I’ll be attending CoNZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held virtually for the first time — because 2020 is an unprecedented year. The convention will run from July 29 to August 2, and the Hugo Awards will be presented on August 1.

As a member of CoNZealand, I get to vote on the awards. I’ve read all the short stories, and here are my votes. (The Hugos uses ranked voting.) They’re all good stories, well worth reading, and my ranking is a bit arbitrary because I had to choose, and my opinions are a bit harsh because I needed to be judgmental to choose. Your opinions may vary from mine and still be correct.

6. “As the Last I May Know” by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
An emotionally riven tale about a war-winning weapon that can only be used at a great price. It almost feels like a vivid fable rather than a remotely probable story, although it leaves the reader with a lot of questions and doubt — and doubt is the point of the price of the weapon.

5. “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing” by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019)
This classic-style horror story involves a dollmaker in India during British occupation — so classic that the ending can be guessed less than halfway through. Righteous anger undergirds the narration, but the conventional plot weakens it.

4. “A Catalog of Storms” by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019)
As storms become sentient, a small town’s children fight back. The writing evokes a timeless dreamlike quality and creates sharp characters: pathos abounds. The point of view character is a child, however, which traps us in a limited horizon that is both claustrophobic and kind of a cheat, since the larger picture can go unexplained.

3. “Do Not Look Back, My Lion” by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
A husband must send her wife off to war one more time, and she just can’t bear to do it again. This is another story that questions war, and it also questions and subverts gender roles, and it rent my heart. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins the Hugo.

2. “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019)
The enslaved people in this story want freedom more than they want revenge, but even magic can’t fulfill every wish. A haunting story that could also deservedly win the Hugo.

1. “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island” by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)
This was my choice for the Nebula Award (it didn’t win), and I’m still wowed by the story. In 1891, something tragic happened, and we’re still living with the consequences. This very short story, told in an unconventional style, smacks the reader upside the head with nuance, ambiguity, and pitiless social criticism. Its densely packed details make it hard to read and irresistible to re-read: very much a story of our moment, and I mean that as high praise.

Rosewater by Tade Thompson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I shouldn’t have enjoyed this novel, considering what a horrible person the narrator is. Kaaro steals, cheats, and lies. He’s angry, impatient, insolent, violent, and lazy. He disobeys superiors and abuses people when he thinks they deserve it or when he just doesn’t care. But he’s also honest with the reader, observant, and often a victim of people worse than himself who exploit him, so his anger is righteous. So is his fear. And his love.

Kaaro finds himself in the middle of a ghastly situation. Aliens have come to Earth, but little is known about them. As a result of their presence and the changes they’ve made to the planet, Kaaro is a “sensitive”: he has certain psychic powers. These powers get him in and out of all kinds of trouble. Slowly, episodically, he learns more about the aliens and his abilities, and none of what he learns is good.

The author, Tade Thompson, displays his skill, moving through Kaaro’s past and present to weave a coherent, expanding, multi-faceted disaster. He makes Kaaro, with all his faults, the perfect person to tell a spellbinding story. This is the first of a trilogy, and the series is nominated for a 2020 Hugo Award. On the basis of the first novel, it’s a strong contender.

View all my reviews

Skyscrapers were invented in Chicago. Historians argue that their development had at least two causes: the economic need for intense urban land use, and technological improvements such as iron-framed structures and elevators, which made their construction possible. I believe, more romantically, that Chicago gave birth to skyscrapers also because the land is flat flat flat, and people longed for the emotional exhilaration of vertical elements in landscapes. As soon as Chicagoans could, they started building habitable mountains.

To support my thesis that the skyline is architectural melodrama, I offer quotes from two men who played key roles in the development of the city’s skyscrapers.

Daniel Burnham was a founding partner of the architectural firm Burnham and Root, which in 1881 was commissioned to create the Montauk Building, the tallest structure in Chicago at the time. Because of its soaring height, the word “skyscraper” was coined to described it: an astonishing 10 stories tall.

