Summary:
A decidedly lacklustre selection of stories with only one that really deserves to be here, the winner Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer. I also liked Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim but I don’t think it is Hugo award worthy.

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Editors, Neil Clarke, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x3), Ellen Datlow, Lezli Robyn

Fiction:
Bots of the Lost Ark • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗∗+
Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. • novelette by Fran Wilde ∗
Colors of the Immortal Palette • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim ∗∗∗
That Story Isn’t the Story • novelette by John Wiswell ∗∗
L’Esprit de L’Escalier • novelette by Catherynne M. Valente ∗
O₂ Arena • novelette by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki ∗∗

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There are six finalists in the novelette category, and they are reviewed below in the order they finished in the Hugo Award ballot.

•

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2021) is a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). The story opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi are extremely hostile to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. As 9 makes its way there it is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation . . . and bots)—but is surprised when he sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride the creature. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not engaged in internecine battles to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus—which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When he wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct him to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

•

Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. by Fran Wilde (Uncanny, May-Jun 2021) begins with Mrs Vanessa Saunders and her Fête Noire Charity Ball co-chairs receiving a photo message informing them that Unseelie Brothers Ltd., a shop that makes bespoke ball gowns, are back in town.
Saunders quickly returns home to tell her daughter Rie (Merielle), and her niece Sera (from whose point of view the rest of the story is told) to go and find the shop. When the pair eventually locate the premises of Unseelie Brothers Ltd. (it does not give out its address or phone number), the story starts falling into standard “magic shop” territory, i.e. it is closed when they find it but opens when Saunders arrives and writes a message on a glove and puts it through the letterbox.
When the door opens, Sera hears “the rustle of wings” and sees a face that she thinks might be her lost mother (we learn along the way that Sera’s mother vanished years before, and that she, along with Mrs Saunders, wore Unseelie Brothers’ dresses when they were young):

from The Social Season, plate 76. The Butterfly Gown, worn by a Serena (née) _____ (unknown) Sebastian to the Spring Charity Gala of 1998. She attended with her sister Vanessa (née) ______ (unknown) Saunders, and soon after married one of the event’s busboys. Saunders herself married the scion of the Saunders soap fortune. The event was notable in that several young women and men were discovered the following morning, on the roof, wearing bacchanalian-styled greenery and nothing more, by hotel staff at The Pierre. Photo by Mrs. Vanessa Saunders. Designers: Dora Unseelie and Beau Unseelie, Sr.

The central part of the story then sees: (a) Rie fitted for a dress, (b) Sera given a pearl necklace and a job offer from Dora, one of the Unseelie employees, and (c) Sera (a student dressmaker) design a “Crown of Thorns” dress for the company, which they subsequently make and sell to Rie instead of the one she had originally chosen during her fitting. During all this there are various magical occurrences (at one point Sera loses track of time, and emerges to find days have passed and the shop has moved location).
The last part of the story (which somewhat lost me) sees Sera discover that (spoiler) her mother is trapped in the dress that Unseelie Brothers made for her, and which Mrs Saunders still has in her wardrobe. However, when Sera (at Dora’s suggestion) unseams the dress to release her mother, only butterflies emerge. Then Sera discovers that that her mother and aunt were both Unseelie shop workers who managed to escape their employer.
Sera later (a) rewrites the contract given to her by Unseelie Brothers to give her and the other workers an ever-increasing share of the business, (b) alters Rie’s Crown of Thorns dress to remove any risk that it will hurt her (the dresses usually bring good fortune, but not always), (c) publishes the emergency number for the shop and, as a consequence, sells many dresses (which, we learn, no longer cause problems). Finally, Beau (the owner/manager) finds he cannot move the shop.
I found this story engaging enough for the most of its length, but the ending, which seems to tack on a magical realist/empowerment ending onto a more-or-less conventional magic shop story, makes it falls apart.
∗ (Mediocre). 8,600 words.

•

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)¹ is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a “vampire” at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:

I’m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I’m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, “I could show you other poses.”
“Yes.” He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes—tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn’t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.

Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman’s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine’s death:

The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I’ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I’d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Café Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort—Édouard, Émile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right—I don’t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I’m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia or Impression, Sunrise. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari), and maybe my lack of success is not—as I have always told myself—because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models—always with their consent—to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.

I liked this piece well enough but there isn’t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone’s taste.
∗∗∗ (Good). 12,800 words.

•

That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell (Uncanny, November-December 2021)¹ opens with Anton leaving a vampire household with the help of an old friend called Grigorii. As they leave the house in Grigorii’s car, Anton sees Mr Bird (the vampire) return:

A black town car trails up the street toward them. Sleek and black, with that short club of a man Walter at the wheel. Mr. Bird’s senior familiar. Anton knows who sits in the tinted windows and the shadows of the rear seats.
From inside the Kia, Grigorii pops the passenger door open. “Come on, man.”
Is blood spotting in Anton’s jeans? He gropes at his thighs, unsure if the moisture is sweat on his palms or if he’s bleeding. The car is getting closer. Mr. Bird definitely sees him. Anton sinks into the car. He clutches his seatbelt until they are doing forty in a twenty mile zone. He’s too worried to turn around, and too afraid not to fixate on the rearview mirror.
The black car stops in the middle of the street. A rear door opens, and a dark thing peers out. There is no seeing any detail of that figure—no detail except for his mouth. It is open and sharp. Distance doesn’t change how clearly Anton sees the teeth.

Anton then meets Luis, another stray, at Grigorii’s house, and worries about Mr Bird before examining himself in the toilet to see if the bite wounds in his thighs are still bleeding (these are semi-permanent, and bleed in the presence of Mr Bird). They aren’t, which means that Mr Bird is not nearby, or not yet.
This background feeling of menace and unease pervades most of the rest of the story, and rises and falls as different events play out. To begin with, Luis is attacked on the way back from his job, something Anton thinks may be related to his departure and which causes a fight between the two when Anton tried to inspect Luis for bites. Then Walter, Mr Bird’s familiar, approaches Anton to tell him that he must return, the first of two visits (during the second one Walter tells Anton that the twins, two of the vampire’s other victims, have also run away).
There is never any force or violence used to get Anton to return, oddly enough and, towards the end of the story, the contacts stop and Anton transitions to a normal life. Then, one evening when Anton and a new boyfriend called Julian go out for a meal, Anton sees Walter working in the restaurant and realises that he has left Mr Bird too.
The story closes a few weeks later, when Anton goes out of town with Julian for the weekend and detours past Mr Bird’s house: Anton sees the building is in an obvious state of disrepair and then, while he sketches the house, it collapses.
This has the trappings of a vampire story but is really a mainstream piece about escaping abusive relationships or situations, and one which suggests that people can choose their own destinies—the line “that story isn’t the story” is used a couple of times:

Walter asks, “What made you think you could survive without him?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today.” [Anton replies.]

[Anton] asks [Grigorii], “What happened to your [abusive] mom? Do you ever see her?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today, man.”

This would have been a reasonably good straight piece, but the story undermines itself somewhat by setting up the vampire menace at the beginning of the piece and then letting it fade away. That said, I realise that the idea of a perceived threat being more perception that reality may be one of the points the story is trying to make.²
∗∗ (Average). 9,000 words. Story link.

