Here is the first post in my customary sequence describing my rankings for the Hugo Awards ballot.
Hugo votes are due July 23, but before that was announced I worked out my reading schedule assuming a slightly tighter due date of July 16; after the announcement, I decided that was doable and so stuck with it. I typically read the finalists in a totally random order, but shuffle things around a little based on availability; this year, that meant saving three big books (Track Changes, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Service Model) until the end. And then, this year one finalist withdrew their book from contention after the ballot was announced, meaning I would actually finish all my reading by July 10 if I stuck with my original pace.
The net effect of these three things together was that I finished my reading for the short fiction categories quite early, on June 20. I don't know that I have ever been done with three categories* over a month before the deadline!
I'm trying to remember if I nominated anything in any of these categories. (Unfortunately, I didn't save my nominating ballot. Maybe I don't have one because I didn't nominate anything at all?) If I did nominate something, it was "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, and it did make the final ballot.
Anyway, here's my rankings and notes. As always, I've linked to longer reviews I've already done when relevant, or to the finalist itself when freely available online.
Best Novella
"I'm only a silly girl," Nhung said gravely. "Aren't I a child until I get married, when I shall magically become the lady of the house?"
No, she hated herself for allowing herself to hope. To believe that it could ever be different. [...] [T]hat she'd unlock the ever-shifting and incomprehensible set of rules that allowed her to make sense of other people.
In a science fiction world, navigating between star systems is dangerous because of carnivorous entities that feed on consciousness (akin to "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith). One of those entities escapes into the real world, and so the clans that handle navigation need to assemble a team to hunt it down. They must overcome their differences and mistrust as well as a larger conspiracy in order to solve the problem. This is the sixth Hugo finalist by Aliette de Bodard I've read since 2017, and while obviously she has her fans, whatever she's doing just doesn't work for me. I felt there were too many characters who I didn't particularly care about, or even care to tell apart, and without that, the book just doesn't work. Like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas, there's a sapphic romance, but like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas it seems to happen instantaneously for not really much of a reason.
A monster who begat monsters, and I walk with them now; little tyrants.
I felt this started quite promisingly: a tyrant loses his children in magical woods from which no one ever returns; he comes to the one woman who ever entered the woods and returned with whoever was lost and demands she recovers his children. At first it's spooky and weird, but—and it feels weird to say this about a novella—it's too long. There's some interesting stuff in here but not enough compared to the length of the book. There's only so much "bargaining with spooky tricky wood creatures" I can find interesting. Still, I was interested at first, so above Navigational Entanglements it goes.
4. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
If you read my full review of this, you'll see I was quite tepid about it—both in the sense I'm not sure What Moves the Dead needed a sequel, and in the sense that it doesn't seem very Hugo-worthy. So that I've placed it here is more a testament to the weakness of the rest of the novella shortlist than anything else. Even if I don't really see the reason for this, you can count on T. Kingfisher to be interesting and amusing all the way through.
3. No Award
Once again, we have a year of entirely Tor novellas, all specifically Tordotcom except What Moves at Night, which comes from a different Tor imprint, Nightfire. Are they all terrible or something? No, they're fine. But is this award doing what I want it do? Not really. People are always proposing new Hugo categories; maybe I'll submit a motion to the Worldcon Business Meeting to split the category into Best Tor Novella and Best Novella by Literally Anyone Else. Anyway, putting "No Award" here is more my protest at the lack of imagination demonstrated by the nominators than anything else; in my mind, there's a huge gap between What Feasts at Night and what comes next.
Once, he said, on ancient Earth, there was a Horizon, and to gaze on it was to look neither up nor down. Look out...
This is an sf story (it is no coincidence that sf stories took up my top two spots) about a generation ship and the people on it who have never known anything else. Those are a dime a dozen in science fiction, of course, but Samatar focuses on the class divide in the ship, and academia's role in both upending and upholding systems of oppression—it's a unique angle on an old sf staple, and of course totally played to my own interests.
"[H]e was a man like you."
"Like me?"
"Yes. A man who thought he could pass the good on to his son without the bad."
There was silence in the tent, for a moment.
Then one of the other men said, "He's right, Mitya. All our fathers were the same."
"Well, let's drink to our fathers then. They wanted the best, but it turned out the same as always."
This is going to be a bit mean, but this is so good it's hard to believe it's a Tordotcom novella. Unlike most of what they publish, it's not a fantasy story that feels like a pilot for a streaming show; this isn't aimed at people who watch a lot of tv and movies, but it's a clever, inventive piece of sf that wouldn't be out of place in Clarkesworld or Asimov's. The basic premise is that in the near future, elephants have gone extinct but woolly mammoths have been revived through cloning, so ivory poachers have turned to mammoths as a new source. It's beautifully written, full of interesting ideas, as a bunch of different plotlines intersect. Disorienting in the way the best sf is, with lots to say about the world we live in now and the world we will live in. The first novella I read for the Hugos, but I instantly knew it would be the one to beat.
