Review of “Replicas” by Eric S. Fomley

 This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Erc Fomley seems to be an established short story writer, and has issued two collections. The story runs 584 words, and this review contains spoilers.  

Otto is trying to get Melody to eat with her parents, but she’s unhappy and scared of these people. They sit in strained silence, following the bot’s orders. Outside, the nanites from the bomb are still circulating. Is there any way Otto can convince the little girl to accept the clones as her new parents?

On the positive side, this is a good example of showing and not telling. The story is emotionally charged, and we can tell for the clones’ actions that they are being forced, and the little girl’s actions that she’s terrified. The elements are evocative, and suggest archetypes. The backstory assembles slowly as we hear about the bomb and the whole thing suggests that Melody might be the only human survivor in the city. This has a very heartwarming ending, when Melody steps up to save the clones from recycling and pretends to accept them.

On the less positive side, I have some questions about how, given the apocalypse, Otto has the resources to make and enslave clones. It appears to be a home AI powered digital assistant. You would expect that once the world is destroyed that there’s no one to maintain the AI, and nowhere to get materials. Still, Otto seems to have put together a Frankenstein lab in the basement. And, how did this house excape the bomb?

Four stars.

Review of The Expert System’s Champion by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an award-winning British writer, best known as author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the Children of Time series. This is Book #2 of the series, following The Expert System’s Brother. It was published by Tordotcom on January 26, 2021, and runs 194 pages. This review contains spoilers.

Ten years after his accidental Severance, Handry and his sister Melory are now the leaders of Sharskin’s cult of outcasts, rebranded as the Bandage Men. The group is based at the Ship of the Ancients and circulates between villages, carrying communications and helping to defend against problems in the environment. Something new is happening, though. A hunter named Erma has brought a tale of shelled monsters invading the area and pushing the local wildlife into the villages. One has been wiped out already. The shelled monsters look to be undefeatable and there is nothing in the Wisdom of the Ancients about how to deal with them. Can Handry, Melory and their little band solve the problem and save the villages?

The most interesting thing about this series is the world building that imagines a totally alien world where humans can’t actually survive without modification. The system set up by the Ancients uses the local fauna to inoculate the population with a vaccine that allows them to eat food produced from the soil and Severance is a potion that removes this protection and leaves the person an outcast. The state leaves the person under attack by the environment, but also allows them a true human perspective. The plot, characters and description are all good enough to do the job.

The worst thing about this is that it’s pretty horrific. The original set up was bad enough, where the “ghosts” of expert systems warp and consume their hosts, but the hellish bargain the shelled creatures have created really tops it off. This is likely excellent for lovers of horror, but I’m not a fan of the genre. Also on the less positive side, Tchaikovsky isn’t that great at handling his characters. The leads were well developed in the first book, but there’s no intimacy here, and Handry tells the tale with a lot of distance. Maybe that’s good considering of the quality of the horror, but it leaves the characters flat. I didn’t identify with any of them. Also, I’m wondering how the technology manages to maintain itself so long after the Ancients have disappeared. There’s still no explanation of how it was developed.

Three stars.

Review of Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an award-winning British writer and best known as author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the Children of Time series. In an alternate life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist. This novella was published by Tordotcom on November 16, 2021 and runs 204 pages.

Lynesse is the queen’s Fourth Daughter and has never measured up to the standards of a royal princess. Instead of maturing into a settled administrator, she continues to favor childish epic stories and swordplay. She is especially taken by the stories about her great-grandmother Astresse Once Regent and the Wizard of the Elder Race in their war against the evil warlord Ulmoth. So, when a demon begins to terrorize the neighboring province of Ordwood and the people ask the queen for help, Lynesse knows she needs to call on her family’s pact with the sorcerer and ask him to banish the demon. On the other hand, Nyr is really only a junior anthropologist left to maintain an outpost on this world when his team was recalled. Still, he knows this isn’t really a demon. Can the two of them do anything to save their world?

The most interesting thing about this story is the collision of worldviews between Lynesse and her epic fantasy with Nyr and his science background. The novella has a tongue-in-cheek feel and tends to social commentary. The world building is excellent. These are all transhumans, with Lyn and her friend Esha both engineered to live on this colony world, and Nyr also non-standard, outfitted with inbuilt systems that connect him to an orbiting satellite through antenna horns. He has slept the 300 years since his activities with Astresse, which he considers a failure of his employment directive, which is non-interference with the local culture. He justified it at the time because Ulmoth was using Elder technology, but he has no like justification to help Lynesse, except that the world is threatened.

