Reading the Hugos: Best Novella 2026

 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

Book Review: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

 A familiar, soothing balm for the soul (if the soul doesn't mind the odd bit of murder thrown in for good measure).

In every story I have read by T. Kingfisher, there is a character of a certain... well, character. She is invariably female, often older, not always the protagonist, and has about her a particular spirit that is immediately discerned - when you meet her, you know her in a heartbeat. Her situation, her backstory, her motivations may change book to book, but her fundamental substance is entirely similar, and if you had them all meet up in some sort of extra-narrative liminal space, they'd all get on like a house on fire and probably organise a trans-universe insurrection so nobody gets imperilled for the plot anymore.

In case it wasn't obvious, I love her, this character. I don't think I'd keep reading the books if I didn't, because she's so integral to all of them. But she is ubiquitous and... well... isn't this a problem? Doesn't that mean the books get a bit samey?

Which is what I want to talk about here, in regards to A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher's latest novel. But first, the boring bit - I should at least tell you what the book is about before I go on a wild tangent about her wider canon. The story follows two women, one, Cordelia, fourteen years old and desperately alone, abused and isolated by her mother; the other, Hester, middle aged and comfortable, living a wealthy life in the manor house of her loving if daft bachelor brother. They come into contact when Cordelia's mother, basically a professional mistress, decided that Hester's brother Samuel is a prime target for marriage and a comfortable life, from which she can set Cordelia up for success and her own advantageous betrothal. No one else in the story, save the hapless Samuel, wants this to happen and does their level best to thwart it at every turn, in spite of the quite present danger. Because Evangeline is a sorceress, and a powerful one at that, who can hold someone prisoner in their own body, turning them to her will while they watch, powerless.

It is a story about power and powerlessness, and suffering, and surviving. It's about helping those in need, recognising cruelty in the world, and the lengths people will go to in harming those around them when they get in the way of their wants and desires. And it focuses very intently on the experience of being the victim of that, using the titular sorcery to emphasise it for anyone at the back who may not have been listening the first time.

So yep, it's a jolly one...

Except, it's T. Kingfisher, so actually it kind of is, despite the murders, mutilations and intense emotional and physical abuse. 

And this is what we come back to in the familiarity of a T. Kingfisher fairytale story, and its likewise familiar characters. The moment we meet Hester, this book's designated no-nonsense woman, we know it's all going to be, approximately, ok in the end. She, like her many brethren (sistren?), is so solidly practical, so absolutely sensible, that she acts as anathema to all the crazy shit going on around her. Sure, someone's been stabbed in a melodramatic fashion, but Hester is going to be reasonable about it all. Stolid, even. It's hard to maintain horror in the face of such down-to-earth pragmatism as The Character always has.

And for me, this is the crux of what T. Kingfisher does so well in her fairytale-retelling-style books in particular - she uses the sense of the familiar, and the intensely mundane, as a contrast to the darkness and grimness that goes with certain types of story, butting up against horror as they do. I would not call them cosy fiction, because they are nothing of the sort, full of, variously, moulds and murderers and abusers. But there is comfort there nonetheless. If anything, the darkness allows the creation of the comfort because it gives The Character something to stand in contrast against - she is a source of security because she exists in opposition to the fantastical (and less fantastical) evils of the world. She says "no more", and rolls up her sleeves and tells them to get lost because she has stuff to be getting on with thankyouverymuch.

But, to come back to our question earlier, doesn't this risk them all running together and feeling samey? Yes. It absolutely does. And, sometimes, they rather do. I am reasonably sure I have mixed up some of what happens in Nettle and Bone, Thornhedge and The Seventh Bride, now that I've put them down and read other things in between. It's what has held me back from nominating those books for something like a Hugo Award - they hold themselves back from the greatest heights of memorable and thrilling and engaging and [insert positive adjectives here to suit], because they set themselves up, and set up the reader, to fit so neatly into so many expectations. But, on the flip side, they do what they do with that comfort and those expectations so incredibly well, that I will never stop seeking them out to read. The ceiling may be a little low, but the bar is very high and so very, very consistent. You know, when you pick one up, that you will receive the experience you expect, and enjoy it, be pulled along by it, be unable to put it down. Often, that is all I want.

For this particular installment, I think it also exists right at the top of the "fairytale retellings" tier of T. Kingfisher works, ahead of Nettle and Bone pretty clearly. The way it uses the magic within the setting to talk about abuse and manipulation is done extremely well, and the two viewpoint characters offer excellent foils for one another, without totally outshining the relatively large cast of secondary characters. There are genuinely chucklesome moments, some really quite horrifying imagery, unexpected geese and a slightly nonsense strategem to solve a problem. It is intensely well-crafted within the space it has set up for itself, even as that space constrains it.

If it has any flaw aside from that, it's perhaps its slightly dated attitude to men - one I am predominantly used to encountering amongst women Of A Certain Age. Most (not all, but most) of the men in the story are slightly daft, hapless but well-meaning lumps who must be directed around the plot by the competent women who hold little official power but clearly actually do everything because those silly men, couldn't possible organise anything could they? Got to let them think they're in charge, poor dears, but we'd be lost if they were actually doing the planning. On the face of it, of course, this is a mildly droll inversion of patriarchy, right? Haha hoho, isn't it funny that the women are actually the competent ones? But as soon as you examine it any more closely than that, it starts to feel a little... off. The implications that one can spin out of its assumptions aren't pleasant, and it has the same lumping-together-ness that is half of the problem of the good ol' fashioned misogyny, tying one's usefulness as a person to innate characteristics of sex. It's something I observe in people the age of... let's say my mother and upwards, and ends up being what traps them into endless life admin and the mothering of the grown ass men around them, while also being rather insulting and infantilising to the perfectly competent men who then aren't being trusted to boil and egg or put away their own socks.

But at the same time, I know, in real life, women who are like this, to a greater or lesser extent, and they are also women I am rather fond of, in spite of it all. They are women who have had to be competent in that way, because of the men who likely merited the inception of the attitude they have held onto. They just haven't quite seen that it's not everyone around them anymore. T. Kingfisher alone is not responsible for the state of shifting feminist attitudes to men, and I'd be rather unfair to pin that on her and her alone. It's just a little niggle, a vibe I see in the world and sigh a little inside to replicated in characters of whom I am also rather fond.

