To mark the transition between our summer Hugo reading and our regular short fiction reading, my online book club decided to have a session focusing on the finalists for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. Why 2017? Well, the stories were all online, it was before we started our Hugo Readalong, and it was the first year under the current voting system. And also I have a longstanding gripe about the results.
Having not read a whole lot of 2016 short fiction to give myself context, I decided to go ahead and make the entire 2017 longlist my reading project for the month. That’s still a lot less context than I’ve had in more recent years since I ramped up my reading of new releases, but it does offer a nice snapshot into the stories that were getting buzz 8-9 years ago.
2017 Shortlist
A full half of these were rereads for me, and while my opinions have shifted a little bit, they’ve probably been more consistent than not. Almost totally unchanged is my opinion about the actual Hugo winner, Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar, which is. . . fine. It’s a mashup of two different fairy tales that’s worthwhile mostly for the quality of the writing itself. But the ending is clear from the opening paragraphs, and it feels like the sort of story that sees itself as more subversive than it actually is. I can certainly understand why people like this one—and I enjoyed the read myself—and it certainly isn’t the first time that the combination of good writing and popular themes has been enough to make an award-winner, but as someone coming to it after hearing all the hype, I was a bit disappointed by how safe the whole thing felt.
A bit more ambitious is the story that improved the most for me on reread: N.K. Jemisin’s love-letter to New York, The City Born Great. When I read this several years ago, I viewed it as a self-indulgent piece interested mostly in singing detailed praises of the city, chock full of references that went totally over the head of a reader who had never been there. Reading it again now, I don’t think that criticism was totally off the mark, but whether it’s having actually visited New York or just being in a better mood to sit back and enjoy the rhythm of the prose, it came off much better this time around. The plot is pretty straightforward, albeit with the eye-catching premise of a city being born as a living, breathing organism, all the while being assaulted by elements who hate it. And it’s still full of cultural references that a lot of people just aren’t going to get, along with fairly simplistic political villains. But the prose is so bursting with life that it makes for a pretty good read if you can go with the flow and avoid getting too bogged down in the details.
However, it is my final reread that remains my favorite, and by a healthy margin. I love stories that zoom in on individuals in the midst of larger conflict, and I love stories that center on the difficulties of relating to vastly different cultures. Carrie Vaughn’s That Game We Played During the War is an exceptional example of both, digging deeply into the lead character to generate real pathos while developing a fascinating point of connection between a society of mind-readers and a group of ordinary people. This would be good enough to top a strong shortlist, and in the 2017 crop, it’s far and away the most complete of the bunch.
Turning to the new-to-me reads, I was impressed by the ambition of Alyssa Wong’s A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers. It’s a wildly disorienting grief story, with the lead returning over and over to the same moment of loss in vain hopes of writing a different ending. The details didn’t always come together smoothly, but the more I stopped trying to puzzle it out and just leaned into the vibes, the more I appreciated it.
Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies by Brooke Bolander is a very short revenge fantasy, bordering on flash, that evidently had a viral moment back in 2016 before I made it to Book Twitter. I don’t care much for either revenge fantasies or flash, so this was never going to be the one that stuck with me long, but it’s crafted well enough and features some satisfying comeuppance.
Last and definitely least is An Unimaginable Light by John C. Wright. This made the shortlist only via a campaign intended to hack the voting process to change the political balance of the finalists, and as such, it would’ve been entirely justified to skip this one entirely and vote it last. But I’m a completionist, so I gave it a read and ended up rejecting it purely on its merits. There’s a lot of smug jabs at progressive ideology in a tone that I invariably hate whether or not I agree with the jabs, quickly putting me in a negative frame of mind. But the biggest issue is the story being framed as a philosophical dialogue and failing to dive any deeper than the first five minutes of an undergraduate philosophy lecture. The questions at issue are genuinely interesting, but if that’s meant to be the meat of the story, it has to dig deeper. The ending tries something interesting that may have hit better with a quality setup, but the story as a whole is just too shallow with too offputting of a tone.
2017 Longlist
One of my favorite parts about the Hugo statistics is getting to see the list of stories that just missed out on the shortlist—the longlist is regularly studded with gems. Here, the nearest miss was Things With Beards by Sam J. Miller, which would have improved the shortlist immensely had it taken the place of “An Unimaginable Light.” Unfortunately, the story that beat it to the final place on the shortlist was “That Game We Played During the War,” so I’m unable to wish one extra vote for “Things With Beards.” Not that my wishes matter one way or the other. That said, it is an excellent story in its own right, jumping off from the actions of The Thing (which I have neither seen nor read) and exploring various monstrousnesses: in the literal sense, in the sense of gay men hiding from a society who hates them, and in the sense of acts of terrorism committed to fight injustice. The storytelling is compelling, and there are so many themes to chew on—this would make an excellent discussion piece.
