Since June, I have been writing up reviews for 2026 Hugo Award finalists that I have purchased; my usual practice is to do this for every Best Novel finalist and any finalist in other categories by authors who particularly interest me. Today, I begin posting my complete ballots with the short fiction categories: Best Novella, Novelette, and Short Story.
Best Novella
The good news was that contracts were like anyone else: with a few shadowy exceptions, they wanted to survive.
This novella is about a bunch of robots in a future California that has seceded from the U.S. and given AIs citizenship, albeit with more limited rights than human beings. They end up deciding to open a noodle bar.
Many commenters have described this book as "cozy" (combine all the variants together, and it's the book's most popular tag on LibraryThing other than "science fiction," "fiction," "novella," and "2025"); others have objected that a book where the main characters all have past traumas (many of them were military robots) and are discriminated against can hardly be described as "cozy." To me, this indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre of cozy fiction (as it currently exists), which I think primarily has two components. The first is that though there may be some kind of traumatic backstory, all conflicts in the present day of the story are resolved with breezy ease. Oh, are you being review bombed? Well, it was trivially easy to get the website to take them down, and besides, you don't even need that website anyway. Is it after a complete environmental disaster? Well sure but people still eat out at fancy restaurants. The second is that there must be some kind of "found family"... and because even writers trying to imagine alternatives to capitalism can't escape the constraints of our contemporary consumerist culture, the only place you can find family or gain meaning in life is in the workplace. As you might intuit from all of this commentary, this book was bad in all the ways that the current seed of the genre, Legends & Lattes, is also bad.
It's also bad in new and different ways. I acknowledge that science fiction has a long and productive history of using robots as stand-ins to metaphorically explore issues of discrimination and personhood; there are a bunch of Next Generation episodes that do this with Data, for example. Automatic Noodle is very obviously doing this—the robots are sort of trans people and immigrants. But the thing about science fiction is that it works on two levels: the metaphorical and the literal. And on the literal level, this is a book about AIs literally taking over what is a human artistic activity! Like, man, I don't need to read this in 2026. Who would ever want to? There is a subplot, as I mentioned above, about robophobia, but the robophobic people are depicted as right-wing trolls secretly funded by the capitalist U.S. government. Oh yeah, it's definitely the capitalist right wing who are worried about AI and employment. I thought this take on the dynamics of AI, artistic expression, and employment was boneheadedly dumb. I can't believe Newitz wrote it, and I can't believe Tordotcom published it. This book about AIs being trained to do human jobs literally has a note in it saying the text of the book can't be used to train AIs! The AIs of the book are, of course, nothing like contemporary LLMs... but that's the problem, it doesn't work on a literal level at all, because in the year 2026, this isn't how anyone thinks about AI. They are no longer cute friends, they're a tool of capitalists who want to extract all the value they can from human intellectual endeavor. I very much do not need to read a book that renders that into something "cute"!
6. No Award
Reader, I hated it.
"Ysabel," she said quietly, "do you... fancy that man?"
She shrugged. "He's not so bad."
"Bel, he's like a bit of bread that's been dropped in a pond!"
I barely remember what this was about even though I just read it a couple weeks ago (as of when I am writing this up). It's some kind of fairytale thing about two sisters. I don't really care about fairytale things usually (though I do remember liking El-Mohtar's "Seasons of Glass and Iron"), but at least it's not actively offensive like Automatic Noodle. (If you own the ebook edition, note that fully a third of its supposed 130 pages is really a preview for a short story collection by El-Mohtar.)
"There's no call to go embarrassing a fellow by telling his aunt his actual feelings."
I really wanted to like this: it's an sf murder mystery set on a generation ship where inhabitants can reload their memories from backups when they die... and even transfer between bodies. Neat premise, and the main detective seems like a fun character. Unfortunately, I found the actual mystery pretty confusing; it felt to me like Dorothy wandered around a bit and then suddenly had the whole thing solved.