And so I can overlook it, for the sake of reliable comforts of the rest of the story, done with the characteristic wryness and dryness that makes her narrative voice an eternal delight. All the characters speak with their own voices (even if their accents, so to speak, are the same as the characters of her other works), and have enough about them to feel real and realised, and with genuine relationships binding them to each other, of friendship and more. The setting doesn't get anymore time than it needs, but enough to feel like a world this story and these people absolutely could exist within. All in all, it's very well put together, and retains the heart, the down-to-earth-despite-the-literal-magic core that I hope for and expect whenever I pick up one of T. Kingfisher's books. I will absolutely be rereading this in the future, on a day when I need something soothing for the soul, but with some real darkness in it to make the comfort all the more present.

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The Math

Highlights: the usual no-nonsense T. Kingfisher older woman character we know and love; funny and distinctive tone of voice to narrative and dialogue; well explored themes of abuse and manipulation

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: T. Kingfisher, A Sorceress Comes to Call [Titan Books, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Review: Paladin's Faith by T. Kingfisher

Come for the plot drama, stay for the intriguing developments in fantasy world theology.

I am, unapologetically, a slightly over the top fan of Ursula Vernon (whether as herself or under her T. Kingfisher pen name), and this series particularly. So believe me when I say that I am coming from a place of love and fondness here... but this one isn't quite up to standard, compared to the rest of the series.

Or... well. That's not quite true. But it all depends exactly what you're reading the series for.

The Saint of Steel is a series of novels following the paladins of a god who died - suddenly, inexplicably - and left them without a holy hand on the wheel of their berserker abilities. Each novel follows one of the seven paladins in trying to pick up the pieces of their life, identity and faith in the wake of this catastrophe, and find how to move on with things. Generally through the medium of finding a romantic partner. Because they are very much romantasy books.

And, for the first three, the romance has been GREAT. They've often gone in different direction - the mutual safety and recovery from trauma in Stephen and Grace's story, or the finding of someone who just Gets how to be the world the same as you like Istvhan and Clara, or just the very intense feelings of Galen and Piper. But if she's anything, Ursula Vernon is a master of writing people being people, and that is exactly what you need to craft these relatable, hopeful and enthralling romantic partnerships.

When we get to Paladin's Faith however... it just isn't quite working out. Our protagonist, Shane, is the most upright, the most po-faced, the most earnestly good boy of the paladins we've met so far (which is saying something), and his love interest is Marguerite, who we know from previous stories to be a spy operating under a false name, gregarious, charming and mysterious... and prone to disappear when her cover seems like it might be blown. This is the setup for an opposites-attract style situation, something which can, and often does, work really well. You can get some fun tension, some great chemistry, some banter, and everyone can have a great time. Here... ehhhhh not so much. And I don't think it's a problem inherent to the characters themselves. There are plenty of moments of potentially wonderful setup for the exact story you expect to see, of Shane surprising Marguerite by solving problems precisely by being a stick in the mud, and for Marguerite to turn out to have a total heart of gold and win him over not just with her confident charm but inherent goodness. It's all right there.

But... but. There's the critical stage that in previous novels Vernon has mastered so well, of the characters really getting to know each other and going from "oh he's pretty" to "oh damn I have actual feelings", and it's a stage that covers a tonne of character work on both sides. It was glorious with Stephen and Grace, full of mutual pining and idiocy and shenanigans, and it made me love them both. And it's been the same - albeit in different circumstances and with different styles of romance/characterisation - in the other two. But here... we get the beginnings of it. We get all the hints, the setup, the "wow he's pretty" and "I should maybe not stare at her" and the beginning glimmers of them each beginning to appreciate the other as a whole person... and then boom, sex, suddenly high stakes and now we're in love apparently? We skipped about five steps in the normal process, and it leaves the romance feeling hollow and weak. And when that's between two very different characters, it means you end the story thinking "well, maybe this won't be happily ever after, maybe just happily for now". Which is really sad, when you know how great the others were, and when you had such hopes for what this might be.

I do wonder slightly if the problem might be that we looped back to an existing character for the love interest, rather than introduce someone new. We already know Marguerite - she was a reasonably prominent character in the first book - and so we don't need to do the same groundwork for her that we did for Grace or for Clara. And while Piper in book 3 was also a repeat, his page time in the previous stories was almost negligible. Whereas Marguerite was a friend, someone with real page time and presence. And so you either have to retread that groundwork and leave the reader going "yes yes I know all this" or move on assuming they do know all that... and risk that it leaves things a bit patchy. There's a balance to strike between the two, and I just don't think it's quite been managed here. She needs more depth than she's given, and clearly has that depth, she's a really strong character concept... but she just doesn't quite bring it all to the page emotionally in the way that the other love interests have. It possibly doesn't help that her spy background means a lot of secrets that aren't and can't be shared with the protagonist, and so there's a tricky thing of trying to work in an honest perspective on her interiority without having too much of an information mismatch between her perspective chapters and Shane's.

But, for me, we end up too much on the side of "no information", and a lot of who she is, where she's come from, is obscured from us. And however understandable the reasons are for this, it makes her just less approachable, less comprehensible as a character. When it's a two person, two perspective romance all the way through, you really need both parties to be pulling their weight and being fully realised vehicles for that romance. And ultimately, I think Marguerite is falling short simply because we cannot fully know her.

Maybe we just needed more time with her, more time for her to share more about herself, even in her thoughts, if not in dialogue. Because we didn't, and her arc, her romance with Shane really did end up feeling less substantial, and far more rushed than the previous three.

But... (and this loops us back to me "not quite" point earlier) there is a reason for all this. Not so much in-plot, but in the meta sense, there is something taking up all that space and time where romance setup might be, something which made me cackle, scream, angrily message friends and make sad noises at my cat in turn. And where the romance may be disappointing... this... this wasn't.

We got some honest to goodness, sexy sexy (in the very metaphorical sense) plot, with a side-helping of some totally A grade world-building. My thoughts about the entire theology of this world have been upended! Shane got a character arc and then some! The bittersweetness of it all! The irony! The joy! The terrible decisions and inevitable consequences and incredibly satisfying deus ex machina! It had everything.

