I am a voter for the 2015 Hugo Awards. I am posting my thoughts about the candidate works. Be warned that spoilers abound.

There are five short stories on the Hugo list. I'll be referring to them using the following abbreviations.

OSP — On a Spiritual Plain by Lou Antonelli
PBB — The Parliament of Beasts and Birds by John C. Wright
SS — A Single Samurai by Steven Diamond
TT — Totaled by Kary English
TC — Turncoat by Steve Rzasa

My comments on these shorts will be short — and scattered.  

PBB is beautifully written.

Above the coliseum and circus, where athletes strove and acrobats danced and slaves fought and criminals were fed alive to beasts for the diversion of the crowds...

That is just one early phrase, with no particular thematic purpose. But read it aloud. It is pointed and rhythmic. And the argument among the Beasts, about who dare enter the final city of Man, is adroitly — let us say — highfalutin'. SS, though less blatantly poetic, turns words in a way that makes a fight with a Godzilla contemplative.

I appreciated that, right after a brief setting of weirdness (narrator huddled on a polar plain with aliens and a human ghost), OSP just explained the mechanics of the situation. I love piecemeal revelation; but especially in a short story, sometimes bluntness is best. TC makes very fine use of a biblical quote, one not well known, that enriches and does not merely decorate. TT's ultimate point is emotional, and to that end nicely uses emotional imagery as part of the SF mechanics.

TC's villain, if you will, is not an AI, but a post-human. The genocidal impulse of the Integration is grounded in hatred from humans for humans. This is better than the usual (often inscrutable) hatred of the Golem for its Master. All I know about samurai I know from fiction yet it seems to me that SS well depicts the point of a samurai, and makes use of it for the resolution. The defeat of the kaiju comes not from some superpowered hero but from the soul of the samurai, as distinct from the souls other warriors. I can't help but think that TT is a commercial for euthanasia; it seemed a little sour, somehow. In the end it's all emoting, not even a frank assertion of this or that point of view on human life.

That the rebellious AI in TC calls itself 'Benedict' at the end seems inapt. Arnold was a turncoat, yes, but not in a good way. Using the name of an American villain as a kind of punchline nearly knocks over the plot. Meanwhile, TT makes a cheap jab at conservatives (calling them 'Treaders'), which, like most left-wing jabs, incorrectly ascribes to conservative intent some evil that leftists actually do (i.e., government-run healthcare-rationing panels).

What distinguishes SF from other sorts of fantastical fiction is, of course, the science; and nothing says 'science' like numbers. TC's litany of empirical specifics just tickles me. True, in some ways it is less science than tech porn, but it is a milieu I love. Wright, who loves to work in eons, is very good at depicting the End of Man, no less so in PBB. SS makes the kaiju a force of nature, frightening in a way that a mere Godzilla can't be; the enormousness and enormity are very well evoked.

I love hard SF. These stories weren't thrilling me in that regard, at least not until I got to TC. Then again, I don't always like cold-hearted SF. (One of the reasons I love Solaris is that — rarely for Lem — there is actual human emotion amid the philosophy.) So while I was disappointed by the rotten paucity of robots, I did like what I read (except for TT, which is nonetheless well-written). In fact, my favorite was SS, which had nary a vacuum tube.

My final vote will be, in this order: SS, TC, PBB, OSP, TT.

In seeking science fiction that is neither left-wing nor Christophobic, I would have thought the worst place to look would be in a novel about aliens crashing in a medieval German town. O! the opportunities to condemn the superstitious villainies of the Dark Ages! Beleaguered aliens — so like ourselves in their adherence to Science! — against the base and ignorant Catholicism of dim-witted villagers! Goodness me, the cliches write themselves.

Eifelheim is absolutely nothing like that. This is a work that depicts medieval Catholics with sympathy, not by supposing them to be unwashed Episcopalians who would vote Democratic if only they could, but by eschewing condescension and hatred — and, more to the point, by depicting the faithful Catholics as fully rational. 

In trying to understand the alien Krenken, Pastor Deitrich does not struggle to accommodate his religion and his science. He doesn't overcome any "provincial" shortcomings nor abandon his beliefs. Rather, he quite intelligently employs the scholarship of his age — secular and religious — to explain the Krenken. His categories may be medieval and Catholic, but they are rational. Put simply, Dietrich is not forced into some sort of proto-Enlightenment. He remains medieval. Best of all, his understandings are never made to seem pitiful for being insufficiently post-Einsteinian.

So Eiefelheim plays upon the actual strengths — intellectual and technical — of the Middle Ages. Does that mean we get an apology for the Middle Ages, a novel of Medieval Boosterism? No. But we are spared any nonsense about "Dark" Ages. Although the villagers are, quite properly, depicted as 14th-century people, they are also depicted as human beings, fearful and wise.

And wonder of wonders, Christianity itself is presented well — not as a generic stand-in for Belief in God but as a precisely dogmatic view of things. I'll give you two significant examples of this.

