Adri and Joe Read the Hugos: Short Story

Adri: Our next Hugo category is short story! Four returning Hugo-favourite authors and two with their first (I think) nominations, stories ranging from heartwarming haunted houses to robot mentorship. How are you feeling about this year’s ballot?

Joe: I hate to admit it, but I’m just not up on my short fiction this year. If I’m being frank (and I’m not frank, I’m Joe), I haven’t been up on my short fiction for a couple of years now. I read a small handful of select anthologies and then the Nebula and Hugo Award finalists.

I mention this because I don’t have quite the breadth of knowledge of comparison to the rest of the field as I do with novels. Here, I’m coming in relatively cold and can only really talk about the stories in relation with each other and not also with the field. That’s the point, I suppose, but for a change I’m not internally bemoaning that story X was my favorite and didn’t make the ballot.

ANYWAY, I ramble because I care.

As a whole, I really like this year’s ballot. There’s one story that doesn’t quite work for me (and that story is just fine), but the other five are quite good.

Adri: I’m on the other side of things, where I did read a lot of short fiction again last year (although not as much as 2019) and that means that inevitably I have feelings about favourite stories that didn’t make it. Nothing from my nomination ballot is here; I’m not going to share those specific five stories, but they all make an appearance in our recommended reading list so I’ll let you extrapolate from there, dear reader.

But, objectively, this ballot is just as good as my favourite stories. There are such a wealth of good short stories that come out every year and if one spends a significant amount of time reading short fiction, then by definition one reads a lot of good individual stories. I read a couple of hundred stories a year and that barely dents the surface of what’s being published!

The other thing I want to note is how different the tone is between the novelette and short story ballots this year, which is not something I’ve ever noticed before! This short story list isn’t exactly fluffy, but it’s overall got more lightness and hope than the six stories in Best Novelette, many of which are… well, we’ll get to that. I don’t think it’s anything more than coincidence, but it’s an interesting one.

Joe: I think I’d like to start with “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” because it’s a kick in the gut and it’s great and it is tonally unlike most of the stories on this ballot, which are otherwise quite charming.

Adri: Yes! Rae Carson’s story of childbirth and survival, set ten years into a zombie apocalypse (clue’s in the title) is excellent for how it turns the hypermasculine-hero survival narrative on its head, focusing on a fundamental aspect of human survival - childbirth - that becomes a nearly insurmountable task in the circumstances, and then putting a group of women at the centre of the story and (again, clue’s in the title) letting them be badasses, and mutually supportive badasses at that, even in the most dire of situations. Most importantly, it’s narrated from the perspective of Brit, the woman giving birth, making her the active centre of the experience, rather than a passive presence whose need for protection reduces her to immobilised, screaming victimhood. I like it.

Joe: Spoilers for the zombie apocalypse!

But - yeah, it’s a super cool story and it’s the sort of story I don’t see all that often and it’s absolutely fantastic.

Fantastic in a completely different way is John Wiswell’s “Open House on Haunted Hill”, a story which is, for lack of a better word, absolutely charming. That’s a word I want to use quite a bit in this category because that hint of lightness is all over the Short Story ballot and it’s frankly refreshing right now.

This is the story of a house that is on the market to be sold and doesn’t want to be alone. It wants a family. It wonders if it could haunt the glue on its own wallpaper to make itself more appealing to a potential buyer. “Open House on Haunted Hill” is just lovely and reads like a quiet exhale that blows the stress out of your body.

Adri: It’s definitely a story that brings a new meaning to the term “found family”! I love how it builds a sympathetic story around a set of people who don’t often get sympathetic portrayals, especially in this kind of genre: the sceptical podcaster trying to raise a boisterous kid, the estate agent (sorry, “realtor”), and of course the house itself would all be two dimensional villains or joke punchlines in another story, but here they’re people all trying to do their best.

The other story that made my cold heart melt is “A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, which continues Prasad’s track record of telling robot self-actualisation stories with wonderful wit and heart. It’s also told through a really great - if simple - text device, where the story is within a chat log between a newly freed robot and its automatically assigned mentor, so there’s lots of light-touch things going on in the “meta” text (e.g. screen names) that really adds to our understanding of the characters. I actually missed the anthology this was in, so I’m glad enough other readers saw it (the tor.com reprint can’t have hurt) and put it on their ballots so I could enjoy it.

Joe: Made to Order was a good anthology, but I tend do well with Jonathan Strahan’s anthologies even if I’m usually a couple of years behind when they are published (sorry, Book of Dragons).

We’ve definitely seen the story format for “A Guide for Working Breeds Before” and in some ways it reminds me of Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please”, though Prasad is doing something different here, but it’s another really pleasant story despite presence of a killer robot.

