Hugo Awards 2026: Ballots for Dramatic Presentation and Graphic Story

Finally, here come my rankings for the "visual" Hugo categories, namely, the two Dramatic Presentation categories, and then Best Graphic Story or Comic. (Is it still called that? I feel like they changed the name.) Unlike most people I know, I am very good at keeping up with reading and very bad at keeping up with tv. So while I finished my Hugo reading three or four days before the deadline, and even had some time for non-Hugo reading throughout, I had to watch two movies and four episodes of tv during my last week, and I finished my last film at midnight the day before votes were due at noon.

(Get yourself a wife who, when you sleep until 11am, wakes you up and checks that you remembered to submit your Hugo ballot on time!) 

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

[UNRANKED] The Wheel of Time 3x04: "The Road to the Spear", written by Rafe Lee Judkins, directed by Thomas Napper

 

Back in 2022, I watched a previous episode of this show when it was a finalist, and I accidentally watched the wrong one first, so I have been bored by this show twice already. I certainly wasn't about to subject myself to it a third time.

 

5. Murderbot 1x10: "The Perimeter", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Paul Weitz 

Say what you will about The Murderbot Diaries, and I have, but the thing the books undoubtedly have going for them is the cynical narration, from a character who largely wants nothing to do with other people and their feelings. Strip that out, and you mostly get a bunch of schmaltz.

4. Murderbot 1x09: "All Systems Red", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Roseanne Liang

 

If an episode of a serialized show is a Hugo finalist, I typically don't watch the other episodes. You either wow me on your own, or you do not. I had a slight advantage coming into "All Systems Red," though, because I have read the first Murderbot book on which the first season is based. I thought this was decent but a bit broad; I was not very convinced by the actors playing all the humans. Some good jokes, but the occasionally sitcomesque tone was jarring. 

 

3. Plur1bus 1x01: "We Is Us", written and directed by Vince Gilligan

 

This was a very well done first episode of a show with an interesting premise that I will probably never watch any more of. Works on its own in the sense that you can understand it just fine; doesn't work on its own in that it's all setting up interesting ideas, so what will be done with these interesting ideas is still to come. I thought the actress playing the main character was very good and there was some striking imagery. I wish a friend hadn't told me the premise at some point, because I think it would have been interesting to work it out while watching it. Much more involving than Murderbot.

 

2. Severance 2x10: "Cold Harbor", written by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller

 

This feels less like a nomination for this specific episode of Severance and more a nomination for the second season as a whole... and indeed, two years ago, the first season as a whole was a finalist. I don't know why that didn't happen again this year. I enjoyed the second season a lot, if not quite as much as the first—I love the premise and the leads, and there's lots of great character work and good twists, but my feeling is that some of the decisions made by the antagonists would fall apart under scrutiny. (Why can they hire whole marching bands but not, like, pay one guy to watch where Mark S. goes?) Still, I enjoyed the season finale a lot, which delves into some of the ethical implications of severance in a really interesting way... but the season ends on a cliffhanger, just like the last one did, so the pleasures of resolution are continually deferred, and that's a thing I just hate about contemporary television. Thus, even though I feel like this was probably better than Doctor Who in most senses, I am penalizing it.

 

(Interesting to note that three of the five tv shows are Apple ones. Are they the only interesting streaming service left at this point?) 

 

1. Doctor Who 2x05: "The Story & the Engine", written by Inua Ellams, directed by Makalla McPherson

 

To me, the best episode of the second season of the largely mediocre Disney Plus Doctor Who revival was "Lux," where the Doctor and Belinda battle an evil cartoon. But this one, set almost entirely within a Nigerian barber's shop, about the power of stories, was probably second best. Not perfect, but bubbling over with ideas, and something you couldn't have done with any other Doctor. Not Doctor Who at its greatest, but largely more interesting to me than the stuff I've ranked below it.

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

6. Frankenstein, directed and written by Guillermo del Toro

 

Look, maybe this is unfair, but I have more opinions about Frankenstein than probably most anyone you know, and this adaptation has largely uninteresting takes on a novel that I find intensely interesting. I was not a fan of reducing it all to Freudian family melodrama, especially its very unearned ending. I liked the earlier parts of the film better; the introduction of (essentially) Victorian Elon Musk was an interesting idea (though it doesn't really go anywhere in the end), and the bit where jaunty exciting music played while Victor was cutting up corpses was probably the best part of the entire film. If it had all been that clever and that striking, I would have ranked it much higher. Too many fight scenes; the gruesome violence of those got old fast.

