Continuing my reading of this year's Nebula Award nominees with Non-Zero Probabilities, by N. K. Jemisin. The hook on this one is that our good luck wards and gestures actually do something. Probability goes weird in New York, and unless you keep up on your luck the rare bad events will catch up to you. Seems kind of interesting, in that you would gain some control over otherwise uncontrollable events. And that's what some in the story think. It's reasonably well executed.
As a side note, it is interesting to see how many of the shorter fiction nominees are coming from online publications now--nearly all of them. The short form lives on in SF, in the advertising/sponsorware support model.
Bonus: Spar, by Kij Johnson
Given that an alien rescue could be most anything, I suppose it could be an endless fuck. So the story goes. Sort of interesting as a nightmare story, but hard to view it as a Nebula award nominee. Hard up, I guess. 2 stars.
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