Haven’t seen these bits on facebook? That’s because I’m writing from the future. These bits won’t appear there for a couple of days. Bwaaahahahaha.

(For more on the notebook I’m writing in, click here.)

Sensio was, of course, a rabbit, and in the photo, Aunt Etta’s stance confirms this bestial fact—she holds the end of the rope that binds Sensio to the post, and she holds it, between thumb and forefinger, with a form of distaste, even disdain? Such a strange pose, delicate against the roughness of Sensio; even a gentle tug and his humiliation would be undone.

Or maybe not. I don’t know. I know only that Aunt Etta’s expression is ultimately unreadable, muddied by the severe red of her lipstick, by the book-ending of her body by a crepe-paper bag of a hat and the shimmering turquoise dress hitched up past her waist, over her stomach, and descending so far down that she appears to float above the matted grass of the ground. (Between the two, a flowsy white blouse that seems stolen from a more sensible person.) She’d dressed me in something similar, so that I looked like a flower girl at a wedding. The shoes Aunt Etta had dug up out of the closet pinched my feet.

Sensio had said nothing as he was bound, nose twitching at the sharp citrus of the orange blossoms behind them. He’d said nothing as we’d formed our peculiar circus procession from the bungalow where we lived to the waiting photographer. No reporters had come, despite Aunt Etta’s phone calls, but she’d hired the photographer anyway—and he stood there waiting in white shirt, suspenders, gray trousers, black wingtip shoes. He looked hot even though it was only spring, and was so white I thought he must be a Yankee. His equipment looked like a metal stork. A cigarette dangled from his lips.

“That’s him,” Aunt Etta said, as if Sensio were her rabbit and not mine. Shameful, but that’s what I felt that long-ago day: Sensio is mine, not hers. I was twelve in 1955, and big for my age, with broad shoulders that made me look hunched over. I did chores around the orange groves. I helped to get water from the well. I’d driven the tractor. In the season, I’d even helped harvest the oranges, just for fun, alongside the sweating, watchful migrants. But I was still a kid, and as Aunt Etta put Sensio down and bound him to the post I’d pounded in the day before, all I could think was that Aunt Etta had no right to do anything with him.

“Do you have to tie him up like that,” the photographer asked Aunt Etta, but not in a caring way. He reached down to ruffle my hair and wink at me. I flinched away from him, wrinkling up my nose. People were always touching my head back then because I had orange-red hair, and I hated it.

Aunt Etta just looked at him like he was stupid. She was stiff that morning—a broken hip that had never completely healed—and further trapped in her ridiculous dress. She grunted with effort and no little pain as she leaned precariouslyto loop the rope over and over again across Sensio’s chest. “Shit,” she said. I heard her, distinct if soft. She looked over as she straightened, said, “Rachel, finish it for me.”

So I tied the last knots and knelt there beside Sensio, smelling the thick musk of his fur.

“It’s okay,” I said to him, thinking, Aunt Etta’s just gone a little cracked. She’ll be better soon. I tried to will the message into that deep, liquid eye, through to the brain beyond.

Aunt Etta tapped my shoulder with her thick fingers. “Come away.”

“Are we ready, then?” the photographer asked. Aunt Etta wasn’t paying him by the hour. He was already looking at his watch.

In the photo, Aunt Etta has the end of Sensio’s rope in her right hand, arm extended down, while her left arm is held at a right angle, palm up, thumb against the index finger. At first, when I show the photograph to people, they think she’s holding a cigar in her hand, because the photograph is so old. Then they realize that’s just a crease in the image and they think she holds something delicate in that hand—something she’s afraid to close her hand around for fear of damaging it.

But I know there was nothing in Aunt Etta’s hand that day.

I’ve been posting a draft of a very strange story on facebook. I don’t actually have access to facebook right now–I’ve locked myself out–but posting photos remotely seems to work out just fine. I have no idea if anyone’s reading and am not really curious to find out. But the upshot is I’m slowly building a tale…of sorts. Lately, it’s gotten out of hand.

