But the SFWA are a welcoming bunch, nevertheless, handing out their Nebula Award in recent years to everyone from crackerjack dreamweavers like Neil Gaiman (the mainstream dark fantasy American Gods in 2002 and the fey nightmare Coraline in 2003) to once-mainstream writers gone gleefully genre like Michael Chabon (his brilliantly imagined counterfactual-cum-detective novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union in 2007). Time will tell if the last decade’s batch of winners will hold up to scrutiny like those in its first decade, when the Nebula was passed out to Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, three foundational works in 20th century science fiction.

There are six novels nominated for this year’s Nebula Award, which will be announced May 19th. They cover the future, the present, and the indefinable. They feature shy faeries, magicians who wield bugs like weapons, and a postapocalyptic steampunk traveling circus. What they don’t do much of is splash about in that shallow, mucky pool of vampire/alien/cop/erotica/fallen angel serial potboilers (new variations ever-spinning off as though generated by some genre virus) being snapped up by ever more readers. Only two of the six Nebula nominees are series books, the rest are novel-novels – left to live or die on their own, no cliffhangers to entice you back.

Firebird by Jack McDevitt: McDevitt is one of those increasingly rare practitioners of the far-future space opera; unfortunately, Firebird is not exactly an advertisement for the subgenre. The sixth of a series, it’s narrated by Chase Kolpath, dutiful assistant to the series’ star, Jack Benedict, a kind of archaeologist-cum-rare antiquities dealer (an earlier Benedict novel, Seeker, took the Nebula in 2006). Chase and Jack meander their way into a mystery linking a disappeared physicist named Christopher Robin and a series of spaceships that have disappeared. The prose has the monotone feel of a constant hum, only slightly upticking even when Chase and Jack are besieged by a band of malevolent AIs rampaging about like more advanced versions of the human-hating machines in Stephen King’s “Trucks.” Alex’s God-like sagacity turns less Sherlockian as the story bumps on, Chase’s dully Watson-like dependability is slightly tweaked, but the lack of dimensionality to the characters is nearly complete. It’s true that McDevitt ratchets up the cross-dimensional drama once more is discovered about the disappeared ships and stirs some embers of an intriguing debate over the souls of AIs. Sadly, though, he sets aside any attempt to portray a cross-galaxy human society many centuries in the future as truly any different from today’s.

The Kingdom of Gods by N.K. Jemisin: Jemisin is a rising talent with a couple of Hugo and Nebula nominations to her credit and a sharp voice — check out her quasi-manifesto: “Don’t Put My Book in the African American Section.” Like half of this year’s nominees, her novel is more fantasy than science fiction, but as previously discussed, all are welcome here. The final entry in her “Inheritance Trilogy,” The Kingdom of Gods is set in the same magic-plagued world as the previous two, but with different characters. The narrator Sieh, is a “godling” who still winces at the memory of his long imprisonment by the Arameri, a tyrannical human dynasty (whose Vatican-sized palace is built in a “World Tree” the size of a mountain range) which has lost the power to enslave gods. Sieh’s a bratty and bloody-minded Loki-esque trickster figure who thinks nothing of slaughtering dozens in a fit of pique, but nevertheless steals the hearts of a pair of Arameri royal siblings. Jemisin paces her book fast and knotty (the glossary at back helps), downgrading Sieh to mortal status and setting him adrift in the roiling dramas of this hyperbolic, violent, and power-crazed world. It’s overripe and overplotted, but rich with detail and emotion; she channels the darker fratricidal and genocidal themes of Greek mythology like few other writers can. Jemisin doesn’t make the mistake of ascribing human morality to her godly characters just because they have recognizably human emotions.

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine: Valentine’s short fictions have been anthologized many times — everywhere from various Year’s Best collections to more themed-works like War and Space — but this is her first novel. The easiest definition of Mechanique’s loosely-threaded story would be “steampunk circus.” No airships and not a pair of goggles to be seen, but still, there’s enough fascination with clanking machinery and low-tech bioware, as well as a fuzzy disinterest in time-period specificity. Call it steampunk-adjacent. The Circus Tresaulti, as described by the young and romantic narrator George, is a fabulist’s dream of patched-together tents and critically wounded performers reborn as pre-digital cyborgs with metallic limbs, surgically attached wings, and lighter-than-air bones (the latter very handy for the aerialists). Their female Ahab is known only as the Boss (whose skill with the performers’ mechanized add-ons seems more than a little Faustian), the circus trundles through a vaguely-described and war-blasted landscape of ruined cities and feral audiences. The whole affair is tied together far too late in the game with a climax that feels too familiar by half. Valentine has imagination, but only to a point. Her characters take too long to come into focus, and her writing just doesn’t have the strength to carry such a lightly-plotted piece to fruition.