Now before you get excited, at least on her Patreon, Vernon confirmed when this book was released that, no, very sorry, but we're not going to find out more about the Saint of Steel's death in this one. So it's not that. But it is sort of adjacent... or related, I suppose. And more critically, it feels like it's setting up something that may become the series end game. So it is big, big stuff. And it is incredibly well-handled, being at turns both sad and joyful, and really digging into some character themes for Shane specifically and the paladins as we know them in general that ends up being deeply rewarding. In some ways, I'd argue that this part of the story is the best the series has got so far (though in that is has to tangle with the somewhat creepy murder plot that stretches over from the first book into the second and third, which is also really solid). 

And so it comes down to what the reader is reading it for.

If you're reading this series purely for the romance? Well, I can't say it's bad, because it's not. But it won't quite reach the level the others took you to, however well it seems to be setting things up. You may come out disappointed.

But if you have any interest in the wider plot, or the characters of the paladins themselves, and their ongoing healing and growth arcs? Even if the romance is disappointing, the rest of the story may well make up for it and more than. And the ending will have you sending messages to friends that are just a string of exclamation and question marks... at least in my experience.

The only other thing I have to say against it is that the rest of the entries into the series could, theoretically, work as standalones. This one absolutely could not. There's too much digging into the overarching plot, there'd be too many implications missed. But when the rest of the series is as good as this one is, that doesn't feel like awfully much of a downside.

So while it's not the 10/10 some of the other Saint of Steel books have been, there's more than enough substance, drama and foreshadowing here to be going on with, and character development for Shane (and a couple of the others) in absolute spades. Once again, I finish a new installment in the series and find myself desperately waiting for the next one, mere days after release. Ursula Vernon remains the master of this exquisite torture, and I thank her for it.

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The Math

Highlights: worldbuilding that will make you do a yell then think about fantasy theology for the next three hours (positive), laugh out loud character moments, the shocking and much bemoaned absence of a hundred gallons of horse piss

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Paladin's Faith, T. Kingfisher, [2023, Red Wombat Studio]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

6 Books with T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher (she/her) writes fantasy, horror, and occasional oddities, including Nettle & Bone, What Moves the Dead, and A House with Good Bones. Under a pen name, she also writes bestselling children's books. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, dogs, and chickens who may or may not be possessed.

Today she tells us about her Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I’m currently reading a bunch of mystery, and have been reading the new Hercule Poirot from Sophie Hannah.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I’m really looking forward to the re-release of the Doctrine of Labyrinths books from Katherine Addison!

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to reread?

Yes, although it’s more that I am itching for it to have been long enough since I re-read all the Murderbot books that I can do it again!

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively? Or if not, a book that you love and wish that you yourself had written?

Hmmm…I think the closest I get is that when I read China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, every few pages I’d go “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that!” Just all the weird worldbuilding bits were so fascinating. 

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Probably Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown. I checked that one out from the library so often that I don’t think anyone else got to read it for about six months. 

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book and why is it awesome?

*laugh* Well, Thornhedge comes out in August, and I think it’s awesome because the main character is anxious and overwhelmed and trying her best and I love her. Also she’s a were-toad. But also I recently had an interviewer on a podcast, who’s read a LOT in-genre say to me “I have read so many retellings of Sleeping Beauty, and I’ve never seen anyone do this particular [spoiler] before. And once I read yours, I thought ‘Why hasn’t anyone done that?’” Which, I mean, originality isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything, but sometimes it’s still nice to get there, even if largely by accident.

But mostly, were-toad. 

Thank you T. Kingfisher!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Review: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

A retelling of sleeping beauty that flips the original on its head.

T. Kingfisher has several modes in which she operates (I'm a big fan of "mocking paladins (affectionate)", though less keen on "horror, genuinely horrifying" because I am coward), and one of those is "fairytale retelling, but make it dark, vaguely feminist and contains at least one aggressively practical woman". Unsurprisingly, Thornhedge is an entry into that latter category.

I mean this as no insult at all, but you know what you're getting into when you start a T. Kingfisher novel. Maybe not in terms of the plot beats or events, nor the interpretation of the source material if it's a retelling, but in the tone. She has a very, very distinctive voice in which she tells her stories, and opening a new book from her is like greeting an old friend, because as soon as they open their mouth/you read the words on the page, you're back in a familiar, comforting place, even if they're telling you about their new partner you've never heard of, or the job you didn't know they had. In her own afterword to Thornhedge, Kingfisher protests that this book is sweet, despite it being filled with death and biting and curses - which... I agree, though it's not the word I'd use. I'd say "friendly" instead. Or "welcoming", perhaps. No matter how gruesome the murders, how many corpses are made to dance and how many demon chickens there are, a T. Kingfisher story is always a welcoming one, where the narrative voice is clear, and comforting and on your side while you watch the terrible things happen. In this, Thornhedge is entirely like her other fantasy works, and particularly her fairytale interpretations, like Bryony and Roses or Nettle and Bone. I think this is a wonderful thing, especially for an author with an extensive catalogue of work not in a single series or unified world. Once you know you like that voice - which, if it wasn't already clear, I very much do - you can dip your toe into anything in the back-catalogue that takes your fancy and know that, regardless of whether the plot is to your taste or the paladins sufficiently attractive and guilt-ridden, there will be something there, constantly, throughout the reading experience, that will make you happy. It reduces the risk inherent to picking up something new.

It then obviously helps if the story, characters and so on are well-constructed and enjoyable, but luckily she's got that covered too.

Thornhedge is a retelling of the sleeping beauty story, but one that asks "what if the briars, the sleep and the centuries of magic weren't to keep people out, but the sleeper in?". Our viewpoint character isn't the sleeper, but instead the godmother who put her into this position, who, through a mixture of flashback and present time slowly shares with us and a knight errant the series of events that led to her solitary vigil of a tower and a tangled hedge of thorns.

