Hugos 2025: Ballots for Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story

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.

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Best Novella

7. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

"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?"

This is the fifth novella in the "Singing Hills" cycle, about a traveling monk collecting stories; it is the fourth to be a Hugo finalist. Having read four of these now, I wish I found them more interesting. The premises always seem good but there's something too languid about them, they never really get off the ground or engage. This has some interesting twists, but largely at a point where I'd stopped caring. I don't actually a have strong opinion about whether this is better or worse than Navigational Entanglements, I found them about equally dull, but I guess I'll give the edge to something that's not an installment in a series that's been nominated three times already.

6. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

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.

5. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

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.

2. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar 

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.

1. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

"[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.

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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.

4. "Signs of Life" by Sarah Pinsker

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.

3. "The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea" by Naomi Kritzer

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.

2. "Lake of Souls" by Ann Leckie

"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.

1. "The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video" by Thomas Ha

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.

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Best Short Story

6. "Stitched to Skin Like Family Is" by Nghi Vo

“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.”

I said above that I haven't really enjoyed Vo's Singing Hills novellas very much, but last year I did really like her novelette "On the Fox Roads," an historical fantasy, so I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, I think this is probably a decent story that I just never figured out, a good example of me finding it easier to glom onto an sf premise than a fantasy one.

 

5. "Five Views of the Planet Tartarus" by Rachael K. Jones

The pilots do always try to hit as many as they can.

This is a piece of flash fiction about a prison planet. It's evocatively written, but I find flash fiction kind of tricky, especially in an sf context; this is more worldbuilding than a story.

 

4. "Marginalia" by Mary Robinette Kowal

“I have misjudged many things very badly and I ask your forgiveness.”

I thought this was perfectly okay. It's set in a fairy-tale world beset by giant snails; the main character is a working-class woman who helps the lord whose estate she lives on defeat one. But that's about it, I felt, except for an overly long epilogue about what happens to everyone later. I get what happened but I didn't think there was much of a hook here. Kowal is a competent writer, so it's well told, but so what? More to my taste than "Five Views," but I didn't think trying to do something as interesting as "We Will Teach You How to Read."†

3. "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" by Caroline M. Yoachim

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.

2. "Three Faces of a Beheading" by Arkady Martine 

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.)

1. "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

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.

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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!)

* Well, actually five, since I also finished my last Lodestar finalist on June 7 and my last Best Graphic Story one on June 11. But those are other posts.

† 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... 

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8

The eighth volume of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year was released in 2024, collecting the best short fiction of 2022. (The series fell behind a year thanks to COVID and has unfortunately not managed to catch up yet.) As I usually do, I dipped in and out of it, reading a story every now and again between other books, stretching my reading across about five months.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8
edited by Neil Clarke

Collection published: 2024
Contents published: 2022
Acquired: September 2024
Read: October 2024–March 2025

As always I enjoyed the experience of catching up on the year's best short fiction, much of which I had not read. (I think there were just two Hugo finalists in here, even though, as always, much of what's here would have been quite competitive on a Hugo ballot in my opinion.) My very favorite story in the book I've already written up here: "If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt. This tells the story of three women making a transcontinental road race in a postapocalyptic United States. Strong worldbuilding, great characterization. Other highlights included: (I will link to the story in question if it has a free and legal online version somewhere)

• "The Dragon Project" by Naomi Kritzer. About genetically engineering custom animals, this story is—like a lot of Kritzer's work—cute and light but effectively done.
• "Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist" by Isabel J. Kim. Neat metafictional piece about being the girlfriend of the main character in a cyberpunk dystopia, and the way she uses tropes to extend her own life. Stylishly told, cleverly written. My second encounter with Kim but hopefully not my last.
• "The Historiography of Loss" by Julianna Baggott. Sharp and creepy story about a technology where people can simulate deceased loved ones. Similar premise to "Proof by Induction," I guess, but goes in a very different but just as effective direction.
• "The Plastic People" by Tobias S. Buckell. I feel like I am always enjoying random stories by Buckell that I happen across; I probably should read a collection of them someday. Horrifying but great story about rich kids who adopt a climate refugee from the Earth's surface and are incapable of treating it like a human being.
• "Mender of Sparrows" by Ray Nayler. Hard to discuss this one without giving a lot away, but I thought it was beautifully told and went in some unexpected directions. Like Buckell, Nayler seems like someone I should seek out more. 
• "The Past Life Reconstruction Service" by Zen Cho. I always really enjoy Cho's short fiction, and this was no exception; a rich guy keeps exploring past lives to try to get over an ex-lover. Acutely observed characterization.
• "Solidity" by Greg Egan. Over on r/printSF, Egan is praised for the rigor of his hard sf, but this is one of those stories by him that demonstrates he has a more dynamic range than even his devotees often grant him. People start slipping between realities, but in subtle, uneasy ways; you can be replaced, but only by someone who could plausibly be in the same situation. So how do people hang on to reality, and to each other, in such a trying circumstance? What would you do if you could never find your loved one again?
• "Two Spacesuits" by Leonard Richardson. Many years ago, I read and very much enjoyed Richardson's novel Constellation Games, but have never read anything else by him. This was fun but weird. A guy's parents start doing weird stuff because of... alien YouTube videos?