•

L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente (Tor.com, 25^th August 2021)³ opens with a man making breakfast for his apparently undead wife:

She slices through an egg and lets the yolk run like yellow blood. Severs a corner of toast and dredges it in the warm, sunny liquid, so full of life, full enough to nourish a couple of cells all the way through to a downy little baby birdie with sweet black eyes. If only things had gone another way.
Eurydice hesitates before putting it between her lips. Knowing what will happen. Knowing it will hurt them both, but mainly her. Like everything else.
She shoves it in quickly. Attempts a smile. And, just this once, the smile does come when it is called.
[. . .]
Then, her jaw pops out of its socket with a loud thook and sags, hanging at an appalling, useless angle. She presses up against her chin, fighting to keep it in, but the fight isn’t fair and could never be. Eurydice locks eyes with Orpheus. No tears, though she really is so sorry for what was always about to happen. But her ducts were cauterized by the sad, soft event horizon between, well. There and Here.
Orpheus longs for her tears, real and hot and sweet and salted as caramel, and he hates himself for his longing. He hates her for it, too. A river of black, wet earth and pebbles and moss and tiny blind helpless worms erupts out of Eurydice’s smile, splattering so hard onto his mother’s perfect plate that it cracks down the middle, and dirt pools out across the table and the worms nose mutely at the crusts of the almost-burnt toast.

The rest of the piece (I wouldn’t call it a story) shows us variously: the daily life of, and tensions between, the couple; a visit from Eurydice’s mother, who bathes her daughter; a trip to the therapist; the arrival of Orpheus’s father Apollo and his groupies (there are various rock music and Greek myth references throughout the story—this chapter sees Prometheus giving Apollo a light⁴); Eurydice heating her body up with a hairdryer so Orpheus will want to make love with her; and, finally, a visit to Sisyphus, who asks Eurydice if she wanted to come back from the dead.
This piece is, according to the introduction to the story, supposed to be a “provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth”, but it is actually a borderline tedious non-story apparently written for goths and classics students. Another effort from Valente that is both plotless and overwritten.
∗ (Mediocre). 9,300 words. Story link.

•

O₂ Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)⁵ opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):

Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O₂ cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O₂ masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O₂ cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O₂ generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.

During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O₂ arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
∗∗ (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.

•••

This is a decidedly lacklustre selection of stories with only Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer really earning its place here.
I get the impression from this category (and the short story one) that there is a Uncanny reading and voting clique that determines a lot of the finalists (half the short story and novelette finalists are from this magazine). There is also a huge online publication bias (something also seen in nomination statistics⁶) and it looks like it helps if you write about life or political issues, or produce material that is sentimental or light-hearted.⁷  ●

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1. That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell was also a 2022 Nebula Award novelette finalist, and won the Locus Poll.

2. I found this comment from Wiswell about That Story Isn’t the Story in a short interview in the same issue of Uncanny:

The other thing I knew was coming was Anton wouldn’t have a normal ending. No confrontation with Mr. Bird. No fight to the death. No self-sacrifice. No diabolical master plan. Everything that we sometimes dread will happen to us, or our loved ones, because of our trauma? That is partially because we’ve been harmed. It’s also partially an illusion. I wanted to let Anton slowly recognize what was a trauma mirage, while his worthiness of self-respect wasn’t illusory at all.

I didn’t get the self-respect part (if you don’t feel that way by default then perhaps this is more apparent), but the rest makes sense.

3. L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente was the runner-up in the Locus Poll for novelette.

4. The Eurydice and Orpheus myth at Wikipedia.

5. O₂ Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki was (unusually) reprinted in Apex, another online magazine, two months later. I cannot see the point of Galaxy’s Edge putting it online for a month and then taking it down, only to let another publication reprint it almost immediately (my understanding is that most venues have a period of exclusivity in their contracts).

6. The Hugo Awards page.

7. One story I am surprised to see ignored by most of this year’s awards and polls is You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson.  ●

Summary: A game of two halves, with three good stories, Mr. Death by Alix E. Harrow (which has a “Reaper” from the Department of Death given a two year old boy as his next job), Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte (a son visits his dead father in VR to finish a math proof and try to establish a relationship), and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (an online group discuss a gruesome folk song, and one of their number later does some field research).

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Editors, Jason Sizemore & Lesley Conner, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x3), unknown (x2)

Fiction:
Mr. Death • short story by Alix E. Harrow ∗∗∗+
Proof by Induction • short story by José Pablo Iriarte ∗∗∗∗
The Sin of America • short story by Catherynne M. Valente ∗
Tangles • short story by Seanan McGuire ∗∗
Unknown Number • short story by Blue Neustifter ∗
Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather • short story by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗∗+

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There are six finalists in the short story category, and they are reviewed below in the order they are listed on the Hugo Award site.

Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow (Apex #121, January 2021)¹ begins with Sam, the narrator, telling us that he has ferried “two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death” before he is given his next assignment:

Name: Lawrence Harper
Address: 186 Grist Mill Road, Lisle NY, 13797
Time: Sunday, July 14th 2020, 2:08AM, EST
Cause: Cardiac arrest resulting from undiagnosed long QT syndrome
Age: 30 months
.
Jesus Christ on his sacred red bicycle. He’s two.

Sam goes to see Lawrence several hours before his death (a requirement that helps smooth the passing of the dead across the river to “rejoin the great everything”) and, when he arrives in the boy’s bedroom, watches him stir. Lawrence’s father, alerted by the intercom, comes in and picks the boy up and takes him into the kitchen. Sam then watches the father hold and feed Lawrence, and notes the father does not know that this will be his last time together with his son. Later on in the garden, the boy (unusually) sees Sam, and the pair later play catch together.
The rest of the story switches between this kind of affecting domestic detail (we see the boy with his mother when she gets home), backstory about the premature death of Sam’s own young son, Ian, and an account of Sam’s own death and recruitment as a “reaper”.
Eventually (spoiler), Lawrence’s moment of passing arrives and, when his heart stops, Sam intervenes, putting a ghostly hand into the boy’s chest and massaging it back to life.
Sam subsequently has his tea leaves read by his Archangel supervisor, Raz (“the kind of sweet, middle-aged Black woman with whom you do not fuck”) and is given another appointment to reap the boy. Once again Sam saves him, and once again Raz appears. This time she asks Sam what he would do if she punished him by leaving him on Earth, never to cross the river and rejoin the great everything, but to fade into nothingness. Sam says he would watch over Lawrence for as long as he could, and the story finishes with Raz telling him he no longer works for the Department of Death. Before she goes she hands him a card, which says, “Sam Grayson, Junior Guardian, Department of Life”.
Although this story pretends, for most of its length, to be an edgy and dark piece, it is ultimately sentimental and feel-good—and, to be honest, quite well done. I couldn’t help but think, however, that there are darker and more profound versions of the story where the boy dies. Two options spring to mind: the first, which would appeal to the religious, is that we see the joy of him rejoining the great everything; the second just sees him die, and has the narrator reflect on the need for stoicism to get us through this veil of tears. I doubt any current SF writer is going to be writing that kind of story any time soon.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words. Story link.

