Saturday, September 18, 2021

Reviewing the 2021 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Short Story

 


Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the November 19, 2021 (The voting period is extra long this year due to COVID delaying the convention till December).  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 four 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 first 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.

Last year we basically had a bunch of serious stories, some of which carried significant punch, but no fun and/or silly ones.  This year, we actually have several fun, lighter stories, in addition to a few serious bittersweet ones.  In a change however, we really don't have any stories with significant punch or historical weight this year, and honestly, there aren't any stories that really make me think of them as "must reads" this time around.  None of the stories are bad, and a few of them are pretty good, but there have been some past stories that have just stood out to me as "Clear Hugo Winning Material", and I don't really see that here this time.  But all are good enough to be better than No Award, so I'll make the effort to rank them.....after the jump.  

As usual, 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.

Last year I separated my choices into tiers rather than just ranking them 1-6, since some stories/books were pretty close, and I'm going to do that again this year.  I think I can break down the six nominees into three tiers, which are further explained below:  

Tier 3:  

6.  “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Rae Carson (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2020)

A fun story featuring a bunch of women surviving in a zombie apocalypse, a woman protagonist who is about to give birth (and in a F-F relationship), and the couple's attempt at surviving zombies who crave not only blood but the remnants of births like their child's.  This is the type of story that 10 years ago might have seemed fresh and groundbreaking, but well, lesbian parents fighting to survive against zombies isn't really that original or interesting anymore - and there's pretty much little else here...and even the fighting isn't that interesting?  

5.  “Little Free Library” by Naomi Kritzer (Tor.com)

Okay minor quibble here:  I'm biased against the "Little Free Library" concept which is at the hear tof this story - the name is used by a company who licenses out the name for money and enforces its trademark extensively which is so hypocritical for the concept, and they basically pop up only in places that are rich and white already, and don't do anything extra to justify themselves over actual libraries.  So I could probably rank this story down in Tier 2 honestly, if I'm being honest.  

Because this is till a fun story, of a woman deciding to put her books in such a library, getting joy as the books are taken and replaced by artwork, and then messages, that suggest something fantastical is going on - like a portal to another world.  Well done as usual for Kritzer, just not really something that is that special and again, I'm biased.   

Tier 2: 

4.  “Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots, 2020)

This story won the Nebula Award for the same category and is probably one of the top two favorites here, featuring the perspective of a haunted house that desperately wants to be occupied, but just can't commit itself to anything horrifying to make it appeal to haunted house hunters and isn't a super nice house that will appeal to normal customers - as it tries desperately to help a broker woo a skeptic and his daughter.  

It's really well done, and I can sort of see why it's won so much praise, in a cute and eventually heartening way, with a really nice atmosphere and a original-ish concept.  It just didn't blow me away though like it seems to have done for others.  

3.  “The Mermaid Astronaut” by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2020)

A short story by Yoon Ha Lee of a mermaid who dreams of the stars, makes a wish with a witch to allow her to travel the stars, without realizing quite the consequences of that wish.  It's a really well done story (although it oddly reminds me of a 2021 Novella by Aimee Ogden with a similar concept and theme, Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters), even if the ending is a bit predictable and you can see coming.  

But the tale of a woman dreaming of the stars, getting to experience it and enjoy it, and realizing what she left behind was as important to her is a classic type story for a reason and this is a well executed version of it.  So I get the nomination.  

2.  “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2020)

I'm a big Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon) fan, so I actually read this one when it came out, and it's a very solid story of two AIs with the power to grow their nanobot bodies with materials, built with minds of innocence, and the sister (the other is named brother) learning the dark concepts of lying and betrayal when the two encounter and are exploited by a third AI.  

It's again a fairly solid story, one that's very original in its concepts (at least to me), and is bittersweet in its ending, since poor Sister finds herself changed irreversibly at the end.  But it just doesn't hit hard enough for me for it to truly stay with me for long after reading, which is what is necessary for a story to be in tier 1.  

Tier 1: 

A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (in Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, Solaris)

The other purely fun story - a tale of two AI robots, with one supposed to mentor the other and the other being innocent, naive, and hilarious - and the only story that really stayed with me after I read it, resulting in me reading this story once when it came out, and another time afterwards when it came up again in conversation.  I have a hard time judging fun stories against serious and powerful ones, but we kind of lack the latter this time around, and this story is just a fun piece of joy that anyone I think will love.  

I'm not really saying anything more about this story, because any attempt at description will just spoil some of the fun and sound far more boring than what actually results.  I think the win for the award will probably come down to this or Open House on Haunted Hill, and I really hope this one wins, because it's just that much fun.  

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