Things With Beards, by Sam J. Miller

Continuing the Nebula Awards Short Story reviews: Things With Beards is a good strong entry.  The Things in the title is a reference to the movie The Thing, based on the John W. Campbell story Who Goes There?  It's basically a followup to the story, with MacReady and Childs surviving but having carried the Thing out with them.  Figuring out the tie-in is fun, but we also get a message with MacReady becoming involved in violent activism as the AIDS epidemic gets under way.  Pretty interesting, I give it a strong 3 stars.

The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History, by Sam J. Miller

The Heat of Us is the sort of story the Sad Puppies complain about for the Hugos.  It's an oral history of the Stonewall uprising with the added fantasy element that a wave of fire magically came off some of the resisters and killed several of the cops involved in the raid.  It's got some literary interest for character development, but there's really not much there that's speculative.  OK but I can't give it more than two stars.

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.

We Are the Cloud, by Sam J. Miller

We Are the Cloud is another Nebula nominated novelette this year, a story of the sort that gets the Sad and Rabid Puppies foaming.  Because as SF it's a bit ordinary.  The technological speculation figures in the story, but isn't the real point.  And it's a bromance.

Our protagonist is a gentle giant living in a group home for kids taken from their families.  The speculative driver is that ISP's have figured out how to use the human brain as chip and storage, and one can rent out processing.  The protagonist is able to dip into the data stream passing through him--which makes him more of an outcast.  And, he's gay and knows it, but is repressing it until he meets Case, and falls for him.

So boy meets boy, boy loses boy--this is not a novel so there's no third act.  The focus of the story is an exploration of the interior life of the protagonist, and as those go it's pretty good.  And the thing is, you just can't set a romance in a boys' group home unless it's between boys, so having this space now open for SF means it's an automatic creative front.  Our Sad Puppies and their sad friends have not figured out that SF is important as outsider fiction, and now is the time for exploring these new outsiders that were formerly so outside it was difficult to accept fiction about them at all.  3 stars.