Nebula Ballot Review: Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz

Nebula Ballot Review: Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz

a review by Rich Horton

Annalee Newitz' first novel, Autonomous, is on the Nebula shortlist. I'd heard lots of buzz about it already, and I knew I liked Newitz' writing (I used her 2014 story "Drones Don't Kill People" in my Best of the Year book), so I meant to get to it -- and I finally did. I have to say, it met my expectations -- it's a really cool book, really hard SF, exciting and scary and moving.

Jack Chen is a patent pirate -- she reverse engineers patented drugs, sometimes ones critical for the health of people who can't affort corporate medicine, and sometimes just for money (a woman's got to live, after all). But her latest effort, a drug called Zacuity, which makes people love their jobs, and want to keep working, has backfired badly -- people are getting addicted to work, to the point of ignoring things like food. She desperately needs to find a cure, and her only hope might be her old lover Krish, who betrayed her a quarter century ago, when she went to jail for her anti-patent activism. She ends up freeing an indentured young man called Threezed (after the last two characters in his ID), and they make their way across Canada to Krish's lab, and to a safer place to work.

Meanwhile they are being chased by agents of the International Property Coalition, which enforces patents. The two assigned to her case are a human named Eliasz and a military bot named Paladin. Bots are nominally indentured for 10 years after their creation, after which they can become autonomous. (Similar rules apply to humans who have been indentured.) Not surprisingly, autonomy isn't quite as easy to achieve as that. And Paladin hardly knows what they -- he? she? it? -- wants -- as most of their wants are controlled by programming.

The story is on the surface about patents and drugs and so on, and about the tense chase as Eliasz and Paladin home in on Jack. And all that works really well. But that's just the surface -- an important surface, to be sure. But the title tells the truth -- the heart of the novel is "autonomy". For bots, sure -- Paladin's eventual realization that they might like to be autonomous is a major issue. But for humans, as well -- Threezed, in particular, who was indentured and sold and had his indenture extended for obscure legal reasons, wants autonomy and is pretty cynical about the whole thing.

But there's more -- what autonomy, for example, do workers who have been given a drug like Zacuity possess? How about Med, a heroic bot researcher who was created as a never-indentured bot -- is she truly autonomous or does her programming control her? And even when Paladin attains autonomy it's temporary -- and can she (as she by then identifies, sort of) trust her "feelings"? What about Eliasz? He's a fanatic about human indenture -- he hates it. And he loves bots, especially Paladin. But he's on the side of a truly evil entity -- well, mostly evil -- and in their service he -- and Paladin -- commit horrible murders. Are they autonomous in so doing?

This is a very thought-provoking book, and tremendously exciting. It's exceptional hard SF. It's not perfect -- the author's hand can be seen on the scales on occasion. And the end is fuzzed just a bit -- there's a cynical side to it, to be sure, but also some convenient resolutions. But what book is perfect? I really liked this novel, and it's pushed its way onto my Hugo nomination ballot.

Late to the Party Review: The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin

Late to the Party Review: The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin

a review by Rich Horton

Maybe I will start a set of "Late to the Party" reviews -- books that I somehow failed to read that have been widely praised, and that when I finally get to them I realize really deserve the praise.

So it is, anway, with N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, which won the Hugo as Best Novel of 2015. Now mind you, at the time of the Hugo voting in 2016 I had only read one of the nominees: Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy. Indeed, until I finished The Fifth Season yesterday, that was still true (I did start Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson, but I put it down and somehow never got back to it. Also, Uprooted, by Naomi Novik, has been on my TBR pile for a long time.) I'm not proud of that, mind you -- but I have a hard time keeping up with novels! (For all of 2015, I have, even now, only read a few more of the highly praised novels: from the Locus Recommended Reading list I have, to date, read Nicole Kornher-Stace's Archivist Wasp, David Mitchell's Slade House, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, Gene Wolfe's A Borrowed Man, and Elizabeth Hand's Wylding Hall (which I thought was a novella). There are a couple more on my TBR pile still: Jo Walton's The Philosopher Kings (it took me a while to get to its predecessor, The Just City), Carolyn Ives Gilman's Dark Orbit, and Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory, to name three.

