More Words, Deeper Hole

Was "A Meeting with Medusa" the first gasbags-on-gas-giants story? I'd give it a C for story -- I didn't think the reveal at the end was especially effective -- but an A+ for spectacle. I'd forgotten how good Clarke was at description; the scenes inside the airship at the beginning were particularly vivid.

I seem to remember liking "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" and being nonplussed by "The Word for World is Forest," but I don't remember any specifics. The other novellas I haven't read.

"Goat Song" has some good moments, mostly in the parts that directly retell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice; the walk out of the underworld is really well done. Elsewhere I wish Anderson would dial back his attempts at poetry a little -- for instance on the first page, where he reaches for the word "begrown" to give a sentence more alliteration than it really needed. Also, the theme of the human spirit versus a mechanized way of life is a very old one in science fiction and this story doesn't add anything new to it.

Since you declined to summarize "A Kingdom by the Sea," I'll give it a go. It's about a boy who can see Others, who are roughly faeries, though not at all in a Shakespearean mould. It's nominally set in the near future, but really takes place in the lost era of free-range childhood, where no one even considers going straight home after school, and while you're not supposed to take a shortcut to the beach by walking down the rarely-used old spur line, everybody does and no adult is paying enough attention to know that. The child viewpoint is extremely well-done and persuasive. In the background of the story, aliens have landed, and naturally the two plot threads come together at the end. I found the conclusion unsatisfying because the conflicts set up earlier in the story aren't resolved, just rendered irrelevant. So I guess I'd call the story a failure, though it has some amazing bits.

Kate Wilhelm's "The Funeral" is about a girl in a grim sort of boarding school, facing a choice of career options that range from awful to more awful. It's well-written, and involving in the way that boarding school stories often are. In the gradually revealed backstory, the people of the US -- or maybe it's the world -- have risen up and slaughtered everyone from 10 to 35 because everyone hates and fears youth so much. That is not the most plausible science fiction premise I've encountered. In fact, I wouldn't have been sure what happened if the story weren't followed in Again, Dangerous Visions by a rant about how store clerks refuse to serve young people even though their money is as good as anyone else's. All this seems perfectly bizarre now. I think the story would have aged better with more worldbuilding and less axe-grinding.

Gerrold's "In the Deadlands" is about a soldier assigned to patrol a bleak, eerie landscape that is gradually expanding to cover more of the earth. It's more free verse than prose, and uses concrete-poetry techniques and lots of repetition to evoke a sense of dread. I found this totally ineffective.


I agree that the short story category comes down to Tiptree vs. Russ, and Russ's win seems right. "When it Changed" is obviously fueled by 70s feminism and yet has a timeless quality. I like "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side," but I don't find Tiptree's attempt at evo psych especially persuasive.

Gene Wolfe's "Against the Lafayette Escadrille" is about a man who builds and flies a nearly perfect replica of a Fokker Dreidecker. It's not bad, but it's very slight. I don't know what it's doing on the Nebula ballot.

Ellison's "On the Downhill Side" is about two ghosts and a spirit unicorn. The female ghost is doomed to walk the earth because she never loved; bringing a unicorn onstage means Ellison can tell us right away that she's a virgin. This is a problem that needs to be solved. The male ghost's problem is allegedly that he loved too much, but Ellison seems to have trouble coming up with examples of him acting as if he loves anyone. Instead we hear about how he left his mentally ill first wife to rot in a state institution and did his best to avoid finding out how she was doing. This unforced error makes the story incoherent.