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We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read
2025 Hugo Award Voter Packet edition (Best Short Story nominee).
21 pages, ebook
Published April 23, 2025
23 people want to read
About the author
Caroline M. Yoachim
100 books92 followersCaroline M. Yoachim is a writer and photographer living in Seattle, WA. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers' Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. For more about Caroline, check out her website at: http://www.carolineyoachim.com
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
July 12, 2025
کلافهام کرد!
۴.۱۴۰۴
۴.۱۴۰۴
July 29, 2025
5 Experimental Stars
Provocative perspective on reading, thinking, and the workings of "other" minds.
You can read it for free (with adverts on the front and back ends) here: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...
I attempted to read the text but just didn't "get it." I found the audio to be much more digestable, a first for me 🧚♀️🙋🏼!
Provocative perspective on reading, thinking, and the workings of "other" minds.
You can read it for free (with adverts on the front and back ends) here: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...
I attempted to read the text but just didn't "get it." I found the audio to be much more digestable, a first for me 🧚♀️🙋🏼!
July 23, 2025
Incredibly experimental and while interesting on that level, I didn't really connect with it. There is a bit of an emotional quality running through this in the desperation of the being trying to teach you how to read, but the nature of following along with the "instructions" while reading the story almost made it impossible to actually view this as a story or connect with it as a story. It's an experiment, and a neat one at that, but there wasn't much else there for me.
Read it here at Lightspeed Magazine.
Read it here at Lightspeed Magazine.
August 12, 2025
So far, my favourite Hugo finalist in short fiction categories. Hybrid and genre bending and frankly haunting.
June 11, 2025
Massively parallel insects
Caroline M. Yoachim's We Will Teach You How to Read, which you can find at Lightspeed magazine. is a finalist for the 2025 Best Short Story Hugo. It's not quite a story in the classical beginning-middle-end sense. In fact, it could have been proposed in the poetry, or even graphic art category. What it definitely is, though, is a lot of effort to read. And when I got to the end, I felt cheated. For that much work, I wanted more than I got.
It purports to be a missive from a species that thinks and communicates very differently from the way we do. Spoiler ahead: I'm going to explain them to you.
I think of them as what you'd get if Nvidia manufactured insects. Nvidia is (as of this writing, 11-June-2025) the second most valuable company in the world by market capitalization. On some days, depending on stock market fluctuations, it is number one. They make video accelerators. A single accelerator board contains dozens or hundreds or thousands of processors that all run in parallel. They are called video accelerators or graphic processing units (GPUs) because they were originally designed to speed up the calculations needed to produce video on the screens of gamers. Eventually people realized that the vast majority of electronic computing power on the planet was in GPUs, and they became central to the training of artificial intelligence models. It is for that reason that on some days Nvidia is the world's most valuable company.
Each of the organisms that purportedly wrote We Will Teach You How to Read has a brain (using the word loosely) that operates like a GPU, thinking in hundreds of parallel streams.
At the same time they have a three-stage life cycle, in which each stage dissolves to serve as the basis for the next stage. Each one can think 3n thoughts in a lifetime, where n is the number it can think in parallel during each stage. So the number of thoughts that can be thought in sequence is only three.
The life-cycle reminded me of insects. Metamorphic insects have a three-stage life cycle: larva, pupa, and adult. (Really, it's four: egg, larva, pupa, adult, but close enough -- the larva is really continuous with the egg.) The larva dissolves away completely, except for the nervous system, to make the pupa, which then builds a new organism -- the adult -- from the juice.
So there you have it. That explanation is, for me at least, much clearer than We Will Teach You How to Read .
"You're missing the whole point!" I hear you shout. No, I'm really not. I got the point. The point is to attempt to convey the 3n way that the notional authors think and communicate in such a way as to make a human sort of feel it. Yes, I did that. I got it.
It's an exercise in deliberate obscurity. That's a thing I never enjoy.
Blog review.
Caroline M. Yoachim's We Will Teach You How to Read, which you can find at Lightspeed magazine. is a finalist for the 2025 Best Short Story Hugo. It's not quite a story in the classical beginning-middle-end sense. In fact, it could have been proposed in the poetry, or even graphic art category. What it definitely is, though, is a lot of effort to read. And when I got to the end, I felt cheated. For that much work, I wanted more than I got.
