First off, thanks to Jeff for letting me continue these guest posts even though he hath returned. This is the end of my nebula posting series, so I’ll be toddling back to the corners of the internet where I usually post — Big Other, Alas a Blog, Ambling Along the Aqueduct, and my livejournal.

Now, novellas. Well, first things first — novellas are long. Anyone else notice that? I guess I always knew they were long, but it didn’t really strike me until I compiled a list and started to read. You can’t get through 9 novellas in a day. Or at least I can’t.

Secondly, novellas are hard to access. I went through the SFWA list of nominations, and then through the SFWA boards, and ended up with a grand total of… 7 novellas that I had free access to. Seven? And I was supposed to nominate from that? So I went back through my list and picked out a couple more novellas that weren’t available for free access, but which I thought I might be able to get the author or publisher to send me. Both requests were answered in the affirmative, and I ended up with two more novellas — bringing my read-for-nomination total to nine.

Nine is still not enough novellas to make an informed reading list, I think. However, given the length of the pieces, and the fact that I have run out of the time I allotted for this project, I’m going to swing with it.

But I’m not going to compile a list of nominees and recommended reading as I did for the other two categories, because it doesn’t seem like it would be as helpful. Instead, I’m including a few brief reviews. (I read one that is not listed here, but had nothing to say about it.)

#1 – “Sublimation Angels” by Jason Sanford, Interzone

This was the first novella I read, and the one I liked best — although it’s possible that my appreciation for it was inflected by the fact that I didn’t have to read it off of my ***ing computer screen, since I had a copy of the magazine in hand. I don’t mind reading off my screen for most purposes, but after about 70-100 shorts, 55 novelettes, and 9 novellas — my eyes are strained, my headache is pressing, and I’m considering buying a damn kindle.

You, however, can read it online as the author makes it available in PDF form.

This hard SF adventure tells a complex story about alien encounter, the travails of living on an inhospitable alien world, hierarchies enforced by resource control, filial love, romantic love, evil artificial intelligences, morally ambiguous artificial intelligences, and more. It deals with some old SF tropes in ways that were new to me, which kept me intellectually engaged. And the action is consistent and interesting, keeping me emotionally engaged through swift turns, reveals and reversals.

I could muster criticisms, but I won’t bother — this is an engaging read, both intellectually and plot-wise. I will definitely be nominating it.
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According to Kathryn Cramer and others, Kage Baker passed away this morning. Rest in peace, Kage. You were one of the good ones, and I would like to think that this is not the end, that instead you have merely been assigned by The Company to some new mission.

Ann and I can’t claim to be close friends of Kage’s, but she was one of those colleagues who you could always count on and who you always expected to be there, and whose loss you feel severely. She contributed to several of our books, always with grace and professionalism. She even recorded a video with her parrot for our pirate anthology, one of our fondest memories of that project.

As we told Kage via email last week, we are dedicating the Lambshead cabinet of curiosities anthology to her, and her sister told us she got a definite kick out of that. She always had a good sense of humor.

Dr. Baker was a contributor to the prior volume, our fake disease guide, and would have contributed to this follow-up if she’d been able. (Dr. Baker’s many accomplishments and adventures will of course be memorialized in the front matter to the cabinet anthology.)

She was a fabulous writer. She will be missed.

(Marty Halpern wrote an extensive appreciation when he found out she was ill.)

The novelette ballot was harder for me to come up with than the short story ballot because I came into my reading with three PodCastle-produced novelettes in mind as being among this year’s best, and it was difficult for me to find ones that I felt were as good or better.

I am genuinely excited by the five I found to nominate, though, and I found a number of other very good novelettes along the way. I was most excited by Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Gambler” as a single piece — but the real trove was Eclipse 3, which provided a number of strong-to-excellent novelette length reads.

I used the same reading process as for short stories, except I also went through all the novelettes available on the SFWA boards to pick out stories by authors who I’ve enjoyed in the past. Very few people seem to be using this resource — the download numbers, even for popular authors, are low.

For full disclosure, I have two novelettes that are doing well in the Nebula nominations so far — “A Memory of Wind” and “Eros, Philia, Agape,” both up at Tor.com — so this is the category in which my objectivity is most suspect.

