I’m not sure if it’s the effect of (gestures vaguely) everything that’s going on in the world lately, but the short story finalists for this year’s Hugo Awards are all kinda dark. The six entries feature death, monsters, murder, bloody revolution, not one but two examples of state-sanctioned torture, and a reading lesson from an alien race with such short lifespans that generations die in the time it took to you to read this sentence. Enter at your own risk.
“We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” – Caroline M. Yoachim
This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.
Let’s start with that last one first. Caroline M. Yoachim’s is a story that’s also a poem, and it’s Experimental to say the least. Most of the story is the first line, repeated. But it’s paired with an explanation as representatives from an otherworldly race try to tell their story, but to do so they have to teach humanity how to read the way they do, think the way they do, how to split attention across multiple lines, knowing the entire time that the ones doing the teaching will be dead and gone long before anyone in humanity will finally understand.
There’s real longing in this story, a voice from the past pleading “See me! See me! See me!”, and the idea that for a meeting of minds to happen, both sides have to be willing to do the work to understand as well as to be understood.
“Three Faces of a Beheading” – Arkady Martine
THEY ONLY CALL US USURPERS BECAUSE THEY KILLED ENOUGH OF US
HOW’S THIS FOR LOYALTYThen she grabs her ponytail, yanks her face up, and cuts off her own head with her sword.
The story starts with the above shocking image, and then hauls you away from the scene with a whiplash-like transition that reveals the whole thing was part of a Virtual Reality game. Or a recreation of a historical event. Or a subversive element that’s been implanted into a simulation that rewites an event with such a forbidden idea that even seeing it will get you a temporary ban, and also the police might be on their way.
Arkady Martine has been wowing readers with her complex novels about Empires, and this story was apparently her way of jumping back into the short-story format. It’s immersive, and also baffling at times because we’re only getting the tiniest bits of information about the “real” world, alternating with quotes from historical treatises (complete with footnotes and attributions) about an event that we gradually realize we will never know the full details of because all the information we have is distorted by the knowledge of the person writing it. Or we’re reading about it through the lens of modern-day morals. Or we’re being drip-fed the agendas of the people who allowed the information to be published in the first place.
This story is “history is written by the winners” on steroids, and an encouragement to challenge the accepted narrative in even the smallest ways.
“Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” – Rachael K. Jones
All traitors to the Sibyllines go to Tartarus to receive the only punishment for rebellion: eternal life.
Not much else to add to this very short and VERY horrifying story. It’s the shortest entry (It should take two minutes tops to read it), and it has one hell of a last line.
“Marginalia” – Mary Robinette Kowal
Another tree crashed and now she could see the massive thing. The sweeping spirals of its stone grey shell had the polish of fine granite shot through with striations of rose. Were it not terrifying, it would have been beautiful.
This is quite a departure from Kowals usual “Lady Astronaut” novels. And it’s quite an interesting idea for a monster.
Snails feature heavily in the marginalia of medieval manuscripts. Quite often they’re big enough to ride, or for a knight to battle. We’ve got something similar here, with townsfolk being terrorized by giant snails that can crawl as fast as a man can run, and who’s slime is acid. You’d think that would be the main focus of a medieval adventure, but instead you’ve got Margary, someone who feels like she herself lives in the margins of other people’s stories. She’s struggling to run a small farm, raise her rambunctious little brother, and be the sole caregiver of a mother who in five years went from being a knight’s housekeeper to living in a hut with a dirt floor, unable to do things like feed herself, or roll over. And now on top of that she has to run out the door to save her little brother from a snail attack, armed only with a satchel of bandages and her good sewing shears.
This is another one where the final paragraphs were kind of a shock, although this one was less “Whoa, that changes everything” and more “What…are you kidding, that just happened?” The story is a bit whimsical and quite a lot heartwarming, like Kowal’s other books. I’m just not quite sure what to think of that ending.
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” – Isabel J. Kim
In 1973 Ursula Le Guin released the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, about a mythical fantasy city where everyone is beautiful and happy, and there aren’t any wars or slavery or disease or religious-imposed shame, and the only way the city stays perfect is if one small child is imprisoned and miserable in a filthy hole.
Isabel J. Kim has taken this concept and written a razor-sharp satire, skewering both the original story and how this would actually look in an era of global trade and social media, and all the ways everyone would rationalize something this horrible because, well, the greater good, y’know?
Would you be okay with this, knowing that if the child stops suffering then the perfect civilization crumbles? What if it was your child? Conversely, what if it was your child that gets killed by violent riots or food insecurity or bullying on twitter or any of the myriad horrible things that start happening the instant someone takes the child out of the hole and puts it out of its misery? And it you don’t like the way we do things around here, why don’t you just leave? Isn’t it a government’s responsibility to make sure that the vast majority of its citizens are happy, well-fed, and entertained, and maybe to add more soundproofing to the hole so people don’t have to hear the cries of the suffering child and feel bad about it?
And if people commit atrocities to try to “bring down the system”, and everyone gets used to it, isn’t that worse? Maybe even as bad as looking at a system like Omelas and saying “Well, we have our problems and our own atrocities, but isn’t it good that we don’t have something like that here?”
“Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” – Nghi Vo
Hurry. Hurry. He’s missing. You’re eating while he’s missing, you’re breathing while he’s missing, you’re living while he’s missing, how dare you?
Once again, Nghi Vo’s story is my favorite in the bunch. Be warned that it’s just as dark as the rest of them though, with a nameless narrator who finds out just how dangerous 1931 Illinois is when you’re traveling on your own.
Like a lot of Vo’s stories, magic exists in the world without a lot of explanation or backstory. The main character here is a seamstress, but one who can sense things from the fabric of people’s clothes. Their history, a conversation they overheard, what it felt like when they were attacked in what should have been a safe place. She can also make fabric…do things, if their previous owners aren’t all that happy about what happened to them.
This story is frightening and achingly sad, but what makes it stand out from the tragedy is all the joy and history and family that Vo wraps up in the entire concept of clothing. The magical elements don’t feel at all convenient or unrealistic. When every stitch in the shirts and dresses and coats the narrator makes or repairs for her family members is an act of love, of course that comes shining through, even after the owners are gone.
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!