Of the six novels nominated for the Nebula Award, I’ve managed to read four.

The two I haven’t read are Jack McDevitt’s Firebird and China Miéville’s Embassytown, largely because they weren’t available inexpensively. Firebird is the sixth volume in the Alex Benedict series; the third entry, Seeker, won the 2006 award. He’s been on the ballot four times since then; this is McDevitt’s eleventh nomination in this category. This is China Miéville’s third nomination in this category; Embassytown was also nominated for the Clarke Award and is also on the Hugo ballot, as a result of which I expect to read it later this year.

Of the four I’ve read, one, Jo Walton’s Among Others, I read a year and a half ago. I had a lot to say about it back then and I expect I will have more to say about it in the future. I’m not at all neutral about Among Others: it affected me more profoundly than any book has in years. This is the one I’m rooting for and the one I’d have voted for (it’s certainly getting my vote for the Hugo).

But that doesn’t mean I can’t say nice things about the other nominated works.

N. K. Jemisin’s first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was on the Nebula ballot last year. It was the first volume in the Inheritance Trilogy, a series Jemisin herself calls “her eyeroll at epic fantasy.” It does things that fantasy trilogies Do Not Do, such as first-person narrative and a new protagonist in every volume. This year, the concluding volume in the trilogy, The Kingdom of Gods, is nominated (book two, The Broken Kingdoms, having got lost in the shuffle somehow). The trilogy deals with the relationship between mortals and gods: in the first book, a mortal became a god; in this one, a god — Sieh, the trickster god of childhood — has somehow become mortal. Intrigue and scheming ensue in a ridiculously gripping and readable fashion, as they always do in Jemisin’s books. She’s achieved “buy everything she writes” status in this house; Jennifer’s hooked. (Buy The Kingdom of Gods at Amazon: trade paperback, paperback, Kindle. Author’s page.)

The other two novels on the ballot are first novels. Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti just won the Crawford Award. It’s the story of a travelling circus in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic landscape; the difference between magic and tech is not immediately clear. The boss of the circus remakes her performers, replacing their bones with copper pipes, killing them and bringing them back as something different. This ability draws attention from a local politician. A subplot focuses on who will inherit the wings of a deceased aerialist. It’s a short book, told non-linearly and with shifting perspective and much incluing, but very masterful for a first novel. (Buy Mechanique at Amazon: trade paperback, Kindle. Author’s page.)

Finally, God’s War by Kameron Hurley, set on another planet, Umayma, where war has been so constant and unremitting that men, sent to be soldiers, are scarce, and where technology seems, um, insect-based. Bel dames act as enforcer-assassins, beheading deserters and other targets; it’s an extremely bloody society. The story mainly follows Nyx as she loses her bel dame status, becomes a bounty hunter, and takes on a job that puts her in serious peril; the plot, truth be told, is a little shaky, and doesn’t seem to cohere much in the first act. But it’s extremely original and the world-building is thoroughly brilliant. (Buy God’s War at Amazon: trade paperback, Kindle.)

For another take on the nominated novels, see Chris Barsanti’s review of the entire slate. And, if you haven’t already done so, read my reviews of the 2011 Nebula Award nominees for best short story, best novelette, and best novella.

The Nebula Awards get handed out on Saturday.

Just finished Theodore Rex, the second volume in Edmund Morris’s three-book biography of Theodore Roosevelt. It covers Roosevelt’s presidency from the moment he was informed that his predecessor, William McKinley, had died to the point where his successor, William Howard Taft, was sworn in. Between those two points Roosevelt was his usual blur of activity and energy, though there are ominous signs of his impending physical burnout. Morris captures a good deal of the political intrigue, maneuvering and cajoling during Roosevelt’s tenure, along with the international statesmanship, from the Panama Canal to the Portsmouth Conference, from trustbusting to conservation. But I get the impression, throughout the bluster and bellicosity, that Roosevelt was essentially cautious, even timid, on many subjects. His position on race was problematic and constrained by public opinion — you get the impression he’d have gone farther if he thought he could get away with it — and then, inexplicably, came the Brownsville Affair. In the end, though, Roosevelt had a lot of fun being president, and it showed.

Buy at Amazon: hardcover, trade paperback, Kindle • publisher’s page

Previously: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

As you may recall, I’ve been on piroxicam since last summer. It seems to have been doing a better job than the naproxen I was on for the previous decade. But there have been some fairly serious side effects. Last fall I discovered that my blood pressure was up substantially, and I’ve been taking diltiazem for that.

More recently I’ve been feeling fairly poorly on a number of fronts: regular gastrointestinal problems that went on for months (I’ll spare you the details), excessive fatigue, and generally feeling out of sorts. It’s been a rough few months. It’s possible that these symptoms aren’t side effects, that they’d be happening regardless of what I was taking for my AS, but I’d like to be sure.

