Williamson Story Wins “Year’s Best Military SF”

“Soft Casualty” by Michael Z. Williamson has been voted the accolade “Year’s Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction Story” by readers of Baen’s The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera edited by David Afsharirad.

The announcement was made at the Baen Travelling Road Show (with Prizes) at Dragon Con. Williamson received an inscribed plaque and five hundred dollars.

[Thanks to Toni Weisskopf for the story.]

89 thoughts on “Williamson Story Wins “Year’s Best Military SF”

  1. This story is still stuck in my mind months after I read it.

    I read it after MZW mentioned somewhere that this story was more indicative of his writing than the one that was nominated.

  2. Better than a lot of what ended up on the Puppy slate.

    I’ll say. And some, ah, interesting underlying assumptions about the sorts of people produced by the different societies.

  3. So this is for the story in that anthology that readers liked best, right?

    Nothing wrong with that, of course–just that the name of the anthology makes the award sound like it’s for the best in the field, when it’s really for the best in the book.

  4. Cat:

    So this is for the story in that anthology that readers liked best, right?

    That’s right.

  5. @Cat

    Yes, best in the anthology, which is (as I understand it) supposed to be that particular editor’s idea of what was best that year.

  6. Congratulations to MZW, I guess. One wonders if there was any behind the scenes ‘get out the vote’ campaigning….

    1) I own this, but had to wait until I could find a used copy: because no money is ever going from me to the assholes who broke the Hugo.

    2) It idly occurred to me that this sort of award is trivially easy to ballot-stuff – and I wouldn’t have been tremendously surprised had someone done so – but that sort of behavior isn’t the sort of thing that honorable people do.

    Now, any time any puppy ever wins anything, people will be wondering if/how they gamed the system….

  7. @’As You Know’ Bob

    I haven’t read the other stories in the anthology, but Soft Casualty is decent enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if it won fairly. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Baen Barfly sympathies with the Puppies helped it along, but I don’t think it’s an unworthy winner.

    Mind you if there was something totally spectacular that got overlooked that might change things. 🙂

  8. Yeah, I read a couple things in there, the Nagata and the Holly Black, maybe? – but decided that I was never again looking at anything by MZW or BT, not after what they stuffed into the Hugo packet – and therefore it wouldn’t be fair to vote for a ‘best’ in this contest.

    (Life is too short, I have plenty of things to read without sending money to assholes.)

  9. Wait, that’s not the pic MZW used to have on his Twitter page! 😉

    More seriously, congrats to him, even if the accolade’s title is a bit overblown (for what it actually is). And hey, very nice award money for winning!

    ETA: Thanks for the link, @Meredith. I’m not sure I’ll read it, but I’m saving that for a possible future reading.

  10. Anthology+Award actually sounds like quite a clever way to do a sub-genre award. I could see myself picking up e.g. a Steampunk collection for the added interest of the award.

  11. Congratulations to the winner of the Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera from The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Award.

    I see that Brad Torgersen did not win. I look forward to the campaign he runs to correct this injustice. May he forever stand athwart history yelling “stop giving other people awards!”

  12. Congrats to him. I haven’t read his work, but I wonder if he particularly suffered from the puppy slate, as the piece of his they nominated seems like it isn’t his usual subject matter.

    I don’t read a lot of anthologies, but this seems like rather a nice set up for readers who favor a specific sub-genre.

  13. I bought (and read – the two don’t always go together so closely) the Baen anthology a few months ago, by way of researching the sort of things the puppies claim to like so much (and then voted, for the Kunsken story). The MZW isn’t bad, but its only claim to being SF is that it’s set on another planet; it could have been written about pretty much any occupying army anywhere. Apart from him, Torgersen is the only writer represented who I would associate with the Puppies.
    Something that struck me was that “space opera” seems to have been redefined to include anything that takes place off-Earth.

  14. Anyone in military sf would well to check out the lads test novel in Neal Adher’s Polity series, Dark Intelligence. Strong characters, human male and female alike, plus many characters not in the least human in a universe where armed conflict is chillingly ever present.

