Hugos 2025: Ballots for Best Novel, Best Related Work, and Best Young Adult Book

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!

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Best Novel

7. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

 

As enumerated in my above review, I very much didn't get into this, certainly my least favorite thing I've ever read from the pen of T. Kingfisher / Ursula Vernon. I think honestly it's about on a par with Someone you can Build a Nest in, in that I don't really want either one to win. I broke the tie between them by deciding that if one of them had to win, I'd rather see someone new win the award (Wiswell), rather than someone who has won Best Novel before (plus other Hugo Awards besides).

 

6. Someone you can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell

 

Look, clearly this is someone's cup of tea, but it isn't mine. Arguably this is cozy fantasy, and it might be overdramatic to say it, but I hate cozy fantasy. I think Abigail Nussbaum puts it really well in her review of Ruthanna Emrys's A Half-Built Garden:

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.

I don't know that this book is "cozy" per se but I do think it fails to recognize the difficulty of kindness, and everything falls apart because of that. If this wins, I'll be as mad as I would have been if Legends & Lattes had won.

 

5. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

A tedious bloated novel that's supposed to be funny but very much isn't. I guess I'm excited Adrian Tchaikovsky is finally getting attention from the Hugo electorate but the novels of his that have been chosen for this are surely not his best.

 

4. No Award

 

I don't think I often use "No Award" in Best Novel, where there's usually at least one book I really like, and the rest tend to follow a spectrum. Sure, you don't like the book you rank sixth very much, but that shouldn't be unexpected, because what are the odds of you loving all six books in a category? But this year, I found myself struggling to decide which of three books I disliked the least so that I could figure out the whole bottom half of my ballot, and I feel like that if you end up in that situation, it demonstrates that none of those finalists ought to have been on the ballot to begin with.

3. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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.

2. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

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!

1. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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.

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Best Related Work

7. "The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion" by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford

 

As any longtime follower of the Hugo Awards knows, there's one thing members of Worldcon are a little too into when it comes to the "Best Related Work" category, and that's finalists that are about Worldcon itself. This is an example of that genre; it investigates the issues that came with the Hugos administered at the Chengdu Worldcon, where members of the Hugo subcomittee preemptively removed works from the ballots without justification, violating the procedures laid out in the WSFS Constitution. Sure, this was definitely a significant piece of journalism when it comes to the Hugo Awards... but does that make it a significant piece of nonfiction writing about the genre of science fiction and fantasy? I don't think so.

 

6. "Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics" by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones 

 

This is another piece of investigative journalism about the Chengdu Hugos. I gave it the edge over the other one because 1) I tend to find Barkley's prose style pretty pompous, and 2) Nicholas Whyte said it was better done, and if anyone would know, it would be him. 

 

5. No Award

 

Like I said, I don't really care for when Hugo finalists are about the Hugos. If a piece of writing about Chengdu had to be a finalist, I would much rather it have been Ada Palmer's "Tools for Thinking about Censorship," which was inspired by Chengdu but has applicability beyond it... unfortunately much moreso with each passing day here in the U.S. I find myself recommending it to people who have nothing to do with the sf&f community all the time. But I didn't think to nominate it, alas; I wonder if it will turn up on the longlist.

4. r/Fantasy's 2024 Bingo Reading Challenge by the r/Fantasy Bingo Team

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.

3. "The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel" by Jenny Nicholson

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.

2. Track Changes: Selected Reviews by Abigail Nussbaum

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.

1. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt Right by Jordan S. Carroll

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.

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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.

4. So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

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. 

3. The Feast Makers by H. A. Clarke

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.

2. Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger

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." 

1. Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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.

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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.

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2 by Edmond Hamilton, John Forte, et al.

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2

Collection published: 1992
Contents originally published: 1961-64
Acquired: November 2023
Read: July 2025

Writers: Edmond Hamilton, Jerry Siegel
Pencillers: John Forte, Curt Swan
Inkers: John Forte, George Klein
Letterers: Joe Letterese, Milton Snapinn

This volume continues on from volume 1, establishing the Legion of Super-Heroes as a regular ongoing feature; it contains the Legion stories from issues #306 to 317 of Adventure Comics, plus one story from Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen guest-starring the Legion. All of the regular Legion stories are written by Edmond Hamilton (husband of Leigh Brackett, fact fans), usually with art by John Forte. We can see that the Legion has bedded in as the regular concept we now recognize. Though the early stories here claim they come from the twenty-first century, it soon switches to the thirtieth and stats there. Beyond that, we get key concepts like the idea of Legion tryouts, the Legion of Substitute Heroes, the debut of Proty (and then Proty II), the resurrection of Lightning Lad, the first mention of the Time Trapper, Phantom Girl's thing for Ultra Boy, Star Boy's thing for Dream Girl, and so on. Overall I found this a solid set of Legion stories that really show how it can work as an ongoing concept; I reread my review of volume 3 (into which this ones leads) before writing this one, and I was I quite grumpy about it, writing, "Even by the standards of 1960s superhero comics, I would argue, most of these stories are dismal and dull and daft." Well, maybe Hamilton's early days were better than his later ones, or maybe I was just in a bad mood back in 2016, because I didn't think this was great literature, but I did enjoy it for what it was. Maybe it was interesting because you can see the Legion concept developing, as was the case in volume 1, whereas that wasn't really a factor later on.

