2026 Hugos - Best Short Story Nominees

The 84th World Science Fiction Convention

August 27-31, 2026 in Anaheim, California

It’s that time of year again, as you’ve seen in my previous posts of novels and novellas.  This post is dedicated to the six nominees for Short Story.  It’s a tight race, and even though there is a difference between the ratings (4 stars versus 5), I liked them all very much.  They are all pretty dark and they comment on problems in our culture.   The stories listed below have a brief plot summary with my reaction and are ordered by how I rank them.  

“Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg – 5 stars – This was awesome!  The Main Character is a wheelchair-bound superabled woman named RazorBeam.  She’s a paraplegic with laser vision.  She joins the Super-Abled 501 Union and finds it’s not ADA compliant.  She tries to get them to add a ramp and change intersections to make them safer.  The Union members don’t listen to her ideas or needs, nor have they been able to stop the rampaging Doctor Croc.  RazorBeam confronts Doc Croc herself when the 501 doesn’t show up during an attack.  Their conversation is a revealing look into the state of superabled affairs.  This book was smart and effective in conveying a message about how the system fails the disabled community.  Hits all the right buttons.

“Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim – 5 stars – Cassie hates that 2/3 of the human population is digital, including her mother.  In fact, most humans have virtual partners and use professional companions/hired humans with a digital overlay for tactile needs.  Not being able to convince her father of her issues with her mother, she finds friendship with another human about her age at the community center, a computer whiz with a penchant for cruelty.  

“Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson – 4 stars – A queer woman has been in therapy forever, dealing with interpersonal issues as well as gender identity.  There’s a new procedure called Revision which will change her, though it doesn’t exactly say how.  To do it, she needs statements from six people about what they would change in her.  The process of obtaining them is intense, but not as much as bringing it up with her wife.  A powerful story of self-awareness and self-care.

“In My Country” by Thomas Ha – 4 stars – An intense tale of living in a controlled society.  Main character’s son becomes a subversive writer, threatening the stability that the MC has lived with all these years.  His daughter and son see through the BS of the regime in power and try to make their father see the truth in the stories’ ambiguities.  Powerful novel.  A difficult read because of the frustration you develop listening to the father lie to himself about what’s happening around him and to his family. 

“Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro – 4 stars – Well written story about a woman whose husband leaves her for her clone.  So she attempts to meet her to explain that she sold her cloning rights away because she needed the money when she ran away from home as a teen.  She doesn’t know what to expect, but hopes to ease the pain of the divorce.  The kicker in this book is that it’s told in second person and the wife is the “you” in the story.  The ending had WOW factor.  

“10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills – 4 stars – A woman has an Amazon-bought crystal ball in which she sees many different futures, all of them apocalyptic.  In each one, she and her husband find little moments of joy amidst the end times.  It really made me smile, with little jokes and with her final conclusion.  

The Iron Garden Sutra

A.D. Sui
Completed 6/23/2026, Reviewed 6/24/2026
3 stars

Don’t believe the online blurb about this book.  This is not cozy in any way.  It’s a Sci Fi-Horror novel that uses many tropes that are popular right now.  It’s similar to the Alien franchise as people are killed one by one by something in a spaceship.  There’s a lot of body horror here.  There is a monk, but unlike Becky Chamber’s placid monk, this one is miserably self-loathing.  However, after I got about 50% of the way through, I started to really enjoy it.  I like reading horror.  And I liked the enemies-to-lovers romance-in-a-horrible-situation-movie that very slowly evolved.  This book was for online book club, so it was a quick break from the Hugo nominees.  

