This year’s Hugo Awards will be presented at the World Science Fiction Convention, LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA, on August 30, 2026

I’ve read all the short fiction finalists, which has some overlap with the Nebula finalists. This is my ranking of the short stories — but there are other opinions, too. I wouldn’t mind if any of my top four stories won the award. Overall, I thought this year’s finalists represent a good overview of the current field with its strengths and faults.

6. “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots, May 16, 2025) — A woman who uses a wheelchair discovers that superpowers will not overcome indifference to accessibility needs. Although the story won this year’s Nebula Award, I think it’s almost a rant and adds no nuance to ongoing concerns about accessibility.

5. “Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro (Clarkesworld, Issue 226) — Slim SFnal thread but deep characterization. A woman and her clone meet in adversarial circumstances, although I wonder how the narrator knew all those things.

4. “In My Country” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, Issue 223) — In a strange country, people are permitted by law to speak plainly or not at all. This story is sort of a parable, and its telling is not plain, and it holds a lot of unspoken but deeply felt feelings.

The Spanish word esquirol looks like the English word “squirrel,” but that’s not what it means. The name for the animal in Spain is ardilla, which comes from an old Iberian language word. In Spanish,  esquirol means “strikebreaker.”

Here’s what happened: In Catalonia, in eastern Spain, the word in the Catalan language for the animal is esquirol, which comes from the Latin sciurus, which comes from the Greek skiouros. The English word shares the same root.

Toward the end of the 19th century, in a town near Barcelona named Santa Maria de Corcó, an inn had a pet squirrel in a cage at its entrance. Eventually the town began to be called “L’Esquirol” after the Inn of the Squirrel.

In 1902, 1908, and 1917, textile workers in the nearby towns went on strike, and workers from L’Esquirol offered to work in place of the strikers. So “strikebreaker” became esquirol — a term of disrespect, like scab in English.

That’s how the Latin-based word for “squirrel” finally entered the Spanish language. But the term has no connection with the cute little animal except for that minor historical accident.

When words travel from one language to another, they don’t always arrive safely.

Squirrels themselves are concerned about their own safety. Urban squirrels seem to believe that they’re safer close to noisy streets, even though they might become roadkill, because cars scare away their predators.

My favorite words are “but” and “what if.” One day I thought about the way the laws of thermodynamics begin with zero. What if magic had rules that started with zero, too? Our understanding of thermodynamics gives us great powers, but what powers would the rules of magic give us? My story offers one answer, but what if there are better answers? This flash fiction story was published at Daily Science Fiction in 2021.

***

Magic Rules Zero Through Four

by Sue Burke

Rule 0. Magic works. But few people believe in it.

A half-dozen students awaited their teacher in a secluded garden. The sorcerer, they thought, would be an elderly man with a long white beard and wise sad eyes. Instead a carefree young woman strolled in, wearing a fashionable hoop skirt, bell sleeves, and corseted waist. She hummed as she sat on a wicker bench.

Years later, you labor in the War Department in utter secrecy. If anyone asks, you manage a special procurement research project, which your coworkers believe is a cover for espionage. You never correct them.

***

Rule 1. The forces of the world will work in accord with magic. But they must be persuaded or beguiled.

“Magic is a matter of will.” Her voice warbled like birdsong. “Human beings are endowed with an enormous force of will. We live for our plans and desires.” The way she said desires made the entire class fall in love, or at least lust. Then she showed how she did that.

“Tiny” means one millimeter or less: a tungsten carbide ball sintered (fused) at 1400ºC for hardness, then polished, but not perfectly smooth. The ball at the tip of a ballpoint pen is textured. Tens of thousands of tiny pits called divots on the surface are connected by channels to assure the presence of ink and to grip the writing surface. The ball fits into a machined brass socket that holds it snugly and ensures the consistent flow of ink from the internal reservoir.

A ballpoint pen exemplifies the marvel of precision engineering. It’s something I use every day but could never make myself, even if I could get the raw materials.

The quill pen was used for writing by my European ancestors in medieval times. I suppose I could stroll into the park next door, tackle a Canada goose (unwise), nab some feathers, and make my own pen. But a common ballpoint pen costs about a dollar (when you can’t get them free as a give-away), less than the medical care needed after a goose attack. In that way, acquiring a ballpoint pen shifts the danger of production onto other people. Sintering sounds potentially hazardous.

