In the Late December, by Greg van Eekhout

Appropriately enough, today I read a Christmas story.  In the Late December was nominated for a Nebula in 2004.  It's a nice little end-of-the-world tale, elegiac enough to be clever but still offering some hope.  Santa has been at it for 43 billion years, and it may be about the end of the line.  Why does one go on, at that point?  Read to see the author's answer.  3 stars.

Four Short Novels, by Joe Haldeman

One more today, this one a bit more remarkable.  Short stories are where most writers cut their teeth, and an ordinary one seems relatively easy to do (I say relatively.  I have only written one, so the opinion may not be informed).  But writing a good, remarkable short story would seem to be way hard.  One is trying to convey a fully formed, interesting story idea in a very compact form.  Some very good ones are close to poetry.  And one could read Four Short Novels that way--as four somewhat long form blank verses.  It would work.  This is a short story, nominated for the Hugo in 2004.  But it is really four shorter stories, each one quite complete, and might possibly have garnered award nominations on their own.  But they are definitely chapters, possibly verses, and hang together beautifully.  They are four riffs on immortality, each beginning "Eventually it came to pass that no one had to die...", thus the poetic overtone.

Joe Haldeman is a veteran writer, and it would take one to pull this off. This is 15 minutes of your life you will want to do again.  Four stars, go check it out.

Don Ysidro, by Bruce Holland Rogers

Don Ysidro is a nice little story on a site called Flash Fiction Online, so it figures to be short.  And sweet, since it won a World Fantasy Award for short story in 2004.  It's an afterlife story, and fairly noncontroversial, at least for pantheists.  I liked it, but don't have much more to say.  Read it in 15 minutes if you are short on time.

Different Kinds of Darkness, by David Langford

Different Kinds of Darkness is a nice little gem that got a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2001.  It belongs to an interesting little subgenre of stories that speculate on what life would be like if a thought or visual pattern put the brain in the equivalent of a Windows blue screen state--frozen up.  Ted Chiang's story Understand contains such a pattern.  I have read at least two others, but they aren't coming to mind right now.  Different Kinds is a good one, worth a read, though it might be just a touch naive.  3 stars.

The World Fantasy Awards confuse me.  I think of fantasy as involving magic somehow, not being too concerned with technical details of how the fantastic element comes about.  Though technical magic may be involved.  This story seems very hard SF, yet it's nominated for Fantasy.  Stretchy.  Oh well.

The Death of the Duke, by Ellen Kushner

The Death of the Duke is set in Ellen Kushner's Riverside series, as Jed Hartman indicates in its introduction.  He regards its main significance as having a gay romance at a time when this was less normal.  Maybe if you hadn't read LeGuin. In any case, the story reads as a sort of postlude to the series--the Duke was one of the protagonists of that romance, but he has had many since, and we see him here at the end of his life with a woman.  I guess it stood well enough on its own to get a World Fantasy Award nomination in 1999, but still goes to show that you should read a series from the beginning to really get it, regardless of what the author or series fans tell you.  Three stars if you read the series, 2 stars if not.

TAP, by Greg Egan

TAP stands for Total Affect Protocol, a brain implant that gives the user a new, personal language--a way to express any emotion or thought, no matter how complex.  Nothing is ineffable.  One of its early users has died from what appear to be complications of the implant, but her daughter does not think so--she thinks it is murder.  So begins this story.

As always with Egan, the premise is one that will make you think hard.  In this case the premise is a bit of a stretch for me--it's hard to figure out what it truly means.  But the way the story proceeds makes it clearer as it goes along. The story winds up as a powerful combination of two future technologies--TAP and immersive virtual reality--and a very difficult moral dilemma.  Both technologies are frightening when carried to their logical conclusion, but even worse would be to have one without the other.  You'll have to read it to see why, the argument builds through the whole piece.

It's not hard to see why it was nominated for a Hugo in the novelette category in 1996.  Also understandable that it didn't win, because it's a challenging story to read, and you probably should read it more than once.  Now, I almost never read things more than once, but I do think about them, and the more I consider this story the better I like it.  Go read it, more than once if that's something you do, or read it closely if not.  Four stars.

Morning Child, by Gardner Dozios

Morning Child is another war story, I think a theme for the collection it is in.  The weapons are fantastic, but they have passed beyond understanding.  Williams and John pass their days in a depopulated post-apocalypse world, near the ruins of their old home.

To describe the story further would be to fully quote it.  It's pretty short, nominated for a Nebula Best Short Story in 1984.  It's a good short story--the relationship brings out what has happened to them, not any sort of exposition.  Except toward the end, where it adds poignancy.  Read it to fill a few minutes.  Three stars, kind of by default.