A generations ship has returned to a human docking station after a thousand years in space.  Everyone aboard is dead.  The Starlit monastery sends Vessel Iris to the ship to perform the soul releasing ritual for the thousands of dead.  He has an AI implant which helps him remember things, like breathing calmly and recalling the hundreds of years of sutras he studied at the monastery.  When he arrives at the ship, he finds a research team already there and it is full of moss, vines, trees, and other plant life.  He tries to avoid the team but inevitably, they interact---a lot.  Some are friendly, but some hate him for having the implant or simply because he’s a monk for the dead.  Vessel Iris senses beats on the ship, like a pulse or heartbeat, that no one else mentions.  So he keeps it a secret, the first of many.  As people die one by one, he keeps his theories to himself because the others aren’t receptive to him.  But his secrets may hold the key to the mysteries of the ship and the reasons for the deaths.

Vessel Iris is a miserable person.  He had a horrible childhood, being orphaned and taken to the monastery.  He believes he is a failure in everything he does.  However, between his senses, the AI (called VIFAI), and the discoveries made by the team, he is the only one who figures out what’s going on the ship.  You expect him to be a hero, but he’s not.  He’s a horribly insecure person.  That made reading through the first half tough.  It’s hard to develop empathy for him because of these personality traits.  Fortunately, the pace picks up and annoyance of Iris must compete with the accumulating body count.  

The character of the VIFAI was strange.  I felt like he was on the verge of having a robust personality, but it mostly seemed one-dimensional.  It’s sort of like a slave/guardian angel but he treats it as an equal.  I didn’t develop any empathy for VIFAI either.

Of the other characters, Riyu Alo was the nicest.  She’s the exobiologist.  Ishtan Ora was cute as the bumbling older archeologist, specializing in ancient, returned generation ships.  Tev and Jesi, the engineer’s interns didn’t seem multi-dimensional until near the end.  There are two guards we don’t know much about, but Iris feels guilty about not knowing their names.  Finally, there’s engineer Yan Fukui who is brash and downright mean to Iris (I just got that his last name might be a self-referential joke).  Because of this animosity, we get a better sense of who he is.  We also get background information about him, providing much needed insight into this belligerent character.  Probably the best developed character, but not the easiest to empathize with for quite a while.  But to me he was the most authentic and realistic human in the group.  He also played practical engineer devil’s advocate to Iris’ theories about the ship.  

I thought the prose was fine, but the world building was not detailed regarding the science.  There was a lot of hand-waving about the mycelium network and generations ship engineering.  During book club discussion, there was a lot of “What was that about?” i.e., vague science.  Despite all this, I was very engaged in the last hundred pages or so.  I liked the climax, but I somehow missed the “Book 1” on the top of every page, ending up shocked that it left some pretty huge loose ends.  It’s not a cliffhanger, but there’s a lot to be resolved.  And it seems to me that the resolutions will come in the form of going back to the ship with the remaining characters, the tired trope used by Alien and Aliens and countless other horror flicks.  When it came to rating this, I wavered between a 3 and a 4 because, by the end, I really liked it, but I also recognized that it had the above flaws.  So I settled on three stars out of five.  But I liked it enough that I will probably read the sequel.

The Summer War

Naomi Novik
Completed 6/17/2026, Reviewed 6/17/2026
4 stars

This novella felt overly long, despite being under 150 pages.  It’s about interactions with faeries: their vengeance, their oaths, and complicated stratagems to bring peace between the two worlds.  This felt like a common fae trope: faeries take a human and the human escapes by convoluting the fae logic.  Novik made it more complex than that, in a good way, but the prose felt bloated and there was too much exposition to catch the reader up on the history of the situation.  This 2026 Hugo nominee for Novella is probably my least favorite of the list.  While I felt like it was a great turn on the trope, all the filler and background kept me from feeling like this book was up there with my other favorite nominees.

Celia is a young girl, a daughter of a powerful nobleman, just about to reach her sexual maturity and come into her burgeoning sorcery gifts.  Their kingdom lies on the border with the fae world, called The Summer Lands.  She was very close to her oldest brother Argent, a highly decorated knight and hero.  When he tells his father he is disowning the family and going to live with the fae, young Celia panics.  She knows he keeps being gay a secret and that that is the reason for him leaving.  She inadvertently curses him by wishing he never find love again.  As time goes on, she regrets the curse more and more and is determined to go after him to break the curse.  However, the prince of their kingdom delivers the message that she fulfills the prophecy of the treaty at the end of the Summer Wars and must marry the prince.  However, the prince is in cahoots with the fae and it looks like another war may break out.  And Celia is at the center of this mess.

