Hugo/Nebula Shorts

I've started devouring the Hugo Awards packet for this year (voting in 2018, written in 2017). I'm going to try to write a post each time I finish and vote for a category, although work and life are likely to interfere with that goal.

I had already read all but two of the Hugo short stories for the Skiffy and Fanty podcast about the Nebula finalists, so that put me ahead. And since all these stories are free to read (or hear) online, I thought this category would be the best starting point.

The stories on both lists are
"Carnival Nine" by Caroline M. Yoachim, text and podcast (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2017)
"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" by Fran Wilde, text and podcast (Uncanny, September 2017)
"Fandom for Robots" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, text and podcast (Uncanny, September/October 2017)
"Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™" by Rebecca Roanhorse, text and podcast (Apex, August 2017)

The stories on the Hugo list but not Nebulas are
"The Martian Obelisk" by Linda Nagata, text only (Tor.com, July 19, 2017)

"Sun, Moon, Dust" by Ursula Vernon, text and podcast (Uncanny, May/June 2017)

And the stories on the Nebula list but not Hugos are

“The Last Novelist (or a Dead Lizard in the Yard)” by Matthew Kressel, text only (Tor.com, March 15, 2017)

“Utopia, LOL?” by Jamie Wahls, text and podcast (Strange Horizons, June 5, 2017)

The Nebulas-only stories had points of interest, but neither of them felt to me like award winners, so I'll focus on the others.

"The Martian Obelisk" is an interesting character study of a woman amid an apocalypse, trying to build a monument so that something will remain after humanity is gone. It left me a little hopeful at the end, but that didn't feel quite earned to me.

"Sun, Moon, Dust" was a very warm-hearted story about someone who inherits a magic sword, which hosts spirits of great warriors, but he just wants to be a farmer. It's a fairly simple story, but deep, and if you want to read or hear something to make you feel good, try it.

"Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™" is unlikely to make any reader/listener feel good. First off, it's told in second person, and I always resist any story that tells me that "you" do this or "you" feel that,  but it turns out that this is a very good choice for this kind of story. It's about an Indian who works for Vision Quest, providing an "authentic" experience for the virtual tourists. Was he displaced, or did he ever belong in the first place? It's very meta, and interesting, and heart-wrenching.

"Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" is also in second person, and also uncomfortable, by design. "You" are being taken through an increasingly disturbing museum, being confronted with hurtful things that have happened, and being transformed by the experience. It hints of horror in which "you" are somewhat complicit. It's creepy and very interesting.

"Carnival Nine" had the best worldbuilding among the nominees, in my opinion. It's set in a world where all the people run on clockwork, with a mainspring that the "maker" winds up in a limited number of turns each night when they're asleep, and everyone is keenly aware of how much energy they have to make it through each day. They can reconstruct themselves, and their children, to an extent, but only the "maker" determines how strong or weak your mainspring is. The protagonist, Zee, has a good mainspring, but she's faced with constant choices about what to do and who else to help. I really felt for her in those choices and situations, and was fascinated by the world. The story also made me and other readers think of Spoon Theory, in which real-life people with disabilities have limited, often random-seeming, numbers of things that they can accomplish in a day; this fictional world appeared to express that very well.

"Fandom for Robots" was an incredibly sweet little story about a sentient robot who becomes a fan of an anime show that features a robot and a human, and starts writing collaborative fanfiction set in that world. The readers believe that the robot is just a human writing AS a robot, who never breaks character. This is the kind of story that makes me want to hug it.

Voting for these stories was hard, because they're all good. But the two that I wanted to reread/rehear were "Carnival Nine" and "Fandom for Robots." I ended up making "Carnival Nine" my top pick because the worldbuilding is so interesting and Zee is such a sympathetic and interesting character. 

However, my actual favorite story from 2017 didn't make it onto either of these lists. I nominated it for the Hugos, and I'll be interested to see where it falls on the long list, when that's released in August. That story is "Texts from the Ghost War" by Alex Yuschik, podcast and text (Escape Pod, June 9, 2017). I adore this story; I've read it once and listened to it at least five times. It's a sort of epistolary tale, since it consists of texts back and forth between two people, and I enjoy that sort of story when it's done well. (In the text, the two texters are right-justified and left-justified, respectively; in the podcast, two narrators read them.) Despite that format, Yuschik provides a lot of worldbuilding, but as subtleties within the conversation, not as infodump. I heard enough to make me really interested in this world, with its ghosts that eat the present, and the mech-suit soldiers who fight them, and sharp class/money divisions, and other things. But as much as I love that subtle worldbuilding, I love even more the dialogue and interplay between the two characters, sometimes snarky,  sometimes silly, sometimes terribly serious, and sometimes, as their relationship develops ... well, I won't spoil it, but it's ADORABLE. Please read it or listen if you haven't yet!  

Note: "Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™" by Rebecca Roanhorse won the Nebula Award.