And Then There Were (N-one) by Sarah Pinsker

I may have already mentioned that this is the first year I've bought a supporting membership so I can vote for the Hugos. This is a bit of a commitment for me, because although I do read a lot, I rarely read books close to the time they come out. Generally I get to them about two years later, so now I'm having to bump a bunch of last year's books to the top of my list.

Since the nominations were announced, I've read all the novelettes, all but one of the short stories, and this novella, the only one that was available online. I'm working on one novel and have another working its way through the library system to me. I feel like that's a good start in the two or three weeks since the nominations were announced.

"And Then There Were (N-one)" was a very enjoyable start to my Hugo Reading Trek 2018. It was the first work I read out, and I devoured it quite quickly. It took me an absurdly long time to get the (N-one) joke and then link it to Agatha Christie, but I got it early enough to know it was probably going to be a murder mystery, even before the murder happened.

In this story, a Sarah Pinsker who is not the Sarah Pinsker who is writing the story, is invited to a multiverse convention of Sarah Pinskers, hosted by the Sarah Pinsker who invented multiverse travel. It's on a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia, and the Sarahs arrive and leave from there directly, so as not to run amok on the world where multiverse travel began.

Initially, this is a story of paths not taken, of meeting hundreds of people who are you, in many important ways, of the wistfulness of seeing every forking path you never took walked by a different version of you.

But of course, a Sarah Pinsker turns up dead. The only Sarah Pinsker who is anything like an detective (an insurance investigator) is brought in by hotel staff to try to solve the murder. (Our Sarah Pinsker must be there somewhere, or at least, her Nebula is.)  She interviews Sarah Pinskers, finding out more about how her life is and isn't like theirs, including who else is married to the wife she wants to get to back to soon, who most of the other Sarahs met and married as well.

There's more melancholy to this than it might sound - so far, I think that as I'm describing it, it sounds like a slamming door farce, and there are funny bits, but it's more about what you did and didn't do with your life. Or, at any rate, what Sarah Pinsker did and didn't do.

When the solution to the mystery is revealed, it's fairly satisfying, but we are left with a cliffhanger, having to decide what, were we Sarah Pinsker, we would do about the murderer. I feel like that's less of a cliffhanger than you might want it to be - do you really want to let another version of your wife be married unawares to a murderer?

I haven't read any of the other novellas, but I enjoyed this a lot and expect it to rank well on my ballot. (Our universe's Sarah Pinsker's novelette, "Wind Will Rove," is without question going to be my top choice in that category.)