    The author is conservative in the right of centre UK style (though not UKIP by any means) but that’s not noticeable within his fiction as he comments upon that in his blog though rarely even there.

    Were there any non-Americamn writers on either the SP or RP slates?

  15. @Peter J

    That’s a bit harsh. The meat production and attitudes to such is all science fiction (if not an original concept), so it isn’t just being set on another planet. I agree that other elements did feel very modern day, but perhaps that added to the verisimilitude for some readers.

    @eselle28

    Yes, of all the Puppy nominees, he’s the one where it’s easy to say that it would have been better not to nominate him at all than to have nominated that.

    @Mike Glyer

    Thanks for the link!

  16. And just too late to edit:
    @Meredith – nothing “totally spectacular”, even for fairly modest values of “totally” and “spectacular”

  17. Anyone interested in milsf would well to check out the latest novel in Neal Adher’s Polity series, Dark Intelligence. Strong characters, human male and female alike, plus many characters not in the least human in a universe where armed conflict is chillingly ever present.

    The author is conservative in the right of centre UK style (though not UKIP by any means) but that’s not noticeable within his fiction as he comments upon that in his blog though rarely even there.

    Were there any non-Americamn writers on either the SP or RP slates?

  18. @Cat Eldridge

    Michael Z Williamson is British born but moved to Canada and then the USA as a child, and Marko Kloos was born in Germany but I don’t know when he moved to the USA.

  19. @Mike Glyer

    While noodling around I discovered Holly Black’s story in the anthology, “Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind)” can be read on Lightspeed.

    Thanks for the link! I really enjoyed that story. Give the MZW a shot later tonight.

  20. The Holly Black story is also in this year’s Jonathan Strahan best of the year anthology, where I read it.

  21. @Mike Glyer

    Another fine example of someone who needs to find the Best Related Work category.

  22. Meredith: Oh, no problem — the same fellow has already recommended a Williamson bit in Best Related, too.

  23. Mike Glyer:

    Thank you for your link to the story by Holly Black! I discovered her a bit late, just two years ago, with the series about the curse makers. Need to read up quite a lot more there.

  24. I found the anthology as a whole to be pretty decent, and the Williamson was one I was actually considering voting for. I finally settled on the Charlie Jane Anders, as being an old Analog-style puzzle story with a new and entertaining coat of paint. (And then I let the deadline pass, anyway.) But I enjoyed the book enough that I’ll probably buy next year’s. But yeah, “set somewhere other than Earth” doesn’t really equal “space opera.”

    Hampus: If you read Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (recommended), also look for the original short story, a completely different story about different characters, but with the same title and setting.

  25. Jeff Smith:

    It is on my TBR list, resting in my amazon shopping basket. But I’m gonna go for The Darkest Part of the Forest first.

  26. Wow, that MZW Soylent Green story is really badly done, for several reasons.

    But I can certainly understand why a person of a certain type of mindset would think it was great.

  27. That story gave me a huge amount of “meh”. Pretty lame, and kind of a scary mindset behind it (with the Iraq parallels). Surely it couldn’t have been the best thing in it.

    I read the Black story months ago and remember it vividly. It’s much better written (literary-quality-wise) and more SFnal. Real aliens, not humans who are being invaded. Pirates! The Nagata story was also better in many ways — there’s real tension, and suspense, and actual military action.

  28. The only hardcore MilSF books that I truly enjoy are Weber’s Honor Harrington series. You couldn’t pay me to read Williamson. Is there also an award for the Space Opera side of the book? Maybe that winner would be more to my taste.

  29. Congrats to MZW. I have actually enjoyed the fiction of his I’ve read.

    Now If only he wasn’t an asshat.

  30. Mike Kerpan: The only hardcore MilSF books that I truly enjoy are Weber’s Honor Harrington series. You couldn’t pay me to read Williamson.

    The MZW story which won isn’t really MilSF. It’s just Mil. It’s the Iraq War, with Iraq replaced by Iota Persei, and airplanes replaced by space shuttles. There is no real SFnal component to the story.

