Hugos 2020: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Hardcover, 448 pages
Published 2019
Acquired and read April 2020

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

This was the first Best Novel finalist I read for the 2020 Hugo Awards. I hope it's also the worst, because I found it a horrendous slog. The cover blurbs set you up to expect something dynamic and exciting: Charles Stross blurbed it as "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" I kept waiting for that bit happen, and was over halfway through before I realized that it was already happening. Reading that description had caused my mind to conjure up something more exciting than people solving banal puzzles on a planet. Sure, the planet is in space... but aren't all planets in space? Seems like a meaningless appellation in that case. And I don't think any haunting ever actually happened? A lot of the blurbs emphasize its pulpiness... but that led to me expect a lot of action, which there was very much not. And I didn't think there was anything particularly twisted going on, either.

Basically, Gideon is a servant of a noble house in a space empire, and goes with her mistress to a meeting of all the noble houses to solve a puzzle. I think this book very much lives or dies on if you care about Gideon. I never did. A lot of the character points are deployed weirdly late in the narrative; near the end, you learn something Gideon always thought was true is actually not true, but even though Gideon always thought it was true, you the reader learned about it so recently the reversal has no impact. The worldbuilding is thin; I never felt like I had an understanding of how this society functions. Who does this empire actually rule over? What actually is the magic system? Gideon talks like someone from a 2020s streaming series, not someone from a far-future feudal society.

It eventually became a chore to read this, one of those books that's over four hundred pages long, but if you asked me what happened, I could only come with about two hundred pages of incident at best. It's published by Tor's Tor.com imprint, and indeed, it reads like a mediocre Tor.com novella stretched out to novel length. I'm prepared to believe that, like last year's finalist Trail of Lightning, it's a good example of a genre/type of book that's Just Not for Me, but I don't really see anything award-worthy in what's at best a competently executed action novel.