Hugo Awards 2025: Best Short Story

Officially, I’m taking a break from reading for the Hugo Awards this year. I’ve found participating in the Hugo process as a reader and voter wonderfully rewarding, not least because it has introduced me to authors I would have completely missed otherwise, but I’m also a conscientious voter, and that means I try to read enough of each work in the categories I vote in to give it a fair shake. That adds up to a significant share of my annual reading page — I am not one of the people who can read upwards of 200 books a year — and this year I felt it would be more of a chore than a joy. I chose to take a year off even before the finalists were announced, so it’s no reflection on the finalists. In fact, the publishers may come out ahead on me this year, since there are several finalists I want to read and will obviously not be receiving in the Hugo reader’s packet.

But then I read Doreen’s post, and I thought that looking in on one category, with manageable reading, would be a fun thing to do even in an off year. In theory, I like formal experiments — yay! stretch what it is that a story can do, push limits on what’s considered a story — but I am coming to realize that I almost never like an experiment better than a really well-told narrative. This year’s short story finalists had four experimental stories, and it’s not surprising that I preferred the two narratives. Here are some short thoughts on each, in ascending order of my preference.

“Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones offers a bare-bones account of horrific punishment in a spacefaring society that can afford the resources to mete out eternal orbital confinement as the penalty for treason. The story pulls names from Greek mythology — Tartarus, of course, and also a Sibylline Court — but the setting and society are not even sketched, just gestured toward. Speaking of Sibyls, the story is more of a dream or a vision than a tale. Jones says so with the story’s title, so a reader should not expect anything else. I found the work more of an evocation of elements that I already knew; I don’t know if the set-up could support a story rather than a set of views, but in any event that’s not what Jones chose to write. It’s a horrific vision with a kick at the end, but there isn’t anything else.

In “Three Faces of a Beheading” Arkady Martine gives readers lessons in historiography, presents scenes from a video game that might also be scenes from history, and uses the second person to tell parts of a story of someone living in a futuristic totalitarian society who plays the aforementioned game. I’m sorry to say that for me the Eight Deadly Words applied to all three elements of the story. I’ve done graduate-level history, and I have a weakness for big and sometimes scholarly works in that area, so I excused myself from class. Before I left, I noticed that the footnotes in this work of fiction refer to real sources. Why? The parts about the game are vivid, and potentially exciting. Martine captures the experience of watching a game near its climaxes, but it’s just watching. It’s intentionally distant, and while I understand the point of that choice, it also limited my engagement with the story. “Here’s an excerpt of a speedrun of a game you’ve never played and can’t play because it’s fictional.” That left the third part, told in the second person as addressed to an unnamed subject of a society hemmed in by social technology put to totalitarian ends. Maybe Martine meant for “you” to pull the reader in, to substitute direct engagement for creating a character that would gain a reader’s sympathy. It had the opposite effect for me, and while I could understand the horror of the society depicted, it remained as abstract as the video game.

“We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read” by Caroline A. Yoachim presents itself as a message from unknown and unnamed others to the reader. From context, it’s eventually plausible that the message is from another, short-lived, presumably alien form of life to readers who are presumably human. It’s written in the second person, as a form of direct communication. One of the conceits of the story as written is that the originators of the message think differently from humans, holding more strands simultaneously. The speakers liken this to humans’ ability to hear multiple notes of music that form a chord. For them, keeping multiple threads of words and sentences in mind is as natural as hearing harmony is for humans. Much of the message is devoted hammering this point home. The speakers spell it out in the first sentence of their message: “This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.” The work then splits into two columns, one explicating and expanding on the ideas the speakers hope to communicate and the second repeating the first sentence. Later, the six items will change order, and “simplified” will change to things such as “with variations” or “terrified.” Similarly, the headings within the message repeat some of the six items. Still later, the number of columns expand, or the variations are printed vertically rather than horizontally, and at one point they are compressed into a bar code. It’s meant to simulate being exposed to an alien expression of consciousness, and it’s an interesting exercise, fun in a way to think about how another form of life might think and try to communicate in a way that humans understand. My three cats know that it’s simple to communicate, but humans can be deathly bad at understanding.