(But don’t read that–read this!)

Thus, it was with some trepidation that I attended one such awards banquet several years ago, accompanied by Big Bad Bear (still in trouble with the police, so I cannot reveal his identity) and Michael Haulica, a Romanian editor and writer. Michael was there to see if he could track down a couple of Smaragdine authors and to observe the local spectacle. He was not disappointed.

This particular award roughly translates as “the Genre Fiction Shovel,” because the award is literally a golden shovel that relates to some Smaragdinean folktale about the price of fame. Beyond the dais sat ten golden shovels, each corresponding to some esoteric category.

The category translations I received from Bear didn’t make too much sense, but I reproduce them here nonetheless:

Best Professional Cockroach
Best Amateur Cockroach
Best Related Amateur Cockroach
Best Recollection of Related Stories by a Snitch
Best Stories of Related Incidents from Perverts
Best Bribe for Preternatural Publication
Best Barter for Supernal Publication
Best Elongated Fiction Sequence
Best Text of Unusual Length

Although some of these categories clearly correspond to categories more familiar to me (like “Best Novel”), Bear stressed, when Michael questioned him, that to reduce the translation to something more familiar would lose the nuance of the award.

“Take, for example, ‘Professional Cockroach.’ In Smaragdine folklore, the cockroach is a trickster creature, like the coyote. Also something with a divided nature, both good and bad. Thus, they can reward dual nature in this category—perhaps an agent who has done good but also screwed a lot of writers over.”

Bear went on to say that the winners of such awards sometimes suffered terribly, became a target in Smaragdinean literary circles. In other words, there were several nominees who were hoping to lose.

“Why show up?” Michael asked as we sampled our rather limp salads while a Smaragdine comedian gesticulated and made jokes incomprehensible to us. The awards program would start in a few minutes.

“Because it is a horrible social faux pas not to show up for the awards ceremony,” Bear explained. “If you lose but do not show up, it is as terrible as if you show up and win.”

For this reason, most Smaragdinean writers and professionals try their best to avoid being nominated for any award. Several people told me that only the poor wind up on the finalist lists since the richer writers manage to bribe their way out of consideration. This creates a vicious cycle, although in Smaragdinean the term for “vicious cycle” refers to the teenage bicycle gangs that have roamed the countryside since the depression of the 1920s.

In any event, Smaragdineans even treat being nominated for awards by people in other countries with the utmost suspicion.

Michael and I looked at each other with some trepidation as the ceremony began, but at first it looked as if everything would be okay, as in the first two categories a judgment of “No Award” was given out.

“No doubt some last minute bribes,” Bear whispered to us.

However, in the Best Related Amateur Cockroach category, two men tied for the award and immediately began trying to get the other to accept the award. This led to a brawl and a stabbing, whereupon the category became untied. The man who accepted the golden shovel was set upon as soon as he left the stage after an abrupt acceptance speech.

Upon the announcement of the winner of the Best Recollection of Related Stories by a Snitch award, several people drew their guns and started firing.

Bear, Michael, and I retreated to the relative safety of the street, leaving our somewhat cold boiled chicken and potatoes main course on the table.

“What was that all about?!” Michael asked.

Bear sighed. “It is complicated. In that category, the text is nonfiction. But Smaragdineans have no libel laws. So you can publish any lie you like. Most nonfiction books in the country are full of lies so no one believes any of them. But for this award, the judges thoroughly check the veracity of the text. If you win, everything you wrote is deemed to be true. This usually upsets the people you wrote about. In this case, almost everyone in the room.”

We would have lingered in the street, but the violence had begun to spill out of the banquet hall. The judges had been tossed out onto the sidewalk in their tuxedos. Several of them were screaming as they were pulled apart limb from limb by various of the finalists and their families.

As we ran to safety, I told my companions I hoped I was never translated into Smaragdinean and Michael expressed a rather fervent if garbled wish to get back to Romania soon.

