I’m not writing much about books anymore, but I’m taking the excuse of “I just read all of the Hugo-nominated novels for this year” to talk a bit about, well, books. The selection for the Hugo Awards for Best Novel 2025 had the interesting property of having two books by the same author, Adrian Tchaikovsky. I had heard from him but hadn’t read any of his work, so that was a good opportunity for an introduction.
I had read only one book from the selection before the nominations were announced, so I was fairly excited to see a lot of stuff that had escaped my radar so far! I was a bit less excited to realize that it looked like a fairly heavily body-horror-skewed list, but I also realized during this reading adventure that it was less of a deal-breaker than I thought it was.
I have not made final decisions on my ballot yet, apart from knowing what’s lower half, what’s upper half, and what will probably be on top of my ballot, but I don’t have the exact ranking yet. So, instead of going by rank, I’m just going to do like the WorldCon announcement and go by title alphabetical order.
Alien Clay – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Alien Clay is told from the perspective of Professor Daghdev, an academic whose dream of visiting alien worlds just got granted. But, in the vast “be careful what you wish for” tradition, it’s been granted by his exile to a penal colony on a very unhospitable planet, Kiln. Kiln has a very enthusiastic ecosystem, which tends to combine together and with everything, including alien-to-them life forms. It does not help with the planet hospitality, and the authoritarian penal colony conditions do not help either.
I was not super convinced by Alien Clay, maybe because I expected more of it. The world-building is honestly great, the whole biology stuff is very cool (albeit very creepy)… but the rest fell somewhat flat for me. My general impression was one of “you fell in love with your setting and the plot fell a bit short”. This is lower half of my ballot.
The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley
The Ministry of Time is the only novel I had read before the nominations. It’s a story that stems from the question “what if we could extract people from their time just before their death, and bring them to our contemporary era?”. It follow an unnamed character who becomes a civil servant tasked with helping these extracted people integrate into society, and it devolves from there into a time travel romance and a spy novel.
I remember highly enjoying this when I read it back in November. I liked the premise of extracting people from their time rather than traveling through time, and I found the idea of having that handled by British civil servants tickling. I was not super convinced by the ending, which felt rushed, but not obnoxiously so either. But, to me, it does not read as genre/SFF fiction. It reads as literary fiction with some time travel sprinkled on top. Because of that, this will be lower half of my ballot – I believe that the Hugos should award a novel that’s more firmly inside the genre.
Service Model – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Service Model follows Charles (it’s complicated), a robot valet who suddenly found himself out of a job because of the unfortunate demise of his human owner. And it turns out that it’s getting very, very difficult to find another human in need of a robot valet. Thankfully, he encounters The Wonk, who will endeavor to convince him that he shouldn’t feel constrained by his programming, and that probably he already already isn’t anymore.
I enjoyed the characters and the situations, it was a very funny book, but somehow I do not remember the ending – I think it may have been quicker-paced than the rest of the novel and that it kind of confused me. It does end on the lower half of my ballot, but only because the other three books are stronger, as far as I’m concerned 🙂
Someone You Can Build A Nest In – John Wiswell
Someone You Can Build A Nest In was maybe the best surprise of this round of nominations. It is described by the publisher as a “creepy, charming monster-slaying fantasy romance—from the perspective of the monster”, and it is indeed exactly that. I was expecting to bounce off that one hard, especially since the monster, Shesheshen, is a blob that steals pieces from her human meals to build her own body in order to pass as human when needed. Charming indeed. Definitely HEAVILY full of body horror, that one.
And yet, I enjoyed it a lot. It’s funny, it’s queer, Shesheshen is oddly relatable apart from the people-eating issue, the romance is sweet, and it worked very well. I read it before it won the Nebula, and I’m very happy it got that award; definitely first half of my ballot.
A Sorceress Comes to Call – T. Kingfisher
A Sorceress Comes to Call is told from the point of view of Cordelia, 14 years old, who lives with her controlling mother, who is determined to remarry and have Cordelia find a rich spouse too. And by “controlling”, I mean “literally magically mind-controlling”. One night, Cordelia’s mother wakes her up and they flee to the estate of the Squire, a man that she has set in her sights as acceptable. The Squire is a nice man, his sister Hester even more so, and it becomes Cordelia’s goal to prevent her mother to wreck havoc on that family. Oh, and of course, there’s a horse.
I wouldn’t call this book “a delightful read” because the amount of family abuse and trauma around Cordelia is heart-wrenching and it does hurt. But the cast of secondary characters is fantastic, the book was hard to put down, and it fits solidly in the first half of my ballot too.
The Tainted Cup – Robert Jackson Bennett
I almost didn’t read The Tainted Cup, because it was provided in the Hugo voting package as watermarked PDF, but I sighed and bought another copy and I’m very glad that I did. In The Tainted Cup, we follow Din, the young assistant to Ana, a brilliant and eccentric detective. Din is an engraver: he got augmented to be able to have perfect recall of the memories he anchors by smell. It comes handy as Ana mostly refuses to go outside of her home and wears a blindfold most of the time to avoid over-stimulation. For their latest case, they investigate the death of an Imperial officer, who apparently died when a tree spontaneously sprouted out of him. Not an uncommon occurrence in Din and Ana’s world, where plant contagion does happen (and where plants and people can be manipulated to fulfill certain tasks), but still somewhat suspicious.
I loved The Tainted Cup and it has a high chance to finish on top of my ballot. I was faulting Alien Clay for “having a cool setting but lacking on the plot”; The Tainted Cup also has tremendous world-building (one that I’ll be happy to revisit in later books of the series) and I found the plot and story far more engaging. I’m definitely happy I read that book.
There, these were my thoughts on the Novel finalists. The Hugo Awards have many more categories, and I do try to vote on as many categories as I can, so I still have some reading to do before July 23rd 🙂
Balise's Blog 