Review - Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer

Short review: Alex Lomax is the only private eye on Mars, and and everyone comes to him with their problems. Unfortunately, these problems involve murder, greed, and treachery and frequently pose serious hazards to Lomax's continued health.

Haiku
When in New Klondike
You can go hunt for fossils
But it's dangerous

Disclosure: I received this book as a Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: Red Planet Blues is a noir-ish science fiction novel clearly inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Set on Mars and featuring Alex Lomax, the red planet's only private investigator, the novel presents a set of interconnected mysteries involving murder, money, and insanity with a healthy dose of alien artifacts and imaginative technology to complicate matters. The novel winds through a series of smaller mysteries, that are threaded together by the facts that almost everyone on Mars lives in one relatively small settlement and Lomax is really the only option people have to turn to when they need a crime solved.

Alex Lomax lives in New Klondike, a domed city on the surface of Mars (which is also the only city on Mars), exiled from Earth for somewhat mysterious reasons that are only revealed near the very end of the book. Without much in the way of technical skills, Lomax plies his trade as a private investigator, filling in for the mostly disinterested local police force. The fictional future world Sawyer created for him lives in is dominated by the technology of identity transfer, a development managed by the "NewYou" corporation, and which allows people to move their consciousness into a new and usually much improved body that is often stronger, more durable, and can be made more attractive, even to the point of changing one's appearance to match that of a well-known celebrity. "Transfers" as individuals who have undergone the process are called, also don't need to eat, sleep, or breathe, can comfortably work unprotected on the surface of Mars, and are exempt from certain life-support related taxes, which quite understandably makes transferring quite popular among the denizens of New Klondike. Despite some legal controls, in short order it becomes relatively obvious that this technology, if abused by someone with nefarious intent, can be used to hide one's identity, and make it very difficult to identify who is actually in a particular body.

It should be noted that the first ten chapters of this novel are a moderately rewritten version of the previously published novella Identity Theft, and they work pretty much as a stand-alone story. This is not to say that the first section is disconnected from the rest of the novel, but if one were to read through to the end of chapter ten and stop, one would have read a reasonably satisfying complete story. The novella (and thus, the novel) opens up like most hard-boiled detective stories do: When a beautiful woman named Cassandra shows up in Lomax's office asking him to find her missing husband. Both Cassandra and her missing husband Joshua are not only transfers, they own the local NewYou franchise. Cassandra's missing husband is located in relatively short order, but that only causes the mystery to deepen and the tale of greed, kidnapping, and murder ensues that takes a couple of interesting twists and turns and hinges on the use (or rather misuse) of identity transfer technology and the attendant difficulties that logically ensue concerning how do you prove who someone actually is, or how one proves which one the "real" version of someone is. By the end of the opening novella, the villains have been foiled, the innocent have been vindicated, and at least some modicum of justice has been served.

Even though the remaining plot of the novel is something of a "fix-up", Sawyer is a skillful storyteller, which means that he is able to pick up the slender threads left by these opening chapters and build the rest of the novel upon them to create a coherent whole. The mystery that runs through every section of the book concerns the Alpha Deposit, a legendary find that kicked off the Great Martian Fossil Rush as hungry fortune seekers flocked to the planet hoping to find alien fossils they could ship to collectors back on Earth for huge profits. The location of the Alpha Deposit, and the fate of Weingarten and O'Reilly - the two explorers who found it - is unknown, and, given the fact that anyone who could answer these unknowns would find themselves immensely wealthy, there is keen interest in being the person who can answer them. There is a further mystery involving a notorious passenger ship and the horrors that took place upon it that wraps into the narrative, adding still more intrigue to the story. Everything is told in Sawyer's extremely readable style, and the text of the entire book just flows smoothly. I have always found Sawyer's prose to be extremely enjoyable and capable of being consumed at a rapid clip, and this book is no exception.

There are only a couple of minor flaws to Red Planet Blues. The first concerns the identity transfer technology, which is described as being a well-established technology that has been in use for decades and so well-entrenched in society that only adherents to fringe religious groups object to its use. Despite this, the inhabitants in the story seem to be frequently surprised or unprepared for the realities of dealing with "transfers". For example, Lomax carries a handgun, which is pretty much useless against transfers due to their incredibly durable artificial bodies, but he seems to act like the weapon should serve as protection in such cases, even while simultaneously pointing out that it won't be. Many of the twists in the story turn on people being caught off-guard by what should be pretty routine ways of exploiting transfer technology, and so on. One is also left wondering why everyone who can doesn't simply transfer - as presented in the book, transferring makes one younger, stronger, and essentially immortal. Given the fact that everyone who isn't regarded as a crackpot holds the opinion that identity transfer is a safe and proven process, there doesn't really seem to be a reason for anyone to not do it.

The second flaw concerns the women in the book. Pretty much everyone who shows up in the story gets involved in the deadly hunt for the Alpha Deposit from geologists to down-on-their-luck thugs, to housewives to writers in residence to police officers, each of whom plays a part. While the men are described as coming in all shapes and sizes, almost all of the women are described as various stripes of beautiful with the one notable exception being a woman who is described as looking like an ape - if a woman isn't sexy, apparently the only other option is for her to look simian. Lomax spends his internal monologue leering at and salivating over these women no matter what circumstances he encounters them under, which serves to make him seem kind of sleazy and unlikable.. Further, this collection of women seem to find Alex improbably attractive, even the ones who would seem to have no real reason to. To a certain extent, this is probably an effort to mimic the noir detective stories that inspired Red Planet Blues, after all, beautiful women who fall for hard-boiled detectives are kind of a staple of such novels. The problem is, the trope sticks out like a sore thumb when imported into this novel, and doesn't really do much other than give the story some uncomfortably creepy segments.

Despite these small missteps, Red Planet Blues is a good science fiction detective story. Lomax is a flawed but ultimately engaging and enjoyable character who inhabits a world that is both interesting and plausible. The mysteries that he is confronted with are just cryptic enough to keep the reader guessing but still sufficiently well-laid out that it feels like the author is playing fair. In the end, anyone looking for something akin to The Maltese Falcon on Mars is likely to come away from this book feeling like they got what they came for. If a noir-era mystery in a science fiction setting sounds like something you would enjoy, this is pretty much exactly what you need to scratch that itch.

2006 Hugo Award Finalists
2006 Hugo Award Longlist
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Robert J. Sawyer     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

2018 Nebula Award Nominees

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Comments: The Nebula Awards are once again upon us, and once again, the members of SFWA have selected an array of novels, stories and dramatic presentations that runs the gamut of speculative fiction works. Granted, the list is a bit heavy on stories set during fictionalized history, and the short fiction list includes a lot of stories from Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com, but that's the topics that have engendered the best writing and where a lot of the good short fiction is getting published these days.

One thing that is interesting is that nominees for the Ray Bradbury Award don't include any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that were released last year, and all three of those movies - Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thor: Ragnarok - were all among the better Marvel movies that have come out in the series. It is also interesting that The Expanse, The Handmaid's Tale, The Defenders, The Punisher, Stranger Things, American Gods, and several other quite excellent episodic series were completely overlooked as well. On the one hand, this is a good problem as there is no way that all of these excellent speculative fiction shows could have been nominated. On the other hand, it is kind of puzzling that all of these other potential nominees were passed over in favor of some of the actual nominees in the category that were not really as good. Oh well, no award is perfect. This one did pretty well this year even so.