THE GREAT LOST BAT EXPEDITION

1

The Great Bat Expedition from Camp Crystal Lakes started out well enough. Nick, his sister Nikki, and their best friend Tom gathered outside Nick’s tent in the mid-afternoon.

One by one they went through their list.

“Flashlight?” Nikki asked. She always kept the lists.

“Check,” said Nick. It was one of his favorite words. Sometimes he would say it all day long. Those were the days Nikki and Tom would try to avoid him.

“Insect repellent?”

“Check.”

“Bottles of water?”

“Check.”

“Net for bat catching.”

“Check.”

“Camera to take photo of bat talking.”

“Check.”

“Fake rubber bat.”

“Check.”

“Hey, wait,” said Tom. “That’s not a fake rubber bat.” “Hey, wait,” were Tom’s favorite two words. Many times the three of them had been saved from an awful fate by Tom saying, “Hey, wait.” Like, “Hey, wait—isn’t that a giant snake?” Or, “Hey, wait—maybe we should ask our parents about that first.”

Tom was right. Nick hadn’t had time to buy one at a toy store. Instead, he’d found an old piece of tire.

“It’s close enough,” Nick said.

“It doesn’t even look like a bat,” Tom said.

It actually had the same shape as the camp meatloaf.

“It doesn’t matter,” Nikki said. “Snacks and backpack to carry it all in?”

“Check,” Nick said.

“Then let’s go!”

They had a map, too. The map showed the way to a nearby cave.

They had decided on a visit to the cave ever since hearing the story of the Talking Bat of Camp Crystal Lakes the night before, around the campfire. A talking bat was too cool for them to ignore.

All around them was scrub forest and outcroppings of rock.

After about twenty minutes, Tom said, “Hey, wait—I think we’re lost.”

“We can’t be,” Nick said. “I’m following the map. Check.”

But it was true: they seemed to be heading away from the hills. The cave was in the hills.

“Let me look at that map,” Nikki said, snatching it away from Nick. She stared at it for a moment, then frowned. “Look—you were holding it upside down. We need to go that way!” She pointed in the opposite direction.

“Check. Well, don’t blame me,” Nick said. “I don’t like maps anyway.”

“Hey, wait—I don’t like you,” Tom said.

“Oh, stop it,” Nikki said. “We need to get to the cave. Forget the arguing.” Nikki didn’t have a favorite word like Tom or Nick, but she did like phrases that started with “Oh.”

“Yes, that’s what I always say,” Nick said, turning up his nose as he walked past Tom. And then added, “Check.”

After another twenty minutes, they seemed to be no closer to the cave.

“Hey, wait—is somebody reading the map sideways now?” Tom asked.

“No,” Nick said. “We’re reading it right now. Check.”

“Okay. I hate this bat trip. Even a talking bat isn’t worth it.”

“Oh, be quiet,” Nikki said.

They continued on in silence for awhile.

Then Nikki said, “I wonder what kind of accent it has.”

“What accent what has?” Tom asked.

“The bat,” Nick said. “Maybe it sounds English. Or Australian. Or Czech.”

“Hey, wait–now why would it sound that way?” Tom asked.

Nick was about to answer but then he fell into a hole and disappeared. It was so sudden, Nick didn’t even have time to shout out. One minute he was walking beside them through the underbrush. The next moment, he was gone.

Nikki and Tom stopped right where they were, shocked. Where had Nick gone?

Mystery solved a second later when a thin, reedy voice said, from somewhere beneath them, “I seem to have fallen down a hole. Check.”

A few seconds of pushing away the grass revealed the pale face of Nick several feet below them, standing in a large hole of darkness.

“Hey, wait–what are you doing down there?”

“I fell down here! Check! You act like I planned it. Check!”

“Well, we didn’t fall in any holes. Nikki and I knew better,” Tom said.