God’s War by Kameron Hurley: First-timer Hurley has a sensibility not too far removed from Jemisin’s. Both have a fine feel for action and have no compunctions about burying readers up to their necks in conspiracies and bloody intrigue. Where Jemisin works in a vein of mythological overkill, Hurley has a grittier cyberpunk feel to her writing. Her fascinating God’s War is another far-future story set on a planet far from Earth in terms of light years, but quite neighborly in the similarity of its politics and problems. Two vaguely Muslim nations, Nasheen and Chenjan, have been locked in a grinding war for longer than living memory. The planet is ridden with disease and toxic with religious orthodoxy and terrorism-inspired paranoia. What high technology there exists seems to come entirely from the specific manipulations of the planet’s native bug species. With entire generations of men sacrificed to the front, women comprise nearly all of civilian society. Hurley’s antiheroine, Nyx, is a former Nasheenian bel dame, or court-appointed assassin, who now plies her trade (bringing a bounty’s severed head back to whoever can pay) freelance. When Nyx is hired for a particularly onerous job, she takes on a larger crew, including Rhys, a Chenjan magician who is not particularly good at bug magic but will do for now. Hurley is a gut-punch kind of writer, with harsh characters in a harsh world doing whatever they think is necessary to survive — even if survival frequently seems little better than the alternative.

Embassytown by China Miéville: The newest, frequently baffling novel by the never-rote Miéville is the most welcome entry in this list, most particularly because it is the novel that most truly immerses readers into a world well beyond their ken. On the planet of Arieki, humans live in tenuous coexistence with an alien race known as the Hosts. A delicate balancing act keeps most humans in circumscribed boundaries, the only dialogue capable via human ambassadors who work in pairs. (The Hosts speak via two mouths, resulting in twinned streams of communication, a fascinating concept that Miéville runs wild with.) The book’s narrator is Avice, an Arieki woman who works as an immernaut, piloting the great depths of space between systems. She is wrangled into helping manage the crisis that erupts after a verbal virus begins to spread in the Hosts, leading to the collapse of the planet’s social order and the threat of all-out war. Miéville’s world is an immersive one, with few roadsigns to assist the beleaguered. But the novel’s all-encompassing alien nature is like a lexicographical blanket, enveloping the reader in abstruse, world-changing theories and riddle-wrapped drama. It’s all less dense than it sounds, for all Miéville’s language-mad word wizardry, there’s a thread of story here that makes it as thrilling and readable as any work of science fiction in recent memory.

Among Others by Jo Walton: You could consider Walton more a fan of science fiction than a practitioner of it, but that isn’t to do disservice to her writing, it’s to give credit to the potency and sharpness of her fandom. Among Others is a rainy, moody thing where the story is little more than a whisper. The narrator, Morwenna Phelps, is a Welsh girl (like Walton) who’s sent off to boarding school in England after a mishap with magic cost the life of her sister but just may have saved the world from the evil powers of their witch mother. Now Morwenna walks with a cane and tries not to let her magic show around the posher schoolgirls (her ability to see and speak to fairies might throw them), all the while trying to reconnect with her daffy father and figure out what to do if her mother returns. That’s all background atmosphere, though. Walton’s real story is Morwenna’s love of science fiction. The novel is told in diary form, and nearly every entry includes some finely argued notation on the joys and merits of what she’s reading. Her list is heavy with dark transgressors like Samuel R. Delany and John Brunner, as befitting Walton’s late-1970s setting. There’s a gripping, deeply-learned love here that goes beyond mere fandom, delivering one of the most intelligently impassioned odes to science fiction, and reading in general, ever put to paper. As Morwenna says on entering her father’s study: “I actually relaxed in his presence, because if there are books perhaps it won’t be all that bad.” Anybody who has felt the glow and tug of mind-warping joy that comes with devouring a stack of broken-spined sci-fi paperbacks will know exactly what she means.

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Eco’s sprawling tale of gluttony and global conspiracy heads an eclectic and surprising six-strong shortlist, which also includes stories rooted in 17th-century Iceland, wartime Ukraine and Finland, and modern-day Germany and rural China. Yan Lianke’s pitch-dark Dream Of Ding Village makes another appearance having also been shortlisted for this year’s MAN Asian Literary Prize.

Uniquely among literary prizes, the £10,000 fund is split equally between the winning author and translator.

