This past year I read a total of 341 short stories, 138 novelets, and 37 novellas. That compares to totals of 303, 115, and 34 in the same categories last year. So I read a bit more, which to be honest I didn't expect. Anyway, 516 pieces of short fiction in all.
Let's do novellas first. No less than 14 seem worthy of mention. I'll list my five tentative Hugo nominees first, then the other ones I thought were pretty good.
"Dapple", by Eleanor Arnason (Asimov's)
"The Actors", by Eleanor Arnason (F&SF)
"Orphans of the Helix", by Dan Simmons (Far Horizons)
"Once Upon a Matter Crushed", by Wil McCarthy (SF Age)
"Twenty-One, Counting Up", by Harry Turtledove (Analog)
"Argonautica", by Walter Jon Williams (Asimov's)
"Forty, Counting Down", by Harry Turtledove (Asimov's)
"Son Observe the Time", by Kage Baker (Asimov's)
"The Wedding Album", by David Marusek (Asimov's)
"Old Music and the Slave Women", by Ursula K. Le Guin (Far Horizons)
"The Gateway of Eternity", by Brian M. Stableford (Interzone)
"Fortitude", by Andy Duncan (Realms of Fantasy)
"Epiphany", by Connie Willis (Miracle and Other Christmas Stories)
"The Astronaut from Wyoming", by Jerry Oltion and Adam-Troy Castro (Analog)
14 novellas is a lot, but in a way I'm not sure it was such a great year. I think one reason I've listed so many is that I was only really excited by the first three on my list. (That is, if I had five or 6 stories that I really liked, I might not have bothered to list the rest.) The Turtledove stories are hard to evaluate, because they really form a diptych, and can't properly be evaluated alone. Indeed, I may end up just nominating "Argonautica" instead.
The Hugo Nomination list including only "Son Observe the Time" and "The Astronaut from Wyoming" and "Forty, Counting Down" from my longer list. The others were Connie Willis' "The Winds of Marble Arch", which won (unfortunately, in my view), and a very routine, very ordinary story by Mike Resnick, "Hunting the Snark". A bad year for the Hugo voters, I think.
In the novelets, normally a strong category, I came up with 16 that I wish to mention. I'm certain of the first story on the Hugo nomination list, the rest are a bit less fixed in my mind.
"Stellar Harvest", by Eleanor Arnason (Asimov's)
"Attack of the Ignoroids", by Wayne Wightman (F&SF)
"Where Does the Town Go at Night", by Tanith Lee (Interzone)
"At Reparata", by Jeffrey Ford (Event Horizon)
"Chanoyu", by Esther Friesner (Asimov's)
"Fossil Games", by Tom Purdom (Asimov's)
"Strongbow", by R. Garcia y Robertson (F&SF)
"Border Guards", by Greg Egan (Interzone)
"Naming the Dead", by Paul J. McAuley (Interzone)
"Recalled to Home", by Michael Armstrong (Asimov's)
"The Giftie", by James Gunn (Analog)
"The Fourth Branch", by Kage Baker (Amazing)
"Soldier's Home", by William Barton (Asimov's)
"Scarlet and Gold", by Tanith Lee (Weird Tales)
"The Secret Exhibition", by Brian Stableford (Weird Tales)
"The Secret History of the Ornithopter", by Jen Lars Jensen (F&SF)
Basically, I thought "Stellar Harvest" definitely the best novelet of the year. Numbers 2 through 8 on my list are really vying for the four other Hugo nomination spots.
The Hugo nomination list included "Stellar Harvest", "Border Guards", "Fossil Games", "The Secret History of the Ornithopter", and one story I don't list here, "10**16 to 1", by James Patrick Kelly. Naturally, the Kelly story won. I like Kelly's work a lot, he's won of my favorite writers. But I downgraded this story because I was unconvinced by its central argument. Oddly enough, the notion that someone like me might be unconvinced by that argument was part of the whole point of the story. But there you have it. Still, it's a well-done story, and I don't consider its win to be a bad thing.
This year was a great year for short stories. In many years, I have a hard time finding more than a couple really memorable stories, though there is always a crowd just behind them. But my Hugo nomination list often consists of say three that I really like and a couple more that I don't mind adding. This year I'm having a hard time cutting the nomination list to 5. Anyway, here's my tentative Hugo nomination list for short stories, plus some 18 additional good stories, of which the first few are just about as good as the top ones.
