2021 Hugo Nominees That Are Worth Reading

Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, and Best YA

Best Novel

Black Sun: Black Sun is a phenomenal epic fantasy novel, one of the best I’ve read in years, and I am sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for the next book in the series. In an act of injustice, Rebecca Roanhorse is also writing a different series I don’t want to read as much, which upsets me greatly.

Black Sun is set in pre-colonization South America and Mesoamerica, in much the same sense that conventional fantasy novels are set in medieval Europe. There’s a certain flavor, but it is gleefully historically inaccurate whenever something else would be cooler.

The basic premise is that the sun priests have united Fake Fantasy Mesoamerica and banned human sacrifice and war, but now the human sacrifice cults are rising again. There is tons of intrigue and suspense and shit happening on every page and engaging characters and body horror. So much goddamn body horror. There’s a body horror crow god and a body horror mermaid and I ship them. The societies are fucked-up in the best possible way.

One warning is that Black Sun drops you in on the deep end with the worldbuilding and you’ll spend the first three chapters spinning in a haze of proper nouns. I personally caught on pretty quickly, but if you have a low tolerance for being confused skip this one.

Network Effect: Everyone’s favorite SecUnit appears in its first full-length novel! (While this is the first Murderbot novel, it assumes that you’ve read the previous four novellas and is not a good starting point for the series.)

One of the things I love about the Murderbot Diaries is its consistency. You open up the Murderbot Diaries and you know precisely what you’re going to get: pulse-pounding science-fiction action with the snarky narration of Murderbot, who really just wants to be left alone to watch its shows and definitely does not care one little bit about all these humans it’s risking its life to save. If you’re having a bad day, Murderbot is going to reliably make it better. Nothing too high-stress, nothing too scary, just an engaging protagonist who’s in the Sanctuary Moon fandom and really wishes its humans would stop doing things that are so dangerous.

Piranesi: Gorgeous, phenomenal, a gem of a book. Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was a masterpiece and Piranesi absolutely blows it out of the water.

Piranesi is about the titular Piranesi, who lives in the House, an infinite labyrinth of rooms and beautiful statues, no two alike, which in its endless kindness provides him the fish he eats and the seaweed he makes clothes from. (I love a book with a fucked-up house.) He venerates the House, devoting his life to exploring its mysteries and recording them in his notebooks. There have been, Piranesi believes, fourteen other people who have ever existed; of those, only one, the Other, still lives. He has meetings with the Other each week to discuss their findings in natural philosophy.

In a certain sense, Piranesi is cosmic horror. But the thing I love about Piranesi is its ambiguity about the cosmic horror. Piranesi thinks it is perfection itself to be utterly destroyed by something vaster and more wondrous and more awe-inspiring and more beautiful than anything your mind can comprehend, and his desire to be consumed by that which is greater than you pervades the novel. But it’s very unclear to me whether the narrative thinks people should ideally be devoured by a fucked-up house. This sort of ambiguity—terror or awe, fear or worship—is one of the things I really adore about cosmic horror.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

Best Novella

Ring Shout: This is an amazing thousand-page novel. Unfortunately, it’s crammed into a 160-page novella. Still, it’s good enough to be worth recommending.

The premise is that the release of Birth of a Nation was an evil ritual which summoned not only the Ku Klux Klan but also supernatural terrors. As Klan members grow more hateful, they mutate into Ku Kluxes—pointy-headed, pale beings which feed on hatred. The protagonist, Maryse, wields a sword powered by the spirits of long-dead kings and chiefs, bound as penance for selling people into slavery. It’s fast-paced, fun, and surprisingly deep, with horror monsters I’ve never seen anywhere before and some imagery that will haunt your nightmares.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, conversely, is an amazing thousand-page novel which has somehow been crammed into a seventy-four page novella and it actually works. I want Nghi Vo to pack my suitcase next time I’m going on vacation.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune is set in fake fantasy medieval China (there are nonbinary people and sapient hoopoe). It has all the court intrigue, backstabbing, and clever plans you love from your favorite cdrama. Vo crams this broad, sweeping story into a very short space through her clever use of framing devices: Chih, a cleric-historian, interviews Rabbit, the handmaiden of the deceased empress. The concrete details of the empress’s life ground the story, making it feel vivid and real. Every character is well-drawn in a very short space.

