Beginnings, by Kristina Ten

Beginnings is a gun fetish/fascism allegory, with a macho dad, and a directionless son.  But the protagonists are two girls that become best friends, exploring their relationship.  It's a sad tale but very well told and very innovative.  I would have voted it higher in the Locus polls.

A Monster In the Shape Of a Boy, by Hanna Yang

A Monster in the Shape of a Boy is a kind of folk tale.  A boy finds himself face to face with a being that looks exactly like him.  He is the son of a hunter of these monsters, but finds himself unable to kill it.  His father fixes that.  A fun story.

The Coward Who Stole God's Name, by John Wiswell

The privilege of omnipotence is explored in The Coward Who Stole God's Name.  Pretty good twist on the topic, giving social media a role.  This was at least as good as D.I.Y., his other highly nominated story this year.  I liked it.

D.I.Y. by John Wiswell

D.I.Y. is a story where justice is served.  The magical metaphor is really pretty thin, it would be fine if the protagonist was an amateur scientist fighting science patents instead of magical ones.  It is an enlightening and enjoyable read.

Master of Ceremonies by Frances Ogamba

Master of Ceremonies is an absolutely unique story.  I have never heard of a microphone passed down through generations that acquires magic powers, so kudos for that. The metaphors are way out toward the strange and nearly nonsensical.  Yet they clearly show the Nigerian cultural influence, so it was actually pretty cool to read.  I do not know if I could say I liked it, but I'm glad I read it.

Douen, by Suzan Palumbo

Douen is an ethnography as a story.  Palumbo is from Trinidad and Tobago and tells the story in her vernacular English.  We learn about child ghosts in this culture.  I liked reading it, and that I have read it.

Dick Pig, by Ian Muneshwar

Dick Pig is gay porn, on the sadistic side but actual consummation not described.  Kind of wrapped in a horror story, but maybe just weird not horrible. Guess it's worth 3 stars for ok writing.

Rabbit Test, by Samantha Mills

Rabbit Test is a reproductive rights protest story.  At first I was confused as to why at least part of this was set 70 years in the future.  All the things in the story (e.g. state supervision of menstrual trackers) are going on now.  The ending makes that somewhat more clear.

Incident at Bear Creek Lodge, by Tananarive Due

I read this story in The Wishing Pool and Other Stories--It's also in Other Terrors.  I do not know what to make of a writer who does not finish her stories.  Finishing stories is the hard part.  At first I thought maybe it was an error in book production, because the story seemed cut off.  But no, according to reviewers this is a pretty normal thing for her stories.  The Incident in question never occurs, though the setup is pretty good.  If you're David Foster Wallace you could get away with this, because his books contain so much other work it is worth reading them even if they don't resolve.  Due is not there yet.

Solidity, by Greg Egan

Solidity is a play-with-the-rules story.  People, and some things, all of a sudden do not persist when they are not observed.  They get swapped for other, sort of similar people and things.  So all of a sudden you're in a somewhat different house, with similar but not related people.  So the story has two tracks--the social handling, and the "scientific" handling.  Our protagonist (a boy named Omar) keeps his cool and tries to start sorting things out.  Most others do too, working out a way to live.  There is a Solidity manifesto that people figure out how to persist.  More magical than Greg Egan usually gets, this could be a Seanan McGuire story.

The Sadness Box, by Suzanne Palmer

The setting for The Sadness Box is America projected forward maybe 15 or 20 years, with worse climate.  Saying that, you'd figure the setting itself is the sadness box.  But no, it's a box built by a boy's father, a very detached inventor.  It is an AI built to be paranoid, and turn itself off every time it's turned on.  A useless machine.  But the protagonist finds a way to get through to it.  The boy just trying to live his life in this setting is sad enough.  Oof.

We Built This City, by Marie Vibbert

We Built This City is labor action on Venus.  And what a nasty place to settle.  Our protagonist really wants to do a good job, which in this case is to wash the windows of the settlement.  Important, since the atmosphere pits it if the nasty stuff is left.  But of course management does not understand.  Predatory capitalism in a nutshell.  Good stuff.

The Prince of Salt and the Ocean's Bargain, by Natalia Theodoridou

The Prince of Salt and the Ocean's Bargain is another fairy tale nominated for a Nebula.  The setup for this one is that the ocean's salt becomes personified (through desire--wanting) and makes a bargain with the ocean to be embodied.  Only a little of Salt is embodied, most is still dissolved in the sea.  The embodied Salt is a new person, with new person wonder in an adult body, and he is discovered by a woman.  The story is there life together, and then morphs into something else as the perspective of the story changes.  So it's pretty good, if you like fairy tales.  Good to know they can still be written, and don't have to be rewrites.