Because it is a solitary vigil, this is, primarily, a novella of few characters. We of course have our protagonist, Toadling, but outside of her, the time we spend with other characters, in memory and in present narration, is relatively brief, and most of them suffer a little for it. The minor exception is Halim, the knight errant, who manages to be endearing to the reader in almost no time at all, just as he is to Toadling. But even he could perhaps have done with some more space and time. We know a little of him, and we are charmed by him, but he lacks the depth many of Kingfisher's secondary characters achieve in other works, simply because he lacks the space to encompass it. Even Toadling is done a little dirty by this, and does not get the impact for instance Bryony does in Bryony and Roses. That being said, what we do get is incredibly sweet and wholesome, while never straying into the saccharine, so it's more a problem of wanting more, than an issue of what we actually get.

The balance between the flashbacks and the present time is very crisply managed, without feeling artificial, and the pacing is well balanced, so we come to the intersection of backstory and story at a very natural point. It never feels like we're being force-fed context and exposition, rather this is just how Toadling is thinking about her predicament. She's intensely inward looking - unsurprisingly, given her solitary situation - which makes it all the easier to achieve, but even so, it's nicely managed to give us those morsels of backstory sufficiently spaced out as to feel worth each wait to get to them.

There's also a pleasing brutality to the world - as is true of many of her books. It never feels gratuitous, like some of the Game of Thrones style attempts at historical "realism" that stray into torture-porn, but rather emblematic of a pragmatism that feels well situated in the period the story is from. Likewise, her fairies are deeply alien things, who do not behave, speak or feel as humans do, and this comes with a cruelty that links them into many of the traditional fairy stories. And yet, it always gets looped back to some essential piece of them, or their nature or their setting in the book, so it never feels forced. They are what they are, and that can sometimes be cruel, but it's never there simply for the sake of it.

And, as ever, there are some really cracking occasional lines dropped in without any warning - "thorns die from the inside out, like priests" hit me out of absolutely nowhere and I was thoroughly unprepared for it, and now it's stuck in my head, likely for the rest of the week. Some of this impact comes from the fact that, for the most part, she's not a prose-forward kind of author, so when you get those little snippets of gold (to horrendously mix some metaphors), they stand out all the greater. Or rather, to borrow Max Gladstone's phrasing, her work is primarily aerodynamic (though with its own, very distinctive style), but this means when it's got a little wing or spoiler or something that affects the flow, it's all the more distinctive for it. 

I'll stop brutalising analogies now, I promise. 

In any case, all in all, it's nice - more than nice, it's a very enjoyable read with some interesting and thoughtful choices about worldbuilding - and very much worth the time spent reading it, but it's not going to set the world on fire or be thrust into the awards limelight. Luckily not all books need to be that - it's a book for the fun of reading, one that you'll blitz through the first time, then put aside, and maybe come back to a few years later when you need something cosy and cheering. And those are just as important as the ones that break your heart or change the way you see the world entirely. Sometimes you need the downtime, the calm and the comfort, to leave you able to appreciate the bright and the brittle and the brilliant. And this is exactly that, done beautifully.

--

The Math

Highlights: lovable characters, enjoyable subversion of the fairytale tropes, fairies that are inhuman in all the right ways

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge, [Tor, 2023]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Review: The Saint of Steel Series by T. Kingfisher

An extremely cosy series (with murders), adorable romance, and something of a thesis on how to make paladins amazing.

What happens when a god dies, but His berserker paladins are left behind without a hand on the holy reins? If T. Kingfisher’s Saint of Steel series is anything to go by, the answers are: angst, romance, lawyers, angst, tutting, solving murders, angst, exasperated bishops, angst, magical morticians and a lot of pragmatic, down to earth do-gooding. Each book (three currently published but more promised) follows one of the seven remaining paladins of the Saint of Steel as they rebuild their lives with each other, find love, and… yes, angst a bit.

This may seem like a lot of angst – and in many ways it kind of is – but unlike most books you could quantify that way, while the paladins in question may do a lot of moping, guilting and general being sad and righteous all over the place, the tone of the books runs so contrary to it, that it never threatens to overwhelm… anything. They are, in fact, surprisingly jolly books, that just happen to have some paladins in them who are slowly together overcoming a serious combined psychological trauma and literal crisis of faith. And those two things shouldn’t marry up neatly, really. They don’t naturally fit together at all. But the key thing that makes this series absolutely work is that what Kingfisher does superbly well is people, and particularly, she never lets the reader lose sight of the fact that here characters are people. What this means is that for every dramatic moment, or every soulful bit of angsting, there are several more where we are reminded that they need clean socks, have to eat porridge that isn’t particularly nice and have a bad back when they’ve been overdoing the exercise. Kingfisher manages to bring to bear the full scope of human from the sublime to the mundane, and by revelling in that contrast, and highlighting the mundane parts, manages to humanise a character archetype that is all too easy to turn into something of a holy robot.

This delightful mundanity and emphasis on the realistic little details of actual humans is what makes her romances work, and all the more so because all of the current three aren’t the type of characters who might normally get a romance plot. Two of them are a little older than your traditional heroines, in their thirties, with experience of love and loss and the world before they reach us, and the third is a mortician, which I’m not led to believe is a traditionally sexy profession, and moreover someone with some very particular concerns when it comes to his partners and his life generally. And because they’re not 19 year olds with big protagonist energy, they all bring quirks and problems with them to their relationships that need to be overcome. Not dramatic problems, not “we are the heirs to rival kingdoms and our parents will never understand our love” problems. But problems like the shadow of a past relationship affecting their self-esteem and self-perception, or being settled into a life that might not accommodate a traditional relationship and cohabitation. Or, because this is fantasy series after all, being a were-bear. But even so magical a problem as that gets touched by very human concerns and made all the more relatable for it.

All this is to say that T. Kingfisher writes characters you can imagine walking out into the real world and being genuine, fleshed out people you could have a cup of tea with, rather than larger than life heroes, all the edges polished off until you have something otherworldly.

Which is a fantastic way to handle paladins as a class. As it happens, they are my favourite D&D class by far, but also one of the ones that I think struggle the most when it comes to characterisation. How do you take someone who is meant to be the righteous hand of god in the world and make them feel like a person? How do you reconcile humanity with the literal touch of the divine? And how do you make someone likeable who exists in a world of black and white, good and bad, holy smiting of the sinners? They are a class that wants to defy nuance, which simultaneously makes them unlikeably inflexible in their dealings with others, as well unflatteringly two dimensional – I can’t even fault someone who says they don’t like paladins because they’re boring goody two shoeses… most of the time, they’re not wrong. And those times when they do get deeper character development, it is often centred around their angst, their sadness that they cannot live up to the goodness/holiness/whatever-else-ness their god has imbued them with, are too weak, human and grey to embody their shining holy purpose, and so are a terrible, flawed person and we should feel very sad for them. Which often falls flat.

