Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. 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 three 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.
This is the second part of this series. You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
In this post, we're going to start covering the nominees in the Short Fiction categories - specifically, the nominees for Best Short Story. These are works of no more than 7500 words, and can often be particularly short, such as only a 1-3 pages long. This length requirement does not mean that these stories cannot make a big impact - indeed past and present nominees often come with a punch so strong to make one feel it for a while. Which isn't to say that all of the nominees for this category have to be serious or impactful - fun, wistful, and heartwarming stories get nominated all the time.
That said, we actually don't have any fun stories in this year's batch of nominees; instead we have a sextet of stories with punch, with the lightest two stories being more bittersweet and longing than anything. Which is not to say it isn't a hell of a ballot, and an incredibly hard one to rank - and with the Nebula Award winner in the same category not on this ballot, it's really hard to know what will win. But well, I Have to rank these in order to vote, so I guess I shall.
All of this year's nominees are available online, and as such I have provided links to them for you to read below. I encourage you to do so.
As I did in my last post, I'll try to rank these by Tiers, to sort out my feelings on them. As I mentioned above the jump, setting these into tiers is a lot harder than it was for the Lodestar post.
Tier 3:
6. "A Catalog of Storms" by Fran Wilde
Fran Wilde is also on the ballot for the Lodestar Award, where I think she's a strong favorite who I'd be very happy to see win (I ranked that book, Riverland #2). And this is her 2nd Short Story nomination in three years, so obviously the voting pool likes her work.
Unfortunately, I had similar feelings to it as I did her last Best Short Story nomination back in 2018: it just didn't really work for me. The story is a bittersweet tales of family in a world in which a battle is raged between people and weather, with people fighting the weather by naming it and becoming it - perhaps literally. As with that prior Short Story, it's relies heavily on the crafty use of language to make it all work, and honestly, I just find that style - at least as Wilde demonstrates it - not to work for me. Obviously it works for others! But, not for me.
I think I'll put this above No Award, but it's close - I can see the merits enough to give it that much.
Tier 2:
5. "Do Not Look Back, My Lion" by Alix E. Harrow
Alix E. Harrow is also on the ballot elsewhere - for Best Novel no less! - and she actually took home this award last year, so yeah she's another voter favorite at this point. And I enjoyed this story, of a matriarchal culture that is obsessed with warfare, and a woman who is the "husband" of that culture's greatest warrior....despite her instead following the ways of the neglected God of Life and of that woman deciding she just can't take it any longer.
It's a solid story, and as I know one reviewer has remarked, would be a fascinating introductory chapter to a larger novel. But it works on its own too, as a bittersweet story of life vs war, of the toll it takes and of a relationship falling apart due to choices made....and of a woman deciding enough is enough. But it just doesn't have the impact of the other stories on this shortlist.
Tier 1:
4. "Blood Is Another Word for Hunger" by Rivers Solomon
3. "As the Last I May Know" by S.L. Huang
2. "Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island" by Nibedita Sen
1. "And Now His Lordship Is Laughing" by Shiv Ramdas
Yeah Two Thirds of the Ballot here is in my top tier - the tier of "I'd be very happy if any of these won." I've tried to order these four in some way and have basically been unable to do it - these top 4 rankings have shifted constantly over the course of me trying to write this post, and they might change by the time Hugo Voting opens.
Three of these four are very similar in themes too - the dealing of the oppressed - either a real life people (American Blacks in Blood is Another Word for Hunger and Colonized Indians/Bengals during WW2 in And Now His Lordship is Laughing) or a fictionalized version of a very real life-like people (Ten Excerpts). They each deal with the oppressed and/or the colonized fighting back in at least some small way, although the amount of hope in their endings varies.
The Fourth, As the Last I May Know, takes a thought experiment: "what if we implanted the Nuclear Warhead codes within the body of a child, so that anyone who sought to use them again would have to first kill a child with their own hands" and makes a full story out of it. Huang's craft is excellent, and this works incredibly well in a bittersweet way, as a decaying situation in a war makes people feel more and more the need for the story's fantasy version of nukes, and through the telling of the story from the child in question's perspective. It's a strong story and well worth your time.
Again the other 3 stories are very similar, and I don't really stand by my rankings of any of these four stories that strongly at all, so I'm not going to try to justify why I have one of them #1 and one #4.
Blood is Another Word for Hunger features a young slave girl during the civil war slaughtering her masters, and then giving a rebirth to a whole community of killed slaves, who start to make a new start....and who seek more when they run out of land to work on.
Ten Excerpts is the most structurally creative, featuring a descendant of a legendarily colonized/slaughtered island of "Cannibal Women" writing a bibliography of sources past and present about the people and what came of them afterwards - a people who may or may not have gained supernatural powers from eating each other and may not need men at all.
And Now His Lordship is Laughing tells the story of an old Bengal/Indian woman during colonized India in World War 2, where the British destroyed the crops and resources of India to prevent the Japanese to getting access to them...causing mass death and starvation among the peoples of India, and how that woman, who creates magical dolls, is pushed to her breaking point by a pushing British Officer and Governor who want only her gifts and don't care about the pain they're causing.
For the moment I have the last one of these #1 because I think it's the clearest in its themes and directions - which is not necessarily a better thing than leaving some doubt mind you - and because I guess it's a part of the world/viewpoint I was the least familiar with, making it the most intriguing to me. But they're all incredibly good and powerful stories, and I'd be thrilled if any of these four win.
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