The deadline for Hugo voting recently ended, so I feel like now is a good time to post my rankings for the best novel nominees.
This year Adrian Tchaikovsky (one of my favorite authors) is a finalist for two separate novels. When I sent him a note to congratulate him on being the first ever double-finalist for Hugo best novel in the same year, he was quick to respond that Silverberg beat him to it. I had to go look that up — it happened in 1973! I told him that "First in over fifty years" is still pretty good.
Getting down to business, here is my opinionated list of this year's Hugo noms, from most favorite to least:
I don't think it's a spoiler to say that this is a book about how a specific kind of AI could bring about civilizational collapse.
The book follows Uncharles, a robot valet, as he explores a dystopian wasteland depopulated of humans, and tries to figure out why things are the way that they are.
I loved how Tchaikovsky wove a somewhat plausible tale about how dangerous it is to offload cognitive tasks to things that are not-quite-humanlike, and how giving an AI clear but shallow motivations can lead to unintended consequences.
The robot librarians were by far the most ridiculous part of the story, but I enjoyed how that subplot felt like a throwback to golden age SF.
It was weird to rank this book against Tchaikovsky's other nomination, Alien Clay, because I loved aspects of both books. Honestly the first three books on this Hugo noms list are tied for me in many ways.
This is basically Sherlock Holmes in a secondary fantasy world where kaiju blood powers a mutagenic magic system. It is just as fun as it sounds, and I loved it so much I immediately read the sequel, which was even better!
The story revolves around the Watson stand-in, Dinios, who is a kind of military police character with a mutagen-derived power of perfect recall. He goes around looking for clues to bring back to his brilliant detective (Ana) who then makes genius deductions. The detective character is a shut-in that is sensitive to stimulus, so she wears a blindfold most of the time, and relies on Dinios to collect data for her.
The characters are wonderful and the worldbuilding is detailed and believeable, I really recommend picking this one up even if you don't normally read fantasy.
Tchaikovsky's second nomination is really just as good as Service Model, but in a very different way. The story takes place on a penal colony on an exoplanet, "Kiln", where political prisoners of a fascist regime called the "Mandate" do forced labor and help study the absolutely bizarre and fascinating biological ecosystem of the planet.
One of my friends called the book "aggressively depressing", and none of the characters are particularly likeable. I feel the need to point that out, because the book isn't for everyone.
With that caveat out of the way: I LOVED the book. The way Tchaikovsky combined the novel biology of Kiln with commentary on the mindset and operational tendencies of fascist regimes was phenomenal. This is the kind of book that annoys my friends because I won't stop talking about it.
I am not kidding, at its core this book is a self-insert romance fanfiction about a historical member of the Franklin Expedition to the Arctic, wrapped in a time-travel bow. This is a testament to the quality of its writing!
I was really pleasantly surprised by The Ministry of Time. The book did a great job conveying how different people relate to culture and power. Also the romance aspect was charming and the book was chock full of fun well-developed characters.
We're now getting into the types of books that I probably wouldn't read if they weren't on the Hugo nominations list, so take the rest of my reviews with a grain of salt. A Sorceress Comes to Call is a fantasy novel with horror elements, and focuses on the daughter of a genuinely monstrous sorceress whose psychopathy is unconstrained.
I liked the book and I got through it quickly, turning the pages urgently with morbid fascination. The most interesting aspects, for me, were about trauma response and how monsters don't need powers if they're inhuman enough.
It may be surprising to some of you that I've put this one at the bottom of my list, considering that it won both the Nebula and Locus awards this year. I want to be clear that it's a good book, bad books generally don't make it onto the Hugo finalists list, it just wasn't as interesting to me as the other nominations this year.
The book is a monster story told from the perspective of the monster. The author does an incredible job of making the reader empathize with someone who literally eats people — the book is actually a romance between monster and the woman who saves her.
Needless to say, in order to make a literal monster empathetic you've got to make the rest of the characters particularly nasty, and so this is mostly a story about surviving and finding love in a hostile world. Well-executed, but not my typical cup of tea.
That's it, that's all of the Hugo finalist novels this year! I'd love to hear what your favorites were, feel free to reply to this email and let me know. Take care,
Joe