Best Novel

Winner:
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

Other Nominees:
Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
Jade City by Fonda Lee
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss

Best Novella

Winner:

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Other Nominees:
And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker
Barry’s Deal by Lawrence M. Schoen
The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

Best Novelette

Winner:

A Human Stain by Kelly Robson

Other Nominees:
Dirty Old Town by Richard Bowes
A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time by K.M. Szpara
Weaponized Math by Jonathan P. Brazee
Wind Will Rove by Sarah Pinsker

Best Short Story

Winner:

Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience^TM by Rebecca Roanhorse

Other Nominees:
Carnival Nine by Caroline M. Yoachim
Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand by Fran Wilde
Fandom for Robots by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard) by Matthew Kressel
Utopia, LOL? by Jamie Wahls

Ray Bradbury Award

Winner:

Get Out

Other Nominees:
The Good Place: Michael’s Gambit
Logan
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Wonder Woman

Andre Norton Award

Winner:

The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller

Other Nominees:
Exo by Fonda Lee
Weave a Circle Round by Kari Maaren
Want by Cindy Pon

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

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Review - Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Short review: Tasked with putting down a heretical rebellion within the Hexarchate that has caused calendrical rot, Kel Cheris convinces her superiors to revive the insane dead General Jedao. If that sounds kind of incomprehensible to you, be warned that reading the book only makes it a little bit clearer.

Haiku
Calendrical math
Makes exotic things happen
Immortality

Full review: Ninefox Gambit is a work of military science fiction in which the science fiction is almost incomprehensible, and the military actions are only slightly less so. That said, it is a beautiful book that is not really hampered by the weirdly exotic world that it drops the reader into, and this weirdness is handled so well that by the end, it almost feels natural. Despite the alien strangeness of the setting, the story told in the book is fundamentally almost ordinary, and that manages to root the book in such a way that even with exotic calendar based math warping reality, there is enough that is familiar to hold onto that the story doesn't dissolve into impenetrability. One of the fine lines that science fiction authors have to walk is the balance between presenting a world in which technology and culture are different enough from ours that it feels at least somewhat alien, but not so different that the fictional reality has ranged so far from the familiar that it is effectively unintelligible for the reader. In Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee flirts with this line, standing right at the border where the setting would become entirely baffling, and occasionally stepping across for just a little bit, but for the most part remaining just shy of mystifying.

The central conceit of the novel is a brand of mathematics exists called "calendrical math", and by using it one can determine which collection of variables need to be controlled in order to change the way physics works, allowing for a variety of "exotic" technologies that are dependent upon this shared belief system. The government under which the various characters in the book live is the "Hexarchate" and it enforces a rigid calendrical orthodoxy of festivals, remembrances, and torture sessions to power the technologies that underpin the authority of the ruling Hexarchs. Deviations from the calendrical observances are treated as heresies and ruthlessly stamped out. Technology that does not depend upon calendrical math is called "invariant" technology, and is represented as generally being less effective than the calendrically powered "exotic" technologies - and with one notable exception none of the "invariant" technologies are ever really described. The "exotic" technologies are only described in slightly more detail than that: We get names like "Amputation Gun", and "Threshold Winnower", and "Carrion Gun", and a couple of dozen descriptions of various battle formations, but with the exception of the obvious effects some of them have, the technology is never really given any substantial definition.

Some have said that Ninefox Gambit is about calendrical math, but that does not seem to be entirely accurate. There are lots of references to calendrical math in the book, with discussions of people doing computations and the effects of maintaining or not maintaining the calendar, but there is no actual math in the book. To a certain extent this is to be expected - after all, if Lee knew how to do calculations that would reshape the laws of physics, he would be publishing ground-breaking academic papers, not writing fiction. On the other hand, when science fiction authors introduce heretofore unknown technologies into their stories, they usually try to give the reader some general idea of the parameters under which those technologies operate. Calendrical math, however, seems to have no limitation at all, which I suppose might be the point, because once you posit a particular technology that can alter the very fundamental elements of reality, all bets would seem to be off. This gives the book a pervasive sense of unreality, as the central conflict involves putting down a heretical faction that has cropped up and instituted their own calendar with an associated competing set of technologies. Since what is possible with calendrical math is never really explained, the reader really has no grounding in what is possible in this conflict, and as a result, must be content with simply gliding along as the various interested parties explain what is happening as it happens and satisfied with never really understanding exactly why.

One thing that is certain is that the political structure that makes up the Hexarchate are both instrumental to and supported by the maintenance of the orthodox calendrical arrangements. The nation is divided into six factions, each with a defined role within society. The Kel are the soldiers, and are imbued with "formation instinct", which causes them to reflexively follow orders. The Shuos are spies, assassins, and information brokers. The Nirai are mathematicians and creators of the exotic technologies that flow from the calendrical math used by the Hexarchate. The Rahal are the magistrates and judges, charged with enforcing civil order. And so on. Each faction has its place in society, and each member of a faction has a defined role to play. The incomprehensibility of the technology is almost entirely irrelevant to the book. While it is weird to read a book that is basically military science fiction in which none of the actions taken by the various forces involved make any sense because the technology they are using relied upon odd patterns of behavior and geometrical configurations that are never given any more detail than a fanciful name, the simple fact is that all of this exotic technology is just a way to explain the existence of a society that is so rigid that the deadliest heresy is allowing people to have choices.

The core story involves Captain Kel Cheris, a member of the Kel faction of the Hexarchate, whose use of unorthodox formations in response to having heretical weapons deployed against her unit has called attention to herself, leading to the Shuos Hexarch selecting her for a team to evaluate the best way to suppress a heresy that is causing calendrical rot at the heart of one of the most important regions of the Hexarchate in the key position of the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Cheris' proposal is to revive the dead and insane Shuos General Jedao and have him plan the attack that will allow the Hexarchate to retake the fortress intact and reimpose the proper calendrical order. This is a daring and dangerous idea: Daring because when he was alive, Jedao never lost a battle, and dangerous because in his final engagement he killed off the enemy and then turned on his own troops, slaughtering them to a man. The part of the plan that Cheris was not really prepared for is that to revive Jedao, he has to be attached to someone living, and that someone turns out to be her, creating what amounts to private a dialogue between the long-dead General and the living Captain (who is pretty quickly breveted to General for the operation). One might think that such an intimate relationship would engender candor, but like pretty much everyone else in the Hexarchate, Jedao plays his cards extremely close to the chest, even with someone who is literally the only person who can hear him. One problem with books in which intrigue is a major part of the plot is that the author runs the risk of withholding too much information from the reader because the characters would withhold information from one another, resulting in a story in which, from the perspective of the reader, things seem to happen almost at random. Ninefox Gambit doesn't quite sink to that level, but it comes close, and when this is combined with the almost inscrutable nature of calendrical math, the events in the book frequently seem almost haphazard.