Finna: Have you ever wandered around IKEA and imagined that you’d make the wrong left turn and wind up in an IKEA in an alternate universe? Then Finna is for you.

The heroine of Finna works a crappy job at Definitely-Not-IKEA-Because-We-Might-Get-Sued. The Definitely-Not-IKEA alternate-universe rescue team got axed due to budget cuts, so she’s been drafted to rescue the latest person who got lost—alongside her ex whom she still has a nasty relationship with. I really enjoyed the crappy-retail-job humor—corporatespeak about weird science fiction stuff is reliably great for me. The depiction of a relationship between two people who love each other and really shouldn’t be together also rang very true.

Best Novelette

Helicopter Story: Previously known as I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter, Isabel Fall’s debut work was the subject of a shitstorm I don’t intend to relitigate here which means that it is difficult to obtain online. If you can get your hands on a copy, I recommend reading it. The discussion about cancel culture, representation, and responsibility in writing can easily displace the fact that this is a really fucking good story.

Helicopter Story is one of the best depictions of the trans experience I’ve ever read. It asks a simple question: there’s a transphobic meme that the speaker identifies as an attack helicopter—but what would it mean if your gender identity actually was an attack helicopter? The protagonist has undergone neurosurgery that remaps the parts of her brain that deal with gender. Her helicopter is her body; combat is her gender performance; instead of tracking the gender expression and gendered behavior of other human beings, her mind tracks bombs and flight plans. The result is dark yet hopeful, beautifully written, an exploration of the US military industrial complex that comes to no easy answers, and with a SFnal element I’ve never seen before unmistakably grounded in the details of trans experience. Fuck the censors, read this story.

The Pill: I feel troubled giving this novelette a rave review because I’m thin. It rings true to me, but it’s about exactly those messy and complicated and fucked-up details of fat experience the accuracy of which I can’t really vouch for. So please take this review with a grain of salt.

The premise of The Pill is that there’s a pill which effortlessly and permanently makes you thin. It’s relatively safe for users who are already thin; however, if you’re fat, the death rate is about ten percent. The Pill is much much much better than you would expect from the premise. It’s the best kind of dystopia, the kind where you imagine the author looking over your shoulder and going “what if THIS happened, would that be fucked up or WHAT?”

The protagonist is not at all a Good Fat Person. She has cupcakes for dinner and the narrative still lets her go “I don’t want to change my body, I think I’m fine the way I am.” It’s ambiguous to what extent she genuinely accepts herself and to what extent she’s terrified of dying. It takes a lot of balls to write an anti-fatphobia story that has an entire pagelong description of how disgusting the protagonist finds someone fatter than her—even though of course it’s not narratively endorsed and is clearly a manifestation of externalized self-hatred.

The narration is very ambivalent about all the choices available to the protagonist; she comes to a decision, but it’s very unclear whether the decision is right. It has smart things to say about objectification and fetishization, conformity and body image, the double-binds fat people face, the different ways that the experience of fatphobia warps your sense of self. The worldbuilding is masterfully creepy and fucked up; it definitely plays its premise for all the horror possible.

One of the purposes of fiction is to let you step outside yourself and empathize with experiences you don’t share. I think, because I read The Pill, I understand better what it’s like to be fat in all its complexity, and that will help me be kinder to the fat people I encounter.

Two Truths and a Lie: Beautifully creepy horror story. Unfortunately, to give any more details of the plot is to spoil it. If you want to be scared, I recommend checking this one out.

Best Short Story

A Guide for Working Breeds: A story about Good Robots. As always, my judgment of how good a short story is is based about twenty percent about whether there are good robots in it. In A Guide For Working Breeds, a robot fresh out of the factory is assigned another robot as a mentor—except that robot is a gladiator! Silly, funny, feel-good, an excellent contribution to the best science fiction subgenre.

