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SF MAGAZINES

SF, Fantasy & Horror Magazine Reviews

The 2022 Hugo Award Novelette Finalists

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Summary:
A decidedly lacklustre selection of stories with only one that really deserves to be here, the winner Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer. I also liked Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim but I don’t think it is Hugo award worthy.

_____________________

Editors,

Fiction:
Bots of the Lost Ark • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗∗+
Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. • novelette by Fran Wilde ∗
Colors of the Immortal Palette • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim ∗∗∗
That Story Isn’t the Story • novelette by John Wiswell ∗∗
L’Esprit de L’Escalier • novelette by Catherynne M. Valente ∗
O2 Arena • novelette by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki ∗∗

_____________________

There are six finalists in the novelette category, and they are reviewed below in the order they finished in the Hugo Award ballot.

•

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2021) is a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). The story opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi are extremely hostile to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. As 9 makes its way there it is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation . . . and bots)—but is surprised when he sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride the creature. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not engaged in internecine battles to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus—which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When he wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct him to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

•

Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. by Fran Wilde (Uncanny, May-Jun 2021) begins with Mrs Vanessa Saunders and her Fête Noire Charity Ball co-chairs receiving a photo message informing them that Unseelie Brothers Ltd., a shop that makes bespoke ball gowns, are back in town.
Saunders quickly returns home to tell her daughter Rie (Merielle), and her niece Sera (from whose point of view the rest of the story is told) to go and find the shop. When the pair eventually locate the premises of Unseelie Brothers Ltd. (it does not give out its address or phone number), the story starts falling into standard “magic shop” territory, i.e. it is closed when they find it but opens when Saunders arrives and writes a message on a glove and puts it through the letterbox.
When the door opens, Sera hears “the rustle of wings” and sees a face that she thinks might be her lost mother (we learn along the way that Sera’s mother vanished years before, and that she, along with Mrs Saunders, wore Unseelie Brothers’ dresses when they were young):

from The Social Season, plate 76. The Butterfly Gown, worn by a Serena (née) _____ (unknown) Sebastian to the Spring Charity Gala of 1998. She attended with her sister Vanessa (née) ______ (unknown) Saunders, and soon after married one of the event’s busboys. Saunders herself married the scion of the Saunders soap fortune. The event was notable in that several young women and men were discovered the following morning, on the roof, wearing bacchanalian-styled greenery and nothing more, by hotel staff at The Pierre. Photo by Mrs. Vanessa Saunders. Designers: Dora Unseelie and Beau Unseelie, Sr.

The central part of the story then sees: (a) Rie fitted for a dress, (b) Sera given a pearl necklace and a job offer from Dora, one of the Unseelie employees, and (c) Sera (a student dressmaker) design a “Crown of Thorns” dress for the company, which they subsequently make and sell to Rie instead of the one she had originally chosen during her fitting. During all this there are various magical occurrences (at one point Sera loses track of time, and emerges to find days have passed and the shop has moved location).
The last part of the story (which somewhat lost me) sees Sera discover that (spoiler) her mother is trapped in the dress that Unseelie Brothers made for her, and which Mrs Saunders still has in her wardrobe. However, when Sera (at Dora’s suggestion) unseams the dress to release her mother, only butterflies emerge. Then Sera discovers that that her mother and aunt were both Unseelie shop workers who managed to escape their employer.
Sera later (a) rewrites the contract given to her by Unseelie Brothers to give her and the other workers an ever-increasing share of the business, (b) alters Rie’s Crown of Thorns dress to remove any risk that it will hurt her (the dresses usually bring good fortune, but not always), (c) publishes the emergency number for the shop and, as a consequence, sells many dresses (which, we learn, no longer cause problems). Finally, Beau (the owner/manager) finds he cannot move the shop.
I found this story engaging enough for the most of its length, but the ending, which seems to tack on a magical realist/empowerment ending onto a more-or-less conventional magic shop story, makes it falls apart.
∗ (Mediocre). 8,600 words.

•

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)1 is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a “vampire” at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:

I’m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I’m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, “I could show you other poses.”
“Yes.” He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes—tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn’t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.

Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman’s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine’s death:

The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I’ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I’d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Café Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort—Édouard, Émile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right—I don’t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I’m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia or Impression, Sunrise. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari), and maybe my lack of success is not—as I have always told myself—because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models—always with their consent—to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.

I liked this piece well enough but there isn’t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone’s taste.
∗∗∗ (Good). 12,800 words.

•

That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell (Uncanny, November-December 2021)1 opens with Anton leaving a vampire household with the help of an old friend called Grigorii. As they leave the house in Grigorii’s car, Anton sees Mr Bird (the vampire) return:

A black town car trails up the street toward them. Sleek and black, with that short club of a man Walter at the wheel. Mr. Bird’s senior familiar. Anton knows who sits in the tinted windows and the shadows of the rear seats.
From inside the Kia, Grigorii pops the passenger door open. “Come on, man.”
Is blood spotting in Anton’s jeans? He gropes at his thighs, unsure if the moisture is sweat on his palms or if he’s bleeding. The car is getting closer. Mr. Bird definitely sees him. Anton sinks into the car. He clutches his seatbelt until they are doing forty in a twenty mile zone. He’s too worried to turn around, and too afraid not to fixate on the rearview mirror.
The black car stops in the middle of the street. A rear door opens, and a dark thing peers out. There is no seeing any detail of that figure—no detail except for his mouth. It is open and sharp. Distance doesn’t change how clearly Anton sees the teeth.

