Hugo Awards Review #1: Best Short Story
Before voting for the 2025 Hugo Awards concludes, we are planning to review every entry in the Best Short Story, Best Novelette, and Best Novel on the slate (maybe even Best Novella if we get crazy). Both of us will give our take on each of these works.
We will also give each work a “Literary Rating” out of 10 and a “Speculative Rating” out of 10. The Literary Rating will be based on how well the story is written: imagery, sound, and characters, as well as the stylistic ambition of the text. The Speculative Rating will be based on the amount and quality of speculation (societal, technological, and otherwise) in the text and to what degree the story has a “reason for being”. These factors, as well as our overall enjoyment of the text, will be factored into an overall “Holistic Rank” within the category.
Both of us will be using a relatively harsh rating scale— please keep in mind that we are using 5/10 to mean “average” for a published short story, and 7/10 to mean a story that we actively like a good amount, not just feel neutral about. With that in mind, let’s get into the Best Short Story nominees!
There were six books nominated for Best Short Story this year:
“Five Views from the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones
“Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine
“Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo
“We Will Teach You How to Read, We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim
“Five Views from the Planet Tartarus”
Rebels in the Sibylline Empire are sent to face the worst of all punishments: eternal life.
Rachael K. Jones
G: This is the only flash fiction story among those nominated, and honestly I just don’t really get flash. I think the premise of the story is reasonably good, but that is all the story is: a premise. There are no characters, no action, no plot, just a setting and then the story is over.
Despite being quite short the story still managed to feel bloated. I felt that all of the content could have been replaced by a single sentence stating: there is a prison where convicts are kept perpetually alive in orbit around a planet indefinitely. I think there is a way to create a compelling story or visceral experience around this idea, but this story wasn’t it.
Literary Rating: 2/10 | Speculative Rating: 4/10 | Holistic Rank: 5th
K: In my view, successful flash fiction is able to sear an image into the reader’s mind, an image so vivid that it forces them to wonder about the events that produced it. (For a great example of this, see “After the God Has Moved On” by Kate Elliott.) I think “Five Views” splits the reader’s focus too much to accomplish this, as the text drifts between lore drops and visual details without giving the reader a clear image to settle on. That being said, “Five Views” is pretty well-constructed at the sentence level— I’m just not really sure how well the style serves the form here. I thought the premise was okay but not novel enough on its own to give the story a strong reason for being.
Literary Rating: 5/10 | Speculative Rating: 4/10 | Holistic Rank: 5th
“Marginalia”
Margery sets off to fetch her missing brother after he goes to see his lord take on a deadly snail.
Mary Robinette Kowal
G: The structure of this story really didn’t make sense to me. It has an introductory exposition section, which is followed by a climactic sequence, and then finishes with a resolution in which the protagonist and her brother are rewarded for their efforts. Now this sounds pretty standard, but for some reason this resolution takes up almost half of the length of the story filled with awkward conversation that stretches out for no clear purpose.
The action scene itself in which they fight the snail was alright, although its resolution felt a bit contrived. And if nothing else the idea of having snails as an evil monster, a slow but unstoppable force leaving paths of acrid toxins in their wake was an imaginative one.
Literary Rating: 3/10 | Speculative Rating: 5/10 | Holistic Rank: 4th
K: This story felt rather arbitrary to me. I didn’t understand why it had the characters that it did, the creatures that it did, or the plot that it did. My doubts about the story’s construction ended up overshadowing most of the story’s interesting elements. Like, why is the Lord worse at fighting these passive snails than a random girl when that is literally his job? Why did no one think of putting salt on the snails before? Why does the story end with such a meandering interaction?
The snail was a genuinely interesting monster, but it unfortunately didn’t have a very interesting role to match. The story wouldn’t have been much different if the snail was replaced with some generic monster, and that was a real missed opportunity. I would have loved to see a story focusing on the snail-lines mindlessly carved through the landscape, rendering certain modes of transit treacherous or impossible.
Out of all the nominees, this story most gave me the feeling that I might be missing something. If there is some big takeaway that I was supposed to come away with, I am very interested to hear it!
Literary Rating: 3/10 | Speculative Rating: 4/10 | Holistic Rank: 4th
“Three Faces of a Beheading”
A new form of mass entertainment called “historiography” proves to be a great place for dissidents to plant the seeds of rebellion.
