2025 Hugo Award Novel nominees: My thoughts!

The 2025 Hugo Awards for SFF works will be announced in August this year. I often like to have a stab at reading to the list for short stories, novels and novellas, and this time I had a big head start, having already read 4 of the 6 novels. Here are my thoughts on the novels!

(Short version: I would give the award to either A Sorceress Comes to Call or Service Model, if I was making the decision :-)

Best Novel Nominees

1. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky: 7/10

This is good, if grim, dystopian writing. As always, Tchaikovsky nails the voice - Professor Arton Daghdev, the prisoner ecologist protagonist-narrator, is vividly real on the page, and the fact that not all the other characters are fully built is actually a consistent representation of the POV we are given (very few of the other prisoner-exile characters become all that real to the narrator either). 

The concept - thought enemies being exiled to a remote barely-habitable planet to end their lives in forced labour, in this case in the service of trying to discover the predecessor alien intelligence that left behind built ruins - is depressing but fascinating. Tchaikovsky goes a long way down the road of exploring what *actually* alien life might be like, and how human rigidity / stupidity might misinterpret it. The malevolence of the groupthink Mandate that controls human life on earth was all too plausible, and certainly very dark. There's a fair whack of Octavia Butler-esque body horror in here, pretty well executed although not as viscerally punchy as the Butler masterworks achieve.

That said, here are the weaknesses from my perspective:

- I think the pacing was a little off. The first third was just set-up for the main story, and there were times when I found myself getting restless and finding it just a tiny bit dull.

- I thought the conclusion was genuinely lacklustre. The reveal about the nature of Kiln and its life forms struck me as unoriginal and quite bland, and was also so heavily telegraphed from about mid-book onwards that it not only came as no surprise, it was a disappointment to learn there was no more than the obvious to it.

- While the Mandate officers, especially the camp commandant, were suitably villainous, I don't think Tchaikovsky did enough to make them feel actually evil rather than just brutal. I did get the heavy-handed compare-and-contrast at the end, of course, but it didn't save that aspect for me.

Nonetheless, I liked it, and am happy to have read it, but it's not (for me) a contender for the award in the company it's in.

2. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: 5/10

I really wanted to love this book. I'm a fan of time travel stories - have enjoyed many, with different devices and conceits, over the years - and the premise of this one intrigued me. I still believe it to be a very solid idea with a lot of potential, but for me, Bradley's writing style is incredibly irritating, bordering on painful, which really undermined my ability to engage with the quite decent plot as it unfolded.

Bradley has an obsessive devotion to metaphor and simile that borders on the farcical, and it means this text reads as trying extremely hard to be self-consciously clever and deep (one of my least favourite traits in any writing). Nothing can just be described, with perhaps an adjective or two for colour; everything has to be put into an odd and often clearly forced metaphoric space. Clouds are never just clouds, or even "grey clouds" or "heavy clouds" to denote coming rain; instead, they are analogised ruthlessly to very specific kinds of blankets, or a particular kind of clothing you've never heard of, and so on. This was a particular issue for me when it was used to express the feelings and thoughts of the main protagonist narrator (the unnamed contemporary woman who works as a "bridge" for the 19th century polar explorer naval officer, Commander Gore). I'm sorry, but I just do not believe that, in the privacy of one's own mind, emotional states are typically characterised in extended torturous metaphor. For me, this destroyed any possibility of immersion into the character, and therefore I didn't care about her at all, which left the book with no emotional centre.

Oddly enough, I found some of the secondary characters much more compelling and interesting than Protagonist and Gore. Arthur and Maggie, in particular, were nicely drawn, and I felt tenderness for both of them and was somewhat invested in their outcomes. But ultimately, that wasn't enough to save this book for me, and I would chalk it up as "interesting idea, but failed to deliver on its promise". 

3. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky: 9/10

This is a brilliantly funny, thought-provoking, affecting and intelligent robot dystopia story, and I enjoyed every part of it. Of the two books Tchaikovsky has in this shortlist, this is far the superior in my opinion.

Set in a rotting post-collapse hellscape world, populated by only miserable remnant human populations and a LOT of breaking-down robots, the tone of this should be grim and dark ... yet, somehow, it isn't completely. I think that comes down mostly to the original and marvellous voice of UnCharles, the robot valet who is the key protagonist of the book. UnCharles, despite everything that happens around him and to him, remains an innocent abroad, and that sense of calm and propriety permeates the chaos around him in ways that shift the balance more than once in the story.

The central conundrum of this book, expressed in very different terms by UnCharles and The Wonk (the scrappy surviving human protagonist), comes down to: Why? Why did UnCharles murder his master? Why did the humans fade away? Why are the robots behaving as they are? Why did the world collapse? Why could the centre not hold? The Wonk's need to find meaning, and preferably for it to be a sensible and fair one, is contrasted with UnCharles' simpler, cleaner, need to find a way to be of use.

The ultimate answer, delivered by "God" (a level-19 system that turns out to be quite important to the whole shebang), reads somewhat polemically and was probably my least favourite part of the book. But the journey to find out, and to begin again, is a wonder, and I would absolutely recommend it.

4. Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell: 5/10

Another body horror fantasy, told from the perspective of the monster, Shesheshen, but this time trying to blend in a romance as well - does that make it romantasy horror? Fantorror romance? I don't know, but whatever it was, it didn't really work for me.  I thought the romance was awkward and forced, the pacing was terrible (nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens, EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE, done) and the monster stuff was more gross than interesting, although I did quite like Shesheshen's voice. Not a winner in my book.

5. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher: 9/10

T Kingfisher really cannot put a foot wrong for me as a reader. I have enjoyed everything I've ever read of hers, but there is something particularly entrancing about her twisted folk / fairytale novels that just gets me. This book is (sort of) a retelling of the Grimm Brothers' Goose Girl story, but Kingfisher's take on it is both creepifying and compelling. Falada, the horse from the original tale, is no longer magical protector but rather horrifying caged demon spirit. The widowed queen mother with benign magical powers becomes Evangeline, the evil sorceress, who visits immense damage on as many people as she can. And the goose girl / princess, Cordelia, is the unlikely heroine of the story, along with a vivid cast of brilliantly realised new characters.

This book is, like all Kingfishers, incredibly vibrant, tinged with humour even through the darkest parts, immensely enjoyable to read, and infused with just enough scariness to give it tang without veering into outright horror. (Well, maybe fantasy-horror? Horror-adjacent? Horror-lite?) I read it in two days and frankly I'm damn proud of myself for making it stretch that long.

6. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett: 7/10

I mostly enjoyed this one. The world-building is deft, clever and well done, and the plot was intriguing and engaging. The idea of a kind of "Roman empire in space, but make the barbarians enormous monsters and add biological and genetic manipulation" is well executed, and it would be hard not to like Din, the narrator-protagonist. My biggest reservation was really that I didn't like the other protagonist (Ana), and I found the rest of the characters a bit difficult to keep separated in my mind. Maybe just a bit too much background and complexity overall to allow for the story to really shine.