Best Novelette
6. "By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars" by Premee Mohamed
[S]he could also see that he was staring at something over her shoulder: the three framed certificates on the wall, busy with gilt and illumincation, B.Wiz, M.Wiz, Ph.W all in a row. Not in envy or awe, she thought, but a doorway, open, beckoning: Here is how you escape. Here is how you get away from them.
An old magician losing her powers takes on a new apprentice. I think this is probably good at what it does, but stories about old magicians taking on new apprentices are just never going to be my thing, to be honest. On a different day, I could be persuaded to move it up one place on my ballot; "Loneliness Universe" has higher aspirations but "By Salt" has better jokes.
5. "Loneliness Universe" by Eugenia Triantafyllou
The world was still filled with people, of course. Just people she knew nothing or very little about.
This story seems quite potent: the narrator stops being able to see her friends and family, even though they're right where she is. It feels like it could be a potent metaphor for the isolation brought on by our modern condition, how you can be in the same room as someone but not connected to them because they're on their phone or whatever. But I didn't find the mechanics of how it worked very convincing, and the metaphor didn't really land, didn't feel like it told me anything interesting about how the world works. I feel bad ranking it this low, because I do think Triantafyllou is probably up to something a bit more interesting than Pinsker et al., but I don't think she really pulled off what she was attempting.
Did you find happiness despite what I did to you?
Sarah Pinsker is my favorite contemporary writer of short sf, but this feels very much like one of her minor works to me. It's about a woman going to see her sister for the first time in a long while, but weird things are afoot. Pinsker has a couple different modes; I think she's at her best when she's doing science fiction (including near future) or fantasy work (especially where the magic is kind of a metaphor), but to me, she's less interesting when she's in what I think of as her "creepypasta" mode, of which this is very much an example. I find this kind of work well constructed but ultimately kind of hollow. This one in particular has a very rushed and unconvincing ending following the big reveal, and I'm not sure why, because it spent too much time building up to that moment, so there was definitely word count to spare.
I sighed. “Academic jobs are hard to find. My husband Stuart also has a PhD, and he landed a job in Minnesota. One thousand miles away from the nearest seals who aren’t in a zoo. And he’s got tenure. We’re only here because he’s on sabbatical.”
Naomi Kritzer is a favorite of the Hugo electorate, and she also ends up in Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes pretty consistently, so I feel like I have read a lot of her work at this point. Based on that sampling, I would say she has two modes: near-future sf focusing on stuff like AI and algorithms, but also community and hope (e.g., the CatNet books, "The Dragon Project," Liberty's Daughter, "The Year Without Sunshine," "Better Living Through Algorithms") and spooky folk horror that is also kind of uplifting (e.g., "The Thing About Ghost Stories," "Little Free Library," "Monster"). This is not too dissimilar to Pinsker, actually, and like with Pinsker, I find Kritzer a lot more interesting in her near-future mode than her horror mode. Unfortunately, this is her in her horror mode... though horror isn't quite the right word for it. This story is well-observed (I am of course always into an accurate depiction of academia) and has some good ideas, but a lot like the Pinsker, actually, feel like too much of a slow burn compared to the length. I doubt it's bad, but it's not really what I am interested in. That said, I did like it more than "Signs of Life"; it felt like it had more of a real pay-off.
"No animal has a soul that I ever knew."
This sf novelette is included in Leckie's new short fiction collection of the same title; above, I've linked to my review of the complete volume. Like a lot of Leckie's work, it's a weird, disturbing story about the way our biology drives us. That said, it did feel like minor Leckie to me compared to her novels or even some of the other short fiction collected in the same book. But I think it was asking more interesting questions and doing more interesting things than "Signs of Life" and "Four Sisters," so in this case minor Leckie outranks minor Pinsker or minor Kritzer.
The biggest difference I noticed in the new electronic copy was the ending.
There was a shootout in Copper Hawk like before, yes. But instead of the loss and the blood and the shame of the rider, the iron-handed sheriff was the one to take a bullet. [...] I could almost sense the hand of audience-score maximizer programs in the plot. It could even have been a re-writer at my agency that oversaw the edition, for all I knew.
I felt better in some ways, having read the new, happier ending, but I forgot it promptly, like some garbled conversation I’d overheard on the subway, something that made me chuckle and then escaped my mind.
