2007

2007 Judge's Report:   As a reader, I'm easy to please. All I want is a story that is fascinating, satisfying, challenging, beautifully told, means something, goes somewhere, and changes my life. Okay, so I might be willing to compromise slightly on that last. When it comes to newer writers, I may give some allowances. Yes, I know they're probably not as accomplished storytellers now as they will be in five or ten or twenty years. On the other hand, in a couple decades they'll be more skilled, but will they be as brash or energetic? At either age, will they be actively ambitious, continuing to strike out into new and dangerous territory, always eager to try something new?

     Okay, so I know that some few of you are thinking, Well, gawrsh, I just wanted to parlay my modest entry in the Science Fiction Writers of Earth competition into oh, a lucrative contract for my highly commercial open-ended epic fantasy series. I sympathize. But as I've tiresomely pontificated in this forum in the past, modest ambition usually only yields modest results at best. Occasionally breaking the playing-it-safe mold is good for your soul. That I believe.

     Once reason I've spent more years than I care to count laboring on behalf of SFWoE is because I appreciate seeing that group of annual finalists who always strike me as being something of a maverick crew of scruffy rebels willing to support a writing competition other than, say, a much more huge, more lucrative, better publicized enterprise that also has the advantage of being underwritten by a corporate global church (which, of course, also has SFnal roots). By comparison, SFWoE's Gil Reis just has himself, his family, a variety of usually anonymous but enthusiastic volunteers, and a dream. I don't disparage any of SFWoE's colleague organizations. But I still admire the classic notion of the American Dream, and so I continue to read the finalists with eagerness, hoping I'll discover a new Theodora Goss or Sue Ann Slocum, or any of the other past winners. And if Gil ever starts up a major new church, I'll face some interesting decisions.

     But I digress.

     2007's most notable SFWoE stories number among them both laudable attempts to bring all the storytelling virtues together, and one piece that lost story points but was so pyrotechnically ambitious I couldn't ignore it for a nanosecond. More about that later.

     Now bring the house lights down, let the curtains sweep open, key the follow spot, and sound the drum roll, please.... My pick for the first-place story in the 2007 finalists is Jonna Laster's "Keys," a story whose roots hark back to the bleak social science fiction cautionary tales of the '50s and '60s, when Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, damon knight, and many others used to demonstrate to us just how often humans could screw up in future societies only a few degrees twisted from the familiar present-day.

     Ms. Laster gives us a young woman named Lee who is a citizen of Colony Five, a hermetically sealed city with a government about as chummy as Singapore's, only raised another quantum level. Keys are all- important to the citizenry. Everyone carries a ring of keys that represents access to food, shelter, transportation, everything. Lose your keys and you're dead meat. The government uses this unhappy event to decide if you're worthy of continuing as a viable and productive member of society. If you're not, you get shunning, starvation, and maybe even end up tossed out the colony door to perish in a harsh wintry hellscape that just might be akin to the author's present home town in Alaska. Lee's a woman who makes a bad choice, in this case choosing to have a social/sexual liaison with Sandy, of course not realizing that he's a sadistic dipstick who will seduce her, leave lipstick taunts on her bathroom mirror, and vanish after swiping her keys.

     So what's a girl to do? Sometimes panic and desperation can indeed lead to self-empowerment. Lee takes after Sandy with the intent to attain revenge as well as a few percent in interest. Has she got the grit to do it? Read the story and find out. The story's tone here is cool, grim, and edgy. Colony Five is a classic dystopian environment, and clearly Lee is an appropriately adapted citizen. Is the story perfect? Well, perhaps not entirely. It might well benefit from a bit more background, so that the notion of keys as both symbol and as a literal lynchpin might make a little more sense, On a structural level, the story's point of view begins strongly with Lee and ends equally strongly with Sandy. It might well be a bit more effective to end with a brief view again of Lee. Just a line or two to remind us whose story this really is. Okay, so this is all writer stuff, boring to most of the world, but hey, you're mostly all writers too, right? Give it some thought.

     In the meantime, the main thing to note is that Jonna Laster of the far North Country has demonstrated she can craft a tight little slice of tough life in a chill clime. Clearly she's got a good literary tool kit and knows how to use the contents. Including the power tools.