Speaking of Naomi Kritzer, I also enjoyed her story “Little Free Library” which is partially told through notes left in, well, little free libraries. I think we have all the story that we actually need in “Little Free Library” but I wanted just a bit more from it. There’s something so much bigger lurking around the outside and I have questions, but I suspect we have as much as we need for the story to work. But I have questions!

Adri: I really like “Little Free Library” but its the story that “sparks” the least for me out of these six, if that makes sense. It’s cute, watching a fae(?) revolution through scraps of documentation left for a girl in her Little Free Library box, but I don’t have much to say about it beyond “that was cute”. Cute is good, but cute plus thought provoking is my bar for Hugo cuteness.

The two stories we haven’t discussed yet are both spacefaring riffs on fairytales: The Little Mermaid for "The Mermaid Astronaut", and Hansel and Gretel for "Metal Like Blood in the Dark". Both end up pretty far from their sources in different ways: “The Mermaid Astronaut” removes the need for the mermaid to specifically yearn over a love interest (good), and in place of either the Disney or Andersen endings, creates a story where growth and change can involve coming full circle. Metal Like Blood in the Dark sticks in some ways to its original plot, but it shifts the moral weight of the story, making it about the sacrifices that Sister makes to keep her Brother safe in the outside world. By the way, they’re both robots.

Joe: I have a lot less to say about either of those stories. I liked “The Mermaid Astronaut” and appreciated what Yoon Ha Lee was doing in telling that story and the arc of the mermaid in question. The T. Kingfisher story didn’t work as well for me as the rest of the ballot did - which is unusual for me with a story from Kingfisher or Ursula Vernon, especially with how much I loved Kingfisher’s novel A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking - which we’ll talk about when we discuss the Lodestar finalists.

Adri: I feel similarly. For fairytale retellings particularly, I’m learning that what makes the overall Hugo audience excited for a new version of a story is… kinda different to what I want? Like, we will never run out of space for retellings, especially ones that come from the margins and re-examine our dominant tropes through that lens. But I want an outstanding retelling to smack me over the head with something - whether that’s bringing in a radical kindness or another perspective or something that makes it obvious what the original story was missing, or pushes a big contradiction to the fore, or whatever. “The Mermaid Astronaut” gets close to that, “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” goes off more in its own direction (and doesn’t do anything terribly interesting with that direction), and it’s all objectively good - and two authors that I love - but they don’t get to that magical nebulous “best story of 2020” point.

Anyway. Now that we’ve covered it all, what’s at the top of your list?

Joe: This would be a really good time to actually put together my ballot and vote, but I’d say I have a very solid top three of “Open House on Haunted Hill”, “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” and “A Guide for Working Breeds”. I *think* that would be my ballot order but I could also change the order a dozen times between now and when I actually submit the ballot.

What does your ballot look like?

Adri: I’m still sad about Fandom for Robots not winning a couple of years ago, and “A Guide for Working Breeds” did similar mushy things to my heart, so it’s going to take top spot for me. We have the same top three overall, but I don’t know how I’ll go between Open House on Haunted Hill and Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse. Coin flip, maybe? I’ll work something out.

Joe: Well, that’s a category and it’s another strong one. It’s been fun reading through the ballot this year.

Next up: Novelette!

Reading the Hugos: John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos: 2019 Edition! Today we're going to look at the writers up for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

I know. I know. The Campbell is "Not a Hugo". It is only "administered" by the World Science Fiction Society. It is sponsored by Dell Magazines. But, beyond those technicalities, I'm not sure I really care much about the distinction. It's not a Hugo. It's totally a Hugo. It's not a Hugo.

The Campbell is an award for a writer whose "first work of science fiction or fantasy was published in a professional publication in the previous two years." See here for eligibility rules, but it mostly follows the SFWA definition of professional publication or professional rates above a nominal fee. With the vagaries of publication, short story writers can be somewhat disadvantaged if they get one story published professionally and then years pass before they are truly noticed or place additional stories. Novels often make larger splashes, even if there is only one published in the eligibility window.

It is not unusual to have some overlap year to year, but a cursory glance through the last several decades of finalists suggests that it is unusual for four of the finalists to be the same from the previous year. With that in mind, I am going to recycle some of my thoughts from last year, making minor changes where appropriate.

Let's see how big of splash everyone has made over the last two years. It's a weird category.

Katherine Arden
S.A. Chakraborty
R.F. Kuang
Jeannette Ng
Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Rivers Solomon


Jeannette Ng: Ng is one of four writers on the Campbell ballot on the back of a single novel, which for a novelist is not necessarily unusual because there is only a two year eligibility window. Under the Pendulum Sun is Ng's debut novel. In Victorian England, a missionary who journeyed to the realm of faerie in order to proselytize and bring the fae to Christ, has disappeared. Catherine Helstone, his sister, undertakes her own search of faerie and the estate of Gethsemane to find him.