I like how in the DC universe, a random guy who sees a kid fall into vat of chemicals can state with confidence that he'll grow up to have superpowers... and that he'll be right.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #306 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

In any case, here are some notes and highlights. Like I said above, this volume contains the debut of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, and in fact two other stories focused on them. Obviously I know about them from later stories, but this was my first time reading their debut. I can see why people glommed onto them, they are actually quite charming. Polar Boy, Night Girl, Stone Boy, Fire Lad, and Chlorophyll Kid are all rejected at Legion tryouts, but remain so dedicated to the Legion that they decide to form a back-up group for the Legion. (Legion rejects get flying belts, which seems kind of over-the-top, but maybe flying belts are a dime a dozen in the thirtieth century.) What really makes the story shine is Polar Boy's determination to make the Subs work as a group; they keep trying to help the Legion but are unneeded, but Polar Boy knows if they don't prove useful sometime, his new friends will fall apart. 

Good guy Stone Boy.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #315
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

The other highlight for the Subs is the one where the Legion creates a contest to admit one Sub. It's neat to see them use their crappy powers cleverly, and it's charming both that Stone Boy wins because of his motivation, not his powers, and that he turns down the offer so he can stay with his friends. You can see why these characters would make an impression on the readers, and why later writers would keep going back to them.

You might think that someone handed a cast of characters with (I believe) eighteen members might think to themselves that that's enough, but not Edmond Hamilton, who introduces three more Legionnaires here: Element Lad, Lightning Lass, and Dream Girl. Element Lad's is okay, more an excuse for a scientific mystery than a new character (and I don't think he really does much in the rest of the volume). 

Lightning Lass's is interesting; I had never read her debut story before, though I was familiar with the broad strokes from later stories: joins while her brother is dead, gets her powers changed. What I hadn't known was exactly how this all happens, and I was actually surprised. I've read the story where Lightning Lad is resurrected before, but it was an awful long time ago, so when Lightning Lad was seemingly resurrected I thought it really was him. It turns out to be his sister disguising herself as her dead brother. Sun Boy figures it out but plays along; the Bierbaums would later make him into kind of an entitled player, but here he's a good guy, helping her out covertly (or at least he thinks he is, because he doesn't know she has lightning powers too). I'm a bit surprised they didn't pick up on the cross-dressing angle later on, as Lightning Lass makes a very successful boy.

I said this story makes Sun Boy into a good guy but maybe not, since he's apparently the kind of person who scrutinizes people's Adam's apples to determine if they "really" are the gender they present as.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #308 (script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

Later, after Lightning Lad comes back to life, she continues in the Legion. I knew she got her powers switched later on, to control of gravity (thus making her "Light Lass") but I had figured it was by accident or something. It's actually done deliberately by Dream Girl in her debut story (who knew it was so easy to change someone's superpowers? who knew someone who take their powers being changed so easily?), because the Legion doesn't permit member to have identical powers. Lightning Lad came back to life in Adventure #312, and the power swap happens in #317. I'm assuming they got letters from earnest fans who noted the contradiction because no one in the intervening stories notes the issue.

The face of a woman who is mean... and likes being mean...
and of a man who likes it when she is mean.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #317
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

Speaking of Dream Girl, she doesn't join up permanently in her debut, but she immediately makes an impression, both in terms of her physical attributes (the subplot about all the boys swooning for her is hilarious) but also in terms of her cleverness, using her powers to try to save the Legion's life without threatening the timeline. Dream Girl is one of my faves, so I was delighted to see this story. If I'm not mistaken, it would be a long time before she returned, not until a story collected in volume 5.

And speaking of long gaps between appearances, Star Boy was one of the very first Legionnaires we learned about, in Adventure #282, but then promptly disappeared, appearing in no other Legion stories for over two years, until #310 (collected here). He finally does something of note in the Dream Girl story, though it's mostly falling for her. During his run, Paul Levitz would explain this long absence, as well as Thom's changing powers, in one of my favorite Legion stories. Another story that later writers would do a lot with is Adventure #316, where Ultra Boy goes on the run... though of course he turns out to have good reasons for it that he can't tell anyone about.

From this, the Bierbaums would later birth a very controversial retcon...
which I'm not gonna lie, I kinda liked?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #312
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

Chamelon Boy's "pet," the seemingly sentient, telepathic, shapeshifting blob named Proty, makes his debut in #308, the story where Lightning Lass debuts... and dies in #312, just four issues later, sacrificing his life so that Lightning Lad can come back to life. But Proty II debuts immediately thereafter, without fanfare, in Jimmy Olsen #72. Jimmy identifies someone disguised as him as Proty (how he does this, I don't know, because there's no story where Jimmy meets Proty), but he's corrected by Chameleon Boy: "Actually, it's 'Proty II', a friend of my first protean pet, who died when he sacrificed his life for Saturn Girl!" And that's it! I wonder if Jimmy Olsen #72 was mostly done when someone informed its writer/editor that Proty had been killed off, so they had to add this comment at the last minute... and thus a whole new character was born! When Proty II pops up in Adventure for the first time, it's with no more explanation.

