In case you hadn’t noticed, this year’s Hugo Voter Packet is out, with tremendous efficiency; I had however already located a lot of the finalists online, and wrote up this listing of the stories in advance.
1) My top vote goes to “In My Country”, by Thomas Ha. I thought this was a tremendously creepy depiction of a totalitarian society where thought control and euphemism are heavy and omnipresent. Also on the Nebula ballot.
Third paragraph (no internal sections):
Like all neighborhoods, mine has a blue house.
2) “Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro was one of my picks for the BSFA Awards, but didn’t make the cut with voters. It is a well imagined story of what happens if your ex gets off with your clone. Second paragraph of third section:
You didn’t know these things about him when he first moved to your city. You’d talked yourself out of the associate’s degree before high school graduation, pragmatism trumping college dreams, and taken an apprenticeship as an electrician with a program specializing in bot tech. You were progressing well, nearing the end of your training. You liked unravelling tricky problems the best, diagnosing a malfunctioning bot like a doctor might a patient.
3) “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days”, by Samantha Mills, is a very short (2000 words) set of effective vignettes about love in times of apocalypse.Second paragraph of third section:
We adopt a pair of cats. We name them Shaun and Liz.
4) “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim. What do you do if you are a teenager whose mother has been replaced by an AI? Second paragraph of third section:
Rina’s in her late twenties. Before there was Rina, there was Wren, and before Wren, there was Agatha, all of whom were pretty, strawberry-blonde women who Cassie’s father had dismissed before they turned thirty. On the screens, Cassie’s mom is forever twenty-five. Some digital people age in simulacrum. Others stay the same as when they were created, and AMY was made the moment that Cassie’s father had the funds to make himself a wife
5) “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg, about a superhero who is also a wheelchair user. I appreciate the message but I found the prose a bit clunky. Second paragraph of thirdsection:
The union leader, a woman named “Big Dig” with hands like gopher claws, went through the agenda. Most of it was assigning press stuff. But eventually we got to the one real thing on the agenda—the union wanted to defeat Doctor Croc, a green scaly menace who’d been razing buildings, most recently a conference center.
6) “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson. I didn’t really understand this one, and to the extent that I did, I wasn’t sure if it was sf. Second paragraph of third section:
I work at the high school where I graduated.
