Breathing Just a Little

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 c...

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 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 short stories! Novella and novel review posts to come. The six stories on the list are: “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones “Marginalia” by Mary Robinette Kowal “Stitched to Skin Like Family Is” by Nghi Vo “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim While I have given a tie mark to the two I think are the strongest, if it were me, I would give the Hugo to We Will Teach You How to Read We Will Teach You How to Read because I think what is does is strikingly original in both form and affect, and I think risk-taking innovation like that should...