Hugos 2022: short stories

[cahn]

So Hugo nominees have come out! And I have read all the short stories and started on the novelettes, but got pulled away by a bunch of holds coming in from the library for the novels -- watch this space :)

Short stories:

“Mr. Death”, by Alix E. Harrow (Apex Magazine, Feb 2021) - Feel-good story about Death's minions. Sometimes one just wants the feel-good story, okay? :) I liked this one, though I will say that it's not one that I see myself rereading.

“Proof by Induction”, by José Pablo Iriarte (Uncanny Magazine, May/Jun 2021) - The conceit here of a person talking to a recording of his dead relative and working out (or not) issues with relative is not super new (Compassionate Simulation is a powerful recent take on it), but gosh I really liked the academic/mathematician twist on it, and how it interplayed with the themes of the story.

“The Sin of America”, by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny Magazine, Mar/Apr 2021) - Having been burned by Space Opera, I forgot that Valente could write powerfully, but yes, she can. Valente made me have a lot of feelings and thoughts about the process of redemption and what we mean by it. Now, I will say that the central conceit was maybe... done better and more subtly by Shirley Jackson? But I still thought it was an interesting story.

“Tangles”, by Seanan McGuire (Magicthegathering.com: Magic Story, Sep 2021) - I think that McGuire's stuff works better for me when it doesn't try so hard to be ~profound~ or ~numinous~. I really liked Middlegame! But this story... didn't do it for me. I popped right out of my suspension of disbelief when, in the middle of a story that seems like it's supposed to be reminiscient of high fantasy, there was a parenthetical clause about the pronouns and gender of a tree's dryad. (I mean, it's great that McGuire is cognizant of gender questions and so on! But wow that was a weird tone shift, and didn't seem to be at all relevant for the rest of the story.)

“Unknown Number”, by Blue Neustifter (Twitter, Jul 2021) - This story, told all in text bubbles, is great and has interesting things to say about identity -- just, I feel a little like the author got to elide most of the hard parts of telling a story due to the creative format, so I'm not rating it quite as highly as the other ones I liked.

“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Mar/Apr 2021) - I feel like this one was tailor-made for my id?? Pinsker is super hit and miss for me. I've read a couple by Pinsker where I think they were reasonably good stories but she didn't tell the story I wanted, and at least one where she actually wrote a story I wanted to read. But this one is the story I never knew I wanted but I really did, told entirely through a wikipedia-like message board where a few really committed internet fans are commenting on a ballad. It's everything I love about the internet, how sometimes you find a few people who really like something you also really like and form a tiny virtual community in a corner of the internet (hello all of my DW friends! you guys are the best!! so glad you talk to me about SF and Hugos and opera and crochet and 18th-century history and all the other completely random stuff around here), and also it's about people geeking out about a ballad, I mean, this was made for me :)
If you liked e.g. Wylding Hall, I think you'll like this story. (why yes, rachelmanija, you should read this)

1. Oaken
2. Proof
3. Unknown NUmber
4. Sin
5. Death
6. Tangles

Comments

[sophia_sol]

yesss so glad you're with me on Oaken Hearts, what a GOOD story!!!

I'm glad to see the Valente story is readable and even interesting to people who are not me. I just COULD not wade through that one.

[cahn]

I loved it! I'm so glad it was nominated for the Hugos because otherwise I might not have read it :)

I feel like Valente's prose is really polarizing! And I'm one of the few people who isn't quite polarized -- sometimes it works for me, and sometimes it really really doesn't.

[sophia_sol]

You know, the funny thing is, I don't think the prose was my problem in this particular Valente story! Generally speaking Valente's prose style does NOT work for me but I didn't notice my usual frustrations with her prose in this one.

[primeideal]

I'm going to try doing part of the Reddit Hugo readalong, I know my tastes are not very aligned with the nominators, but I thought "Mr. Death" was decent, "Proof by Induction" got the math right ( :D ), and...maybe I'm too slow to get "Oaken Hearts," I felt like I was missing something. (One of my work friends really really loved it, so you're in good company, at least!)

[rachelmanija]

I can explain what I think was going on, if you like.

[primeideal]

Yes please! Specifically I'm interested in what, if anything, speculative was going on in the frame story (not the ballad itself).

Spoilers!

[cahn]

So -- I know you said you aren't as interested in the ballad, but I have to talk about that first to talk about the frame story: I think the idea here is that the ballad is about a real (in the world of the story) woman/faerie/being, "Fair Ellen," who somehow preys on her lovers in a supernatural fashion (turns them into trees), and who was written into a ballad centuries ago.

Dr. Mark Rydell, in 2002, was studying the song and thought he had figured out the location of the ballad, but disappeared as he was investigating the location. (The implication is that Ellen turned him into a tree.)

In the year of the story (presumably 2021?) HenryMartyn tries to replicate Rydell's work and is able to figure out the location of the ballad that Rydell figured out. He meets the town historian, "Jenny," who has sisters and who takes him for a walk in the woods from which he never returns... so Jenny is probably actually the Ellen of the song, and has turned Henry into a tree.

One of the title variants is "Where Oaken sisters watch," implying that possibly Ellen and her sisters are also related to, or some kind of (alien? faerie?) tree.

Re: Spoilers!

[primeideal]

Okay, thank you, this is what I needed!

