Hugos 2025: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

I try to approach Hugo finalists with as few expectations as possible. If I don't know anything about a book going in, I try to keep that the case, so that the book can surprise me (for good or for ill) purely on its own terms. This was mostly true with The Ministry of Time, but I didn't quite manage it. One, I knew that some people on r/printSF didn't like it for being frivolous or lightweight, and, two, the book's own paratext gives that impression, with blurbs that say things like "An outrageously fun comedy" and "A delightfully audacious screwball comedy." Not that I don't like fun books or comedy books, I love them in fact... but I typically very much have not loved books that Hugo nominators think are fun comedies (e.g., Space Opera, Legends & Lattes, anything by John Scalzi), unless they're by T. Kingfisher.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Originally published: 2024
Acquired: April 2025
Read: May 2025

Well, the blurbs are all wrong because it's not a comedy, screwball or otherwise. Bizarrely wrong. Sure, there are some good jokes—indeed, there's one thoroughly excellent one that had be guffawing—but a book can have lots of jokes and still not be a comedy, and I certainly wouldn't read this if you were looking for one. In fact, if it owes anything to any genre outside of science fiction itself, it's clearly spy fiction; the title is a tip of the hat to Graham Greene. (I haven't actually got to The Ministry of Fear yet, but I have read a lot of his other stuff, and I've never read one I haven't liked.)

I don't want to say too much about the book here because I myself think I benefited from not knowing much about it, but the basic premise is that in the near future, the UK government has the technology to pull people out of the past, and they're testing it by pulling out people who are known to have died but their bodies weren't found, thus ensuring no timeline changes; the narrator is the "bridge" assigned to help polar explorer Graham Gore acclimate to the present day. (Gore is a real person, who died trying to find the Northwest Passage; so too did everyone else on his expedition.) The narrator used to work as a translator for the UK government, dealing with refugees, and is half-Cambodian herself.

It's a time-travel story, of course, but it's also a story about translation, about resettlement, told through an sfnal lens, about how we translate ourselves, about how we assimilate to other societies. It's about the past and how its attitudes are always with us—even into the future. I found it astutely observed, lots of great character-focused scenes that were beautifully told. At the time that I read it, I had three more finalist for Best Novel to read, but it was very clear to me this would be the one to beat. This is science fiction doing what only that genre can do, but doing it in a way that isn't generic at all. It's not a book everyone would love, I think, but it's a book I would love—it's not a big part of the book, but I loved how it interrogated our ideas about what it actually means to be "Victorian."

Two quibbles, one the author's fault, one not. No one in 1847 would ever use the phrase "career scientist" (p. 139). The term "scientist" was not yet widespread, and you certainly couldn't have a career as one, in fact you were much more likely to have the opposite! My second is that the note on p. 346 talks about the included illustrations, sketched by the actual Graham Gore... but my 2025 Sceptre paperback has no illustrations! I assume they were in the original hardcover edition. If you're gonna take them out, then make sure you also take out the note discussing them, guys.