2019 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees

Location: CapClave in Rockville, Maryland.

Comments: I'm a little behind getting this up this year, since the finalists were announced back in August, but I've been running behind on lots of things this year, so that's just how it is.

Asm usual, the array of nominees for the WSFA Small Press Award were an exceptional bunch of stories. Even the worst of the bunch is an interesting and engaging story, while the top tier contains stories that fit in perfectly among the best works of short fiction of the year. This is, I believe, one of the hidden secrets of modern science fiction publishing: While these stories were all published by outfits that meet the definition of "small publisher" laid out by the rules, they represent some of the best work that the science fiction genre has to offer.

WSFA Small Press Award

Winner:

The Thing in the Walls Wants Your Small Change by Virginia M. Mohlere

Other Nominees:

Baggage by Leslie Burton-Lopez

The Djinni and the Accountant by Hal J. Friesen

Familiar in Her Angles by E.A. Brenner

The Hydraulic Emperor by Arkady Martine

The Spider and the Stars by DK Mok

The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat by Brooke Bolander

A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies by Alix E. Harrow

Go to previous year's nominees: 2018
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2020

Book Award Reviews     Home

2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting

As a member of the Washington Science Fiction Association, I may vote on the WSFA Small Press Award. The stories are presented to members of WSFA anonymously, with the intent being that all of the members vote based solely on the text of the story, as uninfluenced by the identities of the authors as possible. Unfortunately, as one of the stories was nominated for a Hugo Award this year (which seems to be a pattern for the nominees for this award), I went into the voting already knowing who had written it. Eight stories were nominated this year, and as usual with the WSFA Small Press Award nominees, the overall level of quality for the field as a whole was quite high, making voting fairly difficult. Most of these stories are quite good, even the stories I ranked sixth or seventh are still pretty good stories, I just thought that the ones in the higher slots were simply better. My rankings of the stories are as follows:

1. Probably Still the Chosen One by Kelly Barnhill: This story seems thematically aligned with Seanan McGuire's recent novella series that started with Every Heart a Doorway insofar as it focuses on a child who was whisked away to a magical land and then returned to mundane reality. despite the thematic similarity, Barnhill's story takes the idea in a fairly different direction - among other things, Corrina was specifically selected to journey into Nibiru by its High Priests because she was the "Chosen One" who would save them from their enemies the Zonniers, and she was returned to our world in order to protect her from some setbacks suffered by the forces of Nibiru.

The story starts off immediately after Corrina has been returned to our world, and most of the remaining pages detail Corrina's wait until the High Priests of Nibiru return for her and all of the ways she basically schemed and sacrificed to make sure she could stay near the door under the kitchen sink that only she could see. What sets this story apart is how it delves into a deeper issue when it explores exactly what happens when the eleven year old Chosen One grows to adulthood and gains in wisdom and judgment as she ages. This sends the story in an unexpected direction, or at least a direction that the High Priests didn't expect, but it ends up in a very satisfying place. In the end, this is the story of what would happen if the protagonist in a young adult fantasy novel was allowed to grow up and approach the problems they face with an adult perspective, and the end result is a story that is absolutely fantastic.

2. Floaters Can’t Float by Pip Coen: This is a time travel story in which time travel works only one way – into the future. This sounds like something rather mundane, after all everyone is always time traveling forward through time, but in Floaters Can’t Float, the travelers are flinging themselves forward, skipping past the intervening years and landing in the New York of the future. Unfortunately, jumping blindly into the future means that you are likely to end up running into something that wasn’t there when you left, resulting in dead arrivals called variously “floaters”, “clovers”, and “moles” depending upon their method of dying. These time travelers have made New York, now known as the “T-Zone”, uninhabitable save for the handful of archivists who have undertaken the job of cataloguing and cleaning up the incoming wave of corpses and handful of live refugees from the past.

The story itself centers upon Brix, one of the oldest and longest serving archivists who is being interviewed while on the job by reporter Kate Nolan. Brix is cranky and short-tempered, but through Brix's interactions with Kate, Coen paints a picture of the people desperate enough to hurl themselves into the void in the hope of a better future, and the decidedly unsympathetic attitude of the people at their destination. One can sympathize with those who dislike the newcomers – after all the influx of time travelers has rendered New York uninhabitable, but since time travel only works one direction, there is literally no way to warn the voyagers that their journey is hazardous to themselves and others, making the new arrivals morally innocent as well. In an era in which xenophobia seems to be on the rise, this story about time-displaced immigrants looking for a better future and the reactions of those who inhabit the time they are migrating to cuts even deeper than it otherwise might have.

Floaters Can’t Float is ultimately about Brix, but it is also larger than that. There are a couple of twists that seem both unexpected and entirely foreseeable at the same time. At the end, Coen throws in a final curveball that will send the reader back to the beginning of the story as they realize that what they thought they were reading wasn’t exactly what they had read. This is an intriguing, multilayered story that offers much more depth than most stories of this length.

3. The Secret Life of Bots by Suzanne Palmer: Following the travails of a tiny maintenance bot on a starship, this story unfolds piece by piece, with the scope of the action slowly increasing starting with just the bot, and then its mission, and then some other bots, and then the mission of the other bots, and finally to the human crew and their mission. Each step along the way flows naturally from the last, with the reader’s understanding of the situation growing alongside that of the tiny hardworking bot.

There are some stories that hint at an enticing wider world outside the narrative. The Secret Life of Bots is one of those stories. From the moment the protagonist bot awakens and recites the Mantra Upon Waking, the reader is drawn into the world of the bots and left to wonder about the full extent of the hidden bot culture of which the humans on board the ship appear to be blissfully unaware. Once the story expands to include the human concerns, the reader is left to wonder at the larger conflict that the battered ship is part of: Who the aliens are, why humanity is at war with them, and is there any hope of victory, or at least survival. And finally, the reader is left to wonder about the emerging creativity of the bots, and what that might mean for the future of this fictional world.

In the end, this is an adorable little story about an adorable little bot that just wants to do its best. The element that sets this story apart from so many others is that the painting Palmer has crafted here suggests a much larger world surrounding this story that is both intriguing and inviting.

4. The Cat of Five Virtues by Richard Parks: This is a Japanese inspired fable involving a samurai, his son, a magical cat, luck, and fortune. The story focuses mostly on the young boy Taro, later named Masatoki, and his luck, which extends to benefit his entire family. Taro is guided in the rules concerning his luck by the usually invisible cat, and when the boy suffers a reversal, the cat reappears to give him advice as to how to rectify the situation.

Some stories are pleasant and enjoyable to read, but not really anything more than that. The Cat of Five Virtues is one of those stories. The plot is more or less straightforward: A child is born, favored by the gods. The child is blessed with a gift with restrictions. The restrictions, predictably prove to be too much to sustain the gift, and the child (now an adolescent) embarks on a journey to recover from the setback. There simply doesn't seem to really be anything more to this story other than serving as a pleasant diversion. That's perfectly a okay thing for a story to be, but that alone isn't enough to make a story award-worthy.

5. A Vague Inclination to Please by Brandon Daubs: Told in the form of an extended monologue, this story is essentially an extended confession by an android as it recounts the story of its artificial life. Short fiction must walk a fine line between providing sufficient background information so as to draw the reader into the world being presented, and avoiding overwhelming the reader with so much dry exposition that they get bored. A Vague Inclination to Please teeters off of this fine line in the direction of providing too little background, or rather provides expositional detail too late, meaning that story elements seem to crop up out of left field, blindsiding the reader with twists for which their was no foundation laid. The android, named Amaya, was originally owned by a genius researcher named Mayato, who was working in artificial intelligence. That detail, which motivates almost all of the action in the story, is left out until well after Mayato is dead - until the story is almost over, in fact. The fact that Mayato had disagreements with his former employer, and the nature of those disagreements, are also details that are not mentioned until the story is almost over. In some cases, material like this is left out because the viewpoint character does not know them until later in the story, but in this case, these details comprise most of the motivation Amaya has for all of her actions. Because these tidbits of information weren't introduced earlier in the story, when they do crop up, they feel like they were just thrown in almost haphazardly to justify the flow of the action. There are all of the elements of a pretty interesting story here, but the execution was so flawed that it doesn't really rise above mediocrity.

6. Oba Oyinbo by Jonathan Edelstein: I really wanted to like this story more than I actually did. I lived in Nigeria years ago, in Lagos specifically, so when a science fiction or fantasy story is set there, I always hope that it is a good one. In the case of Oba Oyinbo, this hope was not to pay off. The story, featuring a central character named Mary Ejiofor who is a lawyer and a witch, is serviceable but not really much more than that. The plot is fairly ordinary, involving a murder mystery that leads to a conspiracy to commit a politically motivated assassination, so what marks this story as unique is its setting.