•

Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte (Uncanny #40, May-June 2021)² opens with Paulie arriving at the hospital to discover his father has died. Standing next to his father’s wife is the chaplain, who offers Paulie the chance to enter his father’s “Coda”, a computer simulacrum of his father’s consciousness made just before his death:

Gone was the endotracheal tube. The room was eerily silent, with none of the sounds he’d associated with the hospital from his visits over the past week.
He met his father’s eyes. “Hey.”
His father smiled ruefully. “Hey.”
“Are you—”
“Dead?” His father gestured toward the inactive monitors.
“Apparently so.”
“Does it hurt?” Are you afraid, he wanted to ask, but he knew better than to talk to his father about emotions.
“Nothing hurts,” he said, picking at a scab on his leg. “I guess they have a way of turning that off.”
“Did the doctors mess up? Should I ask for an autopsy?”
His father shook his head. “Nah. I’m seventy-one, diabetic, and with a bad heart. You’re not going to win any lawsuits here.”
It occurred to Paulie that Codas could be programmed to give whatever answer benefitted the hospital.
Paulie stared out the window, over the parking lot, to the eerily empty expressway. “I really believed we were close on that Perelman proof.”
“Maybe nobody’s meant to find it.”
Easy for him to say. He’d already been beyond questions of tenure and publication; now all of that was even more meaningless for him.
For Paulie, though, Perelman would have been the home run his tenure dossier needed. He turned back toward the bed. “Okay. Well.” He put a hand on the chair he’d sat in last night while his father complained about his breathing. He should say something. Something like I love you¸ he supposed. But his father had never gone in for the mushy stuff in life, so why start now?
“Goodbye, then,” he finished instead.
“Bye, Paulie,” said his father. “Thank you for visiting.”

Paulie subsequently arranges to take a copy of the Coda home with him, and the rest of the story mostly consists of scenes where Paulie visits his father’s Coda to work on the theorem (although we also see something of Paulie’s own family life and relationship with his daughter, and the peer pressure he experiences at his university job).
The two men’s attempts to solve the theory become increasingly complicated by the fact that Paulie’s father has no memory of what has happened during previous visits, which means that Paulie has to explain everything they have done each time he enters the Coda. We also see further evidence of the emotional distance between the men, and Paulie’s attempts to make some sort of connection with his father, such as the occasion he mentions his daughter’s forthcoming dance recital:

“It just. . .it reminds me of my piano recitals.”
His father leaned on his bed railing. “Is that what this is really about, Paulie? Are you here to tell me I was a shitty father? I know. I already acknowledged that, after the divorce.”
Paulie dropped into the chair by the bed. “No,” he said at last. “Sorry. I keep thinking of what other people use the Coda technology for, and I keep waiting to hear you talk about something besides math or life insurance. I keep hoping you’ll have something profound to say.”
“I’m not the mushy type.”
“You could fake it.”
“You’re the smartest person I ever met. You would see through any faking.”
Paulie blinked. A compliment.
“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t want anything to do with me,” his father went on, “after not being there for you as a kid. But then you made me a part of your life and we got along okay. You treated me like a colleague, so I tried to treat you the same. Now you’re mad at me for not acting more like a father? I didn’t think you wanted that from me.”
Paulie waited to see if he would say anything else. That was about as close to “mushy” as he’d come since the night twenty years ago when he’d apologized for abandoning him.
After a quiet eternity, he got up from the chair. “Okay, well, I think I have enough to work on for now. I’ll come back when I have some progress.”
“Bye, Paulie. Thank you for visiting.”

Eventually (spoiler) they go on to solve the theorem, and Paulie comes to accept that his father is never going to say the things that he wants him to say.
Normally I’m not remotely interested in “Daddy” or other problematical relationship stories, but this one works quite well—probably because Iriarte handles this in a fairly muted way and not as the usual whiny adolescent psychodrama. I’d also note that the description of the mathematical processes undertaken to solve the theorem are an equal focus of the story, and are quite gripping—a significant feat considering that I had no idea about what was being discussed.
This story has an odd combination of ideas and themes, but I liked it a lot.
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 6,250 words. Story link.

•

The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022)³ has a beginning that suggests (more or less correctly) that the story is going to be an overwritten modern myth:

There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan, sitting in the sun-yellow booth in the far back corner of the Blue Bison Diner & Souvenir Shoppe under a busted wagon wheel and a pair of wall-mounted commemorative plates. One’s from the moon landing. The other’s from old Barnum Brown discovering the first T-Rex skeleton up at Hell Creek.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America.

We subsequently learn about (a) the woman (Ruby-Rose Martineau, middle aged, dead baby, parents run a butterfly farm, eating the sin of America), (b) the teenage waitress Emmeline (pregnant by the older and widowed owner), and (c) the diner (various items of décor). Then we see the diner’s clientele watch TV, and news of the trial of a man called Salazar.
Eventually, Ruby-Roses’s huge meal arrives and, as she works her way through it, she thinks about her past and how she came to be selected for her current task.
Many pages of description later, Ruby-Rose finishes her meal. She then goes outside—where (spoiler) the rest of the customers beat her to death. When a new customer arrives in the diner car park and sees Ruby-Rose’s body, a blood-spattered Emmeline tells him it’s okay, and “It’s the beginning of a new era. We’re all better now.” The TV in the diner shows the news that Ruby-Rose was behind a hedge fund Ponzi scheme.
I had no idea what the point of this was. Two suggestions in one of my Facebook groups were (a) that it is a Christ-allegory (she dies for their sins) or (b) it is similar to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, with its themes of scapegoating and conformity.⁴
Another story that illustrates the adage, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,600 words. Story link.

•

Tangles by Seanan McGuire (Magic The Gathering, 2021) opens with the dryad narrator and her tree arriving on a new “Plane” (I assume this is one of many realities in a fantasy multiverse). She has come to the Kessig forest to free the tree from her service:

They had taken another five steps when the tree spoke again, saying, Here. Stop.
Wrenn stopped. They drove their roots deep into the ground, and bit by bit, she began to pull herself out of the home that had been hers for so long. As she pulled, her awareness of the great tree dwindled, until she felt like a tooth that had been loosened in its socket, still part of the body but awaiting only one last sharp blow to knock it out entirely.
Then, with a final yank that she felt all the way to the bottom of her stomach, she uprooted herself and was no longer joined with Six. Six, who was no longer the majestic, towering treefolk he had become during their time together—trees had no gender as such, but dryads did, and upon discovering the concept in her mind, he had considered his choices and decided he preferred the masculine⁵—was now a mature, healthy, beautifully twisting Innistrad oak, his branches reaching for the clouded sky.

Wrenn subsequently searches the forest for a new tree and, as she does so, the villagers from a nearby settlement start hunting her (they fear she is a “white witch”). Accompanying them is a mage called Teferi, who finds her before the villagers do and makes her acquaintance. Then, when Teferi detects a demon behind them, he unleashes a magic spell that vanquishes the beast but also distorts the forest around them—and they end up locked in some kind of maze or Mobius strip (after walking for a time they eventually find themselves back where they started).
By now Wrenn urgently needs to find a tree to help contain the fire within her, so she gives Teferi advice about how to view and untangle his spell, as well as adding her magic to his. He (spoiler) succeeds in undoing the spell’s effects and they return to their original location. They also find that, during this process, Teferi has “bent” time and a nearby sapling has aged and matured into a tree suitable for Wrenn.
This is a competently done story but an uninvolving one—possibly because the plot feels like various game moves rather than something which develops organically.
∗∗ (Average). 5,150 words. Story link.

•

Unknown Number by Blue Neustifter (Twitter, 28^th July 2021) is a story which is presented as screenshots of a text message conversation. The initial exchanges between the two messagers profoundly disturb the recipient because of the amount of personal detail that the sender knows about them but, as the story progresses (spoiler), we subsequently discover that the sender is a male physicist who has developed a device that allows him to contact his other selves in the multiverse (hence his intimate knowledge). Later on we learn that he is looking for a timeline where his other self successfully transitioned to become a woman so he can question them about their life, and discuss his own gender dysphoria. Gaby, the person he is messaging, has completed that transition.
This piece has a novel presentation and a neat idea, but it takes a while to get going (i.e. to the point that Gaby accepts what is happening), and then goes on for too long. It is also quite a wandering, narcissistic conversation, and occasionally descends into bumper sticker/self-help philosophy (“life is a fucking hard thing, and sometimes it’s happy, and sometimes it’s miserable; “life is hard, capitalism sucks, the world is dying”, etc.).
This has a novel format but the SFnal idea at its heart is, I think, amateurishly executed.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,600 words. Story link.