My other favorite from the longlist is quite different, Peter S. Beagle’s The Story of Kao Yu. This one is told in a folkloric voice that’s a pure pleasure to read. But while a wise judge being flustered by a beautiful woman is not exactly an innovative storyline, “The Story of Kao Yu” manages to maintain enough uncertainty that it’s not just a matter of waiting for the inevitable conclusion. It’s just an excellent piece of storytelling.
The longlist features a pair of tales from Aliette de Bodard, and Lullaby for a Lost World pulled me in immediately with its Gothic atmosphere and second-person narration. There’s a lot of commentary here on the willingness of the powerful to sacrifice other people for their own safety and comfort, at the same time slowly unfolding a way for those harmed to fight back. I’ve read a number of Hugo finalists from de Bodard, and I think I like this one more than any of them.
A Salvaging of Ghosts, on the other hand, never really clicked for me. On the surface, it should be the sort of story I enjoy, with the melancholy tone and meditation on grief. But something about the storytelling just kept me from truly engaging with the characters and their struggles. I’ve always found prose a bit of a black box—sure, it’s easy to identify bad prose, but it’s much harder to pinpoint why some competent prose is effortlessly immersive and some is not—so it’s hard to put my finger on what exactly didn’t work for me here, but on the whole, it was a miss.
Another shortlist regular who hit the longlist in 2017 is Seanan McGuire with the first contact Ye Highlands and Lowlands. I often enjoy first contact, and the extremely-over-everything voice of the main character is punchy enough to make for easy immersion here. But while the narrator’s frequent scolds are appropriate for the subject matter, they also start to get a little repetitive in a story that may have been stronger with a little tightening.
Ursula Vernon, who of late has been racking up awards under the pseudonym T. Kingfisher, joined Sam J. Miller and the six shortlisted authors in a fairly clear-cut top eight with her story Razorback. It’s another entry with elements of revenge fantasy, but this one doesn’t center vengeance as much as it does the relationship between a witch and her familiar. Vernon has a fairly consistent fairy tale voice, and those who enjoy it in other works will doubtless like this one as well.
Red in Tooth and Cog by Cat Rambo is a cute bot story—a theme I tend not to like as much as the sci-fi fandom as a whole—that sets up a fascinating ecosystem of abandoned bots gone feral. The plot moves in what seems like the obvious direction for this kind of tale, but the setup is worth the read, and there’s some heartstring-tugging that I’m sure will appeal to many readers.
We Have a Cultural Difference, Can I Taste You? by Rebecca Ann Jordan is the tale of the sole survivor of an alien race struggling through school with classmates who perceive the world in a fundamentally different way. There’s certainly a dollop of xenobiology here, but this is mostly a story of looking for acceptance and common ground in situations where there’s not a lot of obvious common ground.
Terminal by Lavie Tidhar splits its perspective among a handful of characters, telling the stories of the people who abandon their lives in and around Earth to be part of a wave of pilgrims— armed with little but pods equipped only for a one-way trip—looking for a new beginning on Mars. It’s reminiscent of a mosaic novel in miniature, a short story in flashes rather than a novel in stories. But the flashes offer compelling central figures, and the little connections between them make for a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
Like with the shortlist section, I’ll end the longlist section with a story whose voice I found grating. Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0 by Caroline Yoachim is a short, absurdist satire of the American healthcare system, told via a Choose Your Own Adventure-style format. I can certainly understand why someone would be frustrated enough with the healthcare bureaucracy to lampoon it in fiction, but this one is in the awkward middle where it feels too targeted to pull off thorough absurdity and too absurd to be incisive commentary. Not to mention it seems to mostly repeat the same gag in different garb. That said, tastes in humor are notoriously varied, and I’ve already mentioned that I tend to dislike things that come off as shallow mockery. So this one may well be chalked up to personal taste—other readers will surely be able to tell within a couple paragraphs whether the story is more up their alley than it is mine.
Favorites
- The Story of Kao Yu by Peter S. Beagle (short story, Reactor)
- Things With Beards by Sam J. Miller (short story, Clarkesworld)
- That Game We Played During the War by Carrie Vaughn (short story, Reactor)