I did this a few years ago and it was really fun, so I’m gonna do it again; let’s read all the short stories that have been nominated for the big three SFF awards and talk about them. The best part about this, is that most of the finalists are available to read free online, so you can go check them out too.
This year, there are three short stories that have been nominated for the Hugo, Locus and the Nebula Award. Which is pretty impressive. There is also overlap between the Locus and Hugo awards, with two stories on both ballots, and one story that is on both the Locus and the Nebula Awards. For comparison, there was only one story that appeared on all three ballots last year. (The Sound of Children Screaming), and that was also a Rachael K. Jones story just like one of this year’s clean sweeps. Jones didn’t win any of the three awards last year. Though personally I’d like to see her story win at least one this year.
Neb + Hugo + Locus Nominated
The Five Views of the Planet Tartarus – Rachael K. Jones
Published: Lightspeed Jan 2024
Read it HERE
Wow.
That was disturbing.
And that last sentence just hit so hard. Went back and re-read the story immediately after getting to that.
This story is less than 600 words long, so there isn’t much more I can say about it except this; this is amazing, you should go and read it now.
Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole – Isabel J. Kim
Published: Clarkesworld Fed 2024
Read it HERE
I didn’t really like this one that much the first time I read it. I got it, and I agreed with the points it was making, but still, it felt like listening to those people who after hearing the Trolley Problem try coming up with ways to derail the train or untie the people on the tracks. A lot of what this story does is take a famous morality thought experiment and give it real world repercussions. It is a continuation of a discussion started in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, and it is a very powerful take on Omelas.
Anyway, I re-read the story after it got nominated and I did like it more. It really is a good continuation of the Omelas thought experiment. Maybe its the lack of regard for the children, though that is pretty much the point. Maybe its also just that thinking about the Omelas scenario too much does show how impossible it is, thus turning the point into how its actually impossible to make a utopia on suffering (which is a good point that I agree with, but not the same type of lesson I got from the first one.) Okay, this is a good story, maybe I’m just old enough that seeing someone mess with a classic makes me salty.
Also, the story only works because of le Guin’s story that came before it. I don’t think this story packs as much of a punch if you haven’t read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read – Caroline M. Yoachim
Published Lightspeed May 2023
I am a sucker for any story that plays around with formatting and presentation, as well as anything with really alien aliens, so when I first read this one I loved it. This story is written as a message to humanity from an alien race that wants to share their legacy with us, but they live super short lives but can take in thousands of threads of data at once. Instead of just transferring their history, they have to teach us how to read it, starting with two lines of text at a time.
“This is our story, simplified:” we read. A lot. This is a fascinating story that asks readers to imagine the world from a completely alien perspective, and the triumph is that we do really feel for these aliens by the end. This is a great story that will stick with you.
Neb + Locus
The V*mpire – PH Lee
Published Reactor Oct 2024
How dare someone write a period piece set in 2012? Don’t you know how ageist it is to millennials to remind us that the modern internet culture we grew up is now old? I don’t want to feel old so this story is so problematic!
Seriously though, this is amazing. I grew up in the 00s and avoided Tumblr, so I didn’t get all the callbacks, but I saw enough about internet culture and fanfic communities of the time to get enough to get this story. This is a story about a trans teenage girl (or, at the very least a teen who is still exploring their gender) building an online identity on Tumblr around their fandoms. In order to avoid accusations of ‘viviocentrism’ and ‘vampophobia’, she issues an open invitation for all vampires to enter her house. Then an abusive vampire takes advantage of that invitation, and the horror really ramps up.
This is a gory, uncomfortable, horrific story that captures the helplessness that victims of abusive relationships and/or grooming can feel, while also discussing how language meant to fight for the rights of marginalized people can be used by abusers to harm people – including other marginalized people. Its a hard story, but the ending does offer hope. All in all, a unique and modern horror story that doesn’t hold back.
