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.
Best Novella
"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.
"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. KingfisherThis 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 MartineGisil 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.
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."
“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.
Best Short Story
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.
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.
