Novel
Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor, January 2011)

Novella
"The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson (Asimov's, October-November 2011)

Novelette
"What We Found" by Geoff Ryman (F&SF, September-October 2011)

Short Story
"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (F&SF, March-April 2011)

Damon Knight Grand Master Award
Connie Willis

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book
The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House, November 2011)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
"The Doctor's Wife," Doctor Who, Neil Gaiman, writer, and Richard Clark, director (BBC Wales)

Solstice Award
Octavia E. Butler (posthumously) and John Clute

Service to SFWA Award
Bud Webster

The long s has a long history but it's all but forgotten today. Now it haunts archives and rare book rooms, waiting to entrap unwary graduate students who dutifully recopy it as an f. (This is wrong: write it as an s.) It lived on in Fraktur long after it disappeared in Roman type, and survives today as part of the German letter ß, which is essentially (or eſsentially, or eßentially) a ligature of ſs, and in fact "ss" is used for ß where that letter is unavailable.

The two I haven't read are Jack McDevitt's Firebird and China Miéville's Embassytown, largely because they weren't available inexpensively. Firebird is the sixth volume in the Alex Benedict series; the third entry, Seeker, won the 2006 award. He's been on the ballot four times since then; this is McDevitt's eleventh nomination in this category. This is China Miéville's third nomination in this category; Embassytown was also nominated for the Clarke Award and is also on the Hugo ballot, as a result of which I expect to read it later this year.

Of the four I've read, one, Jo Walton's Among Others, I read a year and a half ago. I had a lot to say about it back then and I expect I will have more to say about it in the future. I'm not at all neutral about Among Others: it affected me more profoundly than any book has in years. This is the one I'm rooting for and the one I'd have voted for (it's certainly getting my vote for the Hugo).

But that doesn't mean I can't say nice things about the other nominated works.

N. K. Jemisin's first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was on the Nebula ballot last year. It was the first volume in the Inheritance Trilogy, a series Jemisin herself calls "her eyeroll at epic fantasy." It does things that fantasy trilogies Do Not Do, such as first-person narrative and a new protagonist in every volume. This year, the concluding volume in the trilogy, The Kingdom of Gods, is nominated (book two, The Broken Kingdoms, having got lost in the shuffle somehow). The trilogy deals with the relationship between mortals and gods: in the first book, a mortal became a god; in this one, a god -- Sieh, the trickster god of childhood -- has somehow become mortal. Intrigue and scheming ensue in a ridiculously gripping and readable fashion, as they always do in Jemisin's books. She's achieved "buy everything she writes" status in this house; Jennifer's hooked. (Buy The Kingdom of Gods at Amazon: trade paperback, paperback, Kindle. Author's page.)

The other two novels on the ballot are first novels. Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti just won the Crawford Award. It's the story of a travelling circus in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic landscape; the difference between magic and tech is not immediately clear. The boss of the circus remakes her performers, replacing their bones with copper pipes, killing them and bringing them back as something different. This ability draws attention from a local politician. A subplot focuses on who will inherit the wings of a deceased aerialist. It's a short book, told non-linearly and with shifting perspective and much incluing, but very masterful for a first novel. (Buy Mechanique at Amazon: trade paperback, Kindle. Author's page.)

Finally, God's War by Kameron Hurley, set on another planet, Umayma, where war has been so constant and unremitting that men, sent to be soldiers, are scarce, and where technology seems, um, insect-based. Bel dames act as enforcer-assassins, beheading deserters and other targets; it's an extremely bloody society. The story mainly follows Nyx as she loses her bel dame status, becomes a bounty hunter, and takes on a job that puts her in serious peril; the plot, truth be told, is a little shaky, and doesn't seem to cohere much in the first act. But it's extremely original and the world-building is thoroughly brilliant. (Buy God's War at Amazon: trade paperback, Kindle.)

For another take on the nominated novels, see Chris Barsanti's review of the entire slate. And, if you haven't already done so, read my reviews of the 2011 Nebula Award nominees for best short story, best novelette, and best novella.

The Nebula Awards get handed out on Saturday.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, trade paperback, Kindle • publisher's page

Previously: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

More recently I've been feeling fairly poorly on a number of fronts: regular gastrointestinal problems that went on for months (I'll spare you the details), excessive fatigue, and generally feeling out of sorts. It's been a rough few months. It's possible that these symptoms aren't side effects, that they'd be happening regardless of what I was taking for my AS, but I'd like to be sure.

