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hugos death race 2025

Hugo Award Thoughts for 2025

https://seattlein2025.org/wsfs/hugo-awards/winners-and-stats

Hugo Awards thoughts

Best Novel went to The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett, and I think it's well deserved! This book was fun, well structured, and mastered set up and payoff exceptionally well. I have read Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, which was excellent, but not quite as tightly put together, so I would say that Tainted Cup represents both mature skill and growth. I'd recommend it, particularly if you like a good detective story. I read at least part of most nominated works in this category (I missed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay entirely, and did not finish Ministry of Time in a timely fashion to vote) and I was pleased to see Bennett's win.

I want to plug one other nominee - Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This novel is experimental and fascinating - it rewards familiarity with the classics of both the Western canon and the speculative fiction, but it's riffing on them with a light touch. Tchaikovsky is taking serious concepts and looking thru an absurdist lens, taking things to an extra-logical extreme. These robots are both comprehensible and alien. They feel and yet they don't. A running theme is Tchaikovsky telling us that, in any given scenario, the character is a robot and therefore not feeling a particular feeling - but also not feeling any other particular feeling. This apophatic mode of characterization appeals to me so much - showing the reader the emotion while denying the existence of the emotion is a precision weapon for a writer to wield, and Tchaikovsky holds that pen deftly. The main character is even named for his negation - after leaving his role as valet, he is renamed Uncharles: because of course he's not Charles anymore, that is the name of the valetbot in a particular house serving a particular master. And of course he's still Charles: who else would he be?

I think the flaw with Service Model is the ending - as this is an experimental journey thru several literary imaginations, any ending that tried to mesh well with all of them would fail. So the ending becomes quite pragmatic, and attempts to address the ills being done to the characters that we have become attached to over the course of the story. It charms me, because I love when an author trusts that the reader will care what happens to the fictional people of a story once the book is over, but I concede that it is probably not thematically a strong as some of the book's middle. I don't care, but you might.

The Winning Graphic Novel - Star Trek : Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way - is simply a masterpiece of Choose Your Own Adventure techniques, where the story itself influences how you interact with the multiple routes thru the book. I highly recommend getting this book in physical form and settling in to just PLAY with it for a few hours. The story is not incredibly long, but there is a beginning, middle, and end that take the Star Trek characters into the scenario and then out the other side; I was compelled to keep trying until I figured out the puzzle. It's woven into the story really well! This was my first experience with Lower Decks and made me actually go and pick up the show, which is a delight.

I have yet to read my way thru the other categories, so I'll hold off on my full opinions there until I am Properly Informed.

In personal life news, I get to do more physical therapy - new body part, old issue. Frustrating to have let things get this bad and liberating that it might be fixable.

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reading meme

Wednesday Reading Meme for Aug 15, 2025 (which is a Friday)

Personal life: I am back from my travels - family was seen, babies were hoisted, toddlers were obeyed, much delicious cheese was eaten! Pokemon Go was a definite add to the experience - I even decided it was worth it to me to throw $5 at it to get myself some more game functions, and I had a fun time using it on walks, and making friends with it was an unexpected plus!

It was not much of a reading holiday, tho, as you'll see.

What I Reading
Marrying Efficiency to Ideals by thehoyden -
Untamed/ Mo Dao Zu Shi - https://archiveofourown.org/works/66224968 - Have I sung the praises of thehoyden's writing? If not, I should. A really good author in a lot of fandoms, this piece of Untamed/ Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic is self indulgent in the best ways - taking Meng Yao from canon, making a few minor circumstantial twists, and highlighting all the ways he could have been happy and wonderfully effective as the treasured spouse of a sect leader. I heartily enjoyed it.

King and Lionheart by the hoyden - Hockey RPF - https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010348#main - In fact, I liked the Untamed fic enough that I have been going back thru thehoyden's past work and re-reading my faves! This one is basically my gold standard for the Perfectly Arranged Marriage fic - Sidney Crosby, alleged hockey robot, agrees to marry Evgeni Malkin so that he can come and play hockey in the NHL and bounce on his Russian contract. It's sweet and slow and kind to both of them, showing Sid as the kind of focused person who would, in fact, marry someone for hockey and never regret it, and Geno as the kind of brave idiot who would do it and then feel just a bit bad about it. It's charming and long and full of smut and deeply sweet.

