“We Are The Cloud” is a Nebula Nominee!

In a truly amazing and wonderful surprise, my novelette “We Are The Cloud” is a nominee for the Nebula Award! Scrolling through the list of past nominees is like a guide to [almost] everyone who’s even remotely awesome in science fiction and fantasy, including idols of mine like Ted Chiang, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson…. and I’m just stunned to be in that number.

I worked on this story from 2008 to 2013, and am more proud of it than almost anything else I’ve ever written. So I was beyond ecstatic when it was published by Lightspeed in September…

… and not entirely surprised when it turned out to be the most controversial thing I’ve done… [this from the same guy who once write a story called “Auschwitz Blowjob,” which was accepted into – and then nixed by the publisher of – an anthology series that billed itself as America’s “most provocative gay writing”].
SPOILER ALERT: homophobes hated “We Are The Cloud.” Tangent complained of its “offensive imagery of underage homosexuality in gratuitous proportions,” said it “needs to come with a warning.”

But it wasn’t just homophobes!

A bunch of people said it wasn’t really genre fiction, that “Science fiction elements are all but missing,” or called out its “inattentive world-building,” or said that it “doesn’t really work as a piece of traditional genre fiction as its future is dated, derivative and poorly realised”

In the end, though, the story found its audience, and I was blessed with some truly incredible reviews.

Over at Apex, Charlotte Ashley wrote that “Miller has a nearly unparallelled knack for writing heart-wrenching characters and painful personal attachments… By vesting Sauro with all this power and then showing both why he doesn’t use it and what might make him use it, Miller is telling the story of all power, regardless of how “speculative” it is. Power dynamics are forged by class, money, personality, hate, and love. Technology is the last factor on the list.”

Amal El-Mohtar wrote a crushingly kind and weep-inducing review, and said, among other wonderful things: “I loved this story unabashedly: Sauro’s voice and vulnerability, the generosity of his character, and the integrity of his engagement with the unflinching awfulness of the premise are tremendously effective. It’s a heart-breaking, harrowing piece, made all the more so by that near-future vision’s many intersections with the present: in his Author Spotlight, Miller expands on the realities of foster kids’ prospects and the gross systemic injustices they face. It’s also a desperately elegant story, combining a careful structure with a depth and intensity of emotion that puts me in mind of ivy bursting from a brick wall; the very controlled, deliberate punctuation of Sauro’s present with moments from his past is a mixing of mechanical and organic reminiscent of the cloud-ports themselves.”

I’d love to win, but my category is PACKED with truly brilliant stories.

If you’re a SFWA member, I hope you’ll consider voting for it. But you can’t really go wrong, with a roster of nominees this incredible, and I’d be honored to lose to any of these fine folks.


AND HERE’S A PICTURE I DREW TO ILLUSTRATE THE STORY.
Posted on: March 1, 2015, by : Sam J. M.
File under: Awards & Anthologies, Blog