Best Novelette 2021

[factitious]

ambyr: You know, if you make one post per day you're going to run out of days

So, I'd better make some more posts today! Here's Best Novelette.

Isabel Fall's "Helicopter Story" is an easy pick for first place for me, for two reasons. First, I liked it the most: it's a clever take on gender as social technology, capable of being turned toward a variety of purposes; Barb's reflections on non-helicopter genders are appropriately cutting; and the implications of Pear Mesa being governed by neural nets are fun. Second, this community was horrible to the author after her story was published, life-destroyingly horrible, and I want us to make some efforts toward making it up to her. I want science fiction fandom to be a place that's good to trans women, where we recognize that it was wrong for people to harass Isabel Fall, to say she shouldn't have been published, to claim her writing reveals she can't really be a woman. I'm glad I also have the first reason. I'd feel bad voting for someone just based on the second, even though it's important to me.


"Monster," by Naomi Kritzer, was my second favorite. I like how it starts off feeling like a travel story, then as you discover it's really about Andrew, it takes its time revealing what he means to Cecily, and how bad things actually are. The slow reveal isn't quite a parallel to her experience of finding out that he's a monster, since the reader never feels betrayed by the story, but that's for the best. Good job getting me on the side of the person who murders her friend.


In a very close third, "Two Truths and a Lie," by Sarah Pinsker. I've seen people say this has a creepypasta feel to it, probably because they're thinking of Candle Cove (the one good creepypasta), but there's more to this than a children's show being spooky. As someone who used to make up lies about herself for no reason a bit too often, parts of this hit home for me. The realization that there's a reason we've been getting so little information about Stella's life was a cute trick.


"The Inaccessibility of Heaven," by Aliette de Bodard, was fairly forgettable. Noir with fallen angels sounded like a cool premise to me, but the execution felt like just a fairly by-the-numbers noir story with angel theming. I didn't get much out of it, and I'm not sure what it was really trying to accomplish. In retrospect, maybe that's just the obvious way for a premise like that to work out, and I should stop expecting "noir but with X" to work for me.


"Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super," by A.T. Greenblatt, was also pretty forgettable. It's about prejudice against superheroes, which is a hard topic to do anything new with. Having Sam do accounting stuff instead of superhero stuff might have been an interesting twist, but the story didn't focus on that, and never gave me much else to get interested in. Pretty close between these two; I'm ranking "The Inaccessibility of Heaven" higher because it's easier for me to imagine someone for whom it hits just right.


Finally, I actively disliked Meg Elison's "The Pill." The main premise is that a pill gets invented that gives people permanently thin bodies, with a 10% fatality rate. The secondary premise is that this is a world where nearly everyone in the world is fatphobic in the way very fatphobic people in our world are, so society quickly structures itself around the assumption that everyone will take this pill. (Even thin people, to make sure they no longer have a risk of becoming fat.) The effects of a new cause of death killing off 10% of the population aren't really addressed, because the worldbuilding's not meant to support followup questions. I think there's a place for the kind of worldbuilding that you don't ask questions about! But if I treat the speculative fiction elements here purely as allegory, it just makes the shallowness of the story's message more striking. "People are horrible about fatness, as shown by this story where everything in the world is about being horrible about fatness" isn't enough of a point.


My votes:

"Helicopter Story" > "Monster" > "Two Truths and a Lie" > No Award > "The Inaccessibility of Heaven" > "Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super" > "The Pill"