Bone Shop

Seems to be going around, but Tim Pratt is offering a reader-supported novella on his website. It'll come out in chunks. Details here.

"Bone Shop" is a Marla Mason story, the heroine of Pratt's series (begins with Blood Engines).

I haven't read any of Pratt's novels, but his short fiction collection Hart & Boot was a good one.

The story, which begins today, can be found here.

Hart & Boot: "Hart and Boot"

"Hart and Boot" is the title story, sort of, of Tim Pratt's Hart & Boot collection. I only say "sort of" because the collection has an ampersand and the story has the word "and". Nit-picky, sure, but that's the way it goes. This is the first story in the collection.

I've read this story before. I know I have. Just checked Pratt's website and it was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2005. That's where. I liked it then.

I like it now.

"Hart and Boot" is the story of Pearl Hart, a cowgirl and criminal in the late 1800's who meets John Boot when he crawls out of a hole in the dirt near her feet. Naked. Pearl and John begin a life of crime robbing stagecoaches until they are caught. Then things get really interesting because John Boot seems to be either a ghost or a figment of Pearl's imagination turned real. One of the two. Not sure which. Maybe a third option.

Love it. It's a great opening to Hart & Boot.

Now, if that bastion of accurateness Wikipedia can be trusted, there is a historical Pearl Hart and Joe Boot. If the descriptions are accurate, it seems that Pratt took the basic storyline of these two and built something special around it and gave far different reasons for what happened than possibly could have happened.

It's great.

2007 Hugo Award Winners

Courtesy of Science Fiction Awards Watch:

The Awards That I Really Care About:

• Best Novel: Rainbow's End - Vernor Vinge
• Best Novella: "A Billion Eves" - Robert Reed
• Best Novelette: "The Djinn’s Wife" - Ian McDonald
• Best Short Story: "Impossible Dreams" - Tim Pratt
• Campbell: Naomi Novik

List of Nominees.

My (brief) thoughts on the Novel and Campbell nominees. Worth noting that I've still only read the one novel nominee and it wasn't the winner.

No real surprise that Novik won the Campbell for Best New Writer. Scott Lynch may pick it up next year in a fight with Patrick Rothfuss (just guessing and predicting). In the comments of the above linked post of mine, Brandon Sanderson predicts that Novik wins this year (he called it) and Rothfuss wins next year. I think it'll depend on the success of Red Seas for Lynch.

My thoughts on the short fiction nominees back before I read them all...but reading the not reads didn't change my mind. "Impossible Dreams" was my Short Story Pick, I did not care at all for "The Djinn's Wife" for Novelette, preferring instead Mike Resnick's "All the Things You Are". For the novella category I much preferred "The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko over "A Billion Eves"


I like Awards. It gets me thinking about novels and stories and exposes me to work I wouldn't have read. I'm working on the World Fantasy Award nominees, as I can.

Strange Horizons

Next to Subterranean Online, Strange Horizons is quite possibly publishing some of my favorite online fiction today. Recently I haven't had much to talk about in the world of short fiction, but I’m still reading through Strange Horizons last month or two (I got behind) and they've got some nice quirky stuff. Nothing that right now makes me want to jump up and down and shout from the treetops about (let's ignore how I got up to the treetops), but decent stuff all the same.


Recent Reads:
The Perfume Eater, by R. J. Astruc
The Girl from Another World, by Leah Bobet
Wake Up Call, by Leslie Brown
The Captain is the Last to Leave, by Caroline Lockwood Nelson
Artifice and Intelligence, by Tim Pratt
Limits, by Donna Glee Williams


I rather like The Perfume Eater and The Girl from Another World, though Bobet's ending left a bit to be desired. The Perfume Eater is better. Limits is a decent story, too, after the first couple of pages when we start figuring out what it might be all about.