2023 Astounding
Sep. 21st, 2023 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraDiscussion and ranking behind cut.
Here's the ballot:
Travis Baldree
Naseem Jamnia
Isabel J Kim*
Maijia Liu
Everina Maxwell*
Weimu Xin*
* – finalist in their 2nd year of eligibility
Travis Baldree went viral with the fun but lightweight Legends & Lattes, my review here.
Naseem Jamnia wrote the interesting but sometimes awkward The Bruising of Qilwa, my review here.
I nominated Isabel J Kim, an astoundingly creative and astoundingly productive short fiction writer who's exploded onto the scene. Here's her works online that I've recced in the past two years.
You, Me, Her, You, Her, I, Isabel J. Kim, Strange Horizons. Art and memory and temping.
Clay, Isabel J. Kim, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Golems, mass production, individuality.
Calf Cleaving in the Benthic Black, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld. Generation ship scavengers.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld. Emigration and the divided self. An intriguing magical-realism premise well-executed.
AP Practical Literary Theory Suggests This Is A Quest (Or: What Danny Did Over Spring Break), Isabel J. Kim, Cast of Wonders. Cute light story about some teenagers who do not want to be on a quest.
You'll Understand When You're a Mom Someday, Isabel J. Kim, khōréō. Motherhood and bargains.
Maijia Liu (or more probably Liu Maijia - I think Liu is her surname) is represented in the packet by one short story in English, LEFT, about a physicist who believes that Chinese characters offer special insight into the nature of reality. The translation we were given ended abruptly and inconclusively, and the core idea just felt like run-of-the-mill pseudoscience. There was also a novella or short novel in Chinese, Maxwell, which the summary said was about the aftermath of a human-AI war, and didn't sound very interesting to me.
Everina Maxwell is the author of Winter's Orbit and Ocean's Echo (links to my reviews), two fun tropey SF romances.
Xin Weimu is represented in the packet by three stories in Chinese, which I read (and have posted) in Google translation. "Hanon Fingering Practice" is about a pianist who undergoes procedures to alter his subjective experience of time, first to make years of practice pass by in a subjective day, and then, in an attempt to make up for everything he missed, to make his chance to see his child stretch out for years. Reminded me a little bit of James Blish's "Common Time" except in the service of a "stop and smell the roses/make each day count" kind of message. "Set Off Tomorrow" is about a time-traveling magazine reporter in the future who becomes aware that a waitress at the time travel airport is a Nazi fugitive, and may be involved in a plot to undermine the invention of time travel. "Hammer of Flesh" is a steampunk historical fantasy about the real-life Rock Springs massacre, in which a mechanical dragon becomes an instrument of revenge against an industrialist who may have contributed to the massacre.
Reading in machine translation it's really hard to know what to make of any of these. Is there clever or beautiful language? What's the emotional tone like? "Hammer of Flesh" might be a tragedy (apart from the obvious tragedy of the massacre) - the Chinese steampunk inventor and white industrialist meet as teenagers and connect over a shared love of flight and mechanical creations, and later, the inventor knows how to entrap the industrialist in the revenge plot because "she didn't need to use her brain to predict George's actions, because she only had to imagine what it would be like if she were herself." "In another more ideal world, you might be able to become confidants like Boya Ziqi," the famous musician-and-audience pair source for the term "zhiyin", close friends who understand each other. (See the Bo Ya wikipedia article here, and here for the tumblr post about zhiji and zhiyin in The Untamed which is how I recognized the reference.) So, probably there's a little bit of a star-crossed soulmates thing happening here. But it's hard to say in the machine translation how much the industrialist is at fault, how much he's contributing to the racial animosity, how much it's all a misunderstanding, how much that revenge is deserved. (*Someone* definitely should have answered to some kind of justice, which in reality did not happen, but in the context of this story, was it this guy? I can't tell.) I had similar questions around "Set Off Tomorrow" - is this a triumphant story of a Nazi being caught and facing justice? Yay, I guess? What is the mood here?
Given all that, here's the best I can do at a ranking. It's possible I would rank Xin above Jamnia given the chance to read real translations of her work. But Jamnia was definitely doing some really interesting stuff. Honestly this a great ballot and I feel like the voters have done a good job putting interesting people on here.
