SFWA just announced that the voting form for the 2021 Nebula Awards is open for business, which means it’s that time of year again: fiction awards season. As usual, I’m here with the stories I’ve had published in 2020 that are eligible for next years Nebulas, Hugos, Otherwise, and so on.
What have I got for you this year? Here are my three favourites from 2020, plus a note about the eligibility of works published in this year’s issues of sub-Q Magazine, which closed up shop in August of 2020.
Of course, you don’t have to be voting for the 2021 Nebula Awards — or any others — to read these. My main goal with sharing the stories is to help them find readers who will enjoy them!
Table of Contents
- Summary
- NEW! “How They Name the Ships”
- NEW! “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep”
- NEW! “Five Things I Hate about Phobos”
- “At the Edge of a Human Path”
- “Against the Dying of the Light”
- “Scenes from the End of a World”
- sub-Q Magazine
Summary
If you don’t want to read about my process, here are just the details!
“How They Name the Ships” is a 750 word sci-fi story with my take on the space opera trope of AI ship names, but it’s really about identity, the power names have, and how to stay true to yourself when the society you live in won’t accept who you are. It was published in Frozen Wavelets in December, and can be read online here.
“Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep” is a 3,000 word science fiction story about restorative justice on a future Mars. It was published in No Police = Know Future from Experimenter Press in December of 2020, which can be purchased here.
“Five Things I Hate about Phobos” is a 950-word science fiction story about love, entropy, and wabisabi (also on Mars). It was published in Nature in December of 2020 and can be read online here.
“At the Edge of a Human Path” is a 5,000 word fantasy story about shape-shifting foxes, politics, and power in ancient Japan. It appeared in the 87 Bedford Historic Fantasy Anthology in May of 2020, and can be read online here.
“Against the Dying of the Light” is a 1,000 word sci fi story about dementia and caregiving. It appeared in Flash Fiction Online in May of 2020, and can be read online here.
“Scenes from the End of a World” is a 1,000 word sci fi story about finding a fresh start amidst a disaster. It appeared in All Worlds Wayfarer‘s June 2020 issue, which can be purchased here.
sub-Q Magazine was an online magazine of interactive fiction which published its last issue in August of 2020. The pieces in it from this year can be played online here (the first 9 entries), and while the magazine as a whole isn’t eligible for any categories in the 2021 Nebula Awards, it is eligible for the Best Semiprozine category in the Hugos.
New: “How They Name the Ships”
The Somsei Republic name their Ships after important historical figures (usually male). The Ucchou Federation gives Ships use-names like any other citizen, and let them select their own personal names. The philosophical alien Kfuul and the brutal Kháos Empire follow their own rules for ship names, as always. Even the repulsive, symbiotic Brakm have a specific way of naming the Ships they have scavenged.
But what names do the Ships take for themselves?
To find out, you’ll have to read “How they Name the Ships,” out now in issue 5 of Frozen Wavelets: https://frozenwavelets.com/issue-5/how-they-name-the-ships-by-stewart-c-baker/
New: “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep”
Aala has scratched out a living for themself as a petty thief and pickpocket in the glittering, turbulent spray cast up by the endless waterfalls of Marineris City, where profit is king and men like Vasilis are its loyal, vicious servants. Kirsi, on the other hand, comes from Maricourt, where community, equity and compassion hold sway.
The most Aala ever hoped for in Marineris was to slip through the cracks, to avoid Vasilis’s wrath and out of the local law enforcement’s damp and dreadful holding cells. But all that’s all behind them, now, as they travel to Maricourt with Kirsi–who, for some reason, doesn’t think they’re scum and wants to spend actual time with them.
Maricourt and Kirsi between them give Aala more hope than they dare to admit, but theft is the only way they know how to survive. Will a change in surroundings lead to a happy ending, or will a slip back into old habits ruin their run in Maricourt before they ever had a chance to start?
If you want to find out, you’ll have to read “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep,” out now in No Police = Know Future, edited by James Beamon and available here from Experimenter Publishing.
New: “Five Things I Hate about Phobos”
“Five Things I Hate about Phobos” is about love and the potential of loss, and ultimately asks the question of whether our eventual but inevitable demise is a tragedy or something else.
It’s got nonbinary pronouns, romance, wabisabi, and a celebratory lightshow. Also, it’s set on Phobos, Mars’s erratic larger moon, which is doomed to either break apart in the atmosphere or fall to the surface a hundred million years from now.
You can read “Five Things I Hate about Phobos” (and a brief author’s note) online here in all its glory: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03505-9
“At the Edge of a Human Path”
My short story “At the Edge of a Human Path” follows K, a shape-shifting fox living in ancient Japan, as she tries to stop her mother from guiding the Yamato clan toward a culture of war and domination of the kingdoms around them. K finds an unlikely ally in Soga no Yoshitsuki, a Yamato man who suspects her mother, but can the two of them succeed in ousting her?
(87 Bedford Historic Fantasy Anthology, May 26 2020, 5000 words.)
About the story
This story is set in 6th century Yamato Japan (or at least, an approximation of what Yamato Japan was generally presented as being like in medieval Japan), but the core of it actually comes from a medieval French/English folk tale motif called The Loathly Lady.
