Really good short stories, or at least the ones I like the most, hold up a mirror to something going on now, and either act as a cautionary tale, or an inspirational one. This year’s Hugo-nominated short stories cover the range from dystopian, to near-dystopian, to utterly weird futuristic situations that everyone except the protagonist treats as completely normal. The inspirational stories show someone rising above it. The cautionary tales, not so much.
“10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” – Samantha Mills
“This is a good one,” I whisper, as you shout in fear and surprise at some fresh hell inside the house.
This is a good one.
Do you know what was the most surprising part of a slice-of-life tale of ten different futures with a literal gate to hell causing worldwide destruction? That it ends up being such a sweet and touching story.
The combination of the apocalyptic horror with the comfortingly mundane always made me smile here. And it’s a good reminder – especially with things being NOT THAT GREAT RIGHT NOW – that people continue to be human even while they’re fighting for their life. And that the tiny moments of comfort we give ourselves could end up being the best part of any of our alternate lives.
“In My Country” – Thomas Ha
Listen to what I say. Listen to what I don’t say.
Learning to tiptoe around a repressive government can be a survival tactic. If you can be obedient, say the right things, avoid saying the wrong things, and above all never let the Ones In Charge know that you’re thinking bad things, maybe you can convince yourself that this is a good way to live. That your leaders only want the best, and that no one is in danger of being disappeared forever.
Thomas Ha’s metaphorical story has the sing-song prose of a fairy tale, with a dark, oppressive feel. It’s about the willingness of a society to give away all their power, but it’s also about the power of art. And it’s nothing so simple as picking a good side or a bad side, or giving the right or wrong answer. It’s about how dangerous art can be because it makes people reconsider the questions.
“Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” – Effie Seiberg
“Hey, why are you in a wheelchair if you’re super-abled?”
I took a deep breath and reminded myself that ignorance wasn’t malice. “Laser eyes ain’t everything…”
Effie Seiberg presents us with a world where super-powers are something that can happen accidentally, and superheroes have their own union. Unfortunately it’s also a world where micro-aggressions and dismissive attitudes about disabilities are still an everyday occurrence. Our narrator RazorBeam thinks that her newly-acquired laser eye power and joining the Super-Abled 501 Local Union may be just the ticket to finally getting things done in a city that always has excuses for why any of her improvement projects aren’t worth the time. What she actually gets is a group that still wants to make excuses for why they can’t be bothered with any improvement projects, up to and including getting a damn wheelchair ramp for the front entrance. Or why they never bother to bring her on any missions where a local supervillain keeps destroying things for seemingly no reason.
The author became a wheelchair user in the last ten years, and apparently has had to deal with all of the bullshit that people still haven’t grown out of: dismissing your disability as “not a big deal”, dismissing any and all of your other abilities because of your disability, and dismissing any accessibility problems anywhere with “but if we did this for you we’ve have to do this for everyone.” This story is a bit of a vent and a bit of a daydream, and is definitely a constructive and healthy way to deal with these issues since slapping people upside the head and screaming at them is illegal.
“Missing Helen” – Tia Tashiro
When Mark told you he was marrying your clone, you said “congratulations” on autopilot, because that’s what you say when your friend tells you they’re getting married, and you had promised to stay friendly after the divorce.
The beginning of Tia Tashiro’s story slaps you right between the eyes. It’s set in a world that feels inevitable, one where people can make a one-time sale of their genetic rights and stem cells to couples who need guarantees for what their offspring will be like. None of this sperm or egg donations, this kid is going to be smart, beautiful, and healthy, just like the woman we cloned her from.
It also makes sense for a woman like Helen, still in high school and freshly emancipated from her abusive parents, to make a sale like this that would give her some kind of financial independence. A future.
I thought from the opening line that this was going to be similar to another book, but it takes quite a different tack. No matter how successful you are or aren’t in your life, it’s natural to have some “what if” questions. What if my childhood had been different? Would I be more trusting, less prickly, had a successful relationship if things had gone another way when my personality was still being formed? Would people like me more? And for the clone who had the loving, privileged childhood that Helen hadn’t, would she wonder if she could have been stronger, more driven, if she’d been forged in the same fire?
The fact that this is written in second person is an interesting choice, since it makes me want to re-read this to see how the story changes now that I know who’s telling it.
“Wire Mother” – Isabel J. Kim
“AMY’s your perfect woman,” she sometimes wants to tell her father. “You built her to love you and to love the things you make, but you didn’t build me to love her!”
And in another version of the future that feels depressingly close to reality… You know the story trope of the awkward social outcast who can’t form relationships with other humans, so they bond with a virtual girlfriend/boyfriend instead? Well reverse that. Imagine a world where relationships with AI’s are the norm. Children grow up building semi-sentient play friends, and when they turn 18 they can create their own idealized virtual partner. Fully sentient, legal persons, who even have the option to hire human stand-ins that they can plug their personality into for an evening and recreate that scene from Blade Runner: 2049. (You know the scene I’m talking about.)
And then there’s Cassidy, who grew up with her father and her father’s beloved virtual wife AMY, and who absolutely cannot recognize AMY as her mother. Or as a person. Something in Cassidy’s brain is – in society’s view – broken. She can’t form attachments with virtual beings, and she’s getting pretty tired of everyone treating this like a problem that needs to be fixed.
It sounds odd that, in a list of stories that involve dystopian governments and apocalyptic disasters, I think this is the darkest of the bunch. The concept is not treated as comedy, and there isn’t a moment where Cassidy grows to love her virtual mother, or where everyone recognizes that human relationships are better. Because humans relationships are messy, and humans make bad decisions, and lash out in awful ways, and anyone who thinks that providing people with a robot companion will let them get all their terrible urges out of their system is kidding themselves. This is one of those stories were I was caught between “And then what happened??” and being glad it didn’t go any further so I wouldn’t see how bad things got.
“Six People to Revise You” – J.R. Dawson
A parent or guardian
Someone who has known you since childhood
A mentor or teacher
An employer or coworker
A spouse, partner, or close intimate friend
Someone who does not consider themself a loved one
Trigger warnings for, I don’t know, relentless criticism.
People sure do have a lot of opinions on how to change life for the better. Specifically your life. You could be so happy if you could just fix this one thing. Your job. Your hair. Your attitude. Be more trusting of nice guys. You’re going to regret not having children, and do you really have to be (insert orientation or gender of your choice)? If we’re not 100% satisfied with our life (and really, who is?), then we start believing maybe all of it is true. It’s almost ridiculous how much we take those opinions to heart, all out of proportion to what the people expressing those opinions actually mean to us. It’s been thirty years since that one person decided to stop hanging out with us and damnit, they must have had a reason.
Medical science in J.R. Dawson’s story has come up with a solution: Revision. A simple procedure to make those changes that you can’t, or won’t, make on your own. A guarantee to be truly happy for the first time in your life. And the first step in the process is to reach out to the six people in the above list and ask them to list the three things they think you should change.
Liza thinks she’s prepared to make a drastic change in her life. She’s just not prepared for how much the answers people give hurt.
I saved this one for last, because despite everything I just wrote, it feels like the most uplifting one of the bunch. There’s something truly joyful in the way the author wraps up the story by pointing out, not just that Liza is asking the wrong people, but that she’s asking the wrong question.