Every year, I vote in the Hugo Awards, reading as many of the finalists in the categories I care about as I can prior to the deadline—indeed, I don't think I've ever missed a finalist except deliberately. I buy all the finalists in Best Novel and review them in detail, along with other finalists by authors that particularly interest me; everything else I include in a series of ranking posts I do at the end of the process.
This year, the first finalist I'm writing up (though it's not the first I've read) is The Everlasting by Alix Harrow, a finalist for Best Novel. Harrow has placed regularly on the ballot since 2019, when she won Best Short Story for "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies." That's her only win so far, but she had short fiction on the ballot in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, was a finalist in 2020.
Harrow has a recurrent interest in storytelling, and how the possibilities of stories can be literalized through sfnal devices like alternate universes. The Ten Thousand Doors of January represents portal fantasies as places that can be accessed through, well, portals; her two "Fractured Fables" novellas made alternate versions of fairy tales into alternate universes her main characters could jump between, Everything Everywhere All at Once–style.
The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow |
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Published: 2025 Acquired and read: May 2026 |
Instead of alternate universes, The Everlasting explores storytelling through the device of time travel. (Note that I experienced this book largely knowing nothing about it, but I'm going to give away some aspects of the premise here that I discovered as a reader myself.) One of the two main characters is Owen Mallory, a scholar who specializes in legends of Sir Una Everlasting, a mythical figure from the history of his country of Dominion, a figure who resonates with the Arthur mythos from our world. (She's sort of King Arthur and his knights all in one.) Thanks to time travel, he's able to back to when Sir Una was alive, but what he discovers is that her story has been edited over time through time travel, adjusted to fit the needs of the present. In his time, Dominion has recently concluded a war, and Una serves as an inspiration to the populace and the soldiers—including Owen himself.
I found this a cracker of a premise. I'm very much interested in stories about stories, about the ways that the stories can change people and society. And I'm very much a sucker for stories that take a metaphor and literalize it through some kind of sfnal premise. In The Everlasting, stories aren't just being tweaked over time in the telling to suit the needs of the present-day society, they're actually being tweaked via time travel. The historian actually goes back in time in order to alter the story to make it work out the way it needs to!
There are definitely shades of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States here; imagine if people could go back in time and make Columbus into the hero history needed him to be! I was reminded also of David Mattingly's history of Britain under Rome that I recently read, where he makes the point that when Britain had an empire in the nineteenth century, that was the point where the British told stories about how Britain being part of the Roman Empire was a good thing, actually, that helped the British. Me being me, I was also spending my reading triangulating the book in terms of the contemporary genre, and I think it would appeal to fans of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Those aren't two books that it occurred to me to put together until now, but all three are about time travel, nationalism, and storytelling; Ministry of Time and The Everlasting are very different books in execution, but both are about someone who falls in love with their object of historical study while their government uses time travel for nefarious purposes!
I liked the main characters, Una and Owen, a lot, though I perhaps liked the side characters of Owen's father and professor even more; every return appearance by them was gold. On a prose level, Harrow is a strong writer, as I just really enjoyed reading it. Sometimes stories in this area can be a bit "twee" or "precious" in my opinion (see: oh-so-many Tordotcom novellas), but Harrow isn't that at all.
At the two-thirds mark, I thought this book was the one to beat. Unfortunately, the last third or so moves the book in a different direction than the one I've laid out here, which I found less interesting. It's not bad, but the book previously had been working on two registers: the social commentary of the time travel/storytelling idea, and the personal level of Owen and Una's story. But near the end, 1) the focus of the novel squarely becomes on Owen and Una escaping from the time travel trap, and 2) a lot of that is done via the character of Vivian, who is the novel's villain. But making it all about Owen and Una and Vivian and their personal struggles means that the political/social stuff about the power and importance of stories kind of drops away in favor of time travel mechanics and romance. Which are both interesting, sure, but I found the book more interesting when it was doing all three at once.
Basically the social stuff totally vanishes from the narrative, and I found that disappointing compared to how big of a role it played in the beginning, especially considering it was the clever thing that drew me into the book to begin with. Especially given that ultimately pinning everything on Vivian (and she literally turns out to be responsible for everything bad in Dominion history) really undercuts the book's commentary on the way this kind of thing does happen in the real world. The book does gesture at pointing out it's not all down to Vivian near the end:
The poor downtrodden folk of Dominion, Vivian had called them, but they didn't strike me a victims. I had seen them send their sons cheerfully to war; I had seen them beaten bloody for protesting it. They had put a medal around my neck for something I hadn't done, and spit on my boots simply for being born. And they hadn't been tricked or forced into any of it—they had chosen, over and over, cruelly or kindly, selfishly or bravely. (254)
It's a good bit, but it feels tacked on because 1) narratively, the focus of the ending is all on stopping Vivian, and 2) we never really get a sense of what a history of Dominion without Una would be like. I especially wondered what a version of Dominion history where the good aspects of Una's story were emphasized without the bad ones could be like—if such a thing is even possible. Without that, I feel like the book has the depressing conclusion of pointing at a vast social problem, and then just saying that there's no way of fixing it, so all you can do is get out with your loved ones.
This may seem like a lot of criticism, but ultimately I very much enjoyed the book. It did a lot of interesting things. I just wish it could have carried those things through to the end more consistently.
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