Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022. 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 five (wow, 5!) 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 third part of this series. You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This time around we're going to look at the nominees for Best Novelette. Novelette is the term for stories between 7500 and 17500 words in length - basically still what most people think of as "short stories", but the longer ones that have more time to develop characters and plots...sometimes Novelettes can be long enough to even be sold as novellas when they're really short, although that's fairly rare. This time around, we don't quite have any of those long novellas, but still have six stories that take the format in very different directions - several fun and breezy stories, one angry ecological dystopian story, one take on Greek myth (subverted into a take on the Male gaze), one tale about surviving abuse, and one story of art and of being an outsider everywhere over years and finding oneself. It's another very good crop with a number of candidates I'd be happy to win the award, so ranking these will be difficult.
But I have to do it, so my rankings are after the jump.
Tier Four:
6. L’Esprit de L’Escalier, by Catherynne M. Valente (Tordotcom)
This is a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice with one crucial difference: here, Orpheus gets Eurydice back, but as a zombie-like woman who seemingly has issues remembering who she is and everyone around her, and who without proper care might fade back into a mindless corpse.
And so Valente uses this setup to tell a story of a man (Orpheus) who was so shallow he never really understood who Eurydice actually was, and the Greek gods around him who are utterly shallow in their actions, as Orpheus struggles to deal with caring for a girl who isn't the hot and attractive one he fell in love with. Still, this goes on quite a while and Valente's prose and ideas here just didn't quite work for me, so I might even rank this one below no award.
Tier Three:
Both of the stories I have in this category are fun enjoyable stories, but honestly they aren't quite as enjoyable as they need to be for me to rank them ahead of the serious stories on the remainder of the ballot, each of which work really well.
5. Bots of the Lost Ark, by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, Jun 2021)
A stand-alone sequel to a prior Hugo Winning Novelette (The Secret Life of Bots), this is a fun story featuring an obsolete improving bot trying to help its ship get itself back under control - and back under control of its frozen human crew, as the other bots on the ship have combined to form simulacrums of the crew that they think are superior to the human crew....which is especially an issue given that they're entering territory run by aliens who consider wholly AI run ships to be utter sacrilege.
A lot of fun, sure, but not really that memorable or unique, and well...that's not enough to be particularly high on my ballot.
4. Unseelie Brothers, Ltd., by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, May/Jun 2021)
A bit more memorable of a fun story, Unseelie Brothers features a young woman Sera and a magical store (Unseelie Brothers) that sells famously impressive dresses...for a price (that isn't always monetary, as the story slowly reveals). It's also a story about family love - between cousins, and the lost mother of Sera whose fate is slowly revealed.
And it's rather well done, ending in a way that is cute in how it subverts a little bit of the expectations (although it's kind of abrupt there). But again, it just doesn't do enough to be so fun that it can beat the Tier Two and Tier 1 novelettes.
Tier Two:
3. O2 Arena, by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, Nov 2021)
The Nebula winner in this category, featuring a dystopian African setting where the rich have Oxygen credits in a pollution infested world with unbreathable air, where getting through law school to a prosperous career requires getting through tyrannical and abusive instructors, who are misogynist as all hell as well. And so in this world we follow a young man law student, having survived poverty and gang life only to find the only person he cares for, a young woman dying of cancer, desperately needing credits to survive, forcing him to fight in an arena he's unfit for where the Rich enjoy gambling and exploitation.
It's a story perhaps trying to do too much - the abusive professor in the law school almost feels like an afterthought even tho he's part of the story's ending - but it does tell a powerful tale of dystopia in an African setting, showing environmental devastation, misogyny, classism, and more. Unfortunately for it on my ballot, the top two stories are simply tremendous and just a class above.
Tier One:
Both of these stories in this tier are worthy of the Hugo, and the gap between them is razor thin, if it exists at all. But since I need to choose a winner, here are my final rankings:
2. That Story Isn’t the Story, by John Wiswell (Uncanny Magazine, Nov/Dec 2021)
Wiswell has basically been a frequent award nominee/winner the last two years, and for good reason, as this story shows: the story of a young gay man who escapes what may or may not be a supernatural cult leader who abused him and struggles to adapt to his new reality with the boy who saved him and that boy's own roommate. The fantasy elements here are in the imagery, as the protagonist imagines or feels himself bleeding whenever the abuser he left come near, and believes that the same happens to all those who were left behind, and is forced repeatedly to check himself for blood and holes that he believes to be there....especially when confronted by those still caught in the cult's grasp.
It's a really strong tale using fantasy imagery to tell a story of abuse, its tendrils and how difficult it can be to escape, and it would be a very worthy winner of this award
1. Colors of the Immortal Palette, by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny Magazine, Mar/Apr 2021)
Yoachim is another frequent Hugo Nominee, and she's outdone herself here, with a story framed by colors and paints featuring a French-Japanese woman who wishes to make a name for herself at first as a painter, despite being constantly underestimated due to her being both a woman and not White and stereotypically European....who encounters a master painter who is an immortal vampire, who she hopes will make her immortal to truly establish her art. And yet she soon finds immortality doesn't quite give her the recognition she craves, and with the one woman she thinks of as a friend dying, and time passing, only a surprise love and his recommendations can turn her existence (and her art) into something meaningful and special...unlike the fading existence of the Immortal she once admired.
Just tremendous as it deals with race (and more relevantly with being a combination of heritages that doesn't make you fit in anywhere), and history and meaning through art and colors, and a story that will really just stay with you. Highly recommended and for sure my choice for the award.
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