Here are my votes for the Best Novelette category, in reverse order.
6) “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky is, unfortunately, a story about a sexy anthropomorphic robot who decides to find his soul – told from the point of view of his lover, which is original, but I still hate stories about cute robots.
5) I had formatting difficulties with Peter Watts’ “The Island”, and while the author deservedly gets my sympathy for his recent difficulties with the US legal system, I didn’t get much out of his story; at first I did not understand what was going on, and then when I worked out that it was about a mother and her estranged son trying to avoid a collision with an intelligent Dyson sphere, I found I didn’t really care, and didn’t understand the ending either. (I had similar problems with his Hugo-nominated novel, Blindsighthere. (Won the Nebula.)
1) “It Takes Two”, by Nicola Griffith: it took me about halfway through this story about a Californian businesswoman who has an unexpectedly wild experience at a strip club in Atlanta to work out what the sfnal element actually was. But then I felt the story paid off immensely – a really tangled tale of what happens when you let people mess with your brain, and whether or not you can trust your own emotions. Held my attention all the way.
Previous Hugo roundups: Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Graphic Story
I can definitely see it causing problems, managing things locally.
I’ve heard people from the North of England talking about Scottish Independence from a “Can we come too?” point of view – another question which would be…interesting to find solutions to.