“Very funny. Besides, it’s not just a hole. There’s a passageway down here—and I think I can hear bats!”

Nikki and Tom looked at each other. They were both thinking about the famous Talking Bat of Crystal Lakes Summer Camp.

What if it was down in the hole with Nick?

Without a second thought, they both jumped down into the hole.

2

Nick wasn’t real happy when his sister Nikki and his friend Tom landed on top of him in the hole. Even though they wanted to find the fabled talking bat while at summer camp, this whole expedition was going from bad to worse.

“Check! Get off me! Check!”

“Hey, wait—I didn’t mean to land on you.”

“Oh, stop. Just get up and let’s see where we are.”

“It’s too dark. Check.”

“Hey—that’s what the flashlight is for. Who has it?”

“You do!!” Nikki and Nick shouted at the same time.

“Hey, wait—I have it. One second.”

Tom turned on the flashlight. They looked around.

Sure enough, there was a tunnel, leading off into the distance.

“It looks dark,” Nick said. He was so scared he forgot to say “Check.”

“It does look dark,” Tom said.

“Definitely dark,” Nikki said.

“Well, if you two are afraid,” Nick said, “I guess we’ll just have to climb back up out of this hole.

“Hey, I’m not afraid,” Tom said.

“Neither am I,” Nikki said. “Girls don’t get afraid.”

“Check,” sighed Nick. “Check.”

Down the tunnel they went. It was dark. Water dripped from the ceiling. Strange smells and sounds came to them from far away. Tom held the camera. Nikki held the flashlight because Nick was shaking too hard. Nick held the knapsack.

“How will we know the talking bat when we see it?” Nick asked.

“It’ll talk to us,” Nikki said. “Sometimes, Nick, I just don’t know about you.”

“Hey, wait, though,” Tom said. “Nick has a point. What if it doesn’t want to talk to us?”

Nikki sighed. “I don’t know. Then I guess we just go home.”

Just then Nick fell into another hole and disappeared. It happened so suddenly Tom only had time to say “Hey, wait!” and Nikki only had time to say “Oh!”

Nikki shined the light down into the hole.

“What’re you doing down there?”

Nick looked ashen. “No jokes. That scared me. Help me up.”

So they helped him up out of the hole and continued down the tunnel.

No one made fun of him. No one said anything. All three of them were scared.

They kept close together as they went forward.

After a few minutes, Tom said, “Hey, wait—do you hear something?”

“I don’t hear anything,” Nikki said.

“I hear something,” Nick said. “Check.”

“Crap. Now I hear something, too,” Nikki said.

They rapidly agreed that not only did they all three hear something, but that it was getting louder.

“It sounds like the washing machine at home,” Nikki said.

“No, I think it kinda sounds like clothes flapping on a laundry line in our yard,” Tom said.

“No, you’re both wrong,” Nick said. “It sounds like a lot of people arguing.”

“Actually, now that I think about it,” Nikki said, “it sounds like a great big flock of bats coming right at us!”

“Hey, wait,” Tom said. “No—don’t wait. You’re right. Run!”

“Heyaaaaaaa!” screamed Tom and dropped his camera.

“Oaaaaaa!” screamed Nikki and dropped the flashlight.

“Checkcheckcheckcheck!” screamed Nick and dropped the knapsack.

Then they all ran like a horde of bats was coming up the tunnel toward them.

But they weren’t fast enough. In just seconds, a horde of bats had caught up with them, their wings getting tangled in their hair, their leathery bodies brushing up against their arms. They kept screaming, even longer and harder. The smell of the bats was overwhelming. They smelled like old paint and rotting cabbage. They didn’t feel real good either.

“Aggh!” they’ve got me, Nick said melodramatically, so that even through her panic Nikki stopped to give him a poke in the ribs. “I’m hit!” Nick screamed.

“You’re not hit,” Nikki screamed. “You’re an idiot!”

Finally, overwhelmed, they just collapsed against the side of the tunnel in a heap.

