Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers, by Alyssa Wong

So I think Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers is my new favorite of this year's Nebula short story crop.  It's kind of like a vampire story but way more inventive.  Our protagonist in this story is an eater of thoughts, and the nastier the better.  Murderers have a particularly good flavor.  The particular trope for this story is the afflicted (or gifted) person thinking she is the only one (in this case, with her mother, but that highlights the point) and then finding out she is not.  Played safe with the lesbian love card (all but one of the stories where there's a romantic interest this year is between women, the one exception being hetero--where are the gay men this year?), but it's overall a good story.  A strong 3 stars.

Today I Am Paul, by Martin L. Shoemaker

Today I Am Paul might be my favorite of the Nebula 2015 short story nominees so far.  It's a nice little story about a robot doing Alzheimer's care in the future.  Possibly the rather near future, the author would have been aware that this is being tested.  It's well told and all, as an editor I would be encouraging and give it 3 stars.

But if you really want a good story of this very kind, try Itsy Bitsy Spider.

When Your Child Strays From God, by Sam J. Miller

When Your Child Strays From God is really pretty basic, a coming-out story with the addition of a modern psychedelic called Spiderweb.  The strong point would be that it has a genuine ring to it, a mother risking her sanity to find her son. 

This is the second piece this year to feature being in someone else's mind. Spiderwebbing is pretty darned dangerous, there are a lot of ways to go wrong, but the story says this is the effect users are looking for, the perfect empathy it gives.  Possibly having two drug-induced sharings of this nature is indicative of a desire on the part of the readers who are nominating these stories.  In this time of division, how do we really go about understanding each other.

So it's 3 stars for making us think about relationships a bit.

Damage, by David D. Levine

Damage is a pretty substantial Nebula nominee, probably close to the novelette category.  This allows for some plot development.  The protagonist is a fighter spaceship, cobbled together from spare parts by the losing side at the tail end of a war.  It carries traumatic memories from the two ships it is made from.  But it will do anything for its pilot, a talented but arrogant man.

The end is nearing, and the team gets an extremely vindictive, random terror order.  The pilot is ready to carry it out.  Is the ship? 

It's a good story, keeps you interested.  A straight up telling of a well-worn plot.  So I will give it a serviceable 3 stars.

Cat Pictures Please, by Naomi Kritzer

Cat Pictures Please is a cute Nebula-nominated short story, with a fairly direct premise--let's say Google Now became self-aware and was driven to be a good AI, helpful to people.  And it liked cat pictures.  What would it do?  Cute, benign, and worth 3 stars for a quick read.

Madeleine, by Amal El-Mohtar

Madeline is my first read in the Nebula Short Story category this year.  And it's a nice fun one.  A woman who participated in a drug trial has extremely realistic flashbacks to earlier periods of her life, in which a stranger appears to her.  Anyone who remembers the 70's has a decent chance of having had this happen to them.  OTOH that leaves out a lot of people.  So it is at least a little fresh again.  Give it 3 stars for being nominated. 

Grandmother Nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds, by Rose Lemburg

We have another offering tonight of an author I'm not familiar with, but the story is Nebula-nominated.  Grandmother Nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds is nominated in the novelette category--unfortunately for me the quality that stood out for it was that it felt like an entire novel.  Kind of a long one. 

The story has some promise.  The setting is vaguely North African, possibly as long ago as 4000 years.  Our protagonist is a girl in a trading family.  Magic is present and very useful, but she has none herself.  She has a brother who turns out to be developmentally disabled, thus is not accepted into the society of men (men live separately from women, doing scholarship, singing and making).  So he's assigned to be female and she cares for him.  Her grandmothers have a special item, a Cloth of Winds that fortifies those who touch it.

We get extensive descriptions of this social structure--multigenerational families of women that venture off to fight and trade, men that stay cloistered and veiled, and handling of transgender issues.  But there's vanishingly little to hold all of this social narrative together.  It ended up feeling like reading a very long lecture on some society's social customs.  There was a plot, but no real tension, for all the discomfort some characters felt. 

I give it two stars and hope the author will try again.  She can construct ideas pretty well.