Hugo Nominees: Short Fiction

[ase]

cahn proposed the short fiction is all in the "X is Terrible" subgenre. I will attempt to summarize accordingly.

Alix E. Harrow, "Do Not Look Back, My Lion": Eefa is a healer in a society increasingly given to war. Talaan is her wife, the Lion of Xos, one of the great warriors of her people. Eefa doesn't see how she, a small woman with a small destiny, can change her people's conquering warlike ways. Talaan kills the warmongering Emperor and presumably dies in the attempt as Eefa walks away with their last child. War is terrible.

S. L. Huang, "As the Last I May Know": Two hundred years ago, "sere missiles" were used against Nyma's people. Now they have the technology, but the activation codes are stored in a carrier. To get the codes to use sere missiles, the elected leader has to kill the carrier, always a child, in this case Nyma. Cue several years of being the carrier while war closes in. Points for characters who not only have different opinions about the use of sere missiles, but whose opinions and feelings shift over the narrative. Nuclear missiles are terrible.

Shiv Ramdas, "And Now His Lordship is Laughing": British governor demands grandmother Apa make him a jute "doll" for his wife, then starves India and all Apa's village, so Apa makes him a Hatya’r Putul that kills everyone with laughter. Apa dies laughing. British rule of India is terrible.

Nebeda Sen, "Ten Excerpts from An Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island": Cannibalism is one of my hard "no" lines. So I have a hard time getting past the eating of human flesh on this one! With that said, if I'm reading the fragments correctly, it's about making someone part of you, with a side of scandalized Victorian sensibilities when a friend of a kidnapped Ratnabar young women Gets It and does this for her friend. And then a hundred years of scholarship happen, cue multiple waves of minority studies recapitulated with a woman-dominated cannibal society. I Got It, I think, but I also think this is a story of negative space, it's got lots of room for the reader to make things up. cahn thinks it needs more plot. I think it needs less eating of human flesh by other humans as a metaphor for relationships between women. Victorians are terrible. 

Rivers Solomon, "Blood is Another Word For Hunger": Sully kills the family that owns her, and her anger causes her to birth a dead slave ancestor for each death she commits. So she keeps going with killing.

"Before, Sully thought it was her lack of want for anything that made her feel so shapeless and void, but her relief at seeing Ziza upon her rebirth upended that notion. She wasn’t numb for lack of want but for wanting too much. She was ravenous for the whole world. . . Even as she imagined possessing all these things, she wanted yet more. It was strange, she thought, how limitless a void inside of a person could be. It was strange that a person could be killed, but not anything that that person had done."

Slavery is terrible. 

Fran Wilde, "A Catalog of Storms": Sila lives in a world where Weathermen fight deadly storms by shouting at them until they break, but ultimately become something not-human and lose connection with the people of Sila's village. Not sure what's terrible here, I was going for something post-apocalyptic, but weather doesn't work like this.

I have no opinion on which of these should win, except that the Sen had the craft skills that sort of worked for me. Likely my final rankings will be made by asking, "which one will I be least annoyed to see on the announcement of winners?"

Comments

[cahn]

it's about making someone part of you

Ohhhhh see I completely missed that. Hmm. I'm not sure what I think about that, but that does fill in a major hole in my understanding of the story.

I like the Huang! It actually has characters! But it certainly does slot neatly into the "X is terrible," doesn't it.

[rachelmanija]

They can conceive by eating human flesh, I believe. The bits can be extremely small, so it seems like it's normally consensual.

Cannibalism is a big squick for me too but I actually really liked the story. It implied a lot in a very small space.

[ase]

Is that what the story was getting at? Huh.

[cahn]

Huh! On reread I can see that as a potential reading, though I'm not 100% convinced. That's cool even as a potential reading, though.

...yeah, now that you guys are pointing out all this stuff I think I'll switch this one to #1 (I was previously going to vote for it #2). I was just not a good enough reader for it, lol.

[ase]

True, if the Huang won I would not actively question the Hugo voting crowd's commitment to sparkle motion quality writing. It's also subtle like a hammer to the skull, but maybe it's time for another round of Nuclear Missiles / Devices of Mutually Assured Destruction Are Terrible.

[cahn]

Ha! Oh, sure, the "nuclear weapons are Bad!" part isn't subtle at all, which is a point against. But I liked the characters more than in any other story, especially that they didn't slot neatly into Good and Bad.

[lizbee]

Honestly, this all makes me feel okay about skipping the short fiction, given that's a form I don't hugely love anyway.

[ase]

I'm glad my words have helped someone in this world. :-)