Casting the net a little wider

Let's get this out of the way: literary awards shortlists are subjective. They're the assessment of the jury or the collective preferences of the award electorate as the case may be. Saying the award got it wrong is to misunderstand how these things work and what an award is.

I shall now proceed to suggest that the collective wisdom of the Hugo jury this year was, in one meaningful way, somewhat questionable. The novella category for this year consists entirely of nominees from a single publisher, with all but one from a single imprint. That seems to me to be a rather myopic view of the field; I think we can look much more widely than that.

Prompted by this dissatisfaction, I suggest below some alternate universe shortlists for both longer fiction categories - novellas and novels - featuring books not nominated for either of the 'big two' SFF awards (Hugo and Nebula). I should be very clear that this is an and, not an instead: the fact I think we could probably cast the net wider on awards isn't a slight on those that were shortlisted: I liked the majority of the nominees I've read, and in any event haven't read all of them! Without further ado, the Nebugo Awards Novella & Novel shortlists (commentary for the books that were on my favourite of the year list for 2024 is cribbed from there; comment for those which weren't is new).

2025 Nebugo Award for Best Novella

All of these works are quite different, but they share one thing that really impresses me: none of these should have been a novel. Quite often a novella feels like a cut-down skeleton or section of a novel that needs more room to breathe. That isn’t the case here. All these works tell exactly the story they set out to tell, in efficient, skilled prose, with nothing really feeling missing. And indeed some I think would be too much as a novel; the intensity would become suffocating if stretched out in a longer form. All five of these works are great advertisements for the novella as a literary form.

Alex Jeffers - A Mourning Coat (Neon Hemlock)

A short, moving novella about grief and family. Just an impeccable piece of writing craft, to put across meaning, emotion, character, and setting in a very short word count. What struck me here is the efficiency of the prose. This can sound clinical, but I more mean to get at its depth. For a novella to function as a novella - rather than a cut-down novel - each sentence, each word, might need to put across what a paragraph might in a novel. And Jeffers manages this superbly. The story is, in a lot of ways, essentially inward-looking, as grief is. But the interactions with the characters brave and caring enough to pierce the solitude of grief, and Therre's own recollections of his relationship with his father, let in the world in a way that makes me very much want to read more set here. I also now want to pick up everything Jeffers has written (in an apparently long career!). Roseanna Pendlebury has an excellent review which takes an excellent deep dive; I encourage you to read it if you need more convincing, but this is a book that deserves to be widely read and celebrated.

Karin Lowachee - The Mountain Crown (Rebellion)

Delighted to get more in print from Lowachee after a bit of a break from traditional publishing, and this is a hell of a return to the scene. Like the Jeffers book, a hugely efficient piece of writing where choices of diction in the narration and dialogue do much of the work establishing setting, allowing a reasonably expansive fantasy story to be told in a novella length without feeling like there's anything missing. The main plot - go to mountain; get dragon - is quite simple, but the book spends a lot of time reflecting on what the current geopolitical situation - colonialism and a post-war new status quo, basically - has done to the indigenous inhabitants of the setting. It's effective in conveying the brutality and dislocation without ever feeling like a polemic, and also paints a rich culture alternatively subordinated or ignored by the colonial power. Also, again, casual queerness of main characters, including some of the complications in relationships (especially same-sex relationships) across cultures. Really very impressive, and pleased that the next two novellas to complete the series will be out next year.

Moses Ose Utomi - The Truth of the Aleke (tordotcom)

A brutal gut punch of a story. Somehow even more devastating than the first in the series (The Lies of the Ajungo), building off it as myth builds off history. The lines of right and wrong are blurred significantly more than in the first book, and in many ways this feels like a setup; it’s clearly linking Tutu’s story hundreds of years in the past with one that is yet to come. But unlike many middle books it is compelling in its own right. A self-righteous kid caught up in events he can neither control nor understand; in many ways not particularly likeable but also somehow sympathetic. And a plot arc that leads inevitably to tragedy, something you don’t often see in SFF. All told in beautiful, spare prose which takes advantage of everyone bit of its short wordcount. A truly impressive piece of writing.

Ursula Whitcher - North Continent Ribbon* (Neon Hemlock)

One of the best examples of a mosaic story in SFF I've read in ages. A collection of six stories, set over several hundred years in the history of the planet Nakharat. What's different about this as a mosaic to others I've read and enjoyed (Rakesfall, in this list; Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang), is it isn't a fixup - i.e. existing short work given additional context and narrative structure with newly-written material for the novel. It's six previously published stories which, when put next to each other in a single volume, add up to a more comprehensive portait of the society they depict than they do apart. The through lines become more apparent: why and how attitudes to machine decision-making vacillate over time; how the collectivist union ethos important in one later story developed in an earlier one. All this adds to a startlingly real depiction of a society that does not exist. As with the other novellas/short novels on this list, this only works because Whitcher is an excellent crafter of prose, evoking setting, character, and emotion in comparatively few words. A complete triumph.

*(Note that this is slightly over the general 40k word count for a novella, but it has generally been marketed as such, and the Hugo award (though not the Nebula) has an up to 20% word count tolerance between categories, so I’m sticking this in the novella shortlist)

Lorraine Wilson - The Last To Drown (Luna Press)

A moving, unsettling examination of grief and chronic pain. Tinna, in the wake of a car accident which killed her husband and left her badly injured & with no memories of the last three months, moves back to Iceland to stay with her aunt. The novella follows the first few days of that trip, very tightly, from Tinna’s perspective. And Tinna’s perspective is one shaped by pain and painkillers. The story moves from long, exact descriptions of her body as a physical thing in the physical world and the sensations it is feeling, to almost dreamlike timeskips, mediated by painkillers, where we are not entirely sure what is going on. And this is where the fantastic element comes in; it may be that a sea ghost is trying to murder her and her family, or it may be the drugs and the trauma giving form to her grief. Wilson always takes the supernatural seriously, but I think quite cleverly never gives us a definitive answer of how real it is. A wonderful piece of writing, claustrophobic and affecting, that would be too much if it were any longer.

