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.

Review: Spring List, by Ralph Arnold

Review: Spring List, by Ralph Arnold

by Rich Horton

I picked this up at the annual St. Louis County Book Fair (same place and time that I picked by my copy of The Ante-Room, reviewed here.) It was cheap and I like books and am interested in book publishing and I figure this would be a comedy about a publisher trying to assemble their spring list of books. It turns about to be something a bit different, though it's still a comedy about publishing, and quite entertaining. 

Ralph Arnold (1906-1970) was for a long time in publishing with Constable and Co., rising to Chairman in 1958, and retiring in 1962. He was also a writer, of light fiction (such as Spring List), detective novels, memoirs and history. He was at school briefly with Ian Fleming, and was a good friend of Fleming's brother Peter. He was related to novelist Edwin L. Arnold, though I'm not sure in what way exactly -- likely a nephew, great nephew, or cousin. (Edwin L. Arnold was the author of Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, a Martian story that seems a likely direct influence on Burroughs,)

Spring List, published in 1956, is told from the point of view of Arthur Lynsted, who has a senior position at the firm Southease and Piddinghoe. Arthur has a wife who is a successful writer of what seems to be women's fiction, and a teenaged son. Elizabeth's bestsellers bring in a good deal more money than Arthur's salary, but Arthur insists that he support the family entirely. So Arthur is in just a slightly discontented mood when his childhood friend Diana comes by to talk about the novel she had submitted to the firm. Diana is married to another childhood friend, General Sir Alured Flowers, who had had a notoriously brilliant Second World War. Diana's novel is a light mystery, and surprisingly good for someone who had never shown any interest in writing.

There is some other publishing talk, particularly about Arthur's rival Edward Sligo, whose firm publishes Elizabeth Lynsted's books (Arthur having refused them for ethical reasons), and who also published a hugely successful novel by one Jas Cobham, who alas hasn't written a second book despite a large advance. Arthur's firm reluctantly decides to publish Diana's novel, though they're unlikely to do much more than break even, in the hopes of convincing her husband the General to write a memoir of his time in the Army, which will surely be a bestseller.

This all comes to a head when he goes to visit Diana, in their old home town. Ostensibly the visit is to finalize the contract, but Arthur is supposed to try to get Alured Flowers to write his memoir, and privately he's just slightly tempted to make time with Diana. But he soon learns that Alured has disappeared, and also that Jas Cobham is around too, having bought Arthur's childhood home with his advance money. Then Edward Sligo shows up, clearly on a similar mission to Arthur's ...

It's a very light novel, but it's pretty fun. The plot has some convolutions which are nicely done, of the sort that the reader likely will guess but will still enjoy seeing play out. The hints at "inside publishing" are pretty minor, though they probably do reflect some truths about how it was conducted in England in the 1950s. By no means a deathless masterpiece, this is still a nice book. As far as I can tell it was never reprinted after the UK edition, from John Murray in 1956, and the American edition, from Macmillan the following year. 

Review: Haunt Sweet Home, by Sarah Pinsker

Review: Haunt Sweet Home, by Sarah Pinsker

by Rich Horton

Sarah Pinsker's latest book is this short novel/novella from Tordotcom. (My quick and dirty word count -- certainly vulnerable to errors -- indicates that it's between 40,000 and 45,000 words, which actually makes it eligible for the Hugos in either the novel or novella category -- I'll put in novella myself for my nominating ballot purposes.)

The story is told in first person by Mara Billings, the youngest of her generation in a large extended family, and it's quickly clear that she a) hasn't done much with her life so far (she's about 30, still working barista-type jobs after a few half-hearted stabs at community college), and b) is pretty sensitive about how her family seems to regard her. The best known members of the family are her cousin Jeremy, who is a successful model and has a gig as the host of a cable show about remodeling haunted houses called Haunt Sweet Home; and her Oma, who was a quite successful wood sculptor until her hands gave out. Jeremy offers her a job as a Production Assistant on his show, and after some hesitation she takes him up on it. (The particular season the story covers involves houses in Western Massachusetts, an area I'm mildly familiar with as my Dad was born and raised there.)

