Okay, second in my series of 2025 Hugo posts we have my reviews of all the books: Best Novel, Best Related Work (though once again we have a year with very few books), and Best Young Adult Book. Like I said in my previous post, I didn't save my nominating ballot, but I know I nominated one thing in one of these categories... Speculative Whiteness by Jordan S. Carroll, and it made the ballot. Fun fact: this is the only Hugo finalist where I am mentioned in the acknowledgements!
Best Novel
Too often, what these novels call kindness is actually the flattening of all difference, and what they call coziness is a refusal to acknowledge cruelty. This novel recognizes that kindness is hard, that well-intended people can have wildly diverging points of view that can lead them to abuse and dehumanize others, and that conflicts are not won by "destroying" your opponent with a killer argument, but by getting them to see you as someone worth compromising with—even if that means sitting across a table from someone who thinks you shouldn't be allowed to make your own decisions.
As you'll see in my linked-to review, I thought this book started strong and had a lot of potential it didn't totally deliver on. It's alien biology sf, a subgenre that Tchaikovsky is the current kind of for sure, even if I think he doesn't quite succeed in bringing the science elements together with the political elements thematically. But it's definitely up to something more interesting than Someone You Can or even Tchaikovsky's own Service Model by a significant margin, and I wouldn't be mad if it won, though to my mind the remaining books on my ballot are clearly better.
This is a fantasy murder mystery, and I ended up really enjoying it, moreso than I expected. Just a really good example of its genre, very immersive and interesting; exploring the world is as compelling as the mystery, perhaps more so, but so is exploring the characters. Not as ambitious as The Ministry of Time, but other than that, a very good book, and I'd happily see it win... well, except for my disappointment at the clearly deserving Ministry not winning!
There are some books that are optimized to be of interest me, and this is one of them, even if I did not expect it. Very literary, good jokes, sharp character work, interesting themes. "What if Graham Greene but time travel and the Cambodian genocide and interrogating Victorian-ness?" is the kind of question more sf should ask, clearly. Much better than "What if D&D but nothing bad ever happens?" I do like space adventures a lot but this is why I read the genre.
Best Related Work
7. "The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion" by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford
Is this a "related work"? I guess so. These redditors seem like nice folk but a bunch of redditors doing stuff isn't really what I want out of "Best Related Work"; again, does this really advance our understanding of the genre? Could be worse, though: it's not a Seanan McGuire tweet.
This is a four-hour YouTube video about the Star Wars hotel at Disney, chronicling its initial development and marketing, the host's (not very good) experiences there, and its long-term lack of success. I am not the target audience for four-hour YouTube videos to be honest, but if they have to exist, this is probably a good one. I watched it at 1.25 speed and was reasonably entertained throughout, and am now informed on a topic of mild interest to me.
This collects a bunch of reviews by the sf critic Abigail Nussbaum from the last twenty years, mostly from her own blogs and Strange Horizons. Nicholas Whyte often says something like that a good critic: 1) gives you more insight into texts you already read, and 2) makes you want to read ones you haven't. Of course, these things are helped along by the critic having tastes that are, if not identical to yours, sympathetic and comprehensible.
I think Nussbaum succeeds on all of those marks. Her broadly positive reviews of works like N. K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky, The Good Place season one, Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, Zen Cho's Spirits Abroad, Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became the Sun, and so on gave me a stronger sense of what those works were up to, even when I wouldn't have given them a positive review myself. I didn't particularly care for The Stone Sky, for example, even though I enjoyed the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy, but I did like her discussion of how the "dangerous minority" trope turns up in sf&f, where the persecuted minority has some kind of special power (like mutants in X-Men): "Instead of abandoning it, Jemisin compounds it, and then dares us to keep reacting to it from the same place of comfort that originally made it so popular. What does it mean, after all, to build a world in which there is no choice but to oppress and abuse certain people? It tells us nothing about real racism, but it might say a great deal about the kind of people for whom that kind of story holds an appeal."
She's also an incisive negative critic, figuring out what a text was trying to do and articulating how it fell short, as we see with Becky Chambers's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Severance season one, Helen Wecker's The Golem and Jinni, Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, Jac Schaeffer's WandaVision, and so more. In her discussion of The Last Jedi, for example, she puts really well something that often bothers me about falling-to-the-Dark-Side stories in Star Wars: "Like nearly every Star Wars movie before it, The Last Jedi is a film in which no one seems to have a firm understanding of what good and evil actually are. In which the metaphor of the light and dark sides of the force has been allowed to so thoroughly dominate that the actual meaning of it--the idea that people are 'on the dark side' when they do bad things to others--is treated almost as an afterthought. The result is a film about a struggle for a man's soul in which the matter of morality never even comes up. In which our heroes try to convince a villain to become good without ever articulating either what good is, or why being bad is undesirable." Some of these stories, I actually see more positively than she does, but a good negative review can still let you understand a work more deeply.
In particular, Nussbaum often puts works into their generic context, pointing out how they resemble each other. Not to do the "gotcha" move you sometimes see in genre criticism ("oho you thought this book was original but isn't it just doing Iain Banks again?") but to better reveal each text's own rhetorical project. Because she's done such a good job laying out her perspective on texts I do know, I find myself intrigued to read ones she gives positive reviews to that I haven't. It's clear that, like me, she's interested in both space opera and epic fantasy, but also wants works that interrogate how those genres work in interesting ways. Anyway, great stuff here, and I'd happily see this win.