Hugo + Locus
Stitched to Skin Like Family Is – Nghi Vo
Published Uncanny Magazine March 2024
Read it HERE
This is a great story where the protagonist’s magic ties so perfectly to the story and the emotional gut punches it delivers. It is about a young Chinese-American woman with the ability to hear the words of people on their clothes, and maybe a bit more. She’s travelling around the country looking for her brother, who believed the world to be full of kind people, but whose letters have stopped.
Whilst this story gets surprisingly action-packed, it is mostly an emotional, personal piece that touches on both the grief and the rage felt when someone you love is the victim of violence. It is unsettling, though there is some hope at the end. Most importantly, there is a very emotional family scene. I ended up really liking this, even though I did find it a bit hard to get into at first.
Three Faces of a Beheading – Arkady Martine
Published Uncanny Magazine March 2024
Read it HERE
Okay, this story had an absolutely epic opening. Not going to spoil anything, but that description of the Soldier and her message were amazing, and hit right as they should. Then we get a jump and see that this story involves a ‘mass-story’ game, that touches upon some long ago history but has political implications on this surveillance state present. That is right up my ally. And then… and then we get the essay on history, with footnotes. Actual real world footnotes, not in-universe footnotes.
I must admit, I was a bit apprehensive when we got to that shift, but Martine pulls it off. This is a story about how we repackage history to fit certain narratives, usually politically convenient ones, and also how powerful an act of defiance it is to re-frame historical events. In this world, there was an historical event that ended in the leader of a rebellion being beheaded. There are at least two different historical accounts of this beheading, and there is a complex, multiplayer story game where these events are acted out again and again. Though the character we focus on the most is just a Soldier, who our POV character has seen achieve three particularly notable endings. Our character’s struggles with feeling watched and in danger from the secret police also felt chilling.
This is a strange story, but a powerful one. The tensions that arise from the conflict between the historical truth (whatever that might be), the official version of history, and the re-examinations possible in this game create something super thought provoking and exciting.
Hugo
Marginalia – Mary Robinette Kowal
Published Uncanny Magazine Jan 2024
Read it HERE
So, turns out in 13th centaury manuscripts, there was a fad amongst the illustrators of drawing knights fighting snails in the margins. No-one has any idea why this was a thing, but people went to a lot of effort to draw and colour these big fighting marginalia snails. In this story, Kowal presents a world where giant fighting snails are just a thing that knights have to deal with, and it makes for a great story.
Though the best part of this story, is that the hero is not one of the knights, but a young peasant girl whose main priority is taking care of her disabled mother and younger brother. This is something that I’ve always loved about Kowal’s stories; she always makes sure we see the contributions of those society and history tend to ignore. It makes me so happy that even in a story about knights fighting big snails, focuses on a regular family, and gives the disabled mother a chance to contribute to the fight.
This story is pushing the word limit for a short story, but it is still a short story, and it is amazing how much Kowal brings to this story. The characterization is amazing, the descriptions of both the farmhouse and the snail’s rampage make the world feel real, and there is even a chance to show the nobility being out of touch despite being well meaning. Plus of course, the snail fight is super exciting. Wonderful story all around.
Neb
The Witch Trap – Jennifer Hudack
Published Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet Sept 2024
Buy Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No.49 HERE
This was an interesting story. It was more of an abstract piece, with snippets of history about witches and peeks into the lives of witches/neo-pagans as they redefine what it means to be a witch, and by extension, what it means to be a woman, or to be themselves. Throughout this, we have a simple story of a woman having her new house renovated, and the contractor finding an old shoe under the floorboards that is more than what it seems.
It’s a nice piece, does some interesting things with folklore, and how these beliefs can manifest something new. That being said though, it didn’t really grab me, despite how much I liked the end. The structure is a little too disjointed for me.
