Hugo Awards 2026: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Every year, I vote in the Hugo Awards, reading as many of the finalists in the categories I care about as I can prior to the deadline—indeed, I don't think I've ever missed a finalist except deliberately. I buy all the finalists in Best Novel and review them in detail, along with other finalists by authors that particularly interest me; everything else I include in a series of ranking posts I do at the end of the process.

This year, the first finalist I'm writing up (though it's not the first I've read) is The Everlasting by Alix Harrow, a finalist for Best Novel. Harrow has placed regularly on the ballot since 2019, when she won Best Short Story for "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies." That's her only win so far, but she had short fiction on the ballot in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, was a finalist in 2020.

Harrow has a recurrent interest in storytelling, and how the possibilities of stories can be literalized through sfnal devices like alternate universes. The Ten Thousand Doors of January represents portal fantasies as places that can be accessed through, well, portals; her two "Fractured Fables" novellas made alternate versions of fairy tales into alternate universes her main characters could jump between, Everything Everywhere All at Once–style.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Published: 2025
Acquired and read: May 2026

Instead of alternate universes, The Everlasting explores storytelling through the device of time travel. (Note that I experienced this book largely knowing nothing about it, but I'm going to give away some aspects of the premise here that I discovered as a reader myself.) One of the two main characters is Owen Mallory, a scholar who specializes in legends of Sir Una Everlasting, a mythical figure from the history of his country of Dominion, a figure who resonates with the Arthur mythos from our world. (She's sort of King Arthur and his knights all in one.) Thanks to time travel, he's able to back to when Sir Una was alive, but what he discovers is that her story has been edited over time through time travel, adjusted to fit the needs of the present. In his time, Dominion has recently concluded a war, and Una serves as an inspiration to the populace and the soldiers—including Owen himself.

I found this a cracker of a premise. I'm very much interested in stories about stories, about the ways that the stories can change people and society. And I'm very much a sucker for stories that take a metaphor and literalize it through some kind of sfnal premise. In The Everlasting, stories aren't just being tweaked over time in the telling to suit the needs of the present-day society, they're actually being tweaked via time travel. The historian actually goes back in time in order to alter the story to make it work out the way it needs to!

There are definitely shades of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States here; imagine if people could go back in time and make Columbus into the hero history needed him to be! I was reminded also of David Mattingly's history of Britain under Rome that I recently read, where he makes the point that when Britain had an empire in the nineteenth century, that was the point where the British told stories about how Britain being part of the Roman Empire was a good thing, actually, that helped the British. Me being me, I was also spending my reading triangulating the book in terms of the contemporary genre, and I think it would appeal to fans of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Those aren't two books that it occurred to me to put together until now, but all three are about time travel, nationalism, and storytelling; Ministry of Time and The Everlasting are very different books in execution, but both are about someone who falls in love with their object of historical study while their government uses time travel for nefarious purposes!

I liked the main characters, Una and Owen, a lot, though I perhaps liked the side characters of Owen's father and professor even more; every return appearance by them was gold. On a prose level, Harrow is a strong writer, as I just really enjoyed reading it. Sometimes stories in this area can be a bit "twee" or "precious" in my opinion (see: oh-so-many Tordotcom novellas), but Harrow isn't that at all.

At the two-thirds mark, I thought this book was the one to beat. Unfortunately, the last third or so moves the book in a different direction than the one I've laid out here, which I found less interesting. It's not bad, but the book previously had been working on two registers: the social commentary of the time travel/storytelling idea, and the personal level of Owen and Una's story. But near the end, 1) the focus of the novel squarely becomes on Owen and Una escaping from the time travel trap, and 2) a lot of that is done via the character of Vivian, who is the novel's villain. But making it all about Owen and Una and Vivian and their personal struggles means that the political/social stuff about the power and importance of stories kind of drops away in favor of time travel mechanics and romance. Which are both interesting, sure, but I found the book more interesting when it was doing all three at once. 