1 Isabel J Kim*
2 Everina Maxwell*
3 Travis Baldree
4 Naseem Jamnia
5 Weimu Xin*
6 Maijia Liu
Here's the ballot:
Travis Baldree
Naseem Jamnia
Isabel J Kim*
Maijia Liu
Everina Maxwell*
Weimu Xin*
* – finalist in their 2nd year of eligibility
Travis Baldree went viral with the fun but lightweight Legends & Lattes, my review here.
Naseem Jamnia wrote the interesting but sometimes awkward The Bruising of Qilwa, my review here.
I nominated Isabel J Kim, an astoundingly creative and astoundingly productive short fiction writer who's exploded onto the scene. Here's her works online that I've recced in the past two years.
You, Me, Her, You, Her, I, Isabel J. Kim, Strange Horizons. Art and memory and temping.
Clay, Isabel J. Kim, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Golems, mass production, individuality.
Calf Cleaving in the Benthic Black, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld. Generation ship scavengers.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld. Emigration and the divided self. An intriguing magical-realism premise well-executed.
AP Practical Literary Theory Suggests This Is A Quest (Or: What Danny Did Over Spring Break), Isabel J. Kim, Cast of Wonders. Cute light story about some teenagers who do not want to be on a quest.
You'll Understand When You're a Mom Someday, Isabel J. Kim, khōréō. Motherhood and bargains.
Maijia Liu (or more probably Liu Maijia - I think Liu is her surname) is represented in the packet by one short story in English, LEFT, about a physicist who believes that Chinese characters offer special insight into the nature of reality. The translation we were given ended abruptly and inconclusively, and the core idea just felt like run-of-the-mill pseudoscience. There was also a novella or short novel in Chinese, Maxwell, which the summary said was about the aftermath of a human-AI war, and didn't sound very interesting to me.
Everina Maxwell is the author of Winter's Orbit and Ocean's Echo (links to my reviews), two fun tropey SF romances.
Xin Weimu is represented in the packet by three stories in Chinese, which I read (and have posted) in Google translation. "Hanon Fingering Practice" is about a pianist who undergoes procedures to alter his subjective experience of time, first to make years of practice pass by in a subjective day, and then, in an attempt to make up for everything he missed, to make his chance to see his child stretch out for years. Reminded me a little bit of James Blish's "Common Time" except in the service of a "stop and smell the roses/make each day count" kind of message. "Set Off Tomorrow" is about a time-traveling magazine reporter in the future who becomes aware that a waitress at the time travel airport is a Nazi fugitive, and may be involved in a plot to undermine the invention of time travel. "Hammer of Flesh" is a steampunk historical fantasy about the real-life Rock Springs massacre, in which a mechanical dragon becomes an instrument of revenge against an industrialist who may have contributed to the massacre.
Reading in machine translation it's really hard to know what to make of any of these. Is there clever or beautiful language? What's the emotional tone like? "Hammer of Flesh" might be a tragedy (apart from the obvious tragedy of the massacre) - the Chinese steampunk inventor and white industrialist meet as teenagers and connect over a shared love of flight and mechanical creations, and later, the inventor knows how to entrap the industrialist in the revenge plot because "she didn't need to use her brain to predict George's actions, because she only had to imagine what it would be like if she were herself." "In another more ideal world, you might be able to become confidants like Boya Ziqi," the famous musician-and-audience pair source for the term "zhiyin", close friends who understand each other. (See the Bo Ya wikipedia article here, and here for the tumblr post about zhiji and zhiyin in The Untamed which is how I recognized the reference.) So, probably there's a little bit of a star-crossed soulmates thing happening here. But it's hard to say in the machine translation how much the industrialist is at fault, how much he's contributing to the racial animosity, how much it's all a misunderstanding, how much that revenge is deserved. (*Someone* definitely should have answered to some kind of justice, which in reality did not happen, but in the context of this story, was it this guy? I can't tell.) I had similar questions around "Set Off Tomorrow" - is this a triumphant story of a Nazi being caught and facing justice? Yay, I guess? What is the mood here?
Given all that, here's the best I can do at a ranking. It's possible I would rank Xin above Jamnia given the chance to read real translations of her work. But Jamnia was definitely doing some really interesting stuff. Honestly this a great ballot and I feel like the voters have done a good job putting interesting people on here.
1 Isabel J Kim*
2 Everina Maxwell*
3 Travis Baldree
4 Naseem Jamnia
5 Weimu Xin*
6 Maijia Liu