So I can now agree that The Fifth Season absolutely deserved its Hugo. (Granting that it's possible that reading one of the other nominees could change my mind.) Moreover, of all the other 2015 novels I've read, only The Buried Giant would tempt me to vote differently. (And that's by a Nobel Prize winner!)

I'm not the first person to say this, but I may as well add my voice to the chorus: the most impressive part of The Fifth Season is the worldbuilding. (Which is funny considering the collective name of the trilogy it begins is kind of the opposite: The Broken Earth.) This worldbuilding encompasses, as good worldbuilding should, not just the physical (geological and geographical and technological and magic system etc.) aspects of its world, but the social system, and the history. This is a tremendously impressive imaginative feat, always surprising, eminently satisfying, and above all constantly interesting.

This isn't to say the plot is lacking interest either. The novel opens dramatically, with a man and another creature, a stone eater, magically ripping open a fault line across the entire continent on which most people live, a continent called the Stillness, despite its extreme tectonical instability. This fault leads inevitably to a series of earthquakes and volcanos and lesser faults and aftershocks, as well as a cloud of ash. The result will be a "Fifth Season" -- a time of extreme cataclysm during which people must hunker down and live off stored food. Most Fifth Seasons last a few months, it seems -- they have happened, for a variety of reasons, throughout the history of the Stillness. But this one will last years.

Already we have questions -- for one, where is the Stillness? Is it on Earth? Another planet? A magical realm? Far future or far past? (By the end, while we don't know for sure, it is beginning to look like this is set on a much-changed Earth in the very far future.) And who or what are these "stone-eaters"? (We learn more about them as the book goes on, but many questions remain.)

The action shifts to the south of the continent, and a woman named Essun, who is mourning her son, beaten to death by her husband a couple of days earlier. This woman has a secret -- she is an orogene (or, more insultingly, a "rogga"). So was her son, and apparently his father killed him on learning his true nature. Orogenes can control, to an extent, the Earth, and they can use energy from the Earth for other things, dangerous things, which is why they are feared. Essun saves her village from the immediate effects of the disaster, then heads out to find her husband and her daughter.

At other times, presumably before the disaster, we meet two more women, both orogenes. One is a girl, Damaya, abused by her parents who fear her talents, who is taken away by a strange man, to the capitol city, Yumenes, and the "Fulcrum", where orogenes are trained. At first this seems a rescue, but soon we realize that the orogenes of the Fulcrum, even if they live fairly comfortably, and have status, are also slaves, and subject to considerable abuse. The third thread follows Syenite, a young woman of considerable talent: a "four ringer" orogene. She is assigned a significant task -- to travel to a coastal city and use her orogenetic abilities to clear its harbor. But she must do it in the company of a ten ring (the maximum) orogene, Alabaster: and they are required to have sex until Syenite is pregnant -- the Fulcrum desires more and more orogenes children to control.

You can probably guess the connection between Damaya, Syenite, and Essun, though it took me a while. Damaya's thread serves to introduce us to the place of orogenes in this society. Syenite's is perhaps the most significant -- on her journey she encounters a couple of illuminating items -- the "node controllers", orogenes who maintain seismic calm across the continent; and also obelisks -- apparently created by "deadcivs", and seemingly sources of tremendous power. Most significantly, she finds the harbor she is supposed to clear actually blocked by an obelisk, and her efforts to move it have profound effects -- and end up with her and Alabaster on the run.

Everything knits together very well. It can't be said that the plot is wholly resolved -- this is a trilogy, after all -- but it does come to a reasonable conclusion, complete with slingshot to the next volume. It's powerful stuff -- a society that at first glance seems fairly prosperous and just, if not perfect, is revealed as terribly broken, bitterly unjust in almost every detail. The main characters -- none of them really likable -- are broken, and do terrible things, but seem horribly justified most of the time. It's urgently readable, continually fascinating, and quite powerful by the end. A real triumph.

Here, by the way, is my review of the conclusion to the trilogy, The Stone Sky.

Thoughts on the Nebula Shortlist (Short Fiction)

Thoughts on the 2017 Nebula Ballot (Short Fiction)

The Nebula Awards are dated, sensibly enough, by the year of publication of the stories involved, unlike the Hugos, which are dated by the year of the award. So the 2017 Nebula Ballot is the current ballot, for the best stories of 2017.

