Reviewing the 2019 Hugo Nominees: Best Novelette

Hugo Award voting just opened at the start of May and continues through the end of July.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last two years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

Other Hugo Award Looks:
My Picks for Best Novel:  See HERE.
My Picks for Best Novella:  See HERE.

In this post, I'll be going over the nominees for Best Novelette.  Novellettes are defined by the Hugos as works between 7,500 and 17,500 words, so these are stories that can be read in a single sitting, although, they still require a little bit of time to do that (for the longer end stories).  I'm generally not the biggest reader of shorter fiction, so most of the nominees here were new to me (I'd only read 2 of the 6 nominated stories prior to the packet being released).  Still, I really enjoyed pretty much all of the nominees - so I think all of these six are award worthy, and choosing how to rank them was not particularly easy.

After the Jump, my thoughts on each individual nominee and a link to where a reader can find the stories (where available):




6.  “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” by Daryl Gregory (Tor.com, 19 September 2018)

This Story can be found in its entirety HERE:

Thoughts:  A personal story of a boy (and then man) as he grows up with divorced parents, realizes his sexuality (to the dismay of his father), and builds a family, told in nine moments in time throughout his life from childhood to the end - all amidst an alternate world in which alien plant species have come to the world and have grown in weird forms - to the fascination of the boy and his descendants.  It's a cute twist of the story to use the title to set up expectations that are subverted throughout - the nine days in question are now what you'd think they are.  So I liked this a bit, and it's certainly worth the nomination, but I don't know, even with the cute twist it just didn't make any lasting impression on me when I was done with it.

5.  “When We Were Starless” by Simone Heller (Clarkesworld 145, October 2018)

This story can be found in its entirety HERE:

Thoughts:  A story about an alien, whose role in his pack is to hunt "ghosts" and render where their vagabond group, searching for places to stay and on the run from other creatures, meets what an incredibly powerful "ghost" that promises dreams of the stars.  It's a nice story about what turns out to be aliens with little knowledge of what the tech they have found truly is, meeting an AI terraformer left behind by a precursor race, with the protagonist and his people's lives being changed by the discovery.  I like it a bit more than Nine Last Days, but again, the story didn't leave much impression afterwards, unlike the four stories I have ahead of it.

4. “The Thing About Ghost Stories” by Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny Magazine 25, November-December 2018)

This story can be found in its entirety HERE:

Thoughts: A bit of a meta story following a researcher into ghost stories - not ghosts, but the stories around them and what they mean - telling about her research and interviews in the aftermath of the passing of her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's.  It's a sweet story about dealing with grief in the manner of not actually dealing with it directly, and about the regrets that accompany when someone is truly gone.  It's really well written, and while you can see somewhat where the story is going fairly quickly, it's executed well to result in a bittersweet but heartfelt ending.

3.  “The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections” by Tina Connolly (Tor.com, 11 July 2018)

This story can be found in its entirety HERE:

Thoughts:  Another example of a story you can see where it's going somewhat quickly but is executed really well: this novelette tells of the story of a banquet of confections enjoyed by an evil despot through the perspective taste tester wife of the baker.  But the twist is that these are not ordinary confections, but instead each one conjures up a type of memory - and the tester is expected to explain what they're going to see before the King eats.  Needless to say there's a twist involved in how the baker is using the confections to deal with the King, and the story executes this incredibly well: you get to really know the two major characters - the baker and his wife - as well as the evils of the king, and it's all incredibly clever.  Really liked this one, which also picked up a nebula nomination for good reason.

2.  “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again” by Zen Cho (B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, 29 November 2018)

This story can be found in its entirety HERE:

Thoughts:  A sweet enjoyable story of an Imugi struggling over thousands of years to rise up and become a dragon, thwarted constantly by humans who refuse to believe it's more than an Imugi.  Finally, the Imugi confront its latest human who thwarted it, a woman who saw the Imugi as she climbed a mountain in despair and took it as a sign there was more for her in life - and the Imugi and the woman fall for each other.  It's a really sweet and enjoyable story, with a lovely ending, and having reread it for the second time (this is one of two stories I read prior to the nominations coming out) my feelings remain the same: this is really enjoyable and made me smile, and while I'm not sure it's necessarily a better story than say the #3 story on this list, the tone on this one is more of what I prefer.

1.  The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander (Tor.com publishing)

This story cannot be found online for free, but I did review it as a Tor.com Novella here on this blog:

Thoughts:  Well, whereas the last story on this list was sweet and joyful in the end, and the rest of the nominations at worst turn toward bittersweet, The Only Harmless Great Thing is on the complete opposite side of the scale: tragic.  Combining two of history's evils: the poisoning of the Radium Girls and the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant, Bolander builds an alternate history where the elephants, sentient and with their own language, are sort of but not completely in the place of the Radium Girls, leading to a new version of the same tragedy.

I've seen one reviewer complain that Bolander's works are often infused with a "burn down the world" attitude, and I don't disagree.  Unlike that reviewer on other hand, I don't think that's necessarily a negative - the real world and Bolander herself in her stories makes a good case for that attitude, and the combinations of these two real life tragedies are done really strongly here, to leave the reader feeling rather devastated at the end.  It's the fact that this story's feeling lasted the longest with me - and I read this back in February of 2018 and still feel it - that makes it my choice for the award.