But — did the ball point pen kill cursive handwriting?

Probably. Cursive was originally developed to accommodate the limits and flourishes of quill, steel-nib, and fountain pens.

As part of an Audible sale, my novel Interference will be available for $6.99 from June 4 to June 26! This sale is only offered to Prime membership subscribers in the US. This is also a cash sale, meaning it will not affect those using an Audible credit to purchase.

Interference is the second novel in the Semiosis trilogy. More than two hundred years after the first colonists landed on Pax, a new set of explorers arrives from Earth on what they claim is a temporary scientific mission. But the Earthlings misunderstand the nature of the Pax settlement and its real leader. Even as Stevland attempts to protect his humans, a more insidious enemy than the Earthlings makes itself known.

“Narrators Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas May reprise their roles, and between them, they’ve once more captured the essence behind the voices of multiple characters, and even more impressively, this time there are non-humans thrown into the mix.” — Bibliosanctum Book Blog.

I’ve been asked if there’s anything new coming out. I have some short stories looking for a home, and if they’re published, I’ll announce it here.

As for another novel, I’m most of the way through a very shitty first draft tentatively titled A Nice Galaxy. It tries to deal seriously with the size of the Milky Way, which is almost unimaginably vast. Suppose we humans have settled the galaxy. How can humanity remain united when even something as basic as a radio transmission becomes too attenuated to decipher less than a quarter of the way across the galaxy, not to mention the thousands of light-years it would take to arrive?

Imagine no handwavium shortcuts like faster-than-light travel. Then imagine humanity’s many self-destructive foibles and the problems of survival in a galaxy mostly hostile to human life. That is, imagine trying to carry out the impossible task of keeping humanity connected.

I’ll be reading at the Last Fridays Poetry open mic on Friday, May 29, 8 p.m., at Esquina event space, 4602 N. Western Ave., Chicago. It’s a supportive environment, and all are welcome. This time, I won’t be reading poetry, I’ll be talking about poetry, specifically about translating poetry. Here’s what I plan to say:

***

Today, I won’t be reading poetry, I’ll be talking about poetry, specifically about translating poetry. I’ve lived in Spain and the United States, and sometimes I write poetry in English and Spanish, and there can be problems with translation.

For example, the Spanish language doesn’t have a verb equivalent to “finesse.” You can express the idea, of course. “She finessed her way into the party,” can be said in Spanish: Se las ingenió para entrar en la fiesta. “She used ingenuity on things to get into the party.” Not quite the same, but close.

That technique, using “ingenuity” to approximate “finesse,” is called compensation. Here’s another example. My English-language haiku:

nodding heads —

lavender flowers

weighted by bees

My translation into Spanish:

abejas

meciendo las flores

de lavanda

In Spanish, you nod by asentir con la cabeza or “to agree with the head.” A literal translation would not work. The closest word, mecer, means “to rock,” as in “the hand that rocks the cradle.” So I wrote a Spanish version that means, literally, “bees / rocking the flowers / of lavender.” It supplies the same physical picture, but the implied meaning is different.

On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, creating one of the world’s worst nuclear accidents. A haibun is a Japanese poetic form that combines prose and haiku, usually describing an event or travel. This is a haibun about my guided tour in April 2006 of Chernobyl.

I visited Chernobyl, and I also visited the National Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv, which tells the heartbreaking story of what happened and holds irreplaceable artifacts. Over the weekend, Russia deliberately destroyed the museum.

***

A military checkpoint marks the entrance to the Exclusion Zone, the contaminated area roughly 30 kilometers around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. More than 100,000 people were evacuated within days of its explosion and meltdown in April 1986. At the Chernobyl Interinform Agency, in a room filled with maps, we met our tour guide, Yuriy, who cheerfully answered our questions in Ukrainian and English. Then we reboarded our bus to head toward the areas marked in red on the maps.

his pocket dosimeter

ticking ever faster

our guide keeps smiling

As we approached the nuclear power plant complex, we passed the rusting cranes and beams of buildings whose construction had been halted overnight. But there is a new building.

Visitor Center —

women plant tulips

wearing face masks