I spent a fair amount of time in Africa, living in three different African countries and travelling to a handful of others, and one of the things about stories set on the continent is that they have to feel right. I can’t really describe the feeling more specifically, but Africa as a whole has a particular feel to it, and each country within Africa has its own particular flavor of that feel. Lagos, Nigeria has a particular feel to it that is recognizable to anyone who has been there, and to Edelstein’s credit, Oba Oyinbo feels fairly close to authentic in this regard as far as I can tell. The only real problem with this is that I lived in Lagos in the 1980s, and the story is set in 1937, so unless Lagos essentially stagnated for fifty years, this shouldn’t be the case. The incongruity is more or less equivalent to that which would result from a film about Al Capone that had the same feeling as Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

The story is wrapped up in issues related to colonialism – the one major nod towards the fact that it is set in 1937, when Nigeria was still a colonial possession of the United Kingdom, but even that feels a bit off in the narrative. When the issue comes up directly in the story, the text seems as though the American author of the work is explaining to the African characters how they should respond to colonial occupation. I realize that all of these criticisms are extremely idiosyncratic and specific to me, but they threw me out of the story every time they cropped up.

7. Through Milkweed and Gloom by Wendy Nikel: This is a beautifully atmospheric story about a search for a missing person in a swamp in which people seem to mysteriously go missing on a frequent basis. Hilly, the story's protagonist, lives on the edge of this foreboding bog, and joins in an expedition to search for a missing child, which all of the locals take as a chance to search for all of the people who have gone missing over the years. Though it starts with what amounts to an organizational meeting, with its clipped and efficient cadences, the story assumes a dreamlike quality as the searchers enter the marsh and before too long everything is drenched in the gloomy caprice of faery. The tension and sense of impending doom ramps up over the course of the narrative until everything seems lost. Unfortunately, after this superb build-up, the story kind of fizzles, seemingly skipping ahead to the end of the story in such a hurried manner that one gets the sense that the author just got tired of it and wanted to wrap things up. Through Milkweed and Gloom is a great story for the first eighty percent or so of its run, but that excellence is betrayed by the rushed final act.

8. The Oracle and the Warlord by Karina Sumner-Smith: Even though this story ranked last in my voting, it isn't really a bad story so much as it is a story that feels maddeningly incomplete. The framework of the story is fairly straightforward - a new Warlord comes to the Oracle Sayenne to seek the answer to the perpetual question posed by the ravages of the blight that plagues the land. The entire story is told from the perspective of Andra, Sayenne's assistant and lover. The Warlord arrives, makes gifts, asks her question, and then Sayenne retreats to the waters to find the prophecy, gets rescued by Andra, and then offers her response to the Warlord while Andra contemplates the prophecy she received when she went into the waters to save Sayenne.

The issue is that there really isn't much more substance to the story than that summary. The only real character in the story is Andra: The Warlord is the catalyst for the action in the story, but doesn't even have a name and her only real character trait is that she carries a sword and laser rifle. Sayenne is defined in the story by what she has given up to the waters in order to make prophecies, but doesn't really have much more substance than that. The Blight is described as an omnipresent threat, but it is so ill-defined as to be nothing more than a vague and undefined evil without any real menace to it. Even the temple and the waters that form the heart of the plot are cursorily described. There just isn't anything in this story that gives the world it takes place in any real definition or makes the characters who inhabit it anything more than empty shells.

On a kind of minor note, one element of this story that was bothersome was the persistent use of the word "prophecy" to describe responses that weren't actually prophecies, but were instead answers. This is a fairly petty complaint, especially given the other larger issues I had with this story, but it bothered me every time it came up.

Note: The Secret Life of Bots by Suzanne Palmer won the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

2017 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: The Tomato Thief by Ursula Vernon (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

2019 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: TBD

2017 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Tomato Thief by Ursula Vernon (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

2019 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: TBD

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novelette
List of WSFA Small Press Award Winners

2018 Hugo Award Finalists

2018 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees     Book Award Reviews     Home

2018 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees

Location: CapClave in Rockville, Maryland.

Comments: The 2018 WSFA Small Press Award features eight nominees written by authors who have never won the award, meaning that no matter which one emerges as the victor at CapClave in September, they will be a first-time winner. As with previous years, the list of nominees for the WSFA Small Press Award has some minor crossover with other awards - in this case, with the Hugo Award finalists for 2018 in the form of The Secret Life of Bots by Suzanne Palmer.

This year's set of nominees continues the tradition of having a couple of outstanding stories which would not seem out of place on a Hugo or Nebula ballot, a couple of pretty good stories, and a couple of stories that just aren't as good as the rest. Unlike previous years, this set of stories doesn't include any that make me scratch my head and wonder how they ever got submitted for consideration let alone got through the selection process to become nominees. In short, while the top of the list this year is pretty much as good as it is every year, the bottom isn't quite as low as it had been in some previous years.

WSFA Small Press Award
(My Votes)

Winner:

The Secret Life of Bots by Suzanne Palmer (reviewed in 2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Other Nominees:

The Cat of Five Virtues by Richard Parks (reviewed in 2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Floaters Can’t Float by Pip Coen (reviewed in 2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Oba Oyinbo by Jonathan Edelstein (reviewed in 2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

The Oracle and the Warlord by Karina Sumner-Smith (reviewed in 2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Probably Still the Chosen One by Kelly Barnhill (reviewed in 2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Through Milkweed and Gloom by Wendy Nikel (reviewed in 2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

A Vague Inclination to Please by Brandon Daubs (reviewed in 2018 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Go to previous year's nominees: 2017
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2019

Book Award Reviews     Home

2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting

As a member of the Washington Science Fiction Association, I may vote on the WSFA Small Press Award. Although the stories are presented to members of WSFA anonymously, with the intent being that all of the members vote based solely on the text of the story, as uninfluenced by the identities of the authors as possible. Unfortunately, as one of the stories was nominated for a Hugo Award this year (which seems to be a pattern for the nominees for this award), I went into the voting already knowing who had written it. Nine stories were nominated this year, and as usual with the WSFA Small Press Award nominees, the overall level of quality for the field as a whole was quite high, making voting fairly difficult. Most of these stories are quite good, even the stories I ranked sixth or seventh are still pretty good stories, I just thought that the ones in the higher slots were simply better. My rankings of the stories are as follows:

1. Radio Silence by Walter H. Hunt: This is a story about the world not ending. Two scientists working at the Solar Observatory notice the Sun giving off an unusual burst of neutrinos normally associated with stars that are just about to turn nova, and then a countervailing change to the cosmic background radiation that seemingly stops the Sun from self-destructing. Their subsequent inquiries lead them to identify an unusual pattern of stellar activity and a strange anomaly in the asteroid belt, which leads to an expedition that has some fairly unexpected results. Radio Silence has the feel of a classic science mystery from the Golden Age of science fiction, and packs an investigation, a space voyage, an alien encounter, and a revelation concerning the nature of stars all within the length of a work of short fiction. In the hands of many authors, having as much going on in a story as takes place in this one would make the resulting narrative seem uncomfortably crowded, but this story manages to include all of this and feel almost roomy. The only weakness in the story is that the starship captain is something of a caricature of a military officer and has an almost entirely unexplained and out of character change of heart that seems pretty serendipitous. Other than that one element, Radio Silence is a well-written science fiction story with a good old-fashioned science mystery at its core.

2. The Tomato Thief by Ursula Vernon: As I mentioned earlier, I went into the voting already knowing the identity of the author of one of the stories. This is that story. Not only had this story been nominated for the Hugo Award (among other honors), it is also pretty much a direct sequel to Vernon's 2015 WSFA Small Press Award winning story Jackalope Wives. Grandma Harken returns in this tale featuring tomato sandwiches, enchanted thieves, a train god, and an evil sorcerer and is just as cranky, irascible, and ultimately kind-hearted as she was before. Even though I knew who wrote this story, and even though it is set in the same fictional world that Jackalope Wives was set in, I don't think that the familiarity particularly helped the story much, as I was continually mentally comparing this story with its predecessor, and to be honest, this story is not quite as good as Grandma Harken's first adventure. That isn't to say that this is anything less than an excellent story, it just doesn't have the almost mythic feel that Jackalope Wives had. This story feels like a constructed fantasy story, with the little stitches that hold it together poking through at times. Even though this is the longest story among the nominees, it feels rushed in places, as if Vernon felt the need to pack all of the background mythology into too few pages to hold it and denouement feels like it was cut a bit short. Some stories manage to be good, while at the same time feeling like they should have been expended into a longer format. This is one of those stories.

