BSFA short fiction and Hugo nominations

[nwhyte]

Thanks to the BSFA's new two-round nomination system, we have a long list of 41 stories in the Best Short Fiction category, from we we can choose four to be aggregated into the eventual shortlist of five. This is actually quite tough, because four of the stories of the 41 are there because I nominated them, and so I am reading the others in competition with the vote I cast in the first round. Of course, these are all also eligible for the Hugos, so I also read with a view to augmenting my Hugo nominations for this year.

I was able to get almost all of the stories - not quite dedicated enough to buy back issues of Interzone or anthologies with only one entry of interest, but the rest I was able to access reasonably easily. In contrast to some of the other categories, I didn't detect much gratuitous log-rolling (compare the Best Novel contenders with zero following on Goodreads or LibraryThing). And my conclusion is that for the BSFA second round, I'm nominating:

• "Utrechtenaar" (Strange Horizons), by Paul Evanby
• "The New Mother" (Asimov's Apr/May 2015), by Eugene Fischer
• Wylding Hall (PS Publishing), by Elizabeth Hand and
• "Wooden Feathers" (Uncanny Magazine), by T Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon.

Wylding Hall is actually 43,000 words in length, but the BSFA has ruled it into the short fiction category. If that ruling should change, my backup nomination is:

• "A Short History of Migration in Five Fragments of You" (Omenana), by Wole Talabai.

Of those, Wylding Hall (which is just over the Hugo novella word limit), "Wooden Feathers (a short story) and "A Short History of Migration in Five Fragments of You" (also a short story) are new to my Hugo list. However, the following also hit me sufficiently hard to be added to my expanding list of Hugo potential nominees:

• "Liminal Grid" (Strange Horizons), by Jaymee Goh (short story)
• "The Game of Smash and Recovery" (Strange Horizons), by Kelly Link (short story)
• A Day In Deep Freeze (Aqueduct Press), by Lisa Shapter (novella) and
• "Everything Beneath You" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies), by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (short story).

My list of short stories in particular is getting congested...