 Basically the social stuff totally vanishes from the narrative, and I found that disappointing compared to how big of a role it played in the beginning, especially considering it was the clever thing that drew me into the book to begin with. Especially given that ultimately pinning everything on Vivian (and she literally turns out to be responsible for everything bad in Dominion history) really undercuts the book's commentary on the way this kind of thing does happen in the real world. The book does gesture at pointing out it's not all down to Vivian near the end:

The poor downtrodden folk of Dominion, Vivian had called them, but they didn't strike me a victims. I had seen them send their sons cheerfully to war; I had seen them beaten bloody for protesting it. They had put a medal around my neck for something I hadn't done, and spit on my boots simply for being born. And they hadn't been tricked or forced into any of it—they had chosen, over and over, cruelly or kindly, selfishly or bravely. (254)

It's a good bit, but it feels tacked on because 1) narratively, the focus of the ending is all on stopping Vivian, and 2) we never really get a sense of what a history of Dominion without Una would be like. I especially wondered what a version of Dominion history where the good aspects of Una's story were emphasized without the bad ones could be like—if such a thing is even possible. Without that, I feel like the book has the depressing conclusion of pointing at a vast social problem, and then just saying that there's no way of fixing it, so all you can do is get out with your loved ones.

This may seem like a lot of criticism, but ultimately I very much enjoyed the book. It did a lot of interesting things. I just wish it could have carried those things through to the end more consistently.

Hugos 2023: Ballots for Novella, Novelette, and Short Story

Over the past couple months, I've been reviewing some standalone Hugo finalists; here is my first set of ranked Hugo votes, in this case in the short fiction categories.

If you follow Worldcon and the Hugos much, you'll know that this year is an unusual year. Worldcon is being hosted by a group of Chinese fans. It does end up in non-Anglo countries every now and again, but for what I think is the first time, there was enough of a critical mass of nominators from that country to actually land some non-English works on the ballot. This mostly happened in the short fiction categories: there was one Chinese novelette and four Chinese short stories. This is great in terms of making Worldcon actually be Worldcon, but posed some hurdles in that some of the stories actually have not been professionally translated into English!

(As always, my links below are to where you can read a full review of the story if I did one, or to where the story is freely available on the Internet.)

Things I Nominated

Normally I list what I nominated in these posts... but I don't remember, and if I got a confirmation e-mail from Chengdu Worldcon about it, I can't find it. That said, I suspect I didn't nominate anything this year; I doubt I read any published-in-2022 short fiction in 2022. Other than the Hugos, my main way of finding contemporary short fiction is Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies, but the 2022 one only came out in September, far too late to be useful!

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Best Novella

[UNRANKED] Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire

This year, I adopted a new policy, which was to not read things I was strongly certain I would not enjoy. Life is too short, you know? Every book you know you won't like but read anyway is a book you might have liked you could have read instead. Where the Drowned Girls Go is the seventh Wayward Children novella, and also the seventh one to be a finalist. I have ranked the previous ones 2nd, 4th, 4th, 6th, 7th (below No Award), and 5th (below No Award). The trend isn't very promising; though I enjoyed the first well enough, I found later installments didn't make good use of the central premise and McGuire's writing overly precious and twee. It seemed unlikely to me that this one would turn it around.

5. Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

—if death or betrayal have not torn them apart, why, they must be together still.

A monk travels their country with their talking bird, collecting stories, in this case (this is the third novella in this "cycle") mostly about women who practice martial arts. Well written and with some neat moments of observation, but even though it's a story about a journey and it ends with a big fight, I didn't think it really went anywhere.

4. Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk

“And all I have to do for my soul and a thousand dollars is find the White City Vampire.”
     She lifted her half-filled coupe of champagne. “Correct.”
     “That’s quite the offer,” I mused. “Plus expenses?”

A noir story about a lesbian detective with supernatural powers who takes a case where her soul lies in the balance. Well told, but like a lot of supernatural mysteries (I find, anyway), it didn't totally hang together. Why did anyone even need the detective wasn't really clear. Everyone else seemed to know so much more than she did! But more focused and interesting to me than Into the Riverlands.

3. A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow

“All I wanted was power.” Her lips make a bitter shape. “I know how I must sound, what you must think of me, but I only mean power over myself. Power to make my own choices, and arrive at my own ends.”
     “It's called agency.” And they said my humanities degree would never come in handy. “It's like, the power you exert over your own narrative.”

This is a sequel to A Spindle Splintered, which was a finalist last year. In the first book, the main character discovers she can travel into story worlds, and ends up rewriting Sleeping Beauty. In this book, she jumps into iterations of Snow White. I found the first one solid, but enjoyed this one a lot. There's some clever postmodern stuff, it plays with the multiverse well (it's certainly having a moment, isn't it), and it really thinks through Snow White in a very interesting way. Not quite at the core of what I think of as a Hugo winner to the extent of Ogres, but it would be a worthy winner, and it easily slotted above everything else on the ballot.

2. Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Histories,” Minith says, as though it’s a dirty word. “Apparently we have recruited a humanities student.”

Starts like a fantasy story about a world where ogres dominate humans... but over time, something different and more complicated slowly unspools. Good twists and turns, interesting ideas, and closer to what I find interesting about the genre of sf&f than A Spindle Splintered.

1. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

It's less galling to be mistaken for a man than a woman, for some reason. Probably because no one tries to kiss your hand or bar you from the Royal Mycology Society.

I bought this and reviewed it on its own (see above) because it's by T. Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon), and I always like her stuff. I was not surprised that it turned out to be my favorite novella this year by some margin. Like Ogres, it seems to be a fantasy story but turns out to be sf; like all of Kingfisher's stuff, it's expertly leavened by humor.

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Best Novelette 

[UNRANKED] "The Space-Time Painter" by Hai Ya

In the words of your time, the reason why consciousness and soul are beyond prying eyes is precisely because it is not only limited to the three-dimensional world. [machine translation of Chinese original]

I saved this story for last because I was holding out hope that an official English translation would be issued, but in the end, none was forthcoming. So I took the Chinese Word doc included in the packet, bunged it into an AI translator, and gave it a read. The results were less than stellar, but that's not the writer's fault, so I just left it off my ballot. (Though, functionally, that's the same as ranking it sixth.) It's about a detective investigating a haunting who finds a spirit of an artist... I think? It has some potentially creepy moments at the beginning (though they are undermined by the awkward prose and shifting tenses and weird word choice), but I soon got lost, and it was pretty long for a novelette.

5. "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente

It got in a lot trouble for drawing or carving or scratching its initial in desks all over the place, this funky S that kinda also looks like a pointy figure 8. But not lying on its side like the infinity symbol. Infinity standing up.

I’ve seen them everywhere. Still do. The space/time continuum gets around.

You’ve probably seen it, too.

A woman narrates her love affair with the space-time continuum across the course of her life, which appears to her in a variety of guises. But what does that actually mean, metaphorically or literally? I never figured that out, and like too much by Valente, it came across as a series of weird but ultimately pointless images; by the halfway point, I was dead bored and struggled to maintain focus enough to get all the way to the end.

4. "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi

“My daughter, even if I can do what you assume I can, surely you must know that it is not truly your mother here with us? None of her essence, her ori, is here, only her memories and her knowledge and a record of the neurochemical pathways that primarily drove her emotions.”

This is set in a future Yoruba nation, where leaders consult the ancestors in a very literal way, accessing a supercomputer programmed with all the memories of the dead. Interesting concept, but I felt it went on a bit too long compared to the complexity of the point it was making, and I'm not sure I really bought the ending twist.

3. "We Built This City" by Marie Vibbert

“A city without people is only a ruin.”

This is about a city on Venus under a dome, focusing on the contingent labor that keeps the dome clean, and their rights under increasing pressure from a corporate hierarchy. I like the idea of the story, and it hits all the right beats, but I never felt that emotional connection that I think it was really going for. But I am interested in looking out for more from Vibbert.

2. "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" by S. L. Huang

After all, Sylvie plays by rules we’ve already decided are acceptable.

Told in the form of tech journalism (very well, I might add), this is about an AI named Sylvie that goes after rich corrupt people, stalking them to terrible effect. I have a feeling it might date itself a bit quickly (the story came out the day after ChatGPT debuted), but for the moment, it does a great job speaking to some of the ethical issues around AI and algorithms, that responsibility for actions are displaced and diminished.

1. "If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You" by John Chu

I know. He knows I know. I know he knows I know. And, now, in a thrilling anti-climax, we finally both know that we both know. I swear a big chunk of the experience of being closeted is the bookkeeping.

This is a sort of superhero story, about two Asian-American gay bodybuilders, where one of them has superpowers. It is slow but in a good way: well-observed moments between the two characters as they come to know one another. Good application of an sfnal idea in a meaningful way. I liked this one a lot, and would happily see it win.

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Best Short Story

6. "On the Razor's Edge" by Jiang Bo

There are no real borders in space; all those who walk in space are true human heroes.

The copy of this Chinese story provided in the packet was translated by AI, and is consequently fairly rough. I found it pretty old-fashioned for prose sf: there's a disaster in space, people do some clever and dangerous stuff. It was hard to get very interested.

