Continuing with the reading of Nebula award nominees for 2015, I read And You Shall Know Her By the Trail of Dead in the novelette category. I sort of want my 40 minutes back.
The story centers on Rhye, an artificial person in a grungy near-apocalypse world. She expresses her nihilism in gutter prose that is not quite artful enough to be interesting or extreme enough to be a parody. She cares for no one and nothing except Rack, a partner that somehow took an interest in her. They are now in deep doo-doo over a virtual rescue. She shoots a lot of criminals, he does some computer magic, and all's well that ends well.
It's not a terrible story but sure not very good. The writing is grammatically accurate. But really, this has all been done so very often that one can't get away with a skeleton plot and lots of f-words. Every part of this is borrowed, and I can't make it worth the effort to track all the borrowings down. Two stars because I could finish it, and I guess some have liked it.
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