This is a weird near-future story about a world where there's basically no permanent media anymore: physical books and DVDs and such are all gone, and now all media is electronic—and thus all media can be perpetually altered, updated, tinkered with to suit the present moment. The media of the past no longer serves as a window into that past. I'd never heard of Thomas Ha, but he seems to be one to watch out for based on this. I really liked this, it's basically exactly my taste in short sf, and it easily acquired a high place on my ballot.
Best Short Story
“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”
The pilots do always try to hit as many as they can.
“I have misjudged many things very badly and I ask your forgiveness.”
This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.
I thought this was very clever, but perhaps more clever than enjoyable to read. Its plays with form to communicate content, and it's about stories and the ways we tell them, and how that can change people.
THEY ONLY CALL US USURPERS BECAUSE THEY KILLED ENOUGH OF US
Now this is one of those stories where I didn't totally understand what was going on, but I understood enough, and I found it absorbing regardless. Arkady Martine is the author of the Teixcalaan books (I particularly liked the first of those, A Memory Called Empire), and like those, this is a story about empire, but moreso it's about history, the way we interpret and reinterpret the past. I found it really sharply written and thought-provoking; on a different day, I think I gladly could have put it in first. (Am I just a sucker for stories that include excerpts from made-up works of scholarly writing with real citations? Probably but I guess everyone's got to have their thing.)
This is the one story in this whole post that I had before the ballot was announced, and like I said at the top, if I nominated anything, I nominated this. You can read my full review at the link, but I really enjoyed this a lot; a clever engagement with sf criticism's eternal Omelas debates, and beautifully told in its own way. I kind of think this is the obvious candidate to win (fandom does love its self-referential stuff), so obviously so that maybe I should put "Three Faces" in first just to give it an edge in a potential upset, but oh well, this story is that good.
Overall Thoughts
Last year, I was excited that Best Novella was actually kind of diverse... but this year we're back to the same-old same-old of Tor Tor Tor. I mean, I'm part of the problem here (I don't nominate anything because I don't keep up with novellas) but it does make me grumpy. And not only is it so much Tor, but three of them are written by writers who have been finalists multiple previous times: this is Nghi Vo's fourth nomination, de Bodard's fourth, and Kingfisher's third, and at least two of them are follow-ups to previous finalists. (I have read conflicting information on whether Navigational Entanglements takes place in the same "Xuya Universe" as de Bodard's The Tea Master and the Detective.) If the point of sf&f is to take the reader to new worlds, it's not really happening here.
Similar problems with nominee diversity afflict the other two categories: of the twelve finalists in Best Novelette and Short Story, nearly half from Uncanny, who I think benefit from being freely available online and soliciting stories from Internet favorites. Usually there are a couple that make the Uncanny dominance worthwhile (e.g., I really enjoyed Kritzer's "The Year Without Sunshine" in 2024) but not this year. Thankfully there is a little bit of diversity at the edges: in contrast to Uncanny appearing on the ballot in these two categories a cumulative thirty-five times since 2016, this is only the fourth appearance by a Strange Horizons story since 2007... too bad I didn't like it more. We also have an original story from a single-author collection (I don't think this happens much) and the first appearance of a story from the once-dominant Asimov's since 2018. (Asimov's, admittedly, was the Tor/Uncanny of 1986 to 2010!)‡
All that said, maybe my real problem isn't a lack of nominee diversity so much as that the tastes of Uncanny editors Lynne M. and Michael Damian Thomas just aren't my tastes, as my top spots in Best Novelette and Best Short Story both went to Clarkesworld, and Clarkesworld has had at least twenty stories in those two categories since 2010. But, well, I'm always gushing about how much I like editor Neil Clarke. I'm guessing that whenever volume ten of Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year comes out, I will find a lot more to my taste there.
I'll wrap this up by making my predictions, with the caveat that I have not been very plugged into the discourse this year, beyond reading the threads about Hugo finalists on r/Fantasy and Nicholas Whyte's blog posts, neither of whom I think is very representative. I'm guessing:
- something I ranked below "No Award" will win Best Novella (I am always disappointed by this category)
- Kritzer or Pinsker will win Best Novelette, with an outside chance that it's Leckie (voters love them, and to be fair, they are all good writers)
- Isabel J. Kim will win Best Short Story (the story is so very online, and sort of a meta-take on fandom discourse... plus actually quite good!)
† After I wrote up my rankings, I read the discussion thread for "Marginalia" on r/Fantasy, which was pretty savage, and made me like the story less. I was kind of tempted to downgrade it after that, but laziness won out; and anyway, fundamentally I don't have a strong opinion between the bottom three in this category.
‡ Hm, I am starting to feel a blog post with charts and graphs coming on...
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