T. Kingfisher has solved these problems in a couple of ways. Firstly, she doesn’t try to deny them. She herself calls out her paladins for being inflexible, she eyerolls them in the text for a tendency to martyrdom, and she points the reader very much at the parts where their humanity and their divine duty come into conflict. She never denies the traditional problems we might see with them, and instead revels in them, and then makes them funny. Not, for the most part, laugh-out-loud-jokes funny, but instead the sort of wry, under-the-breath-chuckle funny that you get in Banks’ Culture novels, for instance, and this humanises them more than anything sincere could really manage. But critically, the tone of the books always stays the right side of laughing with them, not at them - there’s a terrible fondness to it all, like teasing a favourite cousin. They’re never a joke, but they are sometimes funny.

Secondly, she lets them fail, at least some of the time. They make mistakes, especially in their personal lives, and then they have to do the work to fix them, and something about having to apologise for an embarrassing social faux pas really seems to undercut a lot of the drama.

Thirdly, she lets them be self-aware. Not always, and not all of them, but some of her paladins are capable of looking at their comrades and despairing, and this somehow sneaks you into immersion in the world, because it makes the exasperation you might be feeling at them part of the setting. It helps too that they are surrounded by some of the most un-paladin-like characters it is possible to imagine, who all collectively sigh and pinch their noses at the noble and martyrly antics that unfold.

Which brings me onto the Church of the White Rat, which is the lodestone around which this series, the Clocktaur War duology and the currently standalone Swordheart all revolve, and the worldbuilding more broadly. In her priests and lawyers sacrosanct, T. Kingfisher gives us an incredibly hopeful bit of religious worldbuilding. While they all seem to be incredibly down to earth and pragmatic people, taken as a whole, the Church of the White Rat is a statement of goodness in the world, of doing the job in front of you and making the best of things, of defending people who are weak simply because they deserve to be defended. As the point to which all the characters in the stories come back, it is a brilliant nexus focussing the narrative of the series into Doing Good, not on a grand, demon-battling scale (as in the Clocktaur War duology), but on a far more prosaic level. We see the paladins escorting healers in dodgy neighbourhoods, helping deal with flood damage and looking for mysterious murderers. Instead of the usual grand concerns of a fantasy series, Kingfisher pulls us closer to home, and to issues that would have been just as present in the generic medieval European fantasy world the series approximately inhabits. Shelter and health, justice and legal aid, food and safety. And while this might seem like it would do nothing to undercut the boring, good-two-shoes paladin argument, something about having them deal with much more mortal concerns does work in their favour, and makes an excellent counterbalance for when they do have to do some smiting. They’re not just concerned with sinners and evil. They also care about people.

And yes, there is some smiting, because they wouldn’t be paladins if they didn’t get their swords out occasionally, but by using it sparingly, and grounding the characters as people first and holy warriors later, Kingfisher gives it more meaning when it finally does come around. That and she understands that good pacing can sometimes mean only giving us the bit of detail a fight scene needs to keep the plot moving, more than every sword swing and step.

The closest comparison I can think of to the Saint of Steel series, and the world of the White Rat as a whole, is the late Sir Terry. It’s a big comparison, not one to use lightly, but I think that in her humour, her worldbuilding and her skill at giving us characters who are intensely human, T. Kingfisher is doing something that feels extremely familiar to readers of the Discworld books. They’re not the same, of course, but they both have the ability to leave a reader feeling incredibly comforted.

Thus far, we’re three books in, and the stories seem to have settled into a formula of paladin-meets-love-interest, plus shenanigans, with some overarching plot. That said, the ending of the third book, and what we know about some of the paladins who’ve yet to be the focus, suggests that this pattern may be broken, at least a little, in what’s to come. I’m hopeful this is the case, because for all that what we’ve got so far has been lovely, seven books, as the series is projected to be, might be too much for it to remain in a single pattern.

--

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10 

Bonuses: +1 excellent representation of realistic romances

Penalties: -1 slightly formulaic at the moment (though with hope that that might change in future novels)

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

References:  

T. Kingfisher, Paladin’s Grace [Red Wombat Studio, 2020]

T. Kingfisher, Paladin’s Strength [Red Wombat Studio, 2021]

T. Kingfisher, Paladin’s Hope [Red Wombat Studio, 2021]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Microreview [Book]: Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher once again brings down to earth magic to a fantasy story.

Cover by Natasha MacKenzie

Fairytales, especially brand new ones, not just rewrites and reinterpretations, are pretty hard to get right. There’s a hard-to-define quality to fairytales, the ones that really feel like fairytales, that seems somewhat at odds with how modern novels are written. If you go back to Grimm, for instance, the stories seem pretty light on characterisation and even lighter on explaining things beyond the first level. Why did the fairy godmother curse the child? Because she wasn’t invited to the party! It’s an answer, sure, but it’s hardly… substantive. There’s not tonnes of motivation going in there. Things tend to be simpler, magic tends to be assumed and unexplained, and a lot of the rules of the world as we know them are just suspended without notice and we just have to accept it. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but when you try to turn that into a novel, you’re going to run into issues. People have expectations of how a novel works, people expect things to make at least a little bit of sense beyond the superficial, and for the characters to feel at least a bit like real people, making real choices in a world that, even if it’s different from ours, behaves in a way that at least implies it has some sort of sense to it. It’s a difficult needle to thread – do you try to find logic for things that don’t necessarily have them, or do you just roll with it and hope your audience suspends disbelief along with you?

T. Kingfisher has absolutely nailed it – to mix a metaphor – with Nettle and Bone. It feels absolutely like a fairytale, and absolutely like a novel. And I loved it.

It tells the story of Marra, the third princess of a small kingdom with a useful harbour, trapped between two larger kingdoms. Less politically savvy than her older sisters, she’s been sent to live in a convent out of the way of court – and of the risk of marriage. But when her second sister turns out to be in danger in her marriage to the prince of the Northern Kingdom, Marra has to do something about it… and that something ends up involving a witch, an ex-knight rescued from the night market, and a fairy godmother with only intermittently useful powers.

