Note: this review originally appeared on the blog of Starship Reckless, as part of a series in which Athena Andreadis discusses works of the contributors to The Other Half of the Sky.

by Athena Andreadis

Cat Rambo’s recent collection, Near + Far (Hydra House, $16.95 print, $6.99 digital), is a tête-bêche book containing 2×12 stories of wildly different lengths that previously appeared in such venues as Abyss & Apex, Clarkesworld, Clockwork Phoenix, Crossed Genres, Daily SF and Lightspeed.

Before I discuss the stories themselves, I’ll mention two secondary but important aspects of the book. One is the attention paid to the presentation; as one example, the text ornaments are almost distracting in their beauty. The other is that each story has an afterword in which Rambo gives its backstory and worldpath. Personally, I greatly enjoy such fore/afterwords (I still fondly recall Harlan Ellison’s needle-sharp, needling introductions) and find that they invariably deepen my understanding and appreciation of the tale – provided that the writer knows their craft. Which brings us to the content of the collection.
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(Cover image for Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 by Julie Dillon)

REVIEW SUMMARY:  The seven stories short-listed for this year’s Nebula Award for Short Story demonstrate that the medium remains a strong and effective method of telling good stories.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:  Aging, death, child care, cultural identity, the importance of books, the price of true love and other pertinent life issues are examined against the backdrop of science fictional and fantasy settings in these seven short stories.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Each nominated story possesses its own strengths; wide variety of style and subject matter; emphasis on the human condition.
CONS: Readers who primarily enjoy fantasy may be disappointed to find that six of the seven stories have a science fictional bent; the judges did not make their task easy when narrowing it down to these seven entries.
BOTTOM LINE:  Take advantage of the fact that these stories are all available free online.  SFF readers exhibit a range of tastes and there is arguably something for most readers to enjoy from this solid group of nominees.

Last week the nominations were announced for this year’s Nebula Awards.  The Forty-Eighth Nebula Awards Weekend will be held May 16-19th, 2013.  Details concerning the awards weekend can be found here.  I have been hosting Short Fiction Friday for a month now, featuring a different current issue of a short fiction magazine each week.  With the announcement of these nominations I thought it would be fun to read the Short Story nominees and offer up a brief description of each one.  I was initially hesitant to provide a rating for these stories because each is a strong contender.   Here as always I made an effort to rate the stories according to a combination of my own personal experience in reading them as well as stepping back to make a more general view of how I accessed each story’s effectiveness judged solely against itself.   With this year’s nominees I firmly believe you could get seven different people in a room and each one could passionately argue for a different story to be crowned the winner.  I do not envy the judges their task.

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In episode 177 of the SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester and Jaym Gates gather panelists to talk about the past, present and future of Cyberpunk.

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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]

This week, in time for the change of season, we asked about Winter:

The first novel that leaps to mind is Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness. It’s a wonderfully bizarre tour de force about a girl, Sym, who is obsessed with all things Antarctic, including her imaginary boyfriend, the deceased Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates. Her mad “uncle” takes her on a once in a lifetime trip there, which turns out to be a nightmare. He believes in the hollow Earth theory and that they will prove it’s true. Along the way, McCaughrean masterfully reveals more and more about Sym’s own past and her phony uncle. Sym’s voice is arresting despite how very in her own head she is—and it’s perhaps because of how that works with a backdrop that is spectacularly isolated and physically challenging. Some people may argue this isn’t a true fantasy, but I would debate them (citing spoilers), and regardless of which of us won I maintain it’d still be of interest to many genre readers because of the hollow Earth fringe science driving the plot.

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Cat Rambo lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her latest collection, Near + Far, appears this month from Seattle-based Hydra House Books.

SF Signal had the opportunity to talk with her about shared worlds and The Fathomless Abyss, a shared world anthology featuring stories from Cat, Mike Resnick, Jay Lake, J.M. McDermott, Mel Odom, Brad Torgersen and Philip Athans. In The Fathomless Abyss, a bottomless pit opens who-knows-when onto who-knows-where, just long enough for new people from a thousand different worlds and a million different times to fall in and join the fight for survival in a place where the slightest misstep means an everlasting fall into eternity. In this world, the laws of physics work against you, there’s no way out, and time means nothing…

CHARLES TAN: Hi Cat! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, how did you get involved with The Fathomless Abyss series?

CAT RAMBO: I came into the project a little later than the rest of the collaborators, as a substitute for Ken Scholes, who’d had to drop out. Ken thought it’d be nice to have a female author in the mix.  Because I’m conscious of that, I actually have been having a little fun by creating titles with Freudian implications. First A Querulous Flute of Bone, and now the two novellas, A Seed on the Wind and A Cavern Ripe with Dreams.

I was a little dubious about the world at first, because it’s such a crazy idea. But I was so pleased with how A Querulous Flute turned out that I’ve become a convert.

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Cat Rambo has posted the cover art and sent along the table of contents for her upcoming collection Near + Far, a publication containing two individual collections that harken back to the days of the Ace doubles:

Here’s the book description:

Whether set in terrestrial oceans or on far-off space stations, Cat Rambo’s masterfully told stories explore themes of gender, despair, tragedy, and the triumph of both human and non-human alike. Cats talk, fur wraps itself around you, aliens overstay their welcome, and superheroes deal with everyday problems. Rambo has been published in Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Tor.com among many others. She was an editor for Fantasy Magazine, has written numerous nonfiction articles and interviews, and has volunteered time with Broad Universe and Clarion West. She has been shortlisted for the Endeavour Award, the Million Writers Award, the Locus Awards, and most recently a World Fantasy Award.

And here’s the table of contents…
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