Today, I'm ranking the finalists in the various short fiction categories of the 2020 Hugo Awards. Here are my ballots (from lowest-ranked to highest) in each short fiction category, with quotations and commentary. Links are to where you can freely read the stories on-line (when possible) or to full reviews (if I did one).
Best Short Story
Didn’t she deserve to be her own person, for whatever time she did have?This is a take on the so-called "Fisher protocol," the idea that the president should have to kill someone to gain access to the nuclear codes. (This is also the basis for the Star Trek novel Dwellers in the Crucible, fact fans.) In this story's secondary world, they are implanted in children, and this story follows one such child as she is attached to a new president. It has some occasional moments, but it is overall banal and obvious and unaffecting, and I am surprised it was published, much less nominated for a Hugo.
6. "And Now His Lordship is Laughing" by Shiv Ramdas
She often wonders how the English have come by their belief that the inability to emote is a virtue. It seems so unnatural.I very much struggled to rank this versus "Do Not Look Back, My Lion," in that I felt both were well-written from a prose perspective, but neither seemed particularly interesting beyond that. This is set in colonial Bengal during World War II; a British ruler asks for a doll from a Bengali woman who has lost her whole family to colonial rule. She seeks revenge. It's pretty predictable on a number of levels.
Eefa wonders how long it will be until their own slaves slaughter them in their sleep. When they do, she thinks, we will deserve it.Okay, this one bothered me because of the worldbuilding. It's set in a world where things like fighting in wars are coded feminine, and nurturing children are coded masculine. The main character is a woman, but a husband because she takes care of kids, married to a great woman warrior. But once you figure out the gender stuff, I felt like the story never did anything interesting. This could be any story about a person who is a terrible spouse and parent because they care about war and glory more... except that they just happen to be a woman, and their spouse is called a "husband." But also I'm meant to believe that a pregnant woman goes into battle! I guess it must be possible, but it doesn't track with my experiences observing pregnant women. Anyway, the worldbuilding consequently feels shallow, but I did think it was well told, so there's that.
4. "A Catalog of Storms" by Fran Wilde
A Glare: a storm of silence and retribution, with no forgiveness, a terror of it, that takes over a whole community until the person causing it is removed. It looks like a dry wind, but it’s always some person that’s behind it.This is a fantasy story (so many on the ballot this year!) about an island where people transform into "weathermen," who leave their homes to rail against devastating storms, protecting the island, but in the long run becoming part of them. I thought it had a decent central idea and some good prose, but it just never really grabbed me. Definitely stronger than the shallow worldbuilding of the Harrow story, though.
What bothered Sully most about Ziza’s relentless happiness was that it was not the result of obliviousness, naivete, or ignorance. It was a happiness that knew pain and had overcome it.This story is set during the Civil War: a young slave murders the family that has enslaved her, and the universe balances itself out by her giving birth to a being from the etherworld. It's weird, and I'm not entirely sure I got what it was going for, to be honest, but I enjoyed the journey, and was actually invested in the main character, which is more than you can say for anything I've ranked lower on the list.
2. "Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island" by Nibedita Sen
“[L]et's be real, ladies, who among us hasn't sometimes had a craving to eat the whole damn world?”As you can infer, this story is in the form of an annotated bibliography (though one that consists entirely of excerpts from sources, not summary/commentary on them). The form is probably the best thing about it, but it does make the form work quite well, a tantalizing glimpse at a story and culture and a civilization, and raising issues of empire, race, gender, and sexuality in an evocative way (as opposed to the heavy-handed way of "And Now His Lordship"). I do kind of feel I've placed it here by default, but it does get bonus points for having flawless MLA style in the citations.
1. No Award
I don't think I can give my top vote to something that ends up where it is "by default," so I am actually giving my top vote to No Award. I know it won't make any difference, but this is a mostly uninspired bunch of short stories in my estimation. I don't think I've ever before encountered a set of them in my Hugo voting where I can't imagine myself recommending a single one of them to someone else. Not sure what happened here.
Best Novelette
He was gone, why should it matter what happened to the Chronicle of his life? But it felt like deleting his letters, or erasing him from the list of contacts on her tablet.This one never really grabbed me, maybe because I never really grokked the central technological idea. Something about looking at the past? But it's not a recording, you're actually there? An archronologist has to figure out what killed her husband. As a portrayal of grief, it didn't really ring true, either, especially in the protagonist's relationship with her son, and I didn't buy that no one would make her recuse herself from such a personal inquiry when there were other qualified personnel.