“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim is a monologue or a report from someone in the fictional world of Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Omelas is famous as a city whose citizens are good and happy, but their fortunate situation is predicated upon the suffering of a single innocent child. In Kim’s story some people break into the place where the child is held, and rather than set the kid free, they kill it. The link between the child’s suffering and Omelas’ functioning, in Kim’s telling, is direct and literal. With no child to suffer, “the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way.” So they — a different “they” than the ones who killed the child — take another child who will do the suffering, and things go right again in Omelas. This cycle repeats for a while. Some adults kill a child; others take a different child so their suffering will keep the rest of the city safe and happy. A philosophical equilibrium sets in, “They haven’t run out of children. But they haven’t run out of murderers, either.” It’s a thought experiment, close to Le Guin’s original slightly breezy tone, but without her telling details.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Marginalia” is an actual story. True, it’s in a generic fantasy setting, with quasi-feudalism, a knight, a monster, and some serving people. The attention that Kowal saves by not aiming for a new setting she uses in bringing to readers people who feel like they could be real, people with lives full of small details, people who are more than just their roles. The monster, by the way, is a giant snail of the type seen crawling through the marginalia of medieval manuscripts. They’re a known hazard to the people of Kowal’s small setting, their size enabling them to knock over trees and the acid trails they leave behind them burning away needed crops. Her characters too come from the margins rather than the main text of the chronicles. Though Margery once served in Sir John’s castle, and her mother had been a reasonably respected housekeeper there too, when her mother came down with a palsy and started dropping things, she was dropped from service. Margery left service to tend her mother. What else could she do? Her younger brother Hugh dreams of becoming a squire, but Margery and her mother both know that the facts of birth do not destine the likes of Hugh for consorting with the nobility. Then a snail squiggles in from wherever manuscript monsters dwell, and things change. Details, events, consequences, outcomes both expected and unexpected; characters who are more than just the forms of the types they occupy; humor and exasperation, and how knowledge can look like heroism. Kowal brings all of these, and I found it more satisfying than a thought exercise or an experiment in form.

In “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is,” Nghi Vo brings all of the virtues of Kowal’s story and adds the specificty of an off-kilter Depression-era America. Her first-person narrator is a young ethnic Chinese woman, a seamstress from New York who has taken to the roads to find her brother Yongjun. He had left home in search of work, not uncommon at the time. He had been diligent about sending letters back, but then they had stopped suddenly. So she makes her way by hitchhiking, headed to the midwestern address that had been on the last envelope that reached her through the US Postal Service. She knows a thing or two about a particular kind of magic, but she can’t help being amazed by the very different kind of magic that takes a letter from one person and delivers it to another, many millions of times a day, every day except Sunday. Vo shows readers a travelling salesman who tries to hit on her, and the quiet solidarity of a Black woman who’s a truck driver who is just headed home to Clovis, but can drop her at the crossroads she needs. The mundane and the magical, the hopeful and the horrible all come together when the narrator finds the address. While the menace is there from the beginning, the outbreak and the resolution are both sudden. Vo’s command of detail and action brought the story to life, the spareness in her writing kept it concentrated, and the heart in the conclusion tied it to larger themes of family and connection. This story is at least a cousin to “On the Fox Roads,” a 2024 Hugo finalist, and I hope that Vo keeps telling tales of her early 20th century America. Maybe there will even be a book-length collection some day.

+++

Some thoughts on other categories. I’ve seen half of the Long Form Dramatic Presentations, an unusually high number for me, and I will probably eventually watch Furiosa. I expect Dune: Part Two to win, though Furiosa might nip it at the finish line. Flow was a wonder and a delight. I hope it keeps finding audiences, and I think I probably would have given it my top vote, just to recognize something quiet and different. I’m not sure why the huge cast lists under Best Semiprozine irk me so much, but they do. I think Best Poem is a worthwhile experiment, and I would be happy to see it continue, even though the number of nominations needed to be a finalist (11 to 26) suggests that Hugo-eligible poetry is a niche interest. Or maybe not: the range for Best Game or Interactive work was 19 to 34, and the range for the venerable Best Fan Artist category was 16 to 37. I always hope that Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher will win something because she give such great acceptance speeches. The Best Related Work pendulum has swung from last year’s five books and one other thing to two books, two online reports, a video essay and a Bingo Reading Challenge. Because the two reports are about the catastrophic failures of the 2023 Hugo Awards, I think that one of them is likely to win, though my heart’s preference is, as almost always, with the books.