Under the Pendulum Sun is beautifully written and atmospheric as hell. The weight and weirdness of Arcadia shines through on every page. The novel feels Victorian without bogging the reader down with faux Victorian prose. The only problem, and this is quite clearly my problem and not Ng's is that there is something about the novel that I struggled to engage with and care about. There was a distance growing between me and Under the Pendulum Sun and it wasn't one I cared enough to overcome. It's a weird dichotomy, understanding the novel is a beautifully written piece of fiction and still not being able to fully appreciate it. Even so, that's where I'm at with this.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Prasad is on the Campbell ballot on the strength of four stories. Two of them, "A Series of Steaks" and "Fandom For Robots" were finalists last year for the Hugo Awards for Novelette and Short Story, respectfully. "Portrait of Skull with Man" (Fireside Fiction, 2017) and "Pistol Grip" (Uncanny, 2018) were not Hugo Award finalists.

It continues to be a difficult and uncomfortable thing to compare and rack and stack writers against each other. The stories, yes, but this is an award for Best New Writer. Are Prasad's four stories stronger than the single novels of Rivers Solomon, Jeannette Ng, R.F. Kuang, and S.A. Chakraborty or the two eligible novels from Katherine Arden?

That's the real challenge here. Both of the Hugo finalist stories are quite good and show an author I want to follow and read more from, the story from Fireside is a trippy bit of goodness, and I really have no idea what to say about "Pistol Grip". The stories are all high quality, but for this award, I'm not sure that they truly measure up to the best of the novels.


Katherine Arden: Arden is eligible for the Campbell following the publication of her novels The Bear and the Nightingale and The Girl and the Tower. Comparatively, it is more similar to Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun in that the prose is more deliberate and beautiful on a sentence level than City of Brass or An Unkindness of Ghosts. That’s the only worthwhile comparison to the other novels because they are all so different in tone and function and story and emotion. The Bear and the Nightingale touches on Russian folklore and is a tight family story mostly set in remote regions of Russia.

I absolutely want to see more from Katherine Arden (and hey, she’s written two more books in the Winternight sequence that began with The Bear and the Nightingale). She’s an author to watch and follow and I’m as excited to read The Girl in the Tower as I am to see what she’s doing ten years from now. The Bear and the Nightingale is the announcement of a major new talent. It’s a slow burn of a novel, but it pays off and it sucks you in.


S.A. Chakraborty: Oh, how I regret having waited so long to read City of Brass. The novel had been on the periphery of my attention since it was published in 2017 and I'm not sure if I would have picked it up if not for Chakraborty making the Campbell ballot this year. I would have missed out. City of Brass is a spectacular debut and is damn near an instant favorite. Chakraborty blends 18th century Cairo with fantasy, the magic of the djinn are very real and there is a culture at war with itself and sometimes with the human world. I don't have the words to describe City of Brass in a way that the beauty of the novel comes across as deeply as it hit me from the start. Chakraborty's writing is smooth as silk and it draws the reader in to one hell of a story.

City of Brass would have been on my Hugo ballot had I read it upon publication, but I appreciate that I have this one more opportunity to recognize Chakraborty's novel. S.A. Chakraborty is a novelist to watch and I'll be there for this year's Kingdom of Copper (not eligible for consideration as part of Chakraborty's Campbell nomination, if you're more fortunate than me and have already read it).


R.F. Kuang: The age of a writer has no particular bearing on her ability to produce outstanding work nor does it say much about the amount of time that writer has put into learning her craft. A writer in her fifties may have only one or two years into developing as a writer while a writer in her twenties may have been writing every day for more than a decade and working to improve and tell better stories. Which is to say that I did a small amount of research to figure out who the youngest winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer was out of curiosity. R.F. Kuang was 22 when The Poppy War was published and when the Hugo / Campbell Award finalists were announced. She is now 23. As near as I can tell, the youngest winner of the Campbell was Lisa Tuttle, who was 21 when she tied Spider Robinson in the voting for the Campbell in 1974 (though I *think* E Lily Yu was fairly young when she won in 2012) . This really isn’t much more than an interesting data point because there is no one path to professional publication and the window for a Campbell nomination is so small for a writer to get noticed. It’s the sort of trivia I find interesting, if not particularly meaningful.

The Poppy War is an extraordinarily accomplished novel. It has echoes of a coming of age story set in a military academy, except that your average coming of age story doesn’t go a fraction as hard as R.F. Kuang goes with The Poppy War. Kuang is unrelenting. When I wrote about the novel in wrapping up my Top 9 Books of 2018, I wrote that “there’s a very real sense of ‘if this is what I did to get here, what do you think I’ll do to stay here?’ It’s brutal from the start.” That also means that even the part of the book that is about training and school is flipped on its head when the hinted war breaks out. At that point The Poppy War almost feels like two different novels, similar to how Full Metal Jacket plays out. It’s a difficult task to decide between R.F. Kuang and Rivers Solomon as the “Best New Writer”, though that difficulty is definitive of how good the new class of writers coming up is and I can’t wait to see what Kuang (and Solomon) have in store for us in the coming years.


