I’m keeping up with my four year-old tradition of reading and ranking every Hugo Award finalist in the categories of Short Story, Novelette, Novella, and Novel, and after a downer of an opening entry and a glowing second one, I’m back to another downer as I check out the Best Novella shortlist. Unlike Best Short Story, I can see flashes of brilliance in most of this list, but there wasn’t anything that I felt truly put it all together. Let’s take a look:

Tier Three

Seventh Place: Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet by He Xi, translated by Alex Woodend

This is one of three Chinese-language finalists written more than a decade ago that gained another year of eligibility in virtue of 2023 English translations. I’ve found all three translations to be a bit awkward, and it’s hard to tell how much that plays into my struggles to relate to the underlying narratives. But the underlying narrative in Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet was certainly a struggle to read. 

The tale focuses on a mission to observe genetically-engineered life that had been seeded on a distant planet by Earth-based scientists, with a dash of doomed romance in the backstory. But the mission includes a bizarre, initially unspoken assumption that humanity must destroy any engineered race, whether sentient or not, that can no longer interbreed with unmodified humans. The narrative clearly doesn’t cast this in a positive light, but the way it’s treated as a run-of-the-mill background assumption severely inhibits the building of tension throughout the story. It’s neither the dramatic reveal at the end of the story—which could have made for a powerful tale about the banality of evil—nor a building cause for alarm over the course of the story. Instead, it’s merely a mystifying bit of background that makes it all the harder for the reader to sympathize with the dilemma facing the main characters, robbing the climax of any power it otherwise might have had. 

It’s hard to tell how much of the disjointed narrative stems from a stilted translation and how much stems from the way the background elements fail to build the tension, but because the shortlisted work is indeed the translation and not the original work, the English-language reader has no imperative to parse out the difference. For me, it’s an easy decision at the bottom of the ballot. 

Tier Two

Sixth Place: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

This is an entirely pleasant read—as it’s clearly meant to be—in an evocative, gaslamp Jovian setting, but beyond that, I’m not quite sure I see the selling point. The inciting incident is a suspected murder, but it’s not a whodunnit by any stretch of the imagination. There is an investigation, but it’s much more concerned with the Why than the Who. Admittedly, the Why is a fascinating question, introducing deep-seated and compelling philosophical disputes between factions who have never actually set foot on Earth debating how best to prepare it for the eventual return of humanity. But we don’t see quite enough of this dispute for it to really carry the story, so what’s left is fog and tea, a little bit of chasing suspects, and the attempted rekindling of an old relationship that had gone entirely cold in the years before the events of the novella. 

Like the mystery, the romantic subplot is pleasant but not totally convincing, and neither major character really captures the heart. It makes for a novella that serves perfectly well for a diverting hour or so of reading but isn’t the sort to stick in the mind a week later, let alone at the end of the year. 

Fifth Place: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

Halfway through Thornhedge, it was easy to see why it appeared on so many Best Novella nominating ballots. It’s a clever Sleeping Beauty subversion with an endearing main character and some delightful banter between her and an earnest interlocutor. Unfortunately, it peters out in the second half, with an anticlimactic ending that doesn’t truly force the lead to reckon with any of the challenges—internal or external—that led to her predicament in the first place. There’s plenty to like here, but it’s undercut by the ending in such a way that makes it hard to rank this in the top half. 

Fourth Place: Seeds of Mercury by Wang Jinkang, translated by Alex Woodend

The second Chinese novella on the shortlist is also an older story that appears as a finalist in virtue of the 2023 translation, and like Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet, the translation feels a little bit wooden. Fortunately, in this case, it’s much easier to see flashes of brilliance in the underlying story, which is split between an Earth-based storyline and a far-future segment set on the titular Mercury. The former tries to capture the magic of new discovery but doesn’t quite manage it, coming off feeling more like infodump-heavy backstory—with an uncomfortable way of talking about disability—than like anything that’s engaging on its own merits. The latter, on the other hand, is fascinating and builds to a truly hard-hitting climax. Like Thornhedge, this feels like half of an excellent novella and half of a disappointing one, but I’m giving the edge to Seeds of Mercury on the grounds that it makes a much better last impression. 

Third Place: Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Rose/House was pitched as a locked room murder mystery in an AI house, but readers hoping for something resembling a classic whodunnit will be disappointed by the fever dream that follows. It’s often beautiful and thematically fascinating, with reflections on personhood, non-human intelligence, self-deception, hero worship, and toxic mentor/student relationships. There’s plenty to dig into here, it’s just that not very much of it is about solving a murder. But while it’s an impressive novella, it’s a wildly disorienting one that left me wanting something more to hold onto in the end. It’s easily the most ambitious on the shortlist, but all the same, it didn’t completely click for me. 

Second Place: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

The fourth installment in The Singing Hills Cycle and the third Hugo finalist, Mammoths at the Gate delivers Vo’s customary vibrant prose, along with a lovely meditation on grief that’s in itself worth the price of admission. But it’s also a story that tries to do too much and ends up leaving major subplots—like the one involving the titular mammoths—feeling a bit underbaked. It’s the most enjoyable entry on the shortlist, and there’s some thematic depth here, but it doesn’t live up to the standard set by the previous two Hugo finalists in the series. 

Tier One

First Place: No Award

By and large, I’m fairly conservative with my use of No Award. There are a lot of works that I think are generally pretty good but not really award-worthy, and I don’t typically place them below No Award on my ballot. Instead, the No Award vote is reserved for the works that I find particularly frustrating—the sort that make me wish I hadn’t read them at all. From this year’s shortlist, only Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet would fall below that threshold. 

But that conservative use of No Award depends on there being something in the category that I want in my top spot. I’m perfectly content voting a solid four-star story in fourth place and leaving it above No Award. But voting a solid four-star fourth–or even second!–feels much different than marking it down in the top spot on my ballot. And for the first time, I have read through an entire category and not found a single thing I’d be happy to vote in first place. There are a couple pretty good contenders for the top half of the ballot—a beautiful and philosophical fever dream, a lovely exploration of grief—but I just can’t bring myself to hand a first-place vote to a book that I appreciated more than enjoyed, or to an overstuffed sequel that doesn’t live up to its predecessors. 

And so I am voting No Award, not because I specifically hated the books I have ranked second and third (I very much did not!), but as a vote against the entire shortlist. There were some really tremendous novellas released in 2023—Nothing But the Rain and The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar especially stood out to me, but I certainly don’t pretend to have read every exceptional genre novella published in 2023—and not a single one of them made the Hugo shortlist. We can do better than filling out a shortlist with a pair of clunky translations of old Chinese novellas, a forgettable mystery, and three offerings from past winners that don’t live up to their previous work.