This year’s Hugo Awards will be presented at the Seattle Worldcon on Saturday evening, August 16. The novella category includes works from 17,500 to 40,000 words, and half of the nominees were also up for this year’s Nebula Awards.

Here are my votes, based on my opinion of the strength of the storytelling, but as always you may have a very different opinion. All the stories are worth reading, and although I think Tordotcom has good taste, I wish more publishers were offering works at this length.

6. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard (Tordotcom) — Some space assassin-navigators are assigned to hunt down a space monster, then there’s a murder and a lot of quarreling among the four survivors. This would make a fun movie.

5. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom) — A woman ventures into a dangerous forest to save two children from a monster. A grim story told with urgency.

4. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire) — A cottage is empty, everyone is dead, and no one will talk about it. Then things get creepy.

3. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom) — The chain is about an ex-slave, the practice is about the chance to become something better, and the horizon the chance to get it. A lot of social justice, told with the distance of spaceships.

2. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler (Tordotcom) — Elephants and newly-revived mammoths face extinction from ivory poachers, but they have protectors. The story explores its ideas back and forth in time to dramatize a contest between greed and survival.

1. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom) — Cleric Chih accompanies a bride to an arranged marriage. But something seems wrong — not to Cleric Chih but to the reader. It turns out the reader is right. Stories can deceive.