"Superboy's brain has been replaced by that of the
man responsible for one of history's worst genocides!"
"Ah, well, must be Tuesday again."
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #314
(script by Edmond Hamilton, art by John Forte)

Obviously a lot of these stories are ridiculous (e.g, the one where Supergirl fights her own duplicate, who turns all the female Legionnaires pink), but the place of honor has to be set aside for the one where a criminal sneaks into their clubhouse and steals a time bubble... so that he can team up with Emperor Nero, John Dillinger, and Adolf Hitler ("the three wickedest men in history"), transferring their brains into the bodies of Superboy, Mon-El, and Ultra Boy to create super-criminals. I am not so sure you would see Hitler treated so casually these days; funny that he gets taken more seriously the further away we get from him. 

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 5

Hugos 2025: A Sorceress Comes to Call by Ursula Vernon

I have enjoyed a lot of previous books and stories by T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon, but this one didn't do it for me at all. I find it a bit hard to enumerate exactly why, to be honest, but I'm going to try.

The book has two protagonists. One is the daughter of a sorceress; the sorceress has (among other powers) the ability to make people "obedient," which forces them to do exactly what she wants. She often uses this on her own daughter as a form of punishment, making her do certain things she doesn't actually want to do. When the book opens, the mother decides she wants to get married, so the two of them head off to woo a rich man, the sorceress coming up with an excuse for them to be houseguests. (The book seems to take place in a place that is vaguely nineteenth-century Britain, though not exactly.)

The other protagonist is the middle-aged sister of the sorceress's target, who is skeptical of this woman intruding into their lives and decides to get rid of her... but also eventually realizes that this woman's daughter needs saving from her too.

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

Published: 2024
Acquired: April 2025
Read: July 2025

In the acknowledgements, Vernon says her influence was the genre of regency romance but it more reminded me of Victorian sensation novels by Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon (or later writers influenced by them, like Thomas Hardy), where the main threat is that the Wrong Marriage is going to happen with catastrophic consequences. Unfortunately, compared to these novelists, the book very much comes up short. In a book by Collins or Braddon or Hardy, one very much feels the threat of the marriage, the inexorable pull of how it's going to wreck everyone's life. But I found that the tone didn't really come across here, as the sister would talk about how big a threat the sorceress was... but then kind of just sit around and throw a big house party, which didn't seem to correlate. Tonally, the moment where the book really fails is that the sorceress succeeds in marrying the brother... but the characters don't react with horror or anything, they're just like "oh well" and continue with their plans to try to stop (now undo) the marriage. I thought it was very weirdly handled, very much a lost opportunity.

The book is, unfortunately, filled with little moments that don't quite vibe right and thus stopped me from feeling invested. The daughter's only friend in her mother's household is their family's horse; it's supposed to be a big betrayal that the horse is actually her mother's familiar and has thus been funneling information to the mother all along... but we've only just been told this about the horse, so it doesn't come across at all. I had very little sense of what the brother saw in the sorceress; the linchpin of the sorceress's plan is that the brother is in love with her but the sorceress can't use magic to make this happen, yet we don't really get to see how she wins him over. Everyone else is onto her so quickly it makes the brother seem like quite a dunderhead. The sister has this subplot about not wanting to marry the guy she's in love with, but it never clearly came across why she had turned him down.

It's a shame because the basic concept of making people obedient and using it to explore the dynamics of child abuse seems quite potent, but I felt like the book largely squandered it. I don't think there's one big way in which this book whiffed it, but add up all my complaints above, and you end up with a book I never engaged with on any level, perhaps the first time that's ever happened to me with Vernon/Kingfisher.

Killmonger: By Any Means by Bryan Hill and Juan Ferreyra

As I have been chronicling, Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther run was accompanied by a wide variety of tie-in miniseries. The next of these is Killmonger, a five-issue story by writer Bryan Hill and artist Juan Ferreyra filling in the backstory of Erik Killmonger, the son of Wakanda cruelly abducted to the outside world by Ulysses Klaw who returned to Wakanda to rule it. Obviously this was originally chronicled in Don McGregor's Panther's Rage, but the more salient reference points here are probably the Black Panther film, where we got an MCU version of that story, and Rise of the Black Panther, where Evan Narcisse and Javier Pina briefly retold the story for the modern era.

from Killmonger #2

I thought this take was incredibly disappointing. This takes place after Erik graduates from MIT (where he sleeps with his "guidance counselor" in a cringey scene) before he returns to Wakanda. There is surely a very interesting story to be told about how Killmonger gets radicalized, how he decides to go back to Wakanda and take it over and possibly even use it to change an unjust world.

Unfortunately, this story mostly focuses on Killmonger running with a gang doing crimes. Killmonger is angry, he's a misogynist, and that's about as deep as his characterization goes. There's no engagement with the political ideas that made Killmonger so interesting on screen, there's no real sense of why he might want to take over a country or why he thinks he can do it. Just lots of action scenes where people get brutally killed. Like, I'm not even sure what anyone involved in this was thinking, it seems so incredibly off-beam from what you would want out of a Killmonger comic that it ought to have been rejected at the outline phase. Boring and dull.

(There is a prominent character who I initially thought was Misty Knight: she's called "Knight," she looks similar. She very much is not. I don't know if this was a deliberate wrong-footing by Hill and Ferreyra, or if I just don't know very much about Misty Knight.)

