To continue the thread of pointing at Hugo-nominated stories which will be up for your vote in August (and no, I have not and will not be able to read all nominated works, as much as I'd like to).
Here we have a short story by Sofia Samatar, called Selkie Stories Are for Losers. It is, as you will very quickly notice, a Selkie story, told not by the Selkie or its lover, as is frequently the case, but by the abandoned child. Who is a young woman, now, and with no little hang-ups about her past and origin.
This is a story which not just deserves, but actually requires multiple readings. At first it appears inconsequential, and rather whiny in tone (that's also due to the age of the protagonist, I reckon); and only going back to it actually showed me the layers, the skilful construction, and the emotional impact which is upon first reading withheld. Maybe 'not a word out of place' is overstating the case. Maybe...
The picture on the right is a chance find on the Internet, I don't know who created it. Should you know then please drop me a message, and I'll add credit here.
I'll keep this reasonably short, as this is a Novella, and not a full-size novel. Equoid is the latest offering in the Laundry Files universe by Charles Stross, and is nominated for the 2014 Hugo Award in the Novella category.
Stross is an award-winning Scottish SF writer, with this story being instalment 2.7 or 2.9 (depending on who does the numbering) in his geek/horror Laundry series. The series currently consists of 4 novels, with the 5th (The Rhesus Chart) out this summer, plus a number of short stories and Novellas.
He also has 4 more books coming out this year – there's a Hardback edition of this story, there's the paperback version of Neptune's Brood, the 2nd book in the Freyaverse (also nominated for a Hugo this year), plus two Merchant Princes books. Yes, he's a busy man, and I struggle to keep up with his output, as enjoyable as it is!
Anyway, Equoid is currently available as eBook through the usual channels, and it's available on the Tor.com website to read online for free and gratis. It also comes out, as indicated above, in July as a Deluxe Hardback edition from Subterranean Press. Take your picks – you need one (or potentially several) of those!
Ellen Datlow provides us with a collection of stories based on Lovecraft's original myths, and the universe of associated legends which has grown up around it. It's her second collection of such stories, and I will not even attempt to enumerate all the other collections she has edited over the years – if it says Datlow on the cover, you know you're in for an interesting and well-chosen selection of stories on the topic of her choice!
The ones in Lovecraft's Monsters, the book at hand, have been previously published between 1977 and 2013, and are thus rooted in a variety of periods, flavours, styles, and movements – but always based on Lovecraft's classic horror, if not his style of writing (which has its benefits – just read Charlie Stross' Hugo-nominated Novella Equoid for more on that). Contributors include Neil Gaiman, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Elizabeth Bear, and many further, well-known names.
The book is illustrated with renderings of the monsters by John Coulthart, a World Fantasy Award-winning artist.
H.P.Lovecraft was a master, not just when it came to creating unusual and inventive monsters and entities, but also for his ability to conjur up not just an atmosphere of dread, but of enveloping the reader in this. Datlow says in the introduction, "I had three goals in choosing stories: the first, as usual, was to avoid pastiches; the second was to use stories that have not been overly reprinted in the many recent mythos anthologies; third, I wanted to showcase Lovecraftian-influenced stories by at least some authors not known for that kind of story."
Congratulations to Aliette de Bodard for winning a Nebula Award for her novelette The Waiting Stars - this is her 2nd win in consecutive years (2013 she won with her short story Immersion).
You can read the winning novelette in full on Aliette's blog - The Waiting Stars is another of her Shipminds/Xuya stories, set in a fascinating universe with a strong dichotomy between two very different cultures, each of which considering themselves to be the right, the good, the high culture.
And, as such (and as frequently in her work) the story plays on topics of identity, of changing identity if immersed in a different culture, and of the risk of losing one's identity as well as oneself in the process. Great stuff, I can thoroughly recommend that you go and read the story for yourself. It is told in two very separate, but cleverly linked threads playing on either side of the divide - it's slightly emotional/sentimental, but nothing like the Mary Robinette Kowal currently nominated for a Hugo... (and I like that one, too - link to come!)
Ken MacLeod is a Scottish award-winning novelist, with, including this book, 14 novels plus a number of collections and other works to his name. Descent, the novel at hand, is a near-future Alien abduction/Men In Black/Economic crisis and revolution story set in a near-future Scotland, which was written whilst he was Writer in Residence on the MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University. It is full of fascinating ideas, which - no, let me start at the beginning.
The story plays mainly in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and with a very limited number of actual protagonists - I can count the main ones on one hand, with maybe one or two more in the second row (now here’s a change from the Nnedi Okorafor book I read before - this is a completely different approach). The rest is window dressing...
The story is told through the eyes a Scottish teenager (and later young man) - it took the book literally 100 pages to tell us that his name is Ryan Sinclair, up to that point I was not sure that all the threads, set at different points in time, really were of the same person. Thanks for letting us hang, Ken ;-)
But going back to Ryan - he’s living with his family, and doesn’t seem to be much of a rebellious teenager, really. He’s heading toward the end of his school life, with the final exams looming up, so we get revision, we get (token) drug experiences, and we get bad first sex. Times are hard, the economy is down in the doldrums, water is scarce, and we see civil disobedience of so-called 'Revolutionaries', with whom Ryan sympathises, a bit at least, even if they are deeply uncool.
Neal Asher is an English writer of action-based Space Opera. His output is hard to quantify I find, given the number of short stories, novellas, collections, chapbooks etc on the market – never mind the different ways different people count his series. My view, then... 5 books (excluding this one) in the Agent Cormac series, 3 in the Spatterjay sequence, plus another 4 novels and a collection in the Policy Universe. Outside of that setting there's a rather marvellous stand-alone time-travel novel (Cowl), and the Owner series he's currently writing (the only part of his output which didn't find favour with me so far).
The Shadow of the Scorpion is the post-written prequel to Neal's Agent Cormac series. Which, in my book (sic), is one of his better, more intelligent ones, mixing the action with character development and rumination/exposition on some of the bigger questions around an AI led society, loyalty, doing the right thing, and the price one pays for those.
But this is not a Cormac novel. Instead you could describe it as a proto-Cormac story, told in two alternating threads. One of them shows Ian Cormac as a child, in school and with his mother (an archaeologist who digs up dinosaur bones. Oh dear.) - his father is away, with his Sparkind unit, fighting the Prador. His brother is also in the war (I suspect most people are, at that point), but we see him come back to have his memories edited, to re-enable him to work as a front line medic. But he is being followed by a war drone, in the shape of a Scorpion (yup, that makes the title. Although I there's more to it, and I thought it quite clever).