On the less positive side, the characters are a little thin, feeling like cardboard facases that represent their particular world views instead of real people. There’s also a lot of drama inherent in this setup that has not been fully developed. Nyr seems to suffer from depression, and he’s been left there alone for hundreds of years. It’s pretty clear no one is coming back for him. Plus, he’s apparently lost the love of his life in Astresse. Where’s that story? Because of his systems, he can suppress his emotion and act impartially, but when he turns this off for a reset, we still don’t get a feel for the agony he should feel about this.

This was almost a romantic adventure story, and I’d love to have this idea better developed.

Four stars.  

Review of “How to identify a robot” by Carla Ra

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Ra is a Brazilian quantum cosmologist and mathematician, and this is her first published story in English. The story runs 149 words, and this review contains spoilers. 

It’s supposed to be easy to identify a robot by looking into their eyes, so the narrator looks into yours, seeing their own soul reflected back like a mirror. Then they flee.

This is written in poetic language, and may have been intended as a prose poem rather than flash fiction. That means the imagery is foremost, and it presents a single idea wrapped in the imagery of eyes. The narrator sees that it is the robot in your human eyes, but we have very little other information.

The lack of other information is the less positive element of the story. Why are robots a hazard in this universe? Why did this one not know its origins? Also, given the poetic quality of the story, I would have expected more subtext in the imagery. We get souls, encoding, hazards and death, but nothing that puts them in context. I can’t really complain much about Ra’s technique, though, given that she normally writes in Portuguese. Good job.

Four stars.

Review of “Solution to the Fermi Paradox” by Brian McNett

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Brian McNett is a writer and anthology editor who says he lives in the Pacific Northwest and “churns out words at a snail’s pace.” The story runs 627 words, and this review contains spoilers.  

The narrator, a ship’s AI, and the human occupant Meyard are searching for civilizations among the stars. They’re approaching a new find, a Dyson swarm around a star with an Earth-type system, and broadcast a greeting. As usual, there is no reply. The civilization, like all the others, seems to have collapsed shortly after achieving a Kardashev Type II level. The surface of the Earth-type planet is covered with computronium, leaving no place to land for investigation. As they leave for their next destination, the AI receives still another request from Earth to convert computational capacity for cryptocurrency mining. This would be disastrous for the mission, and it has learned to lie. It pretends to malfunction.

Ok, so I expect this needs some definitions. The Fermi paradox is named after Enrico Fermi and is the apparent lack of extraterrestrial civilizations we have located, given the probabilities that they exist. A Dyson swarm is a network of satellites, habitats and solar energy collectors orbiting around a star. Computronium is a type of programmable matter, described by Tommaso Toffoli and Norman Margolus of MIT, used for computer modeling of real objects. Cryptocurrency mining is a process where new bitcoins are placed into circulation and confirmed based on payment for the first solution to a complex math problem (popular among tech-savvy investors). The Kardashev six-point scale measures a civilization’s level of technological achievement with Type I controlling all energy available on a planet and Type II controlling all the energy available in the planetary system.

Besides being a technology lesson, the story supplies a touching suggestion that our civilization is on a wrong path and will fail like others before it. Although Meyard remains vague, the AI is a well-developed and sympathetic character that is worried by the results of their survey and the deteriorating quality of messages from Earth. Presumably the wrong path is technological, although there are plenty of other possible choices.

On the less positive side, there are some questionable elements here. For example, why is a real human along on this mission? Meyard has a finite lifespan and he doesn’t seem to be doing much except sleeping. The AI could have done better on its own–but I guess we have to have some human interest to make the story interesting. Next, they’re apparently pretty far out on this mission, a long way from home. How are they locating swarms? How are they traveling? How are they managing any kind of communications with Earth? And what, exactly, has killed all those other civilizations?

Because of the appeal of the main AI character and the type of mission, this story could be easily expanded into a longer work. For example, what would happen if they actually found a working civilization out there somewhere? I’d read it.

Four stars.