I’m not ready to write about the novels yet – I’ve only read, I think, four of the seven. My impression is of a strong field – no bad novels – but still a field missing some of the very best of the novels of 2017, most obviously Ka, by John Crowley; and The Moon and the Other, by John Kessel.

Short Fiction

Novella

The Nebula Nominees for Best Novella of 2017 are:

River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing)

Passing Strange, Ellen Klages (Tor.com Publishing)

“And Then There Were (N-One)”, Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny 3-4/17)

Barry’s Deal, Lawrence M. Schoen (NobleFusion Press)

All Systems Red, Martha Wells (Tor.com Publishing)

The Black Tides of Heaven, JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing)

The first thing I’ll note is the continued strong showing of Tor.com for their line of slim books, most of which are novellas. Even though I would not have nominated all of these for an award, their success is completely deserved – they really are doing a great job publishing a wide variety of first-rate novellas. At least one more of their books was on my list of the best novellas of 2017: Dave Hutchinson’s Acadie.

That said, I do think we risk forgetting the print magazines. There were very good novellas published in the magazines, such as Damien Broderick’s “Tao Zero” in Asimov’s, Alec Nevala-Lee’s “The Proving Ground” in Analog, and Marc Laidlaw’s “Stillborne” in F&SF (and that merely scratches the surface). Even so, I have to admit my nomination ballot for the Hugos probably won’t include any of those stories (maybe the Broderick). It will include a story from an original anthology (“The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse”, by Kathleen Ann Goonan), a story from a collection (“Fallow”, by Sofia Samatar), a story published as part of an Indiegogo project (Prime Meridian, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia), and very possibly a story serialized in an online magazine (“The Dragon of Dread Peak”, by Jeremiah Tolbert).

The third thing to note is the absence of men from the ballot – only one (and his story is clearly the worst). Four women, and one non-binary person. I believe four of the nominees are queer as well. On the one hand, that’s statistically unlikely, but on the other hand, it’s a small sample size. And my nomination ballot for the Hugos will be just as heavily weighted toward women. This weighting continues through the short fiction categories (and the novels as well), and I think it’s fair to ask: if people complained about many previous ballots that were heavily masculine, and rightly asked if nominators were checking their predispositions, were reading widely enough, etc. – are nominators doing the same now? For all that, as I noted, my personal nomination lists, at least for novella and short story, have similar proportions (novelette and novel are more weighted to men). In any small sample size, all kinds of strange things can happen. 

If I had a ballot (and I don’t), I would order them:

1.       “And Then There Were (N-One)”, by Sarah Pinsker

2.       All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

3.       Passing Strange, by Ellen Klages

4.       River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey

5.       The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang

6.       Barry’s Deal, by Lawrence M. Schoen

I’ve already discussed the first two in my Hugo Nomination post, and also in my Locus reviews. They are both very strong stories, head and shoulders above the other nominees. Here’s what I wrote before:“And Then There Were (N – One)”  is a story about a convention of alternate Sarah Pinskers, complete with a murder. It is warmly told – funny at times, certainly the milieu is familiar to any SF con-goer. But it’s dark as well – after, there’s a murder – and it intelligently deals with issue of identity and contingency. And All Systems Red is a ripping good novella about a security android which calls itself a murderbot, guarding a group of researchers on an alien planet. The murderbot mainly wants peace to watch its favorite TV shows, but that becomes impossible when the team comes under threat. It soon becomes clear that there is an unexpected group on the planet that doesn’t want any rivals, and the murderbot has to work with its humans to find a way to safety. That part – the plotty part – is nicely done, but the depiction of the murderbot is the story’s heart: convincingly a real person but not a human, with emotions but not those that humans expect: very funny at times but also quite moving.