I've written a full review of this, but it will appear in the next issue of Studies in the Fantastic, so here I'll just be brief... but I really liked this! Jordan's take on exactly what the appeal of sf is to racists and fascists helped me understand the genre as a whole and our present political moment. What else could you want? Exactly the kind of thing the Best Related Work Hugo ought to be rewarding in my opinion. Am I biased in favor of my friend? Almost certainly, but if voting to help your friend win a Hugo Award is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
[UNRANKED] The Maid and the Crocodile by Jordan Ifueko / Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee
I left these two books off my ballot for different reasons. Jordan Ifueko was a finalist for the Lodestar Award two previous times, in 2021 and 2022, but neither book did much for me. I felt like I didn't need to read a third book by her that I would end up ranking in fourth or fifth. (Nicholas Whyte, though, said the kinks had been ironed out from the earlier books and ranked it first! Oh well, I made my decision.)
Moonstorm I would have read, even though I find Yoon Ha Lee a little variable. But after Worldcon created controversy by using ChatGPT to vet panelists, Lee withdrew Moonstorm. This was after the final ballot was published, so you technically still can vote for it, but he also took it out of the voter packet, and I hadn't downloaded the YA packet yet. So there you go.
This book follows parallel narratives of two sisters. There's certainly a good premise in here, but it very much struggles to get out. Rather than depict a war to liberate an oppressed country, it takes place years later, and shows the struggle to rebuild—both a nation and yourself. If you were the Chosen One who saved your people, what would you do next? Unfortunately, the backstory is a bit too complicated and a bit too relevant; it feels like you're reading a sequel to a book you never read, and the relationships between characters depend too much on things you're only told in brief bits of exposition. In the present-day narrative, one sister goes to dragon school in the nation that conquered her, but this is woefully underdeveloped. (To Shape a Dragon's Breath did the same basic idea much better.) The other sister experiments with dark powers to save her sister, but not much seems to happen there either. Both plotlines are more interested in romance; both sisters end up in very obvious enemies-to-lovers plots. "oh this person seems to hate me and i hate them but everytime i see them i get butterflies idk what this means..."
And this might seem small, but I found the linguistic worldbuilding very unconvincing. Like, the names didn't cohere or fit.
While So Let Them Burn may have felt like a sequel to a book I didn't read, this actually was—and yet I enjoyed it much more. Mostly, I must admit, on vibes. This book gives no quarter to someone who hasn't read the previous ones; it seemed to have no clear central plotline, but instead be paying off character threads from earlier books, mostly about who the main character would get together with. But the vibes are good; it's about a teenage lesbian witch coven in (I am pretty sure) rural Ohio. It's not really my thing, to be honest, but it's so completely itself I found it charming regardless.
Unusually, I had actually read two Lodestar Award finalists before the ballot was even announced. This was a prequel to Elatsoe, which I read and ranked second in 2021. I enjoyed it a lot; as I said in my review, "Though I think probably Elatsoe has got my heart more, Sheine Lende feels like the more accomplished, skilled book on the whole."
This is also a follow-up to a previous finalist. Often I might complain about that, but I guess a good follow-up to a previous finalist is better than a weak original novel (even if a weak original novel is better than a weak follow-up). I found this novel very interesting and unexpected; while the first novel was about the main character battling sexism so she can become an awesome mecha pilot and fight kaiju, the second is about her coming into an awareness of (essentially) Marxism and attempting to impose revolution on her society. Not really where I thought it was all going. Not a perfect book but a fascinating one, which is what I am happy to award.
Final Thoughts
I might have deployed "No Award" higher than normal in Best Novel but I actually think it was a decent shortlist. Of the six finalists, five were by authors who hadn't been Best Novel finalists before, and one by an author who hadn't been a Hugo finalist in any category at all. (That one ended up being my favorite, so there you go.) Yes, I thought three of them sucked but the good ones were quite good.
After last year's book-heavy shortlist, I had hopes that Best Related Work was back on track but unfortunately this year, we have just two actual books, two pieces of self-referential Worldcon journalism, a YouTube video, and bunch of people making posts on Reddit. Hopefully next year is better, because I really like discovering interesting sf criticism via this category, and that only happened once (kinda twice) this year!
What do I think will win? Best Novel is a tough one to judge, I think. Kingfisher has won in the past but I don't think Sorceress is strong enough to be a repeat winner. The Wiswell doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that will win over a majority (thankfully). If it's a Tchaikovsky, I think the voters will prefer Alien Clay to Service Model. I would of course dearly love it to be Ministry of Time, but I also see that it's the kind of book that is probably divisive (a lot of people on r/Fantasy have it on the bottom of their ballots; of course those people have bad taste). So my guess is Tainted Cup, which I think was a very solid book and thus the kind of book a lot of people might rank in second, allowing it to win on transfers.
I'm guessing one of the about-the-Hugos works wins Related Work, it's that kind of year.
The tastes of the Hugo electorate in YA fiction are largely inscrutable. The two debuts in this category (So Let Them Burn and Feast Makers) don't strike me as having quite the wide appeal you need to clinch it. We have three follow-ups to previous finalists, sequels to books that came in second (Heavenly Tyrant), third (Sheine Lende), and sixth (Maid and the Crocodile). Based on that, I'm going to guess Heavenly Tyrant wins, but I am not very confident in this.
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