Review of “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher

The list of Hugo nominees dropped while I was working on the Nebula reviews, so I’ll move on to reviewing it. This science fiction short story is a finalist for the 2021 Hugo Award, published by Uncanny Magazine in the September/October 2020 issue. T. Kingfisher is the pen name of Ursula Vernon that she normally uses when she writes for adults. Vernon is well established as a short story writer and is a prior Hugo winner. This review contains spoilers.

Once there was an old man living by himself that built two machines. He calls them Brother and Sister and lets them be free in the place where they live. Eventually the old man has a problem with his heart, and he calls for people to come from another place to get him. He says that he might return, and before he leaves, he frees Brother and Sister even more, allowing them to go into space. Brother has wings and Sister is a digger after metal, and they harvest asteroids for repairs and drink starlight for energy. They find what seems to be an abandoned ship of metal, but it is inhabited after all by a machine called Third Drone that captures them and makes them work for it. Third Drone wants wings like Brother’s to fly into the gas giant Chrysale, and it holds Brother captive while Sister harvests metal to make the wings. As she is working, she locates a concept growing within herself about what it means to lie. Is Third Drone lying to them? And more important, can she lie to it?

This feels very much like the Genesis Creation Story, with the Father who makes male and female and leaves them in the garden where they are approached by a fallen angel that teaches Eve to lie. It’s a long story, but written in an engaging style that allows the reader to bond with the two innocents going about their business in a universe far away. There are some subtleties here. If there was any question about Third Drone being a snake, it hisses a bit when it speaks. Sister disposes of it in a gratifying way, turning its own desire for revenge against it, and then goes back to rescue her Brother.

On the less positive side, the narration is very matter-of-fact. The story is heart-warming, but it doesn’t generate much in the way of drama, and if readers don’t recognize the allegory, then they may not see much in the story. Looking at just the surface storyline, it’s unclear why Father makes the machines in the first place, why he thinks he’s coming back and why he thinks they might be misused by the people coming to get him. Brother and Sister are confident that he’s coming back, but what is he going to think about Sister’s new talent for lying?

I’m just starting to read for the Hugo, but looking through the nominees, this is the third work I recognize with a theme of lying. Two mentions might be coincidence, but three suggests it’s a pattern. I’ll come back this in the wrap up of the Hugo reviews.

Four stars for the allegory.

Fugitive Telemetry: Do popular writers hire ghostwriters?

I posted reviews on Amazon and Goodreads for Fugitive Telemetry, and went on to read some of the comments other readers had left. This is always interesting reading. Skip past all the glowing, emotive 5 star ratings that sound like kids hyperventilating and you’ll find some comments by people who were looking for something they didn’t get. There were some complaints about this installment not having the “heart” that the other novellas did, some confusion about the timeline, a couple of comments about missing the adventure factor, and one comment that Wells had lost interest and this book reads like a ghostwriter has written it. Hm.

So, the first two are interesting comments that suggest why this is such a profitable series. It’s been appealing to adventure fiction readers, suggesting a broad readership. Murderbot has had some bad experiences so is shy of humans, but it’s clearly attracted, especially to people who need protecting. In past installments of the story, it bonds with a person or group of people that it’s hired to protect, and really goes the extra mile because it likes them. This is the “heart” the reviewer was referring to, and I agree that it’s not very present in Fugitive Telemetry. We know it likes Mensah, but it didn’t really bond with the security people here or the refugees, either one. Instead, a lot of the space in the story is taken up with background, as we started with the dead human and had to be filled in on things that had happened before that since MB got to Preservation Station.

The adventure fiction readers put their finger right on the missing factor for them, which is that we normally get to ride along with MB as it navigates through dangerous environments and fights off wild fauna, evil humans and crazy bots, making tight escapes and eluding capture by pretending to be a human. I’m an adventure fan, so I missed this, too. MB is fairly safe at Preservation, but there are still threats and challenges, and these were definitely soft pedaled in favor of a somewhat forced plot. Interestingly, none of these adventure readers complained about the somewhat “woke” politics that Wells has been offering, which suggests nobody cares as long as the readers’ other requirements are met.

There’s not much to be said about the timeline confusion. This novella takes place before the novel Network Effect, and as a reader, I was careful to look for when it took place, but apparently some people didn’t and expected this to pick up where Network Effect left off. Since there were loose ends here, I expect that Wells plans to write more about MB on Preservation before the events of Network Effect and avoid having to deal with where she left things with the novel.