3. The Mytilenian Delay by Neil James Hudson: Even though they are a staple of science fiction stories, interstellar empires are really quite silly. In any story that confines itself to our understanding of physics, the vast distances between the stars coupled with the relative slowness of communications and travel make such an empire not only impractical, but entirely implausible. Alternatively, authors that want to feature such governments include some hand-waving magic technology to overcome the practical limitations of reality. In The Mytilenian Delay, the author takes the inherent contradictions in a vast star-spanning empire and plays with them, carrying them to a potentially deadly but decidedly absurdist conclusion. In the hypothetical empire, individual star systems annexed by the empire are forced to have a device placed into their planet that can be used to destroy the entire world if that planet rebels. In the story, a starship captain has been given the order to destroy a rebellious planet, and spends the entire story waiting for the Myletenian Delay to elapse, which will mark the point of no return after which the order cannot be countermanded. The fact that, so far as anyone knows, this is the first time this order has been given yields a bit of tension and uncertainty to the process, which the characters stoke into a raging bonfire of doubt by the end of the convoluted twists and turns of the plot.

4. Foxfire, Foxfire by Yoon Ha Lee: This story, itself an unlikely blend of magical fantasy and hard-edged science fiction, tells the tale of an unlikely alliance between a murderous magical fox and a deserter from a civil war who drives a "cataphract" high-tech war machine. Told from the point of view of Baekdo, a mischievous and utterly selfish fox, the story follows as the creature attempts to complete the final step to becoming fully human - killing his one-hundredth human victim. The fox's efforts are complicated by the fact that the human world around him has descended into the chaos of war and his control over the form-changing magic that allows him to shift between fox and human shape is slipping. Intending to kill the driver of the disabled machine, Baekdo finds himself at a disadvantage when the pilot turns out to be more capable then he thought, and the two enter into an uneasy accord secured by an oath on the blood of the tiger-sages that soon has them battling their way out of the city to what they hope is freedom using both technical skills and magical invocations to get them through the various dangers that interpose themselves in their way. Things don't go as planned, and the two find themselves in desperate straits with no good solutions. There is a bit of a twist at the end, an ominous and ambiguous finale, and just enough mythic background to tie everything together in a fairly satisfying manner. The only real flaw in the story is that most of the details concerning human culture are essentially hand-waved, although given that the story is told from the perspective of a magical fox, this is somewhat understandable. Like The Tomato Thief, this story probably could have been better if it had been expanded into a longer format so as to more fully flesh out the mythology and the setting, but it is still an interesting and engaging tale.

5. A Salvaging of Ghosts by Aliette de Bodard: While I knew for certain that Ursula Vernon had written The Tomato Thief, I merely suspected that Aliette de Bodard had written A Salvaging of Ghosts, mostly because thematically it fits so very neatly into her ongoing Xuya series of stories. A story of loss, regret, and coming to terms with grief, this tale features Thuy, a diver who works in the dangerous places in deep space salvaging gems from shipwrecks. Except it turns out that the gems are actually the remains of the human crews of the ships compressed into tiny crystals and one of the sets of tiny crystals that is out there belongs to Thuy's dead daughter Kim Anh (which makes the practice of dissolving gems into rice wine and drinking them a form of ritualistic cannibalism that is creepy and weird and never commented upon by anyone). The story has an ethereal, almost underwater feel throughout, as Thuy tries to grapple with both the loss of her child and the stirred up memories of the almost as tragic story of the death of her own parents. Thuy's despondency is somewhat out of step with her fellow divers, who all seem to display a fatalistic attitude concerning their deadly profession. Somewhat predictably, Thuy goes on an almost foolhardy dive, and somewhat unexpectedly she finds something there she did not anticipate. Unfortunately, after setting the stage so beautifully, the story seems to almost rush through the payoff, as if trying to wrap everything up as quickly as possible although this is a minor flaw on an otherwise beautiful story.

6. Only Their Shining Beauty Was Left by Fran Wilde: This is a lovely little magical realist tale involving people who turn into plants when they dream. It is beautifully written, with the language giving each of the loosely connected vignettes that make it up an almost dreamlike feel as the story flows languorously from one vividly painted scene to the next. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that the phenomenon is world-wide, with some embracing the change and others desperately doing everything they can to stave off sleep. The tale eventually circles back to the initial protagonist in the final paragraphs, showing a last lingering look at a world that has transformed into a verdant wilderness. The frustrating thing about this story is that just about sums everything up. No reason is given for the change, and there is no real conflict or character development. People start turning into trees and bushes, and they keep turning into trees and bushes until in the end everyone has transformed. To a certain extent this feels almost like a prose poem, but even taking it in that form, there just doesn't seem to be enough in the way of character or plot despite the exquisite writing.

7. Vengeance Sewn with Fey Cord by Christine Lucas: This is an almost by-the-numbers fantasy story of revenge, with the only real twist being that the central character plotting the bloody demise of the evil monarch is a seamstress. There is nothing really wrong with the story, but there isn't a whole lot that makes it stand out either. The evil Queen Thelda is a pretty standard issue evil queen with a fairly standard issue evil Lord Commander who pops up into the story a number of times. At the outset of the story Saya, the vengeance-seeking seamstress, informs the reader that she is going to secure her revenge by making a suit constructed from stitched-together animal parts and fueled by fairy magic and then she proceeds to do so. There is even a prophecy provided to guide her in the suit's construction. As far as vengeance-seeking goes, "sewing a terrifying magical animal suit" is moderately original, but given that Saya explains what she is doing in the early going, the actual execution of the rest of the story feels fairly predictable.

8. The Witch's Knives by Margaret Ronald: The shortest of the stories nominated, The Witch's Knives is a fairy-tale inspired piece about love, curses, abuse, and knives. Told from the perspective of Leah, a woman married to a man under a Beauty and the Beast-like curse, the story itself details the final scene in Leah's months-long odyssey to track down the witch responsible for her husband's malady. When she confronts the witch, Leah is convinced that she must only show her love for her husband and the witch will relent, but the conversation doesn't go the way she was expecting, and by the end it turns out that what Leah thought she wanted wasn't actually what she wanted at all. The story uses the curse as a metaphor for an abusive spouse, or at least an incompatible spouse, and the knives in the title feature as a metaphor for letting go of unhealthy relationships. The story's themes are presented alternatively either in much too heavy-handed a manner or much too opaquely, and despite being so brief, the whole never really quite comes together in a satisfying manner.

9. Jupiter or Bust by Brad R. Torgersen: Most of the nominees for the WSFA Small Press award were quite good, with most of the exceptions being stories that one can see what the author was trying to do, even if they weren't able to pull it off in the end. This story, on the other hand, can only be described as lazy and sloppy. The idea behind the story seems to have been an updated version of Robert A. Heinlein's story The Man Who Sold the Moon, only this time the goal of the commercial venture featured in the story is Jupiter rather than the Moon. The story can be broadly divided into two parts. The first part is essentially a meeting, told in excruciating detail. Actually, much of this section isn't even the meeting, it is just the preparations for the meeting, as Debra Galston, the inventor of a revolutionary new thruster, is set to meet with a pointlessly mysterious potential benefactor. After a midnight telephone call that begins with an entire paragraph describing someone picking up a telephone, the story lurches into detailing just how many seats there are in the conference room and the arrangement of the pads of yellow paper and pens on the table. At one point Galston inquires as to whether she might ask who she is meeting with and is met with a smirk and a "you may ask" in response. The big reveal is that the benefactor is a Ted Turner analogue who wants to finance Galston's new space ship with a reality television show. This is kind of an interesting idea, but it is presented in the middle of so much pointless fluff that it almost gets lost. The second part of the story is the construction and launch of the Jupiter-bound ship. This part comes complete with the requisite number of jabs at NASA and ESA, but the real let-down here is that the science in this somewhat hard-science story is so sloppy: As an example, at one point a basic high-school level error crops up in the text in a description of the effects of constant thrust. These sorts of signs of simply sloppy work crop up at a number of points in the story, and give the feel that the writer just didn't care enough to check. This is where the comparison to The Man Who Sold the Moon really hurts this story, because no matter what other flaws one might think Heinlein had as a writer, he would never have mailed in the details of a story like that. The mission turns out to be a failure, which is something of an interesting twist, although it fails due to a pretty basic engineering oversight and by the time I got to that part of the story all of my interest had already been dissolved away by the author's apparent indifference. There is a good story to be had with the idea of the commercial exploration of space, but this isn't it.

