Stories Included:
Ponies - Kij Johnson nasty little girls and fitting in
Sultan of the Clouds - Geoff Landiss terraforming
Map of Seventeen - Chris Barzak growing up
I Awoke and Found Me Here on This Cold Hills Side - James Triptree, Jr society/aliens
Pishaach - Sweta Narayan being the outsider even when on the inside
Blackout/All Clear (excerpt) - Connie Willis I won't touch this one.
Arvies - Adam Troy-Castro umm...how to describe? The depths to which society has sunk; satisfing the desires of a few at the expense of others humanity
How Interesting: A Tiny Man - Harlan Ellison society can't mind it's own business anymore; mutliple endings.Jaguar House in Shadow - Alliete de Bodard
The Green Book - Amal El-Mohtar facinating
And I Shall Wear Midnight (excerpt) - Terry Pratchett Tiffany Aching series
The downside with this years selection - I had read about 1/3 of the stories last year as part of the Hugo Nominee packet.
The upside with this years selection - I had read about 1/3 of the stories already!
What is fascinating to me is the use of a novelette or short story format as social commentary. It might be about current of modern day topics such as Ponies and how nasty little girls can be. (Hey, I'm a girl - I could totally relate.) Or Harlan Ellison's How Interesting: A Tiny Man with societies penchant for sticking our noses into everything these days and slapping it up on the web.
And more frequently, about where society might be headed, as in Arvies by Adam Troy-Castro.
A novel length isn't quite capable of that impact necessary to get a social message across in my opinion. There are too many other factors that need to be plugged into a novel and the message is too easily buried. Not to say those novels aren't being written (Kim Stanley Robinson comes to mind), or have been written (Fahrenheit 451) but it's a harder length to work with.
So overall, I thought the Nebula Awards 2012 was a pretty good selection. Recommended.
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