Best Short Story: “The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard)” by Matthew Kressel.
Review by Michael Isenberg.
Welcome back to the first annual NOT THE HUGO Awards. I’m your host, Michael Isenberg, Editor-in-Chief of Nerds who Read.
Congratulations to the Orville episode, “Majority Rule,” on winning the award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form in my last post.
Our next category is Best Short Story.
Any attempt to single out one science fiction short story as the best of a given year is a Herculean task. The Internet Science Fiction Database shows over 14,000 short fiction entries for 2017, up from around 10,000 at the beginning of the decade. No one can possibly read even a significant fraction of them, much less do justice to picking the top one.
Nevertheless, one stood out for me. It doesn’t promise to solve the world’s problems, merely touching on the question of whether anyone reads anymore. It doesn’t portray the human race in an epic battle for its very existence. It doesn’t even delve into the dark recesses of the human psyche. It’s just a nice story about a friendship between a little girl and an old man. But then, these days niceness is underrated.
The story is “The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard)” by Matthew Kressel. Published on Tor.com, “The Last Novelist” was nominated for a Nebula Award, but sadly did not make the finals for the Hugos, which will be awarded in San Jose this weekend.
Reuth Bryan Diaso is hopelessly out of step with his times. A novelist in a future where no one knows what a novel is, much less reads one, he hasn’t sold a book in twelve years. I don’t mean he hasn’t sold the rights to one to a publisher. I mean he hasn’t sold a single copy of a book. “The last person to request one of my printed books was an Earth antiquities dealer on Bora,” he tells us, “who carefully sealed my book in plastic and placed it in storage, where it would serve as an example to future generations of what paper books had been like. As far as I could tell, the dealer had no intention of ever reading it.” Still, Reuth continues to churn out novels. Rather than transmit his dreams into a “neural,” by means of the link to the “Wee” that everyone seems to have implanted in their brains, he laboriously writes them out in cursive, pen and ink on paper. Then he manufactures the books himself on an old-fashioned press with hand-typeset print. When asked why he keeps writing novels that no one reads, he replies like a true artist: “I can’t stop.”
But first he is determined to finish his last novel, a story about a woman who comes to a planet to look for someone she loves. It’s giving him trouble, but he plugs away. Writing on the beach his first morning on Ardabaab, Reuth attracts the attention of numerous Persons from Porlock (look it up), but also a young girl whose curiosity is whetted by a desire to know what Reuth is “drawing.”
The girl is called Fish, not her real name, but her favorite thing to do is “Watching from my undersea bedroom the way the fish change colors as the sun rises.”
Reuth explains writing to her and she disappears into the sea and home. But by afternoon she returns—and several more times after that—with more questions for Reuth. A friendship blooms between them as the conversation expands from novels and novel writing, to printing and typesetting, and eventually to love and loss. Reuth discovers that Fish has quite a talent for drawing and offers to let her “hill-a-straight” his book. She accepts. He also teaches her typesetting—on a press he sets up in the spare bedroom of his bungalow—and the book, whose words now come easily to Reuth, becomes a collaborative effort.
I don’t want to give any spoilers as to how it ends, but I confess I got a little teary-eyed.
The writing is imaginative, alive with the bold colors of the tropics. Mr. Kressel hits the right balance on style: the slightly ungrammatical speech of the inhabitants of Ardabaab gives us a sense that we’re in the islands, without overdoing it and taking us into Jar Jar Binks territory. Similarly, there’s enough techno-jargon to ground the story in the future, without so much as to make things confusing as to what’s happening. Yiddish expressions are sprinkled throughout, which one wouldn’t expect to work in this setting, but someone it does.
Which leaves one loose end—the dead lizard. Reuth found it under his shoe in the opening lines. He’s not sure how it got there, whether he stepped on it, or whether it crawled underneath during the night. As the story unfolds, its carcass turns up from time to time in progressive states of decay, until it eventually disappears all together. It obviously symbolizes something, although I was puzzled as to what. The dead art of novel writing? Reuth’s struggle to write his last book? Reuth himself? Apparently Reuth doesn’t know either, although he’s sure it’s trying to tell him something. I think I finally figured it out, but it took me a while.
All in all, a sweet and well-written tale. I have a soft spot for genuine friendships and people out of step with their times. Which is why I’m delighted to award “The Last Novelist” with the NOT A HUGO for Best Short Story.
Stay tuned to Nerds who Read all week for more NOT A HUGO Awards with yours truly, along with write-ups of some of the actual Hugo nominees by Nerds who Read Contributing Reviewer Kerey McKenna.
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Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
Photo credit(s): Michael Isenberg |
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