Here’s my look at the six Hugo-nominated novelettes for 2026 (published in 2025). The mini-reviews are in the order I expect to place them on my ballot.

“When He Calls Your Name”, by Catherynne Valente

This story is told by a woman living in a rural setting, married, somewhat happily, to Charlie, whom she met in high school. She’s waiting for something -- a woman? But there’s a name for what that woman is. And Charlie has been sneaking off to conduct an affair with that woman for the past few weeks. So the narrator waits, with Charlie tied to their bed so he can’t run out. And the woman comes -- and she and the narrator have a conversation.

The story is based on a famous song that I’ve known and loved for over 50 years -- Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”. (Anyone who knows the song will pick up on this from the get go, and Valente openly acknowledges the source.) And it uses this correspondence very effectively. I won’t given anything away, but I’ll just say that the story is really well done, and the best and most original take on the other sort of story it is that I’ve seen in quite a while. I’ll also say that the delineation of the characters and situation of the narrator and Charlie is excellent and truly real.

“The Millay Illusion”, by Sarah Pinsker

The narrator is a girl, Lottie, in her teens, who does a magic act for her “Uncle” as a boy named Johnny Chess. Susanna Miller, a girl of about the same age joins the troupe -- she’s an illusionist, and quite good. Lottie and the new girl become fast friends. But Lottie’s ambitions are minor -- she’s good at what she does, but not thinking about anything better. Susanna knows she’s better than the aging and often drunk “Master of Mystery” who is the lead illusionist. But everyone believe that a woman’s place is as the sidekick -- the girl who gets cut in half, not the magician -- so Suzanna’s relegated to a comic role. In the end she develops her own illusions to prove her abilities -- and still meets resistance. So she runs away -- and Lottie knows nothing of her until a show in New York ...

Pinsker is a wonderful writer. She’s also a performing artist herself, and very good at portraying performers at work. This story is well-written, and affecting. The fantastic element is rather slight, and perhaps a bit too much on point. It’s not Pinsker’s best work, but her next rank work is still very worthwhile.

“Never Eaten Vegetables”, by H. H. Pak

There are two threads here: one about a spaceship carrying thousands of embryos, encountering a disaster in which five hundred of them are gestated, leaving a challenging mission to bring (and, on the way, raise) the new children to a new world, while preserving the other embryos to gestate at the right time. The other is about Luwa, the Senator of a struggling small city on a new world, trying to balance the new colony’s needs with the sponsoring Corporation’s desire for profit. We gather soon enough that the young children the spaceship (an AI) is trying to raise (with the help of teaching AIs) are now the adults in the new colony. The crisis comes when the spaceship faces punishment for not following strict protocol (which would have involved killing the early-gestated embryos ... )

This is an intriguing idea, and a nice sort of trolley problem variant. (However, the nameless faceless “Corporation” is a sad cliché, too often invoked as an easy villain these days.) The story has freshness on its side, but for me it didn’t quite work -- but it’s a good try.

“Kaiju Agonistes”, by Scott Lynch

A satirical look at history since the end of World War II based on the notion that the kaiju (Godzilla, basically) are an alien project to detect dangerous use of nuclear weapons and convince the intelligent species using them that that’s a bad idea. It’s funny, clever, amusing, and the idea behind the eventual solution is darkly satirical -- and also (like, in a very different way, Reed’s story) something one can imagine Pohl and Kornbluth coming up with in 1957 or so. I think the story overstays its welcome, too. Still: a cute idea, and a decent development of it.

“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy”, by Martha Wells

This is a sort of pendant to the Murderbot series. A group of people and the ship Perihelion are planning a raid on a Corporation Rim station, which as it turns out is being attacked anyway. But the story isn’t about that -- it’s about why Perihelion is acting so strangely. The reason is nice, and nicely revealed -- but, well, it’s not enough for a full story. And it means a lot more if you’ve read the Murderbot stories. Martha Wells is an excellent writer, and the story is fun, and a nice elaboration of a small part of the Murderbot universe -- but it’s really slight for a Hugo nominee.

“The Girl That My Mother is Leaving Me For”, by Cameron Reed

This story represents the long-awaited return of the writer of the brilliant novel The Fortunate Fall (1996) and the equally brilliant Tiptree-winning short story “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation” (1998). Cameron Reed was also a stimulating blogger and quite interesting person, though my only contact with her was online. Her 2026 novel What We Are Seeking has received a lot of praise, as well.

Alas, then, I found “The Girl That My Mother is Leaving me For” a mild disappointment. It’s set in a corporatist future dystopia. The CEO of Griffin Corporation is always a clone of the “Founder”. The narrator is a trans woman who has been adopted by Griffin’s CEO as daughter, and to bear the next clone, but she hasn’t been able to bring a baby to term. So she is about to be replaced with another woman, Mira. She keeps Mira company as the new baby gestates -- and the two fall in love, which isn’t actually a problem for their “mother”. But the story turns when another corporation makes a (violent) takeover ... and the narrator and Mira need to escape. I found the dystopian background to be too much like something Pohl and Kornbluth might have come up with in the ‘50s, and the rival corporation takeover was similarly cliché (I’d rather have seen the ethics of a conflict with the Griffin CEO), and some of the sketched in science wasn’t terribly plausible. The love story was sweet and convincing, and the narrator is a nicely-developed character, though Mira is less full. Really, it reads more like the opening to a potential novel more than a completed story.