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!

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7
edited by Neil Clarke

I have come to look forward to Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes, the only (I think) best-of anthology going to cover all of the sf genre and nothing but the sf genre. I like getting a sense of the best of the genre has to offer, especially from the not free-to-read magazines, which often get a lot less attention online, and the original anthologies, which rarely cross my radar. I pepper the stories from them in among my other reading; this year that meant it took me about six months to get through the thirty-one stories collected in this volume. If I had a complaint, it would simply be that the pandemic has put the series behind and it still hasn't caught up: volume 7 came out in 2023 but collects stories originally published in 2021.

Collection published: 2023
Contents published: 2021
Acquired: September 2023
Read: October 2023–March 2024

As always, there's a lot to like here even when every story isn't exactly to my taste, and I appreciate the anthology introducing me to writers I haven't (as far as I remember, anyway) previously experienced. My favorite in this volume was the very first story, "Muallim" by Ray Nayler, which I previously wrote up here, a neat story about the uses to which a remote Asian village puts a UN educational robot that the its benefactors didn't quite intend. But that doesn't mean it was all downhill from there or anything. Other highlights included:

• "Proof by Induction" by José Pablo Iriarte. This was a 2022 Hugo finalist, so I had read it before, but it's a neat story about digital consciousness uploading and what some of the implications of that might be.
• "The Pizza Boy" by Meg Elison. A neat tale about a pizza delivery boy... in space! Where he works is a war zone, and the lengths he has to go to to gather ingredients are often illegal. Fun but serious at the same time, which is how I like my fiction.
• "I'm Waiting for You" by Kim Bo-young. Complicated story about a man taking a relativistic flight so that he can line up with one being taken by his fiancée, so they will keep their ages consistent at their wedding, only then his flight is delayed, so she has to adjust, so then he has to adjust, and it all gets quite convoluted and sad.
• "Hānai" by Gregory Norman Bossert. Aliens come to Hawaii to track down a woman who allegedly committed an enormous anthropological crime. Well observed character work and strong prose, neat exploration of a variety of cultural differences.
• "The Equations of the Dead" by An Owomoyela. A kid in a criminal organization is supposed to eliminate someone he's fallen in love with... and then ends up getting in way over his head, in a story involving mind uploads.
• "Complete Exhaustion of the Organism" by Rich Larson. I didn't totally know what was happening here but I very much enjoyed it anyway. Two people are on some kind of walk, trying to get away from some kind of weird society, but are followed by a child who comes back no matter how often they abandon it.
• "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer. Like "Proof by Induction," this was a reread, but I find Palmer's Bot 9 stories incredibly charming and well written, so I was happy to reread it. A little robot is the only hope of a massive spaceship that finds itself out of control, its human crew incapacitated, in what is possible hostile territory.

Those are just a few that stick out to on skimming back over the table of contents, but there are a number of other worthwhile stories here. There were only a couple that I did not enjoy; there were several stories included from an anthology called Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future, and these I found missed more than they hit, the kind of near-future futurism that dates too quickly because it's too timely; only three years later, I didn't feel like the authors had called it correctly. One of them was my least favorite story in the book, Ken Liu's "Jaunt," which was less a story and more like worldbuilding and background for a story. (It's a bit hermit crabby, actually.) But I have previously established on this blog that Ken Liu works for me much less often than he seems to work for other people.

Some of this content you can get online, of course (I have linked to them above when so), but the benefit of the volume is to get all of it in one place. Hopefully this series catches up soon!

Five Further Very Good Short Stories I've Read Lately

I've been enjoying these posts, so here's another one. This is the third in a series.

"The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka

In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God's words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G.

I read this late last year in an excellent anthology, much mentioned by me, called Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Kosmatka was a new-to-me author. The story was originally published in Asimov's in 2007, and doesn't seem to be legally available online in text form, but it was released as an audio reading in an episode of the StarShipSofa podcast, which I've linked to above.

The story is set in a universe where science ended up showing that six-day literal creationism is true, and follows a paleontologist in that world—who ends up involved in the discovery of the very real so-called "hobbits of Flores," which threaten to upend science. The worldbuilding is incredibly well done, the story is tightly written, and it got pretty intense. Much like a similar story for Ted Chiang, it's a neat way of exploring science and technology issues in our world. It was later expended into a novel called The Prophet of Bones; this got mixed reviews but I must pick it up.