By Any Means originally appeared in issues #1-5 of Killmonger (Feb.-May 2019). The story was written by Bryan Hill, illustrated by Juan Ferreyra, lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE 

The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction (anthology, 2010)

This is an anthology from Fall River Press (the publishing arm of Barnes & Noble, I think) collecting "classic" (i.e., public domain) stories of the apocalypse, ranging from Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" (1816) to H. P. Lovecraft's short story "Nyarlathotep" (1920). I picked it up because I wanted to read the Robert Cromie novel The Crack of Doom (1895), and this was its most accessible contemporary reprinting. Several years later, I've finally gotten around to reading the rest of the book. I reread short stories I'd previously read, but not novels: this means I skipped rereading Crack of Doom as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913).

I taught a class on apocalyptic fiction many years ago; an idea that I discussed in that class in the context of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine is that the concept of an apocalypse (in the nonreligious sense) is dependent on a certain understanding of time, one that didn't really emerge until the 1800s. I think in our present moment, apocalyptic narratives usually emerge from an awareness of how societies change: we know we might destroy it, be it from bombs or medicine gone wrong or environmental collapse or whatever. (Isaac Asimov discusses this in his essay "Social Science Fiction," arguing you can only get science fiction once it's clear that societies can evolve and change in fundamental ways quite quickly; he blames the double whammy of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.)  

The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction
compiled by Michael Kelahan

Collection published: 2010
Contents originally published: 1816-1920
Acquired: January 2019
Read: June 2025

But before the idea that we could destroy society emerged, there was a different one that runs across the stories presented in this book: the idea of deep time, that human existence is only a very recent thing across the span of the Earth and the universe, and thus we have no reason to think it will last. We have a lot of natural disasters here: humanity undone by comets, or the sun going dark, or the sun expanding, or what have you. Once you understand how small humanity is on the scale of all time, then you also have no reason to think it will last.

Many of the stories here are good examples of what Isaac Asimov could call technology-dominant (or gadget) stories: they're not concerned with character or even society (as later apocalyptic fiction usually is), but more the mechanics of it. What would happen if the sun overheated the Earth? How could a comet wipe everything out? This means that many of the stories are technically interesting, noteworthy for what they represent in a shift in how humans understand time... but not actually all that good. This is definitely the space that George Griffith's "A Corner in Lightning" (1898) is in, for example. (Which is a little disappointing, in that while Griffith wasn't a great writer, he was usually a more interesting one than he is here.)

That said, even some of these are good to read: Robert Duncan Milne's "Into the Sun" (1882) is kind of technical, but visceral, chronicling the Earth growing so hot no one will live. His sequel story, "Plucked from the Burning" (1882), reminded me a bit of On the Beach in its tour through a destroyed familiar landscape. I don't think "The Star" (1897) is H. G. Wells's best work, but you know of course it's well thought out; similarly, Grant Allen's talent for landscape description serves him well in "The Thames Valley Catastrophe" (1897).

Still, there are some highlights, particularly where you see the way science fiction will go coming into existence. In what's kind of a side comment in Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn discusses how initially, sf has what she calls "the incredible invention story" (Asimov's gadget story), but that it "permits only one level of emotional response, that of ritualized amazement or ritualized horror." Later, sf moves into what she calls "the completed future," where instead of showing the transition from the present moment, the reader is immersed in a world unfamiliar to them (p. xiv). The best stories here are of this type, placing the reader in the postapocalyptic future and letting them build the picture themselves. 

These ones feel particularly modern, and I suppose it's not a coincidence that they're all written by authors who have significance outside of proto-sf. For example, I really enjoyed Ambrose Bierce's "For the Ahkoond" (1888, I think; Kelahan doesn't give an original publication date for it), told as a report from a forty-sixth-century archaeologist exploring a North America devastated by a New Ice Age. Along similar lines, Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (1912) is evocative, and inventive in how it has someone who did live through the apocalypse try to tell its story to someone born after it, who thus has no frame of reference for what the world used to be like. (It reminded me a lot of Wells's The War in the Air [1908]; surely London read it, though he was doing similar work already in The Iron Heel [1908].)

I also really like E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909). I'd read it before of course, but I'd forgotten how clever it was, Forster showing us the darkness of this future by telling the story from the perspective of someone who doesn't see how dark it all is. A lot of his contemporaries would have done a lot worse; it's probably not a coincidence that he was a king of modernism. I think a lot of ink has been spilled about the relationship between sf and realism (including by me, in my never-finished book), but I wonder if there's more to be done about modernism and sf. (It's probably been done; I should ask my colleague Cari Hovanec.)

Anyway, some duds—it would be hard to imagine a collection of pre-1900 sf that wouldn't have at least a few—but a good sampling of what was going on in the genre we know so well today before it was the genre we know so well today.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: June 2025

Pick of the month: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. This was a solid novella I read for the Hugos, which I ended up ranking second. A neat take on academia and oppression in the context of a generation ship. My other highlights this month were The Deep Dark (great graphic novel, also a Hugo finalist) and Track Changes (great criticism, also a Hugo finalist).