Metal Like Blood In The Dark: A retelling of Hansel and Gretel which fixes the primary problem with the original version, i.e., that there were not any Good Robots in it. Metal Like Blood In The Dark is sad and dark and lovely and impossible to put down.

Open House on Haunted Hill: This is not technically a Good Robot story, because it is about a house rather than a Good Robot, but it has the Good Robot spirit. It is about a haunted house that wants to be bought so it can have people to live in it and take care of it. It’s sweet and funny and makes my heart ache.

Little Free Library: Little Free Library is a lovely little story from Naomi Kritzer, the author of Cat Pictures Please, about a little free library with a very mysterious borrower. The imagery is beautiful and it suggests a world much bigger than the one in the story.

Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

Legendborn: I am recommending this book purely because I’m invested in Selwyn. He’s a hot angsty traumatized bisexual half-demon! He’s sworn to the eternal service of his adoptive brother Nick, who has quit this whole demon-hunting gig because of the high chance of dying young and whom he unconvincingly insists he’s not in love with! He’s also completely incapable of processing the fact that he likes the protagonist Bree and thinks she’s cool and badass. "I hate you!!!! Random insults!!! Going to save your life!!! Going to threaten to break someone's arm for being racist at you!!! More random insults!!! Gonna get drunk on magic and murder some trees!!!! Going to teach you to swordfight!!! More insults!!!! I HATE YOU SO MUCH!!!! Here's an infodump about all my childhood trauma. Let's do crimes together. FUCK YOU."

I love him. I ship Selwyn/Nick/Bree so hard. Polyamory has become more popular in science fiction and fantasy these days so maybe there can be the polyamory I’m incredibly invested in? Selwyn deserves to kiss his adoptive brother that he’s sworn to the eternal service of! Selwyn also deserves to go “i—it’s not like I LIKE you or anything!!! baka!!!” at Bree. Solve This Love Triangle With Polyamory.

Overall, Legendborn is a pretty standard “teenage girl gets All the magic powers and also all the hot boys are in love with her” story, but it’s really well-executed and I was rooting for it. The author seems to be very confused about Arthuriana (Gawain has… healing powers? Arthur had… children? That weren’t Mordred? Galahad had children? Which means he presumably had sex?) but if you can tolerate that it’s a fun read.

A Deadly Education: The latest series from Naomi Novik. I enjoyed this less than literally everyone I’m friends with, all of whom have decided to become the Enthusiastic Scholomance Fandom and spent a lot of time trying to figure out the geopolitics and what exactly the death rates are. (Writers are not good at math.) But it’s popular enough among all my friends that I felt I should recommend it.

There are monsters called mals, which find teenage wizards to be the most delicious food available. Teenage wizards have a 5% chance of surviving outside of the magic school the Scholomance—inside of the Scholomance, it rises to a 25% chance. The protagonist, El, is a wizard with a special magical affinity for mass destruction; her love interest, Orion, is a wizard with a special magical affinity for killing mals and zero interests outside of killing mals. (He’s very autistic. I love him.) Orion saved a very high percentage of the class from mals… but that means the mals are lurking at the bottom floor, hungry, waiting for the senior class to try to leave so that they can be delicious food.

It’s funny, El and Orion have a great dynamic, and it’s a fun “there’s a grimdark setting but we’re going to overcome it together and earn our happy ending by being very powerful and very clever” sort of narrative.

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking: If you like Diana Wynne Jones, I strongly recommend checking out T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon. They share a certain practicality, a groundedness, a common sense, that is uncommon in the rest of the genre, alongside a rich imagination and quirkiness.

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking stars a young wizard whose power is the ability to control bread. By far the most delightful aspect of this book is the many creative ways she uses her ability.

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is extremely middle-grade. It’s a great book; it’s just a book aimed at an audience of ten-year-olds. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would enjoy it more were I, myself, ten. This feels like a seriously-missing-the-point critique of the book as a book: it’s hardly a fault in a book that it primarily appeals to its target audience. Still, I recommend it less for your own reading and more as a present for the elementary schooler in your life.