2025 Hugo Award Novella 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 novellas - another post to come on the novels! 

If I was giving the prize? It would go to either The Butcher of the Forest or What Feasts at Night. This is a little surprising, as fantasy-horror is not one of my favoured subgenres usually, but these are two very good works.

Best Novella Nominees

1. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo: 7.5/10

This is the fifth in a series of novellas. The Singing Hills novellas are set in a fantasy world that is closest in analogue to Imperial China, with shades of both Mongolian and Inuit influence. The central conceit and driving device of the series is the journeys of Chih, a travelling archivist and cleric, who gets themselves into a range of problems and adventures as they record the stories of empresses, handmaidens, cultivators, ghosts, tigers, bandits, and many more.

This one starts off as a pretty straightforward Bluebeard pastiche (told well, because Vo tells everything well), but quite quickly, there is a creeping sense of strangeness and disjunction that itches at the back of the brain, signalling a folkoric complexity to the story. 

I can't say much more about the plot without inserting spoilers that would decrease the impact, but I will say that the story uncovers another side of Chih (who is finally on a substantial growth arc as a character) and takes a different approach to novellas 1-3 in that the focus is not on people telling Chih their stories, but rather, Chih living inside the stories as they unfold. 

It is more horror-adjacent than any of the previous books, which is not generally my bag (one of the reasons I rate it lower than most of the earlier ones), but it is beautifully written, and I think very enjoyable for those already into the canon.

2. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed: 8.5/10
As fantasy horror goes, this one has all the tropey elements and then some, in a perfectly paced, tightly controlled, richly evocative story. Veris, the protagonist, is strong and complex and engaging, and the genuine horrible denizens of Elmever, the wild enchanted forest, were vividly chilling and repulsive. Structurally this is a fairly straightforward quest story with elements of fairyland-grotseque, but the original twists that Mohamed inserts make it feel like something a bit special and different. 

I also greatly admired the way real-world ethics and philosophy was seamlessly integrated into the magical plot - the question of what approach to take to the children of evil parents who are being raised in their parents' images is not simple, and the book doesn't try to make it so. 

All in all, a great novella executed with brilliant skill and a very satisfying ending. Strong recommend.

3. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard: 5/10

I actually found this one quite disappointing. Possibly I had been lulled into unreasonably high expectations by having really enjoyed other works by de Bodard in the past, but to me, this was genuinely fairly dull. I didn't find the plot compelling or any of the characters engaging, I didn't altogether understand the worldbuilding, and it felt longer than its length, which is never good for a novella. It's not awful, of course - she is a skilful writer, and that shows - but it's in no way a winner in my estimation. 

4. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar: 8/10

This is a good, really atmospheric dystopia set in a "permanent fleet" scenario, where the remnants of humanity have fled the destroyed world in a series of ships and are now making a living by pillaging resources from asteroids and planetoids. The vision of a sharply stratified society, complete with a very obvious slavery analogue, is not entirely original, but Samatar is persuasive and potent in her elucidation of why and how such a thing might be the default setting for a sick society, and what that might look like. The boy, the woman and the Prophet are all wonderful characters, and the philosophy is well-developed and well-executed. My only real criticism, and the thing that took it down a small notch from the two stories I have picked as winners, was the ending - I felt it was rushed and a little bit overwrought, and too abruptly mixed in magic with science. Still, a good novella, well worth a read.

5. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler: 7.5/10

This novella is immensely sad, quite angry and compelling in the case it makes for how genuinely awful humanity has been (and is) for other life on earth. The book's primary focus is Damira, a one-time campaigner for saving elephants from poaching, murdered by poachers in the end, whose consciousness has been transferred into the body of a female mammoth. The mammoths have been revived from extinction through science, but were not thriving in the wild, lacking skills and instincts that they needed; Damira, the only remaining consciousness with experience of wild elephant behaviour, is able to lead them to a different and more successful life ... until the poachers start coming, and the rich game hunters paying millions for the experience of shooting a mammoth.

Although I admired what the book was trying to do, and really loved Damira (a wonderful protagonist), I thought the story wandered off into unconnected passages a bit too often for such a short work. I actually think it would have been even stronger if it was 20 pages shorter and took a straighter line to its ultimate message. Overall, it was very good, but not quite great.

6. What Feasts at Night, T. Kingfisher: 8.5/10 

An almost perfect 4 hours of audiobook delight :-D Kingfisher is among the best fantasy writers alive today, and these more horror-centric novellas (this is the second featuring retired soldier Alex Easton encountering a range of natural and supernatural horrors, in the company of their valet Angus and the redoubtable English mycologist Miss Eugenia Potter) are superbly balanced between creepiness, plot, and heart. It wasn't perhaps *quite* as good as the first in the series, which was a stone cold banger, but even so, I wouldn't have changed a word.