For all of the exotic trappings, the story itself is fairly ordinary, although it does have some interesting twists: Rebels rise up against what appears to be a fairly oppressively harsh regime, forces are sent to bring the heretics to heel, various players have their own personal agendas they are trying to advance, and there are a couple of betrayals and reversals to spice things up. The heresy at the center of the story is the revival of the Liozh, a seventh faction that used to exist when the Hexarchate was the Heptarchate before they experimented with democracy and the calendar was revised to remove them. It seems notable that both the Liozh heresy and the creation of Kel formation instinct didn't take place until after Jedao had died the first time, but like all things in this book with its ever shifting reality, this is only an impression and there isn't really anything concrete to base that upon. The one somewhat unique question that seems to loom large in the background, but which is only hinted at, is whether it is possible to have anything resembling what we would recognize as a free society in a world in which calendrical mathematics exists. One can only hope this will be addressed in a future installment of the series.

Ninefox Gambit is a fascinating, confusing, and ultimately frustrating book. In it, Lee posits a strange alien society based upon a technology that is fairly off-the-wall and uses this setting to tell a story that feels oddly comfortable. While Lee never quite reaches the point where the story dissolves into complete chaos, the combination of bizarre technology, an alien society that underpins that technology, and pervasive conspiratorial machinations definitely serves to bring it to the brink of anarchy. There is a lot to love in this book, but there is also a lot that seems to simply whirl about without much rhyme or reason. This seems like a book that people either find interesting, or find absolutely intolerable. The real difficulty is figuring out which kind of person one is, and there's really no way to do that short of trying to read the book. That said, I am the sort of person who found it interesting, and as a result, I think it is definitely worth picking up.

2016 Locus Award Winner for Best First Novel: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

2018 Locus Award Winner for Best First Novel: TBD

List of Locus Award Winners for Best First Novel

2017 Clarke Award Nominees
2017 Hugo Award Finalists
2017 Locus Award Nominees
2017 Nebula Award Nominees

Yoon Ha Lee     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Short review: A convoluted story sends Jyn Erso to Scarif with a band of ruffians where they set about stealing the plans for the Death Star and kick off the plot of the original Star Wars movie from 1977.

Haiku
Her father taken
A secret design flaw
Desperate mission

Full review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is the eighth movie set in the Star Wars universe, but the first that is not directly tied to the "Skywalker Saga". The announced intent is, for the foreseeable future, to alternate between additional "Saga" movies - such as 2015's The Force Awakens and the upcoming The Last Jedi, scheduled to be released in December of 2017 - and "anthology" movies featuring ancillary stories that are set in the Star Wars universe, but have plots that are related but not integral to the ongoing "Saga" such as Rogue One and the upcoming "young Han Solo" movie.

Rogue One is about the rebels who stole the plans for the first Death Star, whose actions set up the plot of the very first Star Wars movie. This movie is not about the "many Bothans" who died in the service of the Rebel Alliance, because those Bothans died recovering intelligence about the security surrounding the late stages of the construction of the second Death Star, which led to the events the took place in The Return of Jedi. One thing that is somewhat sad is that the existence of Rogue One would seem to make it less likely that there will ever actually be a movie about those Bothans, as having two movies about a desperate attempt to steal classified military plans would seem to be redundant. On the other hand, the Star Wars series includes three movies that are essentially all variations of a desperate effort to destroy a giant planet-destroying super-weapon built by the forces of evil, so maybe having a redundant plot isn't really all that big of an obstacle.

Given that this is a new style of movie for the Star Wars franchise, the first question one must ask is, does this new format work? And the answer is a qualified yes. The story of how the rebels stole the Death Star plans is, to a certain extent, a predictable one: The audience knows when they are walking into the theater that at the end of the movie, someone will be handing the Death Star plans to Princess Leia, who will then jet away to be caught in the skies over Tattooine at the beginning of A New Hope. On the other hand, the ending of a story is just that - the ending, and the important part is how one gets there. Unfortunately, for much of its run time, Rogue One seems to be something of a disjointed mess. It is fairly apparent that the movie was substantially rewritten at some point during the filming process, and what is on the screen frequently seems to be material that was cut from some other, possibly more coherent movie and then stuck together to make a new story. Everything comes together in the final section of the movie, which is something like a combination of the Dirty Dozen and Midway, and that makes up for the somewhat scattershot nature of what goes before, but there is still a lot of this movie that feels somewhat off-kilter.

The story of Rogue One is, more or less, the story of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the daughter of the scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) and his wife Lyra Erso. In the opening scenes of the movie, Lyra is killed and Galen is abducted by Imperial forces under the command of Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). Jyn hides from Krennic's death troopers and is rescued by the Rebel leader Saw Guerrera (Forest Whitaker). The movie jumps forward in time by about a decade and a half and rebel spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) has learned that an imperial pilot has defected to Guerrera with a secret message about the doomsday weapon that the Empire is building. The trouble is, in the intervening years, Saw has become an "extremist" and the faction he leads has broken off from the rest of the Rebel Alliance.

The Rebel Alliance decides to locate Jyn, being held in Imperial custody for a variety of crimes, and breaks her out with the hope that she will be able to introduce them to her former benefactor. After some twists and turns in the Holy City on the moon Jedha that introduce the characters of the droid K-2S0 (Alan Tudyk), Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang), Jyn gains entry to Guerrera's hideout and hears the message, which turns out to be from her father and reveals that he has been forced to help construct the Death Star but that he secretly planted a flaw in it that can be revealed by a careful study of its plans. Meanwhile, Grand Moff Tarkin demands a test of the freshly completed Death Star's capabilities and destroys the Holy City, apparently killing Saw and most of his partisans in the process. Jyn, Cassion, Chirrut, Baze, and the imperial pilot (named Bohdi Rook and played by Riz Ahmed) all escape.

It is in these sections of the movie that the somewhat haphazard structure of the film is most apparent. despite being played by Forest Whitaker, Saw Guererra is only in a handful of scenes, and doesn't do much of anything in any of them. For the most part, Guerrera's role in the movie is to hold the defector Bohdi and show Jyn a hologram message from her father. Not only does this seem like a waste of the talents of an actor like Whitaker, but there are indications that at one point the role of Saw Guerrera was much more prominent in the story - with his numerous cybernetic parts and frequent need for an air mask, he seems like a thematic counterpart to Darth Vader, someone becoming more machine than man in service of the Rebellion just as Vader did in the service of the Empire. Perhaps Guererra was intended as metacommentary upon the price one might pay for having too much devotion to a cause, but we will never know. We are told that he is an "extremist", but there's never any demonstration of what that might mean. We see men in his service attacking a storm trooper patrol in the Holy City on Jedha, but that seems like awfully weak tea as far as "extremism" goes. I suppose his methods of interrogating Bohdi are a bit ruthless, but that also seems like a pretty limited place to hang the label of "extremist" upon him.

Further, the story that Guerrera was part of the Rebel Alliance until recently, and only left due to disputes over tactics leads to another question: Why doesn't anyone in the current Rebel Alliance know Jyn Erso? According to Guerrera, she was his best soldier until he abandoned her when she was sixteen to protect her from rumors among his other followers. That can't have been more than ten years before the events of Rogue One, so the idea that Jyn never worked with anyone from any other part of the Rebel Alliance seems somewhat implausible, especially given that Cassian says he has been fighting the Empire since he was six. But when they pick her up, the Rebel Alliance acts like they have never had contact with her before. To a certain extent, they act like they had never heard of her before they brought her in when Guerrera became important to the cause again. There are other oddities as well: Cassian meets a contact in the Holy City, but then he and Jyn actually connect with Guerrera's group in the middle of a firefight, and then they are abducted. Who was the contact? What was the actual plan? Was there a plan? Guerrera uses an alien beast to interrogate Bodhi, using a method that is supposed to damage the mind of the subject. Later, when Jyn and Cassian find Bohdi, he seems like a man with a broken mind, gibbering almost incoherently in his cell. A few scenes later, when the time comes to break out and escape from the onrushing wave of destruction caused by the Death Star, Bohdi seems to be perfectly fine. How he was able to recover so quickly is never explained. Time and again, it feels like scenes were reordered, removed, or realigned, leaving the viewer feeling like there is something missing from these parts of the story. On can only surmise that the wrinkles that don't add up are held over artifacts from the original version of the story that were left in because it would have been too difficult to reshoot the scenes that have them.

