Hugo Nominees: Best Short Story

As Kate and I will be attending the Worldcon in Japan, we're eligible to vote for the Hugos this year. In an effort to be responsible voters we downloaded the electronic version of the short fiction nominees that are available from the official nominations site, and I've been working my way through them. To this point, I've finished the Best Short Story nominees:

• "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"Neil Gaiman
• "Kin" Bruce McAllister
• "Impossible Dreams" Tim Pratt
• "Eight Episodes" Robert Reed
• "The House Beyond Your Sky"Benjamin Rosenbaum

If anybody would like to make a passionate argument in favor of one of these stories, I'm willing to listen. Right now, though, my reaction is a big, fat "Enh."

(The comments below may contain spoilers for these stories, so don't click "Read on" if you don't want the stories spoiled.)

"How to Talk to Girls at Parties"Neil Gaiman. One of the other things loaded onto the Palm that I've started carrying around (Kate got a new PDA, so I've acqired her old one) is an electronic copy of one of Gaiman's story collections, so i've spent some time reading that, too (at one point, while under the impression that I was reading the Hugo nominees-- technology is complicated). This has served to remind me just how many of his stories are gimmicky little things.

The conceit here-- a party where the girls are literally from another planet-- is sort of cute, but that's basically all there is to it. The narrator is absolutely the thickest character in the long history of oblivious narrators in fiction, and that destroyed my suspension of disbelief badly enough to undercut the story's only other virtue, namely its attempt at a realistic portrayal of awkward adolescence.

"Kin" Bruce McAllister. A small child in a dystopian future hires an alien assassin to threaten an official of an oppressive government. OK.

I think this story was hurt by the fact that I read too many blogs, and so spent a lot of it trying to determine if it was pushing a political agenda. I almost hope it was, because otherwise, there's not much to it.

"Impossible Dreams" Tim Pratt. A very sweet "Twilight Zone" episode story, in which one of the characters explicitly notes that it seems like a "Twilight Zone" episode, just in case you missed it.

Snark aside, it's a pretty good story. I'm not wild about the particulars of the ending, but I think that's the political blog thing creeping in again.

"Eight Episodes" Robert Reed. This is sort of Reed doing Borges, in that it's more like a description of a story than a story in its own right.

The story it's describing is pretty clever, though, involving a mysterious and badly made serial drama that turns out to be more than people initially suspect. The central conceit is a terrific idea, though I'm sure that some elements of the message will make this yet another exhibit in the case for the death of American SF.

"The House Beyond Your Sky"Benjamin Rosenbaum. Ack. Ptui. What a saccharine piece of crap. The less said about this the better.

I dunno. At present, I'm inclined to vote for either the Reed or the Pratt, with "Kin" a bit behind those. I may put both of the others below "No Award," just because the Gaiman story feels sort of like it was nominated less on merit than because it's a new story by Neil Gaiman.

I'm not much of a short fiction reader in general, but I have to say, I'm not terribly impressed with these. Are these really the best short stories the field produced last year?