A roundup of this year's novella finalists.
The Ignyte Award is always a delight when it rolls around - they are shortlists I love to pore over, to find great recommendations, and to see the things I wanted to have a chance at the spotlight get the recognition they deserve. The structure - where the shortlist is pulled together by a panel but the winner voted on by the public - is a good one especially for highlighting things that are excellent but might not have got quite the widespread appreciation that is recognised in awards that popular vote right from the off, while still retaining the popular vote for the joy of getting to be involved in an award.
I unfortunately don't have time this year to cover all of their shortlists (though bangers there are to be found in every single category), but I did want to take a moment to look at one that is pretty close to my heart: the novella.
The six novellas up for the award this year are:
- The Iron Below Remembers, Sharang Biswas (Neon Hemlock)
- Audition for the Fox, Martin Cahill (Tachyon)
- The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom)
- Psychopomp & Circumstance, Eden Royce (Tordotcom)
- Descent, Wole Talabi (Clarkesworld)
So I thought I'd talk a little about my thoughts on each in turn, and maybe help get a couple of them onto your tbr, if the shortlist hadn't already done so.
I typically get on really well with Neon Hemlock novellas, and The Iron Below Remembers is no exception; in fact, it was one of my top novella reads of 2025. I am extremely happy to see it recognised here.
The story is set in an alternate present, where world history (and colonialism) have gone veeeerrrryy differently, as South Asia colonised the world using their giant mechs. And also where superheroes are real. Why have one difference when you can have two?
Already, cool, interesting, a lot going on. But the thing, is the great thing about this book isn't even the obvious stuff from the blurb and summary: it's the people. Because the narrative is deeply embedded in the perspective of an academic who is dating one of the major superheroes while also working on an archaeological site that might be one of the most important of their time, and which links into the giant mechs and the world's understanding of the superheroes. And he's also just enormously in love with (and anxious about) his hot superhero boyfriend. This is a man at the crux of a lot of different stressors, and someone clearly dealing with a lot of emotions and pressure and uncertainty, and he is intensely compelling as a viewpoint character. It's his skillful characterisation that renders so much of the outlandish content of the plot comprehensible and real to the reader, and which takes all the enormous quantity of Stuff and, without trivialising any of it or taking away from the weight it has in the sense of a wider world, making it feel like a single, coherent story that fits within this single, novella-sized package.
It's incredibly well done, and the sort of thing that seems impossible until you read it. An absolute joy of a book, and one I'd wholeheartedly recommend and be glad to see win.
Another entry from a smaller publisher, Audition for the Fox is a delightful read that I found very hard to put down. It tackles a pretty weighty subject matter, but manages to romp through it at speed without ever undermining the seriousness of the topic, and to hand-wave and imply a depth of worldbuilding, without letting the story get bogged down in details.
The novella follows Nesi, an acolyte hoping to serve one of the 99 gods of the world, but who has failed in her previous 96 petitions. Faced with the remaining gods of war, assassination or mischief, she picks the one that seems least intimidating and prays to the fox god to let her take their trial. They agree, and send her back in time to revisit a turning point in her people's history, under the occupation of an imperial force that Nesi knows will, later, be thrown off, but has to face in reality herself now.
Interspersed through this story are folk tales of the gods, told in a war that feels very true to mythical narratives, and to how people tell stories, and about what.
Between the two halves, it's a book very much about culture, about what survives, and why, and especially religion, myth and the stories about the gods. Religion in fantasy isn't always done well, but I think this is one that manages to grasp the pieces that matter, without getting too into the weeds on the cosmology and distracting from having a pacy, direct narrative that satisfies with the sort of closure it feels like the story sets up with its opening.
Another one I enjoyed a great deal, and would be glad to see as a winner.
This is the only overlap between the Ignyte shortlist and the Hugo, and several other awards besides, as El-Mohtar has been receiving praise in plenty for The River Has Roots. It's also one of the two Tordotcom novellas on this list, a publisher that often does well, and even dominates, the awards for the form.
What can I say that others haven't already? That I haven't already? It's a good book. I had a really good time reading it, way back away when it originally came out. It's based on a traditional folk song (a murder ballad called The Bonny Swans... spoilers it's not a happy fun nobody-gets-hurt type of song or book), and El-Mohtar does a great job carrying through the tone of the song into the prose and the atmosphere of the book. It's a bit of cliché to call someone's prose "lyrical", but sometimes it really is just the most apt term - here is such a time. It's not that it's rhyming or going full iambic or anything, but there feels something of the weight and melody of a song in there in the way she handles her language.
