This is my fifth year reading and ranking every finalist for the Hugo Awards for the Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story in the previous year of sci-fi and fantasy. This year, I’ll be starting my ballot write-ups with the Best Novel category. To be honest, I found the shortlist a bit of a disappointment this year. There were plenty of solid books, but none of the six screamed Book of the Year, and there were a pair that really failed to properly develop their major themes. For more details, read on. And for even more more details, click through the links to my full reviews.

Tier Three

Seventh Place: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

I hate seeing this at the bottom of my ballot, because I’ve been such a fan of Wiswell’s short fiction. But it’s a misunderstood monster story that humanizes the monster by dehumanizing almost every else, and that’s a strategy that rubs me the wrong way. Throw in a lead with a wildly inconsistent understanding of human behavior and a poorly-paced trauma recovery storyline, and you have a recipe for a real miss. Wiswell has developed several of these themes wonderfully in other works, but Someone You Can Build a Nest In never came together.

Sixth Place: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Another book where the pieces don’t quite come together, The Ministry of Time is trying to be a quirky, fish-out-of-water romance while also being a story of immigration and assimilation and being a time travel thriller with a focus on complicity in large-scale moral evils. The problem is that attempts to develop one piece of the story tend to interfere with the others. The immigration story stays relatively surface-level in order to keep the mood light for the romantic subplot. The story explicitly signals that the reader shouldn’t think too hard about the time travel mechanics before shifting to the sort of story in which the time travel mechanics are extremely important–and too underdeveloped to support that plotline. The romantic subplot is endearing enough, but the big thematic elements get short shrift, and the novel as a whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Fifth Place: No Award

Tier Two

Fourth Place: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I liked Alien Clay quite a bit, but it suffers by comparison to other xenofictions by Adrian Tchaikovsky–in particular, Children of Time and Shroud–that I found significantly better. The alien life is delightfully strange, and the revolutionary subplot comes together in a satisfying way, but the narrator’s deep-seated cynicism makes for a difficult read that can drag at times. I could easily understand this book taking the top spot for readers who enjoy revolution stories or who have a little more patience for cynicism, but for me, it came in just below the top tier.

Third Place: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Service Model is an entirely different subgenre than Alien Clay, and rankings of the two will likely come down almost entirely to personal preference. It still delivers plenty of anti-capitalist themes, but this time through a post-apocalyptic satire with an AI lead and plenty of nods to literary titans from a variety of genres. Like Alien Clay, the pacing can be a weakness, but a reader who enjoys the style of humor may well find a favorite here. My opinions of the two books were extremely similar, and I broke the tie in my own mind mostly based on which one felt like Tchaikovsky doing something new and which one felt like a mashup of themes he’d handled better in other works.

Second Place: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

The first third of this book is some of the most compelling work on the entire shortlist, with expert portrayal of a young girl essentially forced into psychological slavery by her sorcerous mother. The tone lightens a bit too much in the final third, leading to an ending that ties up the loose ends in a satisfying manner but doesn’t really do justice to the exceptional opening. Still, a strong opening and no major missteps put this one a hair out in front of a very tightly clustered tier two.

Tier One

First Place: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

This is a bit more of a popcorn read than I’d like to see from my first-place choice, but it’s very good popcorn, and the competition this year isn’t especially stiff. It’s a Nero Wolfe-inspired murder mystery in a fascinatingly strange biopunk setting. The characters aren’t really the selling point here, but neither do they detract from a mystery plot that keeps the pages melting away like snow. And while it’s not a theme-driven novel, it is interesting in the way it consistently avoids oversimplifying the empire into something wholly good or wholly evil. I was happy to have this on my nominating ballot, and it’s easily my favorite on this year’s shortlist.