She learns she's assigned to the night shift, which is charged with prepping things for the actual shoots, which are in the day. And part of that prepping is arranging for the "haunts", which to no real surprise are faked. The work is strenuous, and it messes with her sleep schedule, but she finds she enjoys it, even if she's still not sure she's accepted by her fellows. There's one house worked on per week, and we see a couple of these. She ends up with a tree branch salvaged from a "haunted" woods, that she starts carving in imitation of her Oma. And a couple of houses in she meets a day shift person, Jo, who has volunteered to help with the haunting, and who seems very good at it. (And a reader's antennae should perk immediately!) Jo and Mara become close enough friends that Mara invites Jo to a family get-together during some off-time -- and then Mara becomes annoyed again that Jo is -- to Mara's eyes -- immediately welcomed by her family in a way Mara doesn't feel about herself.

Then we come to Cleaveland House, which has a haunted library -- or which will once they get done with it! This episode is described in script snippets shown between the chapters, and it involves books flying around the library at night. This is Mara's job, of course -- but then somehow books that Mara was nowhere near also go flying ...

Well, I won't tell the rest, though it won't come as much of a surprise, and at any rate it's not really the point of the story. The point of the story is Mara beginning to figure out what she needs to do with her life -- and the particular help she gets in that effort. This is nicely handled and believable. The story does have a supernatural element, though a slightish one, and that works nicely too. I don't rank this with Pinsker's very best work, but it's a fine and effective story, and a good example of using supernatural elements without cheating or diminishing them -- but also to fundamentally tell a pure character story.

Review: The Ante-Room, by Kate O'Brien

Review: The Ante-Room, by Kate O'Brien

by Rich Horton

Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) was an Irish writer, of plays, novels, travel writing, criticism and biography. She was born in Limerick, but moved to England in 1919 after graduating from college. She spent much of the rest of her life in England, and some time in Spain, but most of her fiction is set in Ireland. She was a Lesbian (though briefly married), and had relationships with E. M. Delafield and Mary O'Neill. Her fiction apparently often has sympathetic portrayals of gay people (though there are none (that we know of) in The Ante-Room), and is definitely feminist. At least two of her novels were banned in Ireland. Throughout much of her career she was quite successful -- sufficiently enough that the heroine of the movie Brief Encounter mentions reserving "the new Kate O'Brien" from the library. But by the end of her life she was somewhat forgotten -- but has been restored to her place as a major Irish writer in recent decades.

My edition of The Ante-Room was published in 1984 as part of the Virago Modern Classics series. The novel first appeared in 1934. The Virago edition of the book includes an Afterword by Diana Madden, which I have to confess I didn't much like. The novel itself is excellent, however.

It's set in 1880, at the estate of a wealthy family in Mellick (O'Brien's stand in for Limerick.) The central character is Agnes Mulqueen, the second daughter of the family. The mother, Teresa, is dying of cancer, and her husband, Danny, is fairly ineffectual. The only son still in the house is Reggie, his mother's favorite, a syphilitic mess at the age of 36. Agnes is 25, a very beautiful woman, but somewhat stuck for a few reasons -- she needs to run the house as her mother dies; she is a woman and doesn't have the opportunities men have for independence; and, perhaps most importantly, she is desperately in love with her older sister Marie-Rose's husband Vincent, and he with her. But Agnes is a devout Catholic, and also loves Marie-Rose very much -- they had been inseparable as children -- so any physical relationship is impossible.

The action takes place over three days -- The Eve of All Saints, The Feast of All Saints, and The Feast of All Souls. (Or, as we'd say these days in the US, Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day.) Teresa Mulqueen's illness seems to have come to a crisis. The local doctor, William Curran, has somewhat reluctantly agreed to consult with her cancer specialist, Dr. Coyle, and a specialist from London, Sir Godfrey Bartlett-Crowe. Meanwhile Marie-Rose, who has had another of many fights with Vincent, is coming to visit and spend time with her sister; and Vincent will accompany her, ostensibly for the shooting but primarily to see Agnes. Teresa is ready to die except that she can't bear to leave the feckless Reggie without emotional support. Canon Considine, Teresa's brother, is coming to give her a special Mass. Add to the mix the new day nurse, Miss Cunningham, who may have designs on Reggie despite his illness. 