Most years there's at least one story whose inclusion I find inexplicable, but I didn't experience that this time around; indeed, I was skeptical of "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi going in, having read it before, but ended up enjoying it more this time around. Looking over the 2023 Hugo finalists again, I do think there are two notable omissions here (S. L. Huang's "Murder by Pixel" and Samantha Mills's "Rabbit Test") but both are in Clarke's 2021 recommended reading list at the back.

As always, if you like short sf, this is an indispensable read... at this point, it's the only sf best-of still going!

Hugos 2024: Ballots for Novel, Related Work, and Lodestar

Here is my second set of Hugo rankings for this year, covering everyone's most favorite categories: the book-based ones. Best Novel, Best Related Work (usually but not always a book), and Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo).

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Best Novel 

[UNRANKED] Starter Villain by John Scalzi

 

Another year, another glib-sounding John Scalzi novel for a Hugo finalist. This one is, I think, about a sarcastic cat who becomes a supervillain? It is impossible for me to imagine liking a John Scalzi take on this concept, based on all previous John Scalzi that I have read, so like last year's Kaiju Preservation Society, I have given it a pass. If it somehow wins, I guess I will read it in 2054 when my project to catch up on unread Hugo winners reaches 2024. Maybe by then I will be nostalgic for John Scalzi!

 

5. Witch King by Martha Wells

 

I totally bounced off this book. Though I slogged all the way to the end, I could not tell you who the characters were or what they were trying to do. Such is, in general, my reaction to epic fantasy. Lots of goofy names and obscure terms. I don't think it was bad, probably, but it was very much not for me; an easy placement at the bottom of my ballot.

4. Translation State by Ann Leckie

 

I enjoyed this novel but did not love it. It's solid and serviceable, but I feel like a better novel with the same ingredients was in reach of Leckie. I think my placement of this versus Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is ultimately pretty arbitrary; both books have interesting set-ups they don't quite deliver on. In the end, I gave Chakraborty the edge because Leckie previously won a Best Novel Hugo, whereas Chakraborty hasn't even been a finalist before.

3. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

This book was fun, and did some great stuff, but though I enjoyed it a lot, the ending prevented me from finding the book as a whole great. (As always, read the full review linked above for the details.)

2. The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

As I said in my review of this book, it was complicated and strange, and a bit of a mishmash, but ambitious and highly intriguing. Thus, I feel like it slots in here—I probably enjoyed it about the same as Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, but it's aiming to do more than it, and thus seems to be the kind of thing the Hugos should reward. On the other hand, I think Some Desperate Glory is definitely more successful at doing what it's aiming to, and was more clearly enjoyable, so it gets the edge.

1. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

If your book make me gasp aloud from sheer delight at one point, then I think it is probably going to rank pretty highly. This felt like the one to unseat even though it was the first one I read. Building on previous winners like Ancillary Justice but going in new directions too, exactly the kind of thing the Hugos should go around awarding.

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Best Related Work

[UNRANKED] Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History History, Volumes 2 and 3 by Yang Feng / 雨果X访谈 (Discover X), presented by Tina Wong

 

Last year, the first volume of Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History was a Hugo finalist; last year there was no English translation. The same is true of volumes 2 and 3 this year. I imagine this is a magisterial work, and it seems like exactly the kind of thing that ought to be a Hugo finalist, but I have no way of knowing if it's any good. If I were to rank it, however, I would give it a slight edge over Discover X, which is a podcast—but one that is not eligible in the usual category of Best Fancast because it is professionally produced. Discover X is Chinese but according to the Hugo voter packet, does do English-language episodes... but I have no desire to listen to a podcast, sorry not sorry.