It purports to be a missive from a species that thinks and communicates very differently from the way we do. Spoiler ahead: I'm going to explain them to you.
I think of them as what you'd get if Nvidia manufactured insects. Nvidia is (as of this writing, 11-June-2025) the second most valuable company in the world by market capitalization. On some days, depending on stock market fluctuations, it is number one. They make video accelerators. A single accelerator board contains dozens or hundreds or thousands of processors that all run in parallel. They are called video accelerators or graphic processing units (GPUs) because they were originally designed to speed up the calculations needed to produce video on the screens of gamers. Eventually people realized that the vast majority of electronic computing power on the planet was in GPUs, and they became central to the training of artificial intelligence models. It is for that reason that on some days Nvidia is the world's most valuable company.
Each of the organisms that purportedly wrote We Will Teach You How to Read has a brain (using the word loosely) that operates like a GPU, thinking in hundreds of parallel streams.
At the same time they have a three-stage life cycle, in which each stage dissolves to serve as the basis for the next stage. Each one can think 3n thoughts in a lifetime, where n is the number it can think in parallel during each stage. So the number of thoughts that can be thought in sequence is only three.
The life-cycle reminded me of insects. Metamorphic insects have a three-stage life cycle: larva, pupa, and adult. (Really, it's four: egg, larva, pupa, adult, but close enough -- the larva is really continuous with the egg.) The larva dissolves away completely, except for the nervous system, to make the pupa, which then builds a new organism -- the adult -- from the juice.
So there you have it. That explanation is, for me at least, much clearer than We Will Teach You How to Read .
"You're missing the whole point!" I hear you shout. No, I'm really not. I got the point. The point is to attempt to convey the 3n way that the notional authors think and communicate in such a way as to make a human sort of feel it. Yes, I did that. I got it.
It's an exercise in deliberate obscurity. That's a thing I never enjoy.
Blog review.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 17, 2025
Weird, original, very experimental, a little moving, and I was invested the whole time reading it
August 19, 2025
I just heard Yoachim's impassioned reading of her Hugo-nominated story at WorldCon. She used audio clips of herself to perform the multiplexing, up to four voices at one point. This story is fantastic in print, but when she performs it, the experience is phenomenal. I was practically in tears. The podcast version at Lightspeed comes close, but it did not move me so.
August 29, 2025
I did not enjoy this one, but perhaps listening to it would provide a superior experience.
August 8, 2025
The first three short stories in my Hugo nominee readings were not ‘all that’ as the saying goes. Either they didn’t have enough room to work, they didn’t work for me, or they just plain didn’t work. I’m not alone in that opinion, as the contributors to the Hugo Readalong on reddit had similar thoughts. I want to say that this is a case of ‘great minds think alike’, but even if it’s just that we all went down the same rabbit hole, it is what it is.
This penultimate story in my personal readalong turned out to be one of my favorites. I think I LIKED this one more than the last story, but I think that one had a bit more to say. Or something like that. The two together certainly made my voting decision a LOT harder than those first three stories led me to believe – and I’m glad of it.
The decision, after all, is supposed to be hard. At least at the top of the ballot. This and the last story, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole?” did make it a whole lot more difficult. They turned a mostly ‘meh’ list into an ‘eeny, meany, miney, moe’ choice.
When I first saw the title of THIS story, I thought it was a typo. It’s not. Instead, it’s the first hint of the experimental way this story is told. An experiment which works fantastically well in audio and doesn’t hit nearly as hard in text (at least according to Mr. Reading Reality) – although it certainly tries.
But seriously, get the audio. It’s free and only takes 20 minutes to listen to and it’s so worth it.
The story, within the story, within the story, because that’s part of the structure, is told side-by-side-by-side. Which is what makes the audio work as each of the iterations is read by a distinctly different voice, and those voices overlapping conveys the import of the whole thing, as this is a story of an oral tradition being told by a people or race or species that is dying.
Their own people have fallen away from their traditional telling, and they’re desperate to tell their story as it’s meant to be told, one last time, to the humans who have taken over or conquered them or simply assimilated what’s left of their people.