 

(I could be wrong, but I think this is the first Frankenstein movie I have ever seen! Seems weird that that could be true after forty years, but I am pretty sure it is.) 

 

5. KPop Demon Hunters; directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans; written by Danya Jimenez, Hannah McMechan, Maggie Kang, and Chris Appelhans

This movie has been watched in my household many times since it came out last summer, and the music has been played many times more. I am very familiar with all the music videos. But I had actually never seen the movie all the way through until I was forced to when it was announced as a Hugo finalist. It was cute enough. Not deep, but I did really like "What It Sounds Like," which I think is beautiful stuff. If it had only all been that good!

4. Sinners, directed and written by Ryan Coogler

I thought this was a well done vampire story with good period details. Surprisingly funny, which I had not expected from the somewhat earnest discourse around it. ("Maybe she ain't white" made me rewind to make sure I heard it right!) Some great moments overall, just not totally my kind of thing, so not as interesting to me as Andor but certainly more interesting than Demon Hunters. Anyway, anything from this point up strikes me as a totally worthy winner.

3. Andor Season Two, created by Tony Gilroy

In 2023, two episodes of Andor season one were finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), which didn't really work, as Andor is one of those shows where the whole season is one big story. Thankfully, this year, the entire season was a finalist in Long Form. I know everyone loves Andor, but having seen a whole season of it now, I find it a very frustrating show. I think it's very well shot, it has lots of great, interesting characters (bar, weirdly, Andor himself), and every now and again there's a beautiful moment that just hits it out of the park: Mon Mothma dancing at her daughter's funeral, Mon Mothma's speech, the Ghorman massacre, Kleya Marki's infiltration of the hospital. But this series is structured as four three-episode stories, and it was hard for me to shake the feeling that every single one of these could have been cut down to two episodes and the show wouldn't have lost a thing. Its cardinal sin is that too often it's just boring! So I am ranking it above KPop Demon Hunters (clearly it is doing interesting things) but below Superman (which was never boring).

2. Superman, directed and written by James Gunn

I wanted to see this last summer (it came out on my birthday, even!), but didn't mange to get around to it. Now, having finally seen it, I would say it's good but not great. Clearly conceived as an anti–Man of Steel (every time the film shows massive devastation, it carefully demonstrates both that the area has been evacuated and that Superman scoops up innocent bystanders), it leans into a lot of stuff I like about the character, and obviously was made by someone who—like me—thinks of the Donner movies and the comics of the 1980s and '90s as the "default" version of the DC universe. Given I recently reread all the JLI comics, I of course appreciated the Guy Gardner stuff, though I wish Metamorpho's personality was more like that iteration; as someone from Cincinnati, I of course appreciated the Hall of Justice. But I feel like it never quite grabbed me; I found the emotional conflict supposedly at the heart of the film kind of distant and unclear. But anyway, obviously more to my taste than Andor, but not as interesting to me as Mickey 17.

1. Mickey 17, directed and written by Bong Joon Ho

This movie is about a guy who can't die—or rather, can die as many times as his masters need him to do so—sent into space as expendable support on a colonization mission. The boss of the mission is a sort of combined Donald Trump/Elon Musk figure; the movie as a whole uses these ideas of immortality to think about who we consider expendable in lots of different concepts, but especially imperialism and capitalism. Lots of weird tonal shifts, which I always like, and good, if dark, jokes.

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Best Graphic Story or Comic

6. A Girl and Her Fed, scripts by K. B. Spangler, art by Ale Presser

 

This is a webcomic that has been running since 2006; its third act concluded in 2025. (It's apparently not concluded yet, but the author's blog indicates Act 4 won't begin for a couple years.) Under the way the Hugo Awards handle serial narratives, that means the entire comic is eligible for the Hugo Awards as a unit. However, only the 2025 strips, which run sixty pages, are included in the Hugo voter packet. On the other hand, reading the comic since the beginning would mean reading over two thousand strips... and the art started out quite terrible! So I decided to read the comic from the beginning of Act 3, which started in 2020, and is a more manageable 469 pages, though I did skim some of the very early strips for context.