My nominees
“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi, Fast Forward 2
“The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain” by Jason Sanford, Interzone
“Good Boy” by Nisi Shawl, Filter House
“It Takes Two” by Nicola Griffith, Eclipse 3
“Useless Things” by Maureen McHugh, Eclipse 3

Highly Recommended
“Narrative of a Beast’s Life” by Cat Rambo, Realms of Fantasy*
“The Curandero and the Swede: A Tale from the American 1001 Nights” by Daniel Abraham, Fantasy & Science Fiction*
“The Nalendar” by Ann Leckie, Andromeda Spaceways (Nebula elligible due to PodCastle publication)*

Recommended
“The Pretender’s Tourney” by Daniel Abraham, Eclipse 3
“Sleight of Hand” by Peter S. Beagle, Eclipse 3
“Truth and Bone” by Pat Cadigan, Poe
“Dragaman’s Bride” by Andy Duncan, The Dragon Book
“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster, Interzone
“A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest…” by Helen Keeble, Strange Horizons
“The Magician’s House” by Megan McCarron, Strange Horizons
“Lion Walk” by Mary Rosenblum, Asimov’s Science Fiction
“Errata” by Jeff VanderMeer, Tor.com
“The Mathematics of Faith” by Jonathan Wood, Beneath Ceaseless Skies

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*Stories that would have been on my ballot if not for PodCastle publication
**”First Flight” by Mary Robinette Kowal is still on my reading list — she’s declined eligibility for the Nebula this year, but I intend to consider it for the Hugo.

Green Man Review has posted the following update on Kage Baker’s condition.

Kage’s doctor has informed us she has reached the end of useful treatment. The cancer has slowed, but not stopped. It has continued to spread at an unnatural speed through her brain, her lungs and – now – reappeared in her abdomen. It is probably a matter of a few weeks, at most. Kage has fought very hard, but this is just too aggressive and mean. She’s very, very tired now, and ready for her Long Sleep. She’s not afraid. We’ve been in a motel the last week or so, in order to complete her therapy.I’ll have her home in her own bedroom by the weekend, though, so end of life care can take place in more comfortable surroundings.

There’s no getting around just how much this sucks. Kage is a lovely human being and a writer who has given a lot of us many hours of rapt enjoyment. She’s also a very humorous writer, and I hope that her sense of humor is helping her a little bit in these extreme circumstances. (In typical Baker fashion, when, not knowing she had cancer, we queried about her contribution to the forthcoming Lambshead Cabinet of Curiousities, she replied in part that she wasn’t up to it unless we wanted her as medical specimen.)

If you want to drop her a line or send her something (you really should), the information on how to do so can be found here.

Rachel Swirsky here again with another guest post.

I recently blitzed through a number of short stories so that I could finalize the short story portion of my Nebula ballot. I wanted to post about the ones I decided to nominate, and also some of the other excellent ones I encountered in my reading. I hope people will check out these stories, possibly for award consideration, but mostly because they’re cool.

First, methodology for creating my reading list: I had a few short stories from my year’s reading that I already wanted to nominate. Then, I asked a few authors whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past to send me copies of their eligible stories. I volunteered to read stories by Codex Writers Forum authors who wanted to email me their eligible work. I added stories from the lists by Joe Sherry and Jason Sanford. Editor Sean Wallace gave me his 4 of his favorite stories from Fantasy Magazine, and his 2 of his favorites from Clarkesworld. Editor Scott Andrews sent me 5 of his favorites from Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Then I went through the list of stories that have been recommended for the Nebula so far, copied over all the titles that have received three recommendations or more, and then went through the ones that have received 1 or 2 recommendations to pick out ones by authors whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past. From that reading list, I picked stories to nominate and recommend.

Except for what I read over the course of the year, I did not read stories that I could not easily find online, or find within a few minutes of searching in the SFWA fiction archive. This is certainly not the most comprehensive reading I could have done — if I had more energy, I’d probably try to read all the stories Strahan, Horton, and Harrison have liked this year — but I’m resolved not to fall into the trap Cheryl Morgan describes of disqualifying myself based on too little reading, and unfortunately that means that my nominations will inevitably be imperfect.

My short story nominations
“Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh, Asimov’s Science Fiction
“Remembrance is Something Like a House” by Will Ludwigsen, Interfictions 2
“The Mermaids Singing Each to Each” by Cat Rambo, Clarkesworld
“The Godfall’s Chemsong” by Jeremiah Tolbert, Interzone
“Non-Zero Probabilities” by N. K. Jemisin, Clarkesworld
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While the Jeff’s away, the guests will play — I thought I’d take up his offer of guest posting to promote an interesting conversation about genre that’s happening at one of the other blogs I write for, Big Other.

