This is my fifth year reading and ranking every finalist for the Hugo Awards for the Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story in the previous year of sci-fi and fantasy. I’ve already posted Best Novel and Best Novella, and now it’s time to move to Best Novelette.

Novelette is often my favorite category of the four I regularly read. I’m not sure whether it’s the length being particularly conducive to good storytelling or whether there are just enough novelettes published each year that there are bound to be some excellent ones, but not so much that so much of the quality gets lost in the noise. Perhaps it’s a bit of both. At any rate, I have some cognitive dissonance about this year’s Best Novelette shortlist, because it’s missing the story that I think was clearly the best of the year (The Aquarium for Lost Souls), but at the same time, it might be my favorite list (in any category!) since I’ve been reading for the Hugos. This is a wonderful set of finalists. Let’s take a closer look:

Tier Two

Sixth Place: By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars by Premee Mohamed

“By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars” is doing interesting character work with the wizard lead trying to hide her own infirmity from her apprentice and the magical community writ large, but it follows a compelling setup with an ending that feels expected and perfunctory. There’s a sufficiently dramatic plot to keep this one interesting–and above No Award–but it’s firmly in good-not-great territory. There’s nothing particularly bad here, but there’s no single element that’s executed well enough to make this a serious contender for my top tier. The big character conflict doesn’t dig deep enough to hit the peak of its potential, and there’s no other showstopper here.

Tier 1C

Yes, my top tier is so big that I had to split it into subtiers. This is an excellent shortlist, even though it got the wrong Strange Horizons novelette.

Fifth Place: Signs of Life by Sarah Pinsker

Pinsker can build an atmosphere, and she can tell a small-scale family story in deeply compelling fashion. Both are on full display here, with a mountain cabin setting that just has enough of the uncanny to keep the reader on their toes, serving as backdrop to a reunion between a pair of aging sisters who had been estranged since adolescence. The expert storytelling keeps the reader wondering exactly when the speculative element will enter, and the interpersonal drama is good enough that this would be worth a read even if there were no speculative element at all. When the reveal finally comes, it’s both surprising and a perfect fit with the foreshadowing that preceded it. The ending does feel a little neat, and that keeps this in the bottom half of my ballot, but it’s an excellent story that would be in my top half in any other category.

Fourth Place: Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie

Leckie has a talent for developing truly alien societies, and the building of a strange new society is the highlight of this double-sided first contact story. There are a few plot threads hanging at the ending, in what I can only assume is a deliberately unsatisfying close but that still gives this one a whiff of the unfinished. But the alien society is fascinating, the first contact is well-done, and there are enough plot threads resolved to make this an excellent read overall.

Tier 1B

Third Place: Loneliness Universe by Eugenia Triantafyllou

“Loneliness Universe” makes fantastic use of a strange speculative premise to explore real-life phenomena. In particular, it delves into the isolation that comes from outsourcing so much of interpersonal relationships to online interactions by presenting a world in which loved ones can literally not perceive each other in the real world, instead only able to interact online. By and large, this is a story for the vibes, digging into the way the lead feels at seeing her friends and family disappear. But the vibes are effective, and the themes ring true to life. And while there may be one moment where the reader wishes the lead would act more quickly, she generally investigates the sorts of things a genre-aware reader would like her to investigate. In what is an ongoing theme for this shortlist, it would be a worthy winner.

Second Place: The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea by Naomi Kritzer

Naomi Kritzer regularly does a wonderful job writing down-to-earth characters who feel like they could walk right off the page and into the world, and though “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” is ultimately a fantasy story, that skill is on full display here. There’s some interpersonal conflict from a difficult marital relationship, and the contemporary story dovetails wonderfully with the fantasy tale lurking in the background. It may not be especially difficult to see where this one is going, but the synergy between the two storylines is still plenty satisfying, making for a story I had on my own nominating ballot and would be happy to see win.

Tier 1A

First Place: The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video by Thomas Ha

As we saw on my Best Novella ballot, Best Novelette features a shortlist with several stories I’d be happy to see win, and yet one clearly stands above the rest as the one I really want to win. That story is “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha. It’s an atmospheric and meditative tale that slowly builds the feeling of the uncanny around the main character, all the while digging into the preservation of imperfect historical records, contrasted with a society obsessed with editing experiences in pursuit of perfection. There’s a thriller subplot that doesn’t necessarily feel realistic from a plot perspective but works wonderfully from an emotional perspective, contributing to the lead’s feeling of isolation and displacement from a world that can’t fathom his viewpoint. It comes together for a bittersweet ending that beautifully brings out the complicated memories of an imperfect parent/child relationship. There are plenty of worthy choices here, but I hope it’s “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” that takes home the prize.