Hugo Nominees That Are Worth Reading: Novels

Doing horrible things to your TBR pile, part two

Best Novel

She Who Became The Sun: A historical fantasy retelling of the fall of the Yuan dynasty and the rise of the Ming. Unlike the historical Zhu Chongba (as far as we know), the protagonist of She Who Became The Sun is a woman. The protagonist is prophesied to have a destiny of nothingness, while her brother is prophesied to have a destiny of greatness; when he dies in a famine, she impersonates him in order to take over his destiny.

The primary fantasy element is that the beliefs of Chinese traditional religion are actually true. I appreciated how subtle the magic is. Other than the Mandate of Heaven being a literal physical flame that you can summon, all of the magic could theoretically have natural explanations: perhaps the bodhisattva is an ordinary child, the answered prayers coincidence, the fortuneteller a cold reader, the character who can see ghosts simply hallucinating. The fantasy element is used less to create a supernatural world and more to create for the reader the experience of being a fourteenth-century Chinese person. People in fourteenth-century China genuinely believed in Chinese traditional religion; it was not an invisible dragon in their garage. I also appreciated the characters' complex relationships with their religion: Zhu Chongba, for example, believes that desire and attachment cause suffering, and simply decides that she will suffer as much as necessary to become great.

She Who Became The Sun is one of the more literary fantasy novels I have read recently. The prose is simple, but deceptively lyrical and beautiful; each word is precisely chosen. The theme of destiny and fate—fates chosen for you before you were born, fates you choose, what you must sacrifice in order to achieve your fate—pervades the book. Every major character is a narrative foil for every other character, and their arcs invert and parody and comment on each other in a rich and complex way.

As a monk and a woman (even though she’s a secret woman), Zhu Chongba has little ability to fight. She consistently wins through cleverness, determination, and sheer ruthlessness. Her plans make sense: they don’t rely on luck or implausible series of deductions. A motif I enjoyed was Zhu Chongba winning because she had been raised as a woman and could empathize with women (in order to ruthlessly destroy them to advance her own ambition, naturally), and her concern each time she used that understanding that if she was too unlike her brother Heaven would notice and she would return to nothingness.

My favorite character is General Ouyang, a eunuch who was forcibly castrated as a child and who works for the family who castrated him while secretly planning his revenge. He’s so bitter and angry and conflicted, and his arc is beautifully tragic. You know from the beginning exactly what’s going to happen, and you spend the entire book rooting for him to literally do anything else.

A couple of the reviews called it unremittingly grim with no faith in human nature, which I can see, but to be honest that is kind of what I expected from a historical fantasy novel about someone becoming emperor of China.

Recommended for fans of A Song Of Ice And Fire or the Lesbian Space Atrocities genre.

Project Hail Mary: A man (in my head, played by Matt Damon) is lost in space! He has to figure out how to stop being lost in space with SCIENCE. The science is explained in great detail so that you can follow it and understand exactly how clever the protagonist is. It’s a play-fair mystery: if you know enough physics, you can often work out the solution to the problem before the hero does. However, there are no complicated equations and it is easy to follow for the reader who knows very little physics. There are jokes.

It’s an Andy Weir book? If you like Andy Weir books, you will like this book. Andy Weir can only write one character but it’s a pretty fun and likable character and nothing in the plot relies on his characters having different motivations, goals, or personalities.

A Desolation Called Peace: Sequel to previous Hugo winner A Memory Called Empire, and you should read that first. The Teixcalaan series is probably my favorite of the Lesbian Space Atrocities subgenre.

Arkady Martine is a historian studying Byzantium, and it shows in the richness of her worldbuilding. Teixcalaan feels like a real place, distinctly influenced by Aztec and Byzantine culture, but ultimately its own. The cast is enormous, but I never got lost or forgot who was who. The political intrigue is complicated but gripping and easy to follow.

A Desolation Called Peace deftly explores its themes of identity and colonialism. On Lsel Station, the Councilor for Heritage polices culture to prevent assimilation or the destruction of Lsel Station’s traditional way of life. In Teixcalaan itself, the word for “Teixcalaan” is the same as the word for “world,” the word for “citizen of Teixcalaan” the same as “person”; it is unthinkable, even to the most sympathetic characters, that there is beauty and art and civilization outside of Teixcalaan. Mahit Dzmare is two and a half people in the same brain, carrying around the memories and personality of the previous ambassador to Teixcalaan, Yskander; when they blend too closely, nerve pain shoots up her arms. The heir to the throne, a clone of the previous empire, struggles to discover who he is if not a copy of his original. The protagonists make first contact with aliens, who are a hivemind and don’t understand the concept of people who aren’t hiveminds or who wouldn’t want to join it once they are. Each character has their own relationship with assimilation, empire, and colonialism; each is sympathetic, and the book doesn’t come to easy answers.