I have read some shorter works by thehoyden, but since I usually limit my reviews to the novel-length stuff I have read, I will simply mention Letters from the Northern Continent (DS9, Garak/Bashir post-canon epistolary fic) is wonderful and takes the canon and just... gently tips it to a better direction.

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett - I have not read all of Pratchett's work, and that is on purpose. I am rationing it. This is the second in the Tiffany Aching books, and involves compassion towards you enemies, even the teenage girls who are dicks, even the deathless monsters that want to devour you and leave only your worst parts. Solid work.

What I'm Reading
And Never Been Kissed by thehoyden and twentysomething - this is the horniest piece of work I have ever read. It's simply staggeringly horny, monumentally horny - this fic's horniness is magnificent and impressive, sublte and illuminating. I am blessed and comforted by the horniness in this fic.

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky - reminds me that I never finished Derin Edala's Perfectly Normal Spaceship book. Nominee for a hugo, but I'm not far enough in to determine if it should win.

Deal with the Devil by Kit Roch - I can't put this book down fast enough. Book clubs sometimes must face that members have different tastes - this was suggested by a dear friend who likes to read books where the main characters are stalwartly good people who never hurt each other or do morally wrong things, even if they have a history that says they *absolutely should consider doing wrong things* because that is their ENTIRE career. But alas, this is an adventure without conflict. I will finish this book, I will allow it to pass over me, and in the end, only my 2 star review will remain.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley - this book seems to have started from the very fanficy idea of, what if one of the crew of the lost Arctic expedition on The Terror was found and brought to modern London? And that's a good premise for a short story! But the book is not fleshed out quite enough around it. I'm only 40% in, I'm having a reasoanble amount of fun, I might be swayed! Nominee for a Hugo, should not win.

What I'll Read Next
I'm coming to the end of this year's Hugos push, so I will try and read some of those books but I'm not going to push myself that much about it.

Book Club books planned
Lent by Jo Walton
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison
Space Opera ?
Monsters and Mainframes?

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reading meme

Reading meme for August 6 2025

What I've Read

Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma - There's some interesting elements of this book - Girma is an Ethiopian Australian author and the culture and language are woven into the story with more nuance than I can unravel without help. It came recommended by a friend who could do some of that for me, so I can pass along her recommendation. For myself, I find YA dark academia a hard sell unless the school setting feels very central to the story. The main character is deeply wrathful over the disappearance of her sister, and as she wrangles her position of heir to her family in a social structure built around controlling vampires.

Overall, I think I could have enjoyed it more if the writing were not so slow. Emotions snarl or boil or lash, which should be exciting but instead manages to make a paragraph a slog - It slows the pace and makes the actual action harder to parse. More than once I really wondered if a character had struck at another, but it was always eyes lashing out with rage, in the middle of a paragraph and then the conversation just goes on. I lost the thread of the plot pretty dramatically, and I found the main pairing dull. I really don't think YA is for me.

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky - I loved this book after five pages and I never stopped loving it. Charles is the consummate valet, the gentleman's gentlerobot, trying to maintain standards as he is thrust outside the civilized atmosphere of the high tech manor where he takes care of his master. Each section of his adventures alluded to famous writers' works, taking ideas sideways and upside down like Tchaikovsky does so well, and reworking them into something fresh. The book is post apocalyptic in the sense that the world has fallen apart but not in the sense that the story of humanity is over. I feel like this is in conversation with Remains of the Day, as Charles really does believe in the value or service to his master, and later, extends that to humans. This book asks clearly, who matters? Who gets to decide? It answers both with a resounding: YOU.

Reading Currently
A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett - also a resounding demand that we treat people seriously and with care. I would love to do a book club that holds Excellent Women up to some of Pratchett's witches. I think it would bear examining.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Vol 2 – Emil Ferris

What I'll Read Next

Trying to get my Hugo nominees done, at least the novels. So Alien Clay and Ministry of Time