SF/F Review - 2023 Hugo Nominated Shorts
Just the ones that are available online in English, which wasn’t many this year.
Guys, it was a rough year.
Novelettes
“The Difference Between Love and Time”, by Catherynne M. Valente
If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know I love Cat Valente, so you won’t be surprised that this is my favorite of the year. Her prose is what poetry aspires to be. She somehow manages to only write exactly the words that make a scene spring fully into life, jettisoning every syllable of ballast that would weigh a thought or feeling down. She uses this enrapturing of your attention to show you—viscerally, intimately—what it is to be human. The fears and disappointments, the wrenching pain of love and struggle in this lonely meatsuit, and the beauty in connection and reconciliation that reminds you why you keep going through with it all regardless. She makes you want to cry and cheer at once in a laughing sob.
I ain’t gonna lie—this isn’t her best work. That’s how good Valente is. Even her mid-grade stuff is fantastic top-shelf work that burns in your mind. Never don’t read her.
This is the sort of thing I expect from Hugo nominees. This is beauty.
“A Dream of Electric Mothers”, by Wole Talabi
There’s no way to not say it—this is just plain bad. It’s not like last year’s “O2 Arena” which was a mockery of the targeted author. But it’s still an easily recognizable failure of fiction.
The prose is straight-up clunky. There are ham-fisted sentences throughout. The characters are both flat and stupid. The false urgency forced into the plot is so transparently false that one wonders why the author even bothered? Like, no one is fooled by the equivalent of a rock with the word “BOMB!” painted on it. It’s obviously not a bomb, and having the protagonist try to act like it is just makes the protagonist look like an idiot.
There is no message of any weight to the story, and yet like George Hotz it seems to think it’s saying something profound constantly. But worst of all for a piece of fiction—it never makes you feel anything. One can see what the author was trying to make us feel. But the execution is so bad that not a single emotion is stirred by the text. There’s just nothing there.
How is this a Hugo nominee?
“If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You”, by John Chu
This is a well-written Dating-Superman AU fanfic. If you’ve read stories of this genre before, you already know everything that’ll happen, and you know if you’ll like it. Personally, I was charmed, like I always am. I’m a sucker for awkward romances, meet-cutes, and couples pretending that both of them don’t know Clark is Superman when it’s so obvious that both of them do. :D
I would say it’s kinda weird that the Hugos finally started acknowledging a genre of fanfic that’s been around for 50 years at this point. I realize awards are a lagging indicator of quality, but a half-century lag is pretty significant! Except it’s not weird at all, because the story is sorta spoiled by the Hugo-bait that’s stapled on top.
Forced into the cute dating story is an actual absurd amount of woke pandering. I mean absurd literally here—when cops show up at a crime-scene they actually start looking for minorities they can murder. No, really, they actually are said to be doing that in the text. At one point they try to gun down a little old chinese grandmother who’s just been assaulted by a racist (Superman protects her). This literally happens in the story, I swear I couldn’t make this up if I tried. My guess is that Chu knew he had to do something like this to get a Hugo nod. So he went as all-out balls-to-the-wall as you can go, just to see how far he could push it. Similar to the hoax that got part of Mein Kampf rewritten as a feminist paper and published in an academic journal to show just how unhinged some of these journals are, John Chu got a “The Producers” level of over-the-top outrage to be applauded to show how unhinged the SF lit awards have become.
At least, that’s my interpretation, because one must laugh or one shall surely weep.
Regardless, the woke pandering is completely unrelated to the core story and could be removed without changing anything. It honestly feels like it was written later on and added to the story in an attempt to get that Hugo nod. It worked, and bravo to Chu for being savvy and making the system work for him. :)
“Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness”, by S.L. Huang
A “story” that really highlights the slowness of the publishing process. It’s a reaction to MicroSoft’s Tay chatbot way back in 2016. Obviously written before LLMs existed and had passed the Turing Test. Back when what people were most worried about from AIs was that they might say racist things. Not Huang’s fault, obviously. But as the world keeps changing at an accelerating pace, traditional publishing is going to fall further and further behind.
I put “story” in quotes, because there isn’t a story here. There’s a bunch of fictional articles and news briefs about spambots leading to a spate of suicides, but there’s no story. No plot, no characters, etc. To be clear, it’s not like last year’s “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” which used the structure of Wikipedia articles + comments to tell a riveting story. There’s no plot here.