All books read:

1. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris
2. The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
3. The Feast Makers by H. A. Clarke
4. The Penguin History of England: 7. England in the Eighteenth Century by J. H. Plumb
5. The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag
6. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo
7. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
8. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
9. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night by James Swallow
10. Track Changes: Selected Reviews by Abigail Nussbaum
11. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan
12. Sky Pyrates over Oz by Sherwood Smith, illustrated by Kim McFarland

All books acquired:

1. Doctor Who Magazine Bookazine #36: Daleks: The Ultimate Guide edited by Marcus Hearn with Alan Barnes
2. Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung by Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung, et al.
3. The Fantastic Four Omnibus, Volume 6 by Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, George Pérez, John Buscema, Sal Buscema, Keith Pollard, et al.
4. North Woods by Daniel Mason
5. The Fuzzy Papers by H. Beam Piper
6. We Are Robin, Volume 2: Jokers by Lee Bermejo, Jorge Corona, et al.

Half of these I got for free! North Woods was my prize for completing the library's summer reading challenge, The Fuzzy Papers I found in the free boxes at the library store, and We Are Robin was sent to me by mistake when I bought a completely different comic from an Amazon seller.

Currently reading:

• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
• Shadows of Self: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson
• Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2 by Edmond Hamilton, John Forte, et al.
• Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung by Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung, et al.
• The Pelican History of England: 8. England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914) by David Thomson
• Doctor Who: Short Trips #20: Destination Prague edited by Steven Savile

Almost done with Hugo reading—just one more novel to go after A Sorceress Comes to Call—and then hopefully I can catch up on all the other reading that has piled up... and then get back to my list!

Up next in my rotations:

1. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
3. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 
4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 673 (up 3)

That number is creeping up! Gotta get it under control. 

 

Shuri: "Gone" and Other Stories by Nnedi Okorafor and Leonardo Romero

In parallel to Ta-Nehisi Coates and Daniel Acuña's story about T'Challa in space, Marvel released a series about what Shuri was doing back on Earth, written by Nnedi Okorafor with art by Leonardo Romero. I think Shuri is the first time there were multiple Black Panther–themed ongoings even if it only lasted ten issues; here, I am going to cover the first five because there's a natural break point at the end.

I haven't been very into Nnedi Okorafor's previous Black Panther comics (Long Live the King and Wakanda Forever), but I found this worked a lot better for me—perhaps because it's about a young woman trying to find her place in the world, and much of Okorafor's prose work is YA. The story (surprisingly to me) provides a little more context for what's been going on in The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, as it opens with T'Challa and Manifold (now Shuri's boyfriend) going on a space mission through a wormhole in a ship of Shuri's design... and not returning. 

from Shuri #1

Shuri has to step up as the handler of crises in Wakanda, while she tries to keep her brother's disappearance secret, and deal with her insecurities about replacing T'Challa. Last time she was Black Panther, after all, she died. Also, the powers she got during Coates's first run are on the blink, meaning she needs to rely more on her gadgets. This is pretty clearly to align the comics character with her film counterpart, but I don't mind, as I never really got what Coates was going for with the new Shuri anyway!

Anyway, I enjoyed this. It's not great comics, but it made for a solid five days of reading. Okorafor has a lot of moving parts, which is nice; her previous two stories were probably too straightforward. There's Shuri's adventures, of course, but also her mother's creation of a group of woman to advise her, T'Challa's secret creation of a pan-African council, Shuri's loss of her powers, her online-only relationship with a mysterious hacker from one of Wakanda's "mute zones." There are lots of idea being thrown about, and they overlap and interact in interesting ways.

from Shuri #1

I particularly liked the illustrations by Leonardo Romero, which are well-matched by the coloring from Jordie Bellaire. I apparently previously encountered Romero's work as an illustrator on Titan's Doctor Who comics featuring the tenth and eleventh Doctors; I don't really remember it, but I did once write, "Something about Leonardo Romero's art turned me off; not enough expression in it, I think. Looks like he drew it with a computer. (I mean, I know probably everyone here drew with a computer-- but I don't like it when the inking is all the same thickness.)" Well, maybe he got better in the two years between The Endless Song and this, or maybe he just vibed better with this series, because overall, I enjoyed his style here. It reminds me of the work of Javier Pulido: on the cartoony end, but with solidity. Bellaire compliments it with flat colors instead of shading, which to be honest, I tend to like better! Sometimes I think Romero struggles with clarity in action, but overall, I think his approach really makes this book pop.

Oh, and in perhaps a first for the Coates era... not a single fill-in on art! Not even an ink assist. 

from Shuri #3

The best issue of the five here is the third. At the end of the second, Shuri attempts to astral project herself into space to find out what happened to her brother. The cliffhanger ending is that instead of returning to her own body, she finds herself in that of Groot from The Guardians of the Galaxy: "I am Shuri!" In the third, she must work together with Rocket Raccoon to battle an alien insect; Rocket can understand all of her "I am Shuri" just as well as he usually does "I am Groot." It's fun and funny. (Though it did stretch credulity for me that Rocket Raccoon would somehow know who Shuri is.) I think if the series can keep this up (like a lot of series about mid-tier character, there are a lot of guest characters: Iron Man in #5, and the teaser for #6 promises Miles Morales), it will be solid, and perhaps one of the best contributions yet in the Coates era.

Issues #1-5 of Shuri originally appeared from December 2018 to April 2019. The stories were written by Nnedi Okorafor, illustrated by Leonardo Romero, colored by Jordie Bellaire, lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE 

Hugos 2025: Ballots for Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story

Here is the first post in my customary sequence describing my rankings for the Hugo Awards ballot. 