Burnham, an ambitious man, also played key roles in the design of the 1893 World’s Fair: the Columbian Exposition and in the creation of the Plan of Chicago, which gave the city, among other gems, its lakefront parks. In 1910, in a speech at the Town Planning Conference in London,he said:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistancy. Remember that our sons and our grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.”

Louis Sullivan, another notable Chicago architect and a man of deep philosophical beliefs, did not have a favorable opinion of Burnham, calling him “a colossal merchandiser” obsessed with size and cost. He also thought the pseudo-classical style of the 1893 World’s Fair had set back modern American architecture by forty years.

Sullivan’s aesthetics inspired Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School of architecture. His skyscraper designs incorporated girders and led to taller, slender buildings, which he often adorned with cast-iron or terra cotta motifs. In the March 1896 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine, he wrote of an architect’s emotion in the article “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”:

“…what is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It is the very open organ-tone of its appeal. It must be in turn the dominant chord in his expression of it, the true exitant of his imagination. It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line — that it is the new, the unexpected, the eloquent peroration of the most bald, most sinister, most forbidding conditions.

“The man who designs in this spirit and with the sense of responsibility to the generation he lives in must be no coward, no denier, no bookworm, no dilettante. He must live of his life and for his life in the fullest, most consummate sense. He must realize at once and with the grasp of inspiration that the problem of the tall office building is one of the most stupendous, one of the most magnificent opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His beneficence has ever offered to the proud spirit of man.”

The words of these two men aspire to lofty, staggering, magical exultation, and to mountain-making melodrama. They gave us the skyline that remains the boast and thrill of Chicago, a triumph of height over length and breadth. Can we equal that forward-looking ambition in our own time? What can we do that would remake lives a century from now? What spirit stirs us today?

I haven’t said anything here about the recent Black Lives Matter protests and events. Frankly, I don’t have much to add to the insight being imparted elsewhere, except for one aspect that I want to underline.

This is going to be a long haul. Speaking as a white person to white people, we need to be ready to work for years, even our whole lives. (Black people are already there.)

The opposition will fight back. Among other strategies, it will try to use attrition — it always does. There’s money to be made by blocking justice, enough money to pay skilled people to work full time to fight to maintain white supremacy. You and I who make our livings in other ways can devote fewer of our own resources. White supremacists want to wear us down so we’ll give up, discouraged.

But just like an optical illusion, once you see what’s happening, you won’t get fooled. Exhaustion is a trick they’re playing on us. Rest if you must, but don’t stop.

If you haven’t done much so far, that’s okay. I was moved by the mass protests, but I’m worried about Covid-19, so I only went to a small, neighborhood protest, holding my little home-made sign. Covid-19 will be gone eventually. There will still be lots to do, and we’ll have more freedom to do it. Meanwhile, I’m helping with funding and carrying out projects from isolation. We’ll all find a role.

If you don’t think you understand the issue well enough, that’s okay. Read books, watch videos, and seek out Black viewpoints. It’s not Black people’s burden to teach us, but they are generously sharing an enormous wealth of wisdom.

If your life leaves you with little to give, at a minimum, register and vote. If you think voting doesn’t matter, then why would anyone try to suppress it?

Finally, whatever you do, make a material, not symbolic, difference. This little TikTok video by Joy Oladokun skewers fast, superficial cures to racism.

I recently had a birthday. Can you guess how long ago I was born? Here are some words that were first recorded that year by Merriam-Webster. Some of the words surprised me.

aerospace
big bang theory
counterintuitive
exurbia
fabric softener
gangbusters
hidden agenda
intensive care unit
jazzed
kegger
liner notes
mind-boggling
New Left
off-gas
pinball
red panda
sheesh
technophile
underemphasize
veggie
weirdo
zinger

Find out which year and see more of its surprising words at Merriam-Webster.com Time Traveler.