A roundup of this year's novella nominees.
It's Hugo time bay-beeeeeee. I love awards season. There's a lot of reasons for that, but honestly the main one is that it's the time of year when the conversation all aligns and we're discussing the same books as each other, picking at things and having big thoughts about them, and through them into genre and how it's doing at the moment. Delightful!
And so, in the spirit of doing my part, I'm going to chat about one of this year's Hugo categories, one particularly dear to my heart: the novella.
For those not familiar, the novella category looks at science fiction or fantasy stories published or translated into English during the previous calendar year, which specifically are works of fiction of between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length. Still chunky enough to feel like a whole book, but short enough you can binge them in a sitting if you're so inclined, I find novellas such a nicely digestible format, perfectly in between a full novel and short fiction. There's a lot you can do with that, and I am just incredibly fond of it as a format, and so I read a fair few in any given year.
Which alas means that, as in this year, I'm a bit disappointed when the Hugo shortlist isn't representative of the good things out there in the ecosystem. I'll get into the specifics of the books themselves in a minute, but in my view, this is an unfortunately weak shortlist when taken collectively. It draws heavily from a single publisher (Tor, as is often the way) but even when doing so, manages not to represent the best of what they have to offer, because whatever else you might want to say about the situation, Tor does put out a robust and substantial offering of novellas every year from which we can draw. This just... ain't it. I'll come back to that a little more at the end. But first, let's actually talk through the works in question:
The shortlist this year contains:
- The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK)
- What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire; Titan UK)
- Cinder House by Freya Marske (Tordotcom; Tor UK)
- Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
- The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK)
- Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom)
Going from the top, then:
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar.
This is, for me, unquestionably the best book on the shortlist. I read it almost immediately when it came out, and was delighted to find it showcased El-Mohtar's signature lyrical approach to prose magnificently. Inspired by and loosely retelling the story of The Bonny Swans, there is a strong sense of folk music that underpins the story-logic and stylings, and El-Mohtar has done a lot of good work to do this in a way that feels distinct from just fairytales or mythic retellings: it is emphatically folk music that forms the bedrock. Which of course means there's a lot of horrible to go along with the fantastical. Folk songs are rarely cheery things. The ending is perhaps slightly happier than I might expect from the context, but still feels thoroughly in keeping with the tone.
The whole thing is intensely readable, with an interesting approach to magic (referred to as "grammar" and left delightfully slippery as to its specifics), a believable sisterly relationship, and a fairy-world that has the necessary alien quality to feel truly detached from human things.
My only criticism of it is that, in the year or so since I read it, it has mostly slipped out of my memory, especially in the specifics. It's a book of tone and feeling, and that feeling persists, but the details easily and quickly fuzzed over. Even so, it was excellent, and I think it would be an entirely worthy winner.
What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Sworn Soldier #3)
For all that I didn't love What Moves the Dead, the first in the Sworn Soldier series of novellas and a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, I will wholeheartedly admit that it was intensely creepy. I don't particularly like creepy, but I salute the success of it there and did not want to read the book at night or in the dark. That feels like a goal well achieved.
What Stalks the Deep... does not achieve that. It has all the ingredients to do so, inspired as it is by an H. P. Lovecraft story (At the Mountains of Madness) with its mysterious cave, inexplicable glowing lights, missing men, horrible noises and so on. And yet, tonally, it feels consistently soft and gentle. I never had any concern that things wouldn't turn out, in some way, alright, more or less. Despite moments that really ought to be terrifying, of the claustophobia of mine tunnels, of suffocation and near death experience... somehow none of it actually manages the emotional payoff of terror, or even a light disquiet. I'd wonder perhaps if this is Kingfisher's typical humour working counter to the aims of the story, but both managed to co-exist in What Moves the Dead, so I find myself at a bit of a loss about it all.