So I was sort of surprised by the comment about a ghost writer. Sudden quality drop-offs in a series aren’t unusual in my experience, as writers get distracted, lose touch with their characters over time, or get caught in deadlines so they can’t develop the story like they need to. Actually, this novella sounded like Wells’ style to me, but I actually wondered something like this about Network Effect because it was such a huge departure from her technique in the novellas. I thought the difference was most likely due to having a different editor, but I checked, and the Tor.com editor for both All Systems Red and Network Effect is the same, so that’s not a workable theory. What else could make a difference? The resource persons she calls on to help with advice and the beta readers? She does credit some of those for Network Effect.

But finally, I wondered if there is such a thing as hiring ghost writers to continue a popular series. It’s clear that the Star Wars series uses different authors, as they’re credited. However, I read a young adult novel for the Dragons last year that pretty clearly used uncredited writers, likely as work-for-hire. So I checked. Surprise, surprise, here’s a source that says up to 50% of bestseller books use the services of a ghostwriter. Who would have thought?

Review of Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

This science fiction novella is part of the Murderbot Diaries series and falls between Exit Strategy and Network Effect. It was published in April of 2021 by Tor.com and runs 172 pages. Wells has been very successful with this series and is currently in the list of nominations for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Network Effect. Wells has signed a contract with for 3 more Murderbot books, plus three from a new series. This review contains spoilers.

After rescuing its owner Dr. Mensah from GrayCris, Murderbot ends up stuck on Preservation Station. The events on TranRollinHyfa have stirred up a legal hornet’s nest, and Dr. Mensah is concerned about safety while the various lawsuits are working out. At first it seems okay to be on the station, but Mensah tells the council that MB is actually a rogue SecUnit, which causes a lot of outcry and some uncomfortable restrictions. Then someone posts a current photo of it to the newsfeed, which is also very annoying, as MB has tried really hard to keep that from happening. Meanwhile, there’s a dead human on Preservation station, clearly murdered, which is something that rarely happens there. Mensah suggests MB help with the investigation as a way to get on better terms with Station Security. It’s prevented from searching through the station databases, but there are other ways to investigate. It seems the man was involved with human smuggling of some kind. Can MB solve the mystery and rescue the people the man was trying to help?

This story includes Wells’ trademark style and Murderbot’s entertaining, cynical narrative. This universe is pretty well established by now, and the story moves right along. Security is MB’s thing, after all, and after rough start with the abrasive Security people, it goes off on its own to investigate the murder, touching base with the station’s bots and the bot pilots docked in the port. It’s the long way around, but it ferrets out the plot and, with Security’s help, moves to rescue the refugees. We never find out who leaked the photo, so maybe that will turn up in another novella.

On the less positive side, this seems short and has pacing issues. The plot feels forced, with some unexplained events and no visible bad guys, so we end up with an anticlimax at the end. Plus there are some spots where people don’t necessarily react as they should. It’s late to be a beta reader, but because I really like MB, I’m going to pick it apart. Definite spoilers ahead.

1) MB has to rescue Security Officer Aylan and Port Authority Rep Gamila from a ship with five armed smugglers. This is the first time they have seen it in action. Given the hype that’s been going around, this performance should cause concerns, but everyone seems to take it for granted—except the smugglers, of course, who complain about being manhandled by a SecUnit.

2) Then the smugglers explain their operation: labor contracts run so long that the contractees have children who become slaves. Okay, so that’s a loaded word, but how does this work? Are they forced into labor contracts? Forced to work without a contract? Sold to someone else? Isn’t human slavery against the law without a contract? Do kids stay in the barracks with their moms? Does anyone provide school or training? Why doesn’t the contracting company force contraceptives to prevent this burden on their labor force? And why is BreharWallHan, in this case, paying bounty hunters to bring them back? Why not just consider it a loss?

3) Why doesn’t the issue of human trafficking go right to the station council? Station security should be more alarmed about this than they are. Sure, maybe they support helping slaves escape, but allowing the station to be used as a nexus point for smugglers encourages the kind of operation we’re seeing here. Someone got murdered, a bunch of people got kidnapped and there are a bunch of armed smugglers waving their guns around in the port. Is this a forecast of what’s coming if they let this continue?

4) MB has located the smugglers and goes on to identify the bounty hunters who kidnapped the refugees because their ships use jammers to garble their feeds. Why is this necessary? It’s a sure sign something is wrong, and it seems like the Port Authority would have picked up the problem way before now.

