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, Best Novella, and Best Novelette, so now it’s time to take a look at Best Short Story.

I read more short stories than the other three categories combined, and in the past few years, that has led to being more critical of the shortlist for this category. A little digging reveals a treasure trove of tremendous tales, and yet the awards shortlists tend to be dominated by the most well-known authors and venues. My top ten short stories of the year featured zero stories by authors with previous Hugo nominations. The group of finalists featured five, three of which are previous winners in either Best Novel or Best Novella. And I’m not saying that they’re writing bad stories; on the contrary, a couple of them are quite good! But it’s hard to deny that authors of popular longer fiction are getting a boost in this category, one that I see as squeezing out many of the true best of the year.

That said, while it’s always discouraging to fill out a ballot with a Tier Three that’s bigger than Tier One, there was one viral story in 2024 that I found genuinely excellent, and seeing it hit the shortlist provides a significant bright spot. And in fairness, my second tier features a pair of stories with a lot of ambition–the sorts of story that I don’t mind seeing shortlisted, even if they aren’t personal favorites. Let’s take a closer look:

Tier Three

Seventh Place: Marginalia by Mary Robinette Kowal

I have greatly enjoyed a lot of Kowal’s storytelling in the past, but this one just doesn’t get close to her usual level. There’s a clear intention to dig into the difficulty of losing a parent, but it never comes together. The narrative voice and the editing are inconsistent, the plot more than strains credulity, and the persistent asides about the lead’s cat go nowhere and feel like pure indulgence. Ultimately, what could be a powerful grief story gets drowned out by a lot of other elements that simply do not mesh. This is a tale that’s significantly below Kowal’s typical caliber of storytelling, and it’s hard to understand its place on the shortlist.

Sixth Place: Five Views of the Planet Tartarus by Rachael K. Jones

I rarely enjoy flash fiction, so take my opinions here with a grain of salt. But this is more an image than a story. And yes, it’s a striking image about a ghastly futuristic society. But there’s not much narrative weight here, and what story there is seems to be designed to set up a twist that’s not as clever as it wants to be and fits somewhat awkwardly with the characterization.

Fifth Place: No Award

Tier Two

Fourth Place: We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read by Caroline M. Yoachim

This is a fascinatingly ambitious story, with a multi-column format designed to mimic the linguistic patterns of a dwindling alien race desperate to pass along their history. I found this one a bit more effective in audio than in print format, but while it’s interesting either way, it didn’t quite generate the kind of emotional connection needed to hit my top tier. Thematically, it reminds me a bit of a counterpoint to Sarah Pinsker’s tremendous “Wind Will Rove,” and it may have been hurt in my mind by the incredible effectiveness of Pinsker’s novelette, which had me imagining alternate courses of action instead of joining the narrators in their feelings of desperation. I’m not upset to see this one on the shortlist, but it remains in my bottom half.

Third Place: Three Faces of a Beheading by Arkady Martine

Another wonderfully ambitious story, digging deep into themes of historiography and the shaping of historical narratives. The prose is beautiful, with a mix of academic texts, a mytho-historical narrative, and a game-heavy present-day story in a censorious society. The three elements dovetail wonderfully from a thematic perspective, but the plot feels disjointed, without enough thread binding the pieces together and no climax that leaves the reader with a wow moment. The prose and the themes get this one to the top half of my ballot, but they aren’t enough to put it in my top tier.

Second Place: Stitched to Skin Like Family Is by Nghi Vo

This one is quite a bit less ambitious than the other two in my second tier, but it heads the tier on the strength of expert execution. It’s a supernatural revenge story at heart, which isn’t the sort of plot that tends to appeal to me. But Vo writes some astounding period pieces, and this tale of a Chinese-American in the 1930s Midwest brings its time to vivid life. The plot is fairly straightforward, but it’s well-told and engaging throughout. It doesn’t hit the level of Vo’s 2023 period piece that I put atop my 2024 Best Novelette ballot, but it’s good enough to slot into second place on this year’s Short Story ballot.

Tier One

First Place: Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim

This is the third consecutive year that Kim has hit my nominating ballot in some capacity, and while this is not the best story she’s ever written (at the moment, that honor still goes to the wonderfully weird “Day Ten Thousand“), it’s an exceptional piece that tops my ballot by the largest margin in any of my four focus categories. It’s a response story to Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” but instead of trying to fix Le Guin’s premise, it takes it at face value and uses it as a lens through which to lampoon contemporary society, especially around online responses to moral evil. It makes use of an extremely online writing style that may rub some readers the wrong way, but it’s effective in this context, delivering some devastating lines and balancing social commentary with enough humor to push the reader to self-reflect even while laughing. This easily slotted into my top five short stories of 2024, and as the only thing on my nominating ballot to hit the shortlist, it’s an easy choice for the top of my final ballot. I sincerely hope this is the piece that brings home an overdue Hugo for one of the best new voices in short fiction.