Wrapped up my first Hugo category (not counting movies) yesterday by reading the fifth short story nominee, and I have to say I think that I'm missing the boat on short stories, in that when I used to read a lot of short sf I would invariably vote for stories that wouldn't get on the ballot, and now that I just read the nominees, I'm more often than not left uninspired by any of the choices and inevitably end up picking the one that comes in last. Short stories in the Hugo award can be capricious, since there's so many to choose from it doesn't take that many votes to get on the ballot (usually about 20), and those who've read them all and can vote with confidence are competing against those who'll read the ones by the big names they recognize and vote for them whether they were any good or not. What's good is that typically a few lesser known names (like Molly Gloss and Jeffrey Ford this year) end up on the ballot, but are up against probably inferior stories by writers who are more famous. Fame can mean either they're well regarded in sf in general and have been around for a long time, or it can just mean they go to a lot of conventions and get visibility that way. Last year's entries had a higher percentage of big names (Le Guin, Resnick, Baxter, Swanwick, and fan-friendly Burstein), but no big stories. All but Le Guin were also nominated in the same category the year before, and all lost to Dave Langford, not known as a fiction writer, but still popular enough for Ansible to snatch the award. What I typically look for in a short story is the same thing I look for in everything else, an idea that grabs you, a story with a point to make, not just a little slice of life vignette that goes nowhere, or a well-told rendition of an idea that doesn't seem that interesting or original, two categories that most of the short story nominees fall into. Short stories are notoriously difficult to write well for that reason, because you're basically under even more limitations to accomplish the same thing as a longer story. But plenty of classic sf authors did it all the time, and it was those short stories by Asimov and Bradbury and Clarke and on up through the alphabet that made a lot of us sf fans to begin with. Part of the problem is that a lot of the real idea-men and -women of the field don't write short stories any more, so they're left more to people who can write well but don't have much to say. James Patrick Kelly is probably among the best out there now, along with Terry Bisson and a couple of others, but even they write mostly longer stories these days, which is fine, but it makes for a tough call in the short story Hugo yet again this year.