The obvious slicing and dicing of the intrigue and adventure in the early parts of the movie would be forgivable is one were able to think that it was done simply to try to cram as much of that as possible into the story, but instead the movie keeps shifting away from Jyn, Cassian, K-2SO and the rest of the intrepid rebels to focus on what can only be described as the deadly dull office politics of the Imperial Officer class. In large part, all these scenes really do is provide a really long-winded answer for the question "How did Grand Moff Tarkin become the commander of the Death Star", which is a question that pretty much no one actually asked to be answered. These scenes have the additional downside of retroactively making Tarkin a less imposing villain in A New Hope, as he comes off as a petty backstabber whose only real skill is leeching off of the accomplishments of others, and makes Krennic look like a cloddish buffoon in this movie. Every time the story cuts away from the heroes to these boardroom shenanigans, any momentum the movie has built up grinds to a screeching halt as we watch CGI Peter Cushing outmaneuver Krennic and take over the Empire's new superweapon.

This is probably the juncture to discuss the two CGI characters that everyone noticed in the movie: Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia. There was a third - K-2SO - but no one thought of the droid as being a particularly remarkable example of CGI work. As a CGI character, young Princess Leia isn't very convincing, and has kind of a plastic look about her. She's only on screen for a few seconds, and only has one line to deliver, so this isn't that big of a deal. Tarkin, on the other hand, is integral to the whole Imperial Officer backstabbing politics story, and so has to carry a fair amount of narrative weight. For the most part, the CGI effects recreating the deceased Peter Cushing for the big screen are fine, but the end result is pretty obviously not Peter Cushing. The CGI Cushing looks like the late actor, but Cushing was an incredibly skilled and subtle actor, capable of conveying enormous amounts of meaning with a slightly arched eyebrow or the tiniest curl of a lip and, well, the CGI Cushing just doesn't have those skills. The result is a performance by a creation that pretty much looks like Cushing, but is strangely flat and lifeless when compared to the actual actor.

After the group of would-be rebels escape from Jedha, they make their way to Eadu, which is the location of the Imperial research station where Galen Erso is stationed. The important thing about this excursion is that essentially nothing of importance to the story takes place on Eadu. Jyn thinks that the group has gone to Eadu to rescue her father, Cassian has orders to kill Galen, and everyone else is basically just along for the ride. Krennic shows up looking for the identity of the leaker who sent Bohdi Rook to Saw Guerrera and kills the entire staff of engineers except for Galen and then a squadron of Rebel fighters show up and bomb the whole base, killing Galen just in time for him to die in Jyn's arms. After a whole lot of meaningless activity, everyone leaves the planet and heads back to Dantooine to have a talk with all of the leaders of the Rebel Alliance. Once again, this entire sequence feels like it was stitched together out of scenes from another, more coherent story in which something notable happened on Eadu. As it is, this entire section of the movie could have simply been left out and there would have been almost nothing lost.

What saves Rogue One, in the end, are the characters and the final third of the movie. And by "the characters", I mostly mean K-2SO, Chirrut Imwe, and Baze Malbus. Krennic is a standard issue movie villain, backed by standard issue movie villain henchmen, with nothing that makes him seem particularly unique or even all that interesting. Jyn Erso is perfectly serviceable as a lead, made somewhat more interesting due to the fact that she is the female lead of an action movie, but for the most part she is a fairly standard character - a surly, disaffected rogue who finally finds something to believe in and ends up leading the way. Cassian is also pretty much a standard issue character as well, with nothing in particular that really makes him stand out from any number of other action movie heroes. K-2SO, on the other hand, is almost the platonic ideal of the anti-C-3PO. Snarky and rude where C-3PO is endlessly obsequious, competent and capable where C-3PO is mostly useless, and willing to be ruthless when needed, K-2SO is a droid unlike any seen before in the Star Wars universe, and provides a welcome counterpoint to the rest of the squad. One repeated joke has K-2SO bringing up the odds of something happening, but unlike C-3PO, who would give precise figures as calculated by R2-D2, K-2SO is almost always vague with his estimates, and usually gets cut off by those around him, who simply don't appreciate his wisdom.

The real highlight is Chirrut Imwe, the blind former guardian of the Jedi temple on Jedha. What makes Chirrut so interesting is not the fact that he is blind, or the fact that he is a practitioner of a Jedi-like martial art, although his fight sequences do raise the eternal question of what the Imperial stormtrooper armor is for, as Chirrut is able to knock stormtroopers senseless with nothing but a stick. No, what makes Chirrut interesting is that he is the first character who actually makes one believe in the Force as a religious belief. In previous movies the Jedi have used the Force, but for them it always seems like just a tool. Chirrut, on the other hand, believes in the Force in a way that no other character really has. Despite his religious leanings, Chirrut is also frequently hilarious, with insightful and humorous comments, such as his incredulity at Guererra's men placing a hood over his head when he is captured along with Jyn, Cassion, and Baze, "Are you kidding? I'm blind!" Chirrut's constant companion Baze is interesting by extension, mostly because he clearly doesn't share Chirrut's deep-seated religious beliefs, and yet the two are obviously extremely close. This sort of odd couple pairing isn't particularly original, but in this instance putting the idealistic Chirrut and the cynical Baze together simply works.

After kind of limping through the first two-thirds of the movie, Rogue One finally finds its feet once the heroes make their way to the Imperial records facility on Scarife to actually steal the Death Star schematics. This sequence, which takes up all of the rest of the movie, pretty much makes up for all of the deficiencies that may have gone before as the movie turns into a desperate fight against impossible odds. Jyn and her team of roguish volunteers try to infiltrate the Imperial base while also taking on a garrison of storm troopers and Imperial walkers, while the Rebel fleet valiantly tries to punch a hole in the planetary shield above them. The only notable weakness of this section is that it makes apparent that the movie has been suffering somewhat from Smurfette syndrome, as Jyn is the only woman in a strike team comprised of grungy dudes and at least one alien. This is offset somewhat by the inclusion of a handful of female fighter pilots in the space battle (and a few flying close air support in the land battle), but other than Jyn and these pilots, the movie is pretty short on substantial roles for women, which is something of a shame as the movie's cast is interestingly diverse in other ways. In any event, the battle plays out about as one would expect, which should be entirely unsurprising given that the movie is a prequel and the audience presumably already knew that the Death Star plans would end up in Princess Leia's hands. There is a lot of action, and all of the main characters have their heroic moment to shine. The space battle is exciting, with the inclusion of some references to the original Star Wars movie series that are just subtle enough to be noticeable without calling too much attention to themselves. Despite being predictable, then ending of the movie manages to remain thrilling and tense, with the final resolution being both a completely satisfying close to this story and the perfect launching point for A New Hope.