Anton then meets Luis, another stray, at Grigorii’s house, and worries about Mr Bird before examining himself in the toilet to see if the bite wounds in his thighs are still bleeding (these are semi-permanent, and bleed in the presence of Mr Bird). They aren’t, which means that Mr Bird is not nearby, or not yet.
This background feeling of menace and unease pervades most of the rest of the story, and rises and falls as different events play out. To begin with, Luis is attacked on the way back from his job, something Anton thinks may be related to his departure and which causes a fight between the two when Anton tried to inspect Luis for bites. Then Walter, Mr Bird’s familiar, approaches Anton to tell him that he must return, the first of two visits (during the second one Walter tells Anton that the twins, two of the vampire’s other victims, have also run away).
There is never any force or violence used to get Anton to return, oddly enough and, towards the end of the story, the contacts stop and Anton transitions to a normal life. Then, one evening when Anton and a new boyfriend called Julian go out for a meal, Anton sees Walter working in the restaurant and realises that he has left Mr Bird too.
The story closes a few weeks later, when Anton goes out of town with Julian for the weekend and detours past Mr Bird’s house: Anton sees the building is in an obvious state of disrepair and then, while he sketches the house, it collapses.
This has the trappings of a vampire story but is really a mainstream piece about escaping abusive relationships or situations, and one which suggests that people can choose their own destinies—the line “that story isn’t the story” is used a couple of times:

Walter asks, “What made you think you could survive without him?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today.” [Anton replies.]

[Anton] asks [Grigorii], “What happened to your [abusive] mom? Do you ever see her?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today, man.”

This would have been a reasonably good straight piece, but the story undermines itself somewhat by setting up the vampire menace at the beginning of the piece and then letting it fade away. That said, I realise that the idea of a perceived threat being more perception that reality may be one of the points the story is trying to make.2
∗∗ (Average). 9,000 words. Story link.

•

L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente (Tor.com, 25th August 2021)3 opens with a man making breakfast for his apparently undead wife:

She slices through an egg and lets the yolk run like yellow blood. Severs a corner of toast and dredges it in the warm, sunny liquid, so full of life, full enough to nourish a couple of cells all the way through to a downy little baby birdie with sweet black eyes. If only things had gone another way.
Eurydice hesitates before putting it between her lips. Knowing what will happen. Knowing it will hurt them both, but mainly her. Like everything else.
She shoves it in quickly. Attempts a smile. And, just this once, the smile does come when it is called.
[. . .]
Then, her jaw pops out of its socket with a loud thook and sags, hanging at an appalling, useless angle. She presses up against her chin, fighting to keep it in, but the fight isn’t fair and could never be. Eurydice locks eyes with Orpheus. No tears, though she really is so sorry for what was always about to happen. But her ducts were cauterized by the sad, soft event horizon between, well. There and Here.
Orpheus longs for her tears, real and hot and sweet and salted as caramel, and he hates himself for his longing. He hates her for it, too. A river of black, wet earth and pebbles and moss and tiny blind helpless worms erupts out of Eurydice’s smile, splattering so hard onto his mother’s perfect plate that it cracks down the middle, and dirt pools out across the table and the worms nose mutely at the crusts of the almost-burnt toast.

The rest of the piece (I wouldn’t call it a story) shows us variously: the daily life of, and tensions between, the couple; a visit from Eurydice’s mother, who bathes her daughter; a trip to the therapist; the arrival of Orpheus’s father Apollo and his groupies (there are various rock music and Greek myth references throughout the story—this chapter sees Prometheus giving Apollo a light4); Eurydice heating her body up with a hairdryer so Orpheus will want to make love with her; and, finally, a visit to Sisyphus, who asks Eurydice if she wanted to come back from the dead.
This piece is, according to the introduction to the story, supposed to be a “provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth”, but it is actually a borderline tedious non-story apparently written for goths and classics students. Another effort from Valente that is both plotless and overwritten.
∗ (Mediocre). 9,300 words. Story link.

•

O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)5 opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):

Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O2 cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O2 masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O2 cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O2 generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.

During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O2 arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
∗∗ (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.

•••

This is a decidedly lacklustre selection of stories with only Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer really earning its place here.
I get the impression from this category (and the short story one) that there is a Uncanny reading and voting clique that determines a lot of the finalists (half the short story and novelette finalists are from this magazine). There is also a huge online publication bias (something also seen in nomination statistics6) and it looks like it helps if you write about life or political issues, or produce material that is sentimental or light-hearted.7  ●

_____________________

1. That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell was also a 2022 Nebula Award novelette finalist, and won the Locus Poll.

2. I found this comment from Wiswell about That Story Isn’t the Story in a short interview in the same issue of Uncanny:

The other thing I knew was coming was Anton wouldn’t have a normal ending. No confrontation with Mr. Bird. No fight to the death. No self-sacrifice. No diabolical master plan. Everything that we sometimes dread will happen to us, or our loved ones, because of our trauma? That is partially because we’ve been harmed. It’s also partially an illusion. I wanted to let Anton slowly recognize what was a trauma mirage, while his worthiness of self-respect wasn’t illusory at all.

I didn’t get the self-respect part (if you don’t feel that way by default then perhaps this is more apparent), but the rest makes sense.

3. L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente was the runner-up in the Locus Poll for novelette.

4. The Eurydice and Orpheus myth at Wikipedia.

5. O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki was (unusually) reprinted in Apex, another online magazine, two months later. I cannot see the point of Galaxy’s Edge putting it online for a month and then taking it down, only to let another publication reprint it almost immediately (my understanding is that most venues have a period of exclusivity in their contracts).

6. The Hugo Awards page.

7. One story I am surprised to see ignored by most of this year’s awards and polls is You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson.  ●

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