Language is also at the forefront when it comes to the magic of the world too, based as it is on (and called) Grammar. Don't go in expecting something fully systematised; it ain't that kind of story, and to my mind all the better for it (the wiki-isation of everything, and especially things that ought to be magical and mysterious, is where fun goes to die). It's slippery about its specifics, but that's fine, because the sort of story its evoking, the sort of folk-tale, isn't one that has ever been there for clarity of system. You just have to roll with it. What El-Mohtar creates feels sufficiently intuitively valid to facilitate such rotations.
My one quibble with this one is, having read it a good 18 months ago, is that it has drifted somewhat out of my memory in the interim. It has left a vague - and good - impression, but not a clear or lasting one, and it doesn't feel like a story with a long legacy beyond its initial impact. I still like it, I still had a great time reading it, and I would still support it for the win, but it means it's not my top pick from this (very good) selection.
This is the first of the shortlist I hadn't read beforehand, and what a delight it was to encounter.
This is a Southern Gothic historical story, following a young woman named Phee St. Margaret in the town of New Charleston as she chafes under the expectations her mother and her society places on her, especially because of her gender. She is unwillingly resigned to the idea of marriage, though not to the likely suitor she sees on the horizon... until word comes that her mother's estranged sister has passed away, and someone needs to accept the role of "pomp" for her. Phee seizes this opportunity for an escape, however brief, and the chance to prove to her family that she can do things herself, be independent, take responsibility, and be something more than a prospective wife.
While I don't always love coming of age stories, this one is just as much about duty and about the tangles of imperfect families, uncovering the history of the conflict between Phee's mother and aunt, as well as the feelings Phee has about her own limited contact with an aunt she wishes she could have loved closer. And those are things I do enjoy deeply. It has the sort of mess that feels like it really would cause a family rift, and the reasons too why it would have stayed covered up, as well as the warmth of family feeling that makes it so hard to unpack the hurts that go back years.
It also has a beautifully immediate voice, settling into the character of Phee right from the go, and charming the reader with her mixture of naivety and independence, her charm and her caution and her determination.
In a year when many Tordotcom novellas have found their way onto shortlists, I found myself wishing this one had been on far more of them: it does a lot of what Tor can be really good at, and with an individuality and presence that makes its own argument for its place in the honours. It's a book I'm extremely glad to have picked up, and one I'd gladly see win.
And now for something rather different. Where everything else is a print novella, Descent is from an online magazine. Where everything else is, more or less, fantasy, Descent is SF. Where everything else is standalone, Descent is part of a wider series called the Sauútiverse. And, unfortunately, where I really liked everything else, Descent did not entirely work for me.
As a caveat, I have read no other entries into the Sauútiverse, and I don't know if knowing more about it would have affected my reading of the work, though it felt very much a standalone, and one I never felt confused by or lacking key information. Indeed, the existence of a wider series I think made the reading experience better: there's a clear depth (ha) to the worldbuilding here, that implies a wider scale and sense of understanding than can be conveyed in a single novella, but gives what is in the novella a richness.
And I enjoyed a lot of the broader aims of what it was doing, especially around how it presented a paradigm of knowledge and scientific method other than "write papers", one that relies on the oral and the verbal. I was, as I read, deeply interested in the world, especially culturally, as Talabi presented a set of interacting cultures with their interrelated tensions, snobberies and resentments. The problem I had was with the nature of the story itself, which follows a pioneering scientist on a mission to find tangible evidence for his theory on the nature of the planet he lives on, and to disprove his mother's theories. As such, this is a story that does spend a lot of time on the specifics of theory and state of the world, in a way that feels somewhat akin to (though sometimes different from) more traditional hard SF, which alas is just not my jam. The science is interesting, though for me it struggled both on a point that didn't make sense to me (though that might be because I don't know enough about the mechanics of gas giant planets), and because the science as the focus meant that the more emotional angles of the story - the ones upon which a lot of the drama of the ending rests - felt a little neglected. The emotional crescendo of the final sequence just didn't hit for me.
There are moments when it comes close, and when Talabi deploys some banger lines like "the boundary condition of all knowledge is faith". But it just doesn't quite pull together, in the end. Interesting enough that I would pick up another story in the series, but not I think the one I want to win from this otherwise stacked shortlist.
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And so, there we have it. My broad conclusion is: this is a really strong shortlist, one that covers a variety of angles and styles within the genre, and which delivers strongly especially on distinctive voice: these are stories you could read and know them by their words in a moment. Whether that's lyrical, poetic prose evoking a murder ballad, scientific specificity tinged by the wonder of faith, or a world that diverged wildly from the one we know, each of them has a clear sense not just of the story it wants to tell, but the way it wants to tell it, and the determination that each part is just as important as the other. And I love it.
The great thing about the Ignyte has, so far, been its ability to provide such a consistently high standard and variety in its shortlists. I see no evidence that that has changed, and indeed, it seems like the award continues to go from strength to strength if the novella slate for 2026 is anything to go by.
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POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