5. "The White Cliff" by Lu Ban

“They should not be treated like this. No one in the world is good at death, and no one can impart any experience about death. Even doctors have never really died.”

I found this very slow to start, but eventually it got a bit interesting. It's about a technology to access the minds of the dying, and about coming to terms with one's mortality. Not great, but more to my taste than "On the Razor's Edge."

4. "D.I.Y." by John Wiswell

He wouldn’t let anyone shit-talk my pronouns. My favorite was, How’re you going to memorize spells in dead languages if you can’t even remember ze/zir? 

This story is about a potential magic user who wants to go what is clearly a Hogwarts analogue—but in the story's apocalyptic future, magic might be the only thing that can solve the global water crisis, and instead of helping others, the magic school uses its powers for profit. I think the idea of it is better than the execution; there's interesting room for a critique of that aspect of the Harry Potter series, and the director of the magic school is clearly a satire of Muskesque figures, but the satire doesn't say much that is surprising or interesting or funny or biting, and the ending feels too easy, like a cop out. Succeeds as a story better than "The White Cliff" (I was never bored), but not as convincing as "Zhurong on Mars."

3. "Zhurong on Mars" by Regina Kanyu Wang

Like the humans who had left, e discovered freedom.

This is (the translator's note at the end helpfully explains) a rewriting of Chinese myth, transposed to Mars, with the main characters being a distributed AI intelligence in charge of a manufacturing plant and a robotic probe, instead of two gods. Well told (certainly the best translated of all the Chinese stories on the ballot this year), and with some interesting stuff to say about what counts as intelligence. I think it's probably trying to do less than "D.I.Y." was, but I also think it accomplishes what it set out to do much better.

2. "Resurrection" by Channing Ren

“What are you hungry for?” the old woman asked.
     “Stir fried pork with garlic shoots,” said the synthetic.
     “He really is my son!” The old woman burst into tears.

Originally published in 2020, this was made reeligible under Hugo rules by the publication of an English translation in 2022. It's about a soldier who dies in a war, and his consciousness is put into a new body and sent home to his grieving mother as part of an experimental program. Of the five Chinese-original finalists, this one was the most successful for me, and worked through the most interesting ideas, about life and death and grieving and memory. I'm even thinking of teaching it.

1. "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills

It is 2091, and Grace is praying that someone might have the means, the interest, and the entrepreneurial spirit to help her out.

This is a story about reproductive rights, mostly focused on a girl in the 2090s who gets pregnant in a world where abortion is illegal and implants in your body can even tell your parents when you're pregnant. But it jumps through time, taking in the deployment of contraceptives and abortion rights all across human history. A really powerfully written appeal about a really powerful issue. An easy first place.

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Overall Thoughts

The Tordotcom vibe is again a bit too strong in Best Novella, but it was good to see one from Solaris Books (Ogres) and one from a different Tor imprint at least (What Moves the Dead). I think every author in this category is a repeat finalist in this category, which is always a bit disappointing, but it is nice to see Tchaikovsky finally getting some notice from Hugo nominators. My vibe is that Kingfisher will win, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. (Obviously all right-thinking people think like me!)

On the other hand, I found this a good, diverse set of novelettes and short stories. Lots of different approaches to sf, lots of different sources. I don't think I can hazard a guess what will win Best Novelette (every blogger I've seen discuss them has had a very different ranking), but I think "Rabbit Test" will win Best Short Story unless there's more Chinese voters than not.

Hugos 2022: Ballots for Novella, Novelette, and Short Story

Here is my first set of ranked Hugo finalists; the short fiction was the first stuff I finished. Can't lie; I always approach short fiction a bit trepidatiously these days, because I don't think my tastes are strongly aligned with the nominators', and the same authors and venues tend to come up again and again. (Three stories are from the same issue of Uncanny!) But that's unfair, because I actually do come across a lot of good, new-to-me short fiction!

Things I Nominated

I nominated just one thing across all three short fiction categories, the short story "Lena" by Sam Hughes, an indie short story writer better known by his screen name (do we say "handle" these days?) of "qntm." It's a fictional Wikipedia entry about the first person to have their mind simulated via computer, and I think I will be teaching it in my "life extension"–themed college class. Anyway, no surprise to not find it on the ballot; Hughes comes out of the SCP Foundation, which I don't think has a lot of Hugo-nominator overlap.