•

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022) opens with an online discussion of a song:

→This song, included among the famous ballads documented by Francis James Child, is an allegorical tale of a tryst between two lovers and its aftermath. –Dynamum (2 upvotes, 1 downvote)
.
>That’s awfully reductive, and I’m not sure what allegory you’re seeing. There’s a murder and a hanging and something monstrous in the woods. Sets it apart from the average lovers’ tryst. –BarrowBoy
.
>Fine. I just thought somebody should summarize it here a little, since “about the song” means more than just how many verses it has. Most people come here to discuss how to interpret a song, not where to find it in the Child Ballads’ table of contents. –Dynamum
.
→Dr. Mark Rydell’s 2002 article “A Forensic Analysis of ‘Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather’”, published in Folklore, explored the major differences and commonalities and their implications. In The Rose and the Briar, Wendy Lesser writes about how if a trad song leaves gaps in its story, it’s because the audience was expected to know what information filled those gaps. The audience that knew this song is gone, and took the gap information with them. Rydell attempted to fill in the blanks. –HolyGreil (1 upvote)

This passage pretty much limns the rest of the story in that: (a) it shows several people on a forum discussing the song Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather stanza by stanza—during which we learn it is about a man meeting a woman in the woods and having his heart is excised and used to grow an oak tree; (b) it illustrates the usual online friction between participants (most notably in this case between BarrowBoy and Dynamum above, with the former constantly downvoting the latter); and (c) we first hear of HolyGriel’s account of Rydell’s academic work, which leads a documentary maker called Henry Martyn to investigate further. Martyn later discovers that Rydell visited the location referred to in the song, a village called Gall in England, and (spoiler) he subsequently disappeared. Then, towards the end of the story, Martyn also travels to the village to do research for his documentary. There, he meets a very helpful (and knowledgeable) young woman called Jenny. . . .
This is very well done (the online comments and exchanges are pitch perfect), but the story has an ending you can see coming from miles away. An entertaining piece but not a multi-award winning one.⁶
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 6,700 words. Story link.

•••

As per the summary above, this is a game of two halves, with three better than good stories (the Harrow, Iriarte, and the Pinsker), and three that, in my opinion, should not be here. I can only presume that these latter three arrived for auxiliary reasons: the Valente perhaps for its political/cultural slant and because of her previous Hugo nominations; the McGuire also because of pervious nominations and the popularity of Magic The Gathering, an online game; and the Neustifter because of trans zeitgeist and peak social media. I note in passing that these stories received between 44 and 96 nominations.⁷
I would also note that the Hugo voting (for short fiction anyway) is once again tribal—for the n^th year running nearly all the nominees are women (four or five in this category, depending on how you count), and skew entirely towards online work (three stories are from Uncanny, and there is one each from Apex, Magic The Gathering, and Twitter).
As to the question of what story will actually win in this category, who knows? My choice would be the Iriarte, although that piece does not strike me as a Hugo winner. I suspect that the Pinsker will win, maybe the Harrow. We will know in a few days.  ●

_____________________

1. Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow was also a Nebula finalist and runner-up in the short story category of the Locus Poll.

2. Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte was also a Nebula finalist and placed fourth in the short story category of the Locus Poll. It is currently a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

3. The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente placed fifth in the short story category of the Locus Poll.

4. This is one of the Wikipedia interpretations of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

5. Even trees are choosing their own gender nowadays. Hurrah.

6. Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker won the Nebula and Locus Awards for 2021, and is a finalist for this year’s World Fantasy Award. This a well executed piece but it doesn’t have the substance of a multi-award winner.

7. The Hugo Awards page.  ●

Summary: The 2020 Hugo Award novelettes are another mixed bag, but are better than the short story finalists. There is one worthy finalist from Ted Chiang, a pretty good fantasy from Siobhan Carroll, and a solid enough story from Caroline M. Yoachim. The remaining three stories have their moments, but don’t entirely work.

_____________________

Editors, John Joseph Adams, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x2), Blake Crouch, Ellen Datlow, unknown.

Fiction:
The Archronology of Love • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim ∗∗∗
Away With the Wolves • novelette by Sarah Gailey ∗∗
The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye • novelette by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗
Emergency Skin • novelette by N.K. Jemisin ∗
For He Can Creep • novelette by Siobhan Carroll ∗∗∗+
Omphalos • novelette by Ted Chiang ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Artwork • Reiko Murakami, Julie Dillon (x2), Will Staehle, Red Nose Studio, Betty Lew

_____________________

When I reviewed the finalists in the short story category last month I found that they were mostly poor quality. The novelettes are better but are still a mixed bag. I note that (a) there is only one man among the finalists (the same as the short story category) (b) these are short novelettes, mostly around the 8,000-10,000 word mark (although the Chiang stretches to 11,000).

The first of the novelette finalists is The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed April 2019), which opens with the narrator, Saki Jones, viewing New Mars from the viewport window of an interstellar spaceship. The colony there has collapsed, and she has been sent there to investigate—but the situation is complicated by the fact that her partner (“lifelove”) M. J. died there along with everyone else. However, she hopes to see him again by viewing “The Chronicle,” a time stream of previous events.
In the next section, a departmental meeting, we learn more about the temporal projector that enables viewing of the past and, after some debate, the team agree that they will start at the xenobiology warehouse, which stores the recently recovered remains of alien life.
When Saki and Hyun-sik (one of her assistants and also her son’s boyfriend) travel to the warehouse’s past we see that, while the temporal projector provides a form of time-travel, it only gives the users a non-physical presence in the past (they float in zero gee and cannot touch anything). Their movements also leave trails of white—visual indications of permanently destroyed timestream data.
During the visit Saki notices that the ovoid alien artefacts appear different to the descriptions in M. J.’s messages to her, and then she sees another time-traveller above them:

She studied the ceiling of the warehouse. A maintenance walkway wrapped around the building, a platform of silvery mesh suspended from the lighter silver metal of the ceiling. The walkway was higher than the two-story ceiling of the containment cylinder, outside of their priority area. On the walkway, near one of the bright ceiling lights, something looked odd. “I don’t think we were the first ones here.”
Hyun-sik followed her gaze. “Displacement cloud?”
“There, by the lights.” Saki studied the shape on the walkway. It was hard to tell at this distance, but the displacement cloud was roughly the right size to be human. “Unfortunately we have no way to get up there for a closer look.”
“I can reprogram a few of the bees—”
“Yes.” It was not ideal. Drones were good at recording physical objects, but had difficulty picking up the outlines of distortion clouds and other anomalies. Moving through the Chronicle was difficult, though not impossible. It was similar to free fall in open space. Things you brought with you were solid, but everything else was basically a projection.
[. . .]
There was nothing else that merited a more thorough investigation, so they released the recording drones, a flying army of bee-sized cameras that recorded every object from multiple angles. Seventeen drones flew to the ceiling and recorded the region of the walkway that had the distortion. Saki hoped the recording would be detailed enough to be useful. The disruption to the Chronicle was like ripples in a pond, spreading from the present into the past and future record, tiny trails of white blurring together into a jumbled cloud.

