My ranking of the Hugo Award for Best Short Story

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

This year’s Hugo Awards will be presented at the World Science Fiction Convention, LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA, on August 30, 2026

I’ve read all the short fiction finalists, which has some overlap with the Nebula finalists. This is my ranking of the short stories — but there are other opinions, too. I wouldn’t mind if any of my top four stories won the award. Overall, I thought this year’s finalists represent a good overview of the current field with its strengths and faults.

6. “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots, May 16, 2025) — A woman who uses a wheelchair discovers that superpowers will not overcome indifference to accessibility needs. Although the story won this year’s Nebula Award, I think it’s almost a rant and adds no nuance to ongoing concerns about accessibility.

5. “Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro (Clarkesworld, Issue 226) — Slim SFnal thread but deep characterization. A woman and her clone meet in adversarial circumstances, although I wonder how the narrator knew all those things.

4. “In My Country” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, Issue 223) — In a strange country, people are permitted by law to speak plainly or not at all. This story is sort of a parable, and its telling is not plain, and it holds a lot of unspoken but deeply felt feelings.

3. “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 63) — In the end, this is a very short love story, or rather a story about how love can endure along with survival. Grim and yet humane.

2. “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld, Issue 229) — A teenage girl is blamed because she cannot love AI “people.” She can sense the harm they’re doing to her world, but she has little means besides her own fury to fight back. A close second.

1. “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62) — Liza is sure she needs to change to find peace because a corporation is persuasively selling its services for change to vulnerable, anxious people. But what to change and why? This was also my choice for the Nebula Short Story Award. The story may be a hard to understand at first because Liza is self-deluded, a truly unreliable narrator who reflects our times where ads and influencers try to convince people they are sick when they are not.

When ‘squirrel’ means ‘strikebreaker’

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The Spanish word esquirol looks like the English word “squirrel,” but that’s not what it means. The name for the animal in Spain is ardilla, which comes from an old Iberian language word. In Spanish, esquirol means “strikebreaker.”

Here’s what happened: In Catalonia, in eastern Spain, the word in the Catalan language for the animal is esquirol, which comes from the Latin sciurus, which comes from the Greek skiouros. The English word shares the same root.

Toward the end of the 19th century, in a town near Barcelona named Santa Maria de Corcó, an inn had a pet squirrel in a cage at its entrance. Eventually the town began to be called “L’Esquirol” after the Inn of the Squirrel.

In 1902, 1908, and 1917, textile workers in the nearby towns went on strike, and workers from L’Esquirol offered to work in place of the strikers. So “strikebreaker” became esquirol — a term of disrespect, like scab in English.

That’s how the Latin-based word for “squirrel” finally entered the Spanish language. But the term has no connection with the cute little animal except for that minor historical accident.

When words travel from one language to another, they don’t always arrive safely.

Squirrels themselves are concerned about their own safety. Urban squirrels seem to believe that they’re safer close to noisy streets, even though they might become roadkill, because cars scare away their predators.

Here in Chicago and many parts of the United States, the animal that symbolizes a strikebreaker is a rat, specifically a rat named Scabby. The giant inflatable rat, often used by labor unions in street protests, is protected by free speech laws.

Chicago’s actual rats are preyed on by our urban coyote population, which traveled from the countryside to our streets, and we’re glad to have them.

Magic Rules Zero Through Four

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My favorite words are “but” and “what if.” One day I thought about the way the laws of thermodynamics begin with zero. What if magic had rules that started with zero, too? Our understanding of thermodynamics gives us great powers, but what powers would the rules of magic give us? My story offers one answer, but what if there are better answers? This flash fiction story was published at Daily Science Fiction in 2021.

***

Magic Rules Zero Through Four

by Sue Burke

Rule 0. Magic works. But few people believe in it.

A half-dozen students awaited their teacher in a secluded garden. The sorcerer, they thought, would be an elderly man with a long white beard and wise sad eyes. Instead a carefree young woman strolled in, wearing a fashionable hoop skirt, bell sleeves, and corseted waist. She hummed as she sat on a wicker bench.

Years later, you labor in the War Department in utter secrecy. If anyone asks, you manage a special procurement research project, which your coworkers believe is a cover for espionage. You never correct them.

***

Rule 1. The forces of the world will work in accord with magic. But they must be persuaded or beguiled.

