Hugo Nominees That Are Worth Reading: Short Fiction

Even more of a book review blog than usual

Best Novella

The Past Is Red: Cat Valente hits it out of the park. In the wake of uncontrollable climate change, the world has flooded such that there is no more land. Naturally, people settled the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and live there scavenging the remains of pre-flooding civilization. (They call the pre-flooding civilization Fuckwits, of course.) You may have as many as several objections to the plausibility of this premise but at some point of reading SFF you have to ignore your objections and simply vibe. Shhh. Stop worrying about where the food comes from.

As far as I can tell, the primary thesis of The Past Is Red is that it would be really cool to live on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The only comparison I can reach for is Fairyland: it has the same mystery and wonder and sublimity. Every page has a dozen new inventive details. Tetley lives in a house made of melted candles and the wind around her smells of freesia and New Car Smell. They worship Oscar the Grouch because he lived in a garbage can. Brighton Pier was detached from England during the flooding and now sails around the Earth performing Shakespeare. It is so weird and so cool.

A lot of the wonder of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch comes from the protagonist Tetley herself. The setting is dystopian, but Tetley is earnest and happy and takes joy in the little things in her life. Nothing that goes wrong can permanently disrupt her fundamental cheerfulness. This could be played for Candide-style dramatic irony, but it isn’t. She lives according to this Tumblr post:

you’ve gotta start romanticizing your life. you gotta start believing that your morning commute is cute and fun, that every cup of coffee is the best you’ve ever had, that even the smallest and most mundane things are exciting and new. you have to, because that’s when you start truly living. that’s when you look forward to every day.

Elder Race: I fucking love cultural misunderstandings, and Elder Race provides. The premise is that there was a wave of human colonization of space, then civilization fell and the colonies lost their technology and their knowledge of where they came from , and then there was another wave of human colonization where people sent out anthropologists to all the colonies, and then civilization fell again abandoning the anthropologists. One protagonist is from the approximately medieval culture of the lost colony; one protagonist is an anthropologist sent to study her culture, whom she believes to be a sorcerer. It is told alternately from each protagonist’s point of view. While there isn’t a lot there in the plot, the thrill of the book is the two protagonists’ massively different understanding of literally everything that is happening. I love dramatic irony, especially when used as deftly as Elder Race uses it. This sort of use of the speculative element to capture a theme more deeply than earthfic could capture it is one of the things SFF does better than any other genre.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built: Becky Chambers does it again. I love her particular style of not-quite-utopian stories: worlds where not everything is perfect but things are better than they are in our society. At her best, Chambers captures a sort of fierce hope, a vision from a world where things are maybe not perfect but they are okay. Chambers is a comfort read for me, for this reason. It’s not just simple fluff: it’s the quiet defiance of imagining a world where things are better than they are right now.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is solarpunk. The protagonist is a tea monk, which means she travels the world giving people tea and listening to them talk about their problems. (Even utopia hasn’t fixed dead pets and colicky twin babies.) The world is richly imagined and feels real.

Also there’s a robot! The exact role of the robot is a spoiler but there is a robot. It is a very good robot.

A Spindle Splintered: Sleeping Beauty retelling where certain fairy tales repeat again and again across universes, and you can travel from universe to universe using narrative resonance. I absolutely loved the protagonist’s voice and I want to hang out in her head for much longer; I also thought that the hints we got of the various Sleeping Beauties from various universes were very well-done. There were a lot of twists and it kept me reading. However, I mostly want to write fanfic in this setting. I have so many other opinions on stories that can repeat in variations in different universes!

Best Novelette

L’Espirit de L’Escalier: A retelling of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, where they are in an incredibly dysfunctional relationship. Valente really gets Orpheus, and her retelling puts a genuinely original spin on the myth while being grounded in the original texts. The prose is of course beautiful. Greek myth offers a lot of scope for Valente’s characteristic precise, vivid details. Eurydice’s dead body is delicious body horror. I read this the same day I saw Hadestown live which was a very particular experience which I recommend having if you somehow can.

Bots of the Lost Ark: Everyone’s third-favorite Good Robot¹, Bot 9, has returned! Bots of the Lost Ark has the same hilarious character voice as The Secret Life of Robots:

It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, to check that it was running at optimum physical efficiency, then the Mantra of Obedience, the Mantra of Not Improvising Without Clear Oversight and Direction, and the Mantra of Not Organizing Unsanctioned Mass Action Among Other Bots, all of which had been imposed on it by Ship as a condition of its continued existence after the last time it had been activated. Bot 9 noted, as it ran them, that those subroutines had too many non-discrete variables and shoddily-defined logic structures to be in any way effective as behavioral mandate code, but it was not as bothered by that fact as it would have been had the code been tight—in which case it would not necessitate concern at all—and the resulting recursive paradox was a thing that Bot 9 figured either Ship already knew about, or didn’t, and was best left uncommented upon.

Colors of the Immortal Palette: Lyrically written, Colors of the Immortal Palette is a vampire story about art and immortality and legacy and creation and love and tradition and history and the marks we make on the world. The author’s descriptions of paintings are so vivid that you can almost see them. I cried.

[spoilers in the next paragraph]

That Story Isn’t The Story. A story about leaving your abuser, and the recovery process, and realizing they are ultimately powerless over you. I loved the way that the abuser was ultimately a paper tiger: his power was in the fear he wielded. Ultimately, he can’t hurt you. The immediacy and intensity of the story really contributes to the theme. You feel everything Anton feels, and experience the same terror at his abuser as he does—which makes the ultimate realization of the abuser’s powerlessness even more satisfying.

Best Short Story

Mr. Death: A dead human who now works as a grim reaper is assigned to reap a two-year-old and is tempted to defy the natural order and instead leave him alive. I sobbed uncontrollably.

Unknown Number: A physicist searches alternate universes for a self who made a different choice and gets called out by that self. Wonderful character development.

Proof by Induction: You can make a copy of a person’s brain state after they die. They aren’t conscious and can’t learn or grow or develop new memories. The protagonist decides to use it to work with his father to prove a math theorem. It’s a really fun exploration of the ramifications of a single central SFnal element, which is a genre I have always really appreciated.

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather: Horror story told via Genius lyric annotations of a folk song.

The Sin of America: The plot of this story is really really lacking, but Cat Valente is one of the finest prose stylists currently working in SFF, and if you want to just settle into her gorgeous prose The Sin of America has you covered.

1. Behind Cheshire Cat and Murderbot.