Hugo votes are due July 23, but before that was announced I worked out my reading schedule assuming a slightly tighter due date of July 16; after the announcement, I decided that was doable and so stuck with it. I typically read the finalists in a totally random order, but shuffle things around a little based on availability; this year, that meant saving three big books (Track Changes, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Service Model) until the end. And then, this year one finalist withdrew their book from contention after the ballot was announced, meaning I would actually finish all my reading by July 10 if I stuck with my original pace.

The net effect of these three things together was that I finished my reading for the short fiction categories quite early, on June 20. I don't know that I have ever been done with three categories* over a month before the deadline!

I'm trying to remember if I nominated anything in any of these categories. (Unfortunately, I didn't save my nominating ballot. Maybe I don't have one because I didn't nominate anything at all?) If I did nominate something, it was "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, and it did make the final ballot.

Anyway, here's my rankings and notes. As always, I've linked to longer reviews I've already done when relevant, or to the finalist itself when freely available online.

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Best Novella

7. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

"I'm only a silly girl," Nhung said gravely. "Aren't I a child until I get married, when I shall magically become the lady of the house?"

This is the fifth novella in the "Singing Hills" cycle, about a traveling monk collecting stories; it is the fourth to be a Hugo finalist. Having read four of these now, I wish I found them more interesting. The premises always seem good but there's something too languid about them, they never really get off the ground or engage. This has some interesting twists, but largely at a point where I'd stopped caring. I don't actually a have strong opinion about whether this is better or worse than Navigational Entanglements, I found them about equally dull, but I guess I'll give the edge to something that's not an installment in a series that's been nominated three times already.

6. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

No, she hated herself for allowing herself to hope. To believe that it could ever be different. [...] [T]hat she'd unlock the ever-shifting and incomprehensible set of rules that allowed her to make sense of other people.

In a science fiction world, navigating between star systems is dangerous because of carnivorous entities that feed on consciousness (akin to "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith). One of those entities escapes into the real world, and so the clans that handle navigation need to assemble a team to hunt it down. They must overcome their differences and mistrust as well as a larger conspiracy in order to solve the problem. This is the sixth Hugo finalist by Aliette de Bodard I've read since 2017, and while obviously she has her fans, whatever she's doing just doesn't work for me. I felt there were too many characters who I didn't particularly care about, or even care to tell apart, and without that, the book just doesn't work. Like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas, there's a sapphic romance, but like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas it seems to happen instantaneously for not really much of a reason.

5. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

A monster who begat monsters, and I walk with them now; little tyrants. 

I felt this started quite promisingly: a tyrant loses his children in magical woods from which no one ever returns; he comes to the one woman who ever entered the woods and returned with whoever was lost and demands she recovers his children. At first it's spooky and weird, but—and it feels weird to say this about a novella—it's too long. There's some interesting stuff in here but not enough compared to the length of the book. There's only so much "bargaining with spooky tricky wood creatures" I can find interesting. Still, I was interested at first, so above Navigational Entanglements it goes.

4. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

If you read my full review of this, you'll see I was quite tepid about it—both in the sense I'm not sure What Moves the Dead needed a sequel, and in the sense that it doesn't seem very Hugo-worthy. So that I've placed it here is more a testament to the weakness of the rest of the novella shortlist than anything else. Even if I don't really see the reason for this, you can count on T. Kingfisher to be interesting and amusing all the way through.

3. No Award

Once again, we have a year of entirely Tor novellas, all specifically Tordotcom except What Moves at Night, which comes from a different Tor imprint, Nightfire. Are they all terrible or something? No, they're fine. But is this award doing what I want it do? Not really. People are always proposing new Hugo categories; maybe I'll submit a motion to the Worldcon Business Meeting to split the category into Best Tor Novella and Best Novella by Literally Anyone Else. Anyway, putting "No Award" here is more my protest at the lack of imagination demonstrated by the nominators than anything else; in my mind, there's a huge gap between What Feasts at Night and what comes next.

2. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar 

Once, he said, on ancient Earth, there was a Horizon, and to gaze on it was to look neither up nor down. Look out...

This is an sf story (it is no coincidence that sf stories took up my top two spots) about a generation ship and the people on it who have never known anything else. Those are a dime a dozen in science fiction, of course, but Samatar focuses on the class divide in the ship, and academia's role in both upending and upholding systems of oppression—it's a unique angle on an old sf staple, and of course totally played to my own interests.

1. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

"[H]e was a man like you."
     "Like me?"
     "Yes. A man who thought he could pass the good on to his son without the bad."
     There was silence in the tent, for a moment.
     Then one of the other men said, "He's right, Mitya. All our fathers were the same."
     "Well, let's drink to our fathers then. They wanted the best, but it turned out the same as always."

This is going to be a bit mean, but this is so good it's hard to believe it's a Tordotcom novella. Unlike most of what they publish, it's not a fantasy story that feels like a pilot for a streaming show; this isn't aimed at people who watch a lot of tv and movies, but it's a clever, inventive piece of sf that wouldn't be out of place in Clarkesworld or Asimov's. The basic premise is that in the near future, elephants have gone extinct but woolly mammoths have been revived through cloning, so ivory poachers have turned to mammoths as a new source. It's beautifully written, full of interesting ideas, as a bunch of different plotlines intersect. Disorienting in the way the best sf is, with lots to say about the world we live in now and the world we will live in. The first novella I read for the Hugos, but I instantly knew it would be the one to beat.

