All this week, I have been posting my rankings and overall assessments for the four single-work print fiction categories in the Hugo Awards for the year’s best in science fiction and fantasy. I’ve already covered Best Novel, Best Novella, and Best Novelette. For those who have not seen the previous posts, let me re-share my introduction:

For the sixth straight year, I have read and reviewed the finalists for four print fiction categories in the Hugo Awards for the best of the year in science fiction and fantasy. It feels a little different this year, because I am a Hugo finalist (for Best Fan Writer), and my reviews suddenly feel a bit more visible. Now I’m here as a reviewer, and I’m going to keep reviewing, even if that means I criticize a book pretty strongly. But in the past, I’ve publicly explained the placement of No Award on my ballots, and I’ve decided to keep those thoughts to myself this year. I’m still ranking things and explaining my opinions, and you may be able to make educated guesses, but I do aspire to be kind in my reviewing, and what that means changes as the expected audience changes.

Today, I’m looking at a category where I’ve read more 2025-published fiction than the other three categories combined: Best Short Story. Let’s take a look. Links in the titles go to online copies of the stories, where available.

Tier Four

Sixth Place: 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days by Samantha Mills

Regular readers know that I’m not a big fan of flash fiction, and while this story’s 2,048 words take it comfortably clear of the threshold, it gives the feeling of flash. Primarily that comes in the way it sets a mood rather than tells a story, sketching ten small vignettes detailing the ways that the lead and their companion pass the hours when the end of the world is nigh. The case for the value of companionship as the world outside falls apart is a strong one, but once the story ends, the details slip away almost instantly. It’s certainly possible that the details were never intended to stick, but whether intentional or not, it leaves me wanting more out of a potential award-winner.

Tier Three

Fifth Place: Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything by Effie Seiberg

Many of the best speculative tales address real-world themes along the way to telling the story. Here, the theme is the story. A disabled superhero struggles to make any impact upon joining the local heroes union because of the establishment’s persistent refusal to make even the simplest of accommodations. It’s impossible to miss the real-life analogues, and what veritably drips through the (digital) pages is not so much rage as a baffled frustration at how the smallest adjustments are treated like scaling Everest when brought to the attention of those with the power to make the necessary changes. I tend to prefer a bit more subtlety in my reading, but the lack of subtlety here is clearly deliberate and certainly gets the point across. It also offers some catharsis in the ending, though it requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief when considering the behavior of crucial secondary characters.

Fourth Place: Six People to Revise You by J.R. Dawson

Another story that largely does what it intends but requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief, “Six People to Revise You” considers a technology that allows one to make psychological modifications, guided by the opinions of the titular six people who step in from various parts of the subject’s world to offer accounts of what would make their life better. It’s a fascinating concept, and I’d love to read an entire anthology dealing with various angles of this sort of technology. But here, the technology is only the speculative backdrop to a story of self-discovery that’s cathartic but also a bit predictable. There is enough ambiguity in the ending for me to go back and forth on whether to interpret the story in a way that makes me angry or that makes me appreciate it, but in my ranking, I find myself splitting the difference and slotting it at the front of my third tier.

Tier Two

Third Place: Missing Helen by Tia Tashiro

There is so much fascinating character work in the story of a divorced woman meeting her literal clone, now engaged to her ex-husband. But there are also some structural issues that keep me from fully falling in love with it, with a shift in focus between two major relationships in the lead’s life that makes one feel underdeveloped at the expense of the other. Tashiro is an excellent storyteller (let me remind readers that most of you are still sleeping on her astounding debut, “To Carry You Inside You“), so it’s a consistently compelling read that does a great job digging into messy relationships, but it also leaves me wanting a bit more at the close.

Second Place: Wire Mother by Isabel J. Kim

I’ve been hyping up Isabel J. Kim for a few years now, and it’s hard not to judge this story in comparison to her incredibly deep catalogue (another story that most readers are still sleeping on: “Day Ten Thousand“). In comparison to some of the others, “Wire Mother” feels a bit raw, rushing rapidly through the life of a teen who is incapable of seeing the humanity in her AI mother. It took two reads, but I ultimately settled on the opinion that the visceral whirlwind of emotion serves the story well in how it captures the mindset of an angry teenager, but I suspect this story is earning plaudits mostly for the absolutely chilling world serving as its backdrop. So many elements that would be front-and-center in many dystopian tales just fade into the background here, lending additional power to the work as a whole.

Tier One

First Place: In My Country by Thomas Ha

My top three are all Clarkesworld stories by relatively new authors that readers have been sleeping on (do I mention “Cretins” or “A Compilation of Accounts Concerning the Distal Brook Flood“? ¿Por qué no los dos?). That wasn’t a guarantee, as there were a host of excellent stories published across so many other venues in 2025 that could’ve broken up the trio. But here we are. And for me, the choice is easy. “In My Country” has the feel of the dystopian wave of the mid-1900s, but with its exact targets always blurred by the trappings of weird horror. This story isn’t merely one thing. It’s weird and atmospheric, taking on the surveillance state and the reduction of art and politics to bold stances with no room for ambiguity; at the same time, it’s a somber tale of a naive parent slowing coming into understanding of the world through secondhand experience of his children’s budding subversion. I’ve said a few times that it’s difficult to judge a talented author against the very finest of their past work, but this one is right up there with Ha’s best and would be an eminently worthy Hugo winner.