It's not that I'm not interested in the ballad, it's that even I, who am not the most adept at reading between the lines, had already figured out that within the ballad story, Fair Ellen takes her lovers' hearts and turns them into trees. Got it. But imo just having a "story within a story" where supernatural stuff goes down doesn't qualify the frame story as speculative, so I figured that there was something going on with the disappearances in the "real world," but I couldn't quite figure out the chronology. The fact that HenryMartyn gets the "last word," so to speak, makes the story more hopeful than it might have been otherwise but also requires more effort to piece things together, I'm not sure what the effect would have been with timestamps.

Thanks. Now I can look less slow in front of my work friends/Reddit :)

Re: Spoilers!

[cahn]

You are very welcome! There's a part in the middle where the chronology is clarified because two of the other characters are like "hmm, the last time HenryMartyn posted was a year ago, on the last stanza," so that's the big clue as to the timing of everything -- but because it's in the middle of the story, which isn't the natural place for the statement of the climax, I can see how it would be easy to miss. It's an interesting choice to have the climax of the story happen in the middle but not get the details that elucidate it until the end, and I think it didn't quite work for e.g. cenozoicsynapsid below. But it did work for me :)

Re: Spoilers!

[rachelmanija]

It mentions also that Jenny is an alternate name for Ellen in the ballad.

Re: Spoilers!

[cahn]

Oh, yes, right! That's key.

(K)

[(Anonymous)]

I also liked Proof by Induction, but was frustrated not to have any clues about Perelman's conjecture! It's like the clock in Goblin Emperor. I know the conjecture doesn't exist yet, but as someone who was still doing 3-manifolds when Perelman proved geometrization/Poincare... well, I think I prefer the approach in stories like The Devil and Simon Flagg, where the reader knows enough about Fermat's Last Theorem to understand why the devil is so frustrated.

Re: (K)

[cahn]

Ha! I like that comparison to the clock :) Yeah, that's fair. I just really liked the idea of using recordings of dead mathematicians to prove things and now want a longer story about how that's used and abused :)

[rachelmanija]

Thank you, that Pinsker story sounds great.

[rachelmanija]

Ahhhh I LOVE that story! Thank you so much!

I listened to the extremely creepy linked recording, and YouTube stopped abruptly halfway in, almost giving me a heart attack.

[cahn]

YAY I knew you would like it!!

Oh gosh, I haven't listened to the recording. Wow, that sounds incredibly creepy!

ETA: And I have not forgotten about Sundial! This was the last of my book-reading posts in the queue that I wanted to get out before getting to Sundial :)

[rachelmanija]

YESSS.

Listen to the recording!

[cahn]

OK! Thanks for the rec, because I usually don't listen to recordings unless someone really encourages me to :)

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I hadn't read any of these, but I've found time to follow your links to Oaken Hearts and Proof so far. I liked both stories, but I wasn't blown away. Both stories are about things I'm personally inclined to like--- I'm not a real math person, but I do a fair amount of applied math and occasionally need to stare at the Big Table of Gaussian Integrals for a while. And I'm not a musician, but I was on Mudcat just last week (trying to figure out what the difference between "riding the blinds" and "riding the rods" was in depression-era hobo blues).

I think Oaken Hearts outstayed its welcome by a few hundred words. I did really like the strange complicity between "victim" and "murderer" that the commentators speculate about, but I wish we'd had just a little more understanding of how that might work. I love stories in non-traditional formats, but one thing the traditional format would let us do is hear from Jenny the museum curator, and by the end of the story, I really wanted to.

Proof reveals what's going on with the characters, but it doesn't resolve anything, which is what would move it to the A+ column for me... the main character is just not very self-aware about what he really wants from his relationship with his father (besides math). I'm not even sure by the end of the story if he really likes math, or just doesn't know what he would do outside academia. (I have met many people who feel this way! But it's healthier to admit it to yourself.)

The McGuire novels I've read recently (mostly in the InCryptid universe) have been very poorly edited. McGuire is capable of tight, luminous prose (In the Shadow of Spindrift House had some chilling passages, for example) but also of rambling, lack of restraint and writing the right paragraph in the wrong place. I think ever since COVID, she's been writing at breakneck pace to keep herself in rent and cat food, and her editors have just been letting things drift. There was another jarring "what are your pronouns" passage in "Angel of the Overpass" (along with plenty of other character miscues and bits of worldbuilding that slowed the story down because they were in the wrong chapter and all of that)... and yet, in places, the book absolutely worked.

I'll probably track the rest of these down at some point, and I'll let you know what I thought of them if I do. Thanks for running this friendly (and oh-so-erudite) little corner of the internet!

[cahn]

:) Lately I have not really enjoyed most of the Hugo short story nominees very much, so whenever I find one I like, I get really excited :)

I see what you're saying about Oaken Hearts being a few hundred words too long -- but really I would totally read something like Oaken Hearts' message board for fun, so I was definitely the ideal audience for it and personally would have been okay with it being even longer even if that wasn't the optimum length :) also I am super interested in fic for Jenny the museum curator... her side of the story would be fascinating!

Heh, I know enough people who are not very self-aware about their relationships and/or their relationship to academia (including myself, once upon a time, although I did manage to figure it out before getting too far into it) that for me it came across as realistic :)

*nods* McGuire can sometimes write quite compellingly! (As long as she's not writing judgy prose about parenting or math girls, which I'm still annoyed about :) ) But yeah, an editor should have caught a lot of those kinds of things. My beta would definitely not let me get away with that :P

Thanks for talking to me about stuff in this little corner of the internet! :D <3