The change in the alien artefacts and the mysterious visitor are the mysteries around which the rest of the story revolves.
After (spoiler) a visit to the hospital site (where there are no bodies or any other organic material), and one to an excavation site (where they see what the artefacts initially looked like), the ship’s captain sends non-organic probes down to the surface (where they discover alien nanites). All the threads are drawn together when Saki travels into the future after finding temporal co-ordinates in an old video message. There she meets M. J., and learns that all the colonists were incorporated into the artefacts by the aliens (their way of “understanding” other species).
If you concentrate on the love story thread in this novelette, it isn’t a bad piece, but there is too much going on here. The temporal projector and its implications (especially when you can view the future as well as the past) is a story in itself and, when you add a planetary colonization/first contact story as well, there is too much going on (and that’s before you shoe-horn in the family soap opera of Saki’s assistant’s relationship with her son).
This isn’t bad but it is a bit of a mixed bag, and not something I’d expect to see as a Hugo finalist.

Away With the Wolves by Sarah Gailey (Uncanny, September-October 2019) starts with Suss, its disabled female narrator, waking up in a potato patch after werewolfing for several days:

I wish I could just turn back, right now, right away. I wish I could spend all my time as a wolf. But my mother always told me that I mustn’t indulge myself too often. She taught me that escaping into my other self is lazy. It’s selfish, she said, and there’s always a price to pay for selfishness. There’s no such thing as free relief. Every transformation means a day I get to wake up in a body that doesn’t hurt, but the longer I spend Away, the guiltier I feel when I return.
It was a week, this time. A whole week without pain.  p. 2

When Suss returns home she learns of the damage she has done to the village during this particular werewolf episode, and makes amends with the neighbours. Later, she makes a special trip with her friend Yana to Nan Gideon, who claims her goat was killed. Suss can’t remember doing this but agrees to work off the debt.
By the end of the day, Suss is worn out and despondent. When she sleeps she dreams of being a wolf and hears the howl of another—whereupon she wakes up and realises that the howls are real.
Up until this point the story is a pretty good one—the idea of a disabled person escaping their condition by becoming a werewolf is an intriguing idea—but we then plough into three pages of Suss soul-searching about changing her life before (spoiler) she does just that. The remainder of the story has her frequenting the village seemingly accepted by everyone before finally meeting the other (female) wolf.
There is no complication in this story other than someone finally deciding to get out of their own way, which makes the build up pointless and the ending anti-climactic. Pity.

The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, July-August 2019) starts with a mystery writer called Zanna and her assistant Shar turning up at a rural cabin that has dead wasps, mice, a leak in the roof, and no mobile phone signal. Unperturbed, Zanna settles in for the night at her writing retreat while her assistant Shar leaves for her accommodation nearby.
The next morning Zanna’s breakfast is interrupted by a blown fuse, which she attempts to fix:

[Zanna] checked all the closets and cabinets for a breaker box, but couldn’t find one, which meant it was outside. Two shoes and a jacket later, she stood behind the cabin, swearing to herself. Crawlspace. She didn’t quite remember what had freaked her out in a crawlspace when she was a kid, but she still hated them. Anything might be in there.
A baseball bat stood propped against the wall beside the tiny door. It had “Snake Stick” written on it in blue Sharpie. Whoever had labelled it had also drawn a crude cartoon demonstrating its utility. Swing them away, don’t kill them. No bloodstains on the bat.
She could wait for Shar, but she’d lose hours, and her head was already complaining about the lack of caffeine. Better to do it herself. The half-sized door creaked when she squeezed the latch and swung it open. She waved the Snake Stick in front of her to clear cobwebs and wake any snakes snoozing inside. When nothing moved, she dug in her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone. It was useless for calls out here, but the flashlight still came in handy. She swept it around the space, which looked mostly empty. No use delaying.
She crouched and stepped in. The ceiling was a little higher than she expected, the floor a little lower; she could stand if she stooped. Something crunched like paper under her foot, and she swung the light down to find a snakeskin, at least three feet long. She shuddered.  p. 7

There prove to be no snakes in the crawlspace, and no replacement fuse wire either, so Zanna takes a trip down the mountain to see the owner . . . who (spoiler) she finds dead beside his car. As she can just get a mobile signal at the owner’s house she calls the police and then Shar. The latter soon turns up, followed by the police. When one of the cops interviews Zanna, the mystery writer in her points out one or two discrepancies in the crime scene that she thinks he hasn’t noticed (indications of a previous fall in the gravel, odd animal tracks on the car bonnet, etc.). Eventually, both the women go back to the cabin—and then (spoiler) Shar tells Zanna something about the dead man that she couldn’t possibly know.
Up until Shar’s revelation, this is an immersive story with convincing characters and a good sense of place—but it then rapidly destroys any suspension of disbelief with a data-dump ending that has Shar explain that the man was killed by a weird lizard that lives inside Zanna. We then find out that the lizard is unkillable, and that Shar has, since she discovered the problem, attempted to ensure minimal loss of life among those it attacks (one in five people that encounter the lizard die). Shar also ensures that no eggs are left in the bodies of the dead to prevent the lizard reproducing. Both of the women conclude this loss of life is better than Zanna ending up incarcerated in some scientific institution.
The first half of this is pretty good but the ending just doesn’t work for a variety of reasons—apart from the unconvincing idea (an unkillable lizard the writer periodically vomits out), it is sprung on the reader too quickly.

Emergency Skin N.K. Jemisin (Emergency Skin, 2019) is one of six stories in Amazon’s recently published ‘Forward’ collection,² and opens with the protagonist (a soldier, I guess) being briefed about a mission that will take him from his colony planet to Earth (Tellus) to obtain vital biomaterial. We also learn that the Earth is a dead world, and that a “collective consciousness” will be implanted in his mind:

To ensure success, and your mental health during extended isolation, we have equipped you with ourselves—a dynamic-matrix consensus intelligence encapsulating the ideals and blessed rationality of our Founders. We are implanted in your mind and will travel with you everywhere. We are your companion, and your conscience. We will provide essential data about the planet as a survival aid. Via your composite, we can administer critical first aid as required. And should you suffer a composite breach or similar emergency, we are programmed to authorize adaptive action.
[Reference request denied.] You don’t need to know about that yet. Please focus, and limit your curiosity. All that matters is the mission.
You can’t fail. It’s too important. But rest assured: you have the best of us inside you, enveloping you, keeping you safe and true. You are not alone. You will prevail.

The next part of the story plays out as a mordant Robert Sheckley-like farce: the soldier and his consciousness arrive back on Earth and find that it is not as they expect (all the problems that were left behind by the Founding Fathers of the colony have been fixed and the planet is now a paradise supporting billions of people); the soldier is distracted by the natural beauty in the forest they arrive in; the consciousness is disgusted by the fact that the inhabitants seem to be of all colours and ages and apparently do not practise eugenics in their breeding programs. Then, when the consciousness suggests that they change the soldier’s “composite” skin covering so he can blend in with the populace and find the biomaterial they require, the soldier decides instead to take a hostage to use as ransom.
This plan doesn’t last long, and the story cuts to the soldier recovering consciousness to find that Earth security tasered him. This information comes from a pleasant woman who speaks to him via a translator attached to his face plate and who also gives him the biomaterial he wants. Then she says he is free to go, and mentions in passing that he is not the first visitor from his planet. She finishes by impressing on him that he should’t take any more hostages.
At this point the story pivots, and it becomes clear (there are earlier hints) that the soldier’s colony planet is an all-male, white, authoritarian society founded by billionaires who had fled Earth and its impending chaos centuries earlier.
The rest of the tale has the soldier generate an “emergency skin” that will make him look like the humans in the vicinity (i.e. black), and he goes native (at which point the consciousness switches off in disgust). He then meets an older man who takes care of him, and who later turns out to be an ex-soldier sent to Earth from the colony. He tells the soldier about Earth’s society, and the history of both it and the colony world. This provides the biggest (albeit unintentional) laugh in the story:

“I took you to the museum on a whim. To enjoy the irony. For all these centuries, the Founders told us that the Earth died because of greed. That was true, but they lied about whose greed was to blame. Too many mouths to feed, they said, too many ‘useless’ people . . . but we had more than enough food and housing for everyone. And the people they declared useless had plenty to offer—just not anything they cared about. The idea of doing something without immediate benefit, something that might only pay off in ten, twenty, or a hundred years, something that might benefit people they disliked, was anathema to the Founders. Even though that was precisely the kind of thinking that the world needed to survive.”
We did what was rational. We have always been more rational than you people.
“What the Leaving proved was that the Earth could sustain billions, if we simply shared resources and responsibilities in a sensible way. What it couldn’t sustain was a handful of hateful, self-important parasites, preying upon and paralyzing everyone else. As soon as those people left, the paralysis ended.”

