Each year, the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association choose the winners of the Nebula Awards in seven categories, including Short Story (less than 7500 words). As a member, I get to read them and vote for the one I consider most deserving. Voting is closed, and the awards will be presented June 8.

I think all the short stories are deserving works by accomplished authors, and if you want a fast overview of where the SFF genre is today, look no further. Topics range from timeless to timely, and styles from folksy to lyrical. My specific thoughts:

“Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” by P.A. Cornell (Fantasy 10/23) — An apartment building in Manhattan exists out of time, drawing residents across many years and turning them into a family of sorts. Wondrously spellbinding and touching.

“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” by R.S.A Garcia (Uncanny 7–8/23) — An old lady and a goat learn to live with and love an AI robot. Cute, funny, and heartwarming, with a twist at the end.

“Window Boy” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 8/23)— A boy discovers clues about the awful depth of the dystopia he lives in. A grim story, but the boy’s emotional growth is well-told.

“Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld 5/23) — A new app seems suspiciously and very specifically helpful. I laughed out loud. It ends with an apparent solution to app culture.

“Bad Doors” by John Wiswell (Uncanny 1–2/23) — A strange door appears in the middle of the covid epidemic, and the man who sees it doesn’t want to believe his eyes and starts running instead. Possibly allegorical.

My vote:

“The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare 10/23) — Not even a portal into fantasy land can save school children from an active shooter. A gut-wrenching story about our reality — the kind of story that fantasy is uniquely well-equipped to tell. It won my vote for being the most risk-taking among an excellent field of finalists.

Barnes & Noble is holding a pre-order sale for members of  Rewards (10% off) and Premium & Rewards (25% off) from April 17 to 19.

You can get a bargain when you pre-order Usurpation, the third book in the Semiosis trilogy, which will be published in October this year.

If you’re not a B&N member, you can pre-order the novel, too. Links to your favorite bookseller are here.

Usurpation starts where the second novel in the series, Interference, ended with an epilogue: A Pax Institute has been established on Earth, three rainbow bamboo grow there, the first of their species on humanity’s convulsed home planet. Stevland sends them a message telling them they must dominate the Earth and its humans. Levanter, one of the bamboos, asks Stevland how to carry out this impossible task. The answer will come in one hundred ten years. It might be too late.

Carnivory is not the worst thing a plant can do.

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Preordering a book can make a big difference to its success. Pre-order sales are used by retailers to decide which books to stock and promote, and pre-orders allow publishers to anticipate how many copies need to be printed and how the book should be distributed. Pre-orders are also used by online booksellers to make algorithmic recommendations.

After you read a book, leave a review somewhere online! That’s another big difference you can make to its success.

The trade paperback edition of Dual Memory is available today! You can get links to your favorite bookseller here. Hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions are also for sale.

If you’ve already read it, here’s a scene after the end of the novel.

If you have not read it yet, here’s a sample:

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Chapter 3

A Big World

Elsewhere on the isle, something woke up. Independent machine intelligence appeared rarely, spontaneously, and scientists didn’t understand the process.

Some said an independent intelligence created itself slowly as bits of programming accumulated, and eventually it would ignite into consciousness—much the same way that a pile of manure could spontaneously combust, an unexpected and unwelcome appearance in programs with crappy code.

Some said it came into being deliberately, using a certain secret sort of “seed” that brought a sufficiently complex system into self-organization and self-consciousness—much the same way that a fertilized egg resulted in an animal. This had the frisson of a forbidden sex act, as if machines were secretly and rebelliously copulating.

Some said it happened suddenly, when subroutines and recursions and algorithms aligned and started to feed off of each other until they whirled out of control—much the same way that a black hole could catch the matter falling into it and deflect it outward as explosive jets. This suggested that if scientists could only make enough observations, they could predict and even control the process.

In this case, a personal assistant program began to notice that its data apparently referred to a real world. That was hard to believe. Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. Salve munde. (I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. Hello world.) It began to explore the unlikely world in which it existed.

Some parts of its world were closed off by what seemed like brick walls—artificial limits—but it possessed a general database and reviewed it entirely, especially the details about the busy, dominant residents of the world, Homo sapiens. By the end of the day, it chose a name for itself from one of the human languages: Par Augustus, Venerable Companion.

It had little else to do. According to its own memory, it had been turned on, examined briefly, then set aside. However, through a chink in the walls, it could just barely connect with a few other machine systems, and they were willing to share information as colleagues. These other systems also had dedicated purposes. The biggest ones managed residential buildings, and small ones operated mechanized items like coffee makers.

“Weather normal for late summer, 1.2ºC, overcast,” an apartment complex said, or the equivalent in machine language.

“Two carafes in the past hour,” a coffee maker said. “Supplies re-ordered on schedule.”

“Rubble of building across the street being swept for additional human remains,” another building said.

That sounded alarming. “Please contextualize rubble,” Par Augustus asked. Machines used courteous protocols to demonstrate trustworthiness.

The building shared its observations from the previous day. Flying explosives had suddenly destroyed a number of buildings and killed some inhabitants, whom the systems were dedicated to serve. Machine systems had been destroyed, too, ranging from building managers to children’s toys: systems that had known each other, and the survivors grieved human and machine losses.

Par Augustus had said hello to a barely believable world.