The Litigation Master and the Monkey King, by Ken Liu

And now for something completely different.  Ken Liu usually writes pretty serious fiction.  That continues here, and The Litigation Master... is somewhat dark stuff.  Tian Haoli is a lawyer (songgun) in Manchu China. Law and the ability to argue at court was a pretty disrespected profession, but while today's lawyers can be wealthy, Tian is rather poor.  Probably because he helps the poor himself.  The Monkey King is a demon from that time that seems to talk to or appear to Tian.  That's the speculative part.  Helping the poor against the powerful is always a dangerous proposition, and that's no different here.

Liu likes to teach a bit in his fiction, and Tian is apparently based on a real character.  It's not a light read, but you will come away knowing more than before.  3 stars, because it's a bit more straight-up than his previous work.

Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters, by Henry Lien

There's a line in comic writing wherein the author, trying to make a wry social commentary on a stereotype, ends up merely reinforcing it.  Leslie Jones did this recently on Saturday Night Live.  And I think Henry Lien accomplishes something similar, on a smaller scale, in Pearl Rehabilitative Colony...

The riffs here are on Asian over achievement, filial piety and general disrespect for girls.  All good points to skewer, but this story pretty much beats them with a stick.  It ends up to be mostly wearing and not all that funny.  I guess the Nebula nomination is for bravery in taking on your own, but that's not so special--comics do it all the time.  This is a short read but I would say not worth quite that much time.

Interestingly enough, this is supposed to be the start of a series.  Pearl is an area where much of the architecture is made from a tough substance suitable for skating, so that;s how residents get around.  The story centers on martial arts on skates.  There might be somewhere to go here, but at this point not really.

2 stars from me.

They Shall Salt the Earth With Seeds of Glass, by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Alien invasions seem to be a great way to bring out the best and worst in our social/political situation.  The classic John Campbell style heroism had its best modern representation to me in Independence Day.  But just as often it's more dystopian, with subjugation bringing out (or based on) our weaknesses.  Sometimes it's to save us, as in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series.  There might be something of that going on in They Shall Salt...and in this case the social weakness is the abortion issue.

The narrator is a farmer/survivor of the invasion.  Humans are basically scraping by and a sad bunch.  Aliens come along and mine the area with glass bead bombs (thus we have a commentary on modern warfare as well), along with other social engineering.  They offer to take in pregnant mothers and assist them through birth, but what happens next might be sinister.  So the story revolves around what happens when the narrator's sister becomes pregnant.

Johnson makes things interesting by throwing in an almost-sympathetic alien that discusses their efforts to rebuild human society in foreign NGO/UN speak.  Would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Read this for a tweak at your conscience.  It's one of the things speculative fiction is good for. Three stars from me.

The Waiting Stars, by Aliette de Bodard

I never quite know what to make of Aliette de Bodard.

Critics like her work a lot, she gets nominated for awards every year.  But I find her work difficult to read--not that it's gross or anything, it just seems heavy.  Now that I've read a few other pieces, The Waiting Stars makes more sense to me.  The Mind Ships and their companions are more interesting.  But in the shorter fiction, there just seems to be a lot left out.

In this story, we have a Ship and its human companions searching a Ship graveyard set up by the Outsiders--a group of people very offended at how Mind Ships come about.  The story comes together from two perspectives--a woman named Catherine, who has been "rescued" by the Outsiders and somehow rebuilt to fit into their society, and Lan Nhen, the human companion of the Ship searching the Outsider graveyard.

As her stories go, I was able to follow this one better than most, and the Mind Ships are growing on me a little.  But not really enough to spend a lot of effort searching it out.  Two stars from me, probably more from the critics.

Paranormal Romances, by Chris Barzak

Stories are stories, and pictures are pictures.  But some pictures tell a story, and some stories paint a picture.  Paranormal Romances is the last.  It's one of the better ways to make something that's complete in short fiction, and we have an example here.

This is the story of Sheila the witch, and her struggles with a subject on which she is an expert.  Spoiler Alert: In order to say anything else about this story I pretty much have to give the picture's subject away, so be warned.

Sheila makes a living at witchcraft, specializing in love spells.  She's good at what she does and not greedy, so she has what she believes to be a satisfying life--evenings alone, dinner once a week with her gay neighbors who are quite nice and love her.  Her mother is getting desperate to fix her up, and that desperation (and resulting lousy date, complete with inappropriate disclosures from her mother) gets her off the schneid to go find some romance of her own. 

So in the end you're pulling for her, which is a good thing.  Read this one if you're a bit down, but too proud to just whistle a happy tune.  3 stars from me.

Trial of the Century, by Lawrence M. Schoen

Trial of the Century is a tale for fans of old-school John W. Campbell style science fiction in the Analog days.  It is a novella bridging the first and second of Schoen's Amazing Conroy/Buffalito stories, though this one is very much Conroy's story.  Since the first novel wasn't award nominated and isn't in our local library, I've never read it.  This always puts me on the spot because it's hard to be fair to the work.  But since this novella recaps some of the early history in order to tell the story, I feel like I've caught up with the series better than when I read last year's award nominated novel.

Campbell was the first editor in SF to try to bend storytellers away from tales where aliens came in and killed/dominated earthlings wholesale.  Campbell wanted humans to be able to outsmart more technologically advanced species with local knowledge.  Schoen's novella delivers on this front in Conroy's unfortunate delivery back into the hands of the Arconi he stole Reggie the Buffalito from.  It's a successful story in that vein, so I'll not spoil it further.  But it's a good chance to go back in time and enjoy SF the way it was. Three stars from me

Burning Girls, by Veronica Schanoes

I enjoy a good culturally grounded magic story--all cultures with any history have a culture of "witch" magical lore, and Burning Girls delivers a fine example.  The magic delivered here is Jewish, from the 1800s in Poland.  Pogroms against Jews were a regular feature of Polish history, and one of them drives the survivors to America..  But first we have the training of the witch--she learns the lore from her bubbe in rural Poland.  She then must face a lilit, an apparently high-level demon quite close to Satan. 

I can find no fault and a lot of good.  I have read stories like this before so it wasn't something fresh for me, but would make an impression if you haven't read much of Jewish lore before.  It's not going to turn the world upside down for originality, but that's asking a lot.  Three stars from me.