Nebula Award Nominees 2017- Short Stories
What fun! I would never have read any of these stories on my own, although I expect some of these will show up in some future anthologies.
I have one personal gripe, and this will come up again in another category, and that is the death of the horror genre. Because they have just killed "horror" and lumped scary stories in with science fiction and fantasy, we get stories like Sabbath Wine trying to compete with Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies and it's not fair. It really is apples and oranges. Don't believe me about horror? Go find the horror section in the Barnes and Noble. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Griping over, this selection of stories was AWESOME and heavy on the fantasy stories. Seasons and Wardrobe are fantasy stories. I would even call Seasons of Glass and Iron a fairy tale. Yay to older, mature female narrators! We seem to have many of them this year, and I'm grateful for it.
I really enjoyed Welcome to the Medical Clinic....but I think the clear cut winner here will be A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong. Not just because I had to actually look up what "permutations" meant but also because I could actually feel the narrator's frustration reach out off the page, grab me by the shirt, and scream in my face, "My sister!". Seriously, it was that good. I had to read it through twice, and I appreciated it even more on a second read. It's not an easy story, but essentially, a sister is resetting time over and over again trying to save her sister from a horrible death. The sister feels guilty for leaving home and for not being there for her sister who, if I understand it correctly, was born a different gender and is murdered by frat boys on the sisters' property and her body dumped in the stream that runs there. This one will stay with me for quite some time.
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