“Magic is a matter of will.” Her voice warbled like birdsong. “Human beings are endowed with an enormous force of will. We live for our plans and desires.” The way she said desires made the entire class fall in love, or at least lust. Then she showed how she did that.

You’re not a spy, but your country has excellent spies. The enemy hopes to change the course of the war with an invasion. You know exactly when and at which section of the coast.

***

Rule 2. The past and present cannot be changed. But the future can, and the further into the future, the more easily it can be changed.

She pointed to a nearby rosebush with impossible, sky-blue flowers. “Two years ago I introduced the sky to the rosebush and let them see each other’s beauty. A love charm today can alter the course of a dynasty.” She waved her hand, and a tiny cloud condensed around her wiggling fingertips. “A major storm? Oh, it might take weeks to convince the right tempestas.”

You spend sleepless days and nights negotiating with kobolds, flirting with undines, and chanting to the volcano goddess Pele’s forgotten Atlantic Ocean cousin.

***

Rule 3. Every part of reality in the past, present and future is connected; thus one change can affect many things. But all those connections must be understood.

She suddenly grew grim. “I have much to learn about the causes of famines. I also made a series of sad errors regarding Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Your troops, vastly outnumbered, clear civilians from a coastline and send cannonballs and bullets to slow the onslaught, but the enemy establishes a beachhead. At the right moment, the ocean floor snaps and a tsunami races toward shore. Your soldiers withdraw just in time, and the enemy is ravaged.

***

Rule 4. Rarely can accurate predictions be made about the future. But the future must be considered at every move.

“I have lived for two hundred forty-seven years,” she said, “and experience has taught many hard lessons.”

You fear that sooner or later, the enemy will begin at zero.

A tiny marvel makes this possible

/ Sue Burke / 1 Comment

“Tiny” means one millimeter or less: a tungsten carbide ball sintered (fused) at 1400ºC for hardness, then polished, but not perfectly smooth. The ball at the tip of a ballpoint pen is textured. Tens of thousands of tiny pits called divots on the surface are connected by channels to assure the presence of ink and to grip the writing surface. The ball fits into a machined brass socket that holds it snugly and ensures the consistent flow of ink from the internal reservoir.

A ballpoint pen exemplifies the marvel of precision engineering. It’s something I use every day but could never make myself, even if I could get the raw materials.

The quill pen was used for writing by my European ancestors in medieval times. I suppose I could stroll into the park next door, tackle a Canada goose (unwise), nab some feathers, and make my own pen. But a common ballpoint pen costs about a dollar (when you can’t get them free as a give-away), less than the medical care needed after a goose attack. In that way, acquiring a ballpoint pen shifts the danger of production onto other people. Sintering sounds potentially hazardous.

But — did the ball point pen kill cursive handwriting?

Probably. Cursive was originally developed to accommodate the limits and flourishes of quill, steel-nib, and fountain pens.

In “How the Ballpoint Pen Changed Handwriting,” Josh Geisbricht wrote (probably on a keyboard), “Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely touch it.”

Likewise, Justin Ohms wrote in his Medium column that fountain pens love gliding. “Cursive is a perfect match for this, flowing, continuous, it just happens to be the handwriting style that treats a fountain pen like it’s on a moving sidewalk.”

Myself, I was required to learn cursive as a child, but as an adult, I worked for a long time as a newspaper reporter back when we had no better technology for taking notes than a rugged (ballpoint) pen and paper. I learned to write fast, a jumble of block letters and ligature that incorporated shorthand strokes. Cursive is beautiful, but it’s artificial, slow, tedious, and unnecessary, and I have no more patience for it than today’s young people.

Audible sale of ‘Interference’

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As part of an Audible sale, my novel Interference will be available for $6.99 from June 4 to June 26. This sale is only offered to Prime membership subscribers in the US. This is also a cash sale, meaning it will not affect those using an Audible credit to purchase.

Interference is the second novel in the Semiosis trilogy. More than two hundred years after the first colonists landed on Pax, a new set of explorers arrives from Earth on what they claim is a temporary scientific mission. But the Earthlings misunderstand the nature of the Pax settlement and its real leader. Even as Stevland attempts to protect his humans, a more insidious enemy than the Earthlings makes itself known.

“Narrators Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas May reprise their roles, and between them, they’ve once more captured the essence behind the voices of multiple characters, and even more impressively, this time there are non-humans thrown into the mix.” — Bibliosanctum Book Blog.