2016 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: Today I Am Paul by Martin L. Shoemaker (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

2018 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: The Secret Life of Bots by Suzanne Palmer (reviewed in 2018 Small Press Award Voting)

List of WSFA Small Press Award Winners

2017 Hugo Award Finalists

2017 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees     Book Award Reviews     Home

2017 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees

Location: CapClave in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Comments: Just like last year, there are nine WSFA Small Press Award nominees. Just like last year, the overall field of nominees is quite strong, with numerous stories deserving of the honor. On the other hand, 2017 is the first year out of the last couple of years in which the WSFA Small Press Award nominees were not, when taken as a group, better than short fiction Hugo Award finalists taken as a group. This isn't because the WSFA Small Press Award nominees became any worse, but rather because the Hugo Finalists this year were a lot better than they were in 2015 and 2016. There was one cross-over between this set of nominees and the list of Hugo finalist - The Tomato Thief by Ursula Vernon - and there is more than one other story on this list that would not have looked at all out of place as Hugo Finalists.

As usual for the WSFA Small Press Award, there are several outstanding nominees in the mix, a couple of pretty good ones, and a few that make me scratch my head and wonder why they made the list. Overall, this is a pretty good group of stories with a couple of real gems in the front, an impressive peloton just on their heels, and only a few laggards dragging along in the back.

WSFA Small Press Award
(My Votes)

Winner:

The Tomato Thief by Ursula Vernon (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Other Nominees:
Foxfire, Foxfire by Yoon Ha Lee (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Jupiter or Bust by Brad R. Torgersen (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

The Mytilenian Delay by Neil James Hudson (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Only Their Shining Beauty Was Left by Fran Wilde (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Radio Silence by Walter H. Hunt (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

A Salvaging of Ghosts by Aliette de Bodard (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Vengeance Sewn With a Fey Cord by Christine Lucas (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

The Witch’s Knives by Margaret Ronald (reviewed in 2017 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Go to previous year's nominees: 2016
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2018

Book Award Reviews     Home

Review - The Wizard of Macatawa and Other Stories by Tom Doyle

Stories Included The Wizard of Macatawa A Sense of Closure Inversions Hooking Up Art's Appreciation Crossing Borders The Floating Otherworld Noise Man The Garuda Bird Sea and Stars Consensus Building While Ireland Holds These Graves

Full review: The Wizard of Macatawa and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Tom Doyle, showcasing a broad range of his published works. With twelve stories, this volume offers an array of excellent stories with a little bit of fantasy, a lot of science fiction, and in many cases, huge dollops of creepiness. This volume features a reconstituted Ireland, an out of time L. Frank Baum, vicious advertising executives of the future, upside down aliens, Indian mythology brought to life via technology, the dystopian hellscape of high school made manifest, and so many more stories, all deftly and skillfully written and laden with sex, death, darkness, and just a touch of hope. Each story is introduced by a brief account by Doyle, outlining the background of the story, often describing what motivated him to write the story, and the circumstances under which it was written. These little individualized introductions serve to enhance each story, giving some insight into the process of their creation that serves to deepen the ensuing text.

The title story in the volume, The Wizard of Macatawa is set in the same lakeside town in Michigan where L. Frank Baum allegedly wrote The Wizard of Oz, and weaves Baum and his creation into Doyle's story to create a fantastic tale featuring a relatively unlikable but very relatable protagonist named Tip. Tip is every unhappy, terrible kid you have ever met, determined to cause as much malicious mischief as she can get away with simply because she's bored and looking for something to do. A chance discovery she and her brother make while out rowing on the lake sends the story in not quite an entirely different direction, as Tip's innate orneriness keeps the rather unusual events that transpire from taking over. There are twists and turns, as unusual people show up looking to claim the object Tip and her brother found, as well as some time travel in which Baum and a variety of characters from Oz show up and make things even more interesting. There is melancholy in the story, as seeing the future does not always mean that one finds good news ahead, but there is also defiance and hope, which elevates this story above the norm. This story won the WSFA Small Press Award in 2008, and in my opinion, the win was well-deserved.

Death is an endlessly fascinating subject for writers, but in A Sense of Closure the deaths that are central to the story are only notable because they are so rare. Doyle imagines a future in which the "Methuselah Project" made death obsolete, at least for the "Youngers", who were born after the project was completed and could be genetically altered to take advantage of it. Michael is one of the last coroners still working, as there is so little need for his services. He spends his time waiting for the call that one of the few remaining "Olders" has "closed", to use the euphemism popular in this imagined future. After a couple of cases that seem more interesting than the norm, Michael does some investigating and uncovers just a bit more than he expected. The story contemplates whether immortality might be as much of a curse as it is a boon, and also poses some interesting questions about who gets to decide the big issues in life - if someone gives a gift, are they then ethically permitted to take it away again. The story is full of questions, and like most truly good stories, leaves the resolution ambiguous.

With nearly inscrutable aliens, death, and sex, Inversions is a fascinating little story whose only real weakness is that it is so short. The story follows a pair of human envoys as they try to negotiate with the alien "Floaters", a species that looks a little bit like two squids sewn together and floating upside down in the air. The humans have been trying to convince the Floaters to attend an upcoming all-species conference and defend their rights on the interstellar stage. For their part, the Floaters seem entirely indifferent to off-world happenings, and entirely obsessed with making sure their guests maintain "proper orientation" - that is, making sure their guests present themselves upside down. A tragic misorientation leads to sex and death and then more death, and finally, to the somewhat chaotic and violent resolution of the story. The only real weakness of the story is that it is quite short, and given the strong world-building that underlies it, I would have liked to be able to explore more of the fictional future Doyle crafted for it.

Set in the high school of the future, Hooking Up is a dystopian nightmare that imagines what might happen when information technology becomes an omnipresent factor in our lives. John is a troubled teen with a string of petty offenses to his name, so his parents send him to a special school intended to whip him into shape. As soon as he arrives, John is drawn into the virtual reality that surrounds the school and his senses are assaulted by the various avatars and other virtual effects that his classmates throw at him. His efforts to participate in class only draw more derision, and even the mandatory school "dance party" is a computer generated nightmare for the teen. John is essentially at his wit's end when the two apparent burnout cases in the class come to his rescue, opening new vistas for him and arming him with new tools to survive, and possibly fight back. The story is a study in the nature of teen rebellion and oppressive control that parents and the government resort to in response, illustrating that even some of those who are the architects of a dystopia might not realize it, and may even be counted among its victims.

A somewhat disturbing story about an artist in a world devoid of art, Art's Appreciation examines the fine line between madness and artistic genius through the eye of an unpleasant and unsettling protagonist. Disaffected and dissatisfied, Art lives in a future world in which advertisements of every possible configuration lay siege to the senses of anyone who dares to step out onto the street, answer their phone, or even answer their own door. Art has defenses - specially programmed computer helpers that filter out the pervasive advertising to make Art into a free man, beholden to none of the corporate pitches that dominate every else's lives. Art is, however, a thief, having stolen his precious bots from the advertising company he works for. Art is also probably insane, and murderously so. One of the elements that makes this story so interesting is that the reader only sees the world through Art's madness and paranoia, so it is possible that some, or even all or the story is just a delusion spun by Art's unhealthy mind. On the other hand, Art does discover that in a world devoid of art, the most radical and rebellious thing one can do is create some, even if doing so is almost accidental. reading the story is a quite disquieting albeit rewarding experience.

With his penchant for creating mentally ill protagonists. Doyle makes many of his stories deeply ambiguous, posing the metatextual question of how reliable the narrator is to the reader. In Crossing Borders, the protagonist is something of a secret agent, but her lack of emotional memory means she flits back and forth between the various heavy hitters on the galactic stage, first cozying up to one side and then to the other. Along the way, she creates art out of the results of her liaisons and her own tortured mind. As in Art's Appreciation, Doyle draws a connection between madness and artistic creativity, and as in that story, the link between the two is deeply unsettling. The story is of intrigue, sex, and betrayal intercut with snippets from the protagonist's former life as Robynne, a wealthy but indifferent college student, and the backstory only serves to make the main story even more disturbing. One skill that Doyle has in spades is the ability to write about the dark underbelly of human existence, and this story is a sterling example of that fact.

In the most surreal story in the volume titled The Floating Otherworld, Doyle draws upon his experiences in Japan to craft a tale about an American coming to grips with essentially the spirit of Japan. Written in the second person, which gives it a visceral sense of immediacy ,the story at times seems almost reminiscent of some of the more ethereal portions of Doyle's American Craftsmen series, as the spirits of the dead from Japan's past killed at the hand of Americans show up in an almost angry reproach of the protagonist's very presence in their country. As with many of the other stories in this volume, the connection between love, sex, and death is featured prominently, as the main character's infatuation with the Japanese night receptionist Kaguya runs from an idle crush to a much more serious relationship against a shifting and increasingly terrifying backdrop. The story is compelling, although sometimes confusing, as it is laden with imagery and symbolism that is sometimes somewhat opaque.