Passing Strange is a sweet story about the gay underground in San Francisco in about 1940, and in particular about two women: Emily, a singer, kicked out of college for sleeping with a woman; and Haskel, a bisexual artist who does covers for pulp magazines. (Haskel is obviously to some extent inspired by the legendary Weird Tales artist Margaret Brundage.) The two meet and fall in love, and get in serious trouble, the resolution of which is a pretty cool and moving variation of a familiar fantastical trope. My main problem – and it’s not really a problem – is that the fantastical elements are really minor (though the final resolution is wholly fantastical and pretty neat). The main interest in the story is essentially historical, and pretty convincing (with maybe one or two slips – was “queer” really claimed as a positive identity as early as 1940? My (admittedly slim) research suggests that happened in the ‘60s.) All that said, while I wouldn’t put this on my personal nomination list, it’s a pretty worthy nominee.

The next two stories strike me as nice stories, good fun with some interesting stuff, but not stories I really consider award worthy. River of Teeth is a caper story (OK, not a caper – an operation!) about a mixed team of “hoppers” (hippopotamus wranglers, basically) assembled to clear the lower Mississippi of feral hippos. Their leader, Winslow Houndstooth, also wants revenge, against the man who burned down his hippo farm years before. There’s a lot of violence, a truly evil villain, and a fair amount of believable darkness. I mean, I enjoyed it. I just didn’t see it as special – in particular in a speculative sense – yes, there’s the fairly cool alternate history aspect involving the hippos in Louisiana, but nothing with real SFnal zing. Still – it’s pretty fun. As for The Black Tides of Heaven, I confess some of my reaction is based on the rather excessive hype this story (along with its sequel/companion, The Red Threads of Fortune) has gotten. The story concerns the twin children of the Protector, originally promised to the local Monastery. But one of them turns out to have precognitive powers, and the Protector claims them … the other strikes off on their own, ending up in a rebellion against their mother. The good – a decent magic system (alas, treated in a clichéd fashion on occasion), interesting if seemingly inconsistent treatment of gender (to be fair, the supposed inconsistencies may well be eventually explained), and decent characters. The not-so-good: a fairly clichéd plot (which doesn’t really resolve, though to be sure its companion novella was released in parallel, and perhaps the plot is resolved there), rather ordinary prose, and some pacing issues, mainly in the opening section (about a fourth of the story), which really should have been almost entirely cut. Bottom line – an okay story that has been somewhat overpraised.

Finally, Barry’s Deal is, well, really not very good. It’s another of his tales about the Amazing Conroy and his buffalito Reggie, who can eat literally anything (including nuclear bombs). I’ve read some of the previous Conroy stories, with some enjoyment – they have been pleasant entertainment, though to be honest never close to award-worthy. This is a step below. They come to a space-based casino, Conroy looking to bid on an extremely expensive bottle of liquor, but the casino owner is obviously up to something, not to mention that one of Conroy’s old friends (and her stuffed animal Barry) seems to be cheating. After a lot of illogical maneuvering, Conroy and his friend Leftjohn Mocker, figure out what’s really up. The story quite simply makes no sense, and it isn’t fun enough to make up for that. I truly can’t comprehend this getting a Nebula nomination.

Novelette

The Nebula nominees are:

“Dirty Old Town”, Richard Bowes (F&SF 5-6/17)

“Weaponized Math”, Jonathan P. Brazee (The Expanding Universe, Vol. 3)

“Wind Will Rove”, Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s 9-10/17)

“A Series of Steaks”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Clarkesworld 1/17)

“A Human Stain”, Kelly Robson (Tor.com 1/4/17)

“Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time”, K.M. Szpara (Uncanny 5-6/17)

The good news here is that two of these stories are from print magazines, and one from a print original anthology. Yay! Four women, two men, I believe five of the authors identify as queer. My favorite novelettes this year (“Extracurricular Activities”, by Yoon Ha Lee; “The Hermit of Houston”, by Samuel R. Delany; “Soulmates.com”, by Will MacIntosh; “The Secret Life of Bots”, by Suzanne Palmer; “ZeroS”, by Peter Watts; and Hanus Seiner’s “Hexagrammaton”) include five men (one transgender) and only one woman, and two people who identify as queer (as far as I know).

My favorites are couple of stories that I might have picked for my Best of the Year book except that I chose another Nebula nominated story instead by each author: “Wind Will Rove”, by Sarah Pinsker (a lovely and loving story about the folk process and the conflicts between remembering the old and inventing the new, set on a generation ship); and “A Series of Steaks”, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, about a couple of people who forge steaks (made by “printers”), and their eventual revenge on a rich client.