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Best Novella

7. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Dex realized with a stomach-souring thud that they were standing on the wrong side of the vast gulf between having read about doing a thing and doing the thing.

A "tea monk" spends a bunch of time in the wilderness and meets a robot. Felt like this was about twice as long as it needed to be to make its point. Also for some reason I find Chambers's use of "fuck" jarring. It's not the word in prose in general, just her books. Anyway, bafflingly dull.

6. Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

Eldris, after all, is the kind of princess who gets rescued.

Like a lot of de Bodard that I have read, this read less interesting than it would sound if described to me. A young princess in a fantasy world must navigate false friendships and a fire spirit. Felt to me like the story could never quite focus on what it was actually about.

5. Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

She chose this world, where she could never be normal, over the world she had been made for.

The Wayward Children novellas will continue until the morale improves.

Seriously, though, this was one of the better ones, probably because the twee narrative voice McGuire affects in most of these is largely absent here. It's about an intersex kid who finds belonging in a fantasy world of centaurs and unicorns. I am not convinced the twist made a ton of sense, but I mostly enjoyed it up until that point. Probably better put together than Fireheart Tiger, though I wouldn't rush to recommend either.

4. No Award

If the Hugo electorate will insist on only nominating Tordotcom novellas, then I will insist on using No Award to separate the worthy from the unworthy. (Most of the time I don't bother using it unless I think something is really bad.)

3. A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

Maybe the universe doesn't naturally bend toward justice either; maybe it's only the weight of hands and hearts pulling it true, inch by stubborn inch.

I've read a number of pieces by Harrow for the Hugos the past few years, and this is definitely the best of them. This is a sort of postmodern, feminist, ("hopepunk"?) take on Sleeping Beauty, which moves quickly and does some interesting things: a recent college grad with a degenerative disease finds her degree (from OU!) in folklore comes in useful when she's plunged into the world of her favorite fairy tale. It didn't totally grip me, and Elder Race was more in the area of what I find interesting, but a solid entry overall.

2. Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I have lived a long, long life and it has meant nothing, and I'm on a fucking quest with a couple of women who don't understand things like germs or fusion power or anthropological theories of value.

An anthropological observer from an advanced but lost culture must team up with a princess from a more primitive one who insists on seeing him as a wizard. Pretty enjoyable but I never found it as arresting as I did, say, The Past Is Red. I think it had some interesting things to say (how different cultures process the same things), but I also felt like it could have been richer thematically. I kept comparing it unfavorably to Le Guin.

1. The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

“Have you been running a quality assurance test on me all this time, Tetley?” she teases, laughing.
     But I keep eating snap peas and I don't say anything back because when you really think about it, it isn't funny. When humans meet other humans, that's all they do forever.

This is a postapocalyptic novella about a young girl, and then a young woman, who lives in a place called Garbagetown after the seas have risen so high there's no land left anywhere. It has a strong narrative voice, and a strong sense of theme: it's a great story about the places we look for hope, in each other and in stories, and about the ways we're often let down. Obviously it's a Tordotcom novella, but it's not one of the ones that reads like a pilot for a streaming show, it's an actual piece of prose.

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Best Novelette 

7. "O₂ Arena" by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Now the merchants of death sold life and oxygen because death was now in abundance, and life was the commodity in demand. You had to pay to breathe. O₂ credit was life. 

Set in the near future where oxygen is scarce; the narrator is a law student in Nigeria who ends up battling in the "O₂ Arena" for more O₂ credits. I kind of felt like the whole story was constructed based on that pun. I thought this was pretty bad, to be honest. It spends a lot of time on things that don't matter (how law school works) and not much time on things that do (the narrator's decisions). The writing is clumsy: it consistently implies a thing but then in the next sentence, tells you the thing anyway.

6. No Award

I don't think "O₂ Arena" is not to my taste (as, say, "Unseelie Brothers" is); I think it's outright bad. Sometime after I originally wrote this post, I realized that meant I should rank it below No Award, so I came back and added that to it. Also I guess I am hedging: this won the Nebula somehow!

5. "Unseelie Brothers, Ltd." by Fran Wilde

Inside, the machines—old Singers, new 3-D printers, and everything in between—waited, surrounded by fireflies and shadows.

A girl in fashion design discovers a magic dress store. It felt pretty aimless at first, and I was like, why am I not enjoying it? Then I remembered that an unseelie is a fairy, and nothing interests me less than a fantasy story about fairies. But I guess it was fine for what it was.

