Hugo Award voting should open soon and will continue through the July 15. For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon. As I did the last three years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
This is the Fifth part of this series. I have previously reviewed the nominees for Best Young Adult SF/F (The Lodestar Award) and for Best SF/F Short Story, Best SF/F novelette, and Best Novella.
You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This post is about what's generally considered the big award, the award for best novel (40K words or more) of 2019. It gets the most attention and the most votes (although Best Series has matched it recently?) and serves not only as a mark of what is one of the best books in the genre, but as a historical marker of what is valued at any given time - at least to the type of voters who make up the Worldcon audience (admittedly a niche group). We can see that pretty clearly with this year's Nebula Award winner, which was a book about a future world ravaged by pandemic forcing live music scenes underground as everyone instead lived in virtual space without human contact.
But that book - A Song for a New Day - did not make the Hugo Ballot. So it's less clear what is going to win this year, and we have some pretty strong books on the ballot.
This was actually one of the easier shortlists for me to rank, as I grade every novel I read out of 10, and only two of the six novels below actually earned the same ranking for me when I reviewed them - and in retrospect, I'd clearly consider the two "tied" novels to be on different levels really (Those scores are not set in stone for my ballot).
Tier Five:
6. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders (Review Here)
Charlie Jane Anders' debut SF/F novel (she had one prior novel a decade back) All the Birds in the Sky was a triumph, a hybrid of Scifi and Fantasy concepts that was adorable, heartwarming and just a completely great package - resulting in it taking the Nebula Award and getting a nomination for the Hugo. The City in the Middle of the Night is a very very different novel, feeling like a riff on the ideas of both Octavia Butler (in her Lilith's Blood trilogy) and Ursula K Le Guin in a more serious SF novel with a ton of serious ideas dealing with privilege, oppression, love, freedom, and more.
Unfortunately, it does not really come together in a way that worked for me and this feels like a nomination more influenced by the great work of the author than the work itself. My full complaints can be found in the Review linked above - I haven't read this in forever so I don't remember enough to be specifics - but basically some characters felt badly shortchanged and the plot both included too much stuff that went nowhere and too little effort on themes that it was really trying to deal with - and perhaps tried to handle too much of those themes. I appreciate ambition, and this book has a ton of it. It just fails to achieve that ambition in any satisfying way and I might wind up ranking this one below No Award really.
Tier Four:
5. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (Review Here)
If I had to put odds on the winner of this award, A Memory Called Empire is one of two books that I think have the best shot by far, and I'll be greatly surprised if it isn't in the top 2 in votes. It's a novel featuring an Empire that has spread to great power throughout the galaxy, using economic influence to consume independent planets/stations easily - and if that doesn't work, it can also rely on its military. It's an Empire that may remind others of that in prior Hugo Award winner Ancillary Justice (or of the Masquerade in Seth Dickinson's Baru novels) and it resulted in a novel that is easily one of the most acclaimed in the past year - especially in the circles Hugo voters frequent.
I.....didn't love it as much as I'd hoped though. The book does deal heavily with the themes of Empire, but those themes often take a backseat as the book moves on to the book's frantic thriller plot. That plot works, mind you, which is a big difference from the novel a tier below this one, but it just isn't as interesting as it would've been to spend a whole book dealing with the Empire in a position of strength, instead of what we get here where you almost wonder how it ever became so powerful. The result is that I felt it was fine, but nothing special like I'd been primed to expect from the hype, and so it just isn't that high on my ballot.
Tier Three:
4. Middlegame by Seanan McGuire (Review Here)
3. Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir (Review Here)
Middlegame and Gideon the Ninth are two very very different books, but I have them together in the same tier. Both had me expecting truly fantastic books from their prerelease hype, and both mostly delivered...but not enough to reach the top of my ballot.
