Only five Hugo-nominated short stories reviewed this year; Baoshu’s “Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times” is another Chinese-language work, and I haven’t been able to locate a copy of the translated version. Hit me up if you know where to find this, since it sounds interesting.
The other five entries cover a wide range of styles and themes: an existential question aboard a spaceship, a feel-good tale about an app that makes your life better, a rescue mission involving a dystopian repair project and childhood trauma, a very dark fantasy that features a kind of childhood trauma that seems to be happening in the real world every day, and a neo-Victorian pastiche about a get-rich-quick scheme by someone who hasn’t actually thought things through.
“Answerless Journey” – Han Song (translated by Alex Woodend”)
Han Song’s short story has to be the one with the most accurate title, because there are literally no answers here. Just a lot of questions, all of them being asked by someone who doesn’t even start with a good frame of reference about who, or what they are. And as you can imagine, that makes finding out the where and why pretty much impossible.
A person who names themself “Creature” wakes up in what they eventually decide is a spaceship. They soon meet another being that they name “Same Kind”, and the two of them start trying to figure out what the hell is going on, where they’re going, and why they’re alone. Secret mission? Sabotage? Routine travel that’s going to reach its destination any minute now? Nothing is clear, and any answers they try to come up with are based on other assumptions based on no concrete information.
The situation becomes even more complicated when they realize that the room they theorize is the control room has three chairs, not two. So now they have a possible third member hiding just out of sight. Unless the Third has died. Or never made it to the ship in the first place. Or is possibly one of the two existing people aboard, and how do they figure out which one of them that can be when neither of them even know their own identities.
They just reach an agreement that The Third doesn’t exist, because they need its nonexistence.
It’s hard to get a handle on this one, and I think that’s by design. It’s an intellectual puzzle, set in a locked-room mystery, containing a metaphor about how our own identities are wrapped up in what we assume about others, and what we assume that they assume about us. Don’t expect an uplifting ending with all the loose ends wrapped up; I definitely get the idea that Han Song doesn’t think most of us can ever really know ourselves or each other, and that our automatic reactions are always going to be conflict, if not outright violence.
“The Sound of Children Screaming” – Rachel K. Jones
Travelling to a fantasy world via portal is a very well-established trope, as is the idea that it’s usually children that are able to make the trip. This story features a portal inside a classroom, taking children to a magical world of castles and talking mice and a war between the forces of good and evil. And this particular portal only ever opens when someone with a high-powered weapon and a lot of unfocused rage walks into a public building and starts shooting.
I’m going to tag this one with a spoiler warning for violence; you never actually see the moment the bullets hit, but you get the fear and terror at having to turn the lights out and hide while someone works their way through all the closed doors.
Everyone has a right to a gun. Nothing can take that away from you. What you lack is a right to the lives of your children.
This is a story of fury and despair, and believe it or not, the actual gun is not the villain here. And it’s not gun owners either. The focus of the author’s anger is the fact that we, as a civilization, do not think that saving children’s lives is the top priority. We really don’t. Again and again, someone turns all their rage outward and uses weapons that terrify the police officers assigned to stop them, and any suggestion about how to stop the shootings before the wrong person gets a gun is met with “how dare you”. And then nothing changes. We focus on what the victims should have done, what doors and metal-detectors we should install. We train children and teachers to hunker down and live in fear, and we pretend that arming even more people is anything more than saying “just hope that another person’s child is shot before yours”.
Everything we’re trying now is just as much a fantasy as the medieval world the children are pulled into. The strangely menacing talking mice promise that they’re the important children, the ones who will win the war, and not just the ones on the front line who will either die, or be crushed under the trauma, or turn into more adults who think that the deaths are an acceptable cost as long as it’s someone else who’s dying.
If there’s any hope in this story, it’s that there are still so many people in the schools who never stop trying to keep their children safe, and teach them the kind of compassion that has the tiniest hope of making things better.
“The Mausolem’s Children” – Aliette de Bodard
She’d run, as a child, and her friends had been too scared, too beaten down to follow her. She didn’t blame herself, not exactly; not for being free when others weren’t.
But in reality, she was still running.
Thuận Lộc is also dealing with childhood trauma, the kind where she freed herself from a horrible situation, only to realize as an adult that part of her was still a prisoner.
