After a run of white covers, this year’s cover is tonally quite different – muted browns – and the illustration is of a dragon attacking a pair of mountain goats, which I spose will please fans of Games of Thrones and fans of fantasy with dragons. For the record I quite enjoy GoT, but the one storyline that grabs the least is the Daenerys Targaryen line.
So the book is the usual trade paperback size, and fiction-wise starts with the four main winners of the awards for the Nebula Awards 2012.
Best Short Story : Aliette de Bodard. Immersion. Clarkesworld, June 2012. I’ve yet to read it, but it’s still online so you can read it here. de Bodard’s story won ahead of Helena Bell’s ‘Robot’ (Clarkesworld September 2012), Tom Crosshill’s ‘Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes’ (Clarkesworld April 2012); Lead Cypess’ ‘Nanny’s Day’ (Asimovs March 2012); Maria Dahvana ‘Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream’ (Lightspeed July 2012); Ken Liu ‘The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species’ (Lightspeed July 2012); Cat Rambo ‘Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain’ (Near + Far).
Best Novelette : Andy Duncan ‘Close Encounters’ (The Pottawatomie Giant & Other Stories, and F&SF Sept/Oct 2012) which I enjoyed in it’s appearance in F&SF. Duncan won ahead of Catherine Asaro’s ‘The Pyre of New Day’ (The Mammoth Book of SF Wars); Ken Liu ‘The Waves’ (Asimovs Dec 2012); Brit Mandelo ‘The Finite Canvas’ (Tor.com); Meghan McCarron ‘Swift, Brutal Retaliation’ (Tor.com); Rachel Swirksy ‘Portrait of Lisane de Patagnia’ (Tor.com); Catherynne M. Valente ‘Fade to White’ (Clarkesworld August 2012)
Best Novella : Nancy Kress ‘After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall’ (Tachyon Press). Kress won ahead of Aliette de Bodard’s ‘On a Red Station, Drifting’ (Immersion Press); Jay Lake’s ‘The Stars Do Not Lie’ (Asimovs, Oct-Nov 2012); Ken Liu ‘All the Flavors’ (GigaNotoSaurus, Feb 1 2012); Robert Reed ‘Katabasis’ (F&SF Nov-Dec 2012), Lawrence M. Schoen ‘Barry’s Tale’ (Buffalito Buffet).
Best Novel : Kim Stanley Robinson ‘2013’ (Orbit), which won ahead of Saladin Ahmed ‘Throne of the Crescent Moon’ (DAW/Gollancz); Tina Connolly ‘Ironskin’ (Tor); N.K. Jemisin ‘The Killing Moon’ (Orbit); Caitlin R. Kiernan ‘The Drowning Girl’ (Roc); Mary Robinette Kowal ‘Glamour in Glass’ (Tor).
With over one hundred pages for the Kress novella, and the novel extract, three quarters of the book is taken up by these four winners. Space is found for Ken Liu’s ‘The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species’, an extract from the Andre Norton YA award (E.C. Myer’s ‘Fair Coin’), Cat Rambo’s ‘Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain’, and Gene Wolfe’s ‘Christmas Inn’, selected by Wolfe to mark his Grand Master Award.
And there’s the Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem, Shira Lipkin’s ‘The Library, After’, which is not a poem, it’s a short story. And the Best Long Poem Megan Arkenberg’s ‘The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages’, looks like a poem as it is presented in a narrow column with verse breaks, but you could run it through a wordprocessor and make it work as a short story, so go figure!
