2025 Hugo Award Short Story nominees: My thoughts!

 The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the short stories! Novella and novel review posts to come.

The six stories on the list are:

While I have given a tie mark to the two I think are the strongest, if it were me, I would give the Hugo to We Will Teach You How to Read We Will Teach You How to Read because I think what is does is strikingly original in both form and affect, and I think risk-taking innovation like that should be rewarded when it lands so well.

Five View of the Planet Tartarus by Rachael K. Jones: 8/10
Very short (a single page) but what a gut-punch. The premise has some similarities to one of the novels on the novel list (Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay), but like most really good short stories, it gets to the point a lot quicker and more sharply. Really can't say more without spoiling!

Marginalia by Mary Robinette Kowal: 5/10
This kind of fantasy-versioned ye olde Englandy story, complete with dialect (ish), is not really my cup of tea, but it might be for others. I don't rate it as a possible winner.

Stitched to Skin Like Family Is by Nghi Vo: 8/10
Sad, tightly written, and singing as all of Vo's prose does, this is a beautifully written short story that carries a weight beyond its size. Fantasy proper, albeit in a historical setting. I really liked it.

Three Faces of a Beheading by Arkady Martine: 6/10
Martine is one of the only remaining contemporary SFF superstars that I haven't read at all, so this short story was a welcome opportunity to break the drought. It is a very interesting attempt to blend historiography with next-minute science fiction, but I think the short story format wasn't the right vehicle for the complexity of the ideas, which felt foreshortened and frustratingly incomplete. Concept - terrific; execution - not quite there.

We Will Teach You How to Read We Will Teach You How to Read by Caroline M Yoachim: 9/10
I really loved this one. The format play added massively to the impact (I do love a writer who thinks about the visual representation of words and does something original and powerful with it). Overall, the story could be considered sad, but I more read it as sombre but also beautiful. And the fact that I went back to the start and immediately read it again with a different approach (trying to unhook my eyes and take in both streams at once) is a testament to how successful I think it is. It will linger with me.

Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim: 9/10
This is a biting, stinging, intelligent and incisive extrapolation of the Omelas problem (if you don't know what that is, read Ursula K Le Guin's classic short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas first so this story makes sense). For a taste, try this passage: 
"Many non-Omelan people said a lot of very mean things ... like that the Omelans were monsters for letting the load-bearing suffering child exist and therefore everything about Omelas was fucked beyond belief... This sentiment made the Omelans kind of upset. They pointed out that Omelas was a better place to live than most other places because at least you knew the load-bearing suffering child suffered for a reason, as opposed to all the other kids who were suffering for no reason. Out there, kids had their arms ripped off while they were working in chicken processing plants, kids were left in baby boxes, and kids lived in perfect quiet misery with one parent who was an alcoholic and another parent who beat them... How dare you say shit about our fair city and our single child, when you won’t even help your own."
The phrase "the load-bearing suffering child" is used repeatedly and to potent effect, and Kim tackles the central moral dilemma head on at 100 miles an hour; there's not an ounce of softness in this, and nor should there be. It's really excellent. Will definitely read it again! How's this for an ending - Omelas itself as the Omelas Child of the world:
"And they (the ones who visit Omelas) say: Thank God we aren’t dealing with that horrid wound in society. Thank God there is somewhere that shows us how fucking bad things could get. What a pit in the ground. What a fucked up little trolley problem. What a lesson for us. Thank God we don’t live there. Thank God we know it exists."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hello, and why I am here

I used to blog a lot.  In the heyday of the Australian blogosphere, I was prolific, both in how much I wrote and in how active I was in the community. When I was a parent of very young children, back in the mid-noughts and early 10s, blogging brought me joy and connection and delight.  Times changed, as times have a way of doing, and the rise of the socials meant a decline in the blogosphere and in engagement with blogs. That was alright; change is inevitable, and it's not always a bad thing. I enjoyed the early days of Twitter, along with many of my peers. I had a stop-start relationship with Facebook for years, but from about 2016, I have been a regular user, due mostly to a number of Groups I am in there which have been very important to me. I have Insta (albeit private) for photos. I was part of the post-Musk X-odus and have been paddling aroound on Threads since 2023. TikTok has, thus far, passed me by, which speaks to my generational profile as much as anything else. And...
Read more

Book Review: Careless People - A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Image
I have just finished reading Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, Careless People, about her time working with the upper echelons of Facebook (2011-2017). I have more detailed thoughts (see below), but the summary version: it is a very readable and deeply troubling journey through a worsening landscape of dysfunction. I rate it 8.5/10. Caveats : First up, it's Wynn-Williams' memoir, and she paints herself in the best possible light - there isn't much taking accountability for the ways in which she also enabled, and in some cases actively engineered, some of the shadier stuff she talks about.  It's absolutely the case that she was the victim of a lot of truly execrable behaviour and decision-making, but one can be both a victim and a participant in the victimisation of others at the same time. Wynn-Williams was literally in "room where it happens", and her plaint that she thought she could do more good by staying and trying to influence people wears thin once things ...
Read more

Summer Leave in Review

Image
This is the last day of my 4 weeks of summer leave. It's back to work for me tomorrow (although this week will be a light one; not all my clients - I'm a freelancer - are back to full strength til after the long weekend, so I'm expecting to only do about 3 - 3.5 days worth of work rather than the full 5). It's been a pretty good time, and definitely had some wins in it. My eldest's surgery getting done and being a success has been a huge relief, and it was ideal that I was free to do the required running about and caretaking for that. I cleared off a bunch of medical/specialist appointments for me and the youngest kid too, which starts the year off fresh. My big kitchen clean-out, while not fully complete (I haven't tackled the pantry yet), has really transformed the experience of cooking and using the kitchen, and although I am sure it will devolve towards chaos again, starting from a clean baseline feels really positive. I have been able to do some creative pr...
Read more