Rivers Solomon: Solomon is here on the strength of An Unkindness of Ghosts, a debut that is as much a novel as it is a statement and announcement of arrival. I have long loved the concept and often the execution of a generation ship, but I have never read anything quite like An Unkindness of Ghosts. It is not uncommon to read a generation ship novel that focuses on the divide between the more affluent privileged class and the poor workers living in squalor in the underbelly on the ship. It is uncommon to read a generation ship novel that takes that conceit and drives a knife straight in the gut by running the ship like a plantation. The white overseers are in the upper decks and have significantly greater freedom and luxury. The darker skinned workers are exploited, stigmatized, and brutalized for their very existence.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is a deeply uncomfortable novel to read, but every time I put the book down for the night I immediately wanted to pick it up and keep reading deep into the night. Solomon describes their novel as "a science fiction meditation on trans-generational trauma, race, and identity" and if you take that into the novel, you can see what they are doing. Slavery and trans-generation trauma is central to the storytelling of Unkindess of Ghosts, but so is that idea of identity. Through the generational trauma, so much family and personal histories have been lost. Characters barely know who their parents were, let alone grandparents or farther back. More, Solomon's writing of their protagonist, Aster, is so vital and central to the novel. Aster's voice and characterization of a neurologically atypical narrator is so incredibly well done and distinctive that it is almost impossible to imagine the novel written any other way.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is an almost impossibly accomplished and incredible novel and marks Rivers Solomon as an essential writer to watch.


My Vote
1. Rivers Solomon
2. R.F. Kuang
3. S.A. Chakraborty
4. Katherine Arden
5. Vina Jie-Min Prasad
6. Jeannette Ng


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Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Reading the Hugos: John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos: 2018 Edition! Today we're going to look at the writers up for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

I know. I know. The Campbell is "Not a Hugo". It is only "administered" by the World Science Fiction Society. It is sponsored by Dell Magazines. But, beyond those technicalities, I'm not sure I really care much about the distinction. It's not a Hugo. It's totally a Hugo. It's not a Hugo.

The Campbell is an award for a writer whose "first work of science fiction or fantasy was published in a professional publication in the previous two years." See here for eligibility rules, but it mostly follows the SFWA definition of professional publication or professional rates above a nominal fee. With the vagaries of publication, short story writers can be somewhat disadvantaged if they get one story published professionally and then years pass before they are truly noticed or place additional stories. Novels often make larger splashes, even if there is only one published in the eligibility window.

Writers like Rebecca Roanhorse have more of an uphill fight since she only has the one story published last year. That one story needs to make a huge splash.

Let's see how big of splash everyone has made over the last two years. It's a weird category.

Katherine Arden 
Sarah Kuhn
Jeannette Ng 
Vina Jie-Min Prasad 
Rebecca Roanhorse 
Rivers Solomon 


Jeannette Ng: Ng is one of two writers on the Campbell ballot on the back of a single novel, which for a novelist is not necessarily unusual because there is only a two year eligibility window. Under the Pendulum Sun is Ng's debut novel. In Victorian England, a missionary who journeyed to the realm of faerie in order to proselytize and bring the fae to Christ, has disappeared. Catherine Helstone, his sister, undertakes her own search of faerie and the estate of Gethsemane to find him.

Under the Pendulum Sun is beautifully written and atmospheric as hell. The weight and weirdness of Arcadia shines through on every page. The novel feels Victorian without bogging the reader down with faux Victorian prose. The only problem, and this is quite clearly my problem and not Ng's is that there is something about the novel that I struggled to engage with and care about. There was a distance growing between me and Under the Pendulum Sun and it wasn't one I cared enough to overcome. It's a weird dichotomy, understanding the novel is a beautifully written piece of fiction and still not being able to fully appreciate it. Even so, that's where I'm at with this.


Rebecca Roanhorse: Rebecca Roanhorse has only published one eligible story over the last two years and it's "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience". It's a major, important story. I wrote about it when discussing the short story finalists. While it didn't take the top spot on my ballot for that category, I noted that it marked the arrival of a major new talent and that Roanhorse is an author to watch.

That's where the Campbell is an interesting and a difficult category. We are only evaluating the writers based on their work during the previous two years, so we can't consider Roanhorse's debut novel Trail of Lightning even though those who have read it can't help but factor it in. Where the Campbell gets tricky is that there is an aspect to the category that makes me want to think about what the work of the last two years says about the writer's potential for the future. It's a forward looking category even though it only looks at the work of the past two years.