We don’t know, because we don’t need to know and that’s not what they are trying to tell us. They just want to be remembered in their own words for who they actually were and not what later, fragmented history will make of them – if it makes anything of them at all.
Which makes this story both quite beautiful and heartbreakingly sad and feel like a sigh of relief, all at the same time.
Escape Rating A-: What made this story work for me, and work really well, is that underlying the actual message of the thing it bears a sharp and equally heartbreaking resemblance to the Star Trek Next Gen episode “The Inner Light”. (If you’re trying to remember which one that is, it’s the one with the flute.)
In that episode, Picard experiences the life of a man named Kamin, living out that life as an ironworker on the planet Kataan. He experiences an entire life – love and grief and joy and happiness and everything in between – but when Kamin dies in the memory Picard is returned to the present and the Enterprise. The people of Kataan died out long ago, but one of their final acts as a people was to send out a probe that allowed others, as Picard has just done, to experience their lives as they were.
It’s the same kind of legacy that the people of THIS story were so desperate to leave behind, although the medium they used was very different.
Because the way this story is told in text, with its parallel lines of similar but not exactly alike versions of the story, is meant to be grasped as a whole and not as the separate streams our human brains want it to be, it works fantastically well in audio as the marvelous voice cast (Stefan Rudnicki, Ruth Wallman, Allison Belle Bews, and the author Caroline M. Yoachim) can speak over each other and in counterpoint to give a sense of the fullness of the story as it would traditionally be told.
So take the time. Listen, and then listen again because there’s more in the repetition, as there should be.
Originally published at Reading Reality
This penultimate story in my personal readalong turned out to be one of my favorites. I think I LIKED this one more than the last story, but I think that one had a bit more to say. Or something like that. The two together certainly made my voting decision a LOT harder than those first three stories led me to believe – and I’m glad of it.
The decision, after all, is supposed to be hard. At least at the top of the ballot. This and the last story, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole?” did make it a whole lot more difficult. They turned a mostly ‘meh’ list into an ‘eeny, meany, miney, moe’ choice.
When I first saw the title of THIS story, I thought it was a typo. It’s not. Instead, it’s the first hint of the experimental way this story is told. An experiment which works fantastically well in audio and doesn’t hit nearly as hard in text (at least according to Mr. Reading Reality) – although it certainly tries.
But seriously, get the audio. It’s free and only takes 20 minutes to listen to and it’s so worth it.
The story, within the story, within the story, because that’s part of the structure, is told side-by-side-by-side. Which is what makes the audio work as each of the iterations is read by a distinctly different voice, and those voices overlapping conveys the import of the whole thing, as this is a story of an oral tradition being told by a people or race or species that is dying.
Their own people have fallen away from their traditional telling, and they’re desperate to tell their story as it’s meant to be told, one last time, to the humans who have taken over or conquered them or simply assimilated what’s left of their people.
We don’t know, because we don’t need to know and that’s not what they are trying to tell us. They just want to be remembered in their own words for who they actually were and not what later, fragmented history will make of them – if it makes anything of them at all.
Which makes this story both quite beautiful and heartbreakingly sad and feel like a sigh of relief, all at the same time.
Escape Rating A-: What made this story work for me, and work really well, is that underlying the actual message of the thing it bears a sharp and equally heartbreaking resemblance to the Star Trek Next Gen episode “The Inner Light”. (If you’re trying to remember which one that is, it’s the one with the flute.)
In that episode, Picard experiences the life of a man named Kamin, living out that life as an ironworker on the planet Kataan. He experiences an entire life – love and grief and joy and happiness and everything in between – but when Kamin dies in the memory Picard is returned to the present and the Enterprise. The people of Kataan died out long ago, but one of their final acts as a people was to send out a probe that allowed others, as Picard has just done, to experience their lives as they were.
It’s the same kind of legacy that the people of THIS story were so desperate to leave behind, although the medium they used was very different.
Because the way this story is told in text, with its parallel lines of similar but not exactly alike versions of the story, is meant to be grasped as a whole and not as the separate streams our human brains want it to be, it works fantastically well in audio as the marvelous voice cast (Stefan Rudnicki, Ruth Wallman, Allison Belle Bews, and the author Caroline M. Yoachim) can speak over each other and in counterpoint to give a sense of the fullness of the story as it would traditionally be told.