In general, the characterization was very good.  However, I did not really like Celia and couldn’t empathize with her.  Yeah, the twists and switcheroos of the fae was wonderfully complex, but I couldn’t empathize with any of her feelings through it all.  On the other hand, I liked Argent and her other brother Roric.  Argent stood his ground when it came to being true to himself.  Roric, the forgotten brother, was kind and forgiving despite being treated like he was invisible his whole life.  But the story centered on Celia, and that made it feel very long.  

The world building was great, though.  Novik did a great job of describing the differences between time in the Summer Lands versus human time.  And even though she used summerfolk instead of faeries, she stuck to much of the general faerie mythology while making it feel like her own.  

The biggest reason for taking off a star is the prosy exposition.  I didn’t like how the history of the war and the truce was replayed to bring us up to speed.  It was too chock full of complexity.  And it felt more like it was telling me about it instead of showing me.  It took me until finishing the book that I figured out the difference between the princes, even though their names were very different.  It was part of the fae’s game, but I didn’t like it.  And without empathy for the main character, it was hard to wade through it all to see what happened to her next.  I came close to giving this book three stars, but I settled on four out of five because of the brothers and the exciting twist upon twist of an ending.

The River Has Roots

Amal El-Mohtar
Completed 6/16/2026, Reviewed 6/17/2026
5 stars

This book was so much better than El-Mohtar’s This is How You Lose the Time War.  The prose is sumptuous like in Time War, but it doesn’t distract from the plot.  The story is devastating and beautiful.  It’s about the bond between two sisters whose job is to sing to the Willows along the river to maintain the portal between the human and fae worlds.  The magic system is bizarre; it is called the Grammer.  And the ending is sad, but hopeful.  This book has already won the 2025 Nebula for Novella and is a 2026 Hugo nominee for the same.  This is turning out to be a tough year for this category as the stories are all marvelous.

Esther and Ysabel have a very tight bond.  Their family, the Hawthornes, have been singing the Willows for generations, a job which now falls on the sisters.  Their voices are unmatched, particularly when they sing together.  Esther, being the older, has a local man interested in marrying her.  He owns the next property over and thinks the match would strengthen the claim on the keeping of the Willows and the portal.  However, Esther does not like Samuel Pollard at all.  She is in love with Rin, a faerie that she and Ysabel met when they accidently wandered through the Willows.  They were saved by Agnes Crow, a grammarian who was wandering through the fae lands.  Just when Esther convinces Rin to live with Esther and her family as her lover, Pollard shows up full of anger and resentment.  The ensuing chaos from that encounter ends tragically, but that is not the end of the story. (But no spoilers so I’ll leave you hanging 😊)

This is one of those books filled with tragic events, but still has a heartwarming feel to it.  It emphasizes the bond between Esther and Ysabel, but also supports the bringing of Rin into the mix.  The relationships are very strong, although they were just short of being problematic and maybe too co-dependent.  But it makes Pollard’s actions all the more devastating.  While the magic is very esoteric, the author has it developed enough that it makes sense, even if you don’t understand it.

The character I liked most was Agnes Crow.  She is another grammarian, someone who wields the speaking and singing magic.  She reminded me a bit of Tom Bombadil from Tolkien.  She also reminded me of a rune reader I know here in Portland, so I pictured her with a wild grey perm, soft flowy black fabrics, and a mischievous smile.  She is funny, whimsical, and very serious when needed.  