A. D. Jameson writes:

I love genre, because genres are basically conventions. They’re expectations that both authors and readers (and editors, and sales people) bring to a text—suggestions as to what should be inside, and how it should be arranged. And I dearly love conventions, because they’re the very stuff of communication, and of artistic structure—whether we’re obeying them, or departing from them.

I’ve never really understood what some people mean when they talk about “exploding genres” and “writing between genres,” and so forth, because I myself can think of very little writing that is pure genre. Most literature that I read—even the more conventional things—already exist between multiple genres.

Consider The Lord of the Rings.

On the one hand, it’s a “pure” example of contemporary fantasy fiction. Right? Hell, it’s the cornerstone of contemporary fantasy fiction. And it definitely is fantasy fiction… [b]ut when we look even more closely, we find that Tolkien’s writing contains traces of other genres. It’s contemporary fantasy, to be sure, but it’s also heavily inspired by Norse mythology, Old English and Middle English literature, German Romanticism, and Victorian children’s literature. Tolkien synthesized these various interests to craft a new kind of fantasy literature that differs from, say, fairy tales.

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The situation in Haiti following the earthquake is terrible. Here’s information on how you can help. It reads in part:

“In a blog post on the U.S. State Department Web site, Clinton’s Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills called for those wanting to help to donate $10 by texting “HAITI” to “90999.” The $10 donation will go automatically to the Red Cross “to help with relief efforts” and will be charged directly to your cell phone bill, the Web site said.”

Due to pressing deadlines, I’ll have to post my next blog entry about Finch next week. In the meantime, here are some lovely images from the Bellysnatcher project Eric Orchard and I are working on–and feel free to tell me/us about anything you’re working on or have out.

Also, the Onion AV Club interview with me is up. It was a phone interview and a couple of things got garbled, but it’s pretty good. The “[pastiche]” in an early draft really was of Darconville’s Cat by Theroux, not noir.

(My gawd–this is so weird. Before I renounced cephalopods earlier this year, my next novel was going to be titled The Squid and the Squid.)

Since most of my predictions for 2009 came true–I predicted in 2008, for example, that I would end my 2009 Booklife/Finch tour reading from a storage closet in an Atlanta bar and that the blogosphere would come apart at the seams during a harmless discussion of magazine pay rates–I’ve decided to again put forth some knowledgeable mutterings about the year to come.

(1) I predict that China Mieville will publish a novel about squid and that it will be odd. I predict this because you could see this coming as early as 2003, when City of Saints & Madmen came out in the U.S. China’s entry in the bibliography of “King Squid”–Naughty Lisp and the Squid–points to an unhealthy obsession–one I used to share, but which I have since put behind me.

(2) Because Jane Austen has so much to answer for now, scientists will clone her by combining her DNA with the DNA of a woolly mammoth and she will appear before the International Court on charges of Ridiculous Cross-Pollution, the resulting mash-up called Pride of the Courtly Cave Bears.

(Baby mammoth, or a resurrected Jane Austen?)

(2) Margaret Atwood will announce her new invention, on which she has been hard at work for the past few years: The Infernal Claw. This device, which has replaced her right hand and wrist, is indeed a steel claw hooked up to a machine that allows her, even in her sleep, to remotely sign readers’ books. Her books will now come with nanotechnology embedded in the title pages so that she may randomly and without warning sign your copy of her latest novel. The ectoplasmic, alt-world doppelganger of The Infernal Claw will use the nanotechnology on the title page as a portal through which to enter your brain and both tickle it and convince you to admit that you do not write science fiction (and, in many cases, this will be true).

Just a note that although Finch and Booklife have both gone back to reprint due to brisk sales, they should still be available in most bookstores. Also, Finch will be a featured selection of Indiebound in January, apparently, so support your indie bookstores by picking it up there if you can. (If you want to give me a holiday gift, btw, go to Amazon and write a review of Finch.)

Finch is out from Grove Atlantic in the UK/British Commonwealth in August of next year, and Booklife from A&C Black in July. There’s a distinct possibility I’ll be in the UK in July.