unfortunately it is slightly marred by being told to us rather than unfolded for us.

6. The Assistant by Ian Whates
This story is about a chief cleaner whose company keeps their client’s building free from infestation by microbots and regenerating moulds and other Science Fictional whatnot. The latest attack weapons turn out to be powered by a strange source.
Conventionally told in the first person this is unusual SF in that it focuses on humble workers rather than on innovators or inventors or explorers.

To pick one of these is like choosing between sellotape, string, glue and Blu-Tack. They all hold stuff together but in different ways; for different purposes.
Vishnu at the Cat Circus is the most ambitious – but it has room to be. The others are shorts. Vishnu is a novella. This argues for the BSFA to split its short story category like the Hugos do. I believe the difficulty here, since the BSFA membership is relatively small, might be there may not be enough nominations for this to be practicable.

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?

Rescue Stories by Andrew West

A space ship crewed by descendants of humans whose make up is of various blends of mixed gender and hence use non-specific personal pronouns, who call themselves numwyn and communicate by “melding” (actual spoken words are very much infra dig) has suffered damage and landed on a planet unknown and too far from numwyn civilisation for rescue to be possible. Neither are they able to carry out the necessary repairs themselves.

They come up with a plan to accelerate, by means of propagating myths among the indigenous inhabitants, the advancement of these locals from their copper smelting stage of development to a point where they will be able to help the stranded numwyn.

While Rescue Stories is well enough written, there are unfortunate instances of characters telling each other things they must already know and a huge info dump sequence describing the advancement of the indigenes and – somewhat unnecessarily I thought, as the nunwyn surely wouldn’t care – comparing it to Earth’s. (This last seems to be present to allow West to get something off his chest.)

Again, the ending more or less writes itself and is not really any sort of surprise.

The theme is of course similar to Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God, which I mentioned in my review of the BSFA Award nominee Crystal Night by Greg Egan, except this one is played out through the medium of memetics.

Rescue Stories is not a bad effort, though.*

*Note:- In case you thought it was, this is not meant to be patronising. “Not bad” is the best accolade someone who comes from the West of Scotland bestows on anything they rather like.

————————————————–

Was I asking too much of these stories? Presumably they were submitted in the hope of publication or at the least of attracting attention to the author for the future. However, taken as a whole they failed to meet what I think of as professional standard. In the previous issue of Focus its editor, Martin McGrath, contends that only around 10% of the 120 stories submitted to him “were obviously incompetent in the basic mechanics of writing.” Yet I found at least three of the six on the short list lacking in this regard. Hence I shudder to think what the stories that made up that 10% were like. Perhaps my expectations for this sort of competition are too high.

Of the six stories I much preferred Nina Allan’s Time’s Chariot. On turning to the authors’ published histories it was not surprising to find she has the most widespread portfolio of previous appearances in print. It seems she may not be one to watch but rather has already arrived.

Maria Via Lily by Gary Spencer

Maria’s daughter Lily has died. Before death she was scanned and rendered into a Realm where she lives a digital afterlife. Unfortunately her Realm was stolen, copied widely and has become a world–wide hit. Maria grieves for her own Lily – her unique Lily. The story concerns her attempts to persuade Evermore – the company that makes the Realms and whose employee stole Lily – to grant her wish.

The scenario and story idea are fine, then. However, there was a large degree of very crude info-dumping and Spencer’s handling of English is frankly awful. He apparently has no clue about the correct use of the apostrophe. Mostly it is neglected – we are given the plural forms of words instead of possessives – but elsewhere it is inserted where it doesn’t belong. Spencer also has top draw for top drawer, replaces effect for affect and pixilation (intoxication) for pixellation (blurriness.)

These are huge distractions which undermine any trust in the narrative and, crucially, in the author. Had I not been reading this out of interest in the standard of the BSFA competition’s entries I would have discarded it.

As it stands Maria Via Lily is, in my opinion, not of publishable quality. With suitable editorial amendments it might be, but not in its present form.

It looks like BSFA members were getting these stories warts and all.

The Mark by Nigel Envarli Crowe

This one is set in a town – in Russia or Ukraine judging by the characters’ names – mostly after a Chernobyl type accident at a nuclear reactor. (It can’t have been a nuclear explosion as, like at Chernobyl, there are survivors in the plant and town. It might even be meant to be Chernobyl itself.)

There are three viewpoint characters representing different generations of survivors and highlighting the deterioration of language and civilisation through time.

The Mark of the title is a growth on the throat, an outward sign of a mutation/adaptation which apparently confers protection from the residual radiation (quite how this works isn’t spelt out) but also brings with it a loss of intelligence.

The story is well enough written but I wasn’t convinced by it. The scenario is perhaps a bit too off the shelf – anywhere else apart from the former Soviet Union would have been more convincing. The explanation for language degradation came to late to salve my annoyance at its early appearance. There are also too many characters for a story with such a low word count. None of them has enough space to convince.

Surf Town by James Bloomer

This one’s about a retired surfer who refuses to perform on the new artificial waves produced and controlled by the Mesh, a collection of human minds connected by some sort of neural equivalent of the internet. He is in love with the female star of the Mesh Surf Pro Tour. I’m sure you could almost write the rest yourself from here.

The idea behind Surf Town is fine, if a little trite, but the execution is lacking once more. Plus the whole story badly needs proof-read. Words are missing, others repeated at too short an interval and some of the sentence structures leave a lot to be desired. We also have in the first sentence the neologism skool but later in the story the usual spelling appears. And there is a “span” count of three. (Shudder.)

One more complaint: in a future this far away (such a Mesh is not a likely near future development) the word dude as an appellation will surely have vanished. Its use here is an over-clumsy attempt to convey shallowness of character, made worse by being repeated ad nauseam.

You’ll have guessed I wasn’t impressed.