 

Anyway, that means it's not totally the comic's fault I was often lost, but there are a lot of characters with a lot of history to keep track of here. That I didn't mind too much... what I did mind is that the actual stakes of the act where amorphous and unclear. I don't know if that would have been better if I'd read the whole thing or what; there's apparently a big time gap between acts 2 and 3, and from context, I think a lot of what confused me was new to Act 3. The basic thing here is that 1) ghosts are real, 2) seeing them has something to do with a brain chip (but I wasn't sure what; I think the chip lets you see ghosts but I also think there were unchipped characters who could see ghosts?), 3) the government is going to give everyone brain chips in order to connect minds to create collective empathy (the two leads are the president and first lady), 4) but this means everyone will also know about ghosts, causing a national freakout, so 5) they must figure out how to get the one without the other, and 6) contend with the Catholic Church, which has its own opinions on what people know about the afterlife. What I didn't get is why the president and first lady were so keen to give everyone brain chips. If they couldn't figure out a way to give people collective empathy without giving everyone ghost knowledge, then why not... just hold off? All the characters acted like there was a deadline of when the "Middle Bridge Project" was due to launch, but surely the launch date was chosen by the characters? It was also very unclear to me what the Catholic Church was actually trying to do. Like, they wanted to be in on it in some way... but what were they actually trying to do and how was it bad? I never really knew.

 

So with the stakes so unclear, I was pretty much doomed to not enjoy this.

 

Back in the 2000s, I was a voracious consumer of webcomics, and this struck me as "quirky" in a way very much typical of the era. It would have fit very well among the kind of stuff I read back then! It reads like a weird throwback in the 2020s, however.

 

(The good thing that came out of me reading this is that it spurred me to get the same creators' graphic novel Sidequested out of the library for my seven-year-old, and they loved it so much they read it three times in one week and then asked me to read it too.)

 

5. The Power Fantasy, Volume One: The Superpowers, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Caspar Wijngaard

 

Kieron Gillen is one of those writers who gets on the ballot no matter what he writes at this point: since I started voting in the Hugo Awards, he has been a finalist every year since 2020 except for 2024. Gillen is a good writer... but surely not that good. The Power Fantasy is a case in point. I like to flippantly refer to him as "a poor man's Brian K. Vaughan," but Power Fantasy is actually a poor man's Alan Moore or Warren Ellis: in its depiction "what would it really be like for there to be people with superpowers on Earth?", it seems to do little we didn't see already in Miracleman or The Authority. (The super-fetus is very clearly Miracleman-derived!) It even seems to be derivative of Gillen's own work; the squabbling group of superpowered humans with complex histories is right out of The Wicked + The Divine. Of course, one of the most obnoxious things a critic can do is write something off by telling you it's like some other thing they've already read... but I found this offered little original within the medium or genre, and it definitely felt like one of those things that thinks it's being original.

 

But at least I (mostly) understood what was going on, so I ranked it above A Girl and Her Fed. Hopefully this series doesn't become a perennial finalist in this category like Gillen's Once & Future was.

 

4. The Space Cat, script by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford

As I said in my full review, I thought this was fun but slight. I don't know that it feels particularly award-worthy... but at least it wasn't derivative, so I ranked it above The Power Fantasy.

3. Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon; script by Kelly Thompson; art by Hayden Sherman, Mattia De Iulis, et al.

As noted in my full review linked above, I found this solid, well-done superhero comics... but nothing transcendent despite some of the hype it has received. Similarly, I thought Space Cat was a solid, well-done example of its genre. So they pretty much rank equally to me; I broke the tie because I'm just more into the genre that Absolute Wonder Woman belongs to than I am the genre that Space Cat belongs to.

2. A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel: Book One of Earthsea by Fred Fordham

In the oddball Hugo category that is "Best Graphic Story," one common type of finalist over the last five years is the graphic novel adaptation of an acclaimed prose work: see 2021's Parable of the Sower (which won) or 2023's Dune (though that's technically the comic of the movie of the book!) or 2024's The Three-Body Problem. I feel like the appearance of these kinds of finalists on the ballot say more about 1) the original prose work, and 2) the limited graphic novel reading of the Hugo electorate than anything else. That said, Fred Fordham's adaptation of the first Earthsea novel is clearly the best of these adaptations to ever appear on the ballot. Fordham's art is beautiful, and overall, this reads as a comic in a way that, say, Parable of the Sower did not, with the images doing the storytelling and very effective use of panelling in the storytelling. The magic still manages to feel magical, even though it's been moved out of Le Guin's beautiful prose into (arguably) the more straightforward visual medium. I did think some episodes became a little too abbreviated to follow, but overall this was very effective. (It's not totally fair to the book, though, but I do think my reading experience was diminished by the PDF provided in the voter packet rendering each two-page spread as a single page, which made the pages kind of small when read on my tablet.)