First: The fervent, hard-line Franciscan Joachim, who like others of the villagers believes the Krenken to be demons and, at first, seems like he's going to be the stock Intolerant Bigot, instead proclaims: "Show these beings what a Christian is. Welcome them into your hearths, for they are cold. Give them bread, for they are hungry. Comfort them, for they are far from home. Thus inspired by our example, they will repent and be saved... Imprisoned in flesh, they can wield no demonic powers. Christ is all-powerful. The goodness of Christ is all-powerful... Now we may see that it will triumph over Hell itself!" And Joachim is as good as his word.

Second: Much as Dietrich uses his categories to understand the Krenken Science, the Krenken use theirs to understand Dietrich's Christian Faith. Of course, much as Dietrich's categories fail him a bit, the Krenken's fail them a bit; yet as time goes on, many of the Krenken are actually converted and baptized! Not frivolously, either, but — as Joachim had hoped — in reaction to the Christianity of Dietrich and the villagers. Yes, the baptized Krenken have their moments of doubt (Eifelheim is no more a booster for Christianity than it is for the Middle Ages), but they remain faithful — even unto their personal detriment.

Now, on top of its respect for and intelligent engagement with medieval Catholicism, Eifelheim is simply a beautiful story. As science fiction it is sound, if a little unremarkable. That is, don't come to it expecting any unprecedented ideas about aliens or interstellar travel. But as a story it is beautiful. It is not about aliens but about a medieval village confronted with non-human souls, and there are episodes and events and scenes and characters that are great and plentiful and excellently arranged. Even granting that I am a soft touch, Eifelheim moved me. I can't recommend it enough.

P.S. I'm currently deep into Flynn's novel The Wreck of The River of Stars. Believe the hype: It's masterful. Read it — before or after Eifelheim, it doesn't matter. Gosh and damn, I've never been happier being an SF geek than in the past six months! And all it took was well-written SF that doesn't hate on my beliefs...

Blade Runner is about memory and mortality: memory as the fountain of genuine life; mortality as the completion of memory. 

A replicant begins full-grown, with not a birth date but an incept date. Rachel's memories of childhood are implants, not lived by her but merely received; her life is not genuine. Leon has his precious photographs — some secondhand, but others of his companions: assertions of Leon's own memory, fragments of a genuine life. Roy recalls the magnificent things that he himself has seen offworld, things never seen by Deckard, things that will be lost when Roy dies (by design) only a few years after his incept date.

Roy's mortality, like that of all replicants, is more a brutal termination than a proper completion. Humans acquire their memories slowly, naturally, almost leisurely. Their lives accumulate. Humans live; whereas replicants only briefly exist and must long for life. Even so, the plight of the replicant is of course a metaphor for our own plight.

Although the humans seem to have the better of things, the point of the film is that we do not. Our lives may be genuine, but they are no less ephemeral. Death, whether after four years or eighty, is still death. What, after all, is the final line of the film? As Gaff says of Rachel: "It's too bad she won't live; but then again, who does?"

Now, imagine how stupid the movie would be if Deckard were a replicant, too. The photos that adorn his piano — those old, sepia-toned photos, presumably of generations of his family — become as pathetic as Leon's. More pathetic, indeed meaningless, for at least Leon's are of his real friends. If Deckard is a replicant, we would have to conclude he is precisely as deluded as Rachel. He, too, is one of the latest models who don't even know they're replicants.

Which means that his entire history as a replicant-killer is false. Which means that all his world-weary despair is false. Which means that the heart of the film — the tension between the tragic replicants who cherish life (yet kill) and the degraded human who takes life for granted (while killing replicants) — is false. Which means that the end of the film — when Deckard chooses not to kill a replicant — ceases to be a moment of redemption for Deckard, and even in the "not-as-happy" director's cut becomes no more than the happy escape of two misbehaving robots.

Gaff's line means nothing if Deckard is a replicant. It should assert the equivalence, really, of replicant and human, at least as regards the brevity of earthly existence. The first part ("she") connects to Rachel, the second ("who") to Deckard. But if Deckard is just another Rachel, Gaff's line is emptied. Its second part becomes a mere aphorism, disconnected from any actual protagonist. If Deckard is a replicant, then he no longer carries the role of human in the film. The themes of memory and mortality become abstracted. Indeed, the themes are undermined, since suddenly what we thought was human actually is not. So what then is real?

What then is the point?

The movie becomes nonsensical if Deckard is a replicant! Either Deckard is as new as Rachel and everything about him is a lie, or he's been around for years, pretending to be human, some sort of stealth replicant deployed by Tyrell for — what? To prove what? You would have to deny everything Tyrell says and does, and go searching for grassy-knoll winks-and-nudges, to believe that Deckard is a deluded replicant. It doesn't matter what half-baked cleverisms Ridley Scott intended; it doesn't matter how many dopey unicorns clutter the film. If you believe that Deckard is a replicant, you are colluding in a cheap twist and have ruined the story.

I am not normally one to dismiss the intentions of the artist; but if we are meant to conclude that Deckard is a replicant, then Scott's intentions are bad, very bad. Say it with me: "Deckard is not a replicant." Nothing in the movie mandates that he is. Say he is not, and you will properly see Blade Runner for the wonder it is.