Hugo Reading - Novelette

For some reason I thought this category was of works longer than novellas, or I would have done this one earlier. Anyway, these are not-as-short stories, so I'm hoping for some good stuff.

• "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium", Gray Rinehart (Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, 05-2014)
  I quite liked this one. It felt like it needed one or two more go-rounds with an editor to finish polishing it, but it had good ideas, a functional and nasty threat and a character I liked as the lead. It was a good length for what it was trying to do. There were some questions and plot holes, but the set-up was good enough I didn't really worry about them until thinking about the tale in reflection. In short, a solid story. I'm not sure it's Hugo worthy, but it was good.
• "Championship B'tok", Edward M. Lerner (Analog, 09-2014)
  This story made me very upset. Not because it wasn't good, but because it was moderately ok and interesting... and then it just ended. No conclusions, no solutions, no answers. It just ended. I don't know, but I kind of expected the novelettes to be self-contained, or at least be the end of a chapter and not stop before any resolution. I wouldn't call this the best story even before the abrupt ending, but with that ending? No. Just no.
• "The Day the World Turned Upside Down", Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed, 04-2014)
  A charming little story with a little bit of whimsy along with some very odd science. It's also a romance story gone bad. It's an ok story, but I'm not sure it really deserves the Hugo.
• "The Journeyman: In the Stone House", Michael F. Flynn (Analog, 06-2014)
  I tried to read this. I started it three times but just couldn't get into it. The language turned me off, I guess. I just couldn't do it. I'm seeing people referring to this as "bouncing off" a work. I suppose that's descriptive enough. This work was not for me and will not be on my ballot.
• "The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale", Rajnar Vajra (Analog, 07/08-2014)
  This one came oh so close. It's almost there. It was a good tale, written with a lot of sarcastic wit. It was the wit that amused me the most, but it almost went over the top multiple times (which I guess would mean for some folks it did go over the top). It almost nailed the landing, but the impact wasn't nearly as great as I expected. I'm not sure where it stumbled, but it missed something in there that made it not quite as good as it ought to have been. Hugo worthy? No, not really.

There's a bunch of good stories here, but not one of them is what I'd call great. Two of them won't be on my ballot at all, B'tok and Journeyman. The other three might just rank themselves below "No Award". I'll be thinking hard on this one.