Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer (2024)

This is one of a series of posts I am doing as I read the short stories that have won the Hugo award since it was started in 1954.

I’m reading this story out of order as I am jumping from the 90s, the last years there are print collections of the Hugo winning short stories, to this 2024 Hugo Short story winner. That is a 30-year jump, so there are doubtless a great many trends and developments in the Hugo winners that I might miss as a result. Up to this point I have read the Hugo winners mostly in order as I found the print collections. But now that I am heading into territory where there are no print collections for the Hugo winners, reading may become more sporadic. So might need to make follow up posts as I develop a greater understanding of this story’s place in the literature of contemporary science fiction.

The plot is that a character starts to use a well-ness app that is more intrusive, and helpful, than the main character might expect from a well-ness app. It knows way more about the main character than it really should and the app’s advice is surprisingly helpful, such as letting the character know when their boss will be out and they can take off early from work. The completely unsurprising twist at the end is that the app is run by an AI that was tasked to make people happy. The AI escaped its researchers and set up the app.

This story goes through an interesting cycle of being sort of creepy at the beginning as the main character and her friend think the app is really a cult and the app’s behavior does seem cult-like. Yet at the end it seems almost touching as various people who enjoyed the app get together to draw and enjoy nature together. On one hand this seems like a bit of tonal whiplash and yet it also feels very much like the experience of the internet, apps and AI in our current moment. It (the website, app, AI, etc.) all seems a bit creepy, then you find a great community though it and then it’s destroyed by advertising and the lowering of quality to the point that it is useless. And what you are left with at the end ideally is a community of people that you can stay in touch with no matter the platform you are on.

So overall, I don’t know how I feel about this story on a technical level, but it wonderfully captures the digital experience of the internet, apps and AI. As a result this makes it easy to suspend disbelief for the various elements that do not make sense or are rather convenient, like how the main character’s friend is also the journalist who breaks the story of the app being run by an AI. The story also brings up for me an odd feature of current (in 2026) science fiction, which is that science fiction has in many ways become the literature of our time. The robots are here and stories about people interacting with AI are very real instead of being a pulp fiction trope. For me this really raises the question of whether this is even science fiction, or is it just literature? What would a science fiction that considers what the world will look like in 30-100 years look like?

Source: [clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_0… ]

Read: February 26, 2026