4. "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer

As unfathomably alien as humans were, that at least made sense to 9. The Mantra of Perseverance was clearly fundamental to all thinking units.

This is a sequel to Palmer's "The Secret Life of Bots," which was a finalist (and won) in 2018. Like that story, it was entertaining and engaging... but I don't know that I would give it award. Still, not boring like "Unseelie Brothers" nor actively bad like "O₂ Arena."

3. "Colors of the Immortal Palette" by Caroline M. Yoachim

“An art collector is hoarding time. Time spent by the artist applying paint to the canvas, yes. But there is more to it than that. Each successive painting contains something of the time that went into all the previous canvases, not to mention the time spent studying, practicing. And the art holds other time as well—the model that sits for the painting, holding a pose for hours on end. Time that she has devoted, perhaps, to keeping a certain figure, or creating an appealing hairstyle.”

An immortal Japanese woman who has always been known as a model for painters seeks to become a painter herself. Pretty good, with some great observations on gender, race, and art. Nothing wrong with it; just not my favorite.

2. "L’Esprit de L’Escalier" by Catherynne M. Valente

Marriage isn’t what he thought it would be.

She didn’t even thank him for making her breakfast. He doesn’t want that to annoy him the way it does, but he can’t shake it.

A modernized retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where they're both contemporary celebrities, following their attempts to re-acclimate to normal life after Eurydice's resurrection. If you know my tastes in fiction, you'll know it's quite a compliment for me to say this almost read like it was by Jeanette Winterson.

1. "That Story Isn't the Story" by John Wiswell

Anton knows he doesn’t have a work ethic. The helplines have taught him better. He has a habituated trauma that requires him to do something or face consequences he’s too afraid to think about.

Very clever, well put together, moving story about a gay man escaping the thrall of a vampire, a very unsubtle but very effective metaphor for escaping the pull of an abusive relationship. This one did a great job of putting you in the protagonist's mindset, and of making you unsure what was magic and what was just the protagonist's damaged way of thinking.

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Best Short Story

7. Magic: The Gathering: "Tangles" by Seanan McGuire

[T]rees had no gender as such, but dryads did, and upon discovering the concept in her mind, he had considered his choices and decided he preferred the masculine...

I believe that, with the possible exception of one or two Best Graphic Story finalists, this is the first ever piece of tie-in fiction to be a Hugo finalist. The occasional complaints of a tie-in author with whom I was LiveJournal friends with back in the day aside, I am certain that you could count the number of Hugo-worthy tie-in works ever produced on one hand. This confusing, mediocre story is not among them. How ever did it get nominated? (Oh, Seanan McGuire wrote it.)

6. No Award

I think I would wail in despair if a tie-in to a card game won a Hugo Award.

5. "Mr. Death" by Alix E. Harrow

I can’t quote the Book of Death line and verse the way Raz can, but I’m pretty sure there’s a policy somewhere against playing catch in broad daylight with a doomed two-and-a-half-year-old, surrounded by the green hum of summer.

A reaper who when he was alive lost his toddler-aged son is assigned to recover a toddler's soul himself. I liked it most of the way through but found the final turn obnoxiously saccharine, and it ruined the story for me. If it hadn't been for that false moment, it would have ranked much higher.

4. "Unknown Number" by Blue Neufstifter

if you're asking if I named myself after Xena's girlfriend I think you probably already know the answer

Told as a Twitter thread of a series of screenshots of a text conversation, this is about a trans woman being contacted by an alternate universe self who never transitioned. Neat idea well told, but feels more like an exhortation than a story.

3. "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" by Sarah Pinsker

>@BarrowBoy all you ever do is mark stretches and shoot down other peoples’ theories without ever offering any yourself. Do you care about this ballad at all?–Dynamum

>I don’t even like this song. The melody’s okay, but it needs a bridge. –BarrowBoy

>Argh. If you don’t like the song, why are you here? –Dynamum 

>For those sweet sweet LyricSplainer level badges. U?  –BarrowBoy

This story is a (fictional) English folk ballad, annotated by commenters on a lyrics-explaining web site. Pinsker has a real mastery of both the ballad form and the culture of Internet commenters, and manages to tell something pretty creepy despite the distanced form. Not as emotionally affected as Pinsker's best work, but middling Pinsker beats most other short story writers' best. I could have gone either way between this and "Sin of America," but there's a clear separation between this and everything I ranked below it.