The Galaxy and the Ground Within: After a freak technological failure grounds them on a rest stop on the extremely boring planet of Gora, three strangers—plus the person who runs the rest shop and her child—get to know each other and resolve their various interpersonal conflicts.

Wayfarers is among the best slice-of-life science fiction series I’ve ever read, and it continues to baffle me that there isn’t more of it. The world isn’t at stake here. It’s about an unusually interesting couple of days in the lives of some people who are, for their world, unusual but not unusually unusual. You get the sense that you could find a dozen people equally but differently unusual in the average bar, and it’s just that these are the five we happen to follow.

I also appreciated how kind the characters are. Everyone in this book is struggling to be good and fails in deeply ordinary ways. They reach out to each other for connection, across the gaps of politics and species and experience, and fail to communicate and sometimes, after a lot of work, eventually succeed. Chambers writes books where people are good.

There is only one human in the book, and that only briefly at the end. Instead, all the main characters come from different alien species, which successfully balance genuine alienness with being understandable to the reader. There are no Planet of Hats alien species here. Each species’ biology is well-thought-out and unique, and the effects on their psychology and culture are lovingly detailed. Some of the best scenes describe how the spaceships of each species are different, and how you design a rest stop to accommodate insect-people and bird-people and lizard-people and any number of other species.

A Master of Djinn: A murder mystery set in steampunk Cairo about forty years after magic returns to the world.

The murder mystery itself is good but not exceptional: it hits the beats it needs to hit without much fuss. You can tell A Master of Djinn is straightforward setup so that the fifth book in the series can be as complicated as it likes.

What shines is the world. On every page, something new and imaginative sparkles. The protagonist’s coffee is served to her by steampunk robots called “boilerplate eunuchs.” The Forty Leopards are a team of all-female thieves who can break into things no one can break into. Angels exist, and they may or may not by the ones from the Quran, and while they never tell a lie no one knows exactly what their purposes are. Kaiser Wilhelm walks around with a goblin on his shoulder because of a deal he cut with the fae.

P. Djeli Clark is a historian and you can tell. There are just enough background hints to tell you that history went very, very differently after all the colonized countries got magic. The protagonist doesn’t think about it much—she is kind of busy solving a murder here—but I hope we see more of the alternate history in future books.

Lodestar Award

The Last Graduate: The Scholomance from Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series is a situation of inescapable scarcity. No matter what, only half of the students will get out alive. Every time you help someone, every time you have fun, every resource you devote to something other than the barest survival, is increasing the risk that on graduation day you get eaten by a mawmouth. People are not so much cruel as callous. They can’t afford to care. If you care about other people, you die.

The Last Graduate is a story about the scarcity lessening. People are able, for the first time, to care about other people. They start to care about their friends, then their friends’ friends, then strangers, then the kids that speak Mandarin who have odd customs and whom they’ve never spoken to. And finally they care about the future.

The Last Graduate says: people aren’t good because they don’t have enough to be good. When they can look up and think about something other than staying alive, the first luxury they buy is compassion.

I suggest reading the second half of this book while listening to Taylor Smith’s The Circle on repeat.

Chaos on CatNet: At this point, reading a new CatNet novel feels like settling in for a cup of coffee with an old friend, or maybe like coming home after a long vacation. Everything is where I expect it to be, I am full of warmth and affection and comfort, and I have remembered exactly why I like this so much.

Kritzer’s character voice continues to be strong; from the first sentence of the Cat chapter it was obvious that this was Cat and could not possibly be any other character.

Iron Widow: The author slammed conventional YA, Lesbian Space Atrocities, and fake fantasy medieval China into each other at high speed, and ended up producing mecha that run on traditional Chinese medicine. I am slightly suspicious that the author wrote Pacific Rim fanfiction and changed all the names.

I don’t know that this book is for everyone but I loved it and devoured the second half in one sitting. The thing about Iron Widow is that two of the three protagonists are bitter, angry, traumatized children whose only social skill, problem-solving strategy, and life goal is finding someone in a position of power over them and trying to creatively murder them. The protagonists do protag, they protag very enthusiastically, but it does not seem to have occurred to them at any point to ask whether all of their protagging will cause them to experience outcomes they prefer to the other outcomes that are available. Violence against those who have hurt you is its own reward. Look, man, if you don’t want people to wreck creative giant robot violence on you you shouldn’t bind their feet.

Iron Widow feels like it’s setting up for a redemption arc and I’m dreading this. I don’t want them to be redeemed, I want them to commit murders and then make out in the blood of their enemies.

Ideal for the reader who spent all of Star Wars rooting for Darth Vader.

For those concerned: yes, there is polyamory in it, you do not have to put up with a Standard YA Love Triangle.