So I've started something a little foolish: I'm switching back to naproxen, at least for a little while, to see if these symptoms abate. I also want to determine how much better piroxicam is than naproxen in dealing with my AS. If it isn't substantially better, and these symptoms are side effects, it might be hard to justify taking the drug. It's a tricky question, especially since fluctuating pain and inflammation levels make it hard to compare treatments except over long periods of time.

I've always known that medical treatment is a tradeoff: the best result with the fewest side effects. I'm perfectly willing to adopt a less effective treatment with fewer side effects, because the pain and inflammation of AS isn't the only thing I'm dealing with here.

I expect the next couple of weeks to be full of ow as the body shifts from one NSAID to another. I'm in a very bad flare anyway right now, so I don't have much to lose at this point. And I need the data.

Update, May 17: I'm aborting this little experiment. For one thing, even though it's still too early in the process to draw any decent conclusions, I've already been reminded of why I went on piroxicam in the first place: I'm less likely to be unable to walk. Being reminded of this changes the calculus considerably. I'd also forgotten one rule I've been trying to follow since my diagnosis: never make any major decisions while in flare, because pain, fatigue and the concomitant depressed mood -- to say nothing of a certain amount of desperation -- get in the way of rational thought.

The above image of Messier 78, a reflection nebula in Orion (but not the Orion Nebula), overlays observations from the ESO's Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope on top of Digital Sky Survey imagery. APEX records in the millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths -- essentially it's a microwave telescope -- and reveals (in orange) cold, dark dust clouds that would otherwise be hidden. Image credit: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2.

Other recent awesome space pictures include the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of a black hole outburst in M83, the Herschel Space Observatory's infrared view of the Cygnus X star-forming region and the ESO's infrared look at globular cluster M55. The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes released this narrowband image of the Thor's Helmet nebula. And last but not least, Jason Major's colour composite of Titan and Saturn, based on new Cassini images.

Last year my first impression of the short stories on the Nebula ballot was how nasty a lot of them were: stories whose primary effect was an emotional gut-punch. Stories about cruel children, children in hospitals, the dead of 9/11. I had a problem with that: stories under 7,500 words are capable of evincing more emotional responses than that. This year there's still a measure of children and pain but it doesn't seem to be as bad. We may not yet be at a point where the path to the Nebula ballot is as follows: step one, produce a child; step two, hurt that child. Tase the amygdala, get on the ballot. But sometimes I wonder.

I was also surprised to see how little overlap there was between the Nebula and Hugo ballots: only Kij Johnson's Nebula-winning "Ponies" was nominated for both. (But then only four stories made the Hugo ballot due to the five-percent rule.) This year, three of the seven Nebula-nominated stories are also on the Hugo ballot.

Each ballot is still only a fraction of what's out there -- a lot more short stories get published than novellas or novelettes combined, and there are a lot of publications that only publish short stories. They also represent only a fraction of what's good out there: for example, I nominated four stories for the Hugo that didn't make the Nebula or the Hugo ballot.

I'll deal with the Hugo ballot later. For now, here are the Nebula nominees:

• "Shipbirth" by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2011)
• "Her Husband's Hands" by Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed, October 2011)
• "Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son" by Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed, April 2011)
• "Movement" by Nancy Fulda (Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2011)
• "The Axiom of Choice" by David W. Goldman (New Haven Review, Winter 2011)
• "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (F&SF, March-April 2011)
• "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld 55, April 2011)

Seven nominees (which means a tie or a jury addition). Three from online magazines, three from print SF magazines, one from a literary journal. Three women, four men. Two -- Adam-Troy Castro and Ken Liu -- with novellas on the ballot as well.

Aliette de Bodard's "Shipbirth" is another story set in her Xuya universe. Like "The Shipmaker" (Interzone 231, September 2010), which won a BSFA award last year (but was written after "Shipbirth"), it features a spacefaring Asian-Aztec civilization that uses Minds to pilot ships. The Minds are birthed by human females. In "Shipbirth," a transgendered doctor deals with a birth that has gone ... badly. It's fascinating to see the Aztec mindset so convincingly dealt with in her Acatl historical fantasies transposed into far-future SF in an equally convincing manner, and with real depth of feeling.

