Monday, August 30, 2021

Hugo Awards - 2021 - Short Stories

 I've been read other books lately and had not intended to return to the Hugo nominees.  But as I had them downloaded anyway....

1 - “Metal Like Blood in the Dark”, T. Kingfisher (Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2020) - a great little story about the loss of innocence for a pair AI driven robots.  Or at least one of them

2 - “A Guide for Working Breeds”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Solaris)) - An interesting twist on AI/robots as contract labor.  You never really see where the humans intersect with the AI/robots, but it's there all along.

3 - No Award

4 - “The Mermaid Astronaut”, Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2020) - a somewhat interesting space travel story with merfolk added on the side.  Good, but not above the bar on my ballot.

5 - “Open House on Haunted Hill”, John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots – 2020, ed. David Steffen) - a pedestrian haunted house story.  Nice, but not really notable.

6 - “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse”, Rae Carson (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2020) - Surviving the zombie apocalypse without men.  But they still want babies.  Almost half of which will end up being men.  Illogical setting/world building.

7 - Little Free Library, Naomi Kritzer (Tor.com) - a twee little story using a plot device that has been done too many times already.

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