  31. @JJ The MZW story which won isn’t really MilSF. It’s just Mil. It’s the Iraq War, with Iraq replaced by Iota Persei, and airplanes replaced by space shuttles. There is no real SFnal component to the story.

    I just read it, and I agree to a degree. It’s kind of horror with SF trappings. Which I personally find excusable because the story kind of needs the alien world milieu to work. It’d be an altogether different type of story if it was *really* Iraq and it was Iraqis doing what happens in the story. So, yeah, it’s clearly meant to be Iraq-in-space but the whole story is kind of over the top and it kind of needs to be set on another world to justify it.

    The prose style betrayed a lack of editorial oversight, it felt a bit over-explained at times. I also think it would have been more effective story if it had pushed the SF themes a bit more and probably answered your complaint.

    The logistics of supplying human foodstuffs to human soldiers on alien worlds is pretty rich territory IMO, and there could’ve been an opportunity for some satire if that part of the story had been expanded upon. Like the main character investigating the vendor, finding that the military was turning a blind eye to alien vendors using fallen soldiers as meat. Or discovering they were fighting a race that is cannibalistic, so they don’t really see a problem doing what happened in the story. Or even exploring in more detail the consequences of abandoning solid food in that environment.

    That’s kind of getting into “reviewing the story I wanted instead of the story I got” territory, so I’ll leave it at that. All in all I enjoyed it for what it was, it’s better than what I’ve read of the short fiction the Puppies nominated for the Hugos. With the caveat that I think there was a better story here that MZW missed when he was writing this.

    I enjoyed Holly Black’s story more but I could see retired and current military types preferring the MZW. The jargon rings pretty true and the viewpoint is probably pretty accurate.

  32. Mark Hopper: The jargon rings pretty true and the viewpoint is probably pretty accurate.

    I thought it made the narrator look like an asshole. I laughed at him. There he is, bragging about what a big man he is over civilians, because he eats real meat from live animals which suffered and died, and civilians only eat meat tissue grown in vats — and then he freaks out when he finds out he’s eaten something else.

    His diatribe about how lucky the human colonists were to be “saved” by his military takeover, and how he just can’t believe how ungrateful they are about it, also made me laugh. If the positions had been reversed, he’d have been all “Live Free Or Die” on the conquerors. That sort of hypocrisy sticks out like a sore thumb and, in my view, makes the narrator look like an idiot.

  33. His diatribe about how lucky the human colonists were to be “saved” by his military takeover, and how he just can’t believe how ungrateful they are about it, also made me laugh. If the positions had been reversed, he’d have been all “Live Free Or Die” on the conquerors. That sort of hypocrisy sticks out like a sore thumb and, in my view, makes the narrator look like an idiot.

    He’s supposed to look like an idiot. The story is clearly set in MZW’s ‘Freehold’ universe, and during the occupation of Freehold by the UN forces at that. The entire story is pointing out what a bunch of pansie/transies the invading forces are, and how the noble libertarian Freeholders will do ANYTHING to throw off their oppressors. The meat vendor is the hero of the story.

    Of course, if you haven’t read any of his novels of Freehold, you probably wouldn’t recognize the hook at the end, and why the label on the cargo container means the narrator won’t be eating a damn thing on the entire trip home. The whole thing is an inside joke.

    And these guys keep talking about message fiction being bad? It’s all they write.

  34. @JJ

    That sort of hypocrisy sticks out like a sore thumb and, in my view, makes the narrator look like an idiot.

    Yeah. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad characterization. Soldiers in war are heavily inclined and encouraged to look at their opponents through that kind of frame. It’s entirely consistent with the character’s background.

    There is a threshold though at which the main character is so unlikeable it ruins the story, but that’s entirely subjective.

  35. TechGrrl1972: The whole thing is an inside joke.

    If the only people who are able to understand the story in its proper context are those who’ve read MZW’s books, then he has failed as the author of this particular short story.

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