Marra’s journey to save her sister is a winding one, but for all its relatively slow start and meandering direction, it never feels like it lacks pace. I wanted to keep on reading and keep on reading every time I picked it up, and the big reason for that was the characters – Marra is an incredibly compelling protagonist, not least because she’s not the sort of character we’re used to seeing in the starring role.

T. Kingfisher has a good track record, in my experience, of putting people in her central character roles who aren’t usual protagonists. In the Saint of Steel books, her paladins and their love interests tend to be older, and have different attitudes and experiences to what you might expect from a more traditional fantasy. The mentions of sore backs, mysterious aches and general age-related maladies are often played for jokes – very much laughing with, rather than at, I hasten to add – but they are also just delightfully present, and cementing us in the reality of, for example, someone who has been fighting in armour for a lot of his life and is now in his late thirties. Nettle and Bone takes a different direction on this, though much in the same spirit. Marra is a more typical protagonist age, the youngest of three girls of marriageable age in fantasy medieval Europe, but aside from that, she’s remarkably… average. And this is absolutely a strength. She laments often in the book that she’s a bit slow to catch on to people’s double meanings, or things others pick up on quickly, that she’s not clever like her mother and sisters. She’s not an unattractive person, but nor is she a great beauty (incidentally, I dislike intensely when someone is described as being plain in something like this and then by the end of the book umpteen people have declared them to be actually drop dead gorgeous). She’s good at weaving and sewing – though not to a magical extent – and she’s willing to help out when people need her help. She doesn’t like being coddled particularly, though not to the extent of being headstrong and untameable. She’s just… a person. A nice person. A person it’s easy to like.

What drives her through the plot isn’t some wonderful, intrinsic quality of goodness or intelligence, but instead that she comes to see that something is wrong with her sister’s situation, something that other people knew, or suspected, but that she hadn’t noticed, and realises that she cannot stand to let it continue. She doesn’t necessarily like her sister, but she will not see her treated badly by someone for whom there can be no consequences, and so she sets out to right this wrong.

And she solves her problems by being determined, by being willing to try, by having no other options, and by finding friends and allies where she can, and being willing to trust them, at least a little bit.

And it’s really refreshing to have a character like her, who struggles and fails and has to ask for help, who doesn’t magically solve the problems by being brilliant. You feel like you could meet her in real life, have a conversation with her, and she’d be a genuinely real person who could exist in the world.

And outside of Marra, though they get much less focus, the secondary characters are just as compelling – the gravewitch is delightfully practical about magic, demons and other people, the broody ex-knight manages not to be irritatingly broody (and has a source of his sadness that is entirely compelling, and not one with an obvious solution the reader can be exasperated he didn’t choose to take), the fairy godmother is the slightly scatterbrained friend everyone has met. They all have their flaws, and their flaws make them. They react to each other in a delightfully human way. You can imagine them having casual chats about things that don’t matter, even as they go about some pretty large-scale, sometimes dark adventure.

That darkness is also one of the book’s great strengths – that the problem at the core of the story isn’t a dragon (that might be a metaphor for something) but instead a man who has been allowed too much power gives all of the conflict that much more strength. The reason he has that power is both temporal and magical, but the effect of it is entirely human. He’s a bad man, a man who will not stop himself, who will continue to hurt people, and so he must be stopped. It’s also a sparing darkness, not delighting in giving us any more grim detail than we need to see to understand the gravity of the situation. I find that some fantasy gets too bogged down in emphasising the grimness, not to make a point, but simply to revel in being gritty and dark, and this isn’t this. Kingfisher uses it sparingly, and makes it thus all the more prominent – we don’t need to keep on seeing it on the page for the story to revolve around it.

In a slightly counterintuitive contrast to this, humour is one of the story’s other great strengths. It’s not laugh out loud funny, there aren’t jokes, but it has a thread of wry wit undercutting a lot of it, especially in the dialogue, that reminds me of Iain M. Banks. I rarely laughed reading a Culture novel, but I was often amused.

And this counterbalance – the darkness and the humour, the fantastical and the human – and the way that all of it is managed so seamlessly, is what makes Nettle and Bone, and T. Kingfisher’s work more generally, great. This is a difficult comparison to make, but it’s one I genuinely believe – her writing has the same quality of humanity, of encompassing the earthy and the magical, the funny and the awful, that Terry Pratchett managed so well, and I come away from reading them with the same sense of comfort that I do from a Discworld novel. They are both people who write people, and write them in all their faults and failings, and whatever story they tell, however fantastical, both of them do always come back to people being just… people. And that’s what Nettle and Bone really is. That it weds this so naturally to an intrinsically fairytale story is a great mark in its favour, but it’s the people underneath it that make it worth its while.

---

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10 

Bonuses: + 1 for once again making a Dragon Age reference in a T. Kingfisher book that suggests a tonne of opinions going on in the background

Penalties: I can't think of any

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference:  T. Kingfisher, Nettle and Bone [Titan, 2022]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Adri and Joe Read the Hugos: Short Story

Adri: Our next Hugo category is short story! Four returning Hugo-favourite authors and two with their first (I think) nominations, stories ranging from heartwarming haunted houses to robot mentorship. How are you feeling about this year’s ballot?

Joe: I hate to admit it, but I’m just not up on my short fiction this year. If I’m being frank (and I’m not frank, I’m Joe), I haven’t been up on my short fiction for a couple of years now. I read a small handful of select anthologies and then the Nebula and Hugo Award finalists.

I mention this because I don’t have quite the breadth of knowledge of comparison to the rest of the field as I do with novels. Here, I’m coming in relatively cold and can only really talk about the stories in relation with each other and not also with the field. That’s the point, I suppose, but for a change I’m not internally bemoaning that story X was my favorite and didn’t make the ballot.

ANYWAY, I ramble because I care.

As a whole, I really like this year’s ballot. There’s one story that doesn’t quite work for me (and that story is just fine), but the other five are quite good.