Alice by Judith Hermann (from German; trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo)
The clarity of Judith Hermann’s prose won her a place on the shortlist for Alice, a collection of five inter-linking short stories based around a single central protagonist and the death of a different friend or acquaintance. Technically it’s hard to fault, but the repetitive nature of the stories sometimes drags. The problem is not in the book’s observational qualities, but in its fundamental lack of insight. People die and she moves on, illuminating little about the process of grief, and prompting the reader to question precisely what Hermann had in mind when it came to creating this slim volume. She’s a novelist of considerable repute in Germany, so she’s probably way better placed to answer the question. Until she does, in the context of a major literary shortlist, Alice will remain entirely, perplexingly unremarkable.

Blooms of Darkness by Aharon Appelfeld (from Hebrew; trans. Jeffrey M. Green)
Appelfeld is a prominent Israeli novelist who has written over 40 works of fiction, most concerning the Holocaust. Blooms Of Darkness tells the story of Hugo, an 11-year-old Jewish boy, who escapes the Nazis in an unnamed town in Ukraine by hiding out in a cupboard in a local brothel. Hugo befriends a prostitute, Mariana, and as the novel develops so does their relationship: some might say, given Hugo’s age, in a somewhat unlikely and/or disturbing fashion. Appelfeld’s story is based on truth: he escaped a Nazi concentration camp in 1941 and hid out in a forest with, as he puts it, “underworld figures.” Appelfeld would be the first to admit Blooms Of Darkness is nothing particularly new, but it is nevertheless a worthy addition to the literature of the Holocaust. Its most significant triumph is its understated prose — so heartfelt it could almost have been written in a whisper.

Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke (from Chinese; trans. Cindy Carter)
Lianke’s grim tale of a Chinese blood-selling scandal which sweeps an HIV epidemic through countless small communities was also shortlisted for the MAN Asian Literary Prize. Unsurprisingly banned in his homeland, Dream Of Ding Village serves as a damning indictment of China’s irresistible push towards a form of controlled capitalism. It serves as a vicious allegory of the whole bust-up Chinese communist machine. With the villagers dying in scores, the rabidly profiteering blood-sellers must seek out ever more inventive ways to maintain their cash flow. Blackmail and corruption are rife: this is a society rendered hopelessly naïve by long years of bludgeoning single-party rule. Lianke is merciless in heaping misery upon his subjects, which makes this a terribly bleak book. But it is also highly readable, and undeniably important.

From The Mouth of the Whale by Sjon (from Icelandic; trans. Victoria Cribb)
From the Oscar-nominated composer Sjon comes his second novel, From The Mouth Of The Whale, which is every bit as baffling and brilliant as his first, The Blue Fox, which was previously longlisted for the prize. Set in volcanic 17th-century Iceland, where snow burns and whales grow to the size of mountains, Sjon conjures a fantastical tale of the purging of pagan rituals and the banishment of a scientist and doctor, Jonas Palmason The Learned, to a remote island as punishment for his alleged heresy. There are exorcisms, infant deaths, an uproarious sketch involving unicorn horns and, in the book’s most unforgettable scene, the brutal slaughter of a band of visiting Basque whalers. Sjon’s rich, almost mythical prose never falters for a moment, and the extraordinary success of Victoria Cribb in losing none of its potency in her translation from its original Icelandic deserves to be celebrated. This is a wild, tumultuous, utterly unique novel.

New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (from Finnish; trans. Judith Landry)
New Finnish Grammar is a wholly admirable book, telling the story of a sailor found grievously wounded on the quayside in Trieste towards the end of the Second World War. He has lost both his memory and his language, and carries no identifying documents. Taken in by a passing Finnish doctor, Petri Friari, the pair struggle to rebuild his identity: Friari convinces himself the man is also Finnish, on account of a nametag found in his jumper, and sends him to Helsinki in the hope of reigniting some dormant memories. There, he (re-) introduces his subject to the notoriously complicated Finnish language, evoking myths and legends of his country’s past as the mystery of the man’s identity slowly begins to unfurl. Marani highlights important issues surrounding language and identity, and if it is a little dry at times, valuing intelligence over intimacy, he has written a technically excellent and thought-provoking book.

