Matthew's Journal

I managed to read all of these and get my vote in just before the deadline. All six of these were good stories, and it was hard to rank them.

1. The Inaccessibility of Heaven, Aliette de Bodard; a well put together mystery tale with fallen angels
2. The Pill, Meg Elison; holds an uncomfortable mirror up to how we treat fat people and the pressures we put on them to lose weight
3. Monster, Naomi Kritzer; a well-realized if grim tale of biology, bullying, and betrayal
4. Two Truths and a Lie, Sarah Pinsker; this is a horror story about a children's TV presenter, weird and well-written
5. Helicopter Story, Isabel Fall; it was good to actually get to read this after all the kerfuffle around its publication, it's very angry and has a disappointingly binary view of gender, in my opinion
6. Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super, A.T. Greenblatt; a superhero with a not very useful power in a world where they are not valued, this is a well-constructed story, and putting it last feels a bit mean