Adri: I’m on the other side of things, where I did read a lot of short fiction again last year (although not as much as 2019) and that means that inevitably I have feelings about favourite stories that didn’t make it. Nothing from my nomination ballot is here; I’m not going to share those specific five stories, but they all make an appearance in our recommended reading list so I’ll let you extrapolate from there, dear reader.

But, objectively, this ballot is just as good as my favourite stories. There are such a wealth of good short stories that come out every year and if one spends a significant amount of time reading short fiction, then by definition one reads a lot of good individual stories. I read a couple of hundred stories a year and that barely dents the surface of what’s being published!

The other thing I want to note is how different the tone is between the novelette and short story ballots this year, which is not something I’ve ever noticed before! This short story list isn’t exactly fluffy, but it’s overall got more lightness and hope than the six stories in Best Novelette, many of which are… well, we’ll get to that. I don’t think it’s anything more than coincidence, but it’s an interesting one.

Joe: I think I’d like to start with “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” because it’s a kick in the gut and it’s great and it is tonally unlike most of the stories on this ballot, which are otherwise quite charming.

Adri: Yes! Rae Carson’s story of childbirth and survival, set ten years into a zombie apocalypse (clue’s in the title) is excellent for how it turns the hypermasculine-hero survival narrative on its head, focusing on a fundamental aspect of human survival - childbirth - that becomes a nearly insurmountable task in the circumstances, and then putting a group of women at the centre of the story and (again, clue’s in the title) letting them be badasses, and mutually supportive badasses at that, even in the most dire of situations. Most importantly, it’s narrated from the perspective of Brit, the woman giving birth, making her the active centre of the experience, rather than a passive presence whose need for protection reduces her to immobilised, screaming victimhood. I like it.

Joe: Spoilers for the zombie apocalypse!

But - yeah, it’s a super cool story and it’s the sort of story I don’t see all that often and it’s absolutely fantastic.

Fantastic in a completely different way is John Wiswell’s “Open House on Haunted Hill”, a story which is, for lack of a better word, absolutely charming. That’s a word I want to use quite a bit in this category because that hint of lightness is all over the Short Story ballot and it’s frankly refreshing right now.

This is the story of a house that is on the market to be sold and doesn’t want to be alone. It wants a family. It wonders if it could haunt the glue on its own wallpaper to make itself more appealing to a potential buyer. “Open House on Haunted Hill” is just lovely and reads like a quiet exhale that blows the stress out of your body.

Adri: It’s definitely a story that brings a new meaning to the term “found family”! I love how it builds a sympathetic story around a set of people who don’t often get sympathetic portrayals, especially in this kind of genre: the sceptical podcaster trying to raise a boisterous kid, the estate agent (sorry, “realtor”), and of course the house itself would all be two dimensional villains or joke punchlines in another story, but here they’re people all trying to do their best.

The other story that made my cold heart melt is “A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, which continues Prasad’s track record of telling robot self-actualisation stories with wonderful wit and heart. It’s also told through a really great - if simple - text device, where the story is within a chat log between a newly freed robot and its automatically assigned mentor, so there’s lots of light-touch things going on in the “meta” text (e.g. screen names) that really adds to our understanding of the characters. I actually missed the anthology this was in, so I’m glad enough other readers saw it (the tor.com reprint can’t have hurt) and put it on their ballots so I could enjoy it.

Joe: Made to Order was a good anthology, but I tend do well with Jonathan Strahan’s anthologies even if I’m usually a couple of years behind when they are published (sorry, Book of Dragons).

We’ve definitely seen the story format for “A Guide for Working Breeds Before” and in some ways it reminds me of Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please”, though Prasad is doing something different here, but it’s another really pleasant story despite presence of a killer robot.

Speaking of Naomi Kritzer, I also enjoyed her story “Little Free Library” which is partially told through notes left in, well, little free libraries. I think we have all the story that we actually need in “Little Free Library” but I wanted just a bit more from it. There’s something so much bigger lurking around the outside and I have questions, but I suspect we have as much as we need for the story to work. But I have questions!

Adri: I really like “Little Free Library” but its the story that “sparks” the least for me out of these six, if that makes sense. It’s cute, watching a fae(?) revolution through scraps of documentation left for a girl in her Little Free Library box, but I don’t have much to say about it beyond “that was cute”. Cute is good, but cute plus thought provoking is my bar for Hugo cuteness.

The two stories we haven’t discussed yet are both spacefaring riffs on fairytales: The Little Mermaid for "The Mermaid Astronaut", and Hansel and Gretel for "Metal Like Blood in the Dark". Both end up pretty far from their sources in different ways: “The Mermaid Astronaut” removes the need for the mermaid to specifically yearn over a love interest (good), and in place of either the Disney or Andersen endings, creates a story where growth and change can involve coming full circle. Metal Like Blood in the Dark sticks in some ways to its original plot, but it shifts the moral weight of the story, making it about the sacrifices that Sister makes to keep her Brother safe in the outside world. By the way, they’re both robots.

Joe: I have a lot less to say about either of those stories. I liked “The Mermaid Astronaut” and appreciated what Yoon Ha Lee was doing in telling that story and the arc of the mermaid in question. The T. Kingfisher story didn’t work as well for me as the rest of the ballot did - which is unusual for me with a story from Kingfisher or Ursula Vernon, especially with how much I loved Kingfisher’s novel A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking - which we’ll talk about when we discuss the Lodestar finalists.

Adri: I feel similarly. For fairytale retellings particularly, I’m learning that what makes the overall Hugo audience excited for a new version of a story is… kinda different to what I want? Like, we will never run out of space for retellings, especially ones that come from the margins and re-examine our dominant tropes through that lens. But I want an outstanding retelling to smack me over the head with something - whether that’s bringing in a radical kindness or another perspective or something that makes it obvious what the original story was missing, or pushes a big contradiction to the fore, or whatever. “The Mermaid Astronaut” gets close to that, “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” goes off more in its own direction (and doesn’t do anything terribly interesting with that direction), and it’s all objectively good - and two authors that I love - but they don’t get to that magical nebulous “best story of 2020” point.

Anyway. Now that we’ve covered it all, what’s at the top of your list?

Joe: This would be a really good time to actually put together my ballot and vote, but I’d say I have a very solid top three of “Open House on Haunted Hill”, “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” and “A Guide for Working Breeds”. I *think* that would be my ballot order but I could also change the order a dozen times between now and when I actually submit the ballot.