The bats flew on by and in a few minutes, all was quiet in the tunnel except for the muttered whisper of Nick going “checkcheckecheckecheckecheckcheck” over and over again.

Tom sighed and got to his feet. “I declare this expedition over.”

“Yes. Over,” Nikki said faintly.

“Done with,” Nick said.

“But you haven’t seen the talking bat yet,” said the Talking Bat from somewhere in the darkness over their heads.

***

The publication of Kimber Adla’s Abasi Forgives You All in 2000 by a small press out of Long Island, New York, will prove to be the seminal genre fiction event of the 21st Century, but this fact has not yet leaked out to the critics or the public at large. Therefore, we can say that the Aughts, for all practical purposes, began for fans on nonrealistic fiction with the publication of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, and the riots that followed it. Violence as a result of fiction during this decade has its roots in that core event—marxists versus capitalists on the streets of London—and Longwood’s eventual contribution notwithstanding, created a sense of Us versus Them that lasted more than eight years. One could say that the New Weird world-wide political party that rose from the initial ashes of this conflict was Old Wyrm eating itself Ouroboros-style. It’s a shame that so many writers died in the fighting, their voices stifled forever, and that so many of the young who came to power subsequently mistook the blood for a mandate against extremes, becoming conservatives.

Also rising at the beginning of the Aughts were the somewhat cerebral Technophiliacs, whose mantra of “open source” resulted in massive breakthroughs in nanotechnology and divided the populace into self-proclaimed Immersives, those who lived now with stories in their bloodstreams, and the self-proclaimed Purists who wanted their stories delivered in a more external fashion–soon to be labeled “Closed Source” and “Copyright” by their detractors. The violence endemic to this movement and those who opposed it occurred within the synapses of linked and unlinked minds alike and thus was not as overt as the early New Wave pogroms. Still, in virus-like fashion, it infected the landscape and changed it, sometimes on a microbiotic level.

By the mid-Aughts, however, we had all gotten used to the onslaught of the New and the Old posing as the New. We were comforted by the reappearance of dinosaurs in the form of three-volume heroic fantasy series, these series hardened by the New Weird fight and enlivened by contact with the Technophiliacs. They bestrode the land like something between giant versions of the teddy bears we clutched for comfort as a child when trying to sleep and new, street-savvy beasts.

Fairy tale, periodically orphaned from its origins, rose again toward the end of this period, at times dissected and at times worshipped. Whether wild or tamed, it worked its magic on adult and young adult alike, another familiar sight to remind us of childhood and, uneasily, that adulthood is itself a phase. Gradually, too, these fey folk became more domesticated, more urban, entering into our cities and necessitating the creation of an entire class of “slayers” known for affecting dramatic poses—with guns, with swords—on hills and in public parks, on balconies and rooftops. They weren’t posing so much as scenting their prey, but we did not know this and ridiculed them for their affectations. Others, the Old Folk, who had been there forever and were just being rediscovered, created fastnesses in places like Kiernan Wood.

Hard on the heels of all of this–bloodbath and reconciliation alike–the late Aughts saw the rise of the Other and the rise of the Fail. For it suddenly became apparent amid the din of heroic fantasy dynasties falling like arrow-riddled oliphaunts to the earth, and the tinkling of the faeries in the forest, that there had always been among us other peoples who now, as some perceived it, came out of an empty landscape, to whom most of us had been blind, and made themselves unblinkingly known. It was an insurgency that registered in the bloodstream like the Technophiliacs had, but for social not technological purpose. It traveled through Time, showing those who were blind where it had always existed, handing out magical glasses for those who still had acute astigmatism. The accompanying war was brutal and drawn-out, and conducted in fits and starts. It is still not over, for the old guard, which consisted of some who had been the new guard at decade’s beginning, still could not see these new folk, and the process of coming into focus might take years.

These then were the Aughts–perilous, exciting, bloody, enlightening, and ferocious. They were the end of something. They were the beginning of something. I hated the Aughts. I loved the Aughts.

