short-stories

My votes for the Hugo Short Story Award

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

This year’s Hugo Awards will be presented at the Seattle Worldcon on Saturday evening, August 16. The short story category, as usual, has some overlap with this year’s Nebula Awards, and if you read no other short fiction, I recommend reading the nominated stories. You’ll come away with an excellent panorama of where the field is today.

Here are my votes, and I based them on the storytelling risks and successes. You may very reasonably have different criteria and choices.

6. “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 56) — The story is based on drawings of knights fighting snails in medieval manuscript margins, which is a charming inspiration: What if knights really fought snails? A struggling family joins with their lord in a fight to the death. The story wraps up too neatly for me, so it comes in sixth, but other Hugo voters loved it.

5. “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones (Lightspeed Magazine, January 2024: Issue 164) — This is flash fiction about the horrors faced by those found guilty of treason, with an ennobling, subversive twist. I especially like that very short fiction has found its way onto the ballot.

4. “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 57) — The magic contained in clothing leads a sister to her brother, then gives her power. Carefully and competently told, and Nghi Vo’s love of old (vintage?) clothes and their histories shines through.

3. “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 58) — A convoluted story about complicity in a genocide told through multiple points of view in a multi-player RPG and mass storytelling. I admire the experimental style, even if it was confusing.

2. “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Magazine, May 2024: Issue 168) — A message is sent apparently to humans from a very different, brief-lived species: a simple message that holds entire lives. This is another experimental format, and it left me with a lot to think about.

1. “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld, February 2024) — I nominated this for the strength of the storytelling voice, and after reading all the finalists I still like it best: “… tell me there is a better solution than putting one single kid in the hole, and letting that one single kid have a miserable life, in return for the good lives of all of our children?” The story has already won the Nebula, Locus, and BSFA awards, and I think it’s a strong contender for the Hugo. It’s an update on the classic Ursula K. Le Guin story, which also won awards when it was published in 1974. A half-century later, even though our exact circumstances have changed, we still have to make tough moral choices.

My Hugo Award votes for Best Short Story

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

I’m an attending member of this year’s Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, in August, so I get to read and vote for the Hugo Awards. They’ll be presented at a formal ceremony on Sunday evening, August 11, and I’ll be there.

As often happens, the short story finalists overlapped with the Nebula Awards. I was pleased to see some Chinese finalists. The voting is ranked-choice, and here are my choices, but you may have different opinions — my husband doesn’t agree with me. It’s a solid ballot, and I congratulate the winner, whoever it is.

6. “Answerless Journey” by Han Song, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers) — Two people alone on a space journey seek answers and, instead, find something worse. A parable for our times. It’s a fine story but with a remote storytelling style.

5. “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” by P. Djèlé Clark (Uncanny Magazine, January-February 2023) — No matter what they tell you, do not raise a kraken in your bathtub. Read the entire owner’s manual first, or else the result will be the basis of a cute old-timey story, perhaps a bit predictable but lots of fun.

4. “The Mausoleum’s Children” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny Magazine, May-June 2023) — An escapee from a space disaster goes back on a rescue mission. The story is told with the skill typical of Aliette de Bodard.

3. “Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld May 2023) — A new app seems suspiciously and very specifically helpful. I laughed out loud. It ends with an obvious solution to app culture.

2. “The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare Magazine, October 2023) — Not even a portal into fantasyland can save school children from an active shooter. A gut-wrenching story about our reality — the kind of story that fantasy is uniquely well-equipped to tell. It won my vote for the Nebula for being the most risk-taking among an excellent field of Nebula finalists.

1. “Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times” by Baoshu (Galaxy’s Edge Vol. 13: Secret Room in the Black Domain) — What if technology could allow us to access the feelings of other people as they eat? Baoshu takes this idea to its logical extremes three times. You know it’s going to be bad, but how bad? Original and well-done. In the end, the originality won me over, edging out Jones’ story, but not by much.

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.