A Look at 2013’s Best Novel Nebula Nominees

I’ve been reading my way through this year’s nominees for in the Best Novel category for the Nebulas (an annual award voted on by the Science Fiction Writers of America), and at the beginning of April I found out one of those shortlisted titles, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, had been named the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award—which, like the National Book Award, is intended to recognize the year’s best in American fiction.

It’s a great selection; I was completely hooked by the story before the end of the first chapter, and by the voice of Rosemary Cooke, a college student prompted by her friendship with a volatile classmate to prod the memories of her own emotional trauma, which stem from her sister’s removal from the family nearly twenty years earlier. Fowler deliberately keeps the details sketchy, parsing out information about Fern in bits and pieces, shaping the way that readers process Rosemary’s story and her emotional state before the big reveal. (Some reviewers have discussed this aspect of the story openly; indeed, if you’re going to have any sort of extended discussion about how We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves works as a novel, you can’t avoid the spoiler. But I’m going to let you discover it for yourself.)

My only point of pushback against this novel as a Nebula nominee is that it isn’t science fiction, at least not as I’ve come to understand the term through a lifetime of reading. Yes, the truth about Fern is directly related to the scientific research the Cooke parents were conducting—but there is nothing fantastical or futuristic about that research. In fact, Fowler bases the Cooke family’s experiment on several prior real-life examples, and she keeps what happens well within the realm of the scientifically plausible. The results, I’d say, are much closer to the social-issue novels of Jodi Picoult or Ruth Ozeki than to science fiction or fantasy.

(I’ve heard a similar point raised about another of the Nebula nominees, Nicola Griffith’s Hild, but I’ll recuse myself from that conversation because I’ve had just enough friendly interaction with Griffith over time that my enthusiasm for her work has very little pretense of objectivity.)

So, as excited as I am by the prospect that the best American novel of 2013 and the best science fiction novel of 2013 could be the same book, it’s not how I’d play out this scenario. The rest of the Nebula shortlist has some wonderful books on it, starting with three fantasies. I praised Helene Wecker’s debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, when it came out (becoming friendly with her online after the review’s publication); I also used a segment of my video series The Handsell to recommend Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria. I’d also read Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane when it came out, and though I’m not as passionately enthusiastic about it as I am about some of the other nominees, it’s reliably solid Gaiman and well worth your attention.

At the science fiction end of the spectrum, there’s Charles E. Gannon’s Fire with Fire, which I confess didn’t win me over. I read it as a fairly standard story of first contact and political intrigue, with a resourcefully intelligent but athletic-in-a-pinch protagonist that should be very familiar to Golden Age SF fans (perhaps with a nod to the Jason Bourne/James Bond character type thrown in). I was much more engrossed by Linda Nagata’s The Red: First Light, set in a near future where American soldiers are well on their way to becoming cyborgs—the problem being that whenever you install hardware, you raise the possibility of unintended input… unintended by you, at any rate. James Shelley is a platoon leader with a knack for hunches that keep his troops alive; it turns out those hunches are being sent to his neural network from an unknown source, one that’s manipulating him (and others) for unknown reasons.

Nagata’s world view is sharply cynical, as defense contractors blatantly engineer wars to drive sales, but she’s more focused on the ground level troops, keeping us at Lt. Shelley’s side throughout. The opening scenes, set in Africa, feel like a slightly enhanced version of the recent military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the story gradually takes on a broader scope. The Red: First Light and Fire with Fire are both clearly the first books in respective series, but the plot here is more tightly constructed, with a firmer sense of closure in the immediate context.

Actually, the last of the Nebula nominees, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, is also the first installment of (at the very least) a trilogy, but it’s so effectively self-contained you wouldn’t necessarily notice. It’s also the most far-futuristic of the nominees, set in a galaxy-spanning empire where spaceships are not only sentient but can split their consciousness through hundreds of host bodies. The narrator, Breq, used to be part of the battleship Justice of Toren, but the rest of her was destroyed… how, and why, we find out over the course of the novel, as Breq’s narration flips between her memories and her current path of (what might be) revenge.

Leckie does an amazing job of grounding her novel in a genuinely alien personality, and Justice of Toren’s ancillary bodies allow for a powerful manipulation of perspective during the flashback sequences. Ancillary Justice is space opera at its best—by which I mean that it’s not only epic in scope, but grounded in authentically complex character development. Fans of the late Iain M. Banks will find much to love here… and, as of right now, this is my Nebula frontrunner. And I can’t wait for the sequel.

(NOTE: This post originally appeared on Beacon.)

14 April 2014 | read this |