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year’s Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

I tried to stay out of the great rate fail debate, aside from posting some snarky Cliffsnotes to the whole affair. But it turns out I snarked prematurely, because after I posted a new writer naively waded into the affair, saying established writers were only trying to prevent the newbies from succeeding. After having a great stack of screaming outrage shoved down her throat, she probably staggered away thinking, “What the hell? Why are writers so touchy about short story pay?”

Here’s why: In our hearts, we know making professional rates for our short stories mean we’re still being paid nothing at all.

Only in writing circles would five cents a word be considered professional. After working on a 5,000 word story for 20 plus hours, you’re offering to pay me $250? Hell, you can make more pouring lattes for lawyers at Starbucks! Add in having to pay your own benefits and taxes, and professional rates are actually less than nothing.

I guess that’s why I’ve had such a problem with the outrage over this issue. The screaming chorus, lead by John Scalzi, proclaims that writers deserve to be paid for their work. No argument from me. But missing from their rant is a simple truth: the pay for short stories isn’t anywhere high enough to earn an actual living.

Don’t take me wrong. I still try to publish my short stories in the best possible venues, which are also the ones that pay the highest rates. But don’t pretend that makes you a professional writer. In my book, a professional is someone who earns their entire living working in their profession. Selling a short story at professional rates isn’t even a tiny bit of the way toward earning such a living.

If you write short stories, why quibble over whether a story earns $100 or $250? Instead, focus on writing the best possible story and making it available to readers in the best possible venue. Rachel Swirsky offered some great advice on this the other day (although, as opposed to her, I’d place pay rate after both audience size and prestige in deciding where to publish).

If you want to be a true professional writer like Scalzi, write novels and articles and other freelance work, which can actually pay a living wage if you hustle your ass. But realize there’s also nothing wrong with writing a short story you won’t receive a ton of money for. After all, even professional writers like Scalzi write for free to promote themselves. Scalzi writes tens of thousands of words each year on his blog, none of which he is paid for. But this free writing promotes his other fiction, and convinces people like me to shell out $45 for a limited edition of The God Engines.

In short, either write and publish short stories because you love the genre, or see it as a way to build an audience, or both. But don’t pretend the measly pay alone makes you a professional.

…Wait.

I come to you bearing recommendations for excellent fiction distributed across the web. The first three things are Nebula-elligible stories by Nisi Shawl. Nisi is an amazing, Seattle-based writer who helps coordinate the Clarion West Workshop and is fun to hang out with — but what *you* need to know is that her fiction is awesome.

Last year, her short story collection, Filter House (Aqueduct Press) won the James Tiptree award. Publisher’s Weekly wrote that, “This exquisitely rendered debut collection of 11 reprints and three originals ranges into the past and future to explore identity and belief in a dazzling variety of settings… he threads of folklore, religious magic, family and the search for a cohesive self are woven with power and lucidity throughout this panorama of race, magic and the body.”

Nisi is one of those exquisitely talented writers who works slowly. She has a few prestigious sales to her name, but she doesn’t get nearly the acknowledgement she deserves. I’m mad about her work, though, so this year when the Nebula eligibility questions came up, I said to Nisi, “Hey, Nisi! What work of yours is eligible for the Nebulas?” She confessed to me that three stories of hers were eligible, but that they were not available in electronic form. That would not do! said I, and convinced her to let me coordinate their web posting so that readers can look at her work and enjoy it — and if you’re in SFWA, consider nominating it.

Good Boy:

As a child on their outbound ship, Kressi had enjoyed the lessons on Benjamin Banneker, George McCoy, and technology’s other black pioneers. She’d wanted to be Ruth Fleurny, maverick member of the team that perfected the Bounce. It was because of Fleurny’s stubborn insistence on cheap access for all descendants of enslaved Africans as a condition of the “star drive’s” sale that the Neo-Negroes and a handful of similar expeditions had gotten off the ground.