5. "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye" by Sarah Pinsker
“You found him. You write detective books. Isn’t the person who found a dead body usually one of the people who has to be ruled out? You had opportunity.”Sarah Pinsker is the modern master of short sf, in my opinion, but this isn't one of her best. It has a good horror premise, but it takes an awful long time for that to become clear, and then it's related in a long infodump that feels on the contrived side. The set-up is pretty mundane, and the story drags it out way too long. For over half the story, there's no indication that something sfnal has even happened. I'd probably like it fine if I encountered it in the wild, but it didn't convince as one of the best six novelettes of the year.
“But no motive. Well, except lack of coffee, but that hardly seems worth killing someone over.”
Nothing's changed with these people. They still build societies around their least and worst instead of the best and brightest.The resident of a dystopian space colony returns to what they think is an abandoned Earth only to discover it's inhabited and thriving. The story is narrated by an AI speaking to the explorer in the second person, telling them what they think of the society on Earth. It's kind of interesting, kind of preachy, kind of too straightforward. I think it works better if you think of it as less a piece of science fiction and more a piece of utopian fiction (in the classic nineteenth-century mold): the narrator being a skeptic of the society is a good twist on the old utopian cicerone. It has some fun moments, but I still felt like there was a much better story that could have been told with the same basic set-up. (If the explorer was more skeptical of Earth society, for example, and needed winning over, as opposed to falling for it right away.) However, I felt like this was trying to do something more interesting than "The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye," even if it's not the thing I wanted it to be doing, and I was more consistently entertained by it.
3. "Away With the Wolves" by Sarah Gailey
She tells people that she’s three hundred years old, and I believe her, if only because I don’t know for sure that spite can’t pickle a person into immortality.I thought this was a solid story, told from the perspective of a werewolf who is disabled in human form coming to realize that maybe they ought to prioritize their wolf self. The trajectory of it is a bit obvious once you know what's going on, but it's well done and focused. Not as strong as Gailey's "STET" from last year, but definitely better than the weak bottom half of this category.
And, I said, this is why I am a scientist: because I wish to discover your purpose for us, Lord.This is set a world where young-Earth creationism is true, and is clearly demonstrable because you can find evidence of the point where things just snapped into being: primordial humans without navels, tree fossils without rings, and so on. As a Victorianist who slogged through Philip Henry Gosse's Omphalos, I was predisopsed to like this (since Gosse was stuck in our world, he had to argue that God would create humans with navels, but that doing so wasn't a deception on His part), and I loved the details of the world Chiang constructed, how science and scientists would work in such a world. However, I did not find the story that Chiang told with the premise as absorbing as the premise itself, nor the story of "For He Can Creep," so it nicely slots into second place.
“Exactly. Let us face facts, Jeoffry. The Poem your human labors over—the thing to which he has devoted his last years of labor, burning away his health, destroying his human relationships—even setting aside my feelings on its subject matter, Jeoffry, the fact is this: The poem he writes is not very good.”This was the fourth novelette finalist I read, but the first where upon finishing it, I thought, I really enjoyed that. It's told from the point of view of Jeoffry, the cat of Christopher Smart, a real eighteenth-century poet committed to an asylum. Smart is trying to write the Divine Poem, but when the Devil comes to bargain with Smart, Jeoffrey (being a cat) impulsively signs away the soul of his owner in exchange for a bowl of cream, and must get it back. Carroll does a great job capturing the perspective of a cat in an utterly believable way, and the story is epic and charming all at once.
Best Novella
"I have to go home soon," she said, and her words were hollow, obligations spoken where the wind could hear them, and not things that lingered in the chambers of her heart.This is my fourth year voting in the Hugos, and the fourth year that one of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children books has been a finalist. I liked the first one a lot, but have found the later ones less interesting, the compelling premise being stretched thin, or abandoned altogether. The School for Wayward Children is where protagonists of portal fantasies end up after their portals close; but like book 2, this one abandons the idea of riffing on portal fantasies in favor of just doing a portal fantasy. Katherine is a girl who occasionally finds portals to the Goblin Market, a world where everything that passes between people is an exchange that must be exactly accounted for with "fair value." I think there's a good idea here, but the story is much too long for the point it comes to make, and I find McGuire's affected narrative voice annoyingly twee, especially when describing real-world events. Plus I found the rules of "fair value" too murky and inconsistent to hang a story on. I would not be excited for this to win. (McGuire won for the first installment in 2017, but hasn't won since.)