"Her Husband's Hands" by Adam-Troy Castro is one of those awful, powerful stories that punches you in the solar plexus and leaves you winded. In this story, soldiers come home from battle a fraction of their former selves. Literally. Even a strip of flesh, combined with memory backups, can continue on. Or, in Rebecca's case, her husband's hands are the only things that come back. And they want to talk to her. Deeply and effectively creepy.

In Tom Crosshill's "Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son," a child (uh-oh) becomes a test subject (uh-oh) for a process that allows his brain to become "quantized" -- able to be many places at once, and in many different quantum realities at once. At least that's what I think is going on. It's told as a series of letters home to mother that reflect his changing state, in a strong reference to "Flowers for Algernon." But more confusing.

"Movement" by Nancy Fulda is also about a child facing experimental treatment. (Oh dear.) Teenaged Hannah has a condition called temporal autism: she's profoundly sensitive to and aware of the passage of time, which makes her rather distant. Her parents debate whether to try a treatment that will make her more normal. It's a better story than I make it sound here, largely because it's written from Hannah's point of view, and it's a lovely bit of writing too. "Movement" is also on the Hugo ballot.

Published in a literary journal, "The Axiom of Choice" by David W. Goldman is in the style of a choose-your-own adventure story, and follows the choices made throughout the life of the protagonist, a guitar player who loses most of his fingers in a plane crash. It's a bit of a fake-out: "This is not the choice you make" shows up more than once. It quickly transpires that this story is about free will and determinism, and that this is precisely the point. It's an interesting story. Is it SF or fantasy?

"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu is, to be honest, a bit of a tear-jerker; it's about the mixed-race son of a mail-order mother rejecting his Chinese heritage, embodied by the origami animals she makes, which come to life. The language of the letter at the end is a bit over the top, but the manner in which it was written is devastating; however maudlin, this is an effective story. It's also on the Hugo ballot.

And finally, "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu, which I mentioned before on The Map Room. It's hard for me to be neutral about a ballot that has a map story on it, but in this case there are plenty of people who don't commit regular map neepery who are enthusiastic about this story of a hive of mapmaking wasps that enslaves a bee colony in which anarchism later emerges as a heritable trait. And they should be: it's a story about bees and wasps, and maps, but also about power and revolution. This story is also a Hugo nominee, and was enough to put Yu on the ballot for this year's John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. I would not be at all surprised to see it take the Nebula later this month.

See also Adam Callaway's take on the short story nominees.

Previously: 2011 Nebulas: Novelettes; 2011 Nebulas: Novellas; 2011 Nebula Ballot Announced.

County-by-county life expectancy estimates released last month by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation reveal a startling gap between the longest-lived and shortest-lived areas of the country: the difference can be as much as 15 years.

The range of life expectancies is so broad that in some counties, such as Stearns, Minnesota, lifespans rival some of the places where people live the longest -- Japan, Hong Kong, and France -- while in other counties, life expectancies are lower than places that spend far less on health care -- Egypt, Indonesia, and Colombia. Even within states, there are large disparities. Women in Fairfax, Virginia, have among the best life expectancies in the world at 84.1 years, while in Sussex, Virginia, they have among the worst at 75.9 years.

And the situation isn't improving either: "In 661 counties, life expectancy stopped dead or went backwards for women since 1999. By comparison, life expectancy for men stopped or reversed in 166 counties." When people refer to the U.S. as a Third World country, this sort of thing -- the disparity, the decline -- is usually one of the reasons why. Via Tobias Buckell.

Just look at this Hubble image of the Egg Nebula, a protoplanetary nebula on its way to becoming a planetary nebula: in particular, note the searchlight beams emanating from the dying central star, itself hidden by a surrounding dust cloud. Wow. Image credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA.

Other recent awesome space pictures include MESSENGER's look at Mercury's Donne crater; the ESO's wide-field view of star cluster NGC 6604; and two infrared views of Messier 104, the Sombrero Galaxy, from the Spitzer Space Telescope that reveal that its well-known disk is actually enveloped by an elliptical galaxy structure: one, two.