1. The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio

If you read my review linked above, you will see that I was highly skeptical about 1) a picture book being a finalist in this category, which has up to now entirely been comics (despite picture books technically qualifying), and 2) it being a picture book not created by people who normally do picture books (if you are a parent, you will know there is normally nothing worse). But this turned out not only to be pretty good, but to be the strongest finalist this year! I don't know that I would have thought so in a different year (I would have ranked it third in 2025 or 2024, for example), but this year the category was weak, and I think Invisible Parade clearly had the best storytelling of everything I read from a graphic standpoint: not in the quality of the images qua images, but in the way the images tell the story from page to page.

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Overall Thoughts

I think that serialized streaming shows continue to be a point of difficulty for the Hugo Awards. Normally I'm loathe to propose adding categories, but I think Dramatic Presentation should be rejigged into three . I don't know what to call them, but duration-wise, they would be something like:

• <60 mins.: for single episodes of tv shows (or other short things; like Dirty Computer from a few years ago); hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that actually do work on their own
• 60-180 mins.: for films
• >180 mins.: for entire seasons of streaming television programs; hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that need their entireties to work, like Andor, Murderbot, and Severance

Right now, it's dumb that I have to judge "Cold Harbor" on its own when it clearly doesn't work on its own, but it's equally dumb that I'm comparing twelve hours of Andor to two hours of Mickey 17.

Overall, I thought both Dramatic Presentation categories just fine. I didn't love most of Short Form, but I appreciate that much of it is widely loved, so the category is presumably doing what it's meant to; as always, I am grateful to Long Form for introducing me to a couple interesting movies I probably never would have gotten around to otherwise (this year: Sinners and Mickey 17).

Best Graphic Story is the usual hodgepodge this year, but to be honest, it's probably been worse. A Girl and Her Fed was pretty bleh, but even that, I can appreciate the scale of the achievement. I suspect this category is still not really finding and rewarding the best of sf&f comics, but I also suspect it never will.

Hugo Awards 2026: Ballots for Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story

Since June, I have been writing up reviews for 2026 Hugo Award finalists that I have purchased; my usual practice is to do this for every Best Novel finalist and any finalist in other categories by authors who particularly interest me. Today, I begin posting my complete ballots with the short fiction categories: Best Novella, Novelette, and Short Story. 

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Best Novella

7. Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

The good news was that contracts were like anyone else: with a few shadowy exceptions, they wanted to survive.

This novella is about a bunch of robots in a future California that has seceded from the U.S. and given AIs citizenship, albeit with more limited rights than human beings. They end up deciding to open a noodle bar.

Many commenters have described this book as "cozy" (combine all the variants together, and it's the book's most popular tag on LibraryThing other than "science fiction," "fiction," "novella," and "2025"); others have objected that a book where the main characters all have past traumas (many of them were military robots) and are discriminated against can hardly be described as "cozy." To me, this indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre of cozy fiction (as it currently exists), which I think primarily has two components. The first is that though there may be some kind of traumatic backstory, all conflicts in the present day of the story are resolved with breezy ease. Oh, are you being review bombed? Well, it was trivially easy to get the website to take them down, and besides, you don't even need that website anyway. Is it after a complete environmental disaster? Well sure but people still eat out at fancy restaurants. The second is that there must be some kind of "found family"... and because even writers trying to imagine alternatives to capitalism can't escape the constraints of our contemporary consumerist culture, the only place you can find family or gain meaning in life is in the workplace. As you might intuit from all of this commentary, this book was bad in all the ways that the current seed of the genre, Legends & Lattes, is also bad.

