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Short stories, January 2015 (I think?)
Sep. 11th, 2015 08:35 pmE. hates, hates to take baths. She will come up with any excuse she possibly can to avoid taking one. She will drag her feet. She will whine. Then, when she actually gets into the bath, she loves it and doesn't want to leave! Then -- usually only when I tell her she has to because it's bedtime -- she gets out of the bath and is instantly transformed back into Bath-Hating Kid.
So clearly this is a genetic trait, because this is exactly how I feel about reading short stories online. (Short stories in anthologies, on the other hand, are my jam. They're in a book, so it's like a book, but they are short, which is great for my infinitesimal attention span!) Whine! Grumble! ...oh, okay, fine, I quite enjoyed that.
FFA had some links to 2016-eligible stories (I think these all might be from January??) which I read. Here are some of my thoughts, and I want to hear yours too. (What I'd love is to have a sort of Hugo reading club to talk through potential nominations! I need someone else to collate a shortlist of stories because there's no way I'm wading through entire publications. If the FFA memers keep listing stories they like, I'll try to keep up with that, at least.)
Cat Pictures, Please (Naomi Kritzer) - This is a very cute story and I'm glad I read it, because cute. I do not consider it Hugo-worthy, and indeed rather reminds me of many of the nominees from last year: cute and fun to read, but fundamentally shallow: supercomputer tries to make individual people's lives better, because it has read about Asimov's First Law, where "better" turns out to be, arbitrarily, "what the computer thinks is better." Which could be spun as thoughtful (okay, if I were a supercomputer with access to all the data ever, my first thought would be to run really awesome and thorough studies correlating All the Things) or horrific (...a computer might well think the best use of my time was not to write all this crap on the interwebs), but ends up instead as a little didactic and a lot cute.
Folding Beijing (Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu) - Like Three-Body Problem, I was not really sure I liked it for the first half but was invested by the end. I'm still not convinced as to what I think about it. It's an ambitious SF-nal concept of time-sharing a city, but I'm not quite sure it sticks the landing... but I don't know whether that's cultural or not.
Pocosin (Ursula Vernon) - This story suffered in that I had read Jackalope Wives the previous week, and I enjoyed Jackalope Wives more; I think it richly deserves the Nebula (and that in the absence of Puppies would have rightfully won the Hugo, as it did the "Alfie"). This one is a good story, but I was suffering a bit from Vernon overload, I think; she has a distinctive voice where a little goes a long way. Her writing is excellent, in any case: "This is the place where the old god came to die. He came in the shape of the least of all creatures, a possum."
I also think I'm not the right reader for this story... I think there is a specific feeling she is getting at here that I don't have enough experience with to get, and I bet that if I really understood that feeling that I would be head-over-heels for this story.
Three Cups of Grief (Aliette de Bodard): I liked this a lot better than her last year's Alfie-nominee The Breath of War, which a lot of people liked but which I found sort of irritating. I'm glad I gave her another chance, because this story was great and right now it's on my shortlist to nominate. It's got a lot of rich worldbuilding and characters and emotions and a beautifully-understated plot, and now I'm on board to read her novel.
Cloth Mother (Sarah Pauling): Now this story pushed all my buttons, to the extent that I am aware that I am probably not an unbiased reader when I say I really, really loved this story and will be nominating it for sure. It's SF! It has a plot! And at the same time it has things to say about what kids need, and what parenting means, it has an arc, and I teared up a little at the penultimate scene. I'm not 100% sure about the ending, but gosh, I still just really loved this story. I'm willing to believe other people might not love it nearly as much, though.
Back to grumbling about having to read stories. *grumble*
So clearly this is a genetic trait, because this is exactly how I feel about reading short stories online. (Short stories in anthologies, on the other hand, are my jam. They're in a book, so it's like a book, but they are short, which is great for my infinitesimal attention span!) Whine! Grumble! ...oh, okay, fine, I quite enjoyed that.
FFA had some links to 2016-eligible stories (I think these all might be from January??) which I read. Here are some of my thoughts, and I want to hear yours too. (What I'd love is to have a sort of Hugo reading club to talk through potential nominations! I need someone else to collate a shortlist of stories because there's no way I'm wading through entire publications. If the FFA memers keep listing stories they like, I'll try to keep up with that, at least.)
Cat Pictures, Please (Naomi Kritzer) - This is a very cute story and I'm glad I read it, because cute. I do not consider it Hugo-worthy, and indeed rather reminds me of many of the nominees from last year: cute and fun to read, but fundamentally shallow: supercomputer tries to make individual people's lives better, because it has read about Asimov's First Law, where "better" turns out to be, arbitrarily, "what the computer thinks is better." Which could be spun as thoughtful (okay, if I were a supercomputer with access to all the data ever, my first thought would be to run really awesome and thorough studies correlating All the Things) or horrific (...a computer might well think the best use of my time was not to write all this crap on the interwebs), but ends up instead as a little didactic and a lot cute.
Folding Beijing (Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu) - Like Three-Body Problem, I was not really sure I liked it for the first half but was invested by the end. I'm still not convinced as to what I think about it. It's an ambitious SF-nal concept of time-sharing a city, but I'm not quite sure it sticks the landing... but I don't know whether that's cultural or not.
Pocosin (Ursula Vernon) - This story suffered in that I had read Jackalope Wives the previous week, and I enjoyed Jackalope Wives more; I think it richly deserves the Nebula (and that in the absence of Puppies would have rightfully won the Hugo, as it did the "Alfie"). This one is a good story, but I was suffering a bit from Vernon overload, I think; she has a distinctive voice where a little goes a long way. Her writing is excellent, in any case: "This is the place where the old god came to die. He came in the shape of the least of all creatures, a possum."
I also think I'm not the right reader for this story... I think there is a specific feeling she is getting at here that I don't have enough experience with to get, and I bet that if I really understood that feeling that I would be head-over-heels for this story.
Three Cups of Grief (Aliette de Bodard): I liked this a lot better than her last year's Alfie-nominee The Breath of War, which a lot of people liked but which I found sort of irritating. I'm glad I gave her another chance, because this story was great and right now it's on my shortlist to nominate. It's got a lot of rich worldbuilding and characters and emotions and a beautifully-understated plot, and now I'm on board to read her novel.
Cloth Mother (Sarah Pauling): Now this story pushed all my buttons, to the extent that I am aware that I am probably not an unbiased reader when I say I really, really loved this story and will be nominating it for sure. It's SF! It has a plot! And at the same time it has things to say about what kids need, and what parenting means, it has an arc, and I teared up a little at the penultimate scene. I'm not 100% sure about the ending, but gosh, I still just really loved this story. I'm willing to believe other people might not love it nearly as much, though.
Back to grumbling about having to read stories. *grumble*