The soldier then suggests that, rather than staying on Earth, he should go back and start a revolution on his own planet, and the story finishes with the old man showing him how to get rid of the implanted consciousness.
The politics of this story—“Earth will be a Paradise if we get rid of all the Rich White Guys!!!”—provide a simplistic view of the world that shows little if any grasp of history, never mind any idea of how people, societies, or the world actually works.
Apart from this starry-eyed nonsense there is also a considerable amount of othering going on here: the colony’s wealthy founders and successors are explicitly (a) white (b) rich and (c) misogynists (the only “females” on the colony planet are “pleasurer” robots). If you wrote a story where any other group was portrayed and scapegoated in this way there would be uproar, but it seems that rich white men are fair game nowadays—as if they are a single homogeneous group automatically worthy of everyone’s loathing, and not individuals. I note that this is not the first of this type of story I’ve read recently.

For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, July 10^th 2019) is a story I read when it came out last year, an entertaining light fantasy involving an asylum tomcat called Joffrey, an insane poet, and the devil. You can get a good idea of the general tone from the opening:

Flash and fire! Bristle and spit! The great Jeoffry ascends the madhouse stairs, his orange fur on end, his yellow eyes narrowed!
On the third floor the imps cease their gamboling. Is this the time they stay and fight? One imp, bolder than the others, flattens himself against the flagstones. He swells himself with nightmares, growing huge. His teeth shine like the sword of an executioner, and his eyes are the colors of spilled whale oil before a match is struck. In their cells, the filthy inmates shrink away from his immensity, wailing.
But Jeoffry does not shrink. He rushes up the last few stairs like the Deluge of God, and his claws are sharp! The imps run screaming, flitting into folds of space only angels and devils can penetrate.
[. . .]
The whole asylum is his, and let no demon forget it! For he is the Cat Jeoffry, and no demon can stand against him.

Jeoffrey then visits the poet, who is trying to write a poem for God (when he is not being pestered by his publishers to write something else).
That evening the devil comes to the asylum to speak to the cat—he wants Joffrey to stand aside so he can visit the poet and force him to write a particular poem. If the devil is successful in this it will change the future of the universe and put it under his control. The cat accepts a bribe of various treats.
The next day Jeoffrey is in a dreadful state—the treats were just dead leaves which he has been vomiting up—and the tomcat is in no state to protect the poet when the devil arrives. On a subsequent visit by the devil to check the poet’s progress, Jeoffrey fights him but is unsuccessful, and only survives due to the poet’s intercession.
The final part of the story has Jeoffrey visit three of the asylum’s other cats to help him deal with the devil on his next visit. One of these is an air-headed kitten called Nighthunter Moppet, whose personality changes markedly when they start discussing how the defeat the devil:

<This is the wrong strategy,> says the Nighthunter Moppet, and her voice has the ring of a blade unsheathed.
All kittenness has fallen away from Moppet. What sits before the milk bowl is the ruthless killer of the courtyard, the assassin whose title nighthunter is whispered in terror among the mice and birds of Bethnal Green. It is rumored that the Moppet’s great-grandmother was a demon of the lower realms, which might perhaps explain the peculiar keenness of her green-glass eyes, and her talent for death-dealing. Indeed, as Jeoffry watches, the Moppet’s tiny shadow seems to grow and split into seven pieces, each of which is shaped like a monstrous cat with seven tails. The shadow cats’ tails lash and lash as the Nighthunter Moppet broods on Satan.
<It is true that as cats we are descended from the Angel Tiger, who killed the Ichneumon-rat of Egypt,> says the Moppet. Her shadows twist into the shapes of rats and angels as she speaks. <We are warriors of God, and as such, we can blood Satan. But we cannot kill him, for he has another fate decreed.>

The story concludes when the devil visits the next night to pick up the finished poem.
This is an enjoyable tale, but the plotting at the end is a little on the weak side (spoiler: while the three cats attack the devil, Jeoffrey sneaks past and eats the poem). One more minor criticism: what is with the < > symbols to delineate the cats’ speech? They are disconcerting, and don’t suit the style of the tale.

Omphalos by Ted Chiang (Exhalation, 2019) opens with a diary entry from an unnamed female archaeologist that quickly places us in an entirely different universe. Apart from the fact that the narrator begins her entry (and all the others in the story bar one) with an exhortation to God, we soon pick up other salient details from a lecture she gives. This includes a passage where she shows how wood rings can be used to date remains:

But even that thrill can’t compare to that inspired by examining samples of wood a few centuries older. Because in those tree trunks, there’s a point at which the growth rings stop. Counting back from the present, the oldest growth ring was formed eight thousand nine hundred and twelve years ago. There are no growth rings before that, I told them, because that is the year you created the world, Lord. In the center of every tree of that era is a circle of perfectly clear and homogeneous wood, and the diameter of that ringless area indicates the size of the tree at the moment of creation. Those are primordial trees, created directly by your hand rather than grown from seedlings.  p. 240

We also learn that in this world there are also the remains of humans who have no navels and, later on, she examines a deer bone belonging to her cousin Rosemary which has no epiphyseal line (“the remnant of the growth plate where new cartilage is added as a juvenile’s bones lengthen into an adult’s. The femur had never been shorter than it was now”).
During this conversation Rosemary tells the narrator she bought the bone from the travelling archaeological exhibition at the local church. The narrator also learns that primordial abalone shells are for sale, which arouses her curiosity as there should not be any in public ownership. She decides to investigate, and visits the museum, first viewing the exhibition (there is a scene where she looks at the display of navel-less mummies). Afterwards she quizzes the gift shop salesman, who tells her who sold them the shells.
The narrator then sends an easily identifiable dummy package to the post office box address in San Francisco, and travels there to stake it out. When the owner of the Post Office box turns up to collect the package she sees that it isn’t the “Martin Webster” she had been expecting but a young woman. When challenged the woman identifies herself as the daughter of the museum director who controls the only known collection of the shells, and that she been selling them cheaply to help reinforce people’s faith. She adds that there is a scientific paper due to be published that will challenge everyone’s beliefs.
The final scenes (spoiler) have the narrator visit the young woman’s parents. During an uncomfortable conversation she finds out that the scientific paper reveals that another planet, not Earth, is at the centre of the universe. Further speculation suggests that this newly discovered planet is the reason for God’s creation, and that Earth is probably just a sideshow with no special significance.
The narrator then goes through a crisis of faith and contemplates the point of her existence before having an epiphany:

I’ve devoted my life to studying the wondrous mechanism that is the universe, and doing so has given me a sense of fulfllment. I’ve always assumed that this meant that I was acting in accordance with your will, Lord, and your reason for making me. But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfllment has arisen solely from within myself. What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.  p. 269

This is a polished story which is intellectually and philosophically involving, and which also has a reasonably profound ending. Pretty good stuff, and way above the level of anything else here.