I’d love to see more of this setting that de Bodard has created. It’s a dystopian future where a nameless disaster in the past destroyed gargantuan spaceships that – hollowed out and melted and merged together – are somehow still alive. An entire army of prisoners – mostly children – are kept working at projects that no one understands, that slowly kill the people working on them. And a very toxic ruling party also takes pieces of the wreckage to make a security force known as the Hunt, which lives in the nightmares of anyone who manages to escape. And many of the children don’t escape, because everyone there grows up with the idea that this is just the way the world is, and why would anyone think they’re good enough for anything else. Which of course means escapees get two flavors of guilt to live with; the shame of stepping outside their “place”, and the guilt of leaving others behind.
This is generational trauma here, and de Bodard effectively shows how something like that keeps evolving to make sure that each generation enforces it on the next, at least until someone figures out how to stop it at the source.
“How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” – P. Djèlí Clark
P. Djèlí Clark brings us into a neo-Victorian setting that’s very close to history, except in addition to the various countries that the British Empire has conquered and colonized, there’s also the civilization of Merpeople who lost a war with the British. The Mermen exist now as lowly-paid flunkies, living on the outskirts of society, their role mostly being something that Brits like Trevor Hemley can look down on as one of the “lower” races.
Trevor is unshakably convinced that he’s destined for greatness, even though his biggest accomplishment in life so far was marrying a woman from a rich family. He’s got tons of ambition though, so when he sees an advertisement for a kraken egg – complete with instructions on the hatching, care, and feeding of a creature – he jumps at the chance to make a name for himself as a PT Barnum-like showman of exotic wonders. The fact that kraken tend to be city-sized monsters that eat ships for breakfast never actually occurs to him, and neither does he wonder about the motivations of the person selling this opportunity to a British citizen.
The situation goes about as well as you’d expect. Trevor embodies the worst of the smug British stereotype, so right from the story’s title you know to grab some popcorn to watch the show, because it’s not a matter of if Trevor dismantles his life and brings death and destruction to his neighborhood, but when.
“Better Living Through Algorithms” – Naomi Kritzer
Naomi Kritzer’s entry was definitely the most uplifting of the lot. Although I may not be looking at it entirely the right way, because the Abelique app that the story centers around kept sounding like something I would love to have.
Linnea finally gives in to all the peer pressure to download the new app that nobody seems to be able to shut up about. The app’s promises seem wildly unrealistic, the buzz about its effects on people’s lives sound positively cult like, and it all sounds like one more thing that will be forgotten about by the next news cycle.
But then Abelique actually ends up being…kind of nice?
Whoever’s processing Linnea’s initial questionnaire senses right away that she’s only doing this to get her overbearing boss off her back. (“It’s not a positivity app! It’s a wellness app!”) and encourages her to tell the app what she really wants in her life. Not just healthier food and better fashion, but things that she hasn’t admitted she’d like to pursue. Drawing? You wanna recapture some of the fun you had as a child when drawing? Sure, let’s make that happen. And it does.
The daily reminders to get up in time for work (with some extra time to sit and enjoy a coffee), to bring an umbrella since it looks like rain, to buy these exact ingredients for a new healthy dish to cook for dinner, and yes, daily drawing practice, it all sounds like it would be invasive but it’s actually soothing as hell. Yes, there’s something creepy about an app that knows when your boss is leaving early so you don’t actually have to work late, or what outfit would work best that day since you need cheering up with some bright colors. But the app is undeniably making people’s lives better, so it’s worth it. Right?
The reveal about who runs and coordinates Abelique ends up being not nearly as nefarious as I was thinking it would be. The app’s eventual collapse under the weight of humans doing the human thing and turning something beneficial into a cashgrab sounds a lot more realistic, but Kritzer injects some positivity into that as well. We all suffer from a lot of stress, not just from our busy lives, but from the fact that we know we should be getting more human contact, eating healthier, getting exercise, and improving at a craft we’ve left undone for years. It’s just that we never get around to doing any of that, and we judge ourselves pretty harshly for it. But all of those things are all still there, right at our fingertips, and we still have the ability to embrace all of it, even without a trendy app to tell us how to fine-tune our lives.
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!