Hugo Reading 2020: Novelettes

Let's start with your first question: What is a novelette? Is that like Smurfette?

The short answer: It's a long-ish short story. Not much like Smurfette, except maybe in being short but not as short as some others. According to The Hugo Awards for purposes of their Best Novelette category, a novelette is a story between 7,500 and 17,500 words. You can see what I thought about the Novella category here (novellas are between 17,500 and 40,000 words).

Here's the list of novelette nominees from the Hugo Awards website.

• “The Archronology of Love”, by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed, April 2019)
• “Away With the Wolves”, by Sarah Gailey (Uncanny Magazine: Disabled People Destroy Fantasy Special Issue, September/October 2019)
• “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye”, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2019)
• Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin (Forward Collection (Amazon))
• “For He Can Creep”, by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, 10 July 2019)
• “Omphalos”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation (Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador))

There's some really good stuff this year. I can say I genuinely enjoyed reading all the novelette nominees. I'll have a tough time deciding how to rank them when I vote for the Hugos in the next couple weeks (according to CoNZealand Twitter, the deadline has been extended from July 15 to July 22, which might give me time to finish more of the novels).

I read most of the novelettes during the 4th of July weekend here in the US, and I figured I'd keep my reviews short and sweet, briefly collecting my thoughts after finishing each one. So without further ado, here we go! (I'm also including links to my Goodreads reviews in case you want to see those or see what else I've been reviewing there).

"Emergency Skin," by N. K. Jemisin

A great science fictional answer to some of Jemisin's most vile sexist and racist critics. (Goodreads)

“The Archronology of Love”, by Caroline M. Yoachim

Yoachim's stories are always beautiful. I love how this one uses the metaphor of archaeology and a story about alien contact to discuss memory and relationships and whether love stories ever really end. The Hugo packet also includes an interview with the author that's worth checking out. (Goodreads) [I'll also add that I attended one of Yoachim's Koffeeklatches at Worldcon in 2018, which was great!]

“The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye”, by Sarah Pinsker 

A really well done horror story that makes for some interesting thoughts on the creative process. (Goodreads)

“Away With the Wolves”, by Sarah Gailey

I first became aware of Gailey when I read her super fun alternate history hippo caper, River of Teeth, for the 2018 Hugos. I was keen to read something else from her. This is a quirky werewolf story about, as I suppose most werewolf stories are in some way or other, figuring out who you are and how you fit in to one or more communities, even if you think you might be eating the neighbor's goats. (Goodreads)

“Omphalos”, by Ted Chiang 

"Omphalos" imagines what would happen if evidence in favor of Young Earth Creationism had been found as science developed, which itself raises a lot of fascinating questions in epistemology and philosophy of science, but then it goes on from there to imagine an interesting development that also raises issues in philosophy of religion and our place in the universe. Great stuff as usual. (Goodreads; see also my review of Chiang's novella "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom")

“For He Can Creep”, by Siobhan Carroll 

As a cat lover, I feel like this story of a cat battling the devil is written for me. I'm not entirely sure what, if any, are the deeper lessons, but it's awesome to read nonetheless. (Goodreads)

So there you have it! Ranking them is going to be really difficult, but maybe I'll see which ones stick with me when I sit down to think about it in a week or two. Now I just need to finish more of the novels (I've finished A Memory Called Empire, which was fantastic, and I'm almost done with Gideon the Ninth, but I'm not quite sure what to think about it). I'll also definitely get to the short stories and see if I can manage to get to some of the many other categories. Seriously, how does anyone get through them all? I can't imagine.