I noticed John Scalzi's challenge to his readers to read this year's Best Short Story nominees, and thought that this would be as good a day as any to get through them myself. They are all short, they are all available for free online, and three of them are very good. My preferences will be allocated as follows (in traditional reverse order of preference).

6) “The Homecoming”, by Mike Resnick (PDF). The Hugo shortlists seem to feature a lot of stories about Alzheimer’s, and I have never read one in the short fiction categories that was any good at all. This is no exception. From the second page, when we learn that the narrator’s wife is succumbing to dementia, and that he is estranged from his visiting son because of the latter’s lifestyle choices (which are the only really sfnal element here), we know where this is going to go, and it is not in the least surprising. Or, really, much good. Resnick has five Hugos out of thirty nominations for his fiction.

5) “The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City“, by John Scalzi. This scores over the Resnick story in that it is a conscious effort to write a bad story (or, rather, a prologue to a bad unwritten novel). It doesn’t quite succeed; the style is uneven (more than was intended, I think, or certainly more than could work for me), and at one point it looks like a political satire, the Night Dragons being the imaginary threat waved by the ruling classes to stay in power, but then that is undermined by the concluding paragraphs. Mixing demotic language with a High Fantasy setting is tricky; Tolkien avoided it and Zelazny tried it but did not always succeed. This story is bad and not always for the right reasons. Scalzi has four previous Hugo nominations for his fiction, and two previous wins in non-fiction categories (and the not-a-Hugo Campbell Award).

4) No Award. Has never won any Hugo fiction category as far as I know; last won a Nebula for short story in 1970.

3) “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees“, by E. Lily Yu. This story of Hymenoptera politics in rural China brought me back to my former intellectual stamping ground of science and colonialism, and has elements of reversing the allegory of Animal FarmPDF). Like the Resnick, this is a tale of familial drama, with a marginal (but significant) sfnal element; the narrator explains how he allowed himself to become estranged from his Chinese mother, who had the magical gift of making origami creatures come alive. I thought this was more honest and much less cloying than the Resnick story, daring to actually be sad. The metaphor is fairly heavy (and we never find out the names of the Chinese girls who translate the mother’s words to him and to his father at crucial moments), but it’s very beautifully written and captures the marginalised schoolboy very memorably. Liu has also never been nominated for any Hugo category before.