Of the other stories, Bowes’ “Dirty Old Town” is another solid entry in a long series of seemingly autobiographical fantasies set in Boston and New York. I just found it solid, not new enough to wow me. “A Human Stain”, by Kelly Robson, is horror, and I think pretty good horror, but I confess it takes a lot for horror to truly win me over. I’ll call that a weakness in me, not in the story – so your mileage may well vary! Likewise K. M. Szpara’s “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time” is a vampire story – and a gay/transgender story, and I thought it well-executed but it didn’t thrill me. Jonathan Brazee’s “Weaponized Math” is a step below – ordinary Military SF, with nothing really interesting in a Science Fictional sense. It tells its story efficiently, but there is nothing here to elevate it above dozens of other stories. My putative ballot would be:

1.       “Wind Will Rove”, by Sarah Pinsker

2.       “A Series of Steaks”, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

3.       “Dirty Old Town”, by Richard Bowes

4.       “A Human Stain, by Kelly Robson”

5.       “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time”, by K. M. Szpara

6.       “Weaponized Math”, by Jonathan Brazee

Short Story

The Nebula shortlist is as follows:

“Fandom for Robots”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny 9-10/17)

“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”, Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex 8/17)

“Utopia, LOL?”, Jamie Wahls (Strange Horizons 6/5/17)

“Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand”, Fran Wilde (Uncanny 9-10/17)

“The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard)”, Matthew Kressel (Tor.com 3/15/17)

“Carnival Nine”, Caroline M. Yoachim (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 5/11/17)

None of these stories are on my prospective Hugo ballot, and I do think the Nebulas are pretty clearly missing some of the very best stories of the year – Maureen McHugh’s “Sidewalks”, Charlie Jane Anders’ “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue”, Karen Joy Fowler’s “Persephone of the Crows”, Giovanni de Feo’s “Ugo”, Sofia Samatar’s “An Account of the Land of Witches”, Linda Nagata’s “The Martian Obelisk”, and a couple of excellent Tobias Buckell stories, “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” and “Shoggoths in Traffic”. There are four women and two men on the ballot, not too different from the proportions on my prospective ballot.

I note that all – all – of the nominated stories were published for free online. The stories I have listed above on my prospective ballot include one from an original anthology (Buckell’s “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance”), three from print magazines (McHugh’s story, Anders’, and Fowler’s), and one from a collection (Samatar’s, though to be fair it is also available online, but at The Offing, which is somewhat out of the normal notice of SF readers). The other stories were in free online places. I will reiterate that I think the disadvantage stories from print sources have in award nominations these days is a problem, though not one with a solution I can see.

That said, none of the nominated stories are bad, and indeed all of them are interesting. I have two clear favorites here, the two I’m reprinting, Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s “Fandom for Robots” and Jamie Wahls’ “Utopia LOL?”, both of which, notably, are pretty funny. Prasad’s story (to some extent reminiscent of one aspect of Martha Wells’ All Systems Red in the novellas), is about a robot AI which becomes a fan of anime, and even contributes to fan fiction. Wahls’ story is even funnier, about a man who gets unfrozen in the far future and the guided tour he gets of his options in this utopia – with a strong slingshot ending.

Next on the list is Caroline Yoachim’s “Carnival Nine”, a pretty moving story about a windup family, and in particular the boy whose mainspring isn’t quite as strong as most. This is solid work – and I know a lot of people loved it (indeed, I’ll suggest in might be a betting favorite for the award) – and I liked it but wasn’t wholly convinced.

The other three stories are all pretty original. I didn’t love any of them – but I could see them all doing challenging stuff, and I can see why other people do love them. I think Fran Wilde’s “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand” is my favorite, about a visit to a very odd sort of museum.

My ballot would look like:

1.       “Fandom for Robots”, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

2.       “Utopia, LOL?”, by Jamie Wahls

3.       “Carnival Nine”, by Caroline Yoachim

4.       “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand”, by Fran Wilde

5.       “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”, by Rebecca Roanhorse

6.       “The Last Novelist (or, A Dead Lizard in the Yard”, by Matthew Kressel