Bird Day:

We sat in a circle on the side of the street. Some of us had lawn chairs, or folding chairs we’d brought out from our houses. Stepstools, even. We had a bunch of different kinds of seats we were sitting in.

This was the day to commune with birds.

And The Water Museum

When I saw the hitchhiker standing by the sign for the Water Museum, I knew he had been sent to assassinate me. First off, that’s what the dogs were saying as I slowed to pick him up. Girlfriend, with her sharp, little, agitated bark, was quite explicit. Buddy was silently trying to dig a hole under the back seat, seeking refuge in the trunk. I stopped anyway.

Take a read. It’s worth it.

Now for the gay sex.

Actually, no gay sex! I wrote a review of two related stories before remembering that we’re not supposed to get too R-rated here. Suffice it to say that college friend Tim Jones-Yelvington has recently published a pair of stories about the fictional seduction of gay celebrities diver Matt Mitcham and singer Adam Lambert.

His narrator is a gay sociologist who keeps a blog record of his seductions, in a contemporary take on the epistolary format. “My research methodology: I have sex with gay celebrities and write about it,” his character writes.

Read Seducing Matt Mitcham and Seducing Adam Lambert and/or check out my review at my livejournal.

Guest blogger Jason Sanford often rants on his website at www.jasonsanford.com. His fiction has been published in Interzone, Year’s Best SF 14, Analog, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Pindeldyboz, and other places, and has won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship.

Nominations for the 2009 Nebula Awards ballot are now coming in. Unfortunately, only members of the SFWA can nominate works for the awards. But let’s throw aside the rules for a moment and assume anyone can nominate their favorite genre works for the award. What novels from the last year would you nominate?

In the interests of complete honesty, the reason I’m writing this post is because I’m frustrated that my favorite novel of 2009, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, has received only a few nominations so far. If you want to read my rant on this, pop over to my website.

In addition to Bacigalupi’s amazing book, I’ve also nominated for best novel Green by Jay Lake and The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko. Since I can nominate up to five novels, I’ll likely pick two more novels before the Feb. 15 deadline.

So what 2009 novels would you nominate for the Nebula?

Let’s start with the premise that there are two kinds of urban fantasy. I’ll call them stylistic urban fantasy and contextual urban fantasy. You’ve read the stylistic kind — or if you haven’t, WTH are you doing here on Jeff’s blog? Neil Gaiman (e.g., Neverwhere) and China Mieville (e.g., The City and the City) fall into this category as well. This was the first stuff to be overtly called “urban fantasy” as a literary movement, as far as I can tell (though fantasies set in cities have been written for literally centuries).

You might’ve read the contextual kind too, which is generally called urban fantasy because it takes place in a city or its exurbs, and involves fantasy creatures like werewolves and demons. But this kind of UF, as exemplified by Laurell K. Hamilton (e.g., the Anita Blake vampire hunter series), Patricia Briggs (e.g., the Mercy Thompson series), and Marjorie Liu (e.g., the Dirk & Steele series), bears about as much resemblance to the earlier form of urban fantasy as apples do to… well, no, oranges are both fruit.  Let’s range a bit further afield.  Bean pies?  Yeah, that’ll do.  Apples and fucking bean pies.  (I love me some bean pies, by the way.)

Just from the two sets of examples I’ve provided, if you’ve read any one of each set, you can guess at some of the differences textwise — but let’s skip the text for a moment, and focus on something else. The three stylistic UF authors I’ve mentioned are white guys. Pretty diverse in other ways, but that part’s fairly explicit. The three contextual UF authors are women. Hamilton and Briggs are white, as far as I know, and Liu is biracial (white and Asian). Most, if not all, of the stylistic UF protagonists are also white men, but the characters of the contextual UF I mentioned vary more widely. Briggs’ is Native American. Liu’s go all over the place — white women, black women and men, Latino shapeshifting dolphin boys — but in general, tend to place women in strong central roles.

