547 – 2025 Hugo Novels
Description
Award season is almost here, and as you can no doubt guess, we have… opinions. Specifically, opinions about the six novels on the short list for 2025’s Hugo award. Are these books good? Yes, and also no. They’re a continuum, you might say. And somehow, Adrian Tchaikovsky is on both ends of that continuum. How did he get there? If you listen in, you might just find out.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is:
Bunny: Bunny!
Oren: and
Chris: Chris
Oren: So today we are discussing the six best books of 2024.
[Chuckling]
Oren: This is a very objective measurement of the best books. It’s definitely not just the six that were chosen by a kind of limited audience popularity contest.
Bunny: Look, one of them was pretty good.
Oren: Yes. So, this is our Hugo episode because there are six Hugos. And let’s just go around and say how many of them we read. Bunny, how many of them did you read?
Bunny: Two.
Oren: Okay. Very respectable. Chris, how many did you read?
Chris: Well, I might say three. But the reality is that I read … [laughing] … the truth is that I did not finish most of them. I finished two and then I started three more, and one of them I was just, no. Not at all.
Bunny: And one of them that you did not finish was on the list for some reason.
Oren: Just remember, because I would never brag, I’m a very humble person, but I did read all six and I’m therefore a superior being.
Bunny: Ah, so this was a shaming question. I see. I am firmly in third place here. In my defense, I read a lot of other things on the proto-Hugo List you made, your prediction chart. I was constrained by what was at the library because I’m glad I didn’t buy some of them.
Chris: Well, you did finish Ministry of Time, right? I feel like that deserves a round of applause.
Bunny: Woo. Okay. Maybe I can get bonus points for Ministry of Time. I read Ministry of Time and The Tainted Cup and a bunch of others that didn’t end up on this list. Which is funny to me because there were many on there that deserved to be on the list more than Ministry of Time.
Chris: Yeah. This year we tried to guess–I should say mostly Oren tried to guess, and some of us added a few additional books–what books might end up being nominated, which is an interesting exercise. The book that I was most surprised to not get nominated was Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar. It has a lot of things that I feel like Hugo voters like where it’s got a historical setting that focuses on marginalization and also has the kind of wordcraft that I would expect that Hugo voters would be interested in. I do wonder if the fact that it was so focused on the romance hurt it. Now there are a couple other Hugo nominees that do have romances but I feel like they’re less conventional romances than what’s in The Familiar.
Oren: Yeah. So, okay, let’s run through this real quick what those six books are. I mean they’re on the show notes, but just in case. So, the six are Alien Clay, Ministry of Time, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, Service Model, and The Tainted Cup. So those are the six that actually got nominated for the Hugo. Then there are several others that we think maybe should have been on there instead.
Bunny: Yeah, certainly more than the existing one. I think that the other books from your list that I read, most of them, aside from Tainted Cup, which was the only one I could really wholeheartedly recommend, of the ones I ended up being able to read, I would’ve been a little annoyed if they had been nominated but far less annoyed than I was about Ministry of Time. Like Last Murder at the End of the World had a plot, things happened. The mystery, once it got started and you got past all of the convoluted worldbuilding, was fun. Ministry of Time was a slog.
Oren: Yeah. So, if I was going to modify this list, and again, this is already from a biased sample size, right, because I was reading books specifically because I thought they might be on the Hugo finals, but just based off of that sample size, I would axe Alien Clay and Ministry of Time, and I would replace them with The Spellshop and The Warm Hands of Ghosts. That last one, I think only I read.
Chris: Probably why it wasn’t nominated.
Oren: Yeah, like I haven’t heard anyone talk about it despite it getting a respectable number of Goodreads views. But I liked it. And granted it’s also about World War I and about an aspect of it that I find really interesting, so, there’s a little bit of a targeted audience thing going on there. And I can see replacing A Sorceress Comes to Call with The Familiar. To me, I could go either way on that one. I don’t have strong feelings.
Bunny: I don’t know if I would put The Spellshop up there, but my feelings about The Spellshop are known.
Chris: I know you have different feelings about The Spellshop than we do.
Bunny: It’s not interesting enough. One of the funny things about the Hugos and any awards competition is that comparing these books to each other is always extremely funny, and I think it would be the strangest time for me to have to compare The Spellshop to The Tainted Cup. Like they’re just such different books. But you have to do that, right? You have to do that for the Oscars and stuff too, obviously.
Chris: And I voted for both of those to be nominated. It was pretty predictable that The Tainted Cup got nominated and The Spellshop didn’t. I do think that, just like romance, that cozies have a tough time and lighter stories have a really tough time getting nominated for the Hugos. Legends and Lattes did it because that one was kind of a big hit and a trendsetter, but I think cozies in general are going to, people just feel that darker stories are deeper, and it’s unfortunate, but it’s how it goes.
Oren: Which is just funny because every so often there’s a think piece panicking about how light stories are taking over. It’s like, Calm down. Look at the ones actually winning the awards, friend.
Chris: Yep, yep. Not actually happening.
Oren: Yeah. So, to me they have like a pretty clear scale of quality books where I just find Alien Clay and Ministry of Time to just be… I don’t get it. I don’t understand what we’re doing here. With Alien Clay, yeah, it tells me that the author shares my politics mostly, which I guess is nice, but I can get that from reading his BlueSky account. There’s no story here.
Bunny: Nominating Adrian Tchaikovsky’s BlueSky account for a Hugo. That is innovative.
Oren: Yeah, there you go. I mean, I’m glad. I’m glad he’s anti-fascist.
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