In the end, Rogue One is a flawed but still quite enjoyable installment in the Star Wars franchise. The somewhat disjointed nature of the plot in the first two-thirds of the movie is offset by the engaging characters and the climatic battle that finishes the movie. The only real downside to this movie is that, for rather obvious reasons, most of the characters who appear in it really can't be revisited in the future - it would have for example, been interesting to see a movie that told Saw Guerrera's story and the sequence of events that drove him from being a member of the Rebel Alliance to being the leader of an extremist splinter group. Even so, this movie is a good addition to the original Star Wars story, illustrating the high price extracted from the Rebels in their struggle against the Empire, and depicting the world of the "grunt" level soldiers in the fight. Ultimately, Rogue One contains everything that a Star Wars fan is likely to want in a movie plus some additional grit and self-sacrificing heroics that set it apart from the other installments and make it unique in the franchise.

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Review - The Jewel and Her Lapidary by Fran Wilde

Short review: The Jeweled Kingdom is betrayed and Sima and Lin must salvage what they can from the shards.

Haiku
Kingdom of jewels
Betrayed by lapidary
Only shards remain

Full review: The Jewel and Her Lapidary is a story about transitions - about that space when one story is ending, and new stories are just about to begin. It is also a story about duty, loyalty, and sacrifice, and how sometimes those aren't enough to save the day. Taking place at the death of one kingdom and the genesis of a new order, the story occupies that netherworld that is often lost to history, a fact that is highlighted by the framing device used to tell it. Despite this tale's short length, Wilde manages to convey a complex fantasy world with an unusual and deadly system of magic and a social order that has arisen to deal with it while also infusing the characters with a weight and presence that one usually only finds in longer works.

The story of The Jewel and Her Lapidary is told in two modes, and alternates between them. The conventional aspect of the story is a straightforward fantasy that starts in the immediate aftermath of an act of betrayal that resulted in the murder of pretty much every member of the Jewel Court save for the Lapidary Lin and her Jewel, the Princess Sima. The architect of this treason is Lin's own father, formerly the Lapidary Aba who was bound to the King of the Jewel Court and who had embarked upon a plan born of insanity to overthrow the extant order and allow the armies of the neighboring Western Mountains under their warlord Remir to invade, apparently intending to offer his daughter and the princess as bargaining chips to gain something. The key here is that the plan is in fact born of insanity, and that insanity is part and parcel of the fantastical element that underpins the entire story - the existence of people called "Lapidaries" who can hear and use the powers of magical gemstones. The trouble is, the gems have a will of their own, and that will is apparently often inimical to humanity and drives these Jewels mad. The Lapidaries are bound to the service of people called Jewels, constrained by various oaths to prevent the gems from dominating their minds. Some gems are more powerful and sought after such as the Star Cabochon, while others are less impressive. Although not explicitly stated, the story implies that the more powerful a gem is, the more dangerous it is to the user.

This portion of the story is told by rotating between the viewpoints of Lin and Sima, focusing on one and then the other as they struggle to salvage at least something out of the shards of their shattered kingdom. For her part Lin must face the fact that it was her father who forsook his oaths and betrayed their kingdom, and the fact that she has to break her own oaths of duty in order to fulfill her promise of service to Sima. On her side of the ledger, Sima is faced with the task of navigating an impossible situation to save her people as best she can even though she was intentionally never prepared for politics. There is an almost claustrophobic element to this portion of the story, as most of it takes place within the confines of the Jeweled Palace, and the freedom of movement, and consequently freedom of action, that both Lin and Sima have gets progressively more constrained as the story goes on. As I said at the outset, this is a story about one story ending, and Lin and Sima must face this reality as it crashes into them as all of their options are closed off one by one, leaving them with no good choices, and only one that can even be described as not so bad. Wilde manages this story expertly, giving a sense of desperation and mounting terror and then offering just the smallest glimmer of hope underneath.

The other mode by which this story is told is a travelogue, written some undefined (but apparently quite lengthy) time after the events of the more conventionally told portion. In these sections, the reader is given tips on traveling to the Jeweled Valley, now a tourist destination with picturesque scenery, lovely walking trails, notable sites of interest, and quaint local crafts. These little saccharine snippets of guidebook information are set against the gritty and brutal reality of the other sections, and while they get something akin to the broad strokes of the history correct, they are devoid of crucial details - as if the reality of the society and dying struggles of the Jeweled Court have been entirely forgotten either intentionally or by accident. While the conventionally told portion is a well-told fantasy tale, what truly elevates this story is the meta-commentary provided by the travelogue sections highlights just how ephemeral the importance given to the tribulations faced by Lin and Sima actually was, and how critical events of the past can be obscured by the passage of time. Passages in which the relationship between a Jewel and their Lapidary are casually dismissed as "a conflation of multiple roles" show this decay with a stark harshness contained within the tranquil text of the travel guide. It is this casual disregard couched in almost soporific terms that is so very jarring, and makes it all the more brutal.

At first glance, The Jewel and Her Lapidary might seem like an ordinary, if well-written, little fantasy interlude. Once one starts the scratch the deceptively simple surface, however, one finds interlocking layer after layer of depth. Although Lin and Sima are the only two characters in the story who really feel fully fleshed out, their relationship is so intimately portrayed that it makes up for the fact that everyone else in the drama is essentially a one-note song. The fantastical magic set-up is intriguing, although it is not more than sketched out in outline form, but the characters sell the fact that the stakes surrounding it are incredibly high. Finally, the travel guide snippets worked into the interstitial areas of the story add a tone of almost bitter melancholy to the whole. All of these elements add together to make a beautiful novelette that has just enough to it to leave the reader feeling like they got a complete story, but still wanting more.

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Review - Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

Short review: Nancy went to a twilight realm of the dead and found her home. Then she came back to our world and has to deal with being exiled from the only place that she ever fit in.

Haiku
People who don't fit
Find other worlds where they do
Sometimes they come back.

Full review: The literary world is replete with stories about precocious or misunderstood children who stumble upon a gateway to another world and find themselves in a fantasy realm of wonder and mystery. Once there, these children have adventures in which they discover their true selves, learn life lessons, and become who they were meant to be. At the end of these stories, those children return home with their lives utterly changed, presumably for the better. Every Heart a Doorway proceeds to ask the next question: Then what happens?

Nancy is one such child. After a lifetime of not fitting in, she journeyed to a land of the dead filled with shades and pomegranate seeds in which she learned to be still like a statue at the behest of that cold and silent land's rulers. In this strange and cold world, Nancy finally felt like she belonged - like she had found her true home, but when she asked to stay forever, her Lord told her to return to Earth to be sure, and now she doesn't know the way back into the realm of the dead. Unable to understand their now somewhat creepy child, Nancy's parents send her to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in the hopes that she might be "fixed" and become normal like all the other children they know. But Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children is not dedicated to "fixing" the children who enter its doors, but is rather intended as a place of refuge and understanding that attempts to allow children who have returned from a journey to another world to cope with their loss. As is made clear in the story, the children who have made the trip through a door or other portal into a different world that is made up of cotton candy or skeletons or faerie nobility are lost when they finally return. Having gotten a taste of how it feels to be "home" in their new world, these children no longer fit into ours even to the uncomfortable extent that they ever did in the first place.