4. The Culture by Iain M. Banks

There are probably people to whom this book is very exciting, but I am not one of them. The late Iain Banks was famously the author of the Culture novels, and this collects various meticulous drawings he made depicting spaceships, locations, vehicles, and weaponry from that series. The problem is that I have read just one Culture story, the novella "The State of the Art," and though I very much enjoyed it, and I have been meaning to get around to reading more Culture books, most of what was collected here utterly lacked significance. I spent less than an hour paging through it, and that was it. But if you know what these spaceships were, you would probably be very impressed!

3. A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller

This is a collection of reviews and criticism by the late Maureen Kincaid Speller (1959–2022), a British sf critic. I found it tough going at first, and I would have to fault the arrangement of the book and some of the editorial choices for that. The book begins with a number of essays by Speller on broad topics, but no context is given for them, not even dates of original publication, which makes them hard to digest. If Speller is commenting on the low quality of the Hugo Award shortlist, it makes a big difference if we are talking 2005 or 2015, but you have to look that up in the back of the book; many of the pieces are clearly intervening in early 2000s sf blog discourse... but how? There are then a number of reviews of anthologies, which I don't think show Speller (or any critic) off at her best; these kind of reviews can only skim the surface of an individual story and don't have a strong sense of argument. Finally, about halfway through the book we get to reviews of individual novels, movies, and television programs, and suddenly Speller snaps into focus as an incisive, thoughtful critic. There were no reviews of books I had actually read, but as a good reviewer ought, Speller gives you a sense of what these books were doing, how well they did it, and why you might want to read them; I have jotted several titles down on my always-increasing list of books to get from the library. I was more likely to have seen some of the films discussed (Arrival, The Force Awakens, The Hobbit), and these presented incisive takes even when I disagreed with them. I think if these reviews focused on single texts had come first, I would have had a better sense of Speller and her philosophy which would have let me better understand her takes in some of the sf conversations. So, worth reading if you like sf criticism (and I certainly do), but not as strong a showing for Speller's work as I think could have been made. I would be fine with it winning, but it was not as consistently interesting as City on Mars.

2. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

This is a nonfiction book that goes into meticulous detail about the challenges of space colonization, in Earth orbit, on the moon, and on Mars, from both a scientific and legal perspective. Lots of good details, lively writing. My main takeaway was that however hard you think space colonization might be, it's much much harder, way harder than it's commonly portrayed by science fiction stories, or by the tech billionaires currently trying to set up Ayn Randian utopias on Mars. Not about science fiction per se, but clearly "related" to it; I enjoyed it a lot and keep thinking about tidbits from it months after reading it.

1. All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays by Niall Harrison

This is a collection of (as the subtitle indicates) reviews and essays by the British sf critic Niall Harrison, whose work and even name was previously unknown to me. I found this much more successful than the Kincaid Speller book above, probably because it's both better focused and better organized. The reviews here are all of works published 2005-14, and are arranged in order of publication of the work reviewed. What quickly emerges is a sense of argument, as Harrison probes the changes the genre of sf&d was undergoing in what was in retrospect a pretty key period for how we now understand it. As he lays out in the introduction, 2005-14 roughly takes you from Racefail to the Sad Puppies, an era of increasing deliberation about diversity in sf&f; it's also an era where people started increasingly dealing with climate change in sf&f in meaningful ways. What I really like about Harrison as a critic is how he puts the individual works he reviews into conversation with the broader genre; you get a very clear sense of what these books are up to. His reviews of anthologies are strikingly strong, and there were a large number of books here I had not read—but now want to—so he's doing a good job of not sticking to the expected mass market US sf&f. The end of the book has a number of essays; two of these in particular were what tipped the book over into first-place status for me. One combines three different reviews into a meditation on how we articulate the history of sf&f, the other is an overview of several different anthologies of short Chinese sf, but instead of going through them book by book, he covers them in order of the stories' original publications, which gives a sort of partial history of the genre in China. Overall, this is exactly the kind of thing I want out of the Best Related Work Hugo.