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Best Novelette

6. "By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars" by Premee Mohamed

[S]he could also see that he was staring at something over her shoulder: the three framed certificates on the wall, busy with gilt and illumincation, B.Wiz, M.Wiz, Ph.W all in a row. Not in envy or awe, she thought, but a doorway, open, beckoning: Here is how you escape. Here is how you get away from them.

An old magician losing her powers takes on a new apprentice. I think this is probably good at what it does, but stories about old magicians taking on new apprentices are just never going to be my thing, to be honest. On a different day, I could be persuaded to move it up one place on my ballot; "Loneliness Universe" has higher aspirations but "By Salt" has better jokes.

5. "Loneliness Universe" by Eugenia Triantafyllou

The world was still filled with people, of course. Just people she knew nothing or very little about. 

This story seems quite potent: the narrator stops being able to see her friends and family, even though they're right where she is. It feels like it could be a potent metaphor for the isolation brought on by our modern condition, how you can be in the same room as someone but not connected to them because they're on their phone or whatever. But I didn't find the mechanics of how it worked very convincing, and the metaphor didn't really land, didn't feel like it told me anything interesting about how the world works. I feel bad ranking it this low, because I do think Triantafyllou is probably up to something a bit more interesting than Pinsker et al., but I don't think she really pulled off what she was attempting.

4. "Signs of Life" by Sarah Pinsker

Did you find happiness despite what I did to you?

Sarah Pinsker is my favorite contemporary writer of short sf, but this feels very much like one of her minor works to me. It's about a woman going to see her sister for the first time in a long while, but weird things are afoot. Pinsker has a couple different modes; I think she's at her best when she's doing science fiction (including near future) or fantasy work (especially where the magic is kind of a metaphor), but to me, she's less interesting when she's in what I think of as her "creepypasta" mode, of which this is very much an example. I find this kind of work well constructed but ultimately kind of hollow. This one in particular has a very rushed and unconvincing ending following the big reveal, and I'm not sure why, because it spent too much time building up to that moment, so there was definitely word count to spare.

3. "The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea" by Naomi Kritzer

I sighed. “Academic jobs are hard to find. My husband Stuart also has a PhD, and he landed a job in Minnesota. One thousand miles away from the nearest seals who aren’t in a zoo. And he’s got tenure. We’re only here because he’s on sabbatical.” 

Naomi Kritzer is a favorite of the Hugo electorate, and she also ends up in Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes pretty consistently, so I feel like I have read a lot of her work at this point. Based on that sampling, I would say she has two modes: near-future sf focusing on stuff like AI and algorithms, but also community and hope (e.g., the CatNet books, "The Dragon Project," Liberty's Daughter, "The Year Without Sunshine," "Better Living Through Algorithms") and spooky folk horror that is also kind of uplifting (e.g., "The Thing About Ghost Stories," "Little Free Library," "Monster"). This is not too dissimilar to Pinsker, actually, and like with Pinsker, I find Kritzer a lot more interesting in her near-future mode than her horror mode. Unfortunately, this is her in her horror mode... though horror isn't quite the right word for it. This story is well-observed (I am of course always into an accurate depiction of academia) and has some good ideas, but a lot like the Pinsker, actually, feel like too much of a slow burn compared to the length. I doubt it's bad, but it's not really what I am interested in. That said, I did like it more than "Signs of Life"; it felt like it had more of a real pay-off.

2. "Lake of Souls" by Ann Leckie

"No animal has a soul that I ever knew."

This sf novelette is included in Leckie's new short fiction collection of the same title; above, I've linked to my review of the complete volume. Like a lot of Leckie's work, it's a weird, disturbing story about the way our biology drives us. That said, it did feel like minor Leckie to me compared to her novels or even some of the other short fiction collected in the same book. But I think it was asking more interesting questions and doing more interesting things than "Signs of Life" and "Four Sisters," so in this case minor Leckie outranks minor Pinsker or minor Kritzer.

1. "The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video" by Thomas Ha

The biggest difference I noticed in the new electronic copy was the ending.

There was a shootout in Copper Hawk like before, yes. But instead of the loss and the blood and the shame of the rider, the iron-handed sheriff was the one to take a bullet. [...] I could almost sense the hand of audience-score maximizer programs in the plot. It could even have been a re-writer at my agency that oversaw the edition, for all I knew.

I felt better in some ways, having read the new, happier ending, but I forgot it promptly, like some garbled conversation I’d overheard on the subway, something that made me chuckle and then escaped my mind.

This is a weird near-future story about a world where there's basically no permanent media anymore: physical books and DVDs and such are all gone, and now all media is electronic—and thus all media can be perpetually altered, updated, tinkered with to suit the present moment. The media of the past no longer serves as a window into that past. I'd never heard of Thomas Ha, but he seems to be one to watch out for based on this. I really liked this, it's basically exactly my taste in short sf, and it easily acquired a high place on my ballot.

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Best Short Story

6. "Stitched to Skin Like Family Is" by Nghi Vo

“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”

I said above that I haven't really enjoyed Vo's Singing Hills novellas very much, but last year I did really like her novelette "On the Fox Roads," an historical fantasy, so I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, I think this is probably a decent story that I just never figured out, a good example of me finding it easier to glom onto an sf premise than a fantasy one.

