SFF Review - 2024 Hugo Short Stories

Every year in our book club we read the Hugo nominated Short Stories and Novelettes. We read these well over a month ago, and it’s taken me so long to get around to posting my reviews that the awards have been awarded! Post is too long so I’m breaking it up into two parts - Short Stories, and Novelettes.

Best Short Story Nominees

“Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer

This one isn’t really SF, and is only kinda a story. It requires actual SF history to review!

In 2015 Naomi Kritzer published “Cat Pictures Please” about a hidden AI that goes about arranging fortuitous coincidences in the lives of very-online humans that makes their lives drastically better. They never know how or why these things are happening, the AI never reveals itself. The AI really loves cat pics, and in the end it sets up a dating service that requires cat pics in payment. It’s a really fun story, you should go read it, it won the Hugo back when the Hugos weren’t fully captured. :) It was later developed into a novel (or novels?)

Upon reading this story I realized exactly what was happening. This was a sequel, but from the POV of the humans. The AI dating service has expanded into a full lifestyle app and gone mainstream! Brilliant!

Except that it turns out it isn’t run by an AI, actually. Well, it is, but not a real ASI like the CatNet AI. It’s just a modern LLM. It turns out this isn’t a sequel, it’s Kritzer trying to explore the viability of the idea IRL, playing around with it, imagining how it would pan out. It’s overwhelmed by grifters and spam, and ruined by politics, pretty much like you’d expect. In the end Kitzer comes to the standard conclusion - building a community would be great, but is really really hard in the modern rootless world.

That’s fine, but as an exploration of the idea of how alienating it is to live in the modern world without a community and how difficult but rewarding creating a community can be… this story doesn’t work. It doesn’t evoke any deep emotions or reveal any truths, it doesn’t meaningfully engage new ideas. It’s not very entertaining along the way. This isn’t bad, to be clear! The story is totally fine, it’s just not exceptional.

Which is OK, lots of stories are just OK, it’s actually really REALLY hard to craft a story that hits all (or even most) of the things that make something outstanding. You gotta write a lot of mediocre stuff to get to the occasional absolute gems. That’s why we have awards after all, so those who do read all the words that are published every year can point us to the few REALLY good ones. :)

Anyway, this story won the Hugo.

“How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” by P. Djèlí Clark

A bizarre vengeance story. For a vengeance story it’s written in a very twee way, spending most of its time showing how ridiculously foolish the revenge-victims are. They are the British middle-class in the Age of Sail, and they’re presented as bumbling Mr Bean-style idiots. At least our protagonist is, and while his wife isn’t as useless it seems that he’s the more extreme end of a general trend. Thus when these folks are slaughtered at the end if feels a lot like we’re supposed to rejoice in the fact that the world was rid of these idiots rather than that we’re supposed to feel satisfaction that vile murder/rapists were crushed out of existence.

Furthermore it’s written from the POV of the revenge-victim. This is one reason I have to keep saying revenge-victim rather than villain, because we don’t see them do anything villainous. Instead our protagonist ends up being a patsy of the actual villains, who use him as a tool to enact mass murder on a civilian population. In a standard vengeance story we sympathize with the hero because some truly horrific shit has been done to him, and the monsters he is coming to kill rightly deserve it. In this story the vengeance is against… a people in general? Who are all equally deserving of death because they’re citizens of a country that the villain has a grudge against? And this is played for comedy?

The key, of course, is that the author doesn’t need to make us sympathize with the “hero” or show us why we should hate the revenge-victims and cheer for their deaths. All he has to do is point out that the soon-to-victims are white middle-class British folk during the colonial era. Obviously white colonizers deserve to be killed and eaten, and the stupider they are the more funny it is to laugh at them while they’re being killed and eaten.

Anyway, this story took second place in the Hugos.

“The Mausoleum’s Children” by Aliette de Bodard

A woman who escaped an awful machine-cult as a child (literally escaped, they hunt and murder anyone who tries to leave) returns to the cult’s compound to rescue the two friends she left behind all those years ago.

de Bodard put real work into this story! Which feels like strange praise to give to a Hugo nominee, but here we are. It’s actual SF, being set in a WarHammer 40K/Dune style universe with techno-magic and machine cults and AI gods. Personally, I absolutely love this aesthetic, and I can never get enough. :) Furthermore the protagonist is relatable, we sympathize with her desires, and it’s easy to hate the fanatic monks that enslave children and kill or torture anyone that challenges them.

The surprises our protagonist confronts are well done, the writing is evocative, the resolution is satisfying. It’s not terribly innovative, being a pretty standard vengeance story (that actually works!), but at least its good. Solid story overall!

“The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones

A horror story channeling the horror of school shootings. It’s extremely good. I recently heard Steven King say something akin to ~’every horror story is just a series of images. The line that ties them together doesn’t matter much, as long as it doesn’t get in the way.’ I think this is likely the core of horror… are there a number of images/scenes that invoke feelings of horror in you? Then job well done. Job extremely well done.

Part of the appeal of this story is the dream-like quality of it, as it flips back and forth between the carnage of the real world and the children wandering through evil-Narnia in slowed-down time. It raises some interesting questions about Narnia, like “Hey, didn’t the Narnias just recruit four human kids as child-soldiers into their personal war??” And “isn’t childhood synonymous with helplessness, so giving children power is the equivalent of destroying childhood?”

Part of the appeal is that the Gun is basically a demonic entity of its own right. It has a capital-G name, it has agency and desires, it stalks the schools of the world. Society has been forced to make some sort of deal with the Gun where it is allowed to devour a certain amount of children every year in ritual sacrifice, or perhaps the Gun is a deity that is just too strong to stop. The implacability of an eldritch god that cannot be constrained or reasoned with is horrifying and incredibly effective, I loved it. More creeping blood-sacrifice gods, pls!

The story is confused in parts. While it mostly engages with the Gun deity, it slips back into direct analogy to the real world a few times, alternatively claiming that humans/shooters don’t matter and that laws don’t matter, but then claiming that actually they do and something-something 2nd amendment? It never has anything coherent to say, just sorta breaks the spell and gestures that way vigorously, then continues with the story. It feels like Jones wanted to tie this back to the real world but couldn’t figure out how and just kinda flubbed it a little before continuing. Not a big deal and easy to overlook. Considering how great the rest of the story is, definitely just a minor error. But notable because it happens more than once.

The ending is ambiguous… some of my fellow book club members read it in a very pessimistic light. Which, as a grim horror story, is totally legit. But… I find it very hard to read that final paragraph and not see it as a final victory of the children. Which means this story ends with a very interesting point. A “crown” that grants children the ability to kill others with magic is basically just a magic gun. Which implies that the most effective way to stop an bad deity that is the incarnation of a gun is with a good child that has a magic gun…

This story was my favorite, and the only one I heartily recommend!