Then there are the textual differences. I’ll get this right out in the open: I see better writing on the stylistic side of the coin. But that’s to be expected; it’s stylistic, after all, and craft matters, sometimes to the detriment of the story. The core of stylistic UF seems to be that the city or society is the focus of the story, as much a character as the protagonists themselves — which sometimes serves to reduce the protagonists to ciphers, there just to guide us through the strange, strange world of the story. Contextual UF takes a different tack, putting the city in the background and positioning the character squarely in front (as shown on most contextual UF cover art). Style matters here too, but in a very different way, with a solid emphasis on characterization. Without a vivid, identifiable, frankly lovable character, all the artful prose and scenery in the world becomes meaningless in contextual UF.

All of the authors mentioned, note, are New York Times bestsellers or winners of major awards — or both — which I’m taking as evidence that both forms of UF are popular and viable. The contextual stuff is probably more popular at the moment. Not surprising, really — it’s aimed at a larger audience. But bottom line, neither subgenre is hurting for readers.

So now I want to lay out a very non-scientific hypothesis. Two, actually.

Hypothesis 1: I believe steampunk is the bastard child of stylistic and contextual UF. Given its industrial roots, nearly all steampunk is at least rooted in city culture, if not actually set in cities. The steampunk milieu I’ve seen present haves and have-nots, ready access to skilled craftspeople and precision instruments, and concerns which are probably of greater importance to city dwellers than rural farmer-types (e.g., philosophical/ideological conflicts). And of course the setting and style matters, since steampunk is basically alternate history; effectively capturing the mood and feel of earlier times is essential. But most steampunk stories take as given that the individual is the center of the story, not the society or city in which the individual lives — suggesting a heritage drawn from contextual UF. In fact, I would argue that steampunk makes an archetype of Rugged Individualism, a quintessentially masculine (and white male American) ideology, and lays about with it, subverting the archetype in ways that make it appealing across lines of gender and culture and nation. In steampunk the hero is not the closemouthed cowboy wandering the Midwestern American plain. Steampunk’s heroes are effete British gentlemen wandering a landscape of intellectual adventure. Or never mind the effete part; steampunk goes right for the chicks as protags, in a way the actual progenitors of the Rugged Individualist ideal would’ve found inconceivable. So we get stylistic SF’s absorption with setting and art, and contextual SF’s accessibility and character-centeredness. Two great tastes that taste great together.

Hypothesis #2: As you may have guessed from Hypothesis #1, I think there is not as much difference between these two forms of UF as everybody keeps saying there is. (Where “everybody” = some value of “random people on the internet” [see also the io9 link above, especially the comments] + “random people at SF cons” like + “people I know”, some of whom actually know what they’re talking about.) Oh, sure, contextual UF’s reputation suffers from formulaic marketing (I’m really sick of the tattooed women’s body parts, personally) and the inexplicable success of some very poor writers within the fold. And sure, stylistic SF suffers by its elitism — both textual and by-association. But there’s more overlap than separation here. And lately I’ve been seeing more and more successful combinations of style and context* that make me think a subgenre fusion (or reunification) may be in the offing.

So, in the absence of experimental methodologies which could possibly test and/or refine these hypotheses, I turn to you, gentle Ecstatic Days readers. What are your thoughts on the division, differences, and possible reformation of the two forms of UF? Discuss.

I don’t have a horse in this race, note. My book’s epic fantasy. Just sayin’.

* (My favorite example of this is Kate Griffin’s A Madness of Angels, contextual UF with Big Fucking stylistic Guns; seriously, Griffin’s prose is hypnotic and addictive. I would also recommend Steven Boyett’s Ariel and Elegy Beach if they weren’t so many other things in addition to Urban Fantasy — quest fantasy, postapocalyptic fantasy, fantasy dystopia with a whiff of magic cyberpunk — so they’re not pure enough to be a good example. But good writing, regardless of classification.)