Arkady Martine
G: I really liked this story! Instantly I was gripped by the style of the opening sequence:
“Left hand: a sword, bloody. Right hand: empty as your heart when you watch her. Her feet wide on the cracked marble. To her left, the fallen corpses of statues, dismembered by gravity. … Then she grabs her ponytail, yanks her face up, and cuts off her own head with her sword.” — Three Faces of a Beheading
Even without any context the writing in this introduction is so lively and evocative that I was instantly invested in the story. The structure and style of this story are somewhat bizarre, succeeding this introduction with more casual second-person prose, which has interjections from an actual unpublished academic paper on historiography written by the author complete with real citations. I can’t imagine this style working for everyone, but I was hooked by it.
The idea of players playing through some historical series of events as in a video game, aiming for a desired outcome was unique. Also, there is a portion where the protagonist learns that the government has failed to properly censor this piece of dissident media by being used in a targeted advertisement, and this felt like a pretty realistic idea for how something could escape containment.
Literary Ranking: 8/10 | Speculative Ranking: 9/10 | Holistic Rank: 1st
K: I was very excited to see a story speculate about a new potential form of media, and I was even more excited to see some big brain history takes included alongside. The quippy second-person prose style and shifting perspectives took a while to grow on me, but I ended up liking it. Some lines in the story were quite striking and quotable!
This story reminded me a little bit of Not A Villain, a comic about people that strive to be the stars of an augmented reality show called The Game. Similarly to “Three Faces of a Beheading”, conflict arises when the characters stop agreeing to go along with the program. The webcomic has gone through ups and downs, but it was one of my favorite stories back in middle school. It was really fun to jump into a similar world.
Anyway, this was the clear favorite for me out of the six. My only criticism is that I felt it would be better as a novel! The world felt big enough to power a novel, and a lot of the initial disorientation would fade out once the meat of a longer story began.
Literary Rating: 8/10 | Speculative Rating: 8/10 | Holistic Rank: 1st
“Stitched to Skin Like Family Is”
Nghi Vo
A mother with the power to hear memories through people’s garments goes on the road to investigate the disappearance of her son.
G: I had to read this story three times as well as discuss it with Kevin before I think I truly grasped everything that happened. I think it somewhat depends on the reader whether you see this as a positive or negative. For me, I don’t love rereading things, and saw this story as lacking in clarity at times. I also think a story that takes place in the standard real world can get away with more subtlety in the events of the story because there is nothing else that needs to be introduced.
The action sequence at the climax of this story was quite gripping and imaginative, and definitely my favorite among the action portrayed in these stories. Overall the story has a lot going for it and I am sure many people found this story the best of this group. I think the actual winner will likely be between Three Faces of a Beheading and this.
Literary Rating: 7/10 | Speculative Rating: 6/10 | Holistic Rank: 3rd
K: This story was a bit of a tough read for me. I definitely thought this story was cool; its world drew me in the most, and I found myself wanting to know more throughout. There was some cool stuff going on at the sentence level, some memorable characters and lines. It was the only one of these that I could imagine appearing in a prestige lit magazine like Granta or n+1. But I often found myself lost in the narrative, and I had to re-read it a few times to even sort of get what happened. I still didn’t pick up on one of the murders at the heart of the story until I talked it over with Gordon.
This story actually reminded me a lot of Flannery O’Connor stories. It had a similar style in which these opaque interpersonal interactions with lots of subtext eventually bubble up into some climactic (often violent) act. It also had a similar sleepy-but-not-really midcentury America setting, which was interesting to see with an Asian twist.
But unlike O’Connor, Vo also has to show the reader how her world works. The challenge of parsing out the conversational subtext as well as the mechanics of this world at the same time was a bit too complex for me to enjoy the reading experience.
Literary Rating: 8/10 | Speculative Rating: 6/10 | Holistic Rank: 3rd
“We Will Teach You How to Read, We Will Teach You How to Read”
A fading alien civilization desperately tries to impart both its history and its multi-threaded way of reading to its last human witnesses.
Caroline M. Yoachim
G: This story is quite unique in its structure in that there are two columns of text: one containing a repeating mantra and the other containing the main portion of the story, with the premise being an alien is attempting to teach you how to read multiple threads at once. I have never before read something in which the text attempts to teach you the reader a skill, and it lead to a very entertaining reading experience.
I found it challenging to do but somewhat achievable. I attempted speaking the repeating portion aloud while reading the rest of the text normally, and while it took a bit to get the hang of it, by the end of the story I was pretty successful. There wasn’t really much in terms of plot of the story, which I thought was fine. But given that that was the case, I would’ve preferred if the story was either a bit shorter, or added more of a plot and was longer.