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Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

[UNRANKED] Promises Stronger than Heartbreak by Charlie Jane Anders

This is a sequel to two previous finalists; the first book in the series placed in 2022, and the second in 2023. Though I have liked some of Anders's other work, I found the first book in the series excruciatingly tedious, and thus have no incentive to read further books—I'm not that much of a completist. So I just left it off my ballot.

6. Abeni's Song by P. Djèlí Clark

This is an African-influenced fantasy novel about a young girl whose village is destroyed; she goes and lives with a witch and then assembles a group of friends to go take down her village. Though I have enjoyed some of Clark's short fiction, I haven't found his novels to be to my taste. I thought the main character's reactions to things weirdly absent, the chapters seemed long without going anywhere, the assembly of a group incredibly fast and convenient, and the climax unearned. I never cared about anything in this book, and it didn't seem to be working very hard to make me want to. Like other works of African-influenced fantasy I have read (e.g., Children of Blood and Bone), the cultural elements felt grafted on; it came across as a very generic work of YA fantasy.

5. No Award

I'm sorry, but I can muster up no enthusiasm for Abeni's Song, which seems to me to typify one of the problems the Hugo Awards often have: once a writer gets on the ballot for something actually quite good (Clark has written some good short sf), the nominators start reading everything that person produces, and thus they get on the ballot even for mediocre work. (See also: Asimov getting on the ballot and even winning for Foundation's Edge.)

4. The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix

My wife is a big fan of Nix's Sabriel books, but I had not read anything by him before. This is a sequel to another of his books (The Left-Handed Booksellers of London), but I found that it largely stood on its own, except that it never clearly delineated the difference between left- and right-handed booksellers. Anyway, it's about a secret order of "booksellers" that combat dangerous magical entities; here they have to prevent one particular one from rising up and obtaining great power through sacrificing innocent victims on the solstice. I found it cute and charming without being precious or twee—quite an accomplishment these days. A lot of fun ideas, and I would loop back and read the first book, but it didn't set my world on fire. Pretty easily slots into the middle of my rankings.

3. Unraveller by Frances Hardinge

If my review of Unraveller linked above reads like damning with faint praise, you'd be right. I often struggle to rank the middle of my ballots. It's clear to me that Abeni's Song is the worse of the five books that I read and To Shape a Dragon's Breath the best. But how do the others slot in? Though I enjoyed Liberty's Daughter, I feel like Unraveller was ultimately richer in that it was trying to do more—but I also feel like Unraveller didn't totally mine the rich vein of metaphor it had opened up. So I put Liberty's Daughter higher than Unraveller. On the other hand, Sinister Booksellers also had the vibe of being "more successful if less ambitious"... yet for some reason I wouldn't put it above Unraveller even if I did enjoy it. Anyway, take it all to say that my 2nd through 4th places are pretty arbitrary in one sense... but in another sense I would probably be fairly happy if Unraveller won but less so if Sinister Booksellers did, and maybe that's the ultimately tiebreaker.

2. Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer

This is a "fix-up" of six novellas originally published in F&SF, about a teenage girl living on a libertarian seastead in the near future. I do like Krtizer, but going in I was a bit skeptical, because I didn't see how that might capture what I like about her work, which is (as I said in my review of her Best Novelette finalist for this year) that "she tells stories about the hard work we do to maintain community." But Kritzer finds a place for that here, as what her protagonist discovers is that even in an every-man-for-himself environment, people still form community and help each other. I don't think it's a perfect book—the somewhat jerky movement of plot betrays its origins as six separate stories, the ending leaves perhaps slightly too many threads and ideas unexplored—but overall I enjoyed it a lot and found it very readable. Neat sense of a possible world, and I liked how that world was slowly unspooled. (Fun fact: I asked my local library to purchase this, and though they did, they reclassified it from "Teen" [where I put it since it was a Lodestar finalist] to "Adult.")

