This is my fourth year reading and ranking every Hugo Award finalist in the categories of Short Story, Novelette, Novella, and Novel, and after posting ballots for Short Story, Novelette, and Novella early this week, it’s time to talk about Best Novel. While I disliked the shortlists for Short Story and Novella and loved the shortlist for Novelette, I found the Best Novel shortlist to be somewhere in the middle. For anyone looking for more thorough reviews, I have links in each heading, along with the mini-reviews here in this post. So let’s take a look!

Tier Three

Seventh Place: Witch King by Martha Wells

Martha Wells is an author that I’ve liked a whole lot in the past, and have even put atop my Hugo ballot at least once, but Witch King did not work at all for me. The nice part is that it failed doing something ambitious—the story was split into two timelines with plenty of thematic resonance between them. But I found that shifting between past and present while keeping so many of the characters the same created more confusion than depth, and it relegated much of the interpersonal development to the offscreen segments in between the timelines. I give it plenty of credit for trying something interesting, but unfortunately, it’s my least favorite book on the ballot by some margin. 

Sixth Place: Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Starter Villain is designed to be a quick read that doesn’t make the audience work too hard, leaning heavily into some of the more over-the-top tropes from superhero literature. And while there are a few grating moments, it’s largely successful in being a fun and light read, and it even lands a pretty cool organized labor subplot. Unfortunately, it’s the sort of book that’s fun during the read but tends to fall apart the longer you spend thinking about it. And that puts it several notches below the top four novels on the shortlist. 

Fifth Place: No Award

I don’t object in principle to light, fun reads winning Hugo Awards (Ed.: for example, scroll down), but they have to be really impressive, and Starter Villain didn’t hit that level. 

Tier Two

Fourth Place: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Sorting out my Tier Two stories was the most difficult part of the ballot for me, as I felt both books had serious strengths but also serious weaknesses, and the one I liked more was not the one that was more ambitious. In the end, I went with enjoyment, and so the wildly ambitious The Saint of Bright Doors is slotted into fourth place. It’s a beautiful and disorienting book with a ton to say about tyranny, racism, and religious violence—particularly as it plays out in Sri Lanka. At the same time, it’s written in a way that puts some distance between the reader and the main character, and the lead has a tendency to be dragged around by the plot in a way that doesn’t always seem to fit with the established character. So while the strengths are extremely strong, I did ultimately leave with mixed feelings about this one. 

Third Place: Translation State by Ann Leckie

Translation State is pitched as a standalone within the Imperial Radch universe, and I thought it worked pretty well as one, though I may have missed details that a full series reader would have understood. It’s written in a style that draws the audience in quickly and reads much faster than its length would suggest. And it features truly exceptional non-human point-of-view characters, which serve as the real strength of the book. The plot feels quite a bit safer than I would prefer—it’s not too hard to see where each character arc is going, even if they face dangers along the way—and if my relative enjoyment of the two had been a little closer, this safety in contrast to the ambition of The Saint of Bright Doors would have led me to reverse their order. But Translation State is a really well put-together novel that’s right at home in the top half of my ballot. 

Tier One

Second Place: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Like Translation State, this one is all about the prose and the characters. It’s compulsively readable—perhaps more so than anything else on the shortlist—and offers a tremendous portrait of a zealot learning that most of what she’s been raised to believe consists of lies and propaganda. It turbocharges the character arc through use of the speculative elements, but still manages to deliver a transformation that feels remarkably messy and grounded in reality. 

Also like Translation State, my biggest criticism is that it feels a little bit too safe, with plenty of heavy subject matter in the backstory but a tendency to dodge the most difficult questions and decisions in the main story. The main character arc is still good enough to send it into my top tier, but the complaints are enough to keep it out of my top spot. 

First Place: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

I don’t tend to care much for adventure fantasy, so I came into this pretty confident that it wouldn’t live up to the hype. But it didn’t take long for The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi to completely overturn my prejudice. The plot may be largely run-of-the-mill action-adventure, but the 12th-century Arabian setting is brought to life in stunning detail, and the narrative voice hooks its claws in early and never lets go. Not many pirate novels star a middle-aged mother forced out of retirement, but it’s an inspired choice, as the fascinating—and often hilarious—lead carries the story all on her own. The way the lead’s gender and religion affects her tale gives the novel a bit more depth than I might’ve expected from action-adventure, and combined with the tremendous worldbuilding and narrative voice, that’s enough to send this all the way to the top of my ballot. It would undoubtedly be an eminently worthy winner.