2. "The Sin of America" by Catherynne M. Valente

The Blue Bison Diner is a ghost’s living room and it is serving the sin of America.

Creepy, literary, effective story about a woman eating "the sin of America" at a crappy diner. Sort of a latter-day "The Lottery" or "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but was it really even science fiction or fantasy? Felt more "literary" than that. (By which I mean, I guess there's magic in it, but the magic seems more metaphorical than actual.) I really hated how Valente wrote Space Opera, but her prose on the short fiction ballots this year was great. (Three of them, one per category!) Anyway, neat story I was happy to read.

1. "Proof by Induction" by José Pablo Iriarte

“Don’t you feel anything at all?” He couldn’t remember if his father had ever had a feeling in his damned life.
     “Would it change anything?”

Enjoyable story about a mathematician who uses a simulation of his dead mathematician father to both solve a proof and work through his father issues. Good idea, well told, though that no one else had thought of using mind simulations this way before didn't really ring true to me.

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Overall Thoughts

I know I complain every year about Tordotcom and the novella category, but I found this a much better set of novellas than we've seen in a while. Literally none of them felt like streaming show pilots! And The Past Is Red in particular was very strong. On the other hand, Best Short Story felt a bit weak this year; I feel like I placed "Proof by Induction" at the top largely by default.

I find it a little tricky to predict short fiction winners—especially without Murderbot in the mix. This is McGuire's sixth sequential nomination for a Wayward Children novella, but she only won for the first one, so I don't think she'll win it this year. Who'm I kidding, though? It'll be Becky Chambers. But for the other categories, I don't any inkling at all.

My 2020 Hugo Awards Ballot: Short Fiction Categories

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

7. "As the Last I May Know" by S. L. Huang

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.

5. "Do Not Look Back, My Lion" by Alix E. Harrow

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.

3. "Blood Is Another Word for Hunger" by Rivers Solomon

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

6. "The Archronology of Love" by Caroline M. Yoachim

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.”

“But no motive. Well, except lack of coffee, but that hardly seems worth killing someone over.”

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.

4. Emergency Skin by N. K. Jemisin

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.

2. "Omphalos" by Ted Chiang

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.

1. "For He Can Creep" by Siobhan Carroll

“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

6. In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

"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.)

5. To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

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.

4. The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

"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.

3. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

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.

2. "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang

"You know there's some timeline where I shoot you right now."
     "Yeah, but I don't think this is the one."

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.

1. The Deep by Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes

[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.

Hugos 2020: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Trade paperback, 394 pages
Published 2020 (originally 2019)
Acquired and read June 2020

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

I felt like this riff on portal fantasies had an interesting idea but never really kicked into gear. I've been focusing a lot in my Hugo reading comments over the past few years on a subgenre forming around Ancillary Justice, but the "self-aware portal fantasy" is another one that clearly has a strong presence, in things like McGuire's "Wayward Children" sequence (as well as Middlegame to an extent), Kingfisher's Summer in Orcus, and Brennan's In Other Lands. These are portal fantasies written by and for adults who were children who grew up consuming portal fantasies. Harrow sets her novel at the time of some of the earliest ones (the bulk of the action is set in 1911), and thinks about this question: if our world is full of portals to other worlds, what's coming in to our world?

The problem I had is that the resulting novel is pretty mundane. The book talks about the promise of the portal, the idea that going through a door can take you to this amazing world, and as someone who grew up on Oz and Narnia (and started my own novel about being swept away to Oz when in middle school), I empathize with that feeling. But the novel neverrnever makes you feel it. We barely glimpse any other worlds, and the ones we do... aren't very interesting, to be honest. Harrow talks about that sense of magic you get when crossing over the threshold to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the interview in the back of my edition, but I never felt that here.

There was flashes where I was intrigued or drawn in. January is a good protagonist, her childhood is depicted evocatively, the way the doors worked was neat, and there are a couple harrowing (heh) sequences. The prose is good, though it occasionally drifts into an overly precious Seanan McGuireesque mode. The reveal of the big bad, though, was annoying, because multiple characters are surprised by who it is and what his plan is, even though there's literally no other rational interpretation of events. If I was supposed to be misdirected as a reader, the book failed miserably; if I was supposed to know what was going on even as the characters were misdirected, the book made it a misery to read about. The idea of this book is a lot more interesting than the actuality of it.