I adore short stories; it’s my favorite medium. A really good short story can convey an entire world and the backstory of the characters in the shortest amount of space, and make you care about all of it. This year’s Hugo Nominees are all excellent examples, while being as different from each other as possible. Click the jump for a short (naturally, right?) review of each of the finalists for Best Short Stories.
Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s entry is “Fandom for Robots”. It’s a quick look at a very good indicator of sentience: the need to write fan fiction. I kept expecting the main character to run into the usual gatekeepers who take it upon themselves to weed out people they don’t consider “real” fans, but instead I found a delightful exploration of how the best kind of fiction and fandom can reach across species barriers, with a numerical last line that’s probably the perfect happily ever after for fan fiction writers
“Sun, Moon, Dust” by Ursula Vernon (one of my very favorite authors, as a quick glance at my post history will tell you) is the tale of a quiet and unassuming farmer with a rather terrifying grandmother who leaves him a magical sword in her will. The sword is linked to three supernatural warriors who quickly find out that their job of teaching the main character to be a warrior is not going to be an easy task. It’s a unique coming-of-age story, one that features a little romance, an opinionated goat, and some extremely well-tended potatoes.
The setting for Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™” is a Virtual Reality vacation shop named Sedona Sweats, staffed by several overworked and underpaid employees of various Native American tribes. It offers tourists a chance to live out the “real” experience of being a Native American Indian. And really what’s the big deal? It’s just fashion. It’s just fantasy. It’s only real people who have been persecuted throughout history and told to assimilate, so if all their various cultures are getting homogenized into one buckskin-and-feather stereotype starring Johnny Depp as a caricature, what’s the harm?
We are a brilliant species, Susannah thought. Courageous, creative, generous—as individuals. In larger numbers we fail every time.
“Martian Obelisk” is possibly the bleakest story, but oddly enough the main theme is hope. Linda Nagata paints a lonely picture of the end of the world, where a grand artistic gesture on another planet is the only thing keeping the main character going. There’s something freeing about giving up, about knowing that nothing really matters anymore. And when you reach that stage, hope is definitely the very last thing you want.
I was hooked from the very start of Caroline M. Yoachim’s story “Carnival Nine”, because it centers around a race of clockwork people. It’s a slice-of-life story set in a nursery world, where the main character runs away from boring old Closet City to join the the Carnival. As whimsical as that sounds, it’s not a happy story, but it’s definitely beautiful and intricate. I think this one will resonate with parents of special-needs children, since it deals with the problem of barely having enough for just the usual kind of life, and then somehow having to come up with an impossible amount more.
A carnival of a sort, or a sideshow at least, is also featured in “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand” by Fran Wilde. I’m not gonna lie, I’m not sure what’s going on in this one. And yet…there’s an extremely creepy quality to the writing that I really like, with the unnamed narrator who leads a hapless sideshow visitor through displays titled things like A Hallway of Things People Have Swallowed, or A Room of Objects That Are Very Sharp. Is this about the people who try to fix anyone who’s born different, to catalog the differences? Or is just about that deep-seated urge to stare at the unusual, without a whole lot of concern for what it must be like to be on the receiving end? It’s hard to tell, but among all the excellent entries I feel like this one stands out as a possible winner, if only because it’s the oddest one in the bunch.