Fundamentally, Every Heart a Doorway is about misfits - the children in the book found their doorways to other worlds because they didn't quite fit into our own. It was only in these other worlds that these children felt truly loved and accepted, and now that they have returned to our world they find themselves once again in a place where they are the square peg for a round hole. In a sense, Eleanor West's institution attempts to provide a substitute home for these misfits, giving them a place of refuge and safety. In part, this is the purpose of the labels that are used for the various worlds that the children had returned from: Some children went to a "Nonsense" world, others to a "Logic" world, or to a world of "Wickedness" or "Virtue" or a world on some other part of the axis constructed to try to make sense of the mystical journeys they had returned from. By labeling these worlds and organizing them into a comprehensive structure, the instructors at Eleanor's Home for Wayward Children are showing their charges that they are not alone - that there are others who shared similar experiences, and that they can belong, even if it is little more than a pale reflection of the belonging they felt when they journeyed off to the world in which they fit perfectly.

In that vein, it seems that it is no accident that so many of the students at Eleanor's Home for Wayward Children are misfits in other ways than their shared otherworldly travels. The majority of the students are girls, and we are told that this is because girls can go unnoticed by those closest to them, whereas a boy who wandered would, in most cases, result in a search party being sent to recover him. Girls, it seems, simply don't really fit the society of our world. Further, several of the students are out of the ordinary in other ways: Nancy is asexual, Kade is transgender, other students are gay, and so on. The sexualities and gender identities of the students mark them as being "different" in our world, and the acceptance they generally find in Eleanor West's care is the counter for the rejection they experience elsewhere. These elements are, in some cases, even what got these students ejected from their otherworlds - Kade, for example, was tossed out of the fairyland he had found his place in when the inhabitants discovered that he was a transgender boy.

The real point, it seems, is that there is no safe place in the world, even if one does belong there. As Eleanor herself notes, many of the worlds the various children found their place in would be horrific nightmare realms for many others, and in some cases, even when a child fits into an otherworld, it is still a horrible place. Christopher went to a world of walking skeletons. Jack and Jill went to a world of gloomy moors where Jack apprenticed with a mad scientist and Jill served an inhuman monster. Other children went to worlds where they romanced insects, or cavorted with capricious fairies, or some other terrifying scenario. The point is that even though they belonged to these worlds, none of them were safe, not even the Nonsense worlds full of candy cane trees and cotton candy clouds.

After a fair amount of world-building, the story winds its way to the plot, which is an almost desultory murder mystery involving the students at the Home for Wayward Children. When one student turns up dead and mutilated, shock waves run through the school, and suspicion falls upon those students who went to some of the less than cheerful worlds, including the newcomer Nancy. When a second student turns up dead and also mutilated, the paranoia goes through the roof. On the one hand, these murders reinforce the notion that there are no safe places, but on the other, the resolution of the mystery feels so perfunctory that it lacks any real emotional punch. After the brilliance of the world-building and the interesting characters who populate it, the murder mystery plot is somewhat disappointing.

Aside from the minor misstep of the murder mystery, Every Heart a Doorway is a stunning and evocative story. Set in a world in which the exiles from the other, in some ways better, worlds find themselves, the story paints a starkly beautiful picture, and gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of people who never thought they would fit in who found their perfect place, and now must face the harsh reality that the sense of belonging that they discovered is now gone, and may not ever return. The story even includes an almost gratuitous but ultimately pitch-perfect swipe at C.S. Lewis that sets the tone in a splendid manner. This story is a love-letter to everyone who ever felt left out, who ever felt like this wasn't the right world for them to be living in, or who ever yearned to be allowed to be their authentic self, but it should be read by everyone.

2016 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novella: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

2017 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novella: TBD

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2017 Nebula Award Nominees

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Comments: The 2017 Nebula Awards experienced a minor hiccup when SFWA President Cat Rambo's story Red in Tooth and Cog was nominated in the Best Novelette category despite being too short of a story to qualify for that category. The story could have been reassigned to the Best Short Story category, as it had sufficient votes to place in that category, but that would have eliminated the three stories that had finished in a tie for the last spot in that category. Instead, Rambo graciously elected to remove her story from consideration for the award, allowing both the replacement novelette The Orangery by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam and the three nominated short stories to keep their places on the ballot.

On another note, this list of nominees serves to remind me of just how far behind I am on my reading this year. Usually, when the Nebula nominees are announced, I have already read a couple of the nominated novels and a smattering of the short fiction. This year, the only things on the ballot that I have consumed have been three of the Ray Bradbury Award nominees. I own copies of several of the nominated works, I just haven't read them yet. I really need to rectify this situation soon.

Best Novel

Winner:
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Other Nominees:
Borderline by Mishell Baker
Everfair by Nisi Shawl
The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Best Novella

Winner:

Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

Other Nominees:
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson
The Liar by John P. Murphy
Runtime by S.B. Divya
A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

Best Novelette

Winner:

The Long Fall Up by William Ledbetter

Other Nominees:

Blood Grains Speak Through Memories by Jason Sanford

The Jewel and Her Lapidary by Fran Wilde
The Orangery by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
Red in Tooth and Cog by Cat Rambo [ineligible in this category, withdrawn]
Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker
You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay by Alyssa Wong

Best Short Story

Winner:

Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar

Other Nominees:
A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong

Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies by Brooke Bolander

Sabbath Wine by Barbara Krasnoff
Things With Beards by Sam J. Miller
This Is Not a Wardrobe Door by A. Merc Rustad

Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station│Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 by Caroline M. Yoachim

Ray Bradbury Award

Winner:

Arrival

Other Nominees:
Doctor Strange
Kubo and the Two Strings
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Westworld: The Bicameral Mind
Zootopia

Andre Norton Award

Winner:

Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine

Other Nominees:
The Evil Wizard Smallbone by Delia Sherman
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge
Railhead by Philip Reeve
Rocks Fall by Everyone Dies by Lindsay Ribar
The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi

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

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Review - The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Short review: The end of the world has come, and Essun sets off to find her kidnapped daughter amidst the chaos.

Haiku
Roggas are despised
But they still serve the Fulcrum
Until one doesn't

Full review: There is a vague and indistinct region in between the genres of fantasy and science fiction. While some books rest comfortably on one side of this division or the other, others are happy to rest in that ambiguous zone between them, maybe from some angles a work of fantasy, and from others a work of science fiction. The Fifth Season is one of those books, with elements that make one think that the story is a pure fantasy, and others that are squarely within the realm of science fiction. Against this backdrop, Jemisin weaves a brutal story of enslavement, oppression, and anger that is at once intensely personal and breathtaking in its scope.

At the outset, I will say that this book is an extremely difficult book to review. This is because one of the elements that makes this book so good is the structure of the novel, and how that structure is used to tell the story. Unfortunately, revealing exactly how the structure of the novel works to elevate this book well above the ordinary would serve to ruin it for anyone who has not read it. So instead, one must write around what can only be called the central genius of The Fifth Season, which makes trying the discuss the brilliance of the book something of a frustrating experience.