This is another novella on the shorter side, so I can’t discuss too much without spoilers.  Suffice it to say, the book was gripping.  Everything happens so fast, but it flows very well.  I read this book in a short day, although it took me a few days to get the review written up.  I can’t tell you how much of a difference it was from Time War.  It’s like night and day.  This book made me feel all cozy in the end, my favorite feeling.  But this isn’t a cozy read as the events in the middle are tragic, indeed.  It hit all the right emotional buttons for me to give it a five star rating.

Murder by Memory

Olivia Waite
Completed 6/15/2026, Reviewed 6/17/2026
4 stars

I’m usually not a big fan of noir detective mysteries, but this one had a great twist.  It takes place on a luxury line spaceship called the Fairweather where you can keep coming back in new bodies when the old one died.  Your mind is regularly backed up in case of emergency resurrection.  I was impressed by the world building and that all the characters were gay or lesbian.  It wasn’t an issue story; it was integrated pretty seamlessly into the characters and plot.  And the idea of a spaceship ride to eternity was pretty cool as well.  This is another nominee for the 2026 Hugo Novella category.  It wasn’t the best, but it’s a strong contender.

Dorothy Gentleman is a detective on board the Fairweather.  She is awakened by its computer during a magnetic storm to find she is in Gloria Vowell’s body.  The computer, known as Ferry, acts drunk due to the storm’s interference.  It conveys to her that Janet Dodds has been murdered on this utopian ship.  Also, her own memory backup has been destroyed.  It takes a while to figure out, partly because of the drunk computer, that Gloria may have been the murderer.  But is she?  Dorothy doesn’t have Gloria’s memory but finds out she had a business partnership with Janet.  She suspects her programming genius nephew Rutherford may have done something to the memory storage library, inadvertently causing a bug that’s destroying people’s files.  It turns out Janet’s memory is also erased.  Lastly, there’s the owner of a yarn store named Violet who turns out to be Gloria’s wife.  She’s jealous of Gloria and Janet’s business relationship.  But without the memory of Gloria and Janet, she must piece together the murder the old-fashioned way.  

Dorothy narrates this story in first person.  Dorothy is an excellent gumshoe character.  She’s also a feisty woman in her late fifties, although she is currently in a younger woman’s body.  Her methodical approach to solving the murder is very entertaining.  The blurb for the book compares her to Miss Marple, though I’ve never read any Agatha Christie.  What I liked best about her was how she tried to get information and confessions by appearing to people as Gloria and not giving away who she really is.  When she goes to the yarn store to see how it’s tied to the deceased, she meets Violet who uses a classic noir line, “You’ve got some nerve, haven’t you.”  It made me chuckle.  

I loved this book.  It’s well conceived and well written.  It’s short for a novella, just over eighty pages.  It doesn’t get lost in prose or personality.  The mystery is tight and the big reveal blew me away.  Some people say “If you take a book and remove all the science and you still have a story, it’s not really science fiction.”  Well, in this case, the science is directly tied to the mystery.  It’s not just a murder mystery set in space.  I give this story a strong four stars out of five. 

Cinder House

Freya Marske
Completed 6/14/2026, Reviewed 6/15/2026
5 stars

There are many takes on classic fairy tales.  This time, it’s Cinderella, and Ella is a ghost haunting a house.  Despite being another retelling, I was blown away by the complexity.  It was smart, funny at times, and quite intense.  This is another nominee for the 2026 Hugo Novella.  I think it deserves the nomination just for making the trope feel fresh and exciting.  

Ella was murdered at the age of sixteen.  She wakes up to find herself being a ghost haunting her own house.  It takes a while, but soon she is visible, but only to her stepmother and stepsisters.  They demand she do all the housework for them, just like when she was alive.  She tries to refuse, but her spectral body goes right to the assigned task.  It’s as if she is somehow bound to the house.  Several years pass and she is still the maid for her stepfamily, but she yearns for the senses of being alive, to touch, to dance.  One day in the market, a woman selling charms sees her and makes her dreams come true, for a price.  You may think you know the ending, but it is so much wilder than you’d expect.

