Hugo Awards 2026: Best Short Story

True to form, two of this year’s finalists in the category of Best Short Story are listicle stories. I guess by now they’re just another variation in the form, rather than an innovation. The strength in the variation is that it allows an author to show numerous different perspectives or aspects of a situation within a compressed space. The corresponding weakness is that it enables an author to merely gesture in the direction of a story, expecting the reader to fill in the rest, without actually using the form to expand storytelling possibilities or to actually tell a single story through the listicle format. It’s devilishly tricky to do, and it seems to me that authors often exhaust their creative energy for that particular story with the format, rather than using it to its fullest extent.

Here are brief notes on the 2026 finalists for Best Short Story, in ascending order of my preference.

“In My Country” by Thomas Ha is not a listicle story. The first-person narrator addresses the reader directly about his country, which is one marked by surveillance, censorship and oppression. The moral landscape of the narrator’s country was very familiar to me as someone who has studied Nazism in Germany and communism throughout Central and Eastern Europe. It will be familiar in its contours, if not in the direct actions of the secret police, by people who have lived in societies in which existing hierarchies are backed by state or private violence. Ha strips down the shape of oppression to its bare basics. “Listen to what I say. Listen to what I don’t say.” The oppressors have trouble with ambiguity. The secret police can take you away, and say that everything is fine, and people have to demonstrate they believe it.

I am sure the story is very heartfelt, and it might even have a big effect on a reader who has not encountered this sort of thing before. But I’ve read how Milosz did it, I’ve read how Solzhenitsyn did it, I’ve read how Grossman did it, I’ve read Havel’s essays and Michnik’s tactics for beating it and Konrad’s search for an escape from politics. In my countries, I’ve seen the problems presented in this story many, many times; I’ve lived among folks who still know what their neighbors did during the war; I’ve seen how the kinds of forces that Ha is grasping to describe have shaped lives, and so none of this was new enough to pique much of my interest.

“10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills is, rather obviously, a listicle story. The visions are of supernatural disasters come down on more-or-less present-day California. One is a hellgate, one is the Old Ones “called down upon our mortal plane, and they wreak horrors unimaginable upon the populace,” though of course Mills does try to imagine at least a selection, so that readers may imagine as well. The first-person narrator is part of a married couple who deal with the various apocalypses, sometimes with help from friends and neighbors, sometimes on their own. Most of the time. “There is a future in which we don’t fight at all, and on our deathbeds, this is our greatest regret.” There ya go. It’s a good message, it’s an important message, and it bears repeating, which is what Mills does.

“Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson is the other listicle story among this year’s finalists. It posits a process called Revision that can fix your life and make you happy. But to qualify, you have to get input from six people who tell the providers things about you, and what they think you might need. This story also has a first-person narrator who tells of the six people — a parent or guardian is one, a mentor or teacher is another, an employer or coworker is a third — she collects input from before insurance and the other gatekeepers will approve her Revision. It’s a character study, after a fashion; the same person viewed from six different angles, illustrated by encounters in which they are supposed to summarize their views of her. It’s a sweet parable, a lesson in how things look different on the inside and on the outside.

“Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg takes place in a world in which superpowers are common enough that the supers have their own trade union. Two weeks before the beginning of the story, the first-person narrator got “zapped by a falling piece of alien spaceship debris and developed laser eyes.” She was already a wheelchair user, and when she goes to join the Super-Abled 501 Local Union she is stymied by three steps that lead to their front door. “My brand new laser eyes didn’t exactly fix my mobility problems.” Once inside and duly made a member with the moniker RazorBeam, she finds that they are just as resistant to change as mundane organizations; worse, they are firmly retrograde about accommodating disabilities. The story is drily funny and an amped-up illustration of how organizations that present themselves as open and inclusive are often anything but. I’ve seen that up close, and it cost me about $50,000 all told. I didn’t have to debate it with a green scaly menace named Doctor Croc, who might have a legit point or two. This story evokes its world with just a few strokes. It plays with common knowledge about superheroes to make larger arguments, and does it all with a light touch.

“Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro begins in the second person, a story of a marriage gone wrong, a story that begins with addressee’s ex-husband announcing that he is marrying his ex’s clone. They know each other too well. After that beginning, the story goes back to fill in some of the background about cloning and the social aspects of the technology. Personally, I thought that the story overestimates the role that DNA plays in a person’s development and underestimates the importance of experience and the simple fact of living through different times, since the clones grow up at the usual rate. However, this slice-of-life would not work if it considered the differences too closely, so it doesn’t. More flashbacks take in how they met, how their marriage crumbled. Then the two women — ex and intended — meet up and things get twisty. The narration changes back and forth between first and second person, and the story becomes a tale of more than post-divorce, more than men who have a type.

“Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim does not have a first-person narrator, and it’s not aiming for formal invention. It tells a straightforward story of a world in which digital friends — and romantic partners and, crucially for this story, spouses — are an expected part of everyone’s normal life. Cassie is a teenager, and she is not having it. Her father’s spouse is a digital person, though it is difficult to tell within the story whether Amy has anything like free will. “[Cassie] claims it’s a choice to never have made any digital companions, even though most girls her age have run through a whole hard drive of sub-sentient starter boyfriends and girlfriends. Most of the girls in Cassie’s classes are salivating for their eighteenth birthdays. You aren’t allowed to create a real digital person until you yourself are an adult. Only semi-sents.” The story also includes Manual Interfaces, physical humans who hire themselves out as bodies for the digital persons to use to interact corporeally with human persons. Implications are left as exercises for the readers. “Wire Mother” is a bang-up science fiction story that couldn’t be anything else, a dark John Hughes movie from a nearby future.