It's also bad in new and different ways. I acknowledge that science fiction has a long and productive history of using robots as stand-ins to metaphorically explore issues of discrimination and personhood; there are a bunch of Next Generation episodes that do this with Data, for example. Automatic Noodle is very obviously doing this—the robots are sort of trans people and immigrants. But the thing about science fiction is that it works on two levels: the metaphorical and the literal. And on the literal level, this is a book about AIs literally taking over what is a human artistic activity! Like, man, I don't need to read this in 2026. Who would ever want to? There is a subplot, as I mentioned above, about robophobia, but the robophobic people are depicted as right-wing trolls secretly funded by the capitalist U.S. government. Oh yeah, it's definitely the capitalist right wing who are worried about AI and employment. I thought this take on the dynamics of AI, artistic expression, and employment was boneheadedly dumb. I can't believe Newitz wrote it, and I can't believe Tordotcom published it. This book about AIs being trained to do human jobs literally has a note in it saying the text of the book can't be used to train AIs! The AIs of the book are, of course, nothing like contemporary LLMs... but that's the problem, it doesn't work on a literal level at all, because in the year 2026, this isn't how anyone thinks about AI. They are no longer cute friends, they're a tool of capitalists who want to extract all the value they can from human intellectual endeavor. I very much do not need to read a book that renders that into something "cute"!

6. No Award

Reader, I hated it.

5. The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

"Ysabel," she said quietly, "do you... fancy that man?"
     She shrugged. "He's not so bad."
     "Bel, he's like a bit of bread that's been dropped in a pond!"

I barely remember what this was about even though I just read it a couple weeks ago (as of when I am writing this up). It's some kind of fairytale thing about two sisters. I don't really care about fairytale things usually (though I do remember liking El-Mohtar's "Seasons of Glass and Iron"), but at least it's not actively offensive like Automatic Noodle. (If you own the ebook edition, note that fully a third of its supposed 130 pages is really a preview for a short story collection by El-Mohtar.)

4. Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

"There's no call to go embarrassing a fellow by telling his aunt his actual feelings."

I really wanted to like this: it's an sf murder mystery set on a generation ship where inhabitants can reload their memories from backups when they die... and even transfer between bodies. Neat premise, and the main detective seems like a fun character. Unfortunately, I found the actual mystery pretty confusing; it felt to me like Dorothy wandered around a bit and then suddenly had the whole thing solved.

3. What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher 

Ursula Vernon's third "Sword Soldier" novella (as my linked review notes) is better than the second, but not as good as the first. I don't think I would have nominated this... but even so, it has a level of fun and competence of premise that is lacking from Murder by Memory, so here it goes in the middle tier of this year's finalists.

2. The Summer War by Naomi Novik

My full review is also linked to above. Like a lot of fiction on the ballot this year (see also: The River Has Roots, Cinder House, The Everlasting), it self-consciously uses fairy tale tropes to make a broader point about the way that stories can serve as straitjackets on how we imagine ourselves as people. It's an idea I'm broadly sympathetic to and interested in, but feel like I am encountering a bit too much... which isn't really any one author's fault, but still. Given that, though, I found this an enjoyable read that I would gladly see win—clearly in a tier above Murder by Memory et al. Like Cinder House, I felt like the end of The Summer War got convoluted in its use fairy tale strictures and magic rules, and Novik is the better writer, but I found Cinder House's premise more immediately engaging, so I gave it a very slight edge here.

1. Cinder House by Freya Marske

[S]he sensed it for the first time: the downhill road between a house with a ghost and a true haunted house.
     A house was made to have people in it. It wanted them there, even if it hated them.

This was the fourth novella I read, but the first I actually enjoyed. It's a Cinderella riff, but the idea here is that when the evil stepmother kills Ella's father, Ella dies too, so she becomes a ghost haunting the house—one obligated to do work for the house's inhabitants. It makes so much sense you'd almost think it was designed that way! From that premise, the story goes off in some interesting directions, some expected (Ella gets a fairy to help her attend a ball with the prince), some less so (did not really expect a lot of what actually happened with the prince). I feel like the magic got a bit convoluted, but overall I thought this was a good story about belonging and expectations.

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Best Novelette

7. "Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy: A Murderbot Diaries Story" by Martha Wells

“My sense of security is always false.”

(Yes, that's how the title is rendered on the title page.) This story is set in the world of The Murderbot Diaries, which I assume is why it got nominated, because otherwise there is absolutely nothing interesting or noteworthy about it. It's about the crew of Perihelion going on a mission; I dimly recollected that Perihelion is the real name of "Asshole Research Transport" from the novellas. Murderbot themself is not actually in this story. The rescue mission is a side thing, though, the story is actually about Peri's crew recognizing that it's kind of crotchety and then finding out that's because it's in a new relationship. That's it, that's the story. Way too long compared to what of significance actually happens here.