The opening of the novel is a bit programmatic, as O'Brien sets the scene in a slightly forced way. But once things are in place, the novel is beautiful. It's mostly tiny crises. Agnes hasn't been to confession because she believes her passion for Vincent is a sin, but she feels that she must take Communion at the Canon's Mass. Dr. Curran, a very fine man, is himself very much in love with Agnes, who likes him a good deal but can't forget Vincent. Marie-Rose, sort of an opposite to Agnes, is likewise beautiful, but short where Agnes is tall, blond while her sister is dark, and rather less intelligent -- but she's a nice if flighty woman. Vincent and she torture each other -- they have realized they are wholly incompatible but are trapped. Vincent himself is arguably the least likeable person, clearly spoiled by his good looks, and perhaps feeling himself stuck not just in a bad marriage but in a staid upper class position. Sir Godfrey is immediately taken with Marie-Rose and begins a flirtation -- apparently something normal for him. Miss Cunningham, gently maneuvering for Reggie's affection, is held in contempt by the Mulqueen sisters -- but she herself, having been poor her whole life, and having learned that the doctors she works with will fool around with a pretty young woman in her circumstances, but won't marry one, is sensibly proposing a fair bargain -- a lifetime of caring for an ill and dissipated man in exchange for a security. 

The writing is lovely, and the characterization intense. (Perhaps only Vincent comes off a bit unconvincingly.) The reader truly cares for Agnes, and Marie-Rose, and Dr. Curran and even Nurse Cunningham, even Reggie and poor despairing Danny Mulqueen. The novel moves swiftly through a sequence of heavily weighted scenes: Mass and Confession, dinner, encounters and kisses, songs, fights, and an agonizing extended conversation between Agnes and Vincent. It leads to a perhaps a bit too melodramatic final scene -- but for all that it's a powerful and effective novel. The pain and loss the characters feel is real, and behind that there's a tiny hint of hope. Kate O'Brien was not a believing Catholic, but was certainly raised in the Catholic tradition, and this strikes me as a profoundly Catholic novel, in some ways reminding me just a bit of my favorite Graham Greene novel, The End of the Affair. First-rate work, and I'm very glad I stumbled across this book. 

Review: The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman

Review: The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman

by Rich Horton

I mentioned recently that in looking to see if this particular book -- recommended by Tim Walters -- was available in audio form, and instead I stumbled across the Campbell Memorial Award winner Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman (no relation.) For The Book of the Night I had to read a physical copy! Which I have now done. (I should note that I read physical books at about a 10-1 ratio over audiobooks, and also that yes I do consider listening to an audiobook "reading" it.)

Not to bury the lede -- The Book of the Night (1984) is an astonishingly weird novel. It is set at a monastery on the island of Iona, in distant history, about 900 A.D. But from the beginning, with the monks rescuing an enormous (some 200 feet tall) woman being rescued (temporarily) from the ocean, which also yields a World War I soldier and Coca-Cola caps, it's clear that very strange things are going on. The woman warns of war in heaven before dying. And then the narrative shifts to a young girl, Celeste, who lives as a boy (women being forbidden in the monastery) with her insane hermit father; and it's no more "normal" from there forward. Besides the unstuck in time narrative, the prose is fascinating, playing linguistic games throughout. 

Rhoda Lerman (1936-2015) published six novels in her lifetime, with a posthumous work appearing in 2023. She was quite successful: her first novel, Call Me Ishtar, from 1973, which has the goddess in contemporary times wreaking havoc for feminist purposes, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer; and her later novels seem to have gotten consistently good notices. Most of her other novels seem to have been antically and often bitterly comic, such as The Girl That He Marries (1976), about a woman who figures out the tricks of getting a man to do her bidding -- and perhaps regrets it; and Jewish themes seem important, as with God's Ear (1989), also apparently a comic novel about a dead rabbi. Her most successful novel seems to have been Eleanor (1979), which also became a one-woman play -- it's about Eleanor Roosevelt and to me it seems by a long stretch her least interesting work. Later in her life she wrote a couple of memoirish books about her dogs.