In Loathly Lady stories, a man (usually a knight) ends up marrying a hag with supernatural powers and a hideous appearance, usually described in excrutiating detail. The stories are generally comedic in nature, especially the one I used as my main model, “The Weddynge Of Sir Gawen And Dame Ragnell,” which sees Gawain tasked with finding out “what women really want” to save King Arthur from having his head removed as the result of Yet Another Stupid Act of Kingly Disregard of Other People’s Property.
Way to go, Arthur.
Anyway, Gawain spends a year going all over England and getting hundreds of different answers (because, surprise, women are not a monolith!) and ends up with the answer sovereignty after promising to marry the hag, who knows the “correct” answer for reasons. (You can read the original online at TEAMS Middle English Texts, if you like!)
“At the Edge of a Human Path” mashes up the loathly lady motif with one of my favourite shapeshifting yokai: foxes. In Japanese folklore, much like European animal tales, foxes have a reputation for trickers, and in early modern times their reputation was somewhat malicious. But in earlier stories, they could be helpers, guardians, and even the servants of Inari — one of Shinto’s principal gods/spirits.
This story won the Judith Merrill short fiction contest in 2017, but this is its first appearance, so it is eligible for the 2021 Nebula Awards, Hugos, and anything else which determines elegibility based on year of publication. More importantly, though, I hope you enjoy reading it!
“Against the Dying of the Light”
In “Against the Dying of the Light” (Flash Fiction Online, May 1 2020, 1000 words), Alyssa takes her aging mother to a facility researching a cure for dementia. Although she doesn’t find one, she finds something almost as important: how not to burn herself out as she helps her mother navigate her end of life as an individual with her own desires and needs.
About the Story
With a title that’s shamelessly lifted from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and a setup that sounds like it’s ripe for yet another SFnal dystopia about the Evils Of Technology As A Cure For Something ™, you might expect this story to be cynical, depressing, and angry—especially since the first words of the line in the poem are “Rage, rage.”
While I can’t deny “depressing,” I tried very hard to work against the cynicism and the tpyical SFnal tropes and come at this from a place of compassion and realism. I also tried to work very hard against the even more pernicious, real-world trend where people with disabilities—whether that’s dementia or any other kind—are treated as problems to solve or as infants to pacify, rather than as actual people. “Science/magical cure” is a bad trope for a number of reasons, okay?
On a lighter note, selling this story to FFO in particular amused me. Why? Because for a couple of years, I read slush for FFO and one of the things that annoyed me the most were all the stories about Alzheimer’s that tried to be “clever” by starting and ending with the character going through the exact same situation, often word for word.
As you might guess by the quotes around “clever,” I did not think they succeeded, and just found these stories immensely frustrating. I’m not casting judgment here, by the way. These stories may have been cathartic experiences written by people trying to process the loss of a loved one to what is a horrible disease.
From a storytelling perspective, though, they featured characters who would grow and change over the course of a thousand words, some in ways that were excellently written. And then the end would appear, and all of it didn’t matter. Argh!
I wrote this partly as a response to those stories, curious if there was a way that I could compellingly tell a story about a dementia sufferer that didn’t follow that pattern. You can be the judge of my success!
At 1,000 words, “Against the Dying of the Light” is eligible for the short story category in the 2021 Nebula Awards and any other award that bases its categories on length.
Scenes from the End of a World
“Scenes from the End of a World” follows JT, a survivor of an impending apocalypse, as they struggle to deal with their feelings of guilt for those left behind. As the generation ship they’re now on board departs its doomed planet, will their encounter with a woman their own age start the healing process, or just make them feel worse?
(All Worlds Wayfarer, June 2020, 1,000 words)
About the story
In the long ago and far away, I was part of an online writing group called Liberty Hall. Rather than just being another writing group, the idea behind Liberty Hall was that you would only have 60 minutes to write and submit a complete piece of flash fiction based on a prompt. It was intense, and although I didn’t always get finished stories out of it, the practice definitely helped hone my flash fiction skills!
Although Liberty Hall hasn’t existed for several years now, earlier this year some friends and I tried a similar exercise for a few weekends. This story is one of the results, growing out of prompts that featured the end of the world and finding someone new.
As this was its first appearance in print, “Scenes from the End of a World” is eligible for best short story in the 2021 Nebula Awards, and other awards as well.
sub-Q Magazine
sub-Q was a magazine of interactive fiction (part story, part game) that ran from August of 2015 to August of 2020. I was fortunate enough to be the editor of it from late 2017 through to its final issue this year, and it was a fun thing — if a time-consuming one.
Although it isn’t around any more, it did have a number of releases of new (interactive) fiction this year, many of which are themselves eligible for the 2021 Nebula Awards game writing category, the Hugo Awards’ newly announced video game award, and the XYZZY Awards (the annual interactive fiction awards).
If you’re new to interactive fiction, or just want something new to play, go check them out the magazine’s back issues here: https://sub-q.com/back-issues/
I’m especially proud of our 2020 issues, when we really got into our stride as a magazine, with games by Ken Liu, Monica Valentinelli, and a serial by Sharang Biswas. Not to mention our cover art (pictured at the right) by artist and game designer Laura de Stefani, who you should go follow on Twitter right now.
Finally, while sub-Q itself isn’t eligible for anything in the 2021 Nebula Awards, it is eligible for the Hugo Best Semiprozine award.
Phew.
That’s a lot of stuff from 2020. Even if you’re not reading for any awards, I hope you’ll take a look at what I’ve written this year, and that you like what you see if you do!