So I’ve started something a little foolish: I’m switching back to naproxen, at least for a little while, to see if these symptoms abate. I also want to determine how much better piroxicam is than naproxen in dealing with my AS. If it isn’t substantially better, and these symptoms are side effects, it might be hard to justify taking the drug. It’s a tricky question, especially since fluctuating pain and inflammation levels make it hard to compare treatments except over long periods of time.

I’ve always known that medical treatment is a tradeoff: the best result with the fewest side effects. I’m perfectly willing to adopt a less effective treatment with fewer side effects, because the pain and inflammation of AS isn’t the only thing I’m dealing with here.

I expect the next couple of weeks to be full of ow as the body shifts from one NSAID to another. I’m in a very bad flare anyway right now, so I don’t have much to lose at this point. And I need the data.

Update, May 17: I’m aborting this little experiment. For one thing, even though it’s still too early in the process to draw any decent conclusions, I’ve already been reminded of why I went on piroxicam in the first place: I’m less likely to be unable to walk. Being reminded of this changes the calculus considerably. I’d also forgotten one rule I’ve been trying to follow since my diagnosis: never make any major decisions while in flare, because pain, fatigue and the concomitant depressed mood — to say nothing of a certain amount of desperation — get in the way of rational thought.

The above image of Messier 78, a reflection nebula in Orion (but not the Orion Nebula), overlays observations from the ESO’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope on top of Digital Sky Survey imagery. APEX records in the millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths — essentially it’s a microwave telescope — and reveals (in orange) cold, dark dust clouds that would otherwise be hidden. Image credit: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Igor Chekalin/Digitized Sky Survey 2.

Other recent awesome space pictures include the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s discovery of a black hole outburst in M83, the Herschel Space Observatory’s infrared view of the Cygnus X star-forming region and the ESO’s infrared look at globular cluster M55. The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes released this narrowband image of the Thor’s Helmet nebula. And last but not least, Jason Major’s colour composite of Titan and Saturn, based on new Cassini images.

There are rumours that for iOS 6, the next version of the operating system for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, Apple will replace Google Maps with an in-house mapping application with an impressive 3D mode; the app will apparently “blow your head off,” to quote John Paczkowski’s source. Much is being made of the 3D mapping possibilities, thanks to Apple’s acquisition of C3 Technologies. My interest, and my concern, is with the base mapping data. If this is going to be a flagship product, and signs point to that being the case, Apple can’t use OpenStreetMap (as it does with the iOS iPhoto app), at least not exclusively: it’s still not ready. It would be better, but not cheaper, if Apple used Navteq or Tele Atlas map data directly; when Google abandoned them for their own map data, Google Maps’ quality did not universally improve. (AppleInsider, Daring Fireball, TUAW.)

Long overdue, here’s my look at the shortlist for the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

Last year my first impression of the short stories on the Nebula ballot was how nasty a lot of them were: stories whose primary effect was an emotional gut-punch. Stories about cruel children, children in hospitals, the dead of 9/11. I had a problem with that: stories under 7,500 words are capable of evincing more emotional responses than that. This year there’s still a measure of children and pain but it doesn’t seem to be as bad. We may not yet be at a point where the path to the Nebula ballot is as follows: step one, produce a child; step two, hurt that child. Tase the amygdala, get on the ballot. But sometimes I wonder.

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A patch on a 16th-century map may suggest what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke. The map in question is the 1585 Virginea Pars map by John White. Based on the patch, which hides a symbol indicating a fort, researchers argue that the settlers may have moved westward and inland. AP coverage: ArtDaily, CBC, Washington Post. Via io9.

County-by-county life expectancy estimates released last month by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation reveal a startling gap between the longest-lived and shortest-lived areas of the country: the difference can be as much as 15 years.

The range of life expectancies is so broad that in some counties, such as Stearns, Minnesota, lifespans rival some of the places where people live the longest — Japan, Hong Kong, and France — while in other counties, life expectancies are lower than places that spend far less on health care — Egypt, Indonesia, and Colombia. Even within states, there are large disparities. Women in Fairfax, Virginia, have among the best life expectancies in the world at 84.1 years, while in Sussex, Virginia, they have among the worst at 75.9 years.

And the situation isn’t improving either: “In 661 counties, life expectancy stopped dead or went backwards for women since 1999. By comparison, life expectancy for men stopped or reversed in 166 counties.” When people refer to the U.S. as a Third World country, this sort of thing — the disparity, the decline — is usually one of the reasons why. Via Tobias Buckell.

Robot Chicken kills Muppets. But not just those from The Muppet Show: the carnage extends to Sesame Street, leaving Big Bird and Cookie Monster dead on the floor. Not even the Fraggles escape. Is nothing sacred? (Fortunately, no.)

In December 2003, when she was 12 years old, Laura Nicholson’s father shot her mother to death, then killed himself. Now a journalism student at Carleton University, she explains in a long article published in Saturday’s Ottawa Citizen how the media’s coverage of her parents’ murder-suicide got so much wrong and did so much wrong — and what she will do differently as a journalist when the time comes for her to report on a story like her family’s. An astonishing read from a singular perspective.