The loss of the horror does not really seem to come with the addition of much else though, which leaves the story feeling oddly insubstantial. Shortly after I put it down, I described it as having "passed frictionless through my brain", which I hold even more true the more time passes. The writing, the wry self-deprecating humour at oneself and society, remains distinctively in Kingfisher's voice, making it a very easy, pleasant read. There's just not much else to hang your hat on, alas.
Cinder House by Freya Marske
This is the first of the two fairytale-style stories proper, though I would group them along with The River Has Roots into a loose theme. Folk song and fairytale do share a fair bit of thematic ground. This one is, like The River Has Roots, a retelling of a specific story: Cinderella, in this case. However, it's a rather more vicious version than the one we might be used to. Especially because Cinderella - Ella - dies at the beginning of the story.
Marske remakes the fairytale into the afterlife of Ella's furious ghost, having to co-exist with her stepmother and stepsisters after the murder of her father. In this reimagining, the magic of the house absorbs her at the point of death, allowing her to become a sort of ghostly embodiment of its magic, visible only to those who live there and, initially, bound by its confines. The original themes of the Cinderella story remain, as do some of the critical plot beats (including the ball), but they are remade by coming in the wake of the worst already happening. To some extent, the stepmother has won, and so the stakes, what winning might look like, what revenge might mean, are remade too.
Marske also adds a little depth of characterisation to the stepmother (who now has her motives, though they don't exculpate her) and to the dead father, as well as granting a little more agency to one of the step-daughters, and critically makes the prince a character in his own right, rather than the embodiment of the freedom Ella craves. And the ending is more complex (and queerer) than one might imagine.
That being said, it does not truly escape the risk of all fairytale retellings. It's got a twist of difference to it, but it's still stuck telling us a story we already know. And I don't think, ultimately, the twist is enough to convince me it was worth the retelling. The changes amplify much of the original themes, but don't really change them. It's relatively well done, but I don't think exemplary.
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
I did not like this book. I did not like it at all. It's also one of the kind of books that does not bear up under the lingering scrutiny I tend to direct at awards nominees: the more I think about it, the more it falls apart, even on its key themes and ideas. It is, and here I am using this word again, incredibly insubstantial.
The story follows a group of robots waking up in a shop in California, having been turned off by the shop owners (who have disappeared). The bots, mostly, really need to be working - they have debts to pay, of various sorts - and so, in the absence of the existing restaurant, they decide to set up their own and just hope no one notices that it's not human run. It is fairly obvious from the outset that this will work, and that this is meant to be a relatively cosy story of community and success.
There are, however, a number of problems to grapple with, and one in particular that underlies them all. The world of the story is an independent California, after a mostly unexplored war with the rest of the United States. The area seems to be deprived and war ravaged, with people having to work hard to barely survive. This feels like a really substantial setting, right? A lot to be done with that, possibly some hard hitting critique of the real world? But that doesn't materialise. Problems, even the problems that result from this larger world state, are easily resolved. This includes, at one point, a robot who is haunted by traumatic memories of the war, and the death of his close comrades being told by another robot (a friend) to maybe move his traumatic memories to long term storage rather than immediate memory. This... does not feel to me like a meaningful engagement with that emotional journey.
Newitz keeps trying to set up problems or themes with bigger, thornier stakes... but then never commits to them in that same spirit. Everything is, ultimately, relatively easy, in a way that just does not work with those stakes. It's a story at war with its own tonal choices, with clunky writing to boot, and I think just completely unsuccessful because of it.
The Summer War by Naomi Novik
Another fairytale book! This one, however, is not so much a retelling as a story in the style of fairytales: think something like T. Kingfisher's Nettle and Bone, where the elements are often familiar but not the whole.
In this one, a young daughter of a duke, Celia's beloved brother Argent decides to leave their family home. In her upset, not understanding his reasons, she awakens an as-yet-undiscovered magical talent and curses him to a life without love. He leaves her, becoming a questing knight, and she is left with her guilt, her father's abandonment of his duties at the loss of his favoured son, and the other brother (Roric) she's never really liked.