So I only have one story to work with here, but it's a damn good one. It's a story I'd rather read several times than I would read, say, Under the Pendulum Sun a single time. Novels and short stories aren't at all the same thing and if not for this category, it would be folly to compare them or to compare writers working in different forms.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Prasad is on the Campbell ballot on the strength of three stories: "A Series of Steaks" and "Fandom For Robots" are finalists for the Hugo Awards for Novelette and Short Story, respectfully. "Portrait of Skull with Man" was published at Fireside Fiction and is not on the Hugo ballot, which is not all that remarkable. It's much more remarkable to have a single author with more than one story on the ballot and even yet moreso for those stories to be almost the entirety of the writer's published output (Rebecca Roanhorse is another example of this, with one published story at the time of being a Campbell finalist).

It continues to be a difficult and uncomfortable thing to compare and rack and stack writers against each other. The stories, yes, but this is an award for Best New Writer. Are Prasad's three stories better than Roanhorse's one, and how do those stories compare to the single novel of Rivers Solomon or the two novels of Sarah Kuhn?

That's the real challenge here. Both of the Hugo finalist stories are quite good and show an author I want to follow and read more from, and the story from Fireside is a trippy bit of goodness. Does that make Prasad a "better" writer than Roanhorse? Probably not. But in comparing the writer of three stories against the writer of one, it does show that Prasad's skill across multiple stories. If Roanhorse and Prasad both make the ballot next year, we may have a different comparison because Roanhorse will also have an eligible novel out by then an we'll be able to see how she works in a longer form. But for now, Prasad get the nod.


Katherine Arden: Arden is eligible for the Campbell following the 2017 publication of her novel The Bear and the Nightingale. Comparatively, it is more similar to Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun in that the prose is more deliberate and beautiful on a sentence level than Heroine Complex or An Unkindness of Ghosts. That’s the only worthwhile comparison to the other novels because they are all so different in tone and function and story and emotion. The Bear and the Nightingale touches on Russian folklore and is a tight family story mostly set in remote regions of Russia.

I absolutely want to see more from Katherine Arden (and hey, she’s written two more books in the Winternight sequence that began with The Bear and the Nightingale). She’s an author to watch and follow and I’m as excited to read The Girl in the Tower as I am to see what she’s doing ten years from now. The Bear and the Nightingale is the announcement of a major new talent. It’s a slow burn of a novel, but it pays off and it sucks you in. Arden could so easily trade places with Sarah Kuhn on my ballot, but as of today, this is where I’m ranking her (which, as noted, is an impossible fool’s errand).


Sarah Kuhn:  Sarah Kuhn has two eligible novels, Heroine Complex and Heroine Worship (the third volume in the series, Heroine's Journey, was published this year). I'm basing my thoughts / placement on the ballot on Heroine Complex since I'm simply not going to have enough time to read Heroine Worship before voting closes.

Kuhn's been on my radar since Heroine Complex was published. The novel is set in a modern day San Francisco which, as far I can tell, is just like what San Francisco is like today except that random demon portals open and spew out minor demons that are then vanquished by super heroine Aveda Jupiter. So - just like the regular world. There are other low level super heroes around. Nobody is on the proper level of Wonder Woman, Wolverine, or Captain Marvel. The powers aren't that epic. The story, however, is. It's a wonder and a delight.

Kuhn's writing is punchy and compelling and I loved reading about Evie Tanaka impersonating Aveda Jupiter (who also happens to be her childhood friend), her adventures / misadventures, her romance. It's just so smooth and (seemingly) effortless. I was hooked early on and I immediately wanted to read Heroine Worship right away. Unfortunately, I was three hours away from my house, without an internet connection, and nowhere near a bookstore. The point being, Sarah Kuhn is fantastic and I can't wait to read more. It was exceedingly tough to decide how to slot Sarah Kuhn and Katherine Arden on my ballot. Kuhn got the edge simply because I am more excited to read the next Sarah Kuhn novel right this moment and I want to savor Arden's writing and take longer breaks between books.


Rivers Solomon: Solomon is here on the strength of An Unkindness of Ghosts, a debut that is as much a novel as it is a statement and announcement of arrival. I have long loved the concept and often the execution of a generation ship, but I have never read anything quite like An Unkindness of Ghosts. It is not uncommon to read a generation ship novel that focuses on the divide between the more affluent privileged class and the poor workers living in squalor in the underbelly on the ship. It is uncommon to read a generation ship novel that takes that conceit and drives a knife straight in the gut by running the ship like a plantation. The white overseers are in the upper decks and have significantly greater freedom and luxury. The darker skinned workers are exploited, stigmatized, and brutalized for their very existence.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is a deeply uncomfortable novel to read, but every time I put the book down for the night I immediately wanted to pick it up and keep reading deep into the night. Solomon describes their novel as "a science fiction meditation on trans-generational trauma, race, and identity" and if you take that into the novel, you can see what they are doing. Slavery and trans-generation trauma is central to the storytelling of Unkindess of Ghosts, but so is that idea of identity. Through the generational trauma, so much family and personal histories have been lost. Characters barely know who their parents were, let alone grandparents or farther back. More, Solomon's writing of their protagonist, Aster, is so vital and central to the novel. Aster's voice and characterization of a neurologically atypical narrator is so incredibly well done and distinctive that it is almost impossible to imagine the novel written any other way.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is an almost impossibly accomplished and incredible novel and marks Rivers Solomon as an essential writer to watch.


My Vote
1. Rivers Solomon
2. Sarah Kuhn
3. Katherine Arden
4. Vina Jie-Min Prasad
5. Rebecca Roanhorse
6. Jeannete Ng


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POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Reading the Hugos: Novelette

It's time for another entry of Reading the Hugos: 2018 Edition! Today we're going to take a look at the six stories up for Best Novelette.

Novelette is inherently a weird category. There's not really a substantial difference between a short story and a novelette, except that a novelette is just a little bit longer (but not as long as a novella, which really is a different form).

One thing that I find interesting about the Novelette category this year is that it contains two stories that are spun off recent novels. "Children of Thorns, Children of Water" is part of Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen series and "Extracurricular Activities" is from Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire. Fortunately, for both stories, no previous knowledge of the books is required.

Shall we take a look at how the stories stack up against each other?


“Children of Thorns, Children of Water,” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny, July-August 2017)
“Extracurricular Activities,” by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, February 15, 2017)
“The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)
“A Series of Steaks,” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Clarkesworld, January 2017)
“Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” by K.M. Szpara (Uncanny, May/June 2017)
“Wind Will Rove,” by Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s, September/October 2017)


Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time: We've all read vampire stories and they're a dime a dozen. Whether they can walk in the daylight, are public about their identity, live in fear of being found out, or any variation that you can think of, you've probably read the story. Or, so I thought. On the surface, this can be any other vampire story, except for one thing. Finley, the victim about to transition to becoming a vampire is a transman.

"Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time" excels in exploring the intersection of Finley's transition to male with his transition to vampire. This is what science fiction and fantasy is all about - the exploration of different ideas and identities. What does the transition to vampire do to a body who has undergone gender transition? "Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time" is a sexy story of identity, belonging, heartbreak, and complication. It happens to be a vampire story. Szpara's story pushes boundaries and is an exceptional piece of fiction.


Children of Thorns, Children of Water:  I'm not sure if I can or if I even should attempt to separate my appreciation for "Children of Thorns, Children of Water" from my appreciation of de Bodard's excellent Dominion of the Fallen series of novels. If you've read the second of those novels, The House of Binding Thorns, you know that Thuon is a primary character and you can read this story as prequel. If not, or if you just don't remember, "Children of Thorns, Children of Water" is "just" a very good story of clashing cultures and an attempt to infiltrate another organization that runs not unlike a mob family.

It's good, people. You should expect this if you've read Aliette de Bodard before. She never disappoints. "Children of Thorns, Children of Water" tells the story of Thuon, a minor dragon prince (this is a literal statement) attempting to infiltrate House Hawthorn, one of several "houses" comprised of fallen angels (again, literal) ruling over Paris. It's complicated, risky, and there are problems in the house.

Because I have a poor memory, I spent half of the story thinking "this Thuon seems very familiar" - but that did nothing to lessen my appreciation for de Bodard's skill in telling a very good story.


The Secret Life of Bots: Suzanne Palmer is telling two stories here, though they are very much intertwined. The secondary story is that of the last gasp fight of humanity against an alien that has been winning the war and eradicating every human ship and outpost it can find and has launched a desperate attack in a derelict ship to hold the enemy back. The primary story is that of the titular "bots", which are used to do any number of menial task. The ship's AI is using bots to keep it operational, but sends one of the oldest bots, a now defunct model, after a rodent of sorts that has been damaging the ship.

The little robots are programmed to follow commands, but they have just enough AI to be able to interpret and figure out the best way to accomplish a task. It's that AI that gives the little robots fantastic personality. Palmer's story is charming, though coupled with the impending extinction of humanity perhaps charming shouldn't be the right word. It's tense, but the robots are the real heroes of this fight. I use this description a fair amount when talking about stories, but I wanted a whole lot more of this story while recognizing Palmer told it at the right length. "The Secret Life of Bots" isn't missing a thing and I was delighted the entire time I spent reading it.


A Series of Steaks: Since I've already written about the Short Story category, this is Vina Jie-Min Prasad's second story on the Hugo ballot and it is a real standout. Besides everything, what I really enjoy about "A Series of Steaks" is the framing of forgery and what makes a good forger. Ultimately, that's what "A Series of Steaks" is about. Helena semi-legally fabricates meat for restaurants that is otherwise undetectable for not being the real thing (ultimately, a forgery). She is offered a contract that she can't refuse because it comes with a threat to expose her.

