Here is my second set of Hugo rankings for this year, covering everyone's most favorite categories: the book-based ones. Best Novel, Best Related Work (usually but not always a book), and Best Young Adult Book (Not a Hugo).
Best Novel
[UNRANKED] Starter Villain by John Scalzi
Another year, another glib-sounding John Scalzi novel for a Hugo finalist. This one is, I think, about a sarcastic cat who becomes a supervillain? It is impossible for me to imagine liking a John Scalzi take on this concept, based on all previous John Scalzi that I have read, so like last year's Kaiju Preservation Society, I have given it a pass. If it somehow wins, I guess I will read it in 2054 when my project to catch up on unread Hugo winners reaches 2024. Maybe by then I will be nostalgic for John Scalzi!
I totally bounced off this book. Though I slogged all the way to the end, I could not tell you who the characters were or what they were trying to do. Such is, in general, my reaction to epic fantasy. Lots of goofy names and obscure terms. I don't think it was bad, probably, but it was very much not for me; an easy placement at the bottom of my ballot.
I enjoyed this novel but did not love it. It's solid and serviceable, but I feel like a better novel with the same ingredients was in reach of Leckie. I think my placement of this versus Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is ultimately pretty arbitrary; both books have interesting set-ups they don't quite deliver on. In the end, I gave Chakraborty the edge because Leckie previously won a Best Novel Hugo, whereas Chakraborty hasn't even been a finalist before.
3. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
This book was fun, and did some great stuff, but though I enjoyed it a lot, the ending prevented me from finding the book as a whole great. (As always, read the full review linked above for the details.)
2. The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra ChandrasekeraAs I said in my review of this book, it was complicated and strange, and a bit of a mishmash, but ambitious and highly intriguing. Thus, I feel like it slots in here—I probably enjoyed it about the same as Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, but it's aiming to do more than it, and thus seems to be the kind of thing the Hugos should reward. On the other hand, I think Some Desperate Glory is definitely more successful at doing what it's aiming to, and was more clearly enjoyable, so it gets the edge.
1. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
If your book make me gasp aloud from sheer delight at one point, then I think it is probably going to rank pretty highly. This felt like the one to unseat even though it was the first one I read. Building on previous winners like Ancillary Justice but going in new directions too, exactly the kind of thing the Hugos should go around awarding.
Best Related Work
[UNRANKED] Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History History, Volumes 2 and 3 by Yang Feng / 雨果X访谈 (Discover X), presented by Tina Wong
Last year, the first volume of Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History was a Hugo finalist; last year there was no English translation. The same is true of volumes 2 and 3 this year. I imagine this is a magisterial work, and it seems like exactly the kind of thing that ought to be a Hugo finalist, but I have no way of knowing if it's any good. If I were to rank it, however, I would give it a slight edge over Discover X, which is a podcast—but one that is not eligible in the usual category of Best Fancast because it is professionally produced. Discover X is Chinese but according to the Hugo voter packet, does do English-language episodes... but I have no desire to listen to a podcast, sorry not sorry.
4. The Culture by Iain M. Banks
There are probably people to whom this book is very exciting, but I am not one of them. The late Iain Banks was famously the author of the Culture novels, and this collects various meticulous drawings he made depicting spaceships, locations, vehicles, and weaponry from that series. The problem is that I have read just one Culture story, the novella "The State of the Art," and though I very much enjoyed it, and I have been meaning to get around to reading more Culture books, most of what was collected here utterly lacked significance. I spent less than an hour paging through it, and that was it. But if you know what these spaceships were, you would probably be very impressed!
3. A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid SpellerThis is a collection of reviews and criticism by the late Maureen Kincaid Speller (1959–2022), a British sf critic. I found it tough going at first, and I would have to fault the arrangement of the book and some of the editorial choices for that. The book begins with a number of essays by Speller on broad topics, but no context is given for them, not even dates of original publication, which makes them hard to digest. If Speller is commenting on the low quality of the Hugo Award shortlist, it makes a big difference if we are talking 2005 or 2015, but you have to look that up in the back of the book; many of the pieces are clearly intervening in early 2000s sf blog discourse... but how? There are then a number of reviews of anthologies, which I don't think show Speller (or any critic) off at her best; these kind of reviews can only skim the surface of an individual story and don't have a strong sense of argument. Finally, about halfway through the book we get to reviews of individual novels, movies, and television programs, and suddenly Speller snaps into focus as an incisive, thoughtful critic. There were no reviews of books I had actually read, but as a good reviewer ought, Speller gives you a sense of what these books were doing, how well they did it, and why you might want to read them; I have jotted several titles down on my always-increasing list of books to get from the library. I was more likely to have seen some of the films discussed (Arrival, The Force Awakens, The Hobbit), and these presented incisive takes even when I disagreed with them. I think if these reviews focused on single texts had come first, I would have had a better sense of Speller and her philosophy which would have let me better understand her takes in some of the sf conversations. So, worth reading if you like sf criticism (and I certainly do), but not as strong a showing for Speller's work as I think could have been made. I would be fine with it winning, but it was not as consistently interesting as City on Mars.
2. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
This is a nonfiction book that goes into meticulous detail about the challenges of space colonization, in Earth orbit, on the moon, and on Mars, from both a scientific and legal perspective. Lots of good details, lively writing. My main takeaway was that however hard you think space colonization might be, it's much much harder, way harder than it's commonly portrayed by science fiction stories, or by the tech billionaires currently trying to set up Ayn Randian utopias on Mars. Not about science fiction per se, but clearly "related" to it; I enjoyed it a lot and keep thinking about tidbits from it months after reading it.
1. All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays by Niall HarrisonThis is a collection of (as the subtitle indicates) reviews and essays by the British sf critic Niall Harrison, whose work and even name was previously unknown to me. I found this much more successful than the Kincaid Speller book above, probably because it's both better focused and better organized. The reviews here are all of works published 2005-14, and are arranged in order of publication of the work reviewed. What quickly emerges is a sense of argument, as Harrison probes the changes the genre of sf&d was undergoing in what was in retrospect a pretty key period for how we now understand it. As he lays out in the introduction, 2005-14 roughly takes you from Racefail to the Sad Puppies, an era of increasing deliberation about diversity in sf&f; it's also an era where people started increasingly dealing with climate change in sf&f in meaningful ways. What I really like about Harrison as a critic is how he puts the individual works he reviews into conversation with the broader genre; you get a very clear sense of what these books are up to. His reviews of anthologies are strikingly strong, and there were a large number of books here I had not read—but now want to—so he's doing a good job of not sticking to the expected mass market US sf&f. The end of the book has a number of essays; two of these in particular were what tipped the book over into first-place status for me. One combines three different reviews into a meditation on how we articulate the history of sf&f, the other is an overview of several different anthologies of short Chinese sf, but instead of going through them book by book, he covers them in order of the stories' original publications, which gives a sort of partial history of the genre in China. Overall, this is exactly the kind of thing I want out of the Best Related Work Hugo.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
[UNRANKED]
Promises Stronger than Heartbreak by Charlie Jane Anders
This is a sequel to two previous finalists; the first book in the series placed in 2022, and the second in 2023. Though I have liked some of Anders's other work, I found the first book in the series excruciatingly tedious, and thus have no incentive to read further books—I'm not that much of a completist. So I just left it off my ballot.
6. Abeni's Song by P. Djèlí Clark
This is an African-influenced fantasy novel about a young girl whose village is destroyed; she goes and lives with a witch and then assembles a group of friends to go take down her village. Though I have enjoyed some of Clark's short fiction, I haven't found his novels to be to my taste. I thought the main character's reactions to things weirdly absent, the chapters seemed long without going anywhere, the assembly of a group incredibly fast and convenient, and the climax unearned. I never cared about anything in this book, and it didn't seem to be working very hard to make me want to. Like other works of African-influenced fantasy I have read (e.g., Children of Blood and Bone), the cultural elements felt grafted on; it came across as a very generic work of YA fantasy.
5. No Award
I'm sorry, but I can muster up no enthusiasm for Abeni's Song, which seems to me to typify one of the problems the Hugo Awards often have: once a writer gets on the ballot for something actually quite good (Clark has written some good short sf), the nominators start reading everything that person produces, and thus they get on the ballot even for mediocre work. (See also: Asimov getting on the ballot and even winning for Foundation's Edge.)
4. The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth NixMy wife is a big fan of Nix's Sabriel books, but I had not read anything by him before. This is a sequel to another of his books (The Left-Handed Booksellers of London), but I found that it largely stood on its own, except that it never clearly delineated the difference between left- and right-handed booksellers. Anyway, it's about a secret order of "booksellers" that combat dangerous magical entities; here they have to prevent one particular one from rising up and obtaining great power through sacrificing innocent victims on the solstice. I found it cute and charming without being precious or twee—quite an accomplishment these days. A lot of fun ideas, and I would loop back and read the first book, but it didn't set my world on fire. Pretty easily slots into the middle of my rankings.