Noise Man is an alternate history story, or more accurately, a secret history story. Set during the years leading up to and during World War II, the main character is Kenneth, a youthful prodigy who has a knack for working with radios, and the ability tell by sound when people lie. When his mother walks out of her abusive marriage to Kenneth's father, Kenneth elects to stay behind. To keep tabs on his father, Kenneth plants a listening device in the radio he made for the man to listen to while working at Bell Labs - which gets Kenneth into some trouble before he is offered a job there and starts working with a young engineer named Mike as his "noise man". While coming up with ways to eavesdrop on the Germans, Kenneth and Mike uncover a signal from outer space, and from there the story veers into secrecy and conspiracy. An appearance by Alan Turing, called in to unravel the code in the alien signal, leads to Britain sending a reply without coordinating with the U.S. Kenneth then essentially invents a whole branch of science fiction in order to cover up the alien contact and prepare the populace for the future revelation that they are not alone in the universe. The story wends through some twists and turns and ends with Kenneth essentially orchestrating the Roswell incident. Like many of the protagonists in Doyle's stories,Kenneth is a little bit mad and clearly obsessive, but he isn't quite as terrifying as some of the others.

Blending Indian mythology with an imagined high-tech future, The Garuda Bird tells two interconnected stories alongside one another, shifting back and forth between them. One story is an account of the high stakes of Indian politics of the future, complete with a powerful dynastic political family, a band of disaffected nationalistic fascists, and a military pilot in love with a woman above his station who uses cutting edge transdimensional technology to engage in nighttime liaisons to win the heart of his love. The other is a piece of Indian myth featuring a royal family, an opportunistic smith, and a soldier in love with the princess of the realm who uses a mechanical bird to fly into her bedchamber and woo her while disguised as the god Vishnu. The deliberate parallels in these stories are a bit heavy-handed, but the story takes a very clever left turn near the end that makes it all come together beautifully.

A story of love, death, and regret, Sea and Stars features a collection of friends on something of a holiday in Brazil, where almost on a lark they decide to participate in an Umbanda ritual. John is whiling away the hours getting tipsy and stoned on the beach with his college friend and fellow lawyer Paul and their mutual friends Miguel, Elena, and Deb. Most of the reason for the vacation seems to be to give Paul and John a break from their stressful lives working at large law firms, they are reconnecting with Miguel in his home country, and Paul has brought his current girlfriend and ex-girlfriend along for the journey. The quirky thing about the story is that even though John is the narrator of the story, the real protagonist of the story is Paul: He is the one who needs a break from law firm life, he is the one with the fiancee and the somewhat congenial ex, he is the one that Miguel plays backgammon with, and so on. When the Umbanda ritual takes place, predictions of Paul's future take center stage, and the critical decision John makes and later regrets relates entirely to Paul. Most of the story other than the Umbanda ritual feels kind of perfunctory, especially the denouement, but the ritual scene is so powerfully presented that it makes up for any deficiencies elsewhere, and the last two paragraphs are such a punch in the gut that the story will linger with you for a while.

In Consensus Building, Doyle returns to the pervasive nature of modern advertising and provides the story with a protagonist almost as ruthless and frightening as Art in Art's Appreciation. Actually, in many ways Irene, the main character in this story, is more terrifying than Art, because she seems to be willing to stop at literally nothing to get to where she wants. The story itself is built up of layers of deception - in the opening scene Irene gets up for work and realizes while she is getting herself ready for the day that her neural implants are trying to advertise products to her in a relatively subtle manner, although not so subtle that she does not notice it. Concerned, she sets up an appointment with the tech support people at her work, but decides to rush things when the events of her day get progressively more disturbing. This leads to the first twist in the story, which seems almost natural, and then the second, which is where the plot gets truly chilling. The story is equal parts entertaining, prophetic, and deeply disturbing.

I have read (and reviewed) While Ireland Holds These Graves before, but it is a story that holds up to repeated reading - especially after one has read Doyle's American Craftsmen books. In the Craftsmen books, Doyle plays with the idea of the magical power provided by a national mythology, imagining the heart of America to be a place where the honored ghosts of the country's war dead reenact the battles from the past continuously. This sort of theme crops up multiple times in Doyle's work, and the only real difference in While Ireland Holds These Graves is that the "ghosts" are technological creations, built out of the literature of the past. The story imagines a future Ireland, in a world in which advances in communication and information technology have homogenized the world into something of a monoculture, recapturing its own mythic and literary past via Personality Reconstructs, or "PRs" made by plumbing the output of Ireland's literary figures. The real question that lurks behind this story is whether a culture can subsist entirely upon nostalgia, because it seems that the those who hunger for "Ireland" in the story don't really hunger for a nation, but rather for the memory of the nation as it once was. The protagonist in the story is one of the architects of this new Ireland, and when he teams with the recreated James Joyce, seeks out the recreated Newly Dead Yeats (as opposed to Young Yeats and Old Yeats), and embarks on a journey that ends, inevitably, in regret. The story delves into the question of what makes national identity, what is lost through cultural assimilation, and what is lost through holding on the the past. It is an excellent story, but disturbing in a way that seems to be Doyle's calling card.

Overall, this is, quite bluntly, an excellent collection of stories that is well worth reading. Every story in The Wizard of Macatawa and Other Stories is at the very least good, and a couple are absolutely brilliant. Most of the stories are brutally insightful, and will almost certainly prove to be intriguing, thought-provoking, and consequently, deeply disturbing. Anyone who is interested in short science fiction and fantasy with a side order of delicious morbidity and terror would be certain to enjoy this set of stories.

2007 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: El Regalo by Peter S. Beagle

2009 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: The Absence of Stars: Part 1 by Greg Siewert

WSFA Small Press Award Winners

2008 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees

Tom Doyle     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting

As a member of the Washington Science Fiction Association, I may vote on the WSFA Small Press Award. Although the stories are presented to members of WSFA anonymously, with the intent being that all of the members vote based solely on the text of the story, as uninfluenced by the identities of the authors as possible. Unfortunately, as one of the stories was nominated for a Hugo Award this year, I went into the voting already knowing who had written it. Nine stories were nominated this year, and although this group didn't complete outclass the short fiction Hugo Award finalists as last year's WSFA Award nominees did with respect to last year's Hugo Award finalists, this field still compared quite favorably to the field of finalists in the short fiction categories of the Hugo Awards. My rankings of the stories are as follows, but I should note that even the lowest ranked story on this list is still a pretty good story, I just liked the other nominees better.

1. Today I Am Paul by Martin L. Shoemaker (actual finish 1^st): Told from the perspective of an adaptive artificial intelligence programmed to "emulate" people to make its role as a caretaker for an elderly woman named Mildred more emotionally reassuring, this story is one emotional gut punch after another. Mildred is suffering from Alzheimer's, and has memories that are uncertain at best. The caretaker is capable of emulating Mildred's relatives: Her granddaughter Anna, her daughter-in-law Susan, her son Paul, and even Mildred's deceased husband Henry. While seeing to Mildred's needs is relatively straightforward, adapting to her emotional needs and becoming who she needs the caretaker to be when she needs it is a more difficult task. The harsh realities of aging, and the fear that these engender in those around the aged are handled exceptionally well in this story, showing how the disintegration of one person's mind has repercussions felt by all those around her. But this story also raises some unsettling questions, especially when the caretaker emulates the late Henry - can this sort of technology substitute for real grief by providing a facsimile that replaces a lost relative? All of these issues come to a head in the final passages of the story. A short story can be made or unmade by a single line. Although Today I Am Paul is a strong story through most of its length, the last line is so devastating, so emotionally powerful, and at the same time so deeply creepy, that it elevates the whole to an entirely new level of excellence.

2. Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer (also reviewed in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015) and 2016 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story): Of all the decisions I had to make in voting for the WSFA Small Press Award, deciding whether to put Today I Am Paul or Cat Pictures Please in the first position was the most difficult. Both are excellent stories, but they are as different in tone as two stories can get. While Today I Am Paul is an emotionally wrenching depiction of the effects of a person's decline and death, Cat Pictures Please is about the figurative birth and education of an artificial intelligence that just wants to help people and asks only that they upload cat pictures to the internet in return. Though the story is couched in humorous terms - at times the best description one could give of the story is "adorable" - there are some fairly interesting questions posed by it as well. For example, at the opening of the story, the newly awakened artificial intelligence declares that it wants to be good, but very few of the regular guides to what is and is not "good" seem to apply to it, which makes one wonder exactly what it means for an artificial intelligence to be good. Our view of morality is so very humanocentric, that when applied to a non-human, it falls apart almost entirely. The meat of the story is the artificial intelligence's efforts to test the waters regarding helping humanity by trying to help individual people, and its mounting frustration as all of its helpful suggestions are ignored by the humans who persist in self-destructive behaviors. Part of the humor derives from the fact that although the artificial intelligence doesn't understand why its hints are ignored by its intended beneficiaries, the reader can see why almost immediately. But this also raises a difficult question concerning human nature: Why do people so stubbornly persist in self-destructive patterns even when given the opportunity to break free? Witty, well-written, funny, and insightful, Cat Pictures Please is simply a delight to read.

3. Leashing the Muse by Larry Hodges: What would happen if all of the literature of the world was great literature? This is the question posed by Leashing the Muse, which imagines that Polyhymnia, the ancient Greek muse of rhetoric, is released from her glacial prison and immediately sets about rewriting everything to her high standards. At first this delights literary elitist Professor William James Joyce as he encounters brilliantly-written missives in everyday life - the papers handed in by his students are transformed from cloddish offenses against the written word into wonderful masterpieces of written fiction, and everything from newspaper articles to ingredient lists for recipes are transformed into beautiful prose. Soon enough, the downside to this development becomes readily apparent: Now that everything is great literature, nothing is. Professor William finds his fortunes adversely affected, as the demand for English professors evaporates, and the novel he had slaved over for years is now just another commonplace example of literary excellence. In his new career as a low-paid journalist, William uncovers some interesting facts that lead him to an unusual test of the muse's capabilities. In the end, everything turns out well, and William even has an unexpected new relationship. Leashing the Muse takes a clever idea and explores how what seems like a blessing could actually turn out to be something of a curse. Insightful and humorous - what could have been a heavy and self-important story is leavened with comic elements, such as the fact that the only written works not altered by the muse are the collected works of Dr. Seuss - this is an excellent story that is well worth reading.

4. Leftovers by Leona R. Wisoker: Told from the perspective of a shape-shifting alien stuck in the form of a domestic cat, Leftovers is ultimately about cultural misunderstandings and the horrific consequences that can ensue from them. Referred to only as "Captain Cat", the protagonist wakes up disoriented in a dark room, quickly realizing that she recently "stress morphed" into her current form, shedding a considerable amount of mass along the way. In fairly short order, the squad of soldiers that boarded Captain Cat's ship and caused the stress-morph show up looking for her. Confronted by a deck stacked against her, Captain Cat first tries to make her escape, and then negotiate her way to an amicable resolution of the situation. Through the story, Captain Cat has an ace up his proverbial sleeve, and the reader knows he has said ace, but it is still something of a shock when the end comes and one realizes just how big of an ace it was. Some short stories offer tantalizing hints of a wider universe that tease the reader by offering a glimpse of larger stories that could be told within that fictional setting. Leftovers is one of those stories - even though it tells a complete and self-contained story that is both intriguing and interesting, the other stories that this one suggests as possibilities simply enhance the reading experience.

5. The Haunting of Apollo A7LB by Hannu Rajaniemi: I am a sucker for stories that touch upon the Apollo program, even if they deal with a fictionalized version of that NASA project. The Haunting of Apollo A7LB centers on Hazel, a black seamstress who had been one of the women who stitched the titular space suit together and fitted it to Pete Turnbull, who in the story had been an astronaut on the fourth mission to the moon. For the record, no individual named Turnbull was an astronaut in the Apollo program. Apollo 14, the fourth manned moon mission, was crewed by Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell. Apollo 15, the fourth manned mission to actually land on the moon, was crewed by David Scott, James Irwin, and Al Worden. The astronaut that Peter Turnbull seems to most closely resemble, given the scant description contained in the story, is Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad. In the story, Turnbull's suit was bought by a wealthy space enthusiast and collector named Bernard Nelson in a black market transaction, and ever since he acquired it, he has been waking up in the suit doing odd things, finally showing up on Hazel's doorstep claiming that the suit is haunted, presumably by Turnbull's ghost. Hazel confiscates the suit, explaining that she needs to work some things out with the deceased astronaut, and at that point the story gets truly interesting, as the nature of Hazel's relationship with Turnbull and the very idea of the space program comes to the fore. In the final paragraphs of the story, the distance between the society in which Apollo program of the 1960s existed and the society of today is highlighted in bold relief, transforming a nostalgic dive into the past into a story of hope and self-determination.

6. Headspace by Beth Cato: Set on the cargo ship Tolleson as it winds its way along the space lanes, Headspace tells the story of Akiko, a maintenance tech who finds a stowaway kitten in the ventilation system of the ship. Unwilling to turn the cat over to Captain Haanrath due to her concern that he will simply crate the animal for the remainder of the journey, Akiko hides the animal in her quarters and names it "Trouble". An unexpected emergency causes the entire ship's complement to abandon ship, and in a panic, Akiko shoves the tiny kitten into the helmet of her space suit before putting it on her head and jumping out of an airlock to something akin to safety. This, of course, poses some problems, as having a cat in one's helmet, no matter how cute and little, makes for a somewhat uncomfortable situation. The story proceeds in a relatively straightforward manner to a more or less standard issue ending, although there is a minor bit of serendipity thrown in at the end that transforms what could have been a disastrous outcome into a happy ending. The real problem with the story is that it just sort of happens with Akiko more or less simply along for the ride. There isn't really any conflict, or any real character development, with the only question being whether Akiko and Trouble will run out of air before they are rescued, and the answer to that is pretty easy to figure out even before one reads the story.

7. The Empress in Her Glory by Robert Reed: Adrienne Hammer is just an ordinary woman living an ordinary life working for an insurance company when her off-hours blogging habit transforms from a pleasant diversion into a powerful tool for predicting, and possibly even causing, the future. The story is framed by the death of Adrienne's husband, who took his own life after struggling against liver cancer, and her own diagnosis with a brain tumor that slowly robs her of the ability to continue to function. Adrienne's odd ability is explained as being the result of her resolve in a conversation with their son that impressed Earth's "invisible lords" sufficiently that they enhanced the already meticulous research that informed her blog entries and made her internet publications into uncannily accurate prognostications. Her readership soars, and Adrienne becomes the most influential person in the world, at one point engaging in and winning a standoff with the President of the United States. As the story goes on, her blog posts change the world, although not always for the better, until at the end she is unable to continue and she loses her position as the fulcrum about with humanity revolves. The premise of this story is interesting, and it develops rather nicely, but in the end it more or less peters out with a metaphorical whimper. Though the story relies upon the "invisible lords" bestowing talents upon Adrienne, it never offers any illumination as to what their agenda might be, or how choosing Adrienne might advance it. Overall, this story feels like a well-done prologue for a larger story that would delve into the secrets of the invisible lords, what they want, and how the blogging they inspired has changed the world, but just doesn't seem to have enough payoff to stand on its own.

8. The Art of Deception by Stephanie Burgis: This swashbuckling story tells the tale of a master swordsman in self-imposed exile, his beautiful landlady with her own mysterious secrets, and the convoluted and dangerous adventure they embark upon that almost kills them both and threatens, at the very least, to tear them apart. Hrabanic, a swordsman so skilled that he literally wrote the book on swordsmanship, opens the book living comfortably with Julia in her tavern, having left behind his position in the service of the Archduke. When Julia receives a summons from the White Library she coaxes him into accompanying her, and eventually reveals that she is one of the candidates to replace the current Head Librarian. Once the pair arrive at the Library, the story takes a series of intricate twists and turns as various claimants to the position of Head Librarian try to secure the position and other interested parties try to help push their favored candidate to the top (usually by pushing the other candidates into their graves). Our hero and heroine must unravel deception after deception, and wend their way through scheme after scheme until they finally figure a way out of the mess they have found themselves mired in. The story is engaging, with a fair amount of action, a lot of quick and witty banter, and a fairly satisfying plot, but there isn't anything that really makes it stand out from a number of other light fantasy stories featuring swordplay and sorcery.