It ended up being far easier, once the science matured, to engineer our bodies instead.To put this in creative writing critique terms, I think this was probably one draft away from being very good. It definitely wasn't in the same bracket as the Ted Chiang or the Rivers Solomon. But it rarely actively annoyed me as the Wayward Children novellas have come to.
"No woman would ever think up something so ridiculous."This is set in an alternate 1910s Cairo, where the flooding of djinn and other magical creatures from a portal has made Egypt into a dominant world power. The book follows two detectives from the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities as they investigate a haunted tram car. It's a bit plodding at first-- too much clunky exposition-- and like many Tor.com novellas it feels more like the pilot for a tv show than a novella. I also found the leads thinly characterized. (One's a serious detective who's good at his job, the other is an eager rookie, and that's about it.) But as it goes it picks up steam and becomes a fun supernatural take on the police procedural. Though I think it's less ambitious than To Be Taught, If Fortunate, I think it basically succeeds in its ambitions, so I'm ranking it higher.
Perhaps someday they'll assign us side by side, in some village far upthread, deep cover, each watching each, and we can make tea together, trade books, report home sanitized accounts of each other's doings. I think I'd still write letters, even then.I enjoyed this a lot. That it's down in third is a testament to the strength of the top half of the finalist list in novella this year. Though I enjoyed its cleverness and its prose, it's one of those love stories where you understand it more intellectually than emotionally. Similar to Chiang, I guess, but I think they wanted it to achieve an emotional effect more than he probably did. I'd happily see it win, but the Chiang feels like it more fully carried out its ambitions than this did. This sounds like damning with faint praise, but the top three were all quite good, so placement is pretty arbitrary.
"You know there's some timeline where I shoot you right now."This is a hard sf story about a world with prisms, devices that let people communicate across diverging timelines-- but the premise here is that the timelines only diverge once the devices are activated, so the people you can communicate are often all too similar to yourself. Chiang does a good job simultaneously exploring the ways such a device would be used, and using them to highlight a human dilemma about free will, one that I actually think about a lot. (Is it even possible for someone to choose to do something differently than they do?) I really enjoyed it, and it's probably my preferred form of sf, so I struggled to rank it against The Deep, which as a vague fantasy is less the kind of thing that I read. But The Deep gave me an emotional little twinge whereas "Anxiety Is"'s emotional work ultimately felt more abstract. I'd happily see either win, but I know that, based on "Story of Your Life," Chiang is capable of hitting the emotional and the scientific better than he did here.
"Yeah, but I don't think this is the one."
[S]he didn't mind the unknowing because it came with such calm, such a freedom from the pain.This is a novella based on a Clipping. song that was a finalist for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) in 2018. The song was (to quote myself) "about an underwater race made up of the children of pregnant African women thrown off slave ships." I expected the novella to be about the original founding of the underwater species; to my surprise, it was about one of their descendants, an historian who carries her civilization's traumatic memories so everyone else can be spared them. (Some of the founding is filled in in flashback, but it's not the focus.) I expected the novella to be a mediocre Tor.comesque thing; to my surprise, it was a really powerful meditation on the pain of history versus the bliss of ignorance, and the need to reach out and embrace the unfamiliar. I will have to look out for more by Rivers Solomon.
Overall Thoughts
Every year that I've voted in the Hugos thus far, I've found Best Short Story a weak category, but this is the first year I've been moved to rank No Award above any (non-Puppy) finalist, much less all of them. It's clear that my tastes and those of the Hugo nominators don't really align in this area. Partially, I think, the problem is the lack of science fiction. Every finalist this year is fantasy, and not the kind of fantasy that interests me. When I read Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year last year, I found a number of stories I thought would have been better finalists than what was on the ballot. Clarke, of course, only picks sf, and he also reads the print magazines, which Hugo nominators entirely ignored this year, so there are some systemic biases that result in a weak (to me) category.
Best Novelette was basically fine this year, but this was Best Novella's best showing in a while, I think; I'd gladly see any of my top three win. Probably not a coincidence that there are only two Tor.com novellas on the ballot this year. I suppose the Wayward Children novellas will continue until moral improves. (Though the only novella I nominated myself was from Tor.com, Una McCormack's The Undefeated.) Saga Press (who published both The Deep and This Is How You Lose) seems to be doing good work.
I find it hard to guess what will win in most of these categories. I have no guess at all for Best Short Story, where nothing sticks out to me as being to the taste of the Hugo electorate. For Best Novelette, I have a slight suspicion it will be Ted Chiang, but who knows, it could be another win for N. K. Jemisin. I feel most confident in Best Novella, where I feel certain it will be either Ted Chiang or This Is How You Lose.
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