1. To Shape a Dragon's Breath: The First Book of Nampeshiweisit by Moniquill Blackgoose

One of the things I love about genre fiction is that sense of dialogue, the idea that later books are in conversation with earlier books. I don't know what author Moniquill Blackgoose was actually thinking, but it very much seemed to me that this book was in dialogue with Temeraire and Harry Potter, among others. The main character is a native American woman who finds a dragon egg, in a world where dragons are fairly common, but native dragons largely died out from a plague when European settlers came to America. Temeraire shows us dragons all around the world, of course, but from Laurence's perspective; here, we get a sense of how native culture would deal with them differently. The protagonist must enroll in a white dragon school in order to be allowed to keep her dragon, and here the book feels like a very interesting take on Harry Potter and its ilk, with Blackgoose exploring the dynamics of class and race that underlie privilege, but which authors like Rowling do not meaningfully engage with. It's a slow burn, no big action sequences or anything, but that's exactly what I wanted out of this. I often say (borrowing from, I think, Jo Walton) that sf stories are mystery stories where the world itself is the mystery, and I loved that aspect of this book, as we slowly figure out how this alternate world functions the exploring our protagonist's place in it. Exactly what I want out of my YA fantasy, and I would gladly read the sequel whenever it is published; I had to stop myself from evangelizing about this book to everyone I interacted with.

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Final Thoughts

It's funny—a lot like Best Novella and Best Short Story, I am happy to see a more diverse array of finalists, but also like Best Novella and Best Short Story, I don't think this resulted in a much stronger set of finalists in the end. There were two authors I had never even heard of (Chandrasekera and Tesh), and a third I was only dimly aware of and who was a new finalist (Chakraborty). And yes, we had three returning finalists (Scalzi, Wells, and Leckie), but only in one of those cases was the novel a sequel to a previous finalist. On paper, it was a strong, interesting set of finalists. But though I enjoyed my top four, and was glad to read all of them, it was an easy ranking; only Some Desperate Glory feels remotely competitive, only Some Desperate Glory seemed to be doing something really interesting and, well, novel.

Related Work, on the other hand, was great. Four really interesting books, none of which I would ever have come across without the Hugo Awards. Some years this category can baffle me, but this year is exactly what I want out of it. The same goes for the Lodestar; sure, some stuff wasn't great, but I am very happy to have discovered both the Kritzer and the Blackgoose, and I'm always happy to have an excuse to read more Hardinge.

Prediction-wise, I feel pretty uncertain in all three categories. I think maybe Some Desperate Glory for Best Novel, but maybe that's just my own biases; it seems a bit polarizing. I doubt my personal favorite will win Related Work; I am kind of worried nostalgia will give it to Banks, but my suspicion is the Weinersmith will be everyone's second choice and thus it will win on transfers. As for the Lodestar, the Hugo voters continually baffle me in this category, so it could be literally anyone.

Hugos 2024: Ballots for Novella, Novelette, and Short Story

And here it is—the first of my posts tallying up my Hugo ballots. This one covers the works in the various short fiction categories. As is my usual practice, I have ranked each category from lowest to highest, and linked to either full reviews I have written of the relevant books, or places you can read the stories on the Internet for free.

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Best Novella

6. "Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet" by He Xi

"If tube worms had pessimists, they would definitely shout: 'Shit! Human beings have come to snatch our hydrogen sulfide and tasty water!'"

Works originally published in foreign languages become reeligble for the Hugo Awards upon their first English publication; hence, this is one of three Chinese-language finalists that is eligible because it was translated in 2023 in the anthology Adventures in Space. (It was originally published in 2010.) It's about a colonization effort, and concerns the genetic divergence of a group of "pioneers" altered to function on a water world in space. I found it long on exposition, and full of interchangeable boring characters.

5. "Seeds of Mercury" by Wang Jinkang

"In short, in organic evolution, the tendency to cooperate is everywhere and grows stronger. For example, the scope of human cooperation has extended from individual to family, to community, to nation, to different races, even to wildlife beyond human beings. [...] I think the next step for human transcendence will be integration with alien life."

This is another translation of a Chinese story from Adventures in Space, originally from 2002. Like "Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet," it's a very technical, exposition-focused story—Chinese sf does not seem in step with what is happening in Anglophone sf. Which is fine, of course, but I am the one being asked to vote on these stories! This has an interesting premise, of an attempt to create artificial life that translates into a moral duty to that life, but it seems to me that it skips over the interesting stuff and spends lot of time on the boring stuff. Plus I found the writing pretty stilted, with lots of awkward dialogue and the particularly terrible choice of referring to the protagonist's wife in narration as "wifey"! (All three finalists from Adventures in Space have the same translator, so I don't know why this one would be noticeably worse, except if it was reflecting something in the original.) But it wasn't as boring as "Life Does Not Allow Us" so I will give it a slight edge... but I would not be excited to see either win.