To save Argent, she must work with Roric, developing a relationship she never gave much notice, and learning more about the world, her family and their history than she realised in the meantime. And, of course, discovering a much bigger threat from the fairy people whose border lies alongside their realm.
While the story of this may be an original one, it nonetheless feels awfully familiar while reading. The plot unfolds very much in expected directions and to expected ends, and without anything about it that really feels... itself. Novik's previous fairytale-type stories, especially Uprooted, have a distinctive voice and setting that stands them apart from the well-worn elements of their creation. The Summer War... less so. It doesn't help that the characterisations, predominantly viewed through the eyes of the main character, are often incredibly flat or weirdly patchy (even including Celia's own internal life). By turns, Celia is both a naive pubescent girl and an accomplished schemer, through only her own wit and the writing of a few letters. A story could make something of that, dig into the complexity of growing up, the changing shape of one's own mind and abilities. But it is not this story. It felt, more than anything, rushed, and the whole thing relies far more on tone and vibes than creating something that feels a coherent whole, with genuine concerns to explore.
Novik certainly captures the feel of fairytale in this story, but none of the pieces quite fit together nicely enough when looked at closely. Especially on a ballot with multiple other fairytale stories, this one feels rather disappointing.
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Dorothy Gentleman #1)
Not a fairytale or a retelling! Murder by Memory is the opening volume in the Dorothy Gentleman series, in which an old lady solves murders on a generation ship while talking about knitting and fussing about her nephew.
As a fan of series like Miss Marple, I was entirely in favour of the premise of this story. And indeed, at the beginning, was pretty on board with the execution. Dorothy wakes up in someone else's body, and has to figure out why the sentient ship has awoken her from digital slumber, let alone put her in the wrong body while doing so, without alerting anyone to the situation. The ship leads her to the dead body it needs her to investigate, and she begins her enquiries, telling us about the ship, its inhabitants and its technologies along the way. Great!
There are two problems, however. The first, and far more troubling, one is simply to do with the pacing. Murder by Memory is relatively short by novella standards, and the majority of the length of it feels like setup. And then, rather suddenly at somewhere around 90%, it switches into resolution mode. There's no sense of a comfortable middle of the story, and between the strange structure and the brevity, I ended up feeling slightly short-changed. I was wondering where the rest had gone to; had I lost a forty page chunk somewhere? But no. It also means there are rather more dangling threads than I would like or expect from this sort of story, even knowing there will be sequels.
The other problem, and possibly something that will be solved by the sequels, is the oddness of the worldbuilding. There's a glimpse into the ship and the people, and they're enough to make me wonder what, why, how would something futuristic end up so retro feeling, but not enough to bed that in and make it feel plausible. It's not really answers I crave, more a sense that this world... well, makes sense.
It's a nice idea, a concept I am very easily enticed into reading, but there's a lot wrong with how it goes about it, by the end.
Final thoughts:
With the exception of The River Has Roots, which is a very well-written novella with a strong prose voice and sense of direction to the story, much of the rest of this shortlist is disappointing in some way. There are structural or tonal issues with most of the entries, plots that don't match up to their premises, conflicting emotional journeys and some janky writing choices in parts. Some years, I look at the novella shortlist and, for all I might wish it otherwise because they're not my favourites, I can at least see why they're someone's favourites. Books with big ideas or engaging plots or fascinating worlds, funny or scary or enticing, or just odd in the compelling way unusual things are. For want of a better word, this shortlist feels quite safe, quite quiet, quite middle-of-the-road (and, incidentally, rather homogenous). There's not much daring or doing. And so I struggle to see quite why someone would pick some of these and say "yes, this is the best that 2025 has to offer", even had I not read a single other novella for the year. And so, I finish this with bafflement. I really just do not get it.
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POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
