If there are two words that can describe this year’s nominees for Best Short Story, it would be “triumphant” and “bleak”. Every one of them features someone overcoming a trial, whether it’s living life on their own terms, or making the hard decision to sacrifice their life for others. These are all lyrical and fierce, but my god, what the characters have to overcome is pretty much the worst you can image. Click the jump for a brief rundown of the Hugo nominated short stories.
[…]None of us could have foreseen what she and Emma Yates whispered into each others’ ears behind closed doors as they planned their foul feast.
Two of the finalists take aim at the centuries-long flailing (at least as far as other cultures are concerned) known as “British Colonialism”. (Yeah, I know America doesn’t have any room to talk when it comes to our treatment of other races. We’ll get to that.) Nibedita Sen’s story “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island” is a series of articles and scientific journals that dance around what happened when a British expedition kills off most of an island of cannibal women and then “rescues” one little girl and gives her a good Christian education. I love the nature of this format (which is called what, class? That’s right,”epistolary”), how the different points of view go from scholarly (and missing the point) to gossipy (and missing the point) to some hand-me-down accounts that come the closest to telling the truth but which imply a lot more than what they’re actually saying.
..the rage is gone, replaced by something else, harder, colder, so alien and frightening, so different from any feeling she’s ever known that it couldn’t possibly have come from her. But it’s inside her.
“And Now His Lordship Is Laughing” is a much, much darker look at what an occupying force can do to a continent. Shiv Ramdas set this during a real historical event – the Bengal Famine of 1943 – which was made worse (or flat-out caused) by a British colonial policy that grabbed up all available food and sent it to supply the war effort. We see this through the eyes of a Bengali dollmaker, and it’s a chilling picture of why it’s such a terrible idea to assume someone will quietly do what they’re told when there’s nothing left to threaten them with.
The murder of a family by a girl so tender and young ripped a devilishly wide tunnel between the fields of existence, for it was not the way of things, and the etherworld thrived on the impermissible.
Thinking that you’re safe from someone who has nothing left but her rage comes up again in Rivers Solomon’s story “Blood is Another Word for Hunger”, where a beaten-down slave woman in the American south actually tears open reality with sheer fury. This one has the most unique kind of magical realism, with our main character Sully giving birth to ghosts as full-sized humans, enough to make a small army for a slave revolt. It’s bloody and dark in places, but also quiet and sunlit in others. It tries to reconcile the fact that there are some things that you can simply never get past, and yet there are still ways to find some moments of peace. And it’s all wrapped up in a strangely satisfying little love story.
I haven’t been able to decide if the nuclear deterrent in S.L. Huang’s story “As The Last I May Know” is more “brilliant” or “unworkably horrible”. Probably it’s an equal bit of both. Everyone knows that the people calling the shots in war are usually too far away from the effect to be able to really care about all the death and destruction. A leader can know intellectually that thousands of men, women, and children will die if they order it, but all of that is happening somewhere miles away, to people they’ll never meet.
So what if there were a way to make sure that the blood is literally on their hands?
It’s a frustrating story by design, because as the terrified but determined-to-be-brave protagonist Nyma points out, in the end it’s less about the decision and more about having to agonize, constantly, about whether or not it’s the right decision.
Eefa is running from the city of Xot, from the Emperor and her ceaseless war-making, from her own sacred duties as a healer and a husband, from her near-daughters and near-son. From her wife. It is a terrible, cowardly thing to do, but not as terrible or cowardly as staying where she was.
By far the story I found the loveliest is Alix E. Harrow’s “Do Not Look Back, My Lion.” In the city of Xot, Eefa tries to be a good husband to her wife Taalan, the finest warrior in the empire. But she can’t sit by and watch her family march into war one more time.
As you can tell from the above summary, the traditional gender roles in this story are, well, not reversed or thrown away completely. It’s just that they apply to the person they fit, instead of arbitrarily assigned based on what gender you were born with. And it really does make for a happy picture, the Lion of Xot, the terrifying golden fighter covered with battle scars who could have any husband she wanted in the empire – male or female – happily choosing a gentle healer who’s head-over-heels in love with her.
The problem is that there’s still a poisonous divide between the roles, with healers, and children who rescue abandoned birds, and anyone who doesn’t want to fight in the empire’s endless wars being labeled “weak”, while a good, patriotic, loyal citizen is the one willing to throw away their lives. Or their children’s lives. It’s a beautiful, tragic story about love and sacrifice, both the kind that’s expected and the kind that’s actively discouraged.
A Browtic: rising heat from below that drives the rats and snakes from underground before they roast there. The streets swirl with them, they bite and bite until the browtic cools. Make sure all babies are well and high.
A Neap-Change: the forgotten tide that’s neither low nor high, the calmest of waters, when what rests in the deeps slowly slither forth. A silent storm that looks nothing like a storm. It looks like calm and moonlight on water, but then people go missing.
If I had to have a favorite story in this collection it would be Fran Wilde’s “A Catalog of Storms”. The town is constantly being hit by powerful storms, and one of the only ways to save the citizens from them is to name them, write down the names in embroidery and old brass hinges, shout the names at the storms until they back off and leave the town alone. The problem is that the storms are all so strange, with new ones appearing all the time, and the people who are best at the act of naming are also the ones who start losing their human form, turning into stone and rain and wind in order to fight the storms better.
It’s another tragic story of people who sacrifice themselves, and it’s also the kind I love the most, where the author has created a world with completely different rules, and then drops the reader inside with minimal explanation and lets the story unfold around them.