 

5. "Five Views of the Planet Tartarus" by Rachael K. Jones

The pilots do always try to hit as many as they can.

This is a piece of flash fiction about a prison planet. It's evocatively written, but I find flash fiction kind of tricky, especially in an sf context; this is more worldbuilding than a story.

 

4. "Marginalia" by Mary Robinette Kowal

“I have misjudged many things very badly and I ask your forgiveness.”

I thought this was perfectly okay. It's set in a fairy-tale world beset by giant snails; the main character is a working-class woman who helps the lord whose estate she lives on defeat one. But that's about it, I felt, except for an overly long epilogue about what happens to everyone later. I get what happened but I didn't think there was much of a hook here. Kowal is a competent writer, so it's well told, but so what? More to my taste than "Five Views," but I didn't think trying to do something as interesting as "We Will Teach You How to Read."†

3. "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" by Caroline M. Yoachim

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

I thought this was very clever, but perhaps more clever than enjoyable to read. Its plays with form to communicate content, and it's about stories and the ways we tell them, and how that can change people.

2. "Three Faces of a Beheading" by Arkady Martine 

THEY ONLY CALL US USURPERS BECAUSE THEY KILLED ENOUGH OF US

Now this is one of those stories where I didn't totally understand what was going on, but I understood enough, and I found it absorbing regardless. Arkady Martine is the author of the Teixcalaan books (I particularly liked the first of those, A Memory Called Empire), and like those, this is a story about empire, but moreso it's about history, the way we interpret and reinterpret the past. I found it really sharply written and thought-provoking; on a different day, I think I gladly could have put it in first. (Am I just a sucker for stories that include excerpts from made-up works of scholarly writing with real citations? Probably but I guess everyone's got to have their thing.)

1. "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

This is the one story in this whole post that I had before the ballot was announced, and like I said at the top, if I nominated anything, I nominated this. You can read my full review at the link, but I really enjoyed this a lot; a clever engagement with sf criticism's eternal Omelas debates, and beautifully told in its own way. I kind of think this is the obvious candidate to win (fandom does love its self-referential stuff), so obviously so that maybe I should put "Three Faces" in first just to give it an edge in a potential upset, but oh well, this story is that good.

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Overall Thoughts

Last year, I was excited that Best Novella was actually kind of diverse... but this year we're back to the same-old same-old of Tor Tor Tor. I mean, I'm part of the problem here (I don't nominate anything because I don't keep up with novellas) but it does make me grumpy. And not only is it so much Tor, but three of them are written by writers who have been finalists multiple previous times: this is Nghi Vo's fourth nomination, de Bodard's fourth, and Kingfisher's third, and at least two of them are follow-ups to previous finalists. (I have read conflicting information on whether Navigational Entanglements takes place in the same "Xuya Universe" as de Bodard's The Tea Master and the Detective.) If the point of sf&f is to take the reader to new worlds, it's not really happening here.

Similar problems with nominee diversity afflict the other two categories: of the twelve finalists in Best Novelette and Short Story, nearly half from Uncanny, who I think benefit from being freely available online and soliciting stories from Internet favorites. Usually there are a couple that make the Uncanny dominance worthwhile (e.g., I really enjoyed Kritzer's "The Year Without Sunshine" in 2024) but not this year. Thankfully there is a little bit of diversity at the edges: in contrast to Uncanny appearing on the ballot in these two categories a cumulative thirty-five times since 2016, this is only the fourth appearance by a Strange Horizons story since 2007... too bad I didn't like it more. We also have an original story from a single-author collection (I don't think this happens much) and the first appearance of a story from the once-dominant Asimov's since 2018. (Asimov's, admittedly, was the Tor/Uncanny of 1986 to 2010!)‡

All that said, maybe my real problem isn't a lack of nominee diversity so much as that the tastes of Uncanny editors Lynne M. and Michael Damian Thomas just aren't my tastes, as my top spots in Best Novelette and Best Short Story both went to Clarkesworld, and Clarkesworld has had at least twenty stories in those two categories since 2010. But, well, I'm always gushing about how much I like editor Neil Clarke. I'm guessing that whenever volume ten of Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year comes out, I will find a lot more to my taste there.

I'll wrap this up by making my predictions, with the caveat that I have not been very plugged into the discourse this year, beyond reading the threads about Hugo finalists on r/Fantasy and Nicholas Whyte's blog posts, neither of whom I think is very representative. I'm guessing:

• something I ranked below "No Award" will win Best Novella (I am always disappointed by this category)
• Kritzer or Pinsker will win Best Novelette, with an outside chance that it's Leckie (voters love them, and to be fair, they are all good writers)
• Isabel J. Kim will win Best Short Story (the story is so very online, and sort of a meta-take on fandom discourse... plus actually quite good!)

* Well, actually five, since I also finished my last Lodestar finalist on June 7 and my last Best Graphic Story one on June 11. But those are other posts.

† After I wrote up my rankings, I read the discussion thread for "Marginalia" on r/Fantasy, which was pretty savage, and made me like the story less. I was kind of tempted to downgrade it after that, but laziness won out; and anyway, fundamentally I don't have a strong opinion between the bottom three in this category.

‡ Hm, I am starting to feel a blog post with charts and graphs coming on...