I saved the short stories for last this year, hoping for a little light summer reading to wrap up the Hugo Award reviews. Things didn’t quite work out as planned, because there’s a surprising amount of death in this year’s finalists. Also transformation, and working through grief, and an in-depth study of a folk song, and some math. But also death. You have been warned.
“The Sin of America” – Catherynne Valente
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America.
I’m reviewing this one first because I think it’s by far the most powerful, but it’s also the one I found hardest to get through. The whole concept of someone eating and drinking to the point of misery and beyond is a big bugbear for me. I don’t know why, but it’s guaranteed to make me nope out of story faster than anything, so the image of a woman at a roadside diner plowing through an impossible amount of food because she doesn’t have any choice is nightmare fodder.
But it’s not just the above image to watch out for, there’s also violence against women and cruelty and neglect and the kind of narcissism that comes from everyday mundane weariness with life and all the things that come with it.
It’s Valente, so this story is beautifully and lyrically told, almost a melody, with a repeating chorus and everything building to a crescendo. And it’s one of those stories that will keep creeping back to you, especially every time you run into a little online schadenfreude, or just the daily internet pile-on. I’ve always thought the concept of the sin-eater (both the historical version and the way it’s used now) was useless and maybe even a little silly. But I hadn’t really considered the idea before: what if it’s keeping us from making anything better? What if it’s actually making everything worse?
“Mr Death” – Alix E. Harrrow
…they don’t recruit heartless bastards to comfort the dead and ferry their souls across the last river. They look for people whose hearts are vast and scarred, like old battlefields overgrown with poppies and saplings. People who know how to weep and keep working, who have lost everything except their compassion.
Another one that’s hard to get through, but for different reasons. Sam is a reaper, but think less skeleton with a scythe and more bureaucrat with a briefcase. It’s one of the great jokes of the universe that the best reapers, the ones who care enough to be gentle with souls, are the ones who have the most capacity to hurt on behalf of a life ended too soon. Sam is very good at his job. And then one day he’s given an assignment to collect a soul that hits way too close to his own pain: a two-year-old boy set to die of cardiac arrest in less than twelve hours.
And for the first time since he was recruited, Sam breaks the rules.
Alix E. Harrow writes with an aching compassion here, for all the hardship that parents go through even before they lose their biggest reason for living, and for the pain that comes when the worst happens, and then trying to still find a reason to keep caring afterward.
Believe it or not, this story makes me wish that life and death really did work like this. Because this story is dark and sad, and raging against an uncaring universe. Right up until the moment that it isn’t.
“Proof by Induction” – José Pablo Iriarte
“He can tell you if he had a life insurance policy, where the will is, things like that. The Coda cannot change in the way that a person can, however; it cannot learn or grow.” Her eyes meet Paulie’s. “Your father’s soul is not in there. Your father has moved on.”
This is another story about death, although not quite as heartrending as the first two.
It’s actually an interesting technology that Iriarte has created here: the Coda. It’s a virtual space that family members can enter to interact with the memories and personality of the dearly departed at the moment and location when they died. It’s supposed to be a strictly temporary arrangement, a way to wrap up inheritance questions or maybe just get a final goodbye. So Paulie Gifford’s request to take his father’s Coda home with him is pretty unorthodox, but he’s insistent. The one thing he and his formerly-estranged and just generally distant mathematician father could bond over was their project to solve an unsolvable math problem, and Paulie thinks even a snapshot of his father’s personality could still help make that happen.
The math in this story is complex and entirely over my head, by design; I was impressed by how well the author conveyed the excitement that a mathematician could feel at putting together numbers in a way no one ever had before. The conversations within the Coda are frustrating, also by design, since he has to re-explain the situation to his taciturn father every time he re-enters the virtual hospital room. The two of them inch their way towards a solution, and all the while Paulie is hoping that his father will say…something about their unsatisfying father and son relationship.
It’s an interesting combination, the painstaking mathematical work, and having the same conversation over and over, trying to hint at something to someone who for whatever reason is completely incapable of giving you what you need. This story doesn’t feel as wretched as the previous two, but there still aren’t any easy answers. There’s a solution, but not one that fixes the problem of every person having different needs, sometimes in direct opposition to someone else’s. The idea of closure is here, but as a concept that’s far too complicated to just solve.