The story is told from three distinct viewpoints: Essun, an older woman who must deal with the death of her son and the abduction of her daughter, Damaya, a young girl ostracized by her home community for her powers over the Earth who is taken in by the Fulcrum, a mysterious order comprised of such gifted individuals, and Syenite, a young woman of the Fulcrum, fully trained in the ways of "orogeny", and on an assignment to prove her worth, actually a dual assignment, the full measure of which result in some rather startling revelations about the world and society in which she lives. Though these three stories are separate, they eventually link together into a coherent whole, and the way in which Jemisin does this is a masterful example of skillful writing. Each of the three viewpoint characters adds something to the whole, allowing Jemisin to both give the reader an increasingly clear window through which to see the fictional world she has created and three simply devastating personal journeys.

The skill of orogeny, is one of the cornerstones of the science fiction in the book. In a nutshell, orogeny is the ability to "feel" the Earth's changes, and also to draw upon its power to manipulate it as well. From a certain perspective, one could call orogeny "Earth magic", and that is how those who don't have the skill seem to view it. Those who have ability with orogeny are called "orogenes" or, if one is intending to be insulting "roggas", and despite their power, they are feared and despised as dangerous and unstable elements within what passes for society in the book. Where orogeny comes from and how it works is not explained, just that it does. At several points it is asserted that orogeny is an inherited quality, and this does seem to be borne out somewhat by the abilities of the characters in the book, but like so many of the other assertions made by characters in the book, it is unclear if this is actually true, or merely folk wisdom and confirmation bias.

Another cornerstone of the book is the world itself. All of the events in the book take place on or around "the Stillness", a massive continent that stretches pole to pole that is anything but still. In fact, the geological instability of the Earth is the defining feature of Jemisin's imagined world and drives almost every other element. With an unpredictable and oftentimes hostile world under their feet, the society in which the characters live is almost relentlessly bleak and depressing. Virtually everything about the society is driven by the need to survive the deprivations of the periodic "Fifth Seasons" of extended winter that are triggered by unexpected seismic activity or other environmental changes. This has resulted in a "civilization" that has had almost everything that makes for a civilized life stripped away. People are categorized into castes based upon what utilitarian role they will play during a fifth season. Communities (called "Comms" in the book) all follow the rigid and harsh dictates of "Stonelore" that direct, sometimes in exacting detail, how such communities are to behave during times of crisis. The society that has evolved in the face of repeated global disaster is ruthlessly utilitarian and cruel.

Jemisin populates this harsh environment with suitably hardened characters, which some people have found to be off-putting. In the context of the story, however, almost anything else would have rung false. Essun is angry and enraged because the world she lives in is fundamentally callous and unfair. Syanite's story opens her eyes to the true injustice that forms the foundations of the society she works within and serves. Damaya's story shows how she is indoctrinated into believing that slavery is the natural and expected way of life, and that cruelty is love. These three stories are melded together to tell a unified tale, interacting in ways that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. As an example, when Syenite discovers exactly who the node maintainers are, and the conditions under which they perform, this account is intertwined with Damaya dealing with being bullied by some particularly difficult trouble-making classmates, and the resulting punishment that is meted out by the Fulcrum's instructors. Told separately, these stories would be interesting interludes. Told together, they amount to a brutally effective tale of horror and misery.

The Fifth Season is both a brilliant and difficult book. Jemisin's writing is intense and gripping, and the world she has created is a thing of stark beauty, while the characters who inhabit it are extremely well-crafted and interesting. But the very effectiveness of Jemisin's writing is what makes the book such a tough read, as it makes the truly cruel and bleak nature of her fictional world feel so very real. This harshness makes the book demanding, but anything less would make the book feel superficial and false. In the end, reading this book is a harrowing and sometimes painful experience, but also one that is incredibly rewarding and well-worth doing.

Subsequent book in the series: The Obelisk Gate

2015 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel: The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu)

2017 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel: The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

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Review - Updraft by Fran Wilde

Short review: Kirit just wants to earn her wings and join her mother as a trader, but a chance event derails those plans and puts her onto a collision course with the rulers of the City.

Haiku
In the City's air
Flying on silk and bone wings
Beware the skymouths

Full review: Updraft is the debut novel of Fran Wilde that tells the story of Kirit, a young woman living in the City as part of a civilization above the clouds, who dreams of becoming a trader like her mother Ezarit. This book maps Kirit's journey from child to adult as she navigates the complicated web of customs and traditions that dominate the lives of her countrymen, an endeavor at which she is not always particularly successful. Along the way, she discovers a tale of loss, betrayal, corruption, and sacrifice that will change the City forever, and could very well end up killing her.

In the City, wings mean freedom. Most of the citizens live in towers, residing in the great tiered structures that grow high above the clouds, with the wealthy and privileged occupying the upper tiers, and the poor and disfavored relegated to the lower ones. The only way to move between the towers is to strap on wings and fly (or, more rarely, walk across one of the relatively few bridges that connect some of the towers). Those who cannot fly - the young, the infirm, or the outcast - are essentially confined to their home towers unless they can find someone to carry them from place to place. At the outset of Updraft, Kirit is on the brink of being able to take her wingtest and gain her wingmark, which amounts to a license to fly on her own and symbolizes a citizen's step into adulthood. Kirit's mother Ezarit is a skilled and famous trader who wings her way from tower to tower making deals and returning with the profits for the benefit of her home tower Densira. Kirit's greatest ambition is to win her wingmarks so that she can join her mother as an apprentice and gain fortune and renown for making her own deals.

All of these dreams are derailed when Kirit stays out on the family balcony just a little too long during a skymouth attack, both breaking the law and revealing an unusual power. This event changes the course of her life, and is the fundamental turning point of the book. This event also begins the process of revealing how Wilde's fictional world works, and how its reality differs from Kirit's perceptions. Kirit finds that her display of power has drawn the attention of Wik, one of the enigmatic Singers who effectively rule over the City as a whole, forming a power over the individual towers that binds the entire civilization of Updraft together. Because Kirit refuses Wik's offer to join the Singers (desiring instead to join her mother as a trader), the weight of the laws of the tower falls upon her. Kirit survives the skymouth attack, which is viewed as "lucky" by her fellow tower denizens, but as the powers that govern the towers and the city turn against her, she gets the tag of "unlucky", showing just how fickle popular support can be. Serving her sentence alongside Nat, her oldest friend who seems to have been punished in order to place pressure on Kirit to accede to Wik's demands, Kirit still believes in the fundamental fairness of the system she lives within, and looks forward to her wingtest, which she believes will result in her freedom from restrictions.

But the core story of Updraft is that unaccountable power inevitably results in a corrupt system, and the Singers rig the wingtest to deny Kirit her wingmarks even though she passes all four parts of the test. In a display of power and arrogance, the Singers don't even try to rig the individual scores, but rather simply assert that despite her passing all elements of the test, Kirit is not sufficiently capable to be trusted with her wingmarks. Nat also fails his test, but to highlight the unfairness, the daughter of a wealthy and politically important family in Densira tower passes, despite doing more poorly overall than Nat did. Enraged by the unfairness, Nat and Kirit go rogue, setting out to attack the Spire, the central fortress where all of the Singers dwell. This, of course, ends badly for the two, and Kirit finds herself imprisoned within the Spire and forced to join the Singers, where she learns that the world is not at all what she thinks it is, and the reader finds themselves given a first hand tour of the politics and corruption at the heart of the City.