 

6. No Award

 

I'm being crotchety here. Sue me. But seriously, I agree with the redditor who said of "Rapport," "I suspect everyone who nominated it of not otherwise reading short stories."

 

5. "Kaiju Agonistes" by Scott Lynch

“Comrade Minister of Medium Machine Building, if these were the bad old days, now would be the point at which I note that Siberia is lovely at this time of your life. Fortunately we have all recently stumbled into a more forgiving world.” 

This is an alternate history story about kaiju; basically, the idea seems to be "what would the political ramifications be if Godzilla was real?" But also it's supposed to be funny. I guess it is moderately so, but it goes on way too long, and the longer it goes on, the more implausible I found it. Fine, but sort of a baffling thing to consider one of the six best novelettes of the year. Still, clearly more enjoyable than "Rapport" but not trying to do anything as interesting as anything else on the ballot.

 

4. "The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For" by Cameron Reed

She really fell in love.

I don’t know why she would do something so stupid.  

This is a kind of complicated story, about a woman who was supposed to be the recipient of her mother's brain, now being raised alongside the woman who her mother will transfer her brain into instead, but then they fall in love, and then the compound they live in is attacked. I thought there was a lot going here, probably a tad too much, but it was decent.

3. "When He Calls Your Name" by Catherynne M. Valente

“Anybody in that village could’ve ended up Johnny, because everybody’s Johnny when they want more than they got. And everyone wants more than they’ve got.”

Except when she's in "twee" mode, I always enjoy how Catherynne Valente writes, and this story is no exception. It's about a woman whose husband gets involved with a seductive vampire, and the vampire comes to her house, and she has to defend this husband who had an affair against this woman who doesn't really want him for any reason other than self-interest. As she often does, Valente plunges into the depths of how humans think and their best and their worst.

2. "The Millay Illusion" by Sarah Pinsker

“Nobody is born to play a single role. Nobody is meant to do the same act forever.”

A female illusionist in an early-century travel show meets another one who yearns for bigger things, but can't obtain them because of her gender. For most of the story, I thought this was fairly middling Pinsker—magic as metaphor for our attempts to build ourselves in a hostile world, ground she's covered before in "The Court Magician" and "A Better Way of Saying"—though middling Pinsker still ranks among the best of contemporary short sf&f. But then the ending came along and she paid it all off beautifully and unsettlingly. So more than middling Pinsker for sure.

1. "Never Eaten Vegetables" by H. H. Pak

Their species has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years; surely they must have solved such conundrums from unbirth to birth.

I have never read anything by H. H. Pak before, but to me, this was the clear and obvious standout in this category, a weird but fascinating sf story about a sentient spaceship carrying a bunch of embryos to a prospective colony planet, but a malfunction causes the embryos to be born ahead of schedule, and the spaceship must care for them itself; the story alternates between these events and one of the babies, now an adult, trying to reconstruct what happened. I wasn't totally convinced by the resolution to the latter plotline, but overall, I thought this was well written, dark and plausible, with some weird but well thought through worldbuilding.

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Best Short Story

7. "Laser Eyes Ain't Everything" by Effie Seiberg

They still hadn’t built a ramp, and meetings were in-person, so I joined the union meeting by video. The HR rep made a big deal about making a “special exception” for me since I “didn’t really need this accommodation” because “someone could always carry me in like before.” I managed to keep my smile plastered on my face.

A superhero who used a wheelchair discovers that even when you are "super-abled" you can still experience ableism. I'm sure this was satisfying to write, and I'm sure everything in it accurately reflects the lived experience of people with disabilities, but what was going on was very obvious from the first page, and nothing ever complicates it, and a lot of the dialogue didn't read like real human beings.

6. "Six People to Revise You" by J. R. Dawson

“Everyone changes through life, even if they don’t have a revision.”

This has a very interesting premise, and is well told. People can undergo a process called "revision" where they are literally remade into better people—"better" here is based on collecting forms from friends, family, and acquaintances where they describe what would improve you. The story is mostly the protagonist talking to people as she collects the forms. I thought there was some really interesting stuff to explore here... but the outcome of the story is the protagonist decides not to do it because of bunch of characters we've never seen before write her notes about how she's great as she is. All the interesting questions raised are answered in the least interesting way possible. Bleh.