I don't have access to the word counts, but I am a bit surprised to see either story classified as a novella, given they are each about fifty pages. Novelettes, surely?

 

4. Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

"but what was your grandfather to you but a thousand stories told over and over again?"

The fourth book in Vo's Singing Hills cycle about a traveling monk and their talking bird collecting stories, and the third that I have read; in this one they return to their monastery but find out things have changed in their absence. I find that these books err too much on the side of "contemplative" for my tastes. It took an awful long time for me to figure out what the idea of the book actually was. I can see why other people might find them interesting, but I usually do not, and this was no exception.

3. Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

This is weak Kingfisher, as elucidated in my review linked above, but even weak Kingfisher is doing something I am broadly sympathetic to and interested in, so it clearly ought to go above Mammoths at the Gates and the two Chinese novellas. But even though I didn't love Mimicking of Known Successes, I feel like it was moving in more interesting directions than a fairy tale retelling.

2. The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

There were of course animal rights activists who argued that the animals shouldn't have been reconstituted to live in what was, essentially, captivity. [...] [But] many of the species in the mauzooleum had more space to wander around in than most human residential platforms offered. If they were in captivity on this inhospitable planet, then so were we.

This is a murder mystery set on a series of floating platforms connected by trains in the atmosphere of a gas giant. And not that the rest of the book is bad or anything, but that was definitely the best part; this is one of those sf books where the pleasure is in the discovery of a world and its complications and permutations. I found some of the character work a bit too understated for my tastes (what was the deal between the two protagonists?) but overall I enjoyed it even if I didn't love it.

1. Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Gisil lifted one bare shoulder, shrugging. She looked like she was part of the landscape: the long unadorned column of her black dress, the short dark cap of her hair. Like a pylon or a shadow on a cliff-face.

This, to me, was the clear standout of the novella category. It's set in the near future; a famous architect has recently died, forbidding access to his greatest creation, a house totally integrated with AI. But when the story begins a dead body has appeared in the house—how could either he or his killer have gotten in? I loved Martine's A Memory Called Empire, but aside from the evocative prose, this is very different, a trippy near-future thriller about how the spaces we live in and the functions we serve shape who we are. Obviously there is a lot of AI-focused sf these days, both in a general sense and on the Hugo ballot, and I found this had a lot more to say about it than, say, I AM AI. It has a lot of characters but also a strong sense of voice, as well as place. Expertly done, and it leaves me wanting more Martine, be it Teixcalaan or not. Basically exactly what I want out of an sf novella, an interesting idea explored thoroughly.

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Best Novelette 

6. "Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition" by Gu Shi

In thirty years—no, make it ten—none of this will be a problem anymore. My vision of the future simply surpasses theirs.

Born human, it is our freedom to choose where to live and which era to live in.

I wanted to like this more than I did. It's a hermit crab story, told in the form of an introduction to a book about my current bugaboo, life extension technologies. As I know from teaching my class about technologies of immortality, sf can often be very reactionary, and this story makes a strong case for some of the upsides. Unfortunately, I found the way the story was told made for pretty rough, pretty dry reading. I tried to imagine myself assigning in my class, and I couldn't, even though I think it raises a lot of interesting points worth discussing.

5. "Ivy, Angelica, Bay" by C. L. Polk

“You were good, and kind, and you were real, no matter what you were made of.”

This was a story about a witch using her powers to defend her neighborhood against gentrification, except the gentrifiers have dark magic on their side. It's got some interesting stuff going on to be sure, but it's just not really my kind of sf&f; nothing in it ever grabbed me. Stories where it's our world but there's magic and it's all hidden don't really do much for me. I like to read about different worlds! I'm sure it works for other people.

4. I AM AI by Ai Jiang

I AM AI.
     It isn't a lie. I am Ai, though not necessarily an actual AI.

