The Grand Jete, by Rachel Swirsky

Rachel Swirsky is a very reliable award nominee, it seems like I have reviewed a story of hers every year.  They are always good literary stories, and The Grand Jete is no exception.  The speculative piece is a robot avatar--a capture of a person in robot form, developed for military use.  It is a rather light framework for the story, concerning the relationship between a dying girl and her engineer father.  The cultural exploration is Jewish--the father tries to keep Shabbat and kosher, but they bend the rules significantly, particularly to accommodate her illness.

It's a fascinating and difficult exploration, told from both the father and daughter perspective.  The father intends to keep the robot as a replacement for his dying daughter, but in order to complete the process must have her permission.  We see what she goes through as she considers this.

The story has a little bit of a feeling like it's both speculative and dated.  We have a household run by AI (only a mild enhancement of Google Now) but it is exercised mostly to play DVDs.  It's in keeping with the household and the father, though--he is a tinkerer and has patched together the household components.

Overall, I give it a strong 3 stars for literary value.  Enjoy

If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love, by Rachel Swirsky

So here's a nice, deserving award nominee.  If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love is, indeed, a love story.  Kind of a prose poem.  The emotions are both delicate and raw, thus the dinosaur metaphor she chooses is very accurate.  Good stuff here, spend a few minutes and read it.  Three stars.

Portrait of Lisane da Patagnia, by Rachel Swirsky

Fine art and literary fantasy associate very closely, so closely it's hard to separate them.  Art seems to reach into the same mental space as fantasy, using imaginative perception to see how things "are" as impressionists see space.  Major contrast with science fiction, where mechanical arts and technology dominate.  Portrait of Lisane da Patagnia gives a straight-up combination of art and magic--artists can use magic to enhance their work.  The catch--the process of enhancing a representation with magic damages or destroys the original.

Our protagonist has the gift of using magic in painting, but little else.  The why of that is explained through her relationship with her master, Lisane da Patagnia, last in a line of genius painters.  Lisane lives by no ordinary codes.  And she finally asks her former apprentice to break the last code--to paint her with magic before she dies.  What happens when a painter attempts such a thing?

Good storytelling, with bold and slashing color.  A good and worthy read, 3 stars from me.

Eros, Philia, Agape, by Rachel Swirsky

Robot stories have never really gotten past Asimov--his Three Laws of Robotics have pretty much defined how robot stories get told. It's like Hobbes in political science--everyone has to respond to Asimov.  But Rachel Swirsky's Eros, Philia, Agape is a good move away--the robot is a familiar humanoid, but his thinking is very much not in the logical vein of Asimov's artifical humans. 

We have two very equal protagonists in this one.  Adriana, a rich woman with a difficult past and much too little to do, purchases a robot as a companion.  Lucien is a fine robot, learning about Adriana and assembling his personality as her perfect companion.  She views him as human, and assists groups that work for robot personhood.  The story starts with his taking advantage of this, leaving to find his own programming.  The story got a Hugo nomination for Best Novelette in 2010, and it's quite a good read, if rather relaxed and sad.  I enjoyed reading it, and I think you will too.  Three stars from me.

Fields of Gold, by Rachel Swirsky

I wrote a review of this about 10 days ago, but somehow it did not post.  So I will try again...

Fields of Gold is a Nebula nominated novelette.  It's a good example of a "what happens after you die" story, and I think it's a pretty strong candidate for the award.  Our protagonist has died young, diabetic coma, and is now in the afterlife.  The first event is a big party where everyone important to you, apparently including fictional characters, shows up.  We get a review of Charlie's life and disappointments, as well as its few triumphs, but it is not mean-spirited or sad.  It's a hard story to describe other than to say it is sweet and makes you glad you read it.  We even get an idea of what Heaven might be like.  So it's a nice story, and I'm giving it a strong three stars.  Go check it out.

The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window by Rachel Swirsky

The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window is another Nebula-nominated story linked from my personal favorite website, Free SF Online.  The main trope is familiar, a soul bound in magic, this time for all eternity, summoned back occasionally for her knowledge of magic.  But this story is powerfully unique in its treatment of how magic interacts with ambition. 

The protagonist is bound early in the story, a result of treachery.  She has her revenge on the one who bound her, but the story is only getting started there.  She continues to get called back through time, to advise future societies.  They study and develop magic almost as a science, getting better and better at it but still needing the old versions.  Our subject grows reluctantly fond of several of those she has called. 

The protagonist is an unrelieved bigot, of the fashionable sort--no men allowed to have magic.  And she is called on it as well, by the most sympathetic characters in the story.  She does not change, but she does evolve over time and at least sometimes judge people as individuals.  Fully drawn characters interacting with interesting ideas are the true heart of speculative fiction, and Swirsky has done it well here.  A rare 4 stars.

A Memory of Wind, by Rachel Swirsky

Moving along through this year's Nebula Award nominees, tonight's review is of A Memory of Wind, by Rachel Swirsky. In this story we get Iphigenia's point of view on the Siege of Troy. All we know about her from Homer is that she was sacrificed to Artemis in exchange for a wind to blow the Greek army to Troy. The story is told in a haunting fashion, but it's kind of self-consciously so. While it was crafted well, it left me pretty much unmoved. Maybe it just isn't my thing. But it has many positive comments on the site, so quite possibly you will like it better.