5. No Award

This is going to be mean, but when I read both "Laser Eyes" and "Six People," I couldn't shake the feeling that these were therapy sessions, not stories... and surely there's nothing less interesting than someone else's therapy session? Keep it to yourself, don't publish it, and certainly don't give it an award.

4. "10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days" by Samantha Mills

It’s the elderly couple from next door, Marilyn and Ted. They remember the country’s last stretch of eldritch horror, when the doomsday cultists first unmasked themselves and their century-long search for a hellgate, and they have a plan for neighborhood defense.

At the time I am writing this part of the post, this is the sixth short fiction finalist I am writing up, and the fifth published in Uncanny, and the fourth of those by someone who has previously been a Hugo finalist for short fiction. Wow, don't work too hard on casting a wide net, guys. Despite that, I enjoyed this; it's about a bunch of different timelines where the apocalypse is happening (or not). It's funny and hopeful and pessimistic all at once. The title and the first couple vignettes made me think it was going to be twee (it may have been the apocalypse, but at least we all found community!) but Mills is a better writer than that.

3. "In My Country" by Thomas Ha

The problem with ambiguity is that it demands interpretation. The demand for interpretation welcomes a different magnitude of contemplation and unanticipated dispute. 

This is a horror-tinged sf&f story about a country where art critical of the the regime is permitted... but art containing ambiguity is not. Interesting premise, very well written, very well done overall. I would gladly see it win; I gave the edge to "Missing Helen" mostly based on my overall preference for clear sf over stuff that's less clearly so. 

2. "Missing Helen" by Tia Tashiro

“We all have baggage,” I say. “I think he’s just more comfortable with mine.” 

Okay, just above this, I complained about there being too many Uncanny stories, but on the other hand, there are four Clarkesworld stories on the short fiction ballots this year... and all four are better than everything else in their categories, so there's no such thing as too many Clarkesworld stories. I enjoyed this a lot: a woman discovers that after her divorce, her ex-husband began dating her clone! Truly what I love in sf: a weird concept that works both literally and metaphorically, and strong, character-based writing.

1. "Wire Mother" by Isabel J. Kim

Like most neurodivergences, it was only diagnosed when the condition became aggravating to those around her, which, in Cassie’s case, was when she stopped listening to her mother and began saying that she wasn’t real.

This story takes place in a future where AI companionship has become ubiquitous: why marry a real woman, when you can marry an AI one who will be more obliging and never age? The protagonist is a young woman who has a neurodiverse condition that causes her to be unable to see these AIs as people—and thus she begins to despise her AI mother. Like every Isabel J. Kim story I've read, it's very well-observed, but it also makes some astute commentary on our contemporary society. I would love to teach it. As soon as I read it, it was hard for me to imagine I would read a better piece of short fiction in any Hugo category. I was right.

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Overall Thoughts

Another year, another bunch of complaints about the lack of finalist diversity. Best Novella is all but one Tor; in the other categories, it's all all Tor, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny with one exception. Though even though Clarkesworld takes up four of those twelve slots, I ranked them above any non-Clarkesworld finalists in all categories, and the one story from outside the usual suspects, I ranked below No Award! So perhaps "finalist diversity" is a red herring and the real complaint is "many Hugo nominators do not value what I value in short fiction." I am pretty bummed to once again see a shutout for Asimov's, as I think that's usually much more to my taste. I hope that Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies get going again, so I can see what good sf I have missed from these years!

I'm not very plugged into the discourse this year, and I'm in general pretty bad at predicting winners in the short fiction categories, so I'm not going to try. (The r/Fantasy posters largely agree with me... but I don't think they are very representative!) I dread to think that Automatic Noodle will probably win, though.