This starts fairly strongly. The first-person narrator is a rare human creative worker in a world of AIs; she provides written content for her clients. But her clients don't even want human-generated content, they just want more unique and interesting AI-generated content, so she has to pretend to be an AI to keep up with her competition. But the harder things get for human creators, the more she has to keep augmenting herself cybernetically—making herself more and more like her competition. It's a cracker of a premise, delving into the very real issues forthcoming in our own world, and if it had finished as strongly as it started, I am sure I would have ranked it third or even second. Unfortunately, it has a bit of a cheeseball, simplistic conclusion that meant it ended up not dealing with the complexities of the situation it had set up, so I ended up enjoying it less than "One Man's Treasure," but it's still doing something I find interesting in a way that's not true of "Ivy, Angelica, Bay."

3. "One Man's Treasure" by Sarah Pinsker

“It looks to me like somebody hexed their gardener and left him for trash.”

Pinsker is one of my favorite writers of contemporary short sf&f, but I didn't find this to be one of her stronger works. Neat premise—in a world of magic, who are the people who dispose of magical trash?—and nice politics—how can the disadvantaged work against exploitation by the upper classes?—but probably a bit too long proportional to how much of interest actually happens.

2. "The Year Without Sunshine" by Naomi Kritzer

“It’s very sad and all, but it’s not like the lady who needs oxygen is going to get better,” he said. “You’re just delaying the inevitable.”

Tanesha gave him a narrow-eyed look. “You delay the inevitable every time you eat lunch.”

People (used to, anyway) talk about "hopepunk," and I am not sure it really exists, and if it does exist, I am not sure I like it... but I am coming to really like Naomi Kritzer, and I think that might be what she is doing. What if the most radical thing we could do in our disconnected world was reach out to other people and work together? (See also her story "Better Living Through Algorithms," below.) This is about a year in the near future where an unspecified disaster (we are told COVID was "one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster") has knocked out the Internet and cellular networks, led to gas shortages, and means everyone is subject to occasional brownouts. You're thinking—that's not very hopeful! But Kritzer is, because she tells stories about the hard work we do to maintain community, something that she does from a slightly different angle in her CatNet books; it also reminds me of some of Sarah Pinsker's near future sf. Anyway, good stuff.

1. "On the Fox Roads" by Nghi Vo

It’s a hard thing to stay in a form that’s not your own, even when you love the people who know you in it. It feels like flying when you can be what you really are, even if you love pretty dresses and golden jewelry.

Great, beautiful fantasy work. In Jazz Age, two Chinese-American bank robbers pick up a teenage partner, as they use the magic fox roads to stay one step ahead of the law... but they can never outrun themselves. I haven't been very into Vo's "Singing Hills" novellas, but I thought this was excellent: beautifully told, evocative magic, and great character work. There's a fantastic sequence of the narrator running through Chicago near the end that just works perfectly.

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Best Short Story

7. "Answerless Journey" by Han Song

There is still The Third.

This is a Chinese-original story (see Best Novella above), a translation of a story originally published in 1995! Thirty years old, but it feels much older, one of those old-school science fiction stories that really depends on a twist in the last lines but doesn't have much else going for it. I did really debate how to rank this versus "Mausoleum's Children"—I did know what was happening here but wasn't sure I really cared to! In the end, I decided that the de Bodard is much more indicative of the state of the genre as I understand it; I am prepared to believe someone thinks her work is the best science fiction published in 2023 even if I don't, but I am not prepared to believe that anyone thinks that of this story.

6. "The Mausoleum's Children" by Aliette de Bodard

“At least here we’re safe.”

“Here? Where they work you to the bone?”

“It’s no different elsewhere, is it?”

This is the fifth work of short fiction by Aliette de Bodard I have read in my time voting in the Hugo Awards; I think I may have to accept that I just do not "vibe" with whatever it is she is trying to do. I found this boring and impenetrable, but she clearly has a devoted fan base.

5. "Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times (Three Gourmet Delicacies)" by Baoshu

"It could be said, that they devote their entire bodies, no, their entire lives, to eating! They are the world's most profound epicures! How marvellous!"

This is what Isaac Asimov would call a "technology-dominant" or "gadget" science fiction story, one focused on the implication of particular technologies. In this case, it's a technology that lets you taste things other people are eating as you yourself eat, in order to enhance your culinary experience. We get three different examples of it in action. Clever thought experiments... but not really a story, or at least, not a story in the sense that I find sfnally interesting. My ranking is kind of arbitrary, but Clark does have better writing (this is probably more the fault of Baoshu's translator, admittedly), so I ranked it below him; I knew what this story was actually about, so I ranked it above de Bodard.