3. What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
Ursula Vernon's third "Sword Soldier" novella (as my linked review notes) is better than the second, but not as good as the first. I don't think I would have nominated this... but even so, it has a level of fun and competence of premise that is lacking from Murder by Memory, so here it goes in the middle tier of this year's finalists.
2. The Summer War by Naomi Novik
My full review is also linked to above. Like a lot of fiction on the ballot this year (see also: The River Has Roots, Cinder House, The Everlasting), it self-consciously uses fairy tale tropes to make a broader point about the way that stories can serve as straitjackets on how we imagine ourselves as people. It's an idea I'm broadly sympathetic to and interested in, but feel like I am encountering a bit too much... which isn't really any one author's fault, but still. Given that, though, I found this an enjoyable read that I would gladly see win—clearly in a tier above Murder by Memory et al. Like Cinder House, I felt like the end of The Summer War got convoluted in its use fairy tale strictures and magic rules, and Novik is the better writer, but I found Cinder House's premise more immediately engaging, so I gave it a very slight edge here.
[S]he sensed it for the first time: the downhill road between a house with a ghost and a true haunted house.
A house was made to have people in it. It wanted them there, even if it hated them.
This was the fourth novella I read, but the first I actually enjoyed. It's a Cinderella riff, but the idea here is that when the evil stepmother kills Ella's father, Ella dies too, so she becomes a ghost haunting the house—one obligated to do work for the house's inhabitants. It makes so much sense you'd almost think it was designed that way! From that premise, the story goes off in some interesting directions, some expected (Ella gets a fairy to help her attend a ball with the prince), some less so (did not really expect a lot of what actually happened with the prince). I feel like the magic got a bit convoluted, but overall I thought this was a good story about belonging and expectations.
Best Novelette
“My sense of security is always false.”
“Comrade Minister of Medium Machine Building, if these were the bad old days, now would be the point at which I note that Siberia is lovely at this time of your life. Fortunately we have all recently stumbled into a more forgiving world.”
She really fell in love.
I don’t know why she would do something so stupid.
This is a kind of complicated story, about a woman who was supposed to be the recipient of her mother's brain, now being raised alongside the woman who her mother will transfer her brain into instead, but then they fall in love, and then the compound they live in is attacked. I thought there was a lot going here, probably a tad too much, but it was decent.
“Anybody in that village could’ve ended up Johnny, because everybody’s Johnny when they want more than they got. And everyone wants more than they’ve got.”
Except when she's in "twee" mode, I always enjoy how Catherynne Valente writes, and this story is no exception. It's about a woman whose husband gets involved with a seductive vampire, and the vampire comes to her house, and she has to defend this husband who had an affair against this woman who doesn't really want him for any reason other than self-interest. As she often does, Valente plunges into the depths of how humans think and their best and their worst.
“Nobody is born to play a single role. Nobody is meant to do the same act forever.”
A female illusionist in an early-century travel show meets another one who yearns for bigger things, but can't obtain them because of her gender. For most of the story, I thought this was fairly middling Pinsker—magic as metaphor for our attempts to build ourselves in a hostile world, ground she's covered before in "The Court Magician" and "A Better Way of Saying"—though middling Pinsker still ranks among the best of contemporary short sf&f. But then the ending came along and she paid it all off beautifully and unsettlingly. So more than middling Pinsker for sure.
Their species has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years; surely they must have solved such conundrums from unbirth to birth.
I have never read anything by H. H. Pak before, but to me, this was the clear and obvious standout in this category, a weird but fascinating sf story about a sentient spaceship carrying a bunch of embryos to a prospective colony planet, but a malfunction causes the embryos to be born ahead of schedule, and the spaceship must care for them itself; the story alternates between these events and one of the babies, now an adult, trying to reconstruct what happened. I wasn't totally convinced by the resolution to the latter plotline, but overall, I thought this was well written, dark and plausible, with some weird but well thought through worldbuilding.
Best Short Story
They still hadn’t built a ramp, and meetings were in-person, so I joined the union meeting by video. The HR rep made a big deal about making a “special exception” for me since I “didn’t really need this accommodation” because “someone could always carry me in like before.” I managed to keep my smile plastered on my face.