A Dream of Electric Mothers, by Wole Talabi

This is quite a good story. Interacting with artificial versions of ancestors is a well-trodden path in SF, and is in the process of becoming not-SF. Talabi tries to add a little mystery to the technology with some kind of overdone jargon ("memristic", etc). But that is how he is connecting the spiritual practices of the protagonist's country, and that intent comes across clearly, so for me it's forgivable. Describing the feeding of all of people's available data into a large language model with a particular kind of training would be believable, right now, but would lose that cultural connection.

I was very interested by how the country manages interaction with that entity. It is not a public tool. It is consulted by representatives at need. And part of the tension of the story is whether or not it is really needed. In the end, the Electric Mother AI helps to answer that question in an artfully indirect way. Very much worth reading.

My Goodreads Review

Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness, by S. L. Huang

Murder by Pixel reads like a current Wired Magazine article.  I'm only halfway sure it isn't one.  The actions described (digital harassment until the target commits suicide) happen now.  The bot doing the harassing is not overly sophisticated, except in that it is able to penetrate various devices to deliver messages to the target.  I think the awards committees knew what they were doing, and as such believe that the characters and specifics were made up.  Why present this as SF, rather than, say, doing some reporting and finding real instances?  

Perhaps it reads like that because it was probably written 18 months ago.  It does reference Chat-GPT3.

It's an interesting take, I'm just not sure how it could be speculative, even then.  Cory Doctorow says that he writes SF by looking at the cutting edge of what is possible now.  I think perhaps Huang missed the edge and is further back.

Two Hands, Wrapped In Gold, by S. B. Divya

Two Hands, Wrapped In Gold is a fable.  It's told in S. B. Divya's plain-spoken style (I like it), but it's probably the most literary thing I've read by her.  The protagonist is gifted (cursed) with the touch of gold, like King Midas.  His mother figures out how to manage it, so he can sort of manage with it as a gift if everyone is careful.  He finds love, but it's a complicated story of immigration and confidence.  Well worth reading.

If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You, by John Chu

I found If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You interesting in several ways.  First, the Tom of Finland reference made me go look it up.  The intersection of bodybuilding and Asian culture was a unique one for me.  It's very well written and made me aware of aspects of Asian American culture (and hatred towards it) that I had not encountered before.  Good stuff.

What Moves the Dead by Ursula Vernon

I'm going to give it a 3.5 and round up. This is a pretty good story as retellings go. If you're not familiar with the original story then the pretty clear telegraphing of the root cause of the Fall of the House of Usher takes away from it a bit. Recasting the protagonist as a non-binary soldier is a solid move. So overall I enjoyed it.

So this is the first in a series. Where else is Easton going to go? We shall see.

My Goodreads Review

Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire

I mostly liked this entry in the series. It's not my demographic or normal reading fare, but the stories are well told and keep me turning pages. This installment keeps most of the formula, but we're revisiting a character (Cora the mermaid of size) and getting to see that other school, the one for children who do not have good experiences with their Door.

I enjoyed seeing things through Cora's eyes. This series is useful for me to understand the world from a young woman's perspective. Except that the author is no longer young (not old either), so it definitely now feels like a reflection on childhood by a very connected, sympathetic adult.

Sadly, we don't get to see the real Whitethorn Institute. The ending does not live up to the setup and I'm left a bit sad that we haven't gotten a better portrayal of those who do not want their doors to reclaim them.

I'm sure this series will continue to get award nominations, so I'll likely keep reading it and not be disappointed in doing so. But I'm looking forward to a time when Seanan McGuire decides to take some time writing a book that grapples with an adult plot. AI is going to catch up to formula writing.

My Goodreads Review

Tread of Angels, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Well...I'm going to give this a 3.5 and round up.

This story just didn't feel like it had the depth of the other work I've read from her. At first I thought it might be from coming to this setting from the outside--but no, she actually has deep spiritual grounding in Christianity, as she explains in her Afterword. For me the book picks up as protagonist Celeste and sister Mariel's blind spots and secrets are revealed, and that improved my rating.

The setting is a difficult one for me. I resist metaphors that refer to the losing side in the Battle of Heaven as equivalent to oppressed people of today. Maybe more important, fictional work in this space is really crowded, all the way back to Milton (whom she references). Lucifer and company as antiheroes has been done and done and done, so if you're going to come to this space you have to bring something new. Aliette de Bodard has been mining this vein for awhile, and this book even uses the same term (Fallen) for the demons that de Bodard does. If Roanhorse wants to come back to this world I would want it to be in the form of a novel, maybe a long one, that gets very deep into a unique build of this kind of world. Good luck to her.

My Goodreads Review