I’ve not been entitled to vote at the Hugo Awards since I was a member of LonCon in 2014, but I still find the awards a good way to keep up with the state of the art in speculative fiction, and while I can’t read all the longer works, most of the works in the shorter fiction categories are available online. Escape Pod used to run the short story finalists every year in the run-up to the awards, but they stopped doing that on the grounds that the short fiction was now pretty widely available online.
Locus usually list all the nominees and links to them, but for 2020, they haven’t linked the short fiction that is available for free. So for my own reference, and for anyone else who wants to read good, modern speculative fiction, here they are, all collected in one place.
Best Novelette
- For He Can Creep, by Siobhan Carroll
- Omphalos, by Ted Chiang (part of the author’s collection Exhalation, so not available online)
- Away with the Wolves, by Sarah Gailey
- Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin (you might only be able to read this if you’re an Amazon Prime member)
- The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, by Sarah Pinsker
- The Archronology of Love, by Caroline M. Yoachim
Best Short Story
- Do Not Look Back, My Lion, by Alix E. Harrow
- As the Last I May Know, by S.L. Huang
- And Now His Lordship Is Laughing, by Shiv Ramdas
- Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island, by Nibedita Sen
- Blood Is Another Word for Hunger, by Rivers Solomon
- A Catalog of Storms, by Fran Wilde