A Very Safe Hugos List and the Alternatives

Looking at what was nominated, and what wasn't.

I’ve started reading this, and it’s pretty good. Bleak, but good.

It’s been several weeks now since the Hugo finalists were announced, and the usual round of mild controversy that comes with every awards season – Why wasn’t this nominated? How did that get on the ballot? – has died down. But I still think it’s worth talking about this year’s nominees, particularly in the high-profile novel category.

The best word I can come up with for this year’s list is “safe.”

Let’s take a look:

Nettle & Bone by Ursula Vernon (writing as T. Kingfisher)

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

I’ve read two of the nominees so far – I enjoyed The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, and I’m a sucker for anything Island of Doctor Moreau-related; I even sat through the terrible movie with Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando years ago. I also read Kaiju Preservation Society and didn’t enjoy it. I’ve liked some of Scalzi’s books in the past, but this one just didn’t do anything for me at all.

The other books range from I-like-the-writer’s-other-stuff-so-I’ll-probably-read-it (Nettle & Bone, Spare Man) to doesn’t-sound-like-my-kind-of-thing (Legends & Lattes). And that’s typical of most awards lists – some of them you think sound amazing, or at least interesting, and usually there’s one where you’re like “Well, I guess it takes all kinds, right?”

I feel like that’s a pretty typical list – if you could come up with a Hugo awards list where anyone loved every book, that would be a weird fluke, or a very generous reader.

I’m not going to say much more about this list, but I do want to mention that it strikes me as very fannish.

For example, it has three straight-up pastiches or adaptations on it – Daughter of Doctor Moreau (the original Wells novel), Kaiju Preservation Society (Godzilla/kaiju films) and Legends & Lattes (D&D). That’s not an entirely bad thing – I strongly suspect if I read the entire list I’d still wind up liking Moreau best – but it’s also indicative of the tendency of SFF to look backwards, in nostalgia or revision, as to look forward.

The other notable thing about this year’s list is what’s not on it.

You know it’s a slightly odd year when there are at least three books that people are loudly grousing about for their lack of nominations.

The ones that I’m seeing a lot (and this is not an exhaustive accounting) are Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water, and Babel, by R.F. Kuang.

Of those, The Spear Cuts Through Water was poorly promoted but has a passionate band of fans, The Mountain in the Sea was very well received and actually won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and Babel was both very well received, and also from an author who has already had major success with her previous trilogy AND had a big hit with a non-SF book, Yellowface.

You can understand the absence of one of those from the nominees for the “biggest” award in SFF. But all three? That’s just disappointing.

It’s pointless to litigate what the relatively small slice of fandom that nominates every year for the Hugos chooses. Some years, you can look at the nominees and almost every one is a hell of a book, and some years, you scratch your head in confusion.

So instead, I’ve put together this alternative list of non-nominated books. A few are my choices, and others I’ve not read, but have had suggested to me via Twitter or email. Notably, there are more small press books, more weird stuff that’s just outside of the mainstream of SFF.

It’s not a list of what I think should have been nominated, or what should have won. It’s a list of what some people felt passionately about, but that flew under the radar.

The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler

The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez

Babel, R.F. Kuang.

Desert Creatures, Kay Chronister

Uncommon Charm, Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver

In the Heart of Hidden Things, Kit Whitfield

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka

When the Angels Left the Old Country, Sacha Lamb

Saint Death’s Daughter, C.S.E. Cooney

Neom, Lavie Tidhar

Spear, Nicola Griffith

One of the most Hugo-ish books I’ve read that hasn’t been nominated for a Hugo, if that makes sense.

Those are just ones that were suggested directly to me – and you can expand your reading list of alterna-Hugos by looking at a few other lists.

I’d recommend particularly the Ignyte Awards, which did nominate both Spear Cuts Through Water and Babel, the Nebulas, which were similar to the Hugos, but which saw Babel both nominated and winning, and had both The Mountain in the Sea and Spear on the list, and the Clarke Award, which as always mixed published-as-SFF books with some wild stuff that was published as literary fiction, and which gave the award to Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker.

I have a weird attitude towards the big novel awards – I tend not to worry much about who or what wins in any given year, but I pay attention to the lists of nominees. In their best years – check out 1993¹ or 2017² – and you can see a set of books that would make a pretty good reading list, as well as a good expression of where the genre was, and where it was going. You might even intensely dislike some of the books on a given list, and still agree they were important, worth engaging with and arguing about.

I put this post together partly to remind myself that even if the list of best novel nominees in any good year doesn’t do a lot for me, it doesn’t mean that good and interesting stuff isn’t going on somewhere in the genre. It just means that we have to go a little further out of our way to find it.

Obligatory Self-Promotion Corner!

I still have a story coming out in a future edition of Analog! I still don’t know exactly when or which issue! Watch for Terminal City Dogs at… some point! Wow, the future sure is mysterious!

Anyway, remember, never like or subscribe to newsletters! Go for bike rides instead! I went for a bike ride last week and a great blue heron honked at me! It was cool! Do that instead!

1. Tie victory for A Fire Upon the Deep and Doomsday Book, with Red Mars, China Mountain Zhang, and Steel Beach on the list – holy hell, what a list!

2. The Obelisk Gate, All the Birds in the Sky, A Closed and Common Orbit, Death's End, Ninefox Gambit, Too Like the Lightning – not too bad.