4. "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" by P. Djèlí Clark

“What could you possibly have bought from Mermen?” When he didn’t answer she went on, as she often did to fill his silences. “Arthur says their kind should be run out and put back to sea. We didn’t conquer them just to have them infest our cities.”

Speaking of people I'm much less into than other Hugo voters, Clark has occasionally produced stories I find really interesting (e.g., "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington," Ring Shout), but this is not one of them. It's not bad, but it's very straightforward; the title is the most interesting part. A Victorian man in a world where the British Navy goes around subjugating Mermen buys a kraken egg, but this turns out to be part of an implausibly complicated plot by Captain Nemo (of Verne fame) to undermine the British Empire. Okay, sure, but the characters are boring and the prose nothing to sing about.

3. No Award

I feel like recently I have been less prone to use "No Award" than I was in my earlier years of voting in the Hugos, but I did find the Best Short Story category pretty dismal this year. I can't countenance giving the Hugo to a gadget sf story, so I originally I was going to put No Award above "Tasting the Future Delicacy"... but as I was about to write this up, I realized the Clark is mediocre enough that I was willing to bump it up a place.

2. "The Sound of Children Screaming" by Rachael K. Jones

Children rarely get to feel so powerful. Children spend their days being told what to do and where to go. They don’t get to decide how they dress or what they eat. They aren’t allowed to get angry or to dislike anyone, and if an aunt or grandpa wants a hug, the child will have to give it.

This is set during a school shooting in an elementary school; hiding in a wardrobe, the students and their teacher end up stumbling through a portal into a fantasy world. What's more dangerous: hiding in a closet in a world where "[e]veryone has a right to a gun. Nothing can take that away from you. What you lack is a right to the lives of your children"? Or being a child soldier in a magical world? This fits well into the contemporary genre of what I call "self-conscious portal fantasies" (e.g., Seanan McGuire's "Wayward Children" novellas), and I really got what Jones was doing a couple weeks after reading it, when my five-year-old mentioned that in a lockdown drill, their class had hidden in a wardrobe, and wasn't that a thing from the Narnia books? It's an ambitious story, and I think the ambition slightly outstrips the ability, in that I found the material dealing with school shootings more successful than the interrogation of the assumptions of portal fantasies, which didn't always ring true. But a strong story nonetheless.

1. "Better Living Through Algorithms" by Naomi Kritzer

“It’s like if Reddit Antiwork ran a productivity app.”

I recently had the opportunity to interview Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld, and I asked him where I thought the genre of science fiction is now and was going. He said climate change and artificial intelligence were the two things dominating the short sf market. Naomi Kritzer is one of the more thoughtful writers dealing with AI in her stories today; I like the way she's not a reactionary, how she thinks through what this technology might to do improve our lives. This one reminded me of a piece I heard on public radio a few years ago (probably on WNYC's On the Media), about how right now our phones recommend us things we know we want to do (which coffee store is best?) but ideally could improve our lives by recommending us things we don't know we want to do (walk an extra block and you will see a work of art that will change your life). Kritzer explores how such a technology might work, how our devices could help us be more present in the world instead of less. It's a charming piece of utopian fiction, and like all utopian fiction, it encourages us to make positive changes in the world even if they seem impossible.

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Overall Thoughts

After many frustrating years of Best Novella, I found this shortlist admirably diverse. Just two Tordotcom novellas! One from a different Tor imprint, one from Subterranean Press, and two from China. I wish the actual novellas were better, but I guess you can't have everything. I don't have a good sense of what will win this category. If Kingfisher was going to win, I think it would have been for last year's What Moves the Dead; I don't think Thornhedge is strong enough to take it. Nghi Vo won for the first Riverlands novella in 2021, but follow-ups don't usually win. So probably Rose/House or Mimicking of Known Successes? (If the posters on Reddit's r/Fantasy are indicative, Rose/House will crush it, and most other things will place below No Award!) That said, last year's win by Seanan McGuire for the sixth book in a series surprised me, so maybe I don't know what's up.

The other categories are fine, mostly the usual suspects these days (Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Tor.com—sorry, Reactor), but each has one or two with a nicely unexpected source. I bet Kritzer will win one of the two, but I don't know which! Best Novelette was the strongest of these three categories; while I'm glad the Best Short Story finalists came from diverse sources they were in practice actually pretty crappy.