In a previous review here, Stephen Geigen-Miller discussed all the finalists for the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic. Paul Weimer and I, between us, had reviewed all six Best Novel finalists before they were announced, and I posted links to all those reviews here. I have now finished all the finalists for Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story, and I’m going to share some thoughts here. However, these are my own thoughts and not any endorsement of Skiffy and Fanty as a whole. For any readers who are still undecided about any of these categories, maybe my perceptions will help.
Short stories
All of the short stories this year were well crafted. “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson and “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills were both sort of listicles, and I thought it was a little odd that Uncanny Magazine chose to run them in subsequent issues, but the first offered some gut punches and some comfort in hard times, and the second had very good framing and came to a satisfying conclusion. “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg (Clarkesworld) was humorous and fun, and although this reminded me of “Dr. Diabolo Goes Through the Motions” by Saladin Ahmed (2010) and later works by others, I’m not tired of supervillain stories yet. “Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro, about a woman whose husband leaves her for her clone, took some unexpected twists that I really appreciated. “In My Country” by Thomas Ha was easily the most “literary” story of the six, and the censorship tale has far from subtle correlations for our times (including the repeated statements that WE don’t have a king so everything is OK); it’s also broadly applicable, moving, and extremely well written.
“Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim is my favorite short; its near-future story is about a girl whose dislike and distrust of A.I. characters (including her biological father’s “wife”) is viewed as a mental malady mandating treatment. When she finally meets a human boy and thinks they have things in common, it turns out badly; craving comfort, she takes drastic action. For those who don’t catch the reference and think “wire mother” just means the virtual stepmother, I believe the title refers to the controversial social isolation experiments on monkeys by Harry Harlow, in which the baby monkeys overwhelmingly preferred cloth-covered monkey dummies as parental substitutes to wireframe monkeys that held food. The story is chillingly believable, given how hard “AI” adopters push everyone else to join them, and I fear for the future of the protagonist, but her defiance is heroic.
Novelettes
“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells is a Murderbot story about ART and ART’s people; it’s fun, but it really doesn’t stand on its own. “The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker is interesting but seems lacking in any speculative element. “Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch was mildly entertaining but seemed very 1950s in concept and style. “When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente was a fun story about Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” as a vampire, featuring one of the victimized wives, with some excellent descriptions.
“The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed is a great story set in a fairly near-future corpocracy in which “a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement” and things actually work out in a very heartening way. I loved Cameron’s book “What We Are Seeking” that came out in 2026; here’s my review of that.
“Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak was my favorite of the crop. It’s about a ship’s AI that makes some drastic choices when its cargo of frozen embryos starts thawing and developing early, and about one of those babies 26 years later, on a struggling world lumbered with staggering corporate debt, figuring out what happened and how to go forward. It’s tender and compassionate despite the logic-chain-based decisions of one of the protagonists (since where your logic takes you is based on the values of your hypotheses), and I also love the determination of the woman despite social pressures to just do her basic job.
In my next post, I’ll talk about the novellas.