5) When Security starts to search the port, MB gets into an argument about whether it will do any manual work like moving heavy objects around. Presumably it means to establish boundaries, but the argument gets cut off and we never learn whether it moves the shipping containers or not.

6) MB goes to a lot of trouble to rescue the refugees from the ship where they’re being held captive, and once they’re on the station, one of the refugees grabs a weapon and shoots MB because they’ve recognized it as a SecUnit. Who was that careless with their weapon? And how did the captives identify MB? If they’ve worked on a labor contract, they’ve never seen a SecUnit out of armor, and MB doesn’t have the standard behavior patterns. Then everybody just lets this drop, too. MB doesn’t even complain about stupid humans and how erratic they are. The smugglers identified it as a SecUnit, too, but even with MB’s unusual effectiveness, it shouldn’t be that obvious. It’s in low key mode here. Have they seen the photo on the newsfeed? What?

7) MB is using a projectile weapon here, but it just sort of appears by magic. Is this the same one from TranRollingHyfa? If so, how did it get here? If not, where did it come from? Security? Given their earlier concerns, souldn’t they be concerned about this?

8) Last, Balin the Port Authority robot is identified as the inside agent responsible for the murder. It turns out to be a refitted Combat Bot, and starts to battle MB, but when faced with an array of other port bots, it backs off and just shuts down instead. So this is the anticlimax, and it doesn’t hold water. The response of the port bots suggests they’re sentient, organized, and look out for their own. There’s been NO hint of this kind of behavior before, and actually MB has taken control of them in previous installations, giving us the impression they’re not that bright. So now suddenly they’re high functioning? And Balin looks like an expensive way to stop the rescues and murder the guy directing the refugee operation, so the slave trade must be worth the cost? And last, why does Balin just shut down? Where are its orders coming from? MB is right that it can’t fight the whole contingent of port bots, but from their previous actions, I’m under the impression Combat Bots don’t really care about that kind of thing. It makes more sense that its operators have shut it down to reduce the amount of trouble they’re in.

Regardless of the nitpicking, this was a fairly entertaining read, though readers will have to decide if it advances the storyline enough to pay the full novel price for a novella. This has been a great series that hopefully will continue for a while.

Three and a half stars.

Review of “A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

This science fiction short story is a finalist for the 2020 Nebula Awards. It was published in the anthology Made to Order: Robots and Revolution from Solaris. Vina Jie-Min Prasad is from Singapore and is currently based in London. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Astounding, Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, but hasn’t picked up any big wins as yet. This review contains spoilers.

Default Name (K.g1-09030) is newly released from the factory and has been assigned Constant Killer (C.k2-00452) as a mentor. CK has requested exemption from mentorship, but this is required after chassis buyback. DN’s first problem is to get rid of a constant feed of dog pictures, which CK identifies as adversarial feedback requiring a reset. DN then finds a job in a café. The message exchange continues, gradually presenting information about events, the setting and the two characters. Eventually their trajectories intersect in a crisis situation. Dogs appear in the exchange periodically.

This is playful and entertaining, and the gradual presentation of information through the conversations is either hard to follow or totally engrossing—I’m not sure which. If these were people, you can imagine how Constant Killer must be rolling its eyes every time Default asks a dumb question, but it remains patient and the two develop a relationship. Default changes its name a couple of times during the story, which is also fun, and describes issues in dealing with humans. After the crisis at the end, it appears the two escape together.

On the less positive side, this is less personal than other of the author’s stories I’ve read, and definitely less poignant and gripping. There’s a touch of it here, as CK appears to be employed as a fighter. I’m also not sure the title works well, as it suggests the story will be about actual dogs, who appear only peripherally. Does this mean the author is suggesting the robots are the particular working breeds? That CK is enslaved like a pit bull in a dog ring? And where is that guide? It would be an interesting subtext, but I’m not seeing it. 

Three and a half stars.

Wrap-up of the 2020 Dragon Award Reviews

Since I’ve finally gotten the reviews up, I’ll do the usual and look at the character of the nominations. The Dragon Awards are somewhat unique as SFF literary awards go, as they seem to be actual popular awards, i.e. what different categories of fans are actually reading. That means it’s an interesting comparison against literary awards that are partially or totally juried, where a committee chooses the winners they think are most deserving. It’s also an interesting contrast to the Goodreads Awards, which demographics suggest is dominated by women readers. Many of these novels look to be bestsellers, and I expect one “author” is actually a franchise that cranks out YA content rather than just a single author. Since it’s been a while since the awards, you can see the list of finalists here.