What does your ballot look like?

Adri: I’m still sad about Fandom for Robots not winning a couple of years ago, and “A Guide for Working Breeds” did similar mushy things to my heart, so it’s going to take top spot for me. We have the same top three overall, but I don’t know how I’ll go between Open House on Haunted Hill and Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse. Coin flip, maybe? I’ll work something out.

Joe: Well, that’s a category and it’s another strong one. It’s been fun reading through the ballot this year.

Next up: Novelette!

Reading the Hugos: Lodestar

Welcome to what is likely the final entry in Reading the Hugos this year. As I noted last year, from the perspective of a reader who is not plugged in the YA scene and isn't a YA reader, the Hugo nominators did a good job again this year.

I do always wonder about visibility and this award. How widely are Hugo voters reading in YA? I tend not to nominate much for the Lodestar for that reason (this year I nominated Catfishing on Catnet and Anne Ursu's excellent The Lost Girl), but that is also an argument that can be made for Graphic Story or, if we're feeling nitpicky, the entire ballot. The Hugo Award (and the technically not a Hugo Lodestar Award) is representative of the tastes and opinions of those Worldcon members who take the time to nominate and vote. That's part and parcel of the process, which I suppose makes this paragraph somewhat excessive.

This year I was only able to read five of the six finalists. I missed out on Deeplight, which is the second time I've missed reading Frances Hardinge for the Lodestar. This year I have a good excuse - I was reading all of Seanan McGuire's Incryptid stories included in the Voter Packet (oh, my heart after reading the last of the Johnny and Fran stories).

Let's look at the finalists, shall we?

• Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer (Tor Teen)
• Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan)
• Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee (Disney/Hyperion)
• Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher (Argyll)
• Riverland, by Fran Wilde (Amulet)
• The Wicked King, by Holly Black (Little, Brown; Hot Key)

Riverland: I haven't read much of Fran Wilde's fiction, far less than I would have expected given how well regarded her Bone Universe novels are (start with Updraft), but I have fairly consistently bounced off each story of hers that I have read. Whether it is The Jewel and Her Lapidary, "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" or The Fire Opal Mechanism, I have a growing suspicion that I'm just not a Fran Wilde reader. That, no matter how good or how well regarded, these aren't the stories for me. It also means that I am unlikely to give Updraft a go, but that is a different point.

I had hoped that Riverland would be the book to buck that trend. It is completely unrelated to her Gem novellas, it's YA rather than strictly written for adults, it's a portal fantasy novel dealing with domestic violence. Riverland is beautifully written for those readers able to dive in and work their way through Wilde's storytelling. I know Adri gave Riverland 5 Stars on Goodreads, so there's at least one editor here who strongly disagrees with me on Riverland (this is not likely to be our only disagreement in this category) - but Riverland really locked down the idea that unless Fran Wilde is on an awards ballot I am actively reading for, I probably won't be reading more of her work. It is worth noting that this is written before I read any of the Short Story finalists, which does include a selection from Fran Wilde, so there's one more chance for me to connect with Wilde's fiction this year.

Dragon Pearl: Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy of novels are simply excellent. Each book was a finalist for the Hugo Award (as was the series as a whole), and justifiably so. I thought the series got better as it progressed, and it was pretty darn good from the start. I could not wait to see what Yoon Ha Lee would write next and what was next was Dragon Pearl, a YA novel from Rick Riordan's publishing line. A bit of space opera and adventure.

I absolutely love the idea of Dragon Pearl, of the novel's set up of a girl with hidden magic desperate to find and clear the name of her brother who is accused of desertion from the Space Forces. I loved how Min used her magic, how she cons her way into getting to the heart of what happened to her brother. So much of Dragon Pearl was absolutely delightful and weeks after finishing the novel I'm still thinking about the relationships Min made. Dragon Pearl is a wonderful novel of friendship.

That's what makes it so difficult to put my finger on why I didn't love Dragon Pearl as much as I expected. The individual parts are so excellent, but they somehow don't coalesce (for me) into a novel that reached the heights it should have. All the ingredients were there, the meal just didn't quite come together.

Minor Mage: I have much less to say about T. Kingfisher's Minor Mage, but it was an absolutely charming story of a boy who was training to be a magician but has far too much responsibility for his village compared to his age and training. Minor Mage is a quest story and I would have loved to have another hundred pages of it (Minor Mage is more a novella than full length novel). I look forward to reading it to my kids when they are older.

The Wicked King: When I wrote about The Cruel Prince as part of last year's Lodestar ballot it was my runner up, behind only the superb Dread Nation (The Cruel Prince placed fourth, Dread Nation was the runner up). Where The Cruel Prince was the first book in a series related to other books it did not require any familiarity with Tithe and the other Modern Tales of Faerie. The Wicked King, on the other hand, is the direct sequel to The Cruel Prince and if readers who don't remember the relationships in that first book will be at least half lost in this book, though Holly Black is a skillful enough writer that new readers will be able to keep up, just without some of the nuance.

I wrote last year that Holly Black is a master storyteller and that remains the case. The Wicked King is exactly the continuation of The Cruel Prince one might hope for, though this is not a series for the faint of heart or those who don't want bad things to happen to good people. Black does not pull punches.

Catfishing on Catnet: When Naomi Kritzer won a Hugo Award in 2016 for her story "Cat Pictures Please" (also a Nebula Award finalist) I assumed it was a one-off. "Cat Pictures Please" was a delightful story of an A.I. (artificial intelligence) who wants to help people and look at pictures of cats. Catfishing on Catnet is more than an expansion of that story, it's a complete reworking using that same central premise. Most impressively, it's seamless. Kritzer is not expanding a smaller idea into a shape it doesn't fit, she has a big idea that is bigger than just the one novel (good thing there's a sequel coming next year).

Catfishing on Catnet is a smart and warm hearted thriller that deals with internet privacy, personal identity and rights, friendship, stalking, and social networks - it is an absolute delight. In a category where some of the finalists don't quite work for me - Catfishing on Catnet is a favorite. This is as good as it gets.


My Vote 
1. Catfishing on Catnet
2. The Wicked King
3. Minor Mage
4. Dragon Pearl
5. Riverland



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.