“Tangles” Seanan McGuire
“…there was a great fire once. It devoured the trees of my people, until I found a way to pull it into myself. It burns there still. It burns me now. It grants me the flexibility to move from tree to tree, if the tree can contain the fire.”
A little something for fans of “Magic: The Gathering” (or for readers like me who don’t know anything about the game but who love Seanan McGuire’s writing) this story is a lot closer to a basic fantasy adventure than any of the other nominees. The tale is split between two viewpoints: the wandering mage Teferi, and a dryad named Wrenn who’s time is running out as she tries to find a new tree to inhabit.
The story features terrified townsfolk, flashy spellcasting, and a battle with an entity that might be a malevolent ghost. McGuire takes these basic fantasy elements and weaves something new, painting a picture of a new type of dryad, one who can travel and find trees that she can form a loving bond with that’s always fated to end. There’s moments of humor, and two magical beings with entirely different backgrounds learning something new from each other. It’s the sort of story that makes me want to look up more about this particular fantasy universe. (And you definitely need to check out the story’s gorgeous artwork by Heonhwa Choe.)
“Unknown Number” – Blue Neustifter
“you know that therapy is easier than proving multiverse theory, right?”
“it sure didn’t feel that way to me”
“no offense but it feels like you have some fucked-up priorities”
“probably”
I’m a sucker for stories told in a non-traditional format, ones where authors explore all the new ways that people communicate as social media takes over more and more of our lives. Blue Neustifter’s nominee is about as non-traditional as you can get: a story posted in installments on Twitter in the form of android text messages.
Someone named “Gaby” gets a message out of the blue from a total stranger named (redacted) who knows a creepy amount of details about Gaby’s life. After some hilarious back-and-forth as Gaby has to be talked down from going nuclear on a possible stalker, she’s finally convinced of the impossible. The person messaging her is herself, from another timeline, who has managed to bend the laws of space and time to try and find one version of herself who made the decisions that all her other versions were never brave enough to make.
This nominee is I think the most hopeful, and also the most fun to read. Gaby is a take-no-prisoners kind of person, but with a core of compassion as she sees all the ways her other self is broken but also amazing. The whole conversation is a deep dive into what it feels to be scared, to be afraid of failure, to live your life hiding what you are and end up miserable. But at the same time it’s about what if feels like to just go for it and not let anything stop you, at any stage of your life, even if if feels like the time to change passed a long time ago. I hope this story gives people a reason to smile, and to maybe find their own reasons to change.
“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” – Sarah Pinsker
One1 autumn2,3 as the wind blew cold
and stripped red leaves4 from branches
Fair5 Ellen6 ran to meet her love
Where oaken hearts do gather7,8
The last nominee is another non-traditional format, and also I think the one with the most humor, for all that it’s technically fantasy-horror. The entire story takes place on an online forum where fans of the traditional ballad “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” discuss the history of the song and try to dissect its origins.
Pinsker has really captured what it feels like to have a conversation on a place like Reddit. The gang’s all here: the uberfans who seem to know every single variation of each of the twenty verses, the “well-actually”s who have to point out which verses are the most “valid”, the professional researcher shilling for their upcoming documentary, the enthusiast who posts cute guesses and off-the-wall theories, the troll who downvotes everything the enthusiast posts and then tries to start a fight with all the downvoting.
The ballad itself is something of a cautionary tale about two lovers meeting in the woods, with something very dark and possibly supernatural going on that isn’t entirely clear. Each verse is followed by a flurry of comments and annotations as all the posters band together to offer up historical tidbits, botanical info about oaks, regional knowledge, and pure speculation as they try to figure out what’s really going on in the spaces between the verses.
Owing to the nature of the message board, comments are not always in chronological order. The story doesn’t quite come out and say what happened, but you can get some hints if you pay attention (and oddly enough the biggest hint came from a comment on the site where the story is published, which kind of makes it feel like the story is still happening.)
And that’s it for the main fiction categories! Keep checking back on our main Hugo Awards post for links to the reviews for all the nominees!