nonelvis | 2014 Hugo nominees: best novella (Reply)

Wakulla Springs, Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages
Wow, this had lovely prose: poetic and atmospheric enough that you feel enveloped by green jungle and humidity as you read it. The novella is really four short stories that largely concentrate on the African-American underclass in Jim Crow-era Florida, and which trace the development of a family from FDR's last term all the way through the modern day. The magic of moviemaking, the real and perceived value of superstition, and the real and imagined wild creatures that inhabit the jungle are all critical elements – but not until the final story does any speculative fiction element really come into play. That's my only beef with "Wakulla Springs": it's gorgeous, and the finest portrayal of the weird wilds of Florida I've read since Swamplandia, but I'm not convinced it's SF enough to be nominated for a Hugo.

Equoid, Charles Stross
I'm pretty sure it's not just that I'm cheap for Lovecraft pastiche when I say I enjoyed the hell (no pun intended) out of this story, and am doubly shocked that I enjoyed something Charlie Stross wrote. (My past history with his Hugo nominees has not exactly been good.) The writing was occasionally a little too self-aware of its hipness, but it was otherwise snappy, well-paced, and impressively creepy in the way it wove together unicorn and Lovecraftian mythos. Huge bonus points for this paragraph, which made me laugh out loud: "You wouldn’t believe the scope for mischief that the Beast of Redmond unintentionally builds into its Office software by letting it execute macros that have unlimited access to the hardware. I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn’t entirely human). However, this is the first time I’ve seen a Word document eat a man’s soul."

The Chaplain's Legacy, Brad Torgerson
This is the most traditional of the nominees I've read so far, but I don't mean that in a bad way; it's simply that interstellar battles have been stock in trade for SF practically since it was first written. Here, the combatants are humans versus the insectoid Mantes, who want to wipe out species with faith, albeit for no apparent reason I could discern other than that the concept of faith made no sense to them. That quibble aside, "The Chaplain's Legacy" was rather moving at times, as the faithless are forced to confront what faith can mean to humans, even those who don't necessarily believe in deities.

Six-Gun Snow White, Cat Valente
It took me a little while to get into this one because of the affected Old West language, but I'm always willing to look at a retold fairy tale. There were some occasionally beautiful turns of phrase here, and I really felt for young Snow White, half-white and half-Crow, tormented by her stepmother for her perceived impurities, and ultimately the object of pursuit to fulfill a terrible bargain. But the ending was unsatisfying, in particular the epilogue, which comes essentially out of nowhere and isn't nearly as interesting as the rest of the story.

The Butcher of Khardov, Dan Wells
I was pretty sure from the moment I saw the Rob Liefeld-esque cover art for "The Butcher of Khardov" that it was not going to be my kind of book – and sure enough, it wasn't. The language was perfectly competent, and I felt surprisingly sympathetic towards the mass murderer whose life is chronicled in this story. But all but one of the women exist either as objects to instill angst in the protagonist, or objects to instill desire, and loving descriptions of graphic violence are never going to be my thing.

The verdict

1. Equoid
2. Wakulla Springs (so beautifully written I have to rank it highly, despite limited SF content)
3. The Chaplain's Legacy
4. Six-Gun Snow White
5. The Butcher of Khardov