“Everyone changes through life, even if they don’t have a revision.”
This has a very interesting premise, and is well told. People can undergo a process called "revision" where they are literally remade into better people—"better" here is based on collecting forms from friends, family, and acquaintances where they describe what would improve you. The story is mostly the protagonist talking to people as she collects the forms. I thought there was some really interesting stuff to explore here... but the outcome of the story is the protagonist decides not to do it because of bunch of characters we've never seen before write her notes about how she's great as she is. All the interesting questions raised are answered in the least interesting way possible. Bleh.
5. No Award
This is going to be mean, but when I read both "Laser Eyes" and "Six People," I couldn't shake the feeling that these were therapy sessions, not stories... and surely there's nothing less interesting than someone else's therapy session? Keep it to yourself, don't publish it, and certainly don't give it an award.
It’s the elderly couple from next door, Marilyn and Ted. They remember the country’s last stretch of eldritch horror, when the doomsday cultists first unmasked themselves and their century-long search for a hellgate, and they have a plan for neighborhood defense.
At the time I am writing this part of the post, this is the sixth short fiction finalist I am writing up, and the fifth published in Uncanny, and the fourth of those by someone who has previously been a Hugo finalist for short fiction. Wow, don't work too hard on casting a wide net, guys. Despite that, I enjoyed this; it's about a bunch of different timelines where the apocalypse is happening (or not). It's funny and hopeful and pessimistic all at once. The title and the first couple vignettes made me think it was going to be twee (it may have been the apocalypse, but at least we all found community!) but Mills is a better writer than that.
The problem with ambiguity is that it demands interpretation. The demand for interpretation welcomes a different magnitude of contemplation and unanticipated dispute.
This is a horror-tinged sf&f story about a country where art critical of the the regime is permitted... but art containing ambiguity is not. Interesting premise, very well written, very well done overall. I would gladly see it win; I gave the edge to "Missing Helen" mostly based on my overall preference for clear sf over stuff that's less clearly so.
“We all have baggage,” I say. “I think he’s just more comfortable with mine.”
Okay, just above this, I complained about there being too many Uncanny stories, but on the other hand, there are four Clarkesworld stories on the short fiction ballots this year... and all four are better than everything else in their categories, so there's no such thing as too many Clarkesworld stories. I enjoyed this a lot: a woman discovers that after her divorce, her ex-husband began dating her clone! Truly what I love in sf: a weird concept that works both literally and metaphorically, and strong, character-based writing.
Like most neurodivergences, it was only diagnosed when the condition became aggravating to those around her, which, in Cassie’s case, was when she stopped listening to her mother and began saying that she wasn’t real.
This story takes place in a future where AI companionship has become ubiquitous: why marry a real woman, when you can marry an AI one who will be more obliging and never age? The protagonist is a young woman who has a neurodiverse condition that causes her to be unable to see these AIs as people—and thus she begins to despise her AI mother. Like every Isabel J. Kim story I've read, it's very well-observed, but it also makes some astute commentary on our contemporary society. I would love to teach it. As soon as I read it, it was hard for me to imagine I would read a better piece of short fiction in any Hugo category. I was right.
Overall Thoughts
Another year, another bunch of complaints about the lack of finalist diversity. Best Novella is all but one Tor; in the other categories, it's all all Tor, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny with one exception. Though even though Clarkesworld takes up four of those twelve slots, I ranked them above any non-Clarkesworld finalists in all categories, and the one story from outside the usual suspects, I ranked below No Award! So perhaps "finalist diversity" is a red herring and the real complaint is "many Hugo nominators do not value what I value in short fiction." I am pretty bummed to once again see a shutout for Asimov's, as I think that's usually much more to my taste. I hope that Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies get going again, so I can see what good sf I have missed from these years!
I'm not very plugged into the discourse this year, and I'm in general pretty bad at predicting winners in the short fiction categories, so I'm not going to try. (The r/Fantasy posters largely agree with me... but I don't think they are very representative!) I dread to think that Automatic Noodle will probably win, though.
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