The story pushes Kirit further and further into the heart of power in the City, revealing to her the awful and deadly secrets that have rotted away the core of both the Singers and the City itself. Wilde manages to combine Kirit's personal coming-of-age story with the political maneuverings going on around her by revealing new sources of corruption and deception as part of Kirit's training. Some of the revelations are subtle - such as the differences in the songs sung by the denizens of the towers and the residents of the Spire - while others hit the reader with the force of a heavy hammer blow - such as the terrible secret hidden in the lower levels of the Spire, and what the Singers do with that secret. Step by step, Kirit is drawn into the hidden world of the Singers, and the reader is drawn in with her, with each new piece of shady crookedness explained away, making the next that much easier to accept, until outrages that Kirit has excused with polite fictions are brought home to her on a personal level and the entire rotten edifice comes crashing down.

The story of Updraft is more complex than merely being a case of a corrupt system that must be opposed. Kirit is presented with multiple possible role-models, each with their own vision of how the future of the City should be determined, ranging from the pure power politics of Rumul, to the blind adherence to tradition of Sellis, to Wik's determination to reform the Singers from within, to Nat's call for open rebellion. All of these possible avenues offer Kirit benefits, and all offer profound drawbacks, making every one of her decisions fraught with peril, and weighty with import. Among the most powerful pull is that of tradition, a phrase often invoked by City-dwellers who have imbued it with an almost sacred meaning. Every Singer faction, and most of the non-Singers Kirit encounters, view tradition as being of paramount importance in their lives, and it is wielded almost as a weapon to silence dissent and, in many cases, to protect secrets. But as the story makes clear, such adherence to tradition makes corruption possible: Many dark and underhanded developments are hidden from public view because of the ritual tradition of silence: Only those allowed to may speak, and then only on approved subjects. Following the rules means lying to your fellow citizens at the behest of the powers that be. Much of the book revolves around Kirit struggling against her own upbringing to find a clear path to dealing with the problems she faces, navigating what are, for her and for her society, essentially uncharted waters.

In 2016 Updraft was nominated for both the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the Andre Norton Award, making it the first book to achieve this double honor. Because of its teenage protagonist, this book is likely to be viewed as a young adult novel (hence the Andre Norton Award), but readers should be warned that the society depicted within its pages is violent and bloody. Legal and political disputes are settled by combat, often to the death. Human sacrifices are made to appease the City's apparent wrath. One of the means by which an apprentice in the Spire can achieve the status of Singer is to accept a challenge made by a tower-dweller and then either kill or maim them. Even the "friendly" sports contests of the City-dwellers involve taking to the air with knives and shards of glass strapped to their feet and slashing at one another. But this simply adds one more layer to the world-building of the book, showing the reader that the City, whose denizens fancy themselves to be much more civilized and genteel than their ancestors, is actually an almost horrific place filled with appalling levels of brutality and an almost casual attitude towards death.

Updraft does have a couple of weaknesses: With so much going on in the story, some elements seem to get something of a short shrift - for example, Kirit's mother Ezarit more or less vanishes from the story after the first third or so, and as a character was never really developed much more than "really good trader" to begin with. Some of the plot developments seem just a little bit serendipitous, as almost everyone Kirit comes into contact with outside of the Spire seems to have some connection to the conspiracy that drives the events in the book. There is also a somewhat predictable quality to many of the novel's "plot twists", Plus, there are tantalizing questions that are never answered: What is below the City? The denizens of the towers refer to the "Rise" as the seminal historic event that gave birth to their current way of life, but where did they rise from? The City is alive and seems to have desires, but what is it exactly, and what does it really want? And so on. Overall though, Updraft is well-crafted and engaging enough that the handful of weak plot elements remain minor issues, and after reading the book I have sufficient faith in the author that I believe the various questions about the world itself will be answered in some future volume.

At its heart, Updraft is a well-written bildungsroman that laces political intrigue throughout Kirit's journey from adolescence to adulthood, all supported by strong world-building. With lessons taught by a myriad of mentors both beneficent and malign, Kirit learns, grows, adapts, and eventually chooses her path, and by doing so, chooses the path for the City and its denizens. Despite being packed with Kirit's training and a moderately complex volume of political maneuvering, the book remains fairly fast-paced and action-packed, which seems perfect for a story in which the characters swoop and glide through the air upon wings of silk, bone, and sinew. In the final analysis, Updraft is a book that has a little bit of just about everything and mixes them all together into a stew that most genre fiction fans will likely find quite tasty.

2015 Andre Norton Award Winner: Love Is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson
2017 Andre Norton Award Winner: Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine

List of Andre Norton Award Winners

2016 Nebula Award Nominees

Potential 2016 Hugo Nominees

Fran Wilde     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

2016 Nebula Award Nominees

Location: Chicago, Illinois.

Comments: With the Sad and Rabid Puppies engaged in unethical slate tactics in the nominations for Hugo Awards over the last couple of years in order to place works of inferior quality onto that award's ballot, the Nebula Awards have begun to loom larger and larger on the award scene. The simple truth of awards is that damaging the quality of one award only serves to direct people's attentions elsewhere, and should the Hugo Awards continue to be dominated by a group that is bound and determined to treat it as a crony-driven marketing opportunity, no one will pay them much mind any more. What will happen is that people will look to awards such as the BSFA Award, the Locus Awards, and the Nebula Awards.

For their part, the Nebula Award voters seem to have stepped up the the challenge, and have nominated an excellent collection of works for consideration in 2016. Up and down the ballot there are works of superior quality for a fan to choose from. There is even a book published by Baen Books - Charles Gannon's Raising Caine - a work by an author whose repeated nominations for this award puts the lie to the oft-heard claim that Baen-published authors are routinely snubbed in award honors. The truth is, no matter what the Puppies of either stripe do, they will never accomplish what they claim their objectives are for the simple fact that fans will flow away from them to venues that remember that the objective of awards is to reward quality, rather than to reward spiteful political organizations.

Best Novel

Winner:
Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Other Nominees:
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
Raising Caine by Charles E. Gannon
Updraft by Fran Wilde

Best Novella

Winner:

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Other Nominees:
The Bone Swans of Amandale by C.S.E. Cooney

The New Mother by Eugene Fischer reviewed in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, Nos. 4 & 5 (April/May 2015)

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn by Usman T. Malik
Waters of Versailles by Kelly Robson
Wings of Sorrow and Bone by Beth Cato

Best Novelette

Winner:

Our Lady of the Open Road by Sarah Pinsker

Other Nominees:
And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead by Brooke Bolander

The Deepwater Bride by Tamsyn Muir (reviewed in Fantasy & Science Fiction: Vol. 129, Nos. 1 & 2 (July/August 2015))

Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds by Rose Lemberg
The Ladies’ Aquatic Gardening Society by Henry Lien

Rattlesnakes and Men by Michael Bishop (reviewed in Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 39, No. 2 (February 2015))

Best Short Story

Winner:

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong

Other Nominees:

Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer (reviewed in Clarkesworld: Issue 100 (January 2015))

Damage by David D. Levine
Madeleine by Amal El-Mohtar

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

When Your Child Strays From God by Sam J. Miller

Ray Bradbury Award

Winner:

Mad Max: Fury Road

Other Nominees:

Ex Machina

Inside Out
Jessica Jones: AKA Smile
The Martian
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Andre Norton Award

Winner:

Updraft by Fran Wilde

Other Nominees:
Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Bone Gap by Laura Ruby
Court of Fives by Kate Elliott
Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge
Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
Seriously Wicked by Tina Connolly
Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older
Zeroboxer by Fonda Lee

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

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