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.

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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

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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  ●