One may ask how the Hugos got baited into nominating this one. The answer is that this is a revenge fantasy with the popular targets. Everyone made to kill themselves is a multimillionaire techbro or corporate exec or similarly successful at capitalism. We are reassured—again literally in the text—that all the victims are white men. Huang knows her audience.
I find it unbelievable that dozens of extremely successful people would be harassed into suicide by a spambot of all things, when even a minor internet celebrity without billions of dollars can deal with tsunamis of human bile without killing herself. But hey, it’s not my revenge fantasy.
“We Built This City”, by Marie Vibbert
It’s fine. It’s a perfectly serviceable story. I, again, find it imponderably dumb that a city would choose to commit suicide because they don’t want to… raise their taxes enough to pay the salaries of a dozen laborers?? But I understand that coming up with a more realistic scenario would have taken more work, and writing is already hard enough without needing to put multiple evenings of thought into it. As long as you can overlook everyone in a city aside from the janitor protagonist being just that dumb, this is a nice mid story. Kills some time between flights, you’ll have forgotten it forever by this time next week, but it was fine while it lasted.
Short Stories
I have a well-known prejudice against YA fiction. As far as I can tell, this is a great YA story. It’s bombastic and silly. The protagonists are pure-hearted underdogs that win through the power of friendship and being pure-hearted. The villain is a moustache-twirler that’s a lot of fun to hate due to all the puppies he kicks whenever he’s on stage. Good vibes and root beer floats all around!
If you like YA, you’ll probably like this a lot. I dislike YA, so I disliked it. I really REALLY wish the Hugos would just create a YA category already. I understand why its great. I just don’t think it is comparable to non-YA genre fic. Whenever YA is in a category it becomes a “what has more fans this year, YA or non-YA?” contest. If you put ice cream into a cake-tasting competition, you aren’t judging the ice cream by the same metrics as you’re judging the cakes.
It’s also unfair to the YA!
“Rabbit Test”, by Samantha Mills
Another “story” that isn’t really a story, it’s just a bunch of articles. I’m more pro-abortion-rights than any person I know, and even I was bored by this. The point of a story is to make the reader feel emotions through narrative. You can’t just point at the terrible effects of abortion restrictions a half dozen times and call it a story.
Look, I appreciate that a lot of people wanted to try structure play after reading “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”. It was incredible. I’m a huge fan of structure play myself, my favorite novel in the world is Vellum which relies hugely on structure play. And obviously people are going to need to practice a lot to get it right. There’s gonna be a lot of misses on the way to greatness. So this one isn’t on Mills.
Weeding out the misses is the job of the Hugo nominators. Being the people who read a whole heckin’ lot and sorting the wheat from the chaff is your whole thing. If people are still refining the tools and working out the kinks, don’t go around promoting the half-formed learning projects along the way!
Side note—one of our book club members saw the list of trigger warnings at the top and noped the heck out right away, saying she didn’t need to read something this horrific. Those warnings are: Sexual Assault, abuse, traumatic miscarriage, psych ward treatment, and suicide. The trigger warnings on this story are a lot like a hype-man with an airhorn yelling “WE’LL SELL YOU THE WHOLE SEAT, BUT YOU’LL ONLY USE THE EDGE!!!” for a rather bland event. Needless to say, the trigger warning itself is the most traumatic part of this “story.” The brain can conjure up all sorts of horrors with only a suggestion. When you actually read the “story” and see a poorly-made rubber monster suit, it dispels all the fears that had been tormenting you. This is probably the best use of trigger warnings I’ve ever seen. Much like most trailers, it is the best part of the movie, and the movie itself is disappointing in comparison.
What Happened This Year?
The only short worth reading this year is Cat Valente’s.
The obvious answer to what happened is that the EnWokening of an institution is taking its natural course and progressing into full-blown collapse. However this year is complicated by the fact that WorldCon is in China and the CCP likely had a massive amount of influence on what was acceptable. There’s rumors circulating of multiple people declining nominations, and at least one work pulled by the committee. Supposedly we’ll hear people speak up after the awards are done.
It’s been weird watching a respected institution being hollowed out over the years, killed by pacifism. I dunno if this is just one of the sacrifices we have to accept as part of the cost of living in a liberal democracy. I’ll probably have more thoughts over time, and they’ll be here when I do. I won’t know what I’m thinking until I can read it. :)