"Suicide Coast", by M. John Harrison (F&SF)
"Jennifer, Just Before Midnight", by William Sanders (F&SF)
"Sailing the Painted Ocean", by Denise Lee (Realms of Fantasy)
"Lifework", by Mary Soon Lee (Interzone)
"Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz", by David Marusek (Asimov's)
"Human Bay", by Robert Reed (Asimov's)
"From Alfano's Reliquary", by Andy Duncan (Weird Tales)
"macs", by Terry Bisson (F&SF)
"Everywhere", by Geoff Ryman (Interzone)
"In from the Commons", by Tony Daniel (Asimov's)
"Dirty Little Cowards", by William Sanders (Asimov's)
"The Volvax Immersion", by Tom Arden (Interzone)
"Grandma's Bubble and the Speaking Clock", by Alexander Glass (Interzone)
"Tranquillity", by Mary Soon Lee (Interzone)
"Her", by Stephen Woodworth (F&SF)
"Dear Floods of Her Hair", by James Sallis (F&SF)
"Of Scorned Women and Causal Loops", by Robert Grossbach (F&SF)
"Original Sin", by S. N. Dyer (Asimov's)
"Jaycee", by Daniel Abraham (Asimov's)
"The Challenger", by Robert Reed (SF Age)
"Painted Houses", by Melisa Michaels (The Age of Reason)
"Ars Poetica", by Neile Graham (Odyssey)
"Outcasts", by Kevin J. O'Donnell, Jr. (Quantum)
I really think the top 10 or 12 stories on this list are good stories to nominate for the Hugo, stories that it hurts me to have to leave five of off. (Beyond that, no order is meant to be implied, by the way.)
The eventual Hugo nominations included only "macs" from my list, and in addition "Hothouse Flowers" by Resnick, "Sarajevo" by Nicholas di Chario, and two stories by 1999 winner Michael Swanwick, "Scherzo for Tyrannosaur" and "Ancient Engines". Swanwick won again, with "Scherzo for Tyrannosaur". He had three stories on last year's short list. I'm proposing that we rename the Short Story Hugo the Michael Swanwick Invitational. As to the merits of the Hugo: both Swanwick stories were decent, and even though I preferred "Ancient Engines" I don't the "Scherzo" is a terrible story. That said, for two years in a row, the Hugo has gone to the worst of the multiple Swanwick choices, in my opinion. As for the Resnick and di Chario stories, well, perhaps the less said the better. Oh,they're not rotten, but by golly, a Hugo nomination ought to be special. And you know, I'm looking again at my list of stories. Maybe not enough Hugo nominators read fantasy magazines, but by golly "Sailing a Painted Ocean" is special, it's a fantastic story, and more people should see it. (Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling did choose it for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.) And "Everywhere" by Geoff Ryman is wonderful: another story that keeps growing in my memory. But it appeared in a British magazine. This also applies to "Lifework". And maybe "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz" was downgraded because it's a comedy. And maybe my favorite story, "Suicide Coast", is too overtly literary for some tastes. I remain quite puzzled, though, by the omission of "Jennifer, Just Before Midnight" and "Human Bay". And I still maintain, strongly, that any list of any five of the top ten stories I listed would be far better than the Hugo nomination list. Oh well.
I am amused to see that my own Hugo nomination list had three stories by a woman named Arnason (all the same woman), and three stories by a woman named Lee (three different women).
My pick for most interesting SF thematic trend of the last couple of years is the focus on what I'll call "posthumans", that is, humans so radically altered as to not seem the same species anymore. In the stories I've listed, this is explicitly a theme of the Egan, Purdom and Barton novelets, and the Simmons and McCarthy novellas. I see a fairly high number of offworld pieces among the novellas and novelets, though that counts explicit fantasies like the Ford and Tanith Lee novelets. If memory serves, though, every single short story I list is set on Earth, except for Tony Daniel's story. By contrast, 5 of 11 SF (as opposed to Fantasy) novelets are off-Earth, and 5 of 14 novellas are off-Earth. Those latter percentages seem a bit higher than in recent years. Some variety of time travel or alternate history is featured in 11 of the 52 stories I've mentioned here, which again seems a high total.
All in all, it's been a good year for short SF, if not perhaps an outstanding year. And at least the short story crop is excellent.