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For the month of June, 2022, our short story choice is Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte.

This story has been nominated for this year's Hugo award. As far as I can tell, it is the only SF short story nominated this year. The others appear to be fantasy.

The story has 6296 words and can be read in Uncanny magazine here:

Thanks, Ed. On Mt. TBR!

Cool story. It was a thoughtful exploration of a new technology - a sort of consciousness after death - and how that relates to grieving loved ones and the potential to use a dead person's mind after they've passed.

Only two things I didn't like about it - the lack of dividers between different sections of the story, and I thought it could have gone a little further in exploring how society might use codas.

This story is a finalist for al of these awards: Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial.

And I don't see why. I don't see anything special about it. The basic idea of keeping a consciousness running after death has been explored many times. I don't think this adds any significant new twist. In the story the main character continues to work on a math problem with his father's uploaded consciousness. I've never seen that done before, but it isn't very interesting to me.

It is a perfectly fine story. But I don't understand all the award nominations.

Since I know nothing about Iriarte, I went over and looked at their twitter. Here is what I learned...

They use the pronoun 'they'.
They are a high school math teacher in Florida.
They are one of 5 "Directors at large" for the SFWA.

They recently posted this: Someday, hopefully years from now, my gravestone will read, "Okay, but it's called 'Proof BY Induction.'"

So, I guess someone, somewhere, has been calling the story by the wrong title.

Iriarte talks in depth about this story here:



In short, this is a deeply personal story. The emotional part with a child looking to please a parent comes from real life.

While an after-death consciousness isn't unique, all the times I've read it before it's been a full consciousness, a sapient being. Hamilton's Commonwealth, Banks' Culture, and Taylor's Bobiverse come to mind. The coda in this story isn't that - there's no persistent memory, no emotional depth. Perhaps a parallel could be drawn to the headmaster portraits of the Harry Potter series.

For me, this is enough of a difference, or "twist", as you put it, to be worth writing about. I thought the story was clever in the way it tied the math to the emotional neediness.

Cute little story. "You are my n + 1" haha. I'm glad by the end Paulie gave up on his father telling him he loved him and was proud of him. Let it go and break the cycle with your own family--we all have to do that.