The 2025 Hugo Best Novel Ballot

My thoughts, and my projected ballot order

Hugo Novel Ballot Review Summary, 2025

(photo by John O’Halloran, taken at the Hugo ceremony at Sasquan, Spokane, WA, 2015. L-R: Stefan Rudnicki, John Joseph Adams, yours truly, Christie Yant, Wendy Wagner. )

I've read all six Hugo nominated novels again this year. As with last year, they are divided half and half between science fiction and fantasy. There are two first novels on the ballot -- first novels do seem to have become very popular in recent years on the ballots (though, as I showed last years, first novels won Hugos in the past, included the very first two Hugos for Best Novel.) The other four nominees are relative veterans -- all have published multiple novels dating back at least a decade. Only one author has previously won a Hugo for Best Novel -- T. Kingfisher (under that name and her real name, Ursula Vernon) has a Hugo in each of the traditional four fiction categories. Adrian Tchaikovsky has a Hugo for Best Series. John Wiswell has no Hugos but as of now two Nebulas, including the recently awarded one to his current Hugo nominee. Robert Jackson Bennett has a British Fantasy Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, but no Hugos or Nebulas. Not surprisingly, there are no previous nominations for Kaliane Bradley in the SF/Fantasy field -- The Ministry of Time is her first novel and first work of genre interest, though she has published well-received literary short fiction.

I'm going to list the novels in the order I plan to put them on the ballot. I will say that my first-place choice is fixed, and my last-place choice is fixed -- but in all honesty the four novels in the middle could have gone in any order. I'll also link to my reviews of the books -- just click on the titles. At the end I'll share my personal nomination ballot -- which had only one book on it that made the final ballot. That said, the four books in the middle of my nomination list might possibly have vied for a couple of spots between them on my list of nominations. I have a couple criteria I use to pick the order -- one is, how ambitious, how original, is the book. Another is, how much did I enjoy reading it. In this case, after a lot of vacillation, I went with category two to break a tie for second place -- The Tainted Cup was simply the most fun to read of those four novels I have ranked 2 through 5.

1. The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

This is Kaliane Bradley's first novel. The central story concerns 5 people fetched from the past in near future London, in particular Graham Gore of the doomed Franklin Expedition in Canada, and his "bridge" -- the narrator, a woman assigned to help him integrate into his new life. Predictably enough, the narrator and Gore fall in love (and I found the love story engaging), but there's a lot more going on here: an intricate (and not wholly convincing ) plot revolving around multiplying time traval paradoxes, an honest examination of the difficulties faced by people from past centuries dealing with the future -- this tied the to issues faced by migrants (as the narrator is the daughter of a Cambodian immigrant to the UK), some grappling with the problems of climate change, and finally a surprising and moving resolution that tries to face the serious problems caused by the UK's Ministry of Time as well as wrestling with real difficulties in the narrator's relationship with Graham Gore. The examination of the expat experience, the depiction of the horrors of the Franklin Expedition, and the intricate plot are very well done. There are some truly wrenching -- tragic -- happenings, which hit home. It's well written -- Bradley in particular has a way with striking images and metaphors. I did have some quibbles -- time travel stories are always weird when the paradoxes are acknowledged, but some of the effects of this version of time travel seemed contrived to me. Some of the political business (and busyness) towards the end felt flat to me (and a bit "tick the boxes" obligatory.) I'm not sure I quite bought a couple of characters' transformations, and some of the motivations driving the climax didn't quite work. That said, in the end I loved the novel, and the very end is a honest and very moving indeed. The book made me laugh, made me think, made me go wow! -- and brought me to tears.

2. The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett

This is the first novel I've read by Bennett, though he has published a dozen novels to date, and he's gotten plenty of praise. This is the first in a new series, about Iudex investigator Anagosa Dolobra and her assistant Dinios Kol. They live in the Empire of Khanum, whose frontiers on the sea are threatened each year by truly massive Leviathans. Ana is a brilliant woman, but so affected by external stimuli that she lives mostly in seclusion; and so Din performs the physical investigations. Din is an "engraver" -- magically enhanced to have perfect recall. Magical enhancements of many kinds are used widely in the Empire -- giving soldiers great strength, for instance; or giving "axioms" great mathematical skills.

Ana has been assigned to investigate a murder in a remote canton, in which an Engineer was killed by a variety of bamboo-like "dapplegrass" that has been engineered to grow very rapidly -- and that had been added to his tea. Soon after, they are summoned to Talagras, a canton by the sea where engineers are maintaining the walls that protect the Empire from the leviathans. It seems that these engineers were also killed by dapplegrass. Their investigation will involve the powerful ruling families, the Gentry, especially a succession crisis in the Haza family; as well as some shady doings by some engineers, and a years-previous disaster in which dapplegrass had run wild and destroyed an entire Canton. I found the novel very entertaining, with some clever ideas, and two main characters who were very fun to read about.

3. Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

One of two novel nominations this year for the very prolific Tchaikovsky. A number of political criminals have been exiled to extrasolar planets in a future dominated by the "Mandate". The narrator is Arton Daghdev, a biologist who had been resisting the Mandate, largely due to their anti-science views. He's now on Kiln, a marginally habitable world with a fecund and very dangerous ecology. Daghdev is a good scientist and the camp commandant is eager for evidence supporting the Mandate's human-first views, and so he gives talented people, like Daghdev, some chances to find data in support of Mandate ideas, but instead Mandate quickly recognizes the strangeness of Kiln's biology, in which living creatures share and trade body parts or form chimeras readily in order to adapt to changing conditions. The story is a slow burn at the start, but the ending is exciting and fascinating as the true implications of Kiln biology eventually become clear.

4. Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is set in a near future which had recently undergone complete societal collapse. The protagonist is Uncharles, a robot valet who has been declared defective after murdering his master. He has no memory of the murder, and is fully ready to believe that he is defective, but his journey to the Diagnosis Center quickly reveals that the world is in chaos, and nothing much is functioning. With the occasional help of another apparently defective robot called The Wonk, who believes robots have become self-aware, Uncharles wanders through much of this future landscape, encountering an underground "farm" where humans are forced to live in a simulation of 20th century life; the Central Library Archive, which is trying to preserve all traces of recorded data to help restore civilization; a group of feral humans living in a ruined cityscape; and a number of soldier robots under the rule of a robot king; and well as a being that calls itself God. Uncharles is simply looking for another master to serve, but the Wonk wants to know why society collapsed, while God has very different motives altogether. It's a bit programmatic -- too clearly constructed to make its points, but its points are worthwhile, and Tchaikovsky's sarcastic voice and ready way with narration make it a fun read.

5. A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher is the pseudonym used by Ursula Vernon for her adult novels. Vernon has won Hugos under both names, for Best Graphic Novel, Best Novel, and each short fiction category. I've enjoyed her short work, but this is the first novel I've read by her. I enjoyed it as well. It primarily closely follows two characters: Cordelia, a 14 year old girl whose mother Evangeline is a witch who can take control of other people's minds (including of course Cordelia's), and Hester, a middle-aged woman living with her brother. Evangeline decides she needs to marry a rich man to cement her financial future; and moves to the city with a design on making Hester's brother her husband. And she figures finding a rich husband for Cordelia is a good idea too, and ends up choosing Lord Richard Evermore, who happens to have been Hester's former lover. Cordelia is appalled, of course -- after all, she's only 14, and she has learned to hate her mother anyway; and of course Hester too is horrified. The two of them, with the help of Lord Richard and some other friends, hatch a plot to foilEvangeline's plans, but Evangeline is a formidable opponent, and her powers are truly scary. It's nice work and I'm glad to have read it, but it doesn't strike me as terribly original, with a faux-Regency sort of setting that seemed a bit thin to me; and with not much really original in plot or fantasy elements. There's really nothing wrong with that -- it's still good entertainment with a moral sense -- but it doesn't seem special enough for the Hugo (which is what I say about the Bennett novel and both Tchaikovsky novels as well.)

6. Someone You Can Build a Nest In, by John Wiswell

I regret to say that this novel is a terrible disappointment, even though it has won this year's Nebula. It has a promising central idea -- a shapeshifting monster, Shesheshen, is awakened from hibernation to realize that a human nobleman and two monster hunters are trying to kill her. She escapes, and the nobleman is killed, and she ends up in the nearby city. She has two problems -- she needs to eliminate the threat to her life, and she needs to find a worthy person in whom to lay her eggs. The local Baroness is the problem -- it was her son who was trying to kill Shesheshen, and the Baroness had previously killed Shesheshen's mother. But Shesheshen, disguised as a woman, is forced to run away, and falls into a canyon, where she is rescued by a young human woman, whom Shesheshen quickly falls in love with, recognizing this woman, Harmony, would be a great person to build a nest in. But -- it turns out Harmony is the Baroness's daughter -- and she has two rather unpleasant sisters. Things proceeds, with the main characters falling deeper in love, and with the Baroness hunting for the monster, never realizing that it's actually that woman her daughter is fooling around with; etc. etc.

As I said, the premise is promising. But the novel just doesn't work. There are minor problems, like some really slapdash worldbuilding -- the setting is a quite uninspired faux-Medieval (or somewhat post-Medieval) Europe; and some unconvincing characterization (really only Shesheshen comes through at all -- Harmony in particular just doesn't come to life); and inconsistent prose. The structure is flabby as well -- a slow start, an OK middle to almost the end, and then a terribly overlong epilog – what have been a 2 page wrapup is pointlessly extended to 30 or more pages, with the only important action in that section not even shown! Shesheshen herself is either not monster enough -- there's not enough danger, and killing, from her; or is forgiven too easily for the killings she does do, especially of an admittedly annoying young child. And, worst of all, the implied promise in the novel's title -- that Sheshesgen needs to resolve the issue of what to do with her eggs especially after she's fallen in love with the best candidate for a host -- is completely dodged.

John Wiswell has written some nice stories, including his Nebula winner "Open House on Haunted Hill". He definitely has promise. But his first novel is deeply flawed. That's no sin, and he may have excellent novels in his future. But this isn't one.

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So that's my ballot. What would I have preferred to see on the final ballot? Here's what my nomination list looked like:

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 Mississippian 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.

I also liked Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer; The Book of Love, by Kelly Link (another first novel); and Vinyl Wonderland, by Mark Rigney.

I had not read the other Hugo nominated novels besides The Ministry of Time before I sent in my nomination ballot, and definitely a couple of the books on the final ballot would possibly have superseded a couple of those on my nomination list. Having said that, I very strongly believe that Cahokia Jazz was (by far) the best novel eligible for the Hugo this year, and The Ministry of Time was second. Behind that there are perhaps eight more novels of similar quality that would have been worthy nominees, including the four on the final ballot that I have ranked second through fifth above. It is certainly true that for most awards, distinguishing between the top contenders is almost pointless, a matter of personal preference. (But it is worthwhile to try, and to realize why you prefer one to another.)