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco (from Italian; trans. Richard Dixon)
The extrovert, octogenarian Italian is back with a book many are calling his best yet. Fans of Eco will recognize his style from the start: grueling, disconcerting and often frustrating, it often feels that Eco is deliberately taking liberties with his reader, and yet The Prague Cemetery is astonishingly vivid, and never less than engaging. Eco weaves fact and fiction to devastating effect to unveil the mystery of a real-life document entitled The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, which was contrived to unite nations against the (supposed) Jewish plot for world domination, and would later by cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf. A master forger, Simone Simoncini, who has tricked and murdered his way through Turin and Paris, is tasked with creating the document. It is its inherent truth which gives The Prague Cemetery an extra dimension. It serves as devastating proof of how falsehoods can shape history, and misery can be heaped upon whole peoples by the stroke of a pen.

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Meanwhile in the General Nonfiction category, Stephen Greenblatt‘s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern took home the top prize.

Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with excerpts where available:

Fiction:

• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson – (excerpt)
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (excerpt, The Millions interview)
• The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (excerpt, previously unpublished scene)

General Nonfiction:

• Winner: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (excerpt)
• One Hundred Names For Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing by Diane Ackerman (excerpt)
• Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl (excerpt)

History:

• Winner: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (excerpt, The Millions review)
• Empires, Nations & Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 by Anne F. Hyde (excerpt – PDF)
• The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan (excerpt)
• Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White (excerpt)

Biography:

• Winner: George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis (excerpt)
  
• Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution by  Mary Gabriel (excerpt)
• Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (excerpt, The Millions review)

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.

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This year’s shortlist is typically eclectic, representing several countries and ranging from bestsellers to relative unknowns.

• Rocks in the Belly by Jon Bauer
• The Matter With Morris by David Bergen
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – (excerpt, Egan’s Year in Reading, The Millions profile of Egan, A Millions Hall of Famer)
• The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (excerpt)
• Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor
• Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes (our review, excerpt)
• Landed by Tim Pears
• Limassol by Yishai Sarid
• The Eternal Son by Cristovão Tezza
• Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin (excerpt)

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Fiction: Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (excerpt)

Nonfiction: Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (excerpt)

Autobiography: Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace: A Memoir (“The Writer at the Memory Table“)

Criticism: Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (“Putting It Together,” “The Millions Interview: Geoff Dyer on the London Riots, the Great War, and the Gray Lady“)

Biography: John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (excerpt)

Poetry: Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

Previously: The finalists

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Fiction

• Teju Cole, Open City (our review, excerpt)
• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write The Marriage Plot, our review, excerpt [pdf])
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (our review, The Millions Interview: Alan Hollinghurst Answers his Critics, excerpt)
• Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (excerpt)
• Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (our review, excerpt)

Nonfiction

• Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (excerpt)
• James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Ben Marcus on The Information, excerpt)
• Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (excerpt)
• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (excerpt)
• John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (Staff Pick, excerpt [pdf])

For more on the NBCC Awards and the finalists in the other categories, visit the NBCC.

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The Wandering Falcon, written by octogenarian Jamil Ahmad, is the first Pakistani novel to be nominated, while other shortlisted subjects include a vivid history of Guyanese coolies, inter-generational conflict in South Korea, a seafaring epic in nineteenth century Canton, a Chinese blood-selling scandal, and arranged marriage in modern India. It’s a broad, engaging list, and probably all the better for not being dominated by such a powerful figure as Marukami. Here are the contenders that are still left standing:

The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad: Ahmad, now almost eighty, spent much of his life working for the Pakistani Civil Service in its remote border regions: no-go zones that flash up on Western news reports as Taliban hidey-holes or the destination de rigeur of unmanned drones. The Wandering Falcon focuses on the tribes of those areas, casting overdue light on their deeply religious and honor-bound societies. Ahmad’s era may be pre-Taliban – he wrote the book thirty years ago, before being persuaded to seek publication by his wife – but his fractured tales, loosely based around the wanderings of Tor Baz, the eponymous Black Falcon, indicate a resistance to outside interference which would escalate in decades ahead. A masterpiece of focus and brevity, and brilliant in its evocation of an unforgiving landscape, Ahmad’s book is also now – for a book that came out thirty years late – remarkably timely.

The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya: Bhattacharya won high praise for his book on Pakistani cricket, Pundits From Pakistan, which was published in 2005. Sly Company is a partly autobiographical picaresque of one young man’s journeys in Guyana, a nation with which the author fell in love during a previous cricket tour. Bhattcharya’s central character is retracing the steps of the boatloads who set sail from Calcutta and Madras in the mid-nineteenth century, lured by tales of a land of gold. The descendants of those so-called coolies as well as the emancipated slaves from Africa have created a unique, tempestuous nation which Bhattacharya succintly captures with his convincing – but at times almost impenetrable – mix of Rasta patois and Hindi movie references. Aiming only for a kind of inner fulfilment, his character hunts diamonds in the country’s thick, dark interior, then falls in love and heads for Venezuela. His adventures are underpinned by constant reminders of Guyana’s colonial past, and the heavy price it still pays for it.

