Nommo 2020: Novella Nominations

WEATHERMAN

Caldon Mull

Caldon Mull is the pen name of a veteran storyteller with continent-spanning work experience consulting for the financial and military sectors. His work includes his primary series the 'Sol Senate Cycle' and his time-tripping fantastika series 'Agency Tales'. His fiction work has received 'honorable mention' over the years beginning with the 1986 Writers of the Future contest and from the SFSA Nova Award over later decades. He only recently debuted on a shortlist for the 2019 Nommo Awards with his new weird novella Neid-fire. He has been published in Omenana, RPGA Network, the SFSA Probe and several other, now-defunct local publications. He currently is resident in Finland with his wife and many cats.

WEATHERMAN

Weatherman describes a future through the experiences of the Esteban Perez. It portrays a rigid and exploitative future economy in which a machine and a person are interchangeable cogs in the system. Esteban has undertaken extensive trans-human modifications as a condition for his family and his people to join the Martian colonizing fleet. 

THE BORDER KEEPER

Kerstin Hall

Kerstin Hall's debut novel, Star Eater, is forthcoming from Tor.com Publishing in 2021. Her novella The Border Keeper was released in 2019, and her short fiction has been featured in Strange Horizons and Fireside. She is a first reader for Beneath Ceaseless Skies and lives in Cape Town.

THE BORDER KEEPER

Vasethe, a man with a troubled past, arrives at the border keeper’s door asking for a favour — he wants to enter the lands of the dead. With the immortal psychopomp’s reluctant aid, he travels through the war-torn nine hundred and ninety-nine realms of Mkalis, where gods and demons battle for domination over their mortal subjects.

But what Vasethe discovers in Mkalis threatens to bring his own secrets into light and throw both worlds into chaos.”

INCOMPLETENESS THEORIES

Wole Talabi

Wole Talabi Is a full-time engineer, part-time writer and some-time editor from Nigeria. His fiction has been published widely, translated into three languages and shortlisted for several awards including the Caine Prize. He edited two anthologies and co-wrote a play. His collection Incomplete Solutions (2019) is published by Luna Press. 

Incompleteness Theories

In this Novella, a clandestine international team led by a Nigerian physicist, work to develop teleportation technology while wrestling with their own personal issues, as they come to learn just how complex it may be to completely define, package and transports all the elements that make a person.