The short fiction categories are probably the hardest Hugo Awards to nominate for, if only because of the immense body of work that is published each year. It also doesn’t help that, while I read what I consider a good amount of short fiction, it’s by no means anywhere near even a representative section of what is out there. I only habitually read a handful of magazine issues and whatever free work I come across by authors that I already know and like or that sounds interesting (vague criteria for choosing what to read, I know). To make a long story short the reason it’s taken me until now to get this list out is simply because it’s taken me this long to cram a bunch of extra reading in, and it’s still not as much as I would have liked—and, at the same time, far too much, because now I have just a couple of days to whittle each of these lists down to just five.

Best Short Story

• “The Lily and the Horn” by Catherynne M. Valente
• “Hello, Hello” by Seanan McGuire
• “A is for Alacrity, Astronauts and Grief” by Sofie Bird
• “Pockets” by Amal El-Mohtar
• “The Robot Who Couldn’t Lie” by Sunil Patel
• “Who Binds and Looses the World with Her Hands” by Rachael K. Jones
• “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong
• “Dispatches from a Hole in the World” by Sunny Moraine
• “La Héron” by Charlotte Ashley
• “Trickier with Each Translation” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
• “Of Blood and Brine” by Megan E. O’Keefe
• “Archana and Chandni” by Iona Sharma
• “Elephants and Corpses” by Kameron Hurley
• “The Light Brigade” by Kameron Hurley

Best Novelette

• “Another Word for World” by Ann Leckie
• “Little Men with Knives” by L.S. Johnson
• “Follow Me Down” by Nicolette Barischoff
• “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” by Catherynne M. Valente (Part One | Part Two)
• “Fabulous Beasts” by Priya Sharma
• “Y Brenin” by C.A. Hawksmoor
• “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander
• “Morrigan in Shadow” by Seth Dickinson