As I said back when I posted my Best Related Work ballot, this year, I have much more time to get all my ballots up, so I'll be doing a single post for each category in which I am voting. Here is Best Short Story.
Things I Nominated
Most of my sf&f short fiction reading comes via the Hugo ballot and Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies, so it's hard for me to nominate anything, as by the time I read it, it's too late. But I actually nominated three things in this category, though I knew none of them would make the ballot.
One was the short story "In Vivo" by Christiane Vadnais; I read this as part of the short story collection Fauna (translated by Pablo Strauss, Coach House). The collection as a whole I found hit or miss, but this story was a creepy bit of thoughtful horror. I doubt it came to the attention to the majority of the Hugo electorate, however, being an indie non-sf publisher translation of a Francophone short story collection!
The other two were both Doctor Who: Lockdown! short stories by Paul Cornell, "The Shadow Passes" (about the thirteenth Doctor and companion waiting out a disaster in isolation) and "Shadow of a Doubt" (about the thirteenth Doctor going back for Daughter-of-Mine from "Human Nature" and giving her the second chance that the tenth Doctor wouldn't). Again, I didn't expect them to make the ballot (tie-in fiction is not a preferred subgenre of the Hugo electorate, despite their tastes in film only running as far as mediocre franchises), but Cornell got the thirteenth Doctor down better than any of her screen stories have bar one, I reckon, and these were both uplifting tales in a time where we really needed them, and they were certainly among the best 2020 fiction I read in time to nominate.
6. "Little Free Library" by Naomi Kritzer
Is there a sequel to The Fellowship of the Ring? I would very much like to read it. I will leave behind anything I have for the other books, if you will give them to me. Also, I am sorry about the day I took everything. I promise I will never do this again. What would you like in trade for the next book about Frodo, if there is one?
This is a somewhat twee fantasy story about how good it is to read fantasy stories, the kind of thing that Hugo nominators and often Hugo voters evidently eat up. The basic concept is okay (people from a fantasy world love the fantasy books they find in a Little Free Library) but it went on too long and didn't go somewhere that I found very plausible.
5. "Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse" by Rae Carson
So many things could go wrong. We’ve discussed all of them. Like billions of child-bearers who came before us, we’re counting on a little luck.
I read a thing by Rae Carson that explained where this story was coming from, and once I got that, I appreciated it more, but I still didn't like it a ton. This is about a group of women during a zombie apocalypse; zombies go particularly crazy for the birthing scent, and the story follows two moms hiding out as one gives birth. I see that it's working against particular tropes about women in general and mothers in particular in zombie stories... but as a story, I still didn't find it very interesting. Basically, two people hide from zombies for a while, then they get out. Its particular ranking is kind of arbitrary, but I felt the Lee story was up to something I found more interesting, but it also didn't put me off like the Kritzer. Just kind of dull.
“It will hurt,” the witch said. “Certain kinds of desire always do.”
A mermaid wants to go into space, but has to give up being a mermaid to do so. Lee knows how to craft engaging prose, and I think he works better in the short form than the novel form a lot of the time, but the actual story I thought was pretty good though not great.
3. "Open House on Haunted Hill" by John Wiswell
“I’m a software engineer, and I host a skeptic podcast. You might have heard us.”Cute story about a haunted house, except all the haunted house wants is for a nice family to move into it. I feel like you would get more out of this if you read it from inside the horror genre, where it's clearly subverting tropes, than from outside it. As a piece of worldbuilding, it doesn't really do anything. Not the story's fault it got nominated for an sff award, I guess!
The house isn’t offended. It doesn’t believe in ghosts either.
hey again
just wanted to ask
do you know how to be mean to humans
This is cute (so many short fiction Hugo finalists are these days, not sure how I feel about that) but enjoyable: told largely in chat logs, it's the tale of two robots, a newly activated barista and an experience killing machine; the machine is assigned to mentor the barista. The at-first-stodgy killing machines learns there is more to life than its narrow vision; the naïve barista learns to stand up for itself. I thought the resolution was a bit pat, but otherwise I enjoyed it.
1. "Metal Like Blood in the Dark" by T. Kingfisher
Eve had had the knowledge of good and evil handed to her, but Sister had to create it for herself from first principles, and it went slowly.
This at first threatens to be a cute story about robots, but this is by T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon, so the fluffiness is wrapped around an iron mallet. Two naïve robots are taken advantage of, and one must invent the concept of lying in order to protect her brother. Clever and moving, and an angle I don't remember ever having seen before on a pretty common sf concept.
My attempts to predict winners are often pretty bad, especially in the short categories, where I know less of the "buzz" around various stories than I do as regards novels and films. But if I were to give it a go, I would say that the Hugo electorate 1) always loves T. Kingfisher (justifiably) and 2) always loves self-serving stories about how great it is to be a fan (less justifiably). So I would guess either "Metal Like Blood" or "Little Free Library."
As is often the case with Best Short Story of late, I find it hard to believe this is the six best stories in the genre for the year, but at least the top couple are strong and deserving winners. The past couple years, I've read Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year volume and found his selections much more to my taste than the Hugo electorate's. The volume covering 2020 isn't out yet, but from the table of contents, I can see that none of these stories made it in. (Of course, Clarke's book is sf-only, so three of these stories wouldn't have even been eligible.) Actually, I think none of Clarke's picks were Hugo finalists in any category, which is a first, I believe. The problem is, I suspect, that the Hugos for short fiction are biased towards what is freely available on the Internet; Clarke reads much more widely, and gets the good stuff out of Asimov's, F&SF, and all the rest that the awards don't.
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