So take the time. Listen, and then listen again because there’s more in the repetition, as there should be.
Originally published at Reading Reality
July 10, 2025
An experimental work, “We will teach you how to read | We will teach you how to read” presents a guide where the author attempts to pass on the knowledge of their civilisation to to the reader. Their civilisation has came to an end, leaving commemoration in place of the iteration of life.
The work can be read in different ways, as a reader of the message and as the author desperate to leave a legacy behind. The unexplained role of the author and the reader leaves the storyline up for imagination and exploration, making it an intriguing story to ponder upon.
The work can be read in different ways, as a reader of the message and as the author desperate to leave a legacy behind. The unexplained role of the author and the reader leaves the storyline up for imagination and exploration, making it an intriguing story to ponder upon.
July 4, 2025
(3.5/5 stars)
I initially tried listening to the audiobook for this one while following along with the text. That didn't quite work for me.
The narrative structure has two things going on, side by side on the page. I stopped the audio and tried to read it with my eyes instead, which worked way better for me.
I kind of wonder if this should have been in the Poetry category instead of the Short Story category. It's definitely another example of experimental speculative fiction!
I initially tried listening to the audiobook for this one while following along with the text. That didn't quite work for me.
The narrative structure has two things going on, side by side on the page. I stopped the audio and tried to read it with my eyes instead, which worked way better for me.
I kind of wonder if this should have been in the Poetry category instead of the Short Story category. It's definitely another example of experimental speculative fiction!
August 3, 2025
Amazing story, primarily due to its mode of delivery. Which is the story.
If you want a truly engaging experience with an alien way of thinking, look up the audio version of this story on Lightspeed Magazines' podcast. Sit yourself down with a pair of good headphones. Give it your full attention.
If you want a truly engaging experience with an alien way of thinking, look up the audio version of this story on Lightspeed Magazines' podcast. Sit yourself down with a pair of good headphones. Give it your full attention.
August 9, 2025
This did not work so well for me as a short story. If had been nominated in the poertry category though it would have romped it in for me. It is the rhythm of the repetition which does it.
An alien race seeks our assistance. But it does not communicate as we do. Much might be lost in translation.
A finalist for 2026 Hugo Award for Short Story.
An alien race seeks our assistance. But it does not communicate as we do. Much might be lost in translation.
A finalist for 2026 Hugo Award for Short Story.
May 30, 2025
Read for the 2025 Hugos
I don't like abstract art. I don't get it. This story feels like abstract art to me. I don't know what the author is trying to say. I'm sure it's good art, but I think I need someone to explain it to me.
I don't like abstract art. I don't get it. This story feels like abstract art to me. I don't know what the author is trying to say. I'm sure it's good art, but I think I need someone to explain it to me.
June 27, 2025
I'm not sure I understood everything, but I really appreciate the experiment. I listened to the podcast version, which is quite something. I may read the text version again just to see how different the experience is.
May 13, 2025
Experimental book that didn't work for me
May 20, 2025
A very cool concept, touching, well presented
May 24, 2025
wasn't crazy about the format, distracted me too much.
Read
May 30, 2025This was perhaps not written for me.
June 7, 2025
read at: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fi...
Very clever, made me think and go over it additional times
Very clever, made me think and go over it additional times
June 11, 2025
Formatting was distracting and detracted from the story. Read for the Hugo awards.
July 13, 2025
extra credit for doing something interesting, even if I didn't feel like it super landed for me
July 16, 2025
An effective short story, especially in audio form (although I initially thought my audio file was corrupt). This could easily transfer to the stage.
August 8, 2025
(Mostly notes to myself)
2025 Hugo Nominee Short Story category (6 of 6)
Abstract, experimental, not my cuppa tea but kudos to the author for doing something different.
2025 Hugo Nominee Short Story category (6 of 6)
Abstract, experimental, not my cuppa tea but kudos to the author for doing something different.
August 26, 2025
I love experimental stuff like this. Your mileage may vary.
June 29, 2025
Mega Ted Chiang vibes.
Felt more like a poetry than a short story.
4.5ish star
Felt more like a poetry than a short story.
4.5ish star
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews