IMS_Blog

So, short story: I just have to go with Gaiman’s How To Talk To Girls At Parties. In the end I just love Gaiman’s writing too much. Bruce McAllister’s Kin ran it close, and I quite enjoyed the strange idea of Robert Reed’s Eight Episodes.

Novelette (a strange word!): I think Michael F Flynn’s Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth. I also liked Mike Resnick’s All The Things You Are and Geoff Ryman’s Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy) [PDF]. To be honest I’ve always found Novelette an awkward length—too long for the cleverness and impact of the short story, too short to really get into developing ideas.

Having said that, Novella length risks reading something which feels like a working draft of a novel. Anyway, I’m not here to talk about what lengths of fiction writing I feel work best but I think that did make this the hardest category for me to chose. In the end I’d go with Paul Melko’s The Walls Of The Universe, perhaps because it felt the most self contained and despite dismissing quantum mechanics as simply a statistical way of modelling particles (though maybe that’s just the character’s understanding). Of the others I enjoyed Robert Reed’s A Billion Eves the most and William Shunn’s Inclination seems a bit stuck in my head.

So there we are; my choices. Have to wait and see how well they match the eventual winners!

Update: I’m a bit late with the update but the winners are out (and have been for a while; tardy blogger!). Looks like the judges didn’t particularly agree with me!