novelette

My votes for the Hugo Best Novelette Award

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

This year’s Hugo Awards will be presented at the Seattle Worldcon on Saturday evening, August 16.

Like other categories, novelettes have some overlap with this year’s Nebula Awards. Here are my ranked votes, and I based them on how original I thought the stories are. You may very reasonably have different criteria and choices. In fact, these two  reviewers made very different rankings.

6. “Signs of Life” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 59) — Two sisters reconcile after a long estrangement, each with her own secrets. A slow, personal story that takes a surprising turn toward the end, but for me, the emotions are too muted.

5. “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 58) — Friends try to meet, but they can’t find each other even though they’re in the same place. Then things get more eerie (no spoilers). Not quite horror but very unsettling.

4. “Lake of Souls” by Ann Leckie in Lake of Souls (Orbit) — A denizen of a distant planet suffers a crisis of identity and a planetary explorer struggles to survive. They meet, and this changes some things. Not a new idea, and in my opinion not developed in a new direction.

3. “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by Naomi Kritzer (Asimov’s, September/October 2024) — Every now and then, Asimov’s publishes a story that isn’t exactly science fiction. A woman takes a hard look at her life and must set it right, but I saw the ending from a long way off.

2. “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” by Premee Mohamed (Strange Horizons, Fund Drive 2024) — A wizard gets an apprentice, but there’s a problem — a monster-sized dragon problem. Well told with a little humor.

1. “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, May 2024) — The accidental discovery of a book printed on paper triggers an existential crisis in an electronic world with constant volatility. The understated storytelling style effectively delivers growing horror.

My choice for the Nebula Award for Novelette

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

Each year, the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association choose the winners of the Nebula Awards in seven categories, including novelette (7,500 to 17,500 words). As a member, I get to read them and vote for the one I consider most deserving. Voting is closed, and the awards will be presented June 8.

Two of the six novelettes are full-on dystopias and one is a catastrophe, which may speak to our times, alas. The other three could not be more different from each other. As with the short stories, I think all are worthy of nomination, and the variety speaks well to the strength of imagination within the genre.

“A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair” by Renan Bernardo (Samovar 2/23 in English – in Portuguese)  — A chair, infused with sentience, witnesses a family drama, first with anxiety and confusion, then with a broken heart, and finally with joy.

I Am AI by Ai Jiang (Shortwave)— A gig cyborg worker, a writer, struggles to survive at the edge of an inhumane, predatory city. Could her life be better if she shed her humanity and became a true AI? This grim dystopia feels inspired by the way we treat creative work today.

“The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny 11–12/23) — A catastrophe fills the air with ash and causes major societal breakdown, and a Minneapolis neighborhood comes together to help everyone living there survive. More seems to be happening beyond the neighborhood, but like the cause of the catastrophe itself, no one in the neighborhood seems to talk about it. This is a cozy catastrophe and a paean to good will.

“Saturday’s Song” by Wole Talabi (Lightspeed 5/23) — Cosmic storytellers share a story and learn from it. The complex layers of the story add to its power.

“Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 9–10/23) — A teenage girl makes a deal with the devil, or she thinks she might have, but things go wrong and then wronger. Tense, complex, symbolic, and almost a horror story until the end.

My vote:

“Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon” by Angela Liu (Clarkesworld 6/23) — An artist tries to survive in a relentless dystopia that seems to have a rule against every means of survival. “Life is an ugly ride that turns everyone into a monster eventually,” the artist concludes. She might not live long enough to become a monster. A fully-imagined story, but not for the faint-hearted.