2025 Nebugo Award for Best Novel

Minsoo Kang - The Melancholy of Untold History (Morrow)

A modern historian deals with the death of his wife. Gods bicker over who slighted who. A storyteller possibly constructs a fake history for his whole country while staring his death in the face. A complete and convincing repudiation of the “show don’t tell” bromide; this is storytelling and proud of it. And it’s storytelling about storytelling without that ever being dry or disappearing up its own ass. Both funny and moving in places. Very interested in who gets to tell which stories and why, and the ways in which that is an expression of power. In a very different - more traditionally literary - context, asking some quite similar things to the Madson book mentioned below. Truly impressive, and unlike anything else I’ve read in a long time.

Devin Madson - Between Dragons and Their Wrath (Orbit)

If you're not paying attention, this might look like a pretty standard, nicely done epic fantasy series opener. But hoo boy is there so much more going on. There are, indeed, dragons in this book (one of the major points of view focuses on them), but the dragons of the title are also metaphorical. The book depicts a society founded on a colonial enterprise and extractive capitalism, and one which is deeply patriarchal and increasingly nationalistic. It is those dragons our characters begin their fight against in this book. The other thing it does that I really appreciate is almost obsess over control of information and narrative. In all three points of view, who gets to tell stories and who gets to hear them is a major driver of the plot. In one particular case, one character is told "not everyone is owed all of every story", and we then get a major plot revelation entirely off-screen and are never told exactly what was said; we can only infer it from the actions the characters take in reaction to it. I cackled out loud at this sort of metafictional audacity coming up in a genre not known for it. If I have any criticism at all of this book it's that it is very, very firmly in Book 1 mode; the plot drive is a little slow, and most of what happens here is setup. But the setup is so good, and I'm so here for the space Madson is working in, that I don't really mind. Bring on book 2!

Robin Sloan - Moonbound (MCD)

It'd be easy to read Moonbound as just a delightfully written, oddball quest narrative. Because it is that, but it also is a great deal more. Like several of the other books on this list, it plays with time; here a 10,000 year time jump from our narrator's time to the book's present. It also plays with context; what do things that look familiar to our narrator actually mean, when separated by 10,000 years of societal, environmental, and technological development? What's the meaning of culture filtered through the slightly deranged eyes of out of control AI? These aren't just questions the book leaves to us, they're also ones which confront our narrator, who is at heart a sentient sourdough starter bonded to the nervous system of a 12 year old boy. The narration in this book is brilliant, sliding in and out of passive third person to the narrator actively commenting on and even involving itself in the action. It's an incredibly effective writing choice. Sloan is also a master of a particular tone that really works for me; teetering on the tightrope of engagingly whimsical, never falling into the fail states of twee on the one hand or irony-poisoned snark on the other. I read and very much enjoyed Sloan's first novel (Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore) this year as well (10 years after release); Moonbound is much better than it. Serious craft, serious ideas, packaged in something that might look like fluff if you're not paying attention.

Nghi Vo - The City in Glass (tordotcom)

This is my first Vo book and I will be hurrying to pick up more. God this was good. She's an incredible prose stylist, and that's deployed here in a short novel narrative that covers a sweep of 600 years in its limited page count. It's a difficult trick to make this engaging; we have two immortal characters at the centre, but their interactions aren't the core of the novel. That core is the rise and fall and rise and fall of Azril, the city our point of view demon, Vitrine, is the patron (?) of. Adrian Tchaikovsky pulls of the "city as character" thing in the Tyrant Philosophers. Brian Aldiss managed the "plot about society across centuries" thing with Helliconia. Vo pulls both together here. And the ending is both perfect and absolutely wild. Vo says in the author's note that this was a pandemic book, and that completely makes sense - reality redefining destruction coming out of nowhere, with no clear meaning or context. I found the book moving; hopeful about the possibiltiy of something new, contrasted against the inevitability that something new means something old has to end.

Aliya Whiteley - Three Eight One (Solaris)

I know writers who are familiar with the concept of context and they're all cowards: the novel. A confounding, confusing novel and that's entirely the point. Again comparison is difficult, but Pale Fire sort of works; if Pale Fire was a possibly AI-generated piece of fic on AO3 and Charles Kinbote was the individual personality strand of a post-singularity quasi collective society. Another pandemic novel, and again that makes sense to me. The book reads to me like a deliberate denial of context to the reader. Our annotator doesn't understand the text she's annotating (mistaking fictional elements for real aspects of our society), and neither do we; an odd, surrealist quest narrative that veers wildly in tone, content, and narrative perspective. Neither do we really understand the society of the annotator, far in our future. The effect on the reader is to deprive us of any context for what is going on, despite a clear narrative actually being present. It's unsettling and odd, but never unreadable - I actually finished the book over the course of a day without rushing. And the mental state it evoked in me is something quite unlike anything I've ever experienced reading a novel before. And none of this is to mention the startlingly audacious Oulipo-esque literary game Whiteley plays throughout. An absolutely staggering piece of writing.