I just finished rereading the Hugo Novel nominees! My voting slate will look like this, and it's an incredibly strong year.

  1. 1.

    Shroud

  2. 2.

    A Drop of Corruption

  3. 3.

    The Raven Scholar

  4. 4.

    The Everlasting

  5. 5.

    The Incandescent

  6. 6.

    Death of the Author

1. Shroud

Starting with my vote for best novel this year, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud is a phenomenally inventive novel that does thoughtful work with POV, eloquently sketches a whole world and worldview, and executes well on 'novel-as-engineering-problem.'

I first read this novel when it came out, as one of the first in a project to read all of A.T.'s novels, and rereading it on the other side of that project it strikes me how expert a writer Tchaikovsky is. It's rife with the tropes that characterize a lot of his SF - we even get a cameo by some giant spiders, the real enemy is capitalism, etc - but not for a moment did the novel feel tiresome. It's an action-packed novel whose protagonist spends most of the pages sitting on a couch. Great for fans of A Deepness in the Sky, The Martian, and more. A five star novel.

2. A Drop of Corruption

Robert Jackson Bennett's latest in the Ana and Din series is a wonderful sequel that enriches the world of that novel while telling its own compelling mystery. Come for the sharp dialogue and worldbuilding, stay for the politics.

In grad school I TA'd a class on detective fiction, where we talked about Charles Rzepka's idea of the "puzzle element" - the thing in a novel that's a game to be solved by the reader. Corruption "plays fair," in Rzepka's terminology, because an astute reader can figure it out along the way.

It's great, and it's only a testament to how much I loved Shroud - along with The Tainted Cup's win in last year's Hugos - that has this in the number 2 slot.

3. The Raven Scholar

The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hogdson's first foray into sf/f, is a labyrinthine joy to read that is just as inventive with POV as Shroud. This was the most compulsively readable of the year, for me - one of those books I picked up and couldn't put down.

Raven is somewhat, subjectively, by a less deft hand on the trope tiller than I'd have liked. I've learned after reading that Hodgson was in publishing before working as a writer, and the collision of buzzwords here - "It's like the Hunger Games meets Game of Thrones and A:TlA" - does make the novel feel a bit more focus grouped than I would have liked. But it's a wonderful, visceral novel, with well-drawn characters, good pacing, and great action. I'm looking forward to the next in the series.

4. The Everlasting

The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow, is another stellar novel that, in a less strong year, would have a shot as my favorite of the year. It's formally ambitious, with a compelling rhythm to its storytelling that made it hard to put down, and has the best romance of the year imo.

This novel has some of the sharpest-drawn characters of the year, with a truly contemptible villain, and it has some spicy scenes that I thought were pretty hot! I could see a less patient reader not enjoying the repetition, but it felt thoughtful to me. A terrific novel.

5. The Incandescent

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh, was a real pleasure to read, and I feel bad about putting it this far down the list. Again, it's a testament to how strong of a year we've had! Strong dialogue, strong characterization, and a good, well-sketched world. The pacing felt a little off to me -- it's harmed, I think, by having such a strong first act that the back half has to labor mightily to keep up. Enjoyed it more on my re-read than the first time around, though, and I liked this better than Some Desperate Glory, Tesh's 2024 Hugo winner.

6. Death of the Author

Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor, is a novel I expected to like more than I did. There's stuff to admire here, but I have to assume the novel just Isn't For Me. The structure is interesting, but none of the three parallel narratives landed as strongly as I wanted.

It may be more damning of me than of the book, but I found the protagonist, Zelu, extremely unlikeable. This can be fine, but it doesn't work when the author and the book is so tightly aligned with the protagonist's POV. DOTA has more than a whiff of autobiography to it, and Okorafor's no doubt righteous grievances get in the way of telling a good story here. The prose is solid where it doesn't clunk, but it rarely soars. It reminded me some of R. F. Kuang's Yellowface, another autobiographically-inflected literary departure for a woman of color.

But where Kuang's novel is ironic, equivocal, and deftly satirical (recalling Pale Fire, which I think is an underappreciated intertext here), DOTA feels much more like an attempt to settle scores. But, it may be just that it's not for me!

Some stray thoughts

Every novel this year was worth the time, and I'm looking forward to digging into the novellas next.

  • Lots of academia in this batch - DOTA, Incandescent, Everlasting, and Raven all take place at least partially in an academic setting.

  • All of the novels but Incandescent do formally inventive POV work this year, which is great.

  • Both Shroud and Corruption feature an uninviting, horrible place called Shroud. A fun little coincidence.

  • 2 novels by men and 4 by women, I believe. As I dig into the historical Hugos, this is unlikely to hold.

  • 4 fantasy novels to 2 sf ones (I'll need a separate post to talk about the generic difference, if anyone is interested). Another thing worth tracking.

#hugo #laconv