Middlegame is the one of the latest novels from highly prolific author Seanan McGuire (who is nominated in two other categories on this year's ballot) but it's mostly unlike anything else I've read from her (and I've read over 20 novels from her, so that's saying something). Featuring a pair of kids growing up secretly as part of a mad scientist's experiment, with one embodied with the power of language and the other the power of math: it tells the story of these combined reality warpers struggling to deal with loneliness, pain and depression as they grow up in a world that can't quite really know what to do with them and with each other farther apart than they ought to be (again thanks to said scientist's experimentation). It's a non-linear novel, jumping back and forth between an ending multiple times for reasons I won't spoil, and it's main duo and one major secondary character are tremendously well done.
It also.....set up my expectations probably a bit too high, with many threads seeming to me to be leading in certain directions that are never paid off, and major focuses seeming to go nowhere. Which, well, I liked the book and have it in the middle tier here for a reason - the character work and themes they deal with are really well done. But I just expected to be more blown away than I was.
Gideon the Ninth is, unlike Middlegame, a debut novel and is the book I firmly expect to take this award - it was just as acclaimed as A Memory Called Empire in Hugo circles, was even more hyped pre-release (to a point I'm not sure I can think of a comparable novel?), and seems to have been immensely popular. And unlike AMCE, I really enjoyed Gideon the Ninth - it's a tremendously fun novel featuring space necromancers all in what is essentially a locked room mystery, with the main character being a really fun sarcastic swordswoman (and lesbian, as the advertising is so proud to brag about even if this really important to her part in the story, but I guess that's a big appeal to a lot of people and it's nice that it's not a big deal) partnering with a necromancer who she kind of hates kind of likes. It's a ton of fun, and I cannot wait for the sequel, so yeah, I'm happy to see it on the ballot.
Still, It's not one of my top two, because honestly while Gideon is an incredibly fun novel, and one I enjoyed a ton and I still remember fairly well despite not having read it for months (not the case with much of this ballot), it's just that: fun. Not every book needs to tackle other issues but when there are ones that do so as well as my pick for this award, I kind of value it higher. I have to rank these books somehow, after all.
Tier Two:
2. The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow (Review Here)
If there's a spoiler that could possibly win, it's this book - Harrow surprised me (having not heard of her prior) with her Hugo win for short fiction last year - but this is a really enjoyable book with some serious themes that also somehow manages to have the most ratings on Goodreads, suggesting it's far more popular in some circle (that I don't run in) than I knew and Harrow is nominated in short fiction again this year. And well, it's a really enjoyable and solid novel featuring themes of colonialism and oppression in addition to being a portal fantasy featuring a trio of really strong characters. I liked this novel a lot when I read an advance copy, and gave it a 9 out of 10 at the time, tying it for the top of any book on this list.
And yet, honestly, this book really didn't stay with me that much compared to many of the other books I read last year, and in retrospect I'm kind of surprised I rated it that high. It was still a very good book mind you, but it doesn't compare in that respect to my top pick on the ballot which is.....
Tier One:
1. The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley (Review Here)
Everything about The Light Brigade said it probably shouldn't have worked for me. I don't particularly like MilSci, and my experiences with Hurley's prior work have been from negative to meh - she creates fascinatingly weird SF/F worlds, but they're generally too grimdark for my liking. So the marriage of the two should probably not have been for me. But as it turns out the marriage of the two worked out nearly perfectly, as Hurley delves deeply into themes of the horrors of war, the power of propaganda, and the powers of beliefs, of hope and of fear, through the story of a soldier who is experiencing an unclear military conflict out of order.
This is a book the old "Sad Puppies" would hate - as it's a clear direct subversion of triumphant old MilSci novels, with Hurley including multiple interludes from the main story in which an unknown character essentially goes on a screed about her themes. And yet, these screeds work tremendously well and don't feel like preaching because they're illustrated in full by the greater parts around them (and are later justified by the plot as the novel goes on). Like pretty much all of Hurley's novels that I've read (4 novels), it's not a book I'd probably want to reread: I reread the interludes after finishing the book to make sure I understood it, but that's about all I'd go. And yet it still is easily memorable to me to this day, as a story with power and punch and thus stands out from all the above.
I doubt it'll come close to winning the actual ballot. But it's my choice from the nominees, and honestly an easy one.
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