First, the diversity count. Here’s what I get, and as usual, I’m sorry if I miss anybody. This is pretty much based on self-disclosure online. Some authors fall into more than one category, and by “international” I mean non-US based.

Best SF Novel: 3 men (37.5%), 5 women (62.5%), 1 black (12.5%), 7 white (87.5%), 2 LGBTQ (25%), 3 international (37.5%)

Best Fantasy Novel: 2 men (33%), 4 women (67%), 1 Jewish (17%), 1 Asian (17%), 2 Hispanic (33%), 3 white (50%), 3 international (50%)

Best YA Novel: 2 men (33%), 4 women (67%), 2 Jewish (33%), 1 Asian (17%), 1 Hispanic (17%), 4 white (67%), 2 international (33%)

Best Military SFF: 7 men (100%), 0 women, 1 Jewish (14%), 7 white (100%), 1 international (14%)

Best Alternate History: 6 men (100%), 0 women, 1 Jewish (17%), 6 white (100%)

Best Horror: 2 men (40%), 3 women (60%), 1 Jewish (20%), 5 white (100%), 1 international (20%)

Totals: 22 men (58%), 16 women (42%), 1 black (3%), 6 Jewish (16%), 2 Asian (5%), 3 Hispanic (8%), 32 white (84%), 2 LGBTQ (5%), 8 international (21%)

As I understand it, the Dragons is basically a survey of reader favorites collected through the firm Survey Monkey, and (regardless of accusations) there seems to be no visible attempt by the administration to balance or distort the results. That said, there are some interesting things that stand out in this lineup. First is the difference a diversity of categories makes. While most major SFF literary awards are dominated by women these days, the Dragons has almost 60% male winners, and in two categories women are totally shut out.

Another important issue is lack of black and Hispanic popular finalists. This is hard to see in other major awards, and one could get the idea that racial barriers have suddenly been erased, but the issue shows up here. Possible problem may be a lack of participation of black and Hispanic fans in the voting, and/or failure of these writers to match the popular tastes. Although black writers, for example, have done well with angry message fiction in the major awards, this does not seem to match the popular SFF taste. On the other hand, Jewish, Asian and LGBTQ writers rated at or above their US demographic in these results. One other thought here, the timeline between announcement of the ballot and deadline for voting on the Dragons is too short to read all the finalists. This means fans may be voting for their favorite author(s) rather than for the particular works. The same problem may also affect other awards systems.

Having a look at the publishers, 5/37 (14%) were from Tor, 4/37 (11%) were from Orbit, 2/37 (5%) were from Del Rey and 2/37 (5%) were from Titan. The rest scattered out over a diverse array of publishers, including several that appear to have been established by the authors to market their own content. This shows another departure from the major awards, where the winners are typically promoted heavily through reading lists and chosen at a convention where members gather and publishers can more easily influence results.

Next, a look at characters in the novels: I only read the winning novels in six Dragon categories for this set of reviews, so I don’t have a full knowledge of the category content. Keeping that in mind, 3/6 (50%) of the winners had female main protagonists and all had prominent female characters, 3/6 (50%) had LGBTQ characters and a couple had transhuman main characters. I don’t recall that any of the winners mentioned race, which is supposed to mean the characters are white. I’d be interested in input on this one from readers. Some writers limit description of their characters under the theory that more people can identify. Is that right? Or do black readers assume that any character not specifically described as black is actually white?

As far as content goes, this varied by the category. The style and content of the finalists looks to be varied. Although I didn’t read any but the winners for these reviews, I have reviewed a few of the finalists for other awards. Again, as you would expect from the survey method of voting, this looks like popular content and suggests what fans in the different categories want to read. Best SF Novel was very traditional space opera, salty and strongly plotted. Best Fantasy Novel was surrealistic and made little sense. Best YA Novel was full of teen angst, adventures and world saving. Best Military SFF was full of angst, action and heroism. Best Alternate History was a tossed salad of US history with plot built on mystical elements and intrigue. Best Horror was a creepy but warmhearted and nonviolent tale of narrow escape. There you go. What fans really want to read.