Evan: A Reminder – Jordan Kurella
Published Reactor Jan 2024
This one is a bit of a horror romance, though the horror elements seem more poetic than horrific. It’s about Evan, a transman living during the end of the pandemic times, who went through a divorce after coming out and must learn to start again. He has a stoner neighbour, a cat, a new boyfriend, an obsession with the bloodstain in his new house, and it also turns out that now he’s coughing up bones.
the bones Evan buries eventually come back to life, and Evan calls this entity ‘Skeleton Boyfriend’ for pretty self-explanatory reasons. There is a passage at the end explaining what the bones that make up Skeleton Boyfriend are and why Evan is so drawn to him that really hits home. Not going to spoil it, but the metaphor and the meaning of this story is beautiful. Unfortunately the plot didn’t really do much for me. Nothing wrong just seemed a bit underwhelming. As of writing this review I am still unsure if the meaning makes up for this.
Locus
Parthenogenesis – Stephan Graham Jones
Published Reactor Oct 2024
Okay, I’m finding it hard to talk about this one, because I just didn’t get it at first. I think the problem was that I was expecting this to be a straight up horror story, and it maintained enough creepiness to maintain that impression right up to and after the end, so I didn’t really know how to take the sillier elements to the story.
Parthenogenesis is a horror story about two friends getting messed up by the dumb stories they tell each other. Which I was digging. I do like the two characters in this and the way they told their story, and when they got stranded there were some very intense, creepy scenes that set the tone. But instead of being spooked, I just ended up curious about whether or not the US had an equivalent to NRMA roadside assistance. So, I was pretty pulled out of it.
Its a well written story with some great horror set pieces and atmosphere, but not really one that connected with me. To be honest, I do find horror harder to digest in short story form, both in comparison to longer horror pieces and SF/F short stories, and it takes something really special – and disturbing – for a horror short to stick with me. So I was probably never going to love this story as much as all the other Locus votes who obviously loved this one a ton.
The Night Birds – Premee Mohamed
Published Reactor Sep 2024
Published in the Northern Nights anthology
Okay, after everything I just said about horror short stories sometimes being hard for me to get into, here is one I absolutely loved. This is a story that combines mundane horrors and supernatural horrors really well, and was quite shocking at the end.
The Night Birds is about a social worker, Hayley, trying to find the family of a Serbel, an abused runaway girl who was found in the middle of nowhere and whose existence isn’t recorded anywhere. You can see what I’m getting at when I mentioned mundane horrors before. Whilst the titular night birds are supernatural horrors, the threat of an abusing parent, of the horrors that can happen in isolation, and racist dehumanization are all touched on as well. It really makes you wonder what horrible things could be happening out in the most isolated areas of the world.
The characterization was also perfect. So much happened despite how short the story is. And it was very action-packed as well. This story is great. Terrible, but great.
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There are two more Locus nominees that unfortunately, I am unable to review for this post. The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke, and Autumn’s Red Bird by Aliette de Bodard. Neither of these stories are available online, and the kindle price for Clarke’s short story and Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, the anthology de Bodard’s story appears in, are both beyond what I’m willing to pay, especially when I’m trying to limit Amazon purchases.
I have no doubt that both stories are quite good. Not only did they make it onto the Locus ballot by popular vote, but both are well known authors who have written some amazing stuff in the past. But if I wait until I’ve got access to the stories before making this post, then I’m probably not going to make the post until after some of the winners have been announced.
It’s hard to predict winners. My personal favourites are The Five Views of the Planet Tartarus, We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read, Marginalia, and The V*mpire, and I’d like to see a couple of them get an award. As stated before, this is the second year in a row that Rachael K. Jones has been nominated for all three awards, however she didn’t win any last year, showing that a clean sweep in the nomination process doesn’t mean a win. In fact, last year all three awards had different winners. Though that being said, in 2023 Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills won all three. (which of course it did, go read it now if you haven’t already), and also 2022 was a clean sweep for Where Oaken Hearts do Gather . Before that I think we have to go back to 2017 when Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar –
-And this is turning into a stat rant. I better stop myself. Point is, we don’t really know whose going to win. The winners will be announced on the following dates:
Nebula: June 5th-8th
Locus: June 18th-21st
Hugo: August 16th
Not too much longer now.
~ Jayde
Jayde Holmes 