The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2012) starts with Fry, a female member of a spaceship crew in orbit around Jupiter, breaking her leg.
After this there is a lot of scene setting, most of which is about her being a “two-stepper” (an unmodified human) in a crew of “octos” (I presume these are humans that have transitioned to being octopuses; we find later that others have become Nautiluses, but I can’t remember seeing any particular reason why people would do either).
Arkae (the octo narrator) then visits Fry in hospital, and learns that her sponsors on Earth want her back dirtside. Fry decides to transition (presumably to avoid having to go back) and gets Arkae to contact Dove, a Nautilus lawyer.
Most of the rest of the story is a lot of waffle that includes: how octos live together as a group; Arkae’s team finding that there are missing sensors in the ring (the big job everyone is on are the preparations for observing a comet pass by Jupiter); and the bad feeling that exists between the two-steppers and octos. Eventually (and not soon enough for me) Arkae gets a message from Fry saying she has—surprise!—become a Nautilus instead of an octo, and has joined the Jupiter colony, who are going to hitch a lift on the comet and seed the Oort.
There is very little in way of story here, and most of it seems to be Arkae endlessly talking about everything and nothing:
Fry had worked with some other JovOp crews before us, all of them mixed—two-steppers and sushi. I guess they all liked her and vice versa but she clicked right into place with us, which is pretty unusual for a biped and an all-octo crew. I liked her right away and that’s saying something because it usually takes me a while to resonate even with sushi. I’m okay with featherless bipeds, I really am. Plenty of sushi—more than will admit to it—have a problem with the species just on general principle, but I’ve always been able to get along with them. Still, they aren’t my fave flave to crew with out here. Training them is harder, and not because they’re stupid. Two-steppers just aren’t made for this. Not like sushi. But they keep on coming and most of them tough it out for at least one square dec. It’s as beautiful out here as it is dangerous. I see a few outdoors almost every day, clumsy starfish in suits.
Blah, blah, blah—and this goes on for twenty pages or so. Bafflingly, this won the 2013 Hugo for Best Novelette (and topped the Locus Poll): I don’t know if this was because it was a bad year for short fiction or whether this got the trans and/or minority and/or Fans are Slans vote.1
* (Mediocre). 8,850 words.
1. Fans have, in the past, viewed themselves as a mocked minority, and so have a tendency to identify with persecuted minorities in SF stories (especially when they are supermen in hiding), e.g. the Slans in A. E. van Vogt’s novel of the same name.