2026 Hugo Short Story finalists
Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Short Story Hugo Award, with my rankings:
1. ★★★☆☆ 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills
2. ★★★☆☆ Six People to Revise You, J. R. Dawson
3. ★★★☆☆ Wire Mother, Isabel J. Kim
4. ★★★☆☆ Missing Helen, Tia Tashiro
5. ★★★☆☆ Laser Eyes Ain't Everything, Effie Seiberg
6. ★★☆☆☆ In My Country, Thomas Ha
I apologize: I'm gonna do a half-assed job of reviewing these. It was, IMO, a lack-luster harvest. What I always hope for when I read the Hugo finalists is something that makes me say, "I sure am glad the Hugo nomination process pointed me at that story!" This year, 2026, that happened in the series, novel, novella, and novelette categories. It didn't happened for a short story. (I have not yet read the poetry finalists -- the only remaining category in which I plan to vote.)
I have one complaint for all the short stories: they aren't. Stories that is. They are written English documents that have the form of stories, but not the essence. Everyone knows the famous but unhelpful dictum from Aristotle's Poetics that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end (usefully modified by Jean Luc Godard, "not necessarily in that order") Unhelpful though Aristotle is, the point on which he fails to put his finger is a good one: a story has a structure, not just of words, but also of events and emotions. I would summarize it as, "a problem should be resolved."
It's not that that doesn't happen in any of these stories -- it's just that it feels perfunctory, as if that isn't what the story is about. Several of them are more like thinly disguised polemics than stories. I'd put Six People to Revise You, Laser Eyes Ain't Everything, Wire Mother, and probably In My Country in that category. ("Probably" because I didn't understand In My Country.) Missing Helen was more storyish, but it was just not, IMO, a very good story.
10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days is a series of ten very short stories about a Lovecraftian end to the world. So there was some story-ness to it, quite possibly more than I understood. Also, it was funny. I chuckled several times.
So, there you have it. Better luck next year!