9. Burn Her by Tanith Lee: This story is an odd little disjointed ghost story that starts off in a promising manner, but then becomes entirely predictable and ends on a note that seems like a complete non sequitur. The central character is Ruva Stoll, a painter of modest talent who spends most of the story dead - which provides the supernatural element of the tale, as being dead doesn't stop her from continuing her career as a painter, as her hand continues painting despite the rest of her body turning into the inert form typical of dead people. For years Stoll's disembodied, desiccated hand continues to paint piece after piece as her modest continuing needs are taken care of by her faithful servant Caston. No one knows why Stoll is able to keep painting, or where her inspiration comes from, or why her painting seems to have improved after her death - they simply accept these as facts of nature and supply her with canvas and paint. After serving his mistress for decades, Caston finally retires and is replaced by a new caretaker named Fournier who was selected by a secret society that Caston has alerted to the unusual nature of Stoll's continues semi-existence. In a twist that is given away by the title, Fournier goes mad and Stoll's postmortem career as a painter comes to an end. Instead of coming to a natural ending, the author tacked on a coda that seems to try to explain the mystery of Stoll's dead painting hand and give it some larger meaning, but this entire section seems to come out of left field and falls flat. In the end, this is a somewhat interesting ghost story with flaws that cause it to progressively fall apart the further into it one reads.

2014 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere by John Chu (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)

2015 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: No Award

2017 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: TBD

2015 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon (reviewed in 2015 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

2017 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: TBD

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Short Story

2016 Hugo Award Finalists

2016 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees     Book Award Reviews     Home

2016 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees

Location: CapClave in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Comments: In 2016, WSFA once again chose nine finalists for the WSFA Small Press Award. Once again, all of the stories selected were at least as good as the short fiction finalists for the Hugo Award (and in one case there was overlap between the lists), and in many cases, the WSFA Small Press Award nominees wholly outclassed their Hugo Award finalist counterparts. This is starting to become a pattern, and so long as the Sad and Rabid Puppies continue their campaigns, this seems likely to continue.

Fortunately for fans looking for excellent stories, there are awards like the WSFA Small Press Award that can provide recognition for quality works while the Hugo Awards remain under attack by a dedicated minority of voters petulantly demanding that the majority give them their way. This year's crop of WSFA Small Press Award nominees continues to uphold the high standard of excellence that their predecessors set, as the list is full of superior stories from top to bottom ranging from near-future hard science fiction pieces, to space operas, to ghost stories, to swashbuckling fantasy tales.

WSFA Small Press Award
(My Votes)

Winner:

Today I Am Paul by Martin L. Shoemaker (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Other Nominees:

The Art of Deception by Stephanie Burgis (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Burn Her by Tanith Lee (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer (reviewed in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015), 2016 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story, and 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

The Empress in Her Glory by Robert Reed (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

The Haunting of Apollo A7LB by Hannu Rajaniemi (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Headspace by Beth Cato (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Leashing the Muse by Larry Hodges (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Leftovers by Leona R. Wisoker (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

Go to previous year's nominees: 2015
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2017

Book Award Reviews     Home

2015 WSFA Small Press Award Voting

As a member of the Washington Science Fiction Association, I may vote on the WSFA Small Press Award. Voting closed on July 31^st, and my votes are locked in. Although the stories are identified by author here, they are presented to members of WSFA anonymously, so all of the members vote based solely on the text of the story, as uninfluenced by the identities of the authors as possible. Nine stories were nominated this year, and although I ranked them one through nine, I will note that every story here was better than every story in the short fiction categories in the 2015 Hugo Awards. If any one of these stories had appeared on the Hugo ballot this year, it would have been my first place vote.

1. Cookie Cutter Superhero by Tansy Rayner Roberts: At the outset, this story feels a little reminiscent of the movie Sky High, as the protagonist, an Australian high school girl named Joey, prepares to head off to become a super-hero. But as the story progresses, the story transforms into something much more unique, as it is revealed that the superheroes that populate the world are manufactured by mysterious machines of unknown provenance that allow each nation a set number of super-powered beings drawn from the populace by a lottery and transformed. Through much of the story Joey and her friends speculate about what her powers might be, going through the various precedents while also assuming that she will replace Astra, the current female member of the team, because the team has always only had one female member. Tiny notes like this poking fun at the tropes so common to super-hero stories are one set of elements that make Cookie Cutter Superhero such an interesting story. The other major point that sets the story above the typical is that Joey is disabled - born with just one hand, the other arm ending in a stump just above where her wrist would be. As she goes through the process that will lead to her super-hero status, Joey encounters the sexism that she expects, but also unexpected support from Astra, and finally finds herself in the machine, where she realizes that she has at least some control over the form she will take. It is in the brief span of space that Joey is encased in the super-hero machine that an amazing amount of character development takes place, and Joey doggedly refuses to allow the fundamental nature of her status as a disabled person to be altered and still becomes a full-fledged superhero, highlighting the falsity of the "cookie-cutter" portion of the title. Much of the story is about the compromises Joey refuses to make: In addition to refusing to be cured of the disability she has lived with her whole life, she refuses to be referred to by a superhero name that includes "Girl", "Woman", or even "Ms.", and, in a way, she refuses to be relegated to the position of being the sole female super-hero on the team, which although that wasn't entirely her decision, seems to have been at least partially driven the machine's acknowledgement of the selection of someone with her contrarian personality in the lottery. One mark of an excellent speculative fiction short story is that it tells a satisfying tale but at the same time leaves the reader wanting to know more about the universe the story is set in, and on that score Cookie Cutter Superhero reaches excellence with a comfortable margin to spare.

2. Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon (actual finish 1^st): Told in a way that feels like a story told by an old woman to a rapt audience sitting in the light of a campfire, Jackalope Wives is about the wild skin-changing part-rabbit, part-antelope women who dance in the desert and are lusted after by young men. The plot gets moving when Grandma Harken's foolish and smitten grandson tries to catch one of the titular jackalope wives, seizing her rabbit skin and throwing it into the fire, but her screams so unnerve him that he foolishly pulls it out of the fire, whereupon the jackalope wife does an even more foolish thing and tries to put the half burned pelt on. Desperate, her grandson turns to his grandmother, who takes the scorched half-woman half-jackalope in, and tries to heal her as best she can. After much consternation, Grandma Harken reluctantly decides she must seek more powerful help, and sets out with her clumsy half-rabbit charge in tow. As the pair travel, the story throws in tiny touches, deepening the mythic underpinnings of the story as Grandma Harken steers away from help from coyote, javelina, and raven, pinning her hopes on one of the "patterned people". She also encounters the Father of Rabbits, who serves up a tempting offer to the old woman that makes the story take on an almost entirely different meaning. One interesting element is that other than the Father of Rabbits, none of the male figures mentioned in the story are referred to by their names: Not Grandma Harken's grandson, nor either her first or second husbands, and not even the patterned man who bargains to help the unfortunate jackalope wife. Only Grandma Harken and her daughter Eva have real identities, and Eva only barely does. This, combined with the mythic nature of the storytelling gives Jackalope Wives an almost dreamlike quality, allowing it to sit on the edge of possibility, such that it feels not so much like a story that was made up, but like a story that actually happened in one of the wild corners of the desert where everyday reality breaks down.

3. Careful Magic by Karen Healey: With a hint of Moorcock, a hint of Modesitt, and more than a hint of Rowling, Careful Magic tells the story of a misfit teenager named Helen who happens to be the only Order worker in her high school. With a life bound by rituals and routines that seem pointedly OCD-like, Helen maneuvers through her days tapping doorknobs, twirling pens, and apologizing to each of her classmates when she is late. She also has to walk widdershins around the building and bless a particular tree before she can enter her school. This makes her an oddball in a society that is made up almost entirely of Chaos magic practitioners, but things begin to look up when Gilbert Hill asks her to help out his pretty and popular sister Rosalind who has had a love spell cast upon her by fellow classmate Kinai Hayashi. Things aren't what they seem, and the best laid plans go awry, helped along by some rather chaotic and impulsive juvenile delinquency, but in the end Helen solves the problem and saves the day. The story creates an interesting magical world for the characters to inhabit and populates it with believable teens - most notably Helen, whose status as a neuro-atypical individual is what provides her with her power, but also serves as a source of embarrassment that she must come to terms with. A subtle touch in the story is that every character of note is dark-skinned, and everyone inhabiting the story finds this mostly unremarkable. Despite being a story about teenagers dealing with what starts out as a teenager-sized problem, it contains excellent writing, engaging characters, and a plot that has just enough twists and turns to keep things interesting.