Hugos 2021: Network Effect by Martha Wells

Originally published: 2020
Acquired: August 2021
Read: September 2021

Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel

by Martha Wells

Having caught up on my Murderbot novellas, it was finally time for me to dive into what was in publication order book 5, and in chronological order book 6, but the first novel in the series. Really, it shares all the strengths and weaknesses of the novellas. At first, when it's Murderbot straining against the strictures of people in authority, it's pretty enjoyable, and there are some good flashbacks showing Murderbot settling into its life on Preservation. I also liked the hook of how Asshole Research Transport returned; indeed, I liked it so much that I think I will steal it for the Star Trek RPG I am DMing. But as is almost always the case with this series, once it switched into action mode, I got bored, and unfortunately, the novel length means there is much more of this than there is in a novella. On the other hand, the action stuff is a bit more character-focused than in was in books 2 and 3 in particular, and Murderbot's character arc has some good moments... it's just that, thanks to the previous books, I'd kind of checked out of Murderbot's character arc by this point, and I find it hard to care again. I can see that if you are already a big fan of the series/character, you will surely love this one too, but if you are not, this one will not win you over.

I was quite pleased, though, that a worldbuilding thing I complained about as regards book 4 actually turns out to have a clever, character-based explanation. I don't know if this was a long-term plan or a clever retcon, but either way, well played, Martha Wells. Still too much damn CamelCase, though.

Hugos 2021 [Prerequisite]: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, Books 3–4 & 6

One of this year's finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel is Network Effect, which is the first Murderbot novel but the fifth Murderbot book. Only I left off back at book 2 in 2019, since that was the last one to be a finalist for Best Novella. So before reading the novel, I caught up on the intervening books via the library. In addition to books 3 and 4, I also read book 6, since it chronologically precedes book 5, as well as a bonus short story that goes between books 4 and 6.

Published: 2018
Read: June 2021

The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol

by Martha Wells

I enjoyed the first Murderbot book, but was cool toward the second. I was also cool toward this. I recently read a comment on r/printSF that did a good job of summing up why; I went looking for it, but I can't find it, so I'll have to paraphrase: "Murderbot became considerably less interesting when they stopped being me: a snarky person trapped in a terrible job for an awful corporation who just wants to spend their time binge-watching television." Yet again, Murderbot finds itself pulled into saving a group of people on some expedition, and I found its protestations obnoxious and the action dull.

 

Published: 2018
Read: August 2021

The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy

by Martha Wells

This book contains all of the flaws of the previous two. Like the others, it's slow to start. Which can be fine; a book, even if it's a novella, doesn't have to rocket out of the gate, but so many of the opening chapters seem to be Murderbot reading newsfeeds in order to summarize exposition about corporate maneuverings to the reader, and I keep thinking there must be a better way to handle all of this. It's like when I DM and my characters have to sit through a mission briefing at the beginning where I throw a bunch of information out because I can't think of a better way to communicate it all to them. I just don't follow all the corporate stuff, and the book doesn't make me want to. Also it seems like a curious gap in the worldbuilding that the bond company so pivotal to GrayCris's problems and thus Muderbot's is never even given a name. Like in the last couple, I find Murderbot's snark less effective when it's out on its own doing stuff that it wants to do. Anyway, eventually the action started and then I was really bored. I think this book—all of them, really—overestimate how much I care about or even remember about the supporting characters from the first book.

 

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: August 2021

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory

by Martha Wells

This short story was given away as a bonus to readers who preordered the Murderbot novel, and later published for free on Tor.com, and for $0.99 on Amazon. It's basically an epilogue to Exit Strategy, showing Murderbot settling into its new status quo; for the first time in the series, the perspective isn't Murderbot's own, so we get a sense of how it is perceived by others. I remember thinking it was fine enough, but it's not really a story, just some scenes that feel like set-up for a longer work, and by the time I read the next book a week later, I'd already forgotten anything that happened here.

 

Published: 2021
Read: August 2021

The Murderbot Diaries: Fugitive Telemetry

by Martha Wells

At the beginning, I was like, "Wow, this is a return to form for Murderbot." With Murderbot settling into a life on Preservation Station, it has an annoying structure for its snark to push against once again, and the narrative voice I remembered from reading All Systems Red way back when once again shone clearly. But then like halfway through, the book kicked into action mode, and I lost interest.

Plus: lots of people call this a locked-room murder mystery, but... even though it's about someone investigating a murder, I didn't really think it read like a murder mystery, more like a police procedural. I guess that's not really the book's fault, but I think I would have liked the book better if it had been about Murderbot talking to suspects more, instead of Murderbot fighting a CombatBot.

Also, and this is a weird sentence I never thought I'd utter, but I am sick to death of CamelCase.

 

So, uh, I am hyped to read the novel, I guess!