Back to The Book of the Night. The main thread concerns Celeste's life on Iona. Her father, Manuel, left her mother (whom Celeste misses even as she still loves her rather dreadful father) and game to the monastery, presenting Celeste as a boy named CuRoi. The Abbot -- who turns out to be her grandfather -- is a mystical sort of Irish Christian, and there is a rival who wishes to hew closely to the leadership of Rome. So at one thematical level the book is about the clash between an older, more mystical Irish religion, with significant syncretic elements, and Roman Catholicism. (All of this arguably a strange choice for a seemingly very Jewish writer.) But the book is much weirder than that seems -- Rome has an army made up of Carthaginians, plus modern weapons like submachine guns, and seeminly airships as well. There are Ethiopian Catholics as well. 

Manuel's religion (or lack thereof) is even stranger. And he teaches Celeste strictly but oddly, and here again we see the timelessness of the book, for "non-linear thermodynamics" and "the uncertainty principle" are among the subjects; and too the strangeness: "What is the effect of the uncertainty principle on the fugue?" One of his methods -- repeated to great effect throughout the book -- is to string together eccentrically related words and phrases: "Zeus, Deus, juice, Jews, Yid, Druid, druse." "Methuselah, Medea, Medua, Medusa, Madonna." As Celeste grows, Manuel becomes more obsessed. A female Cook is hired, with consequences, and the Abbot's sister (armed with a submachine gun) visits as well. Celeste, or CuRoi, takes up duties in the monastery, mostly copying. And then some shocking events: a fire, killings, a transformation into a cow, a flying man, a new Abbot, too much more to mention, leading to a wild and transcendent conclusion.

It's a really remarkable effort. The linguistic inventions, the mystical speculations, the sex and death (I wonder if Alice Sheldon read this book -- at times it seems in sympathy with her work), the sheer wildness, the gods. It's unexpected everywhere -- not like any other novel I've read, not, unless I miss my guess, very much like anything else Lerman wrote. It can be a bit hard going at times, to be sure, but we shouldn't regret the work, for there are rewards. 

Review: This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

Review: This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

by Rich Horton

A little while back John Kessel mentioned this slim book, which was published in 2001 by McSweeney's Books. I had completely missed the book when it appeared. I greatly enjoyed Lethem's early short fiction and his first few novels, which were science fiction but with a distinctly different voice, and different objectives than most genre SF writers. (Indeed, I wrote a review of his first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, and sent it to a free distribution newspaper sort of thing -- perhaps it was BookPage? I'm not sure anymore. They didn't take it though their response hinted that they came really close. That's the first attempt at (semi)professional reviewing/criticism I ever made.) It wasn't, then, precisely a surprise that he moved out of the genre pretty much at the turn of the millennium, and, not really for that reason, the last of his books that I read was his 1999 detective novel Motherless Brooklyn. His next novel, The Fortress of Solitude, was still ambiguously genre (and got savaged in the New Yorker by James Wood, who is an excellent critic when he is in sympathy with a book, but has a completely blind eye, it seems to me, for genre.) But that book was long and about Superman, and I didn't get around to it, after which I was actively reviewing for Locus and my time for novels was much diminished.

This Shape We're In is a very short book -- about 13,000 words long by my estimate. It's narrated by Henry F., a middle-aged man whom we meet at a backyard barbecue, when the neighbors' son Balkan tells Henry F. and his wife Marianne that he's been in the eye and seen their son Dennis, who has been away for a while. And soon we realize that this refers to a real eye -- maybe -- as it seems that everyone lives in what they call the Shape. The Shape seems to be an enormous body of some sort, with eyes and a neck and bowels and liver and so on. While Mr. F is skeptical about Balkan's testimony, his wife insists that he and Balkan try to find Dennis.

And so Henry and Balkan begin their journey, up the spine towards the eye. There are problems, of course -- which eye was it? Could it have been the theorized "third eye"? Or was it a fraudulent creation? Things get stranger and stranger, confrontations with paramilitary groups, and religious groups, along with a visit to a clearly false eye, and references to Central Command, which can be contacted by red phones except that those phones always seem connected to a phone sex channel. This is all transmitted through Henry's voice -- that of a disappointed, heavy drinking, middle aged man, who seems to have had a military past but now is merely a "garbage hider". The science fiction reader will come up with hypotheses -- at first this seems perhaps a generation starship, for example -- and other readers will probably take everything as satirical surrealism. I'll just say that Lethem doesn't really disappoint either reader -- the story is certainly satirical and much of it can be read as sort of surrealistic, but in the story world the "Shape" is real, and its nature is, to an extent, eventually revealed. In the end, I think, it is truly a case of using SFnal imagery and allusions (though there are allusions to many other fictions) in the service of a commentary on present day life

