Hugo-nominated short fiction for 2014

Every year, over the summer, after the Hugo nominees are announced, I read at least all the short fiction nominees.  It's also been my habit to write short notes as I read the stories and rank them so I can vote, and I share those with you now, by category:

Novella

1. "The Butcher of Khardov" by Dan Wells: Sword and sorcery, with a Russian flavor. I was unimpressed through the first third, but then it turns into an interesting psychological portrait of a broken warrior, trying to maintain his humanity, and failing.
2. "Equoid" by Charles Stross: A novella in Stross's "Laundry" universe, taking yet another page out of HP Lovecraft. Unicorns are not cute and fluffy, but actually dangerous eaters of souls, and they're invading rural England. More of the same from Bob Howard's universe of eldritch horrors.
3. "The Chaplain's Legacy" by Brad Torgersen: A chaplain's assistant who was a prisoner of war holds the key to preventing a resumption of an alien war, except the powers-that-be want to fight on regardless. A rehash of CJ Cherryh's stunning 1986 nominee "The Scapegoat," crossed with a bit of CM Kornbluth's Not This August. 
4. "Wakulla Springs" by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages: An excellent literary story, but there is no science fiction content here, until perhaps the last three paragraphs.
5. "Six-Gun Snow White" by Catherynne M Valente: Retelling Snow White with a western flavor, mashed up in a feminist narrative, dragging on for too many pages to drudge through.

Novelette

1. "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal: An astronaut wants one last long-range exploratory flight, but must leave her dying husband to do so. Lovely cross-references to L Frank Baum.
2. "The Exchange Officers" by Brad Torgersen: Space battle in low earth orbit between American and Chinese astronauts. Annoying political swipes, but well-told.
3. "The Waiting Stars" by Aliette de Bodard: Humans transplanted into cyborg starship-controlling minds, and one family rescuing their matriarch whose ship is lost, and her mind transplanted into another body.
4. "Opera Vita Aeterna" by Vox Day: An elf decides to explore human religion, and becomes a scribe in a monastery. Workmanlike, not stunning.
5. "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang: What's the difference between recording our thoughts in writing or electronically taping everything around us? Like all Chiang stories the message is "life is shit and you have to live with it."

Short Story

These were uniformly bad. I only finished Olde Huevelt and Chu's stories, which were both pointless. The other two were unreadably bad, even the Swirsky which is only a thousand words.  How did these get nominated?  Is the good short fiction only in the longer two categories now?  I know that excellent stories can be written at less than 8000 words, as evidenced by last year's stunning Ken Liu story "Mono no Aware."

• "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky
• "The Ink Readers of Doi Saket" by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
• "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" by Sofia Samatar
• "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu

If you've been following the controversy, you'll know that a number of nominees appear, in part, because of a concerted campaign by novelist Larry Correia and Vox Day.  Day (a penname for Theodore Beale) has been spouting some vile, misogynist, racist claptrap, which (when he posted it on the official Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Twitter account) got him expelled from SFWA. However, I believe that's immaterial:  I think we need to read the nominees on their merits, not the views of their authors.  And, I'm not sure but that the "Vox Day" screeds are an act of self-promotion -- I can't believe that in this day and age anyone actually believes the crap he's been saying.