I think what impressed me the most was the complexity of the world building, including the characters.  It reminded me of world building of Gregory Maguire’s “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.”  Cinder House may not go quite as deep, it still created a believable world with very realistic characters, including the “Handsome Prince.”  They had a lot of depth, and considering this is a novella, had good character arcs.  The one exception is the older stepsister named Greta.  She has the personality of an aspiring serial killer.  She tortures ghostly Ella to no end and seems bent on completely eradicating her.  Greta’s character arc goes from horrible to terrorizing with no believable reason, at least I didn’t quite believe it.  Nevertheless, she fits into the story well.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  I found myself getting so excited when each box of the original story got checked off.  Not all of them are checked off, but more than enough to feel satisfied that this was a very imaginative work.  I should mention this comes with a spiciness warning.  As long as Marske doesn’t just stick with fairy tale retellings, I look forward to seeing what else she produces.

Automatic Noodle

Annalee Newitz
Completed 6/12/2026, Reviewed 6/13/2026
5 stars

I had only read Autonomous by Newitz before this.  I felt meh about it.  This book began that way.  I had trouble connecting with and understanding the operation of the robot main characters.  But that all goes away in about fifty pages.  This being a novella, that’s about the first quarter of the book.  It was worth sticking with.  What we end up with is a marvelous fable about nominally free robots trying to start a noodle business in a world where California has seceded from the Union and the civil war it caused has just ended.  Once it gets going, it’s full of mystery and intrigue as the robots try to uncover the online smear campaign against them and work to build a client base.  This is the first nominee of the 2026 Best Novella Hugo category that I haven’t read yet.  

Four robots start up after months of being shut down during the war between the US and California.  They are unaware of everything and need to catch up.  They realize the owner of the restaurant where they worked has taken off and atmospheric rivers are flooding the streets.  Without work, they get no coin and they can’t pay their personal debts.  They come up with a plan to start a noodle shop when the rains stop, specializing only in biang biang noodles.  After the terrible ingredients and conditions they’ve been working with, they want to create a top tier noodle with the best ingredients and the most expert preparation.  They turn out to be a hit.  Their excitement though doesn’t last when online trolls start bashing their place, spreading robophobia and condemning it for being run by robots.  Dejected, they come up with a plan to rely on their word-of-mouth success while investigating the troll who started the campaign.

The toughest part of the book for me was getting the robots names and personalities down.  There’s Staybehind, the former military robot; Sweetie, the robot with a human appearance; Cayenne, the octobot with the ability to taste; and Hands, a food prepper and cooking bot.  Also early on, a human employee named Robles returns asking for food and shelter and offering to help in any way to pay them back.  I had trouble remembering which robot was talking at any given point.  I think that’s because most of the time they were texting over wifi and the conversations were often between all of them.  Somehow it just didn’t connect for that first quarter of the book.  Eventually I got it.  Staybehind was the naysayer in the project, and the troll investigator.  Hands had a severe problem with depression.  Sweetie had lost skin on her face and decided to stop pretending to be human anymore.  Cayenne was a liberated bot who became best friends with Hands on their first job.   So it all worked out, but I feel like I missed out on something while I was lost in the beginning.  

There is an important point worth noting about the plot.  The robophobia has just been legally outlawed in California.  Robots are “free”, though they do not have the right to vote, own property, own a business, have a bank account, etc.  That’s why their business is so tenuous.  They made up a human to be the successor to the original owner.  So effectively, they are a “ghost” restaurant --- there are no humans running the place.  Robles is their only “cover.”  

I have to say, the prose and world building is pretty great.  But the real star of the story is its relatability for anyone who feels oppressed.  Women, blacks, the queer community, and anyone else will get some of great lines spoken, thought, or texted in this book.  Yeah, you can say this is a book with an agenda, but doesn’t any great story have an agenda, or better yet, a moral?  I give this book five stars out of five.  It smacked me in the face, this is how we’ve survived and will continue to survive.  Stick together, be yourself, and stand out.  Happy Pride!