This year’s list of nominated short stories covers a pretty wide range of themes. In this group there are two re-told fairy tales, a portal to another world via a book-loaning program, ruminations on wholesale slaughter by a sentient house, a day in the life (well, week in the life) of a couple of brand new mothers surrounded by zombies, and an ongoing online conversation between a struggling new robot waiter and their killbot mentor.
For the first time, she felt a pang of uncertainty.
What is really going on here? Who am I giving books to?
There’s something utterly appealing about the idea of setting up a tiny little Free Library in your front yard. Crafting the little cabinet, decorating it, filling it with lovingly-selected books (or the ones that have been in your collection for a while and you don’t think you’re going to read again), and connecting with any fellow reader who happens by.
In Naomi Kritzer’s story “Little Free Library”, the owner of a Free Library makes a connection with someone a lot further away than the neighbor down the road. The friendship starts with whimsical gifts of feathers and whistles in exchange for her books, and gradually becomes more and more mysterious as it becomes obvious that her anonymous borrower is looking for something more than a good read to pass the time.
She saw the twin sunsets over methane seas and meteor showers flung across brilliantine nightime skies. She walked through forests of towering trees sharded through with crystal and breathed in the fragrance of flowers that bloomed only once in a millennium.
Yoon Ha Lee’s story is – as any of her fans would expect – achingly beautiful, dreamlike and triumphant and wistful all at the same time. This story takes readers on a tour of the universe, seen through the eyes of a traveler who learns about the price of getting what you’ve spent your whole life dreaming about.
The story is called “The Mermaid Astronaut”, and the mermaid main character bargains with the Sea Witch for legs, not to chase after True Love, but to see the stars.
What did a lie do, once you let it loose? Did it sit still, like the pebble, or did it go spinning off into a chain reaction, like a radioactive particle? There was too much she did not know.
It’s the nature of fairytales for the monster (or wizard, or witch, or evil stepmother) to be defeated, but not too many people focus on how the heroes of the story have to change in order to do that. To become more ruthless, more like the monster and less like the child of a peasant (or a rich merchant, or a king) that they were before. This reimagined fairy tale by T. Kingfisher (and no I’m not telling you which tale) is set in an asteroid belt, with robots that can eat metal and weave wings and maybe, if they’re very clever, learn how to recognize lies and then spin their own.
I put my hand to my giant belly. Is it horrible to bring a person into the world, knowing you might have to send them right back out of it before they’ve hardly lived?
“Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Rae Carson is exactly what it says in the title. It’s a grim, funny, bloody, backs-to-the-wall celebration of life and death in all its messiness and fear and love. Two women, madly in love, spend a week literally clawing their way to bring new life to their enclave while surrounded by hordes of the undead.
133 Poisonwood Avenue would be stronger if it was a killer house. There is an estate at 35 Silver Street that annihilated a family back in the 1800s and its roof has never sprung a leak since. In 2007 it still had the power to trap a bickering couple in an endless hedge maze that was physically only three hundred square feet. 35 Silver Street is a show-off.
Longtime listeners to the Binary System Podcast will know that we’ve ranted at length about The Haunting of Hill House, a TV show that we love and which frustrates the living daylights out of us because the writers couldn’t decide if the House was a place where families could live happily forever as ghosts with their loved ones, or if it was an evil mansion that eats people.
John Wiswell has obviously spent some time thinking about the motivation of haunted houses. The house he’s created is just as conflicted, needing the power that comes from creepily slaughtering an entire family, but much much more interested in not being alone anymore. “Open House on Haunted Hill” is a lovely exploration of loneliness and grief, patience and love, both familial and architectural.
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
well if you’re ever free, you can drop by
i’m in whenever
like literally whenever
my boss set my charging casket to autowake me up when someone approaches the cafe door
even if it’s like 3 am and they’re a possum
don’t order the omelette though, i suck at itConstant Killer (C.k2-00452)
I’ll keep that in mind.
It would be hard to pick a favorite out of this year’s nominees, but the entry that made me laugh the most was “A Guide For Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. The story is told in a style that I love: a dialogue that consists entirely of instant messages. Prasad captures so much in the clipped back-and-forth conversation, to the point where you can see the entire personality of, say, an eager-beaver brand new robot waiter working for the world’s crappiest boss, or a world-weary killbot who was not looking to be anyone’s mentor today.
The conversation is interspersed with email subject lines and online purchase notifications, and things get progressively more and more madcap, with all of the ‘splosions taking place in the spaces between messages.
There’s a darker undercurrent to the story, highlighting some of the ways the most vulnerable are usually the ones the most exploited, and sometimes are even kept from knowing just how they’re being exploited.
It’s also a delightful meet-cute between two robots who bond over their shared love of cute dog videos.
Keep checking back on our main Hugo Awards post for links to the reviews for all the nominees!