River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh: River Of Smoke is the second novel in Ghosh’s planned trilogy, the first of which, Sea Of Poppies, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. It’s an epic by any standards: 517 paperback pages, describing the early skirmishes which would ultimately lead to the 1840 Opium Wars, the Treaty of Nanking, and the secession of Hong Kong to British rule. Bahram, a Parsi trader from Bombay, seeks to land the enormous haul which will finally buy him the respect of his rich wife’s family back home. But the Chinese are determined to make trading in opium illegal, and as their crackdown becomes more unforgiving, so Bahram and the brigade of British merchants in whose company he has become inveigled must consider increasingly drastic options. It’s all a bit bogged down by an unnecessary sub-plot that is likely left over from his previous book. That said, Ghosh has written a story of such a grand scale that it deserves its opportunity to stand alone.

Rebirth by Jahnavi Barua: Rebirth is the only book on the shortlist for which overseas rights are yet to be granted. For that reason, if you manage to track down this book outside India, you’re a better literary detective than I. All of which is a shame, because reviews on the sub-continent suggest it is a delicate, deeply affecting novel deserving of wider readership. Set in modern-day Bangalore, Kaberi is pregnant with a longed-for child nobody else knows about: neither her estranged, unfaithful husband, nor her parents or friends. Rebirth takes the form of a monologue from mother to baby in which she expresses her doubts about her marriage and her life, and ultimately seeks, and finds, some form of redemption. In time, it’s likely its shortlisting will open it up to a bigger readership; for the time being, the next best thing is probably this comprehensive review via The Hindu Literary Review.

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin: Kyung-Sook Shin is something of a literary phenomenon in South Korea. Please Look After Mom (Mother outside the US) is her seventh novel, and it has sold in excess of one million copies in her homeland. Maybe the most remarkable thing about her latest offering is how she manages to fashion something so unique and soul-searching out so ordinary a conceit. So-nyo, an ailing wife and mother, disappears on the Seoul subway on a trip from the country to visit her eldest son. Her siblings and their father join together in a futile quest to find her. In the course of their search – split between the points of view of son, daughter, father and finally, So-nyo herself – they agonise over how they took her for granted, and in doing so raise the kinds of questions that can apply to us all. Most of all, it offers rare glimpses of life in rural South Korea, and asks whether the nation’s insatiable push for progress has come at a price.

The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto: She’s big in Japan, inspiring a cult following and selling upwards of six million novels, but Banana Yoshimoto will always polarise opinion. Critics may be tempted to call her Murakami-lite, given her fondness for the same kind of broad subjects as her heavyweight compatriot – ultra-modern and slightly otherworldy paeans to urban restlessness. But that comparison probably doesn’t do Yoshimoto too much justice. Certainly, Murakami could learn from her brevity. The Lake revolves around the relationship between two fragile students, Chihiro and Nakajima. Nakajima bears the scars of a terrible past, and the plot – such as it is – concerns Chihiro’s attempts to figure him out (complete with a visit to a couple of Nakajima’s mysterious old friends who live in a run-down shack by the side of a conveniently misty lake). It has its moments, and her champions – of whom there are many – will doubtless shout her claims from the rooftops. But if this was the best book to come out of Asia this year then I’m – well – a Banana.

Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke: Set in modern, rural China, Dream Of Ding Village addresses a topic of unimaginable grimmness: the story of the Chinese blood-selling scandal which swept an HIV epidemic through countless small communities, while the authorities, in thrall to the relatively new concept of controlled capitalism, looked away. The most extraordinary thing about Lianke’s tale – narrated by the murdered son of the man most culpable for this local tragedy – is his rich use of satire, creating an astonishing allegory of the whole bust-up Chinese communist machine and its clumsy lurch into the free market. With the villagers dying in scores, the rabidly profiteering blood-sellers must seek out ever more inventive ways to maintain their cash flow. Blackmail and corruption are rife: this is a society rendered hopelessly naïve by long years of bludgeoning single-party rule. Lianke is merciless in heaping the misery upon his subjects, and just as cutting in his implied criticism of his country. This is, no doubt, a terribly bleak book. In Lianke’s expert hands, however, it is also a very readable and eminently worthy one.

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The non-fiction award went to The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt (excerpt). The Poetry award was won by Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split. The winner in the Young People’s Literature category was Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai (excerpt).

Bonus Link: The 2011 nominees

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