In conclusion we have one very good story from Ted Chiang, a superior piece of light entertainment (but not award winning good) from Siobahn Carroll, a good but flawed story from Caroline Yoachim, and three stories that just don’t work from the two Sarahs (which are good in part), and Jesimin (about which I’ll say no more). So—another lacklustre set of 2020 Hugo Award finalists, but at least they are not as bad as the short stories.  ●

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1. Here are the links to the texts of four of the six stories (you can find links to other Hugo work at File770):

The Archronology of Love • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim
Away With the Wolves • novelette by Sarah Gailey
The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye • novelette by Sarah Pinsker
For He Can Creep • novelette by Siobhan Carroll

The other two are available at Amazon and other booksellers:

Emergency Skin • novelette by N.K. Jemisin (free to Amazon Prime subscribers)
Omphalos • novelette by Ted Chiang

All these stories are in the Hugo Award Voter Pack.

2. How ironic that Jesimin’s Emergency Skin is published by Amazon, founded and run by the world’s richest man. Ker-ching!
The rest of the Amazon Forward collection of original fiction includes:

Ark by Veronica Roth
Summer Frost by Blake Crouch
You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles
The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay
Randomize by Andy Weir  ●

Summary: The most lacklustre group of Hugo finalists I can remember reading. The only worthy nominee is Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow.

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Editors, Vanessa Rose Phin, Diana Gill, Jonathan Strahan, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Scott H. Andrews, John Joseph Adams

Fiction:¹
And Now His Lordship Is Laughing • short story by Shiv Ramdas ∗∗+
As the Last I May Know • short story by S.L. Huang ∗∗
Blood Is Another Word for Hunger • short story by Rivers Solomon ∗
A Catalog of Storms • short story by Fran Wilde ∗
Do Not Look Back, My Lion • short story by Alix E. Harrow ∗∗∗+
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island • short story by Nibedita Sen ∗∗∗

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When the 2020 Hugo nominations were announced a few weeks ago it seemed pretty obvious that the awards (or the main fiction categories, at least) are still broken: for the third year running, the finalists in the novel, novella, novelette, and short story categories are almost entirely women and/or people of colour (this does not reflect the demographics of the genre, nor of those producing the best work).
Whereas previous years’ nominations nevertheless managed to include some reasonable work despite this bias, that is not the case this time around.²

The first of the Hugo finalists is And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9^th September 2019). This gets off to a dull—almost attention numbing—start with an elderly Indian woman rising at dawn and working jute to create a doll for her grandson (there are subtle hints that it may have magical properties). However, things don’t really get going until a British officer turns up (at which point we realise we are in colonial India) and pressures the old woman to make one of her dolls for the wife of the regional governor. She refuses, and the officer—after telling her she will regret her decision—departs.
The story then skips forward in time to a period where the grandson is dead, the village fields burnt, and people are starving to death. Then the British arrive and force feed the grandmother. After she recovers, she learns that the British haven’t burnt the fields to pressure her to make the doll, but as a consequence of the wartime Denial of Rice Policy.³ When she learns that all India is suffering, and not just Bengal, she agrees to make a laughing doll for the Governor’s wife.
Later on, the grandmother watches the hanging tree as she makes the doll:

With the fields all gone, she can see further from the verandah than ever before, all the way to the tree. It used to be the sabha sthal, where the villagers congregated for Panchayat meetings under the broad, dangling roots. Now it’s something else entirely. Vultures peck at the swaying bodies hanging from its boughs, rats scurry around its base, gnawing at the bodies on the ground underneath it. It had started out as a place of punishment, where the British hung farmers who dared to hide rice from them. Then villagers took to hanging themselves there as well; the rope is more painless than the slow, pitiless grip of starvation. Parents hung their children, and then themselves; it was just easier that way. That was when the British burnt the jute fields, to ensure no one could make any rope. Or maybe they just enjoyed watching their victims die slowly. So people have taken to cutting down the bodies and reusing the rope. There are now almost as many corpses on the tree as leaves below it.

After the grandmother finishes the doll—the final touch involves her putting some of her blood into it—she insists on accompanying it to the Governor’s mansion to show him and his wife how to make it laugh.
The final scene is a Grand Guignol revenge spectacular that takes place at the Governor’s dinner party where, once she is among the guests (spoiler), the grandmother lets out a maniacal laugh, which causes the doll to do the same. Anyone within earshot—the old woman’s ears are plugged with jute—laughs uncontrollably, and they continue to do so until they die. This is quite an effective scene to start with but it is spoilt by the later addition of pools of blood (initially one victim bashes their head on a table—fair enough—but then the writer can’t help over-egging the pudding by having blood stream out of the Governor’s nose, eyes and mouth). This excess ruins the fantasy logic of the piece—you’d expect continual violent laughing to asphyxiate people to death, not cause blood to come spurting out of them. Why is it that fantasy writers think that they can have anything at all happen in their stories? The best are constrained by their own internal logic.
There is probably a better story hiding inside this simplistic anti-colonial revenge fantasy—one that has a more engaging start, that goes deeper into the historical issues, and which loses the phlebophilia at the end.
As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23^rd October 2019) starts with ten year old Nyma talking to her tutor Tej: it soon becomes apparent that we are in a different world, one where this child has the control codes for her county’s “sere weapons” implanted in a capsule lodged in her heart. If their demagogue President wants to use the weapons he must personally cut the capsule out. (The backstory to this involves the founding of the Order Tej serves two hundred years previously, after the first use of sere weapons against their country. The Order’s mission is to ensure that their President faces a personal moral dilemma before using their own weapons against any attacker.)
The rest of the story has Nyma and the president meet and speak; later, a relationship of sort develops between the two. Meanwhile the war rumbles on in the background.
Eventually the conflict worsens and reaches the city, and the President calls for Nyma so (spoiler) he can use the sere weapons—but he cannot bring himself to kill her. Later, after the situation deteriorates further, Tej comes to Nyma and says that the Order has discovered a way to get the codes without harming her; Nyma refuses, saying that the decision is meant to be a difficult one. Then . . . well, then Nyma just sits there and waits. No resolution, the story just hangs in the air after setting up its moral quandary. It’s a pity the story doesn’t, for example, summarise both sides of the dilemma in the final scenes and force the reader to make a choice. Almost anything would be better than it just stopping.
The only one of the stories I’ve read so far is Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24^th July 2019). This one starts with a slave girl called Sully who massacres her mistress and her family. This action has supernatural consequences:

It was Sully’s unsoftened anger in the face of what she’d done that cut a path between dominions. The etherworld spat out a teenage girl, full grown, called Ziza into Sully’s womb. Ziza had spent the last two hundred years skulking in the land of the dead, but she rode the fury of Sully’s murders like a river current back to the world of flesh. Ziza felt it all, wind and sky and the breath of wolves against her skin. She spun through the ages looking for the present, time now foreign to her after being in a world where everything was both eternal and nonexistent.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Ziza called as she descended from the spirit realm down a tunnel made of life. Breathing things, screaming things, hot, sweaty, pulsing, moving, scampering, wild, toothy, bloody, slimy, rich, salty things. Tree branches brushed her skin. Sensation overwhelmed her as she landed with a soft, plump thud into the belly of her new god. Ziza took in the darkness, swum in it. It was nothing like the violent nothingness of her home for the past two centuries. For here she could smell, taste, feel. She could hear the cries of the girl carrying her, loud and unrelenting.
Sully had never been with child before, and she didn’t understand the pain that overtook her so sudden as she shoveled the last gallon of dirt over the graves of her masters. Spasms in her abdomen convinced her she was dying.