Literary Ranking: 6/10 | Speculative Ranking: 8/10 | Holistic Rank: 2nd
K: Caroline M. Yoachim is already one of my favorite authors, so I had high hopes for this story going in. The story did not disappoint! It was very interesting to try out this new way of reading, especially since I have been very into questions of language in general recently. My favorite part of this story was when it immediately called me out for just reading one column of the story at a time, which caught me in the act. It felt very aware of itself and its audience, which I appreciated.
In the end, I just wanted a bit more from this story; I just found it a bit repetitive after the initial novelty wore off. I’m not exactly sure what that “more” would have been, but I do think this story would have been extremely cool as parallax fiction. If the story had been embedded in some kind of dreamlike soundscape with just a tad of motion on the screen, I could imagine it being even more impactful.
Literary Rating: 7/10 | Speculative Rating: 7/10 | Holistic Rank: 2nd
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole”
Isabel J. Kim
In a modern version of Le Guin’s famous Omelas setting, protestors are so fed up with the ethics of the situation that they start repeatedly killing the “load-bearing child”.
G: I am fine with the existence of these stories, but I am opposed to awarding them. I think that a lot of the art of creating a quality short story is navigating a balance between having enough exposition to inform the reader, while still focusing primarily on the plot in the limited amount of space given to you. Fanfiction stories like this take the exposition from a separate story and can’t exist by themselves in a vacuum, and to me this feels like removing something fundamental about what a short story is.
Regardless, I did not find the story itself all that compelling. Despite relying on the original Omelas story for its exposition the Omelas depicted in this story is noticeably different. It is clearly not utopic in the same way as the original Omelas, and considering the fact that the majority of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” was Le Guin attempting to convey that Omelas was actually a utopia outside of the suffering child it was aggravating to me.
I would much prefer to read a story with the same philosophical argument, but in an original setting. Although, unfortunately such a story may not have been nominated for an award, as there seems to be an insatiable appetite for stories which are set in Omelas in particular.
Literary Rating: 3/10 | Speculative Rating: 2/10 | Holistic Rank: 6th
K: I had many problems with this story on a conceptual level. The story didn’t seem to engage with the dilemma of the original in any substantive way, and despite leaning so heavily on “The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas”, “WDWJKtKitOH” doesn’t feel like it is set in Omelas at all.
In the original Omelas story, Le Guin forces us to reckon with the fact that we are uncomfortable with the trade-off described, even though it is far better than the less overt tradeoffs involved in capitalist society every day. If even the most utopian of tradeoffs gives us pause, what does that say about our current circumstances?
This story misses that point, depicting Omelas as some kind of hell-hole that is even more exploitative than the wider world. But without being the utopia that it is in the original story, Omelas isn’t Omelas! It’s just… another place where bad things happen.
I feel obligated to compare this story to “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” by N.K. Jemisin. This is another Omelas story that I don’t love for similar reasons, but it at least tries to make an ethical point. Jemisin argues that solidarity is such an inherent Good that we must be willing to sacrifice some of our overall happiness for its sake. “WDWJKtKitOH”, with its strictly better societies, has no such rebuttal. It seems to offer little substantive critique besides “Don’t you know that bad things are bad?”.
“WDWJKtKitOH” also imagines Omelas as a modern social media society, which is very jarring. The original world of Omelas is a timeless medieval-esque world that is purposely isolated from modernity. The very modern in-your-face prose style only exacerbates this disconnect. Jemisin’s typical “ancient storyteller” prose style and timeless worlds end up fitting the Omelas setting much better than Kim’s.
But despite my dislike of the story, I did find it to be a smooth read, with the prose being somewhat entertaining and readable. The author also made a quality eligibility shitpost (shown below). So at least there’s that.
Literary Rating: 4/10 | Speculative Rating: 1/10 | Holistic Rank: 6th
Conclusion
Overall, we ended up with the exact same ordering, which is a perhaps a bit disappointing. But it definitely feels correct in this case:
“Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine
“We Will Teach You How to Read, We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim
“Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo
“Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal
“Five Views from the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim
We do tend to have pretty similar taste in books, so this isn’t too surprising. But in the future you can expect to find us disagree more, starting with Best Novel.
Despite some of these reviews being pretty negative, we were actually pleasantly surprised by these Best Short Story nominees. We tend to be pretty harsh critics, and we were a bit worried going in that we wouldn’t really like any of these stories. That most definitely wasn’t the case.
Thanks for reading! Let us know your thoughts on the format for these reviews, and if there is anything you would like to see changed.
