The Nebula Novella Finalists

After their kingdom was flooded, the few survivors struggle along on an ark with scant resources, always aware of the ravenous beasts that circle them. Iraxi is one of the refugees, a common who is pregnant with a child that might not be entirely human, ostracized because she refused the advances of a prince. Her fate and her child’s will change their world… though for better or ill is the question.

On the island of Alimnia lives an old woman who is a tattoo artist for the dead, who ensures that their spirits can reach the promised waters of heaven, and her estranged daughter. They come together to clear the air between them, to lay to rest a lost brother and son.

Elder diplomat Bréone Hemmerli has one last task she’s set herself–to negotiate a new peace between humanity and a species of aliens that have come to an Earth slowly falling to ruin due to climate change. Unfortunately for Bréone and the future of humanity, her memory has also started to fail… and when she and the alien, named Tura, find a way forward, she can no longer remember.

In a space opera retelling of The Little Mermaid, the galaxy has been populated by scattered clans of gene-edited humans, those who live in the sea and those who live on land. The daughter of a Sea-Clan lord, Atuale, started a war between two clans by choosing to marry a land-bound husband. But now he and his people are dying of a plague, and she must find a cure at all costs.

Princess Thanh spent most of her childhood as a hostage in the kingdom of Ephteria, which hasn’t moved to colonize her homeland… though it’s only a matter of time. While there, she had her first romance–with the daughter of Ephteria’s ruler–and survived a devastating fire that destroyed much of the royal palace. Now back home, she must navigate between that first love, her conflicted relationship with her disapproving mother, and her loyalty to her home country–and herself.

Jewel is an established courtesan in a luxurious and well-renowned House in a far-future city where the government will cull anyone for a single mistake. Jewel is keeping her head down and living her life… until one of her friends dies at the hands of a client and then, even more shockingly, comes back to life.

Centuries ago, the robots used as mindless workers in Panga became self-aware and walked out into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Until one day, a tea monk having a crisis of purpose meets one of the robots who has returned. The robot has a very specific mission: to find out the answer to the question, “What do people need?”