Sully wakes after the birth to find that Ziza has put her in bed and cleaned the house. Ziza tells Sully that, as she committed a multiple murder, she will give birth to others from the etherworld and, in due course, a boy of ten named Miles joins them. Two months later a forty-one-year-old woman named Liza Jane is “born” and, a few days later, a twin sister Bethie. Finally, an old man called Nathaniel arrives.
The group later ambush wagon trains and, for every traveller they kill, Sully births another of their kind. Eventually, they are enough of them to take on the town, which they do successfully.
The final scene (spoiler) has Sully cutting out her own uterus, burying it, killing herself, and being reborn from the soil.
This didn’t work for me, partly because Sully is not a particularly engaging central character (aside from the fact that she is a mass murderer, she spends quite a lot of time bickering with Ziza), and partly because the story is just about a lot of people getting murdered.
A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019) starts with a mother and three daughters watching the Cliffhouse, and the people who have turned into “weathermen”—supernatural beings who fight the weather, and take a similar form. As the twin girls squabble, one of them blurts out that she has spoken to a weatherman, and only avoids punishment when one passes overhead and warns of a squall.
Later, this daughter joins the weathermen in the Cliffhouse; the narrator states she will be the next.
The rest of the story further describes the various family relationships (listed as storm metaphors); tells us what the weathermen do (they “name” or fight the storms to stop them); and finishes with a visit to the Cliffhouse (where the remainder of the family find storms that have been turned into brass hinges).
Although this feels somewhat Bradburyesque to start with, the story spins its wheels for the most part and doesn’t really go anywhere. I also found it a bit baffling (even after someone pointed out it is a “magical realist allegory,” I couldn’t finish a second read through). Another aspect of the story I disliked is that it is told in an irritatingly telegraphic style, with lots of one or two sentence paragraphs:

The basket I hold is made of grey and white sticks; my washing basket most days. Today it is a treasure basket. We are collecting what the weather left us.
Mumma gasps when she tugs up a floorboard to find a whole catalog of storms beaten into brass hinges.
We’ve found catalogs before, marked in pinpricks on the edge of a book and embroidered with tiny stitches in the hem of a curtain, but never so many. They sell well at market, as people think they’re lucky.
Time was, if you could name a storm, you could catch it, for a while. Beat it.
If it didn’t catch you first. So the more names in the catalog, the luckier they feel.
We’ve never sold Lillit’s first catalog. That one’s ours.

Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019) opens with Eefa fleeing the city of Xot and her warrior wife Talaan:

Eefa has been a good husband, she knows, but now she is running.
She’s kept their hearth warm and their home clean. She’s prayed each dawn and dusk at the twin temples of Ukhel and Idral, serene and pious as a dove. She’s sent her wife off to war a thousand fucking times, lining the streets with the other husbands and pretending to weep with pride rather than terror.
She’s been a good healer, too, and delivered each of her wife’s four children: three great, howling daughters who latched like wolf pups to the breast and one sweet, sloe-eyed son. All of them healthy and strong, all of them given their bloody promise-scars at birth. Soon they will be marching to war alongside their mother and Eefa will be praying and weeping and waiting for them, too.

This opening limns the personal conflict that is at the centre of the story, and we learn much more about the pacifistic Eefa, her hatred of the warlike culture that pervades her society, and the conflict that takes Talaan—the people’s hero—and her near-daughters away from her.
When Eefa finds out that Talaan is pregnant once more, she forces her to agree that this new child will be a healer, and not a warrior like her near-daughters and son. Of course, the Emperor eventually visits Talaan, and insists that the sixth month pregnant Talaan goes to battlefront to help with the war. Tallan’s son (spoiler) dies there, and Eefa suffers another reversal after the birth of her near-daughter when other family members interfere in its destiny.
There is a lot of interesting world-building and character interaction packed into this engaging piece but, if it has a flaw, it is that it goes on for too long at the end; the imagined sequence where Talaan fights the Emperor after Eefa flees with the new born daughter also raises unanswered questions (if Eefa thinks Talaan is going to win the fight and change society, why would she flee?)
The only worthy finalist here.
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019) consists of, as the title suggests, ten extracts from various books and academic journals, etc. These tell of the discovery of a female tribe of cannibals on a remote island and the shocking incident that occurs when one of the children later goes to Churchill school in Britain (spoiler: one of the English girls carves off strips of her own flesh to give to the visitor).
Most of these extracts view the incident through a particular political or cultural lens and, at times, this is mordantly amusing—as can be seen from the some of the titles (“A Love That Devours: Emma Yates and Regina Gaur,” “The Subaltern Will Speak, If You’ll Shut Up and Listen,” “Dead and Delicious II: Eat What You Want, and If People Don’t like It, Eat Them Too,” etc.). Parts of the text also raise a smile as well:

“[. . .] the problem is that we have everyone and their maiden aunt dropping critique on Ratnabar, but we’re not hearing from us, the Ratnabari diaspora ourselves. If I have to deal with one more white feminist quoting Kristeva at me . . . [. . .] No, the real problem is that our goals are fundamentally different. They want to wring significance from our lives, we just want to find a way to live. There’s not a lot of us, but we exist. We’re here. We don’t always quite see eye to eye with each other’s . . . ideology, but we’re not going anywhere, and we have to figure out what we are to each other, how we can live side by side. So why aren’t we getting published?”

Although this is clever and occasionally amusing, it’s also a slight and very short piece (1400 words), and not Hugo finalist material.

In conclusion, a poor selection of stories—mostly a mixture of the lacklustre, broken, or minor. I’ll be voting for Harrow’s story and then No Award.
As to the question of what story will actually win in this category, who knows? Harrow has the best and most reader friendly story, and the advantage of being a Hugo winner last year (this sometimes gives finalists an inertial advantage);⁴ if the voters decide on Buggins’ Turn they may give it to Fran Wilde, who is three-time finalist;⁵ alternatively, and maybe more likely given the political/cultural voting bias of some of the Hugo voters, there may be a Black Lives Matter moment which sees Solomon Rivers as the winner (as well as Jemisin in the novelette category, and Clark or Rivers in the novella).  ●

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1. Story links:
And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019)
As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019)
A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019)
Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)

2. This was another of the group reads in my Facebook group. Very few people commented on the stories, and nearly all the comments were negative. While this may be the result of the small sample size and demography, I also note a recent longer thread in a much bigger FB group (5000 members plus) that had considerable amount of negative comment about last year’s The Calculating Stars (a lot of it from women, surprisingly). I’m beginning to wonder how much overlap there actually is between the Hugo voters and the the wider SF readership.

3. You would think, given the way the Denial of Rice policy is presented in Ramdas’s And Now His Lordship Is Laughing, that the British were idly practising their Evil Villain skills. The causes of the Bengal Famine were considerably more complicated than shown here (the reason for the scorched earth policy in Bengal was because of the anticipated Japanese invasion in the east of the country, for one thing). Wikipedia on the Bengal Famine.

4. By inertial advantage I mean, for example, Joe Haldeman receiving a Hugo for his short story Tricentennial after getting one for The Forever War the year before, etc. There are a number of these double tap award winners.

5. Wilde placed fourth in the 2017 Hugo novelette category with The Jewel and Her Lapidary (after receiving 160 nominations), and sixth in the 2019 Hugo short story category with Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand (after receiving 69 nominations). So there is a small group of Wilde enthusiasts—but perhaps, it would seem, not widespread support.  ●