2009 Hugo Award Short Story Nominees

This isn't particularly new, since these stories were nominated for a Hugo Award last year, but we've been reading them this month in the ModernScienceFiction2 Yahoo Group. We haven't gotten to the 2010 Hugo nominees yet, but three of those stories were also nominated for a 2009 Nebula Award, and we read them in March. We'll get to the other two soon enough, I imagine.

Anyway, these are the five short stories nominated for a Hugo last year. All of them are (legally) available free online, so I'll include the link to each story.

My favorite of the bunch was the eventual winner of the award, "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang. In a strange tale of a mechanical world, a sentient robot dissects his own brain to discover the secret of intelligent thought - and the doom which awaits his whole universe. The comparison to entropy in our own universe is clear, and quite clever. It's really a unique story, and very good - not one of my all-time favorites, but easily good enough to top this list.

"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson is a pure fantasy which was also nominated for a Nebula Award (the only short story in 2008 which was on both ballots), and which won the 2009 World Fantasy Award for best short story. This is another odd story, but it's also cute, romantic, and pleasant. Aimee runs a magic act where 26 monkeys vanish into a bathtub, and she has no idea how it's done.

I didn't think the story was anything special when I first read it a year ago, but I liked it better this time. Maybe my expectations were too high last year. I've been disappointed in a lot of award nominees lately, so maybe my standards are simply lower now. Or maybe I've just finally wrapped my head around the fact that the Hugo is awarded for science fiction and fantasy. I really don't know.

"Evil Robot Monkey" by Mary Robinette Kowal is a short, sad story about a chimpanzee with an implant - making him smarter than other chimps, but still just an animal to humans. It's very good, but very short, which I guess is why I didn't rank it above the previous story. And good as it is, it really doesn't bring anything new to science fiction.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great little story. And this is a classic theme in SF - for good reason. But I expect a lot from award nominees. And three of these stories were really unusual (two of them successfully). So maybe this story just suffers in comparison.

I was less impressed with the last two nominees, but Michael Swanwick's "From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled" really tries to be unique. In fact, I think it tries too hard. It's a shame, too, because I think there was a good story there. And I've read some excellent short fiction from Swanwick in the past.

Narrated by a man's protective suit, which is imprinted with the mental pattern of his lover, this is the story of the lone surviving human and a millipede-like alien escaping from a destroyed alien structure/city and traveling across a hot - boiling water hot! - jungle world.

The story is actually stranger than it sounds from this description, and it comes close to being quite interesting. But I'd say it's too consciously stylish (that's really the best way I can think to describe it). The descriptions, for example, don't work. (Can you picture an alien face "like a cross between the front of a locomotive and a tree grinder"?  Me, neither.)

And the ending,... well, I still don't know what I think about that. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what I think about the whole story. I guess I'll say, "Nice try." It's an impressive attempt, but ultimately unsuccessful (for me, at least - it must have worked for other people, I assume, or it wouldn't have been nominated for this award).

Finally, there's "Article of Faith" by Mike Resnick. A robot worker at a church decides that he has a soul and tries to worship with the congregation, with unsurprising results. OK, it's obvious from the start where this story is going, but it's still emotionally effective. But I had two big problems with it.

First, too much of it doesn't make sense. I just couldn't maintain my suspension of disbelief. The robot is too ignorant about some things (and ignorant like a two-year-old: "God must be very large to need such high ceilings"), while being too knowledgeable, too perceptive, in other situations. OK, that might actually make sense, except for where he was ignorant and where he was perceptive. I just couldn't buy it.

Also, the story is very, very similar to "Samaritan" by Connie Willis, a much better short story (her first, I think) written clear back in 1978. OK, in her story it's an orangutan, not a robot, who gets religion, but that's really not a big difference. The two stories are still very similar.

Now, I'm certainly not claiming that Resnick copied the Willis story, not at all. But if you're going to nominate a modern story for an award, a SF story that is very, very similar to a 30-year-old story, the new story really needs to be better than the old one. This one isn't. For both of these reasons, "Article of Faith" gets my lowest ranking here.