It's quite effective. Much of this is propelled by Lethem's writing, which is very clever, imaginative and quite funny. John Kessel compares it to Kafka, and I can see that, though Lethem's prose and tone are not precisely Kafkaesque. I wish I'd seen it back in 2001. I'm not saying it would have got a Hugo nomination (it wouldn't have, but not for any reason having to do with its worth) but I think it would have been on my list. (Though looking at that year I'm reminded that Ian MacLeod wrote arguably the two best stories at novella and novelette length, both pure SF, and neither nominated: "New Light on the Drake Equation" and "Isabel of the Fall", neither of which ended up on the Hugo ballot either!)

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

by Rich Horton

Lawrence Block was born in 1938, and began publishing in the late '50s. He's written some SF, some romance, a fair amount of erotica, and other things, but he's been primarily a crime writer. He's probably best known for his Bernie Rhodenbarr and his Matthew Scudder series, as well as four novels about Chip Harrison, the first two comic soft porn, the other two crime novels. But his first series character to gain traction was Evan Tanner. Tanner appeared in seven novels between 1966 and 1970, with an eighth coming out in 1998. These novels are not crime novels, but lightly comic spy thrillers. (Based on the one book I have, they were packaged as titillatingly as possible, despite content that never really reaches event the softest porn (though there are mild sex scenes.))

I say "lightly comic", but I don't think that gets the tone quite right, based at least on Tanner's Twelve Swingers, which was the third in the series, coming out in 1967. There are definite comic bits, mind you, and in some ways it's kind of a sendup -- the action is implausible, and we're not supposed to believe in it, and the CIA, as well as political and other authorities in any number of countries, come in for plenty of mockery, but it's not really a funny novel. The character interactions feel real (if idealized, especially as to the way beautiful and good women keep wanting to sleep with Tanner), and the political commentary is often quite pointed. (Tanner is cynical about the US, the Soviet Union, China, and dictators everywhere -- his ideal is, really, a world of many more independent polities. It's striking to see him advocating strongly for the dissolution of the Yugoslavia into at least five different nations -- which of course happened (not without a terrible war) about a quarter century later.)

Evan Tanner fought in the Korean War, and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head, and destroyed his sleep center. He has a disability pension, and has used his extra 8 hours of wakefulness to learn a lot of stuff -- different languages, lots of science and other knowledge, memberships in all sorts of organizations from various revolutionary groups to the Flat Earth Society.) He writes term papers and even Ph. D. theses to make extra money. And, he does a bit of work on the side for a government organization without a name, which seems to allow him lots of latitude in his assignments.

In this book he has promised a Latvian friend to rescue his lost love from the USSR. (Yes, another thing Tanner advocates is the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent states. (Also, he's intrigued by the idea of 50 independent American states,)) Alas, he thinks the job is impossible. But when the organization he works for wants him to go to Colombia for what he thinks is a bad reason, he uses his mission to Latvia as an excuse to decline. He begins in Macedonia though, where it turns out he has a young son (presumably conceived in a previous book?) So he sees his son, and on the way out of Yugoslavia finds himself further burdened with a Montenegrin who has written a book calling for the splitting of Yugoslavia. The two proceed through Hungary and Poland to Lithuania and Latvia -- and somehow by the end he's picked up a 7 year old girl who is the rightful Queen of Lithuania, 12 extremely beautiful Latvian gymnasts (a package deal including his friend's lover) and eventually even a jazz-playing Russian pilot. All this of course further complicates his mission.

Does he succeed? Well, there are sequels to come! The means he uses to cross borders and foil the police and so on are, as the book goes on, increasingly absurd. He sleeps with a few women -- most of whom would be happy if he'd settle down with them, though in the end he has the one son, the prospects of perhaps another child but who knows?, and an adopted daughter. We don't have to believe in much of this -- but it's entertaining throughout, a truly professional but affecting performance.