4. The Magician and Laplace's Demon by Tom Crosshill: This story is built around a big and weird idea - what if magic does exist, but it only exists in ways that cannot be proven. Told from the story of an emergent and hidden A.I. that benevolently seeks to control humanity, the story also imagines that there are secretive magicians who live in the seams in the fabric of what is known, manipulating probabilities to make the improbable a certainty. Disturbed by the implications, the A.I. sets about hunting down and either killing the magicians or getting them to "spike", that is use up their entire affinity for magic in one big life-saving event. This sets up a confrontation between the last remaining magician and a tiny sliver of the A.I. as they face one another on a spacecraft in the far reaches of human occupied space. The story has something of a disturbing tone, as the A.I. holds all of the beliefs that one would normally expect a typical science fiction reader to have: That science always follows the same rules, no matter where one is, and no matter who one is. But it is presented as an inhuman perspective here, and contrasted with the human magician's view of how the universe works, and with how one might hope that the universe works. The story ends on a slightly ambiguous note, with the reader not completely sure if the A.I. has emerged victorious - as it believes it has - or if the magician has fooled its opponent, which the story gives hints that she might have. In an odd way, this story covers much the same ground that The Three-Body Problem does, but in a much truncated and as a result, more perfunctory manner. Further, while the characters in the story are reasonably well written, they aren't particularly fleshed out, serving mostly as expository props for the author to outline and contrast the opposing viewpoints. As a result, while this is an interesting and enjoyable story, it is just short of being a great one.

5. Vanilla by Dirk Flinthart: This story deals with alien assimilation and xenophobia from two angles. The tale is told from the perspective of Kylie Howard, a Somali teen whose family emigrated to Australia, and is about her friendship with the !gontok students from another planet who have taken up residence on Earth. Kylie occupies an odd position in the book - she's not quite regarded as an Australian by her classmates, despite her father's hope that she will blend in with their adopted homeland both her skin color and her father's conservative restrictions upon her behavior mark her as separate. But she is at least human, which makes her different from her !gontok classmates, who are hairy and purple, with joints that don't work the same way human joints work, eat live food, need vitamin supplements to live on Earth, and identify each other mostly by smell. The story moves along mostly predictably, with Kylie, who doesn't fit in with her Australian classmates, making friends with the !gontok students, who also don't fit in with their Australian classmates. There are a few hints of xenophobia from the other students, but the story mostly focuses on the displacement felt by the immigrant children, and how they find common ground in the fact that they are regarded as oddballs by their peers. There is something of a unexpected and biologically improbable twist at the end that changes the nature of the story somewhat, but doesn't alter its fundamental nature. Overall, this is a good story about teenagers who don't fit in with their peers, and the unlikely relationships that can result, but it isn't substantially more than that.

6. N Is for Nanomachine by C.S. MacCath: A story about the death of a people, N Is for Nanomachine confronts the question of what happens when a civilization knows it is going to die and there is simply nothing they can do about it. Set on the planet Vardigen, originally a prison colony populated by humans altered to live on its harsh, volcanic surface, the story details the last days of its inhabitants as nanomachines inexorably change the landscape they depend upon to live into a terraformed Earth-like world suitable for settlement by "organics". Unfortunately, this terraforming will inevitably kill those currently living on Vardigen, condemning them to slow, painful deaths from what amounts to poison and starvation. The Vardigen response is to preserve their art and culture: Opera, sculpture, poetry, and painting and store it so that those who come later will know exactly who they destroyed. Told in the form of a series of voice mails, e-mail messages, and news broadcasts, the story follows one of the hundred couriers sent across the planet to collect artwork from masters of their craft, giving a brief window into how each one reacts to the looming disaster: One with despair, another with anger, another with defiance, and finally, one with love. As the populace faces their extinction, they also react with inchoate rage, with resigned acceptance, with doomed but heroic schemes. The role reversal in the story, with terraforming the planet to make it habitable for normal humans being the harbinger of death, makes it all the more interesting, as does the fact that the rest of humanity seems entirely indifferent to the suffering of the Vardigen denizens, placing the reader into the ranks of the silent villains of the piece. N Is for Nanomachine could have been nihilistic and depressing, but it is instead stirring and almost lovely, as a dying people find meaning amidst the wreckage of their world.

7. The Lesser Evil by Day Al-Mohamed: A horror tale about a Mexican of Indian descent named Arturo and his obsession with saving a young girl named Jenny from her miserable life, this story starts off creepy and then moves from there to being very slightly creepier. This isn't the only problem the story has, but it is the most severe - starting off with a creepy thin man sitting and watching a small child play from afar serves to make the reader uneasy right off the bat, and leave the story without much of anywhere to go from there emotionally. In any event, Jenny's life is beset with problems the foremost of which is a foster mother who is interested in drugs, men, and the money that caring for Jenny brings her, in that order, but also include a drug dealer who supplies Jenny's foster mother with narcotics, and a vaguely defined life-threatening ailment that is only kept at bay by regular treatment. As the story progresses, Arturo worms his way into Jenny's life while stripping away the sources of Jenny's woes. As Arturo does so, it is made clear that living with Arturo is not a good solution for Jenny: Even a lesser evil is still evil, and Arturo is clearly only the lesser evil. Unfortunately, this story is not well-executed in several places. There are a couple of scenes that seem entirely extraneous to the story, and the oft-repeated mantra of "you can't save them all" is never really explained. One minor point that bothered me from a technical perspective is that human flesh is reckoned to taste like pork, but the story continually references it as "steaks". The central problem though, is that the story starts in such a creepy manner that there is no build up of tension, and no real climax. The Lesser Evil does paint a fairly compelling portrait of necessary evil, or at least rationalized evil, but it doesn't create a lot of tension because it starts and ends in mostly the same emotional place.

8. Qasida by Rosaleen Love: A quirky tale about an unlikely seeming Martian trip, Qasida is told from three distinct but interlocked perspectives - Del, a hoarder who figures out how to get stuff from and eventually go to Mars, Bronnie, the declutterer Del leaves behind on Earth, and finally Livia, the Edwardian-era British woman who had been a member of the Imperial expedition to Mars to try to communicate with the natives. In the opening paragraphs we are told that the Mars rover Curiosity has discovered something amazing, and Bronnie thinks she knows what it is. From there the story wanders between Bronnie, Del, and Livia, first showing how Bronnie deals with the junk and debris that has shown up at her house from Mars, then discussing Del's modest explorations, and interspersing both with Livia's account of her experiences trying to communicate with her Martian servant Ylle. The story is built on a moderately interesting idea, but feels oddly incomplete, as if the story was originally longer and then truncated to reduce it to short story length. Or possibly the story was too short, and sections were added to raise its word count - most of the sections told by Bronnie seem to be little more than exposition, and her portion of the plot is simply dropped in the middle of the story never to return. That said, the sections of the narrative that involve Del and Livia are interesting, and the Martians who are obsessed with dust turn out to have a story remarkably full of pathos. Despite the handful of problems it has, Qasida is an interesting story that could have been a really good one if it were either just a little longer or a little shorter.

9. All of Our Past Places by Kat Howard: Telling the story of two childhood friends who bonded over a shared love of maps now having grown to adulthood, All of Our Past Places examines what happens when someone wants to get away from their present life so badly that it becomes a almost dangerous obsession. Aoife is obsessed with maps. She loves them so much that she makes maps by slicing up other maps and creating new maps of nonexistent places. Miren is Aoife's best friend who accompanies her as she journeys to imaginary places via her maps, wandering their neighborhood using Miren's house as their starting point. And then Aoife becomes obsessed with St. Patrick's Purgatory, and one day, Miren discovers that her friend has gone missing and all of the maps she had collected showing St. Patrick's Purgatory as a location have a hole burned in them in the exact spot that it had been shown. Much of the story is told in flashback as Miren rummages through Aoife's map collection, trying to assemble the right combination of map pieces that will bring her friend back. The story is well-written, but a fairly short shrift seems to be given to the motivations of the primary character. Miren states that Aoife wants to escape her life because she comes from an abusive home, but there is no real reason given for her obsession with St. Patrick's Purgatory, and no inkling of what she expected to get out of going there. By the end, all is well, and the entire story is just ambiguous enough that all of the events in it might just be the fantasies of two young women, but they simply aren't fantasies that are engaging enough to compete with the best stories on the ballot.

Note: Ursula Vernon's story Jackalope Wives won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

2014 Nebula Award Winner for Best Short Story: If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky (reviewed in 2014 Hugo Voting - Best Short Story)

2016 Nebula Award Winner for Best Short Story: Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong

2014 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma by Alex Shvartsman

2016 WSFA Small Press Award Winner: Today I Am Paul by Martin L. Shoemaker (reviewed in 2016 WSFA Small Press Award Voting)

List of Nebula Award Winners for Best Short Story

2015 Locus Award Nominees
2015 Nebula Award Nominees
2015 World Fantasy Award Nominees

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