"The Silence of the Asonu" by Ursula K. Le Guin 

To perceive the Asonu thus is almost inevitably to interpret their silence as a concealment. As they grow up, it seems, they cease to speak because they are listening to something we do not hear, a secret which their silence hides.

This Le Guin story was originally published (under the title "The Asonu") in an environmental magazine called Orion in 1998; it was subsequently incorporated into her 2003 story cycle Changing Planes, which is where I read it. It has since been reprinted many times, including in Lightspeed magazine, which is what I've linked to above.

Like most of the Changing Planes stories, it takes the reader onto another "plane" and explores the people who live there. The Asonu start out capable of speech, but gradually give it up as they grow older; in one example, an Asonu elder says eleven things in the last four years of his life. The story explores the way humans want to make sense of things, want utterances to have meaning, want to ascribe wisdom to what is cryptic. Like all of Le Guin, clever and kind of funny, but also dark.

"Muallim" by Ray Nayler 

“I must go to the school, or I will be late.”
     “Are you avoiding the subject?” Irada asked.
     “The first subject is math,” Muallim said. “There is no avoiding math.”
     “Hey – that was a pretty good joke!”
     “That was not a joke,” Muallim said as it walked out of the yard. “There really is no avoiding math.”

This is a more recent story than most of what I describe in this post; it's the very first story in the most recent volume of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and was originally published in Asimov's in 2021. It's about a UN inspector who goes to Khynalyg, a (real) remote village in Azerbaijan to evaluate the success of a program to use a robot instructor in schools. Somewhere (I forgot where now) I found a negative review dismissing it as cliché, but I actually found it a sharply observed story about how interactions between different societies can surprise us, and how often technology is put to unexpected use. Clearly written, cleverly done.

"Five Sphinxes and 56 Answers" by Kij Johnson 

And, riddles solved, Phix kills herself. She has served her purpose in advancing the hero's story, and now she is extraneous, a potential plotline complication down the road when sex with his mother, his blinding, and his ignominious death should be driving the story; and so she is hustled off-stage. She throws herself from the column and dies.
     A life depends on the answers to the Sphinx's riddles: yours, if you are wrong—but hers, if you are not.

I read a volume of Kij Johnson stories last fall and overall enjoyed them, but this was probably my favorite. (It was originally published in an online litmag called Diagram, which ISFDB does not seem to know about.) It bounces back and forth between a take of the sphinx myth, a modern girl growing up who is captivated by riddles, and embedded riddles that resonate with the events of the story. Johnson is probably one of the best writers in terms of craft in the contemporary sf&f space, and this story certainly helps show that. Like much of her work, it's a striking reflection on the stories we tell and what we think of the nonhuman.

"History Report" by Simon Rich 

My Great-Grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom. After the two people had finished all the alcohol they’d been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch “Arrested Development.” “Arrested Development” was a non-“Spider-Man” show that you played by putting small, round disks into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge each other’s interest in becoming naked, without having to directly ask them. The way this worked was a little complicated, but my Great-Grandfather was able to explain all the steps. First, you asked the other person if they had seen “Arrested Development,” and they would respond, “Some, but not all of it.” This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes they’d missed. If they didn’t want to see you naked, they would say that they had to “finish a paper,” which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch “Arrested Development,” it meant that they probably wanted to see you naked. But here’s where it gets complicated: sometimes it didn’t mean that. Sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch “Arrested Development.”

Now, this story I discovered where I least expected it: driving home from dropping my family off at the airport, I didn't happen to bring my iPod and was thus forced to endure This American Life. The last segment of the episode I listened to was a reading of this, a 2022 New Yorker story about how two people fell in love, narrated by their great-grandson after everyone has left the Earth due to the climate apocalypse. (Unfortunately, Ira Glass introduces it with a joke about StoryCorps that made me confused about what it was trying to do at first.)

It's quite funny, it's nostalgic if you went to college and dated in the mid-2000s, and it's a pointed take on the things we say are important versus the things we actually act on. If you didn't go to college in the mid-2000s as I and evidently Simon Rich did, you might not find it very entertaining, but I suspect that most of the people who care about my recommendations for short fiction probably did.