Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2025, Novels and Novellas

Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2025, Novels and Novellas

by Rich Horton

This will be a shorter Hugo nomination post than usual for me, as I really haven't read many novelettes or short stories this year. Too many 800 page novels I guess!

Novels

1. Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford. This is first on my list by a wide margin. Brilliant alternate history set in a world where the Mississipian culture of native Americans survived long enough to form their own state -- it's a murder mystery, a political thriller, a love story, and has some of the best writing about the experience of music I've seen.

2. The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. A really neat time travel story about people rescued from the past, wrapped around a love story between a man taken from the disaster of the Franklin expedition and his "bridge" in the near future. 

3. Three Eight One, by Aliya Whitely. A very strange story that hardly bears explanation in a paragraph -- mostly it's about the sort of coming of age journey of a young woman from an oddly retro community across a strange nearish future world (maybe?) -- but it's much weirder than that.

4. Navola, by Paolo Bacigalupi. This one is not so weird. It's a lovely fairly traditional quasi-historical fantasy (sort of in the Guy Gavriel Kay mode) set in analog of an Italian city in the early Renaissance era: a coming of age story about the scion of a powerful family. Nothing much is new here, but it's beautifully done.

5. Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile. Near future SF about the intertwined lives of several people, satirizing corporate culture and investigating relationships in a slowly disintegrating world affected by some algorithmic meddling with love.

Also:

 The Book of Love, by Kelly Link. This is a good book but it falls short of great. Probably longer than it needs to be. Kelly Link will write a great novel at some time, I'm sure, but this is well worth reading but not up to the level of her short fiction.

 Vinyl Wonderland, by Mark Rigney. A fine novel about a kid making a mess of his life after his mother's death and his father's decline, as he encounters a strange landscape behind the "Elvis door" in a '70s used record store.

Novellas 

1. A Mourning Coat, by Alex Jeffers. A really lovely story about a man mourning the death of his father and forming a new relationship. The fantastical elements are minimal but they enhance a moving and convincing small scale narrative.

2. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar. A dark parable of class structures in the society on a group of mining spaceships.

3. The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Nayler. Searing story of a woman with her consciousness uploaded into a mammoth's brain, and her efforts to keep them from being hunted as elephants were.

4. Haunt Sweet Home, by Sarah Pinsker. An enjoyable story about a young woman struggling to find her way in life who gets a job with the title home improvement show, and finds some of the "haunts" more real than expected.