     Just down the dystopian highway from Colony Five is Canadian Susan M. Boyce's "Encore," a slightly more light-hearted view of dysfunctional life in a not-so-cheerful future. In Boyce's scenario citizens can expect to live a century or so in a not-terribly-satisfying world where they receive a life allowance from the government to cover basic necessities. That government is overjoyed when citizens borrow against their life equity so they can live it up for a few months, then commit culturally sanctioned suicide. Everybody wins. The narrator of "Encore" has a permit-and then discovers he (or she) still isn't quite affluent enough to afford the really spiffy sendoff she aspires to. What to do? Enter one Larry Lizard, an alienish entrepreneur who reminds me of nothing so much as a human-scaled version of the Geico Gecko (an animated reptilian spokeslizard for an insurance company on U.S. television, for you far-flung SFWoEans). Before long, Boyce's protagonist with Larry Lizard's help, finds a fascinating new future in suicide theatre. The amusement value is high and Boyce is terrific at world-building details. Her apparent weakness is playing a little too fast and loose with the technology. "Encore" is a good story, but probably not for Analog.

     In third place is the unignorable piece I mentioned a few paragraphs back, William Wood's "One One Thousand," a great title for a hyperkinetic, pyrotechnic, headlong tumble through time and space that doesn't quite make it as a story per se, but still is a bravura piece of writing that speaks volumes about the writer's talent. "One One Thousand" pack's a novel's worth of possibility and general excitement into about twenty-five hundred words. Protagonist Aaron wakes to a state of sensory distortion and we discover that a time travel experiment gone horribly awry has tapped into an otherness that is destroying our entire universe. Before the last stars blink out, surviving scientists send Aaron back in time one day to attempt to halt the experiment, time paradoxes be damned. Aaron finds himself in the right place at the right time, but there's now the matter of malign, spidery intelligences that apparently want the ill-fated experiment to go ahead. It's good stuff, Maynard, but there's little space or time to really establish a reader's relationship with Aaron, his colleagues, the world, or the unearthly dangers of science gone bonkers. But the stylish detail and the inexhaustible energy pretty much carry the day. This is a piece that could equally be a pitch for a projected novel or the prologue of the book. And I suspect the book would be a killer.

     Runners up to the top three? "The Abduction" by Graham Parks gives us an essentially Socratic dialogue between a young boy and his abducted grandfather as they lie beneath and summer stars and Gramps discloses his experience with the ET's. The terrible irony is that the boy finds the old man's experiences are less exciting than the average installment of "The X-Files." Courtney Crawford's "Living Dead Queen" brashly blends dark historical fantasy, a touch of romance, and a soupcon of political commentary. We are given doomed French Queen Marie-Antoinette in the Bastille awaiting execution when three witches abruptly appear to offer her a salvation of a sort. She's magically packed off to Spanish colonial Cuba to become a teacher and nanny, only then to be pressured by the witches to kill her slave lover and foil the looming slave rebellion.

     In the rest of the top ten there were plenty of ideas at work. Tom Humphrey's "The Exospatial Theory of Hellenic Origin" is a competent tale of hunter and hunted, blended with the theory that western civilization came from the Greeks with a lot of help from ancient astronauts who probably liked gyros and dolmades. Eric Pearson's "Edmund and the Dragon" is a light and charming fairy tale of a young man who goes off to slay the dragon, only to discover that the reptile in question is actually the fair maiden. The plot betrays a little confusion, and the prize is won far too easily.

     "Enceladus Mine" by Fran B. Giuffre is a too-leisurely written love story about the relationship between a shuttle pilot and the captain of a soon-to-be-decommissioned base above Saturn. Tightening and sharpening are the ticket here. In Keith Garsee's "Forty Five Cents Will Buy You Fifty Four Minutes" wormholes can take you to a steampunk parallel world. "Rites of Passage: at the Edge of the Universe" by David "Rudy"Grossman is saddled with a weighty title, but relaxes thereafter with nice characters and plot.

     Some of these writers are familiar to me from previous years and it's clear their talents are still simmering nicely; others are new to me and I'm delighted to see them. Good fortune to one and all.

--- Edward Bryant

SFWoE Note:   SFWoE thanks author Edward Bryant for taking the time to judge our 2007 contest from his busy schedule.

Judge's Bio:  Edward Bryant founded the Northern Colorado Writers Workshop 36 years ago after attending the Clarion Workshop's first incarnation in 1968. Over the years, the NCWW has included such participants as Connie Willis, Dan Simmons, Wil McCarthy, Steve and Melanie Tem, Michael Bateman, Alex Irvine, John Dunning, Lucy Taylor, and many, many other notable writers.

     Ed is a multiple Nebula and American Mystery award winner, the author of a dozen books and a vast body of short fiction and nonfiction. He's been a reviewer, an Internet interviewer, and a radio talk show host, and still keeps his cattle brand registered in the state of Wyoming. He's worked in Hollywood, writing projects for Walt Disney Cable and CBS, and the independent feature based on his story "While She Was Out" starring Kim Bassinger is currently in post-production. Ed presently lives in a home that's seen three centuries in Denver, Colorado, with Alex and Bernard, a pair of feline-American companions.

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