3. Unraveller by Frances HardingeIf my review of Unraveller linked above reads like damning with faint praise, you'd be right. I often struggle to rank the middle of my ballots. It's clear to me that Abeni's Song is the worse of the five books that I read and To Shape a Dragon's Breath the best. But how do the others slot in? Though I enjoyed Liberty's Daughter, I feel like Unraveller was ultimately richer in that it was trying to do more—but I also feel like Unraveller didn't totally mine the rich vein of metaphor it had opened up. So I put Liberty's Daughter higher than Unraveller. On the other hand, Sinister Booksellers also had the vibe of being "more successful if less ambitious"... yet for some reason I wouldn't put it above Unraveller even if I did enjoy it. Anyway, take it all to say that my 2nd through 4th places are pretty arbitrary in one sense... but in another sense I would probably be fairly happy if Unraveller won but less so if Sinister Booksellers did, and maybe that's the ultimately tiebreaker.
This is a "fix-up" of six novellas originally published in F&SF, about a teenage girl living on a libertarian seastead in the near future. I do like Krtizer, but going in I was a bit skeptical, because I didn't see how that might capture what I like about her work, which is (as I said in my review of her Best Novelette finalist for this year) that "she tells stories about the hard work we do to maintain community." But Kritzer finds a place for that here, as what her protagonist discovers is that even in an every-man-for-himself environment, people still form community and help each other. I don't think it's a perfect book—the somewhat jerky movement of plot betrays its origins as six separate stories, the ending leaves perhaps slightly too many threads and ideas unexplored—but overall I enjoyed it a lot and found it very readable. Neat sense of a possible world, and I liked how that world was slowly unspooled. (Fun fact: I asked my local library to purchase this, and though they did, they reclassified it from "Teen" [where I put it since it was a Lodestar finalist] to "Adult.")
One of the things I love about genre fiction is that sense of dialogue, the idea that later books are in conversation with earlier books. I don't know what author Moniquill Blackgoose was actually thinking, but it very much seemed to me that this book was in dialogue with Temeraire and Harry Potter, among others. The main character is a native American woman who finds a dragon egg, in a world where dragons are fairly common, but native dragons largely died out from a plague when European settlers came to America. Temeraire shows us dragons all around the world, of course, but from Laurence's perspective; here, we get a sense of how native culture would deal with them differently. The protagonist must enroll in a white dragon school in order to be allowed to keep her dragon, and here the book feels like a very interesting take on Harry Potter and its ilk, with Blackgoose exploring the dynamics of class and race that underlie privilege, but which authors like Rowling do not meaningfully engage with. It's a slow burn, no big action sequences or anything, but that's exactly what I wanted out of this. I often say (borrowing from, I think, Jo Walton) that sf stories are mystery stories where the world itself is the mystery, and I loved that aspect of this book, as we slowly figure out how this alternate world functions the exploring our protagonist's place in it. Exactly what I want out of my YA fantasy, and I would gladly read the sequel whenever it is published; I had to stop myself from evangelizing about this book to everyone I interacted with.
Final Thoughts
It's funny—a lot like Best Novella and Best Short Story, I am happy to see a more diverse array of finalists, but also like Best Novella and Best Short Story, I don't think this resulted in a much stronger set of finalists in the end. There were two authors I had never even heard of (Chandrasekera and Tesh), and a third I was only dimly aware of and who was a new finalist (Chakraborty). And yes, we had three returning finalists (Scalzi, Wells, and Leckie), but only in one of those cases was the novel a sequel to a previous finalist. On paper, it was a strong, interesting set of finalists. But though I enjoyed my top four, and was glad to read all of them, it was an easy ranking; only Some Desperate Glory feels remotely competitive, only Some Desperate Glory seemed to be doing something really interesting and, well, novel.
Related Work, on the other hand, was great. Four really interesting books, none of which I would ever have come across without the Hugo Awards. Some years this category can baffle me, but this year is exactly what I want out of it. The same goes for the Lodestar; sure, some stuff wasn't great, but I am very happy to have discovered both the Kritzer and the Blackgoose, and I'm always happy to have an excuse to read more Hardinge.
Prediction-wise, I feel pretty uncertain in all three categories. I think maybe Some Desperate Glory for Best Novel, but maybe that's just my own biases; it seems a bit polarizing. I doubt my personal favorite will win Related Work; I am kind of worried nostalgia will give it to Banks, but my suspicion is the Weinersmith will be everyone's second choice and thus it will win on transfers. As for the Lodestar, the Hugo voters continually baffle me in this category, so it could be literally anyone.