The rest of the story is a tense game of Helena (and her new assistant) trying to fulfill the order and somehow protect herself. Prasad's writing is clear and pulled me right in. It's a damn fine story and I'm going to be looking for much more from Vina Jie-Min Prasad.


Extracurricular Activities: This is the second story on the ballot that is related to a novel. This one is set well before Yoon Ha Lee's novel Ninefox Gambit. "Extracurricular Activities" is a story of one of Shuos Jedeo's early missions well before he became a legend and a mass murderer, though already he had a reputation.

"Extracurricular Activities" will work perfectly well if you're not familiar with Shuos Jedeo from Ninefox Gambit or Raven Strategem. In one sense, this is a fairly straight forward story. It's an undercover mission to rescue another undercover crew that might be capture or otherwise in trouble. On the other hand, even if you're unfamiliar with Jedeo, there is a strong sense that Yoon Ha Lee is building a legend while showing what he was like as a man and an officer. Effective. Passionate. Creative and unconventional. Yoon Ha Lee's writing is on point and top notch. This is either a bite sized slice of a much larger story or it's a perfectly compact and excellent story that stands on its own. It's both, and it's exceptional.


Wind Will Rove: Though I don’t read nearly as much short fiction as I used to, it is becoming quickly apparent that Sarah Pinsker is one of my favorite short fiction writers and that her name on a story tells me that not only do I want to read it, that it is also likely to be exceptionally good. “Wind Will Rove” is one of two stories from Pinsker on this year’s Hugo ballot and, like “And Then There Were (N-One)”, it is fantastic. I want to use the phrase “top notch”, but I’m afraid I’m beginning to overuse it to the point that “top notch” has lost some of its meaning.

“Wind Will Rove” is a story of history, music, and a generation ship. I’m a sucker for a generation ship story. I almost always want more and more from the story, and that includes this one. With so much lost to a virus that destroyed databases worth of knowledge and culture, the residents of this particular ship have clung to what they can recall and what they were able to recreate – even knowing that so much of it is only partial truth mixed with imperfect memory. Depending on who you ask, of what generation, the culture of the ship has either stagnated or it is focused on remembering where they’ve come from. Sarah Pinsker asks important questions about what cultural identities are important to bring along untouched into the future and what culture should shape and reform around who the people are at that moment and in that place. What relevance does a song of an “Oklahoma Rooster” have for people several generations away from ever having even seen a rooster or a barn or the feeling of natural air on a planet? What meaning does learning the history of a long departed planet have for children who will live and die on a ship speeding between the stars?

Pinsker examines history and culture through the lens of “oldtime” fiddle music and through the passage of time on a generation ship. She doesn’t offer an easy answer but does suggest a way through. Perhaps she’s looking at a unique situation of a particular generation ship, but there are still things to consider in how we respond to changing culture today. Sarah Pinsker’s easy storytelling pulls you in, takes hold of your hand, and guides you on a journey. I don’t play music, and I know Pinsker is a musician, but the traditions and the art of music really comes through here. It’s a wonderful story.

My Vote
1. Wind Will Rove
2. Extracurricular Activities
3. A Series of Steaks
4. The Secret Life of Bots
5. Children of Thorns, Children of Water
6. Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time


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POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

Reading the Hugos: Short Story

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos: 2018 Edition! Today we're going to take a look at the six stories up for Best Short Story!

Even though the skill it takes to write an excellent short story does not necessarily translate exactly for the skill it takes to write an excellent novel, and short stories are by no means training grounds for novel writing, the short story category here is absolutely building a reading list of authors I want to read more from.

I'm already well familiar with Linda Nagata's recent near future military science fiction novels (The Red Trilogy, The Last Good Man), but this might be the first of her shorter works I encountered. Rebecca Roanhorse has received all the nominations for this story, but I'm also excited for her debut novel Trail of Lightning (really). I should really read more Ursula Vernon. You get the picture.

Rather than more babble, let's look at the stories.


“Carnival Nine,” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2017)
“Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand,” by Fran Wilde (Uncanny, September 2017)
“Fandom for Robots,” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny, September/October 2017)
“The Martian Obelisk,” by Linda Nagata (Tor.com, July 19, 2017)
“Sun, Moon, Dust” by Ursula Vernon, (Uncanny, May/June 2017)
“Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™,” by Rebecca Roanhorse (Apex, August 2017)


"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand": For some reason, I have bounced off Fran Wilde's Hugo finalist stories. Last year was "The Jewel and Her Lapidary", which took two reads to even appreciate. This year "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" is the story I struggled with most. It is a more of an art exhibit than it is a straight up story. You, the reader, are being led through a museum of atrocities but that perhaps the real atrocity is you, the reader.

"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" becomes increasingly horrifying as the story goes on, and Wilde is very effective in delivering a disturbing experience for the reader. I appreciate what she is doing, but at the same time, it's not something I really appreciate in fiction, either.


Carnival Nine: More of a straight forward story than "Clearly Lettered", "Carnival Nine" is a story of family and sentient clockwork automatons whose lives are determined by the number of "turns" remaining in their main spring. It's a touching story of the sacrifices parents can make of their dreams for their children and how meaningful those sacrifices can become. Thinking about my own children, it isn't that my dreams are truly sacrificed, it's that my priorities have changed and so have some of my dreams. That's ultimately the story of "Carnival Nine", which is what the last line gets at. "My life had been different from the adventures I imagined as a child, but I made the most of the turns I was given, and that's all any of us can do."

I like what "Carnival Nine" is about, and I certainly appreciated it as a story more than "Clearly Lettered", but it still was not a favorite or something I expect to revisit any time soon.


"Fandom for Robots": So, the original sentient AI discovers fan fiction and gets involved in the fandom for the anime Hyperdimension Warp Record. On its surface, "Fandom for Robots" is exactly what it seems to be - an AI learning about fandom, about shipping characters, about writing fan fiction and commenting on other stories. But, I wonder, is there a point here where Prasad is also talking about how fanfiction gives a greater opportunity to marginalized people to see themselves in stories where they are otherwise excluded? Is Prasad telling a story about how fanfiction can build community and inclusion?

"Fandom for Robots" was a lot of fun to read, but it's a better story when I'm reading a bit deeper into what message may be baked into an otherwise basic story of an AI discovering fanfiction.


“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” is a complicated story that seems, on its surface, fairly simplistic. Jesse works for a virtual reality company that sells “authentic Indian experiences” for (generally white) tourists looking for their idea of “authentic Indian” rather than anything that might resemble the real thing, as if there were a singular real experience to be had anyway. So, the experiences are more cinematic and theatrical and pop cultural and anything that smacks too heavily of realism tends not to sell well to the public.

There is an interesting resignation to Jesse’s character. Some of his peers are angry and disgusted (while still accepting this is the job they need to do), but Jesse goes along fairly passively. I suspect there are multiple layers to this story that I’m unlikely to grasp, being a white male on the cusp of middle age, but from what I’m able to see the idea of cultural identity is being addressed in fairly original and important ways. Jesse’s identity seems tied up in the popular tropes of what an Indian is, while his wife recognizes that he is an Indian because he is, in fact, an Indian. Then, there’s the white man who may have some distant heritage seeming to come in and take everything away from Jesse, perhaps for not being “Indian enough”. I’m not sure if that’s a right reading of the story. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” gets a bit weird the deeper it goes and Roanhorse examines the difference between Jesse and “White Wolf”.

The story is told in second person perspective, which puts me (if not the generic “reader”) in the position of wondering if maybe we’re also getting Jesse’s “Authentic Indian Experience” as much as we’re being told the story on the surface. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” is an excellent story as also is the kind that puts the reader on notice that Rebecca Roanhorse is an author to watch out for.


"Sun, Moon, Dust": I am reminded how much I enjoy Ursula Vernon's short fiction. I should really make a point to reading more of it. "Sun, Moon, Dust" features a farmer given a magical / possessed sword by his warrior grandmother on her deathbed. The story I expected is that the farmer would take up the sword, embark on some quest, learn to be a warrior and standard fantasy tropes. That just seemed to be the set up Vernon was giving us, except everything about "Sun, Moon, Dust" is a subversion of that standard epic fantasy.

Sometimes a farmer just wants to be a farmer. Allpa, the farmer, knows who he is. He's not seduced by the sword's ideas of fame and valor and violence. Rather, it is his gentle humanity that gives a lesson to the spirits bound to the sword about who and what they may want to be. "Sun, Moon, Dust" is an absolute delight.


“The Martian Obelisk” is a bleak, bleak story that is ultimately about and laced with hope. This is what happens after the slow apocalypse, after the climate change and the rising seas and the wars and the viruses without cure. There are small pockets of humanity on Earth living in relative civilization because of proximity to particular cities that came through okay, but the inference is that most everyone else is not. There’s nothing left to do for the people who remain on Earth and the attempted colonies on Mars have all failed. Susannah has spent the last sixteen years of her life gradually (and remotely) building a monument on Mars, the titular obelisk.

What I most appreciate about "The Martian Obelisk" is that the story begins as a massive futile gesture of defiance into the void, but it ends with ultimately the smallest but most important of gestures of hope and kindness. It ends with the reaching out to help another, even at the cost of Susannah's dream of tilting at windmill with her obelisk. Nagata's story is powerful and moving.


My